Earlier this month, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) issued a position statement, writing that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Coming from an organization devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts this was a surprise.
Rather than encouraging the nation’s English teachers to confront troubling and persistently low levels of literacy in America, the NCTE “now prefers that they use ‘teaching and learning practices that help to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice,’” observed the Fordham Institute’s Amber Northern, a former high school English teacher. At National Review, Daniel Buck, also a teacher, described the counter-intuitive missive as “a bold, heroic display of lowered expectations.”
NCTE had
to know they were inviting ridicule by insisting—in writing, no less!—that
books and the written word are overrated. But might there be a devil’s advocate
case to be made that “everyone in our society now needs the ability to assess
the widely varying quality of the information, entertainment, and persuasion
that surrounds them, to evaluate the veracity and validity of claims, and to
debunk misinformation”? Certainly. Less certain, however, is whether this
responsibility falls exclusively or even disproportionately on English teachers,
or if there are curricular or pedagogical approaches that would give cause for
optimism that they were up to the task.
In fairness to NCTE, a vision of literacy encompassing “critical reading comprehension skills that require [students] to distinguish between journalism and sponsored content” is consistent with the English language arts standards of most states, including those that adopted Common Core, notes Tim Shanahan of the University of Illinois at Chicago. “The point isn’t to stop teaching kids to read and interpret text, but to expand the scope to apply that kind of analysis and thought to a wider range of messages,” he told me via email. Less clear, however, is whether this should this be taken up in English class, social studies, or across all disciplines, how much time analysis of non-textual communications is worth, and whether we’re able to teach this successfully at all.
The NCTE’s sudden interest in “listening and viewing” and “critical examination of digital media and popular culture” reminds me of the late, un-lamented 21st century skills movement, which similarly downgraded traditional ideas about academic knowledge in favor of communications, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. We may conceive of these as transferable skills, like riding a bike, but they’re not. Try thinking critically or evaluating claims on topics about which you know little or nothing. Neither is there much evidence to support NCTE’s claim that “ELA educators have long been well-poised to support students’ as digital consumers, creators, distributors, and inventors through curriculum and pedagogy.” Schools tend to be much better at identifying new “literacies” (media literacy, financial literacy, digital literacy, et al.) than developing them, as any number of studies will attest. American K–12 education is even less successful at teaching media literacy than reading. And we are famously poor at teaching reading.
In sum, it is by no means clear that “media literacy” as envisioned by NCTE is an attainable instructional outcome in the absence of a comprehensive, knowledge-rich approach to schooling across academic disciplines. There are no tips, tricks, or suite of “thinking skills” that can compensate for simply knowing things. Some years ago, researchers at the University of Connecticut asked a group of middle school students to evaluate the credibility of a well-known internet hoax site concerning the habitat, diet, and mating rituals of the “Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.” The students all fell for the hoax, despite obvious giveaways, such as the site’s claims that the tree octopus’ main predator is “Sasquatch.” Even when they were told it was fake they couldn’t produce clues to prove it; some students continued to insist the tree octopus was real. Still, the UConn researchers concluded merely that classroom instruction in online reading is “woefully lacking.”
Critics
have lambasted NCTE’s position statement for its aggressively political stance that
English teachers should be focused on “disrupt[ing] the inequalities of
contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and
economic justice.” But what is even more troubling is NCTE’s blithe unawareness
of how to create the conditions that might actually prove disruptive. A consistent
theme in educational thought and practice is the belief that knowledge is
negotiable, of secondary importance, or mere stuff that we needn’t spend
much time worrying about.
NCTE is not claiming that “media literacy” would make kids better readers. Rather the statement reads as an expansion of our understanding of literacy to encompass fashionable social justice ideas. In the final analysis, this is the undoing of the “position statement.” Having failed at their principal task of boosting reading achievement, NCTE would now have English teachers do something—anything—else.
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