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How much do we tell the children? - An exploration
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From: Charles Bayless <charles.bayless_at_ttmd.com>
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:47:51 -0500
Megan,
Well, that was quite a kaleidescopic question you asked given the different questions that are being answered in the various threads.
It seems as if there are a number of issues
1) Who is the We in "How much do we tell the children?" I assumed that it was an epistemological question directed to parents but it appears from the comments that most are reading this as We teachers/librarians. Quite a different question, answer and implications.
2) Do we agree on the boundaries of acceptable books? Are we most concerned about books that are dealing with difficult topics (bulimia, poverty, FGM, privilege, exclusion, deforestation, etc.) or are we concerned about books that are exploitive (using language and shock content in order to entice readers)? Is there a difference in how we treat the different categories?
3) Is there any evidence that bibliotherapy works?
4) How do we define the norms outside of which we are concerned?
5) Is truth any sort of guideline?
6) What are the limits within which we are working?
If our goal is for children to become habitual, enthusiastic and critical readers, with the expectation that that reading will assist in their epistemological development, then we need to answer those ancillary questions sparked by the base question of How much do we tell the children? I attempt to reason my way through each of these in subsequent postings. The summary is:
In particular circumstances (principally parent disengagement), teacher/librarians will be forced into the position of being chief advocate of reading for a child and figuring out which books will cultivate a love of reading in a child's life and which ones will help grow their epistemological garden. But I think that has to be a default position. We all know and the data tells us that the best predictor of a child's performance in school and in life are the education and demographics of the family home from which they come. If they are from an intact, educated, reading family, they are likely to be habitual readers themselves and are likely to do well in school and in life. The degree of influence of individual teachers and quality of school are minimal influences behind those three variables. Yes, we have all had that one teacher that made a profound difference, but on average, across 18 years from birth to adulthood, the differentiator is the effectiveness of the family in teaching the child (and leveragi ng the resources of a school in doing so). If that is the case, then the opinions of teachers/librarians have to take second place to those of parents; or rather, we need to figure out a different and better way for teacher/librarians and parents to collaborate on the goal of inculcating a love of reading.
If that is the case, the challenge becomes, how do we establish a means for teachers/librarians to assist parents in becoming more effective in creating a home environment that will foster a love of reading, how do we enable parents to more effectively find books that are consistent with the parent's values and are of interest to a child, and how do we put the whole process on to a more rigorous, fact-based footing so that we aren't always talking at cross-purposes based on opinion. There is a second set of issues then arising which is how to create an objective process for helping those children from environments without engaged parents, in other words, in the absence of an engaged parent, what can/should the librarian/teacher do in order to foster a love of reading in a child and what principles ought to guide a teacher/librarian in selecting books in an environment absent a parent opinion.
I suggest a couple of tools that might be developed to make the process of identifying books that are appropriate to children, given their cognitive and emotional capacity and given their parent's views, more objective and effective. I suggest that Miriam's category is a very useful one, Just-Case-Books, i.e. books that are useful from a therapeutic perspective for particular children, at particular times and under particular circumstances but that how we manage Just-In-Case books is quite different from the general population of books. I think the admonition to just tell the truth does a disservice to the complexity of what we are discussing. I suggest that, absent any evidence that bibliotherapy is actually an effective idea and any evidence about the importance of children seeing themselves in books, that we set aside those opinions as distractions to the main goal of cultivating effective reading. They may be true but if we have no evidence to their truth then they are a distraction. Finally, I focus on how our desires for certain approaches to reading often seem to be discussed in isolation of the numerical reality with which we are dealing and that the discussions need to be brought into alignment with the numerical reality.
I have found this whole discussion fascinating and thought provoking. I am sure that in summarizing and repeating, I have probably mangled some of the ideas advanced. My main conclusion from this discussion though is that 1) our focus has to be shifted to parents and working with them and 2) that we have to move from the realm of opinions to the realm of demonstrable facts; we have to put some hard numbers to the soft concepts. Otherwise we are stuck in an endless do-loop with everyone making arguments by assertion and we make no progress.
Apologies for the extended disquisition but these aren't simple topics that lend themselves to sound-bite answers. Or I am an undisciplined writer. One or the other.
Respectfully
Charles
Received on Sun 27 Nov 2011 01:47:51 PM CST
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:47:51 -0500
Megan,
Well, that was quite a kaleidescopic question you asked given the different questions that are being answered in the various threads.
It seems as if there are a number of issues
1) Who is the We in "How much do we tell the children?" I assumed that it was an epistemological question directed to parents but it appears from the comments that most are reading this as We teachers/librarians. Quite a different question, answer and implications.
2) Do we agree on the boundaries of acceptable books? Are we most concerned about books that are dealing with difficult topics (bulimia, poverty, FGM, privilege, exclusion, deforestation, etc.) or are we concerned about books that are exploitive (using language and shock content in order to entice readers)? Is there a difference in how we treat the different categories?
3) Is there any evidence that bibliotherapy works?
4) How do we define the norms outside of which we are concerned?
5) Is truth any sort of guideline?
6) What are the limits within which we are working?
If our goal is for children to become habitual, enthusiastic and critical readers, with the expectation that that reading will assist in their epistemological development, then we need to answer those ancillary questions sparked by the base question of How much do we tell the children? I attempt to reason my way through each of these in subsequent postings. The summary is:
In particular circumstances (principally parent disengagement), teacher/librarians will be forced into the position of being chief advocate of reading for a child and figuring out which books will cultivate a love of reading in a child's life and which ones will help grow their epistemological garden. But I think that has to be a default position. We all know and the data tells us that the best predictor of a child's performance in school and in life are the education and demographics of the family home from which they come. If they are from an intact, educated, reading family, they are likely to be habitual readers themselves and are likely to do well in school and in life. The degree of influence of individual teachers and quality of school are minimal influences behind those three variables. Yes, we have all had that one teacher that made a profound difference, but on average, across 18 years from birth to adulthood, the differentiator is the effectiveness of the family in teaching the child (and leveragi ng the resources of a school in doing so). If that is the case, then the opinions of teachers/librarians have to take second place to those of parents; or rather, we need to figure out a different and better way for teacher/librarians and parents to collaborate on the goal of inculcating a love of reading.
If that is the case, the challenge becomes, how do we establish a means for teachers/librarians to assist parents in becoming more effective in creating a home environment that will foster a love of reading, how do we enable parents to more effectively find books that are consistent with the parent's values and are of interest to a child, and how do we put the whole process on to a more rigorous, fact-based footing so that we aren't always talking at cross-purposes based on opinion. There is a second set of issues then arising which is how to create an objective process for helping those children from environments without engaged parents, in other words, in the absence of an engaged parent, what can/should the librarian/teacher do in order to foster a love of reading in a child and what principles ought to guide a teacher/librarian in selecting books in an environment absent a parent opinion.
I suggest a couple of tools that might be developed to make the process of identifying books that are appropriate to children, given their cognitive and emotional capacity and given their parent's views, more objective and effective. I suggest that Miriam's category is a very useful one, Just-Case-Books, i.e. books that are useful from a therapeutic perspective for particular children, at particular times and under particular circumstances but that how we manage Just-In-Case books is quite different from the general population of books. I think the admonition to just tell the truth does a disservice to the complexity of what we are discussing. I suggest that, absent any evidence that bibliotherapy is actually an effective idea and any evidence about the importance of children seeing themselves in books, that we set aside those opinions as distractions to the main goal of cultivating effective reading. They may be true but if we have no evidence to their truth then they are a distraction. Finally, I focus on how our desires for certain approaches to reading often seem to be discussed in isolation of the numerical reality with which we are dealing and that the discussions need to be brought into alignment with the numerical reality.
I have found this whole discussion fascinating and thought provoking. I am sure that in summarizing and repeating, I have probably mangled some of the ideas advanced. My main conclusion from this discussion though is that 1) our focus has to be shifted to parents and working with them and 2) that we have to move from the realm of opinions to the realm of demonstrable facts; we have to put some hard numbers to the soft concepts. Otherwise we are stuck in an endless do-loop with everyone making arguments by assertion and we make no progress.
Apologies for the extended disquisition but these aren't simple topics that lend themselves to sound-bite answers. Or I am an undisciplined writer. One or the other.
Respectfully
Charles
Received on Sun 27 Nov 2011 01:47:51 PM CST
