Living Literacy

Michael Rose

Sujets

• Literacy
• Education

Informations

• Publié par: Hawthorn Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781907359750
• Langue: English

Extrait

Living Literacy copyright © 2007 Michael Rose
Michael Rose is hereby identified as the author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. He asserts and gives notice of his moral right under this Act.
Published by Hawthorn Press, Hawthorn House, 1 Lansdown Lane, Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 1BJ, UK Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] [e-mail] www.hawthornpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means (electronic or mechanical, through reprography, digital transmission, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover photograph by Anna Marshall Illustrations by Marije Rowling Cover design by Hawthorn Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire Design and typesetting by Hawthorn Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire Printed in the UK by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Every effort has been made to trace the ownership of all copyrighted material. If any omission has been made, please bring this to the publisher’s attention so that proper acknowledgment may be given in future editions.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978-1-903458-52-5 eISBN 978-1-907359-75-0

Contents
Foreword

Introduction
Part One: Seeing the Picture


1. The Great Divide


Communication in the home
Television
Education
2. What IS Literacy?


The last faculty to evolve
Reading versus writing
The reader-writer relationship
A complex of skills
3. Literacy in the World Today


Economic factors
Social factors
Self and world
Self versus tradition
Linguistic monoculture
4. The Emergence of the Alphabet


Proto-writing
Pictography
Logographic writing
Phonetic writing
A brief overview of writing
5. Lessons of Development


Embryonic development
Infant development
Laterality, movement, balance and speech
Imitation and environment
Cognitive development as reflection of evolution
The trials of maturity
Ideals and pressures
Alienation, limiting projection and distorting expectation
Part Two: Making the Difference


6. Tuning to the Mother Tongue


Love and literacy
Language as a whole
Song into speech
Language as a creative principle
7. Animating the Word


Orality and community
Living toys
Living pictures
Conversation to story
Reading: inclusion or exclusion?
8. First Writing and Reading


The sense of sound
Demystifying script
Slow awakening
First steps to literacy in Steiner Waldorf schools


Form drawing
From movement into letters
From picture to symbol
Consonants and vowels
From writing into reading
9. Developing Literacy as Faculty


Elements in the development of faculty


Developmental readiness
Impulse and motivation
Communication
Perception
Concentration
Memory
Conceptualisation
Selection and application
Approaches to teaching reading


Phonics approach
Linguistic method
Multi-sensory approach
Neurological Impress technique
Language experience approach
Reading comprehension support
10. Further Suggestions for Practice


Auditory discrimination/articulation
Auditory memory
Visual discrimination / hand-eye co-ordination
Visual memory
Kinaesthetic memory
Feeling for sentence structure (and other elements of grammar)
Communication exercises
11. Literacy and Learning Differences


The four temperaments
The main causes of learning differences
Dysfunction
Lower and higher senses
Delayed and precocious development
Cultural differences
History as reflection of child development
Spreading from the centre
Complementary realities
Culture and media
Tact and authority
Completing the picture
Part Three: Closing the Book


12. The Three Persons of Literacy


The key of three
From ‘It’ to ‘I’
Three literacies: it, you, I
Walking, speaking, thinking
From function to relation
Truth and fiction
13. Harvesting the Word


Literacy to literature
The descent of fiction
Children’s literature: the magical child
Three archetypes of the book
14. The Future


Towers and temples
Literacy’s loss – orality’s gain?
Living with new media
The long journey home
Can we learn from other cultures?
Cycles of history and seasons of biography


Appendix 1. School Readiness
Appendix 2. Checklist for Preparing a Child Study
Appendix 3. Pointers to Learning Difficulties
Appendix 4. Commonly Used Words
Appendix 5. A Curative Story
Endnotes
Bibliography
Resources
About the author
Foreword
When his servants and friends wanted to stop Don Quixote from undertaking even more madcap adventures they decided to burn his library of books on chivalry. For them, his unbalanced taste for literature had been his undoing. However, this dramatic and preventive action was to no avail as Don Quixote had fully imbibed the medieval stories of knights and valiant quests. His character had been deeply influenced by them, and he continued in his idealistic pursuit of what, in his eyes, was true and good. His literacy had raised questions in him of how he should act in a corrupt world that was decaying around him. Literacy changes us and there is no going back. In recent years the word itself has assumed connotations beyond just reading and writing, and is now used generally to describe the competencies we are thought to need in fulfilling our responsibilities as citizens of the modern world. ‘Literacy’ in these contexts suggests a way of finding our full potential.
In its more traditional definition literacy is a right that was recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is also the means whereby we achieve those rights, yet is one still denied to a fifth of the world’s population. This timely book is being published close to the start of the United Nations’ ten-year ‘Literacy Decade’, from 2003 to 2012. It is hoped that 100 million children not in primary education and 771 million over-15s with no basic literacy skills will be helped to achieve this entitlement. Even in so-called developed countries these skills are still lacking in large segments of the population, and it is the duty of society as a whole to remedy this situation – something that will require a holistic, thoughtful and sensitive approach.
We all recognise that literacy – and engagement, beyond the basics, with life and culture through the written word – is an integral part of our lives and contributes to a sense of identity and self-worth. Where people differ, in an educational sense, is how to get there. This book draws on the Steiner-Waldorf approach, now practised in more than 60 countries, which attempts to imbue the learning and use of literacy with a living quality, rooting it in the child’s total experience rather than as mere cognitive icing on the cake. In other words literacy should arise as part of a natural, overall development, which takes full account of ‘pre-literate’ skills such as physical dexterity, imagination and feeling. Reading and writing skills are part of our human nature and how we acquire them continues to live on in our dispositions regardless of our chronological age. At the same time this book also acknowledges the best in modern literacy teaching, and uses its professional insights to enhance and extend the Steiner method.
Wonder, curiosity and awe are the gifts of childhood, and our attainment of necessary skills should allow us to embrace and sustain them, not lead to their demise. Faced by accelerated technological advances, we have to ask how we can develop in children the inner resources to deal with them; how, in other words, we can keep the human spirit’s integrity intact without isolating children from the realities they must inhabit. Courage, insight and inspiration are needed here. Globalisation is a two-edged sword, but literacy has always served to connect people, and now can do so right around the globe.
This book is a call for literacy with attitude: one that is child-focused, and age-appropriate. As is increasingly recognised by governments, educationalists and parents around the world, we need a transformation of educational practice and learning. As Vaclav Havel stated in his 1990 address to the US Congress ‘...The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed – be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilisation – will be unavoidable.’
The ideas based on Rudolf Steiner’s insights are a contribution to this pressing need. They do not supply ready-made answers or fixed formulae but try to look beyond the obvious to seek underlying symptoms and holistic remedies. A truly humane approach must involve dialogue, listening as well as voicing our own views. Through living literacy we educate ourselves in a lifelong process, and evolve tools and capacities as befits our particular circumstances, times, environment and ideals. We en