Reading, 'Science', History: Literacy Policy across Time and National Boundaries
Since World War 2, the issue of literacy teaching and literacy difficulties have been frequent and fraught sites of debate in educational and public forums in post industrial societies such as the UK, US and Australia (Soler & Openshaw 2006) (Green, Hodgens, & Luke, 1994; 1997). The last ten years have seen ongoing 'literacy wars' (Snyder, 2008) being played out in newspapers and literacy teaching being increasingly politicised and connected to large-scale government initiatives (Moss 2009). These debates have tended to focus on the best approaches to teaching reading - the 'methods debate' - and on the quality of the literacy skills of the nation's teachers (Comber & Cormack 2006). Recent policy interventions have emphasised 'evidence-based' practices connected with particular kinds of research dominated by scientific conceptions of research.
This symposium canvasses these debates to consider the continuities and discontinuities in how research, policy and practice have been articulated historically and in the present. While contemporary constructions of policy emphasise scientific rationality and particular forms of technical and managerial discourse, we argue that other forms of 'evidence' are being elided or ignored - for example, practitioner perspectives and even the history of the subject itself. We ask what might be learned from incorporating a wider range of 'evidence' in literacy policy beyond narrowly technical and rational perspectives. We consider the potential for including historical, practitioner and other perspectives in the policy process to account for the complexities of literacy learning.
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