In press: Language Arts (US NCTE), 1998

The ‘Great Debate’ Isn’t So Great Anymore

The hype of press and politicians aside, there are troubling reports from teachers that many of their students continue to struggle with literacy, and appear to be having difficulty engaging with the cultures and texts of schooling. Many teachers are facing these challenges in crowded classrooms, with increasingly less specialist assistance and support in, for instance, developmental reading, special education and English as a Second Language, diminishing curriculum and in-service support, and scarcer school resources. This is particularly the case in lower socioeconomic communities in old industrial inner cities, new suburban ‘edge cities’, and rural communities where schools might have to contend with declining taxation bases, uneven political support for education, and students most visibly ‘at risk’ in new economic conditions.

This may be the story of literacy education in the late 1990s. It is not a story about the triumph of method but a story about government cutbacks and institutional downsizing, about shrinking resource and taxation bases, and about students and communities, teachers and schools trying to cope with rapid and unprecedented economic, social and technological change.

In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US and England the ‘great debate’ over literacy education has been waged on a near continuous basis as a debate over which instructional approach is best able to ‘solve’ student reading and writing problems. Judging from recent exchanges with teacher educators in Thailand and Hong Kong, there is the risk as well that versions of the American debate are being picked up in other cultural contexts, even where the linguistic and cultural practices and traditions of literacy are quite divergent from those in the postindustrial West. But in this particular historical context, is literacy education simply ‘a question of method’?

My comments here are deliberately narrative, anecdotal and polemical, and they are written from an Australian perspective. Yet again I want to make the case that literacy teaching is always first and foremost a social practice, one that is constrained and enabled by the changing economics and politics of schooling and communities. My purpose is to provide a vocabulary for a practical rethinking of teaching methods and approaches in relation to the contexts of professional and industrial work.

Many of us working from sociological and cultural perspectives on literacy education have tried to change the subject of the great debate, to shift it sideways. We have argued that there is no ‘right’ way of teaching reading and writing, but that different curricular approaches – and their attendant textbooks, classroom events, assessment instruments and adjunct materials – shape literacy as social practices differently. The ways that literacies are shaped have uneven benefits for particular communities and, unfortunately, the outcomes of literacy teaching continue to favour already advantaged groups in these communities. The matter thus is not one of finding the right and correct scientific methods of teaching literacy and ‘targeting’ these at marginalised groups. Rather it is about reconstructing and realigning the ‘selective traditions’ of curriculum, instruction and assessment in ways that better address the knowledges, practices and aspirations of communities most at risk in the face of the new technologies and economic conditions.

So the question for teachers should not be: What is the best way of teaching reading and writing? All literacy-based programs ‘work’ to some degree or another. Phonics programs ‘work’ at shaping different pathways and practices of literacy than, say, literature based programs; process writing programs tend to create different kinds of practices and texts than genre-based programs. Rather the question is a normative social and cultural one. It is about how and to what ends we can reshape students’ reading and writing practices – and their schemas for transgressive and progressive work with cultural texts – in communities facing new and old technologies, media and modes of expressions, emergent hybrid cultures and institutions, and forms of cultural identities and life pathways for which we have few precedents. It is about the kinds of literate cultures they’re likely to encounter and how we would have them design and redesign those cultures and their texts (New London Group, 1997; for classroom examples, see Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1996).

What is needed, then, is less of a nostalgic debate about a mythological past that either didn’t exist in the first place or cannot be reconstructed in any case. Regardless of whose surveys we accept and believe, it should be obvious that we require a vigorous debate about the future of literacies and the futures of our students in the communities and workplaces of what have been called "New Times" (Hall, 1996), a debate and social analysis that should be with our students and their communities and not simply about them (for examples, see Muspratt, Luke & Freebody, 1997; Fairclough, 1993).

As a result, our decisions about how to teach literacy (whether, for instance, to build initial reading programs around functional texts, new media texts or traditional literature, or whether to begin early literacy education with narrative or community texts, or whether to teach the essay or the Web page, whether we teach monolingually or bilingually, and so forth) demand that we undertake a social analysis of the dynamic communities that children live in - that we have a ‘reading’ of their futures in social institutions, workplaces and mass cultures which, for many teachers, are more alien to us then them. It is in these ecologies and communities of the next century that students will use conventional print literacy and new multiliteracies alike to access, construct and, indeed, ‘talk back’ to information both print, electronic and face-to-face. They will use literacies for productive work in economic sectors private and public, corporate and local (Gee, Hull & Lankshear, 1996). They will use literacies to shape their values, ideologies and identities, and to design and redesign the practices of civic and community life.

For these students, the risks of an ‘uncritical’ approach to language arts pedagogy now are not only that our instructional approaches might fail to teach viable, powerful ways of reading and writing. There is also a risk that our teaching might succeed – succeed at generating forms of reading and writing that don’t have much purchase or power in New Times. We might indeed be doing an excellent job of constructing post and inter-war industrial-era print literates fit for life pathways that are either obsolete or no longer exist. Essay writing as a preparation to enter and deal with the employment possibilities and potential rip offs of new, volatile service and information industries? Individualised pencil and paper tests of basic skills as preparation for new workplaces that require intercultural problem solving and teamwork? English literature studies for multilingual, multicultural adolescent migrants entering the workforce and having to contend with racism? There are, of course, arguments that competence with particular genres and textual practices do particular kinds of intellectual and social ‘work’ that are requisite for participation in higher education and workplace training (e.g., Hasan & Williams, 1997). Nonetheless, there are, indeed, serious questions about the kinds of ‘transfer of training’ problems that we actually create in our curricula – particularly when we step outside of our assumptions about the academic need for particular school-based literacies, for example, that students must master examination writing or textbook question answering, simply because they are required by later grades or post-secondary institutions.

I’m suggesting a different ‘take’ on our work as teachers then that which has driven the great debate. On the one hand, where we historically have failed and continue to fail – in our attempts to "compensate for society" as Basil Bernstein (1972) so accurately put it almost four decades ago -- schooling and literacy education remain one part of the complex social, cultural and economic puzzle by and through which disenfranchised classes are constructed and positioned. What is needed is a realistic, sociologically-based view of what the teaching of textual practices can and cannot do to enable people to alter their material circumstances – rather than the frequently overblown ‘pitches’ affiliated with particular methods and approaches.

Indeed, our everyday ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ alike tell us that literacy education can and does make a difference for individual students and for communities. But for whom, when, and to what end depends not just on our work but on other enabling social and economic factors. These include: (1) access to rudimentary and useable levels of economic capital to gain initial entry into the games of education and employment, access and mobility, and (2) equitable geographical, physical and social access to institutions of government, post-secondary education, workplaces, corporations and so forth (Carrington & Luke 1997). That is, literate competence is a kind of cultural capital that students take out into the social fields of workplaces and educational institutions. In itself it may but does not always make a difference, since it only counts and works in combination with their economic capital and social capital. Competence, money and access: on a rudimentary basis, each is necessary but not sufficient for occupational and educational success – though not always in the same combinations and mixes.

If the local combination of these things is what it takes for literate practices "as cultural capital" to make a difference in peoples’ lives – Pygmalion, Dangerous Minds and Stand and Deliver mythologies aside – it should not surprise us that ‘new method’ after ‘method’ have failed to turn around educational and social systems where what are needed are meaningful jobs that encourage and enable people to ‘capitalise’ on a diversity of textual practices, forms of cultural identity affiliated with economically viable life pathways, and sustainable community and economic infrastructures.

Literacy Teaching is (Post)Industrial Work

I recently attended my first International Reading Association conference in Atlanta, as the incoming editor with John Elkins of The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. For someone who was raised in the US, but who has spent most of my working life as a teacher and researcher in Canada and Australia, I view the US as a hybrid cultural insider and outsider. On this trip, I came away with several distinctive impressions, worked through in discussions with Elkins and other Australian colleagues during the trip.

First, I was struck by the tenacity of the great debate over method, and the extent to which this debate permeated all levels of public discussion, from media reporting, to legislative debate, to research agendas. When Reading Recovery makes the front pages of the New York Times, and Internet chat groups fill up with acrimonious exchanges between phonics and whole language advocates, a systematic set of silences and omissions is created. This preoccupation with ‘method’, its longstanding historical roots notwithstanding, creates a myopia on the work of many teachers and teacher-educators. For it presupposes that the literacy-related problems encountered by students and teachers in classrooms are indeed questions of method, questions that can be resolved by finding the right pedagogy. This is, I think, still pushed along to no small extent by the extremely profitable corporate business of textbook and basal reader publishing.

The second impression was a sense of how deeply embedded literacy issues are in the complex social and economic problems of postindustrial nation-states like the US. Particularly given the concentration of ‘failure’ amongst historically marginalised communities, it is impossible to see literacy failure apart from its complex sociogenesis. What seems strange to many of us is how many North American literacy educators’ preoccupation with method seems a distraction from what seem to be the central issues that ultimately influence who succeeds and fails. To an outsider, the key issues for youth would have to do with decent and safe housing, health care and living conditions, equitable access to meaningful and fairly compensated work, education and other institutions, convivial participation in community and civic life, and the actual access to life pathways that will enable participation in powerful systems of economic, political and social exchange.

As I’ve argued here, the relationships between literacy, work and education are far more complex than common sense correlations between rates of literacy, rates of employment and economic competitiveness would indicate. The causes for employment, structural changes in labor markets, national debts, economic and technological expansion and exploitation, and so forth, lie elsewhere in economies and societies – not in their literacy rates, and certainly not in the methods of teachers.

One of the other striking things about the US and many OECD states is the reorganisation of the public sector and the civil service, including education, social welfare, aspects of health services, and the provision of government and civil services. The idea of school boards and municipalities going ‘bankrupt’ is still foreign in many countries, but is indicative of the crisis in governmental structures and practices in the postindustrial West. Whether indeed this is the end of the ‘welfare state’, if and how one ever existed is far beyond my brief here. But the more immediate question is how nations whose governments and economies are predicated on highly developed systems of universal education are able to sustain that commitment.

It was obvious to John Dewey and his early twentieth century contemporaries that public schooling was a requisite foundation for the industrial state – both in the provision of skills and in the foundation of civic and moral education. Schooling in postindustrial conditions seems to be heading in a different, disturbing direction: towards partial or defacto privitisation and towards models of market competition that risk exacerbating the problems of inequality. In some Commonwealth countries this has been marked by an increase in government subsidies of private and religious schools. Throughout Asia there has been an expansion of elite private schools for the emergent middle classes and the increased reliance on private tutors, institutes and augmenting support – while, in many states, universal free secondary education still is struggling to gain a foothold in an environment of IMF "structural adjustment policies", governmental austerity and fiscal collapse. In the US, the development of Charter Schools, quasi-voucher systems, the increasingly explicit involvement of the private sector in schooling, the privitisation and outsourcing of some services including tutoring and home schooling are all indicators of a coming apart of many of the bases of the industrial-era model. What seems clear is that the grounds for a fundamental restructuring of state schooling are being set out. Yet these grounds are not so much the results of educators’, teacher educators’ or educational researchers’ innovation, but rather the results of declining funding, and a changing relation between government and the corporate sector.

Yet debates about language arts, reading and literature curriculum and pedagogy (i.e., about what we should teach, how and why, according to which foundational knowledges and theories) have tended to be viewed as separate from questions about industrial conditions (i.e., about who should teach, under which conditions, in what kinds of institutions). At the IRA and other US forums I’ve attended, many of the ‘great debates’ between experts were about competing methods and paradigms, while offstage discussions with teachers invariably returned to two issues: (1) the significant changes in students, cultures, communities and economies they were having to contend with in their everyday lives, and, relatedly, (2) the increasingly difficult conditions many of them worked under. My ‘outsider’s’ impression is that the debates over pedagogy are tending to be waged apart from analyses of new social conditions.

NCTE, IRA, the Canadian Council of Teachers of English, the Canadian Reading Association, and, in other countries, organisations like NATE (UK), AATE (Australia), NZRA (New Zealand) have been built as separate institutions from teachers' unions. For many, pedagogy has come to be seen as a concern of "professionalism", while teaching as work is seen as a concern of trade unionism. This is an understandable historical development, given the cyclical necessity for unions to take strong action around issues of pay and working conditions, and given the varied structures, activism and influence of teachers’ unions nationally and internationally. But this division of labor among representative bodies contributes, however unintentionally, to a questionable assumption about teachers' work: that pedagogy and curriculum can be debated in intellectual and professional forums independently from debates over industrial, teaching/learning conditions in schools and classrooms, which are rightly the domains of collective bargaining and industrial negotiations.

New Times are Changing Teachers’ Lives

For once this isn’t just about them, the objects of our labor: our students and, indeed, our own children. It is as much about us: about teachers and the reorganisation of teachers’ work in what are, in our lifetimes at least, new and unprecedented economic and social conditions. Historically, when it comes to counselling our students into career pathways and life trajectories, we have engaged in subtle kinds of ‘projective identification’, based on assumptions about our own job security and stability. We have always been able to stand apart from our students with a complacency that we were talking about their futures in risky economies, new technologies and changing workforces – not ours. That isn’t the case any more.

When we talk about the reorganisation of work in New Times – we also are talking about the changes that are restructuring the work of teachers, counsellors, principals and teacher educators. How teaching is valued as work and a ‘form of life’ is a cultural construct. Consider, for instance, how Aboriginal cultures, Confucian cultures, and various religious and ethnic subcultures in Western nation-states define and position teachers and teaching differently. The image and status of teachers in the postindustrial West has changed rapidly since the 1950s and 1960s. The sense of teaching as a secure, respected job in a growing postwar public sector has changed significantly. In the 1990s there have been shifts from tenured careers to casual contracts, increases in the out-sourcing and privitisation of specialist teaching, and local school-based management and decision-making. This is a mixed picture, with different regions, states and provinces and national systems proceeding in different directions. But teachers’ work is changing.

Literacy education is teachers’ work – it is one kind of discourse-based labor. In technical terms, we are service and information-based workers engaged in complex intellectual work with knowledge and with spoken, written and electronic texts. Our work as literacy educators is to be knowledgeable and flexible readers and writers – to set the social and cultural conditions for those textual practices that we have mastered to be produced and designed, critiqued and redesigned. Our work is itself a form of heteroglossia - we are in a way ventriloquists for the diverse cultures that we live in. We listen and speak, read and write different voices, cultures and texts, and we enable our students to do the same, blending their community knowledges, practices and voices to reframe and redesign these texts. This is to say nothing of the exhausting physical, hands-on work involved in organising learners, the actual physical materials for curriculum work, the environments of classrooms. It is easy to underestimate the sheer hard physical effort and stamina that is involved in organising people to work with print and all of its physical tools and artefacts, from print libraries to enlarged print books, videos to chalkboards, from keyboards to paint brushes.

Teaching also is potentially alienated work. The intensity of the conditions we work under may make it difficult for own conception, planning and intellectual development, and the cultivation of the very textual practices that we have mastered. In the current conditions I’ve described here, there is the risk that scarce resources, work intensification and competition separate rather than integrate us from our colleagues, students and school communities.

With the alleged rolling up of the welfare state, a globalised redistribution of wealth and economic power, cutbacks and marketisation of public services – schools are entering or moving through a period of dynamic change, instability and, indeed, ‘inequity’ where the comparison of the complex local politics of each school and region almost defy any generic claims about ‘all schools’. In New Times, teaching is a matter of coping – but that coping now involves navigating our way through the complex industrial environments that schools, districts and state (and private) education authorities have become.

An Introductory Guide to Teachers Work

The ‘top down’ model of school control continues to work in many countries and jurisdictions. The model works through a combination of centralised and standardised curriculum, corporately produced curriculum materials with teacher guidebooks, and state and nationally normed standardised tests together represents an extension of the industrial control model. Designed by educational administration experts in the 1920s and 1930s, this model attempts centrally regulate and control teachers’ work through an industrial, "Fordist" model.

In recent years in Australia, the UK and parts of the US, there have been moves for a "corporate managerialist" model based on local school management, reporting and accountability through "performance indicators" and "quality assurance" systems (see Lingard, Ladwig & Luke, in press). On the surface, these models of devolved management bring with them greater degrees of local curriculum, professional development and innovation, but increased accountability. In Australia the move has been towards local materials and curriculum selection based on national curriculum "benchmarks", towards increasing the use of local performance indicators, teacher-based assessment and student profiling (Luke, Land, VanKraayenoord & Elkins, 1997). This has involved a move from direct control to what Lingard, Taylor, Rizvi & Henry (1997) have called "steering from a difference", from direct surveillance of schools to what we might term ‘self-surveillance’. In the face of the local economic and community pressures on schools, there are fears that this may mean decreased financial resources, further intensification of teachers' work, with increasing external accountability. This emphasis on economic performance – on what is termed performativity - is part of the broader realignment of public sector management.

Regardless of where one stands on the political and managerial value of such changes, teachers and systems are still under considerable pressure to continue to accommodate a postwar human capital model of education. This approach places a premium on state and private "investment" in the production of business and entrepreneurial, technological and scientific expertise (i.e., educational funding = credentialled workers = "human capital"). Whether and how this model is particularly successful at producing either economic reform or social justice is questionable (for international case studies, see Freebody & Welch, 1993). Nonetheless, schools are dealing with an increasingly diverse clientele of students and community needs, in an environment where these same economic conditions impact directly on the long term unemployed, specifically on the economic participation of youth, women, migrants, cultural minority groups and indigenous peoples.

Since the first fiscal ‘crises’ in the 1970s, the managerial policies of many governments have place a high priority on budget reduction, leading to cutbacks for institutions like education and social welfare. What this means is that many state educational policies are operating with an internally contradictory model. At once, they retain the rhetoric of a postwar human capital model of economic growth (i.e., increased educational investment = increased economic growth), while rapidly moving to an rationalist, managerial model of government downsizing and cutbacks (i.e., decreased educational investment = increased school/teacher performance). In this situation, schools and teachers (and universities) are caught in a dangerous and increasingly difficult ‘squeeze play’. At once, we are asked to deliver increased numbers of ‘trained’ workers and skills. But at the same time we are being asked to do so with less resources, larger classes and less professional support.

For teachers, this amounts to intensified industrial conditions: a financially ‘zero-sum’ game where any increase in resources for literacy education needs to be subtracted from another area of school operation. The push is on to deliver a more varied and specialised curriculum, to diverse groups of students, with less financial and material resources, with higher degrees of workplace accountability for teacher and student performance. Schools are being held accountable, often quite unreasonably, for a range of social and economic ills, and schools and teachers are increasingly being pressured to demonstrate the same kinds of quantifiable "value-added" outcomes (e.g., increased test and exam scores, graduation and retention rates, employment rates of graduates) as the business sector.

There is no doubt that such scenarios require highly professional, critical and innovative teachers. Yet with diminishing funding, downsizing of tenured and secure teaching and administrative staff is common. This is being done through a range of industrial strategies, including the casualisation of work through more contract, part-time and less tenured teachers, the outsourcing of services ranging from janitorial work to special education services. For those remaining teachers, the danger is that these conditions of work intensification will lead to further deskilling of teachers. At its worst, deskilling refers to the kind of repetitive and routinised work required when a teacher is required to run, for instance, five repeat classes for Year 10 English on the same day, or run large, unwieldy reading groups with students: a numbing experience where one is dragging one's body and students through an overdetermined lesson plan. It also refers to those instances where teachers use curriculum packages and sequences dictated from the 'top down', with little adjustment, local input or adaptation.

The deskilling of teachers' work, then, occurs when teachers are required to perform specific tasks and pedagogies without having any direct control or say in their conceptualisation and evaluation. In effect, this means the stripping of thinking, autonomous action and creativity out of teaching, and their replacement by standardised sequences, patterns and materials. As preparation time to vary, modify and reconceputalise lessons declines, as class sizes increase, and as teachers are called on to respond to centralised curriculum guidelines and teach towards standardised tests -- the use of pre-packaged or externally developed materials becomes a logical, if educationally questionable response. This may lead to and is encouraged by an increased reliance on formulaic teaching and packaged, commodified curricula. Most importantly, it impedes the capacity of teachers and schools to respond flexibility to students' local, community and cultural contingencies, the local conditions that are at the heart of New Times.

Many teachers, then, are expected to do more work, to handle additional responsibilities, with less time for reflection, analysis and evaluation of their work. Despite current talk of the need for multiskilling and flexible specialisation in the postmodern workplace (it’s arguable that elementary teachers are among the most multiskilled individuals in any professional workforce), school retrenchments and cutbacks have had quite opposite effects. Many teachers have been forced to take on responsibilities that they were never trained for (e.g., English as a Second Language, remedial reading, special education), with a decline in consultant and support services. This may indeed take the form of increased contact hours, class size and diminished time for preparation, counselling, administration, extra-curricular participation and so forth.

Initially a strictly male profession, school teaching, and English and language arts teaching in particular, has evolved historically into women’s work. Areas of work that have undergone this process of feminisation (e.g., education, nursing, social work), they have long been undervalued by the community at large. Today, women comprise a significant majority of English and language arts teachers, and schools more generally are structured by a gendered division of disciplinary knowledge and labor (with males generally dominating maths and sciences, and educational administration). Where casualisation has occurred in other sectors of the job market, it is women who have been most adversely affected through diminished possibilities for promotions, loss of seniority and retirement benefits.

As resources in state systems decline, it is likely that the subcontracting of educational work to businesses will increase. The privitisation of prisons and welfare functions, and indeed of their affiliated human sciences, is well underway in the US and has begun in Australia. Corporate business views schools as a lucrative marketplace for everything from textbooks to clothing, toys and consumer goods. As state resources decline and teachers' work intensifies, there is an increase in the attractiveness of private and corporate resources to finance school activities, curriculum development and even professional in-service.

At the same time, the press and politicians have become artists at ‘playing the literacy card’, directly and indirectly blaming schools and teachers for systemic economic and social problems, from unemployment and underemployment, to linguistic and cultural change in communities, to shifting formations of cultural identity and family (Green, Hodgens & Luke, 1997). The rhetorical tactics are straightforward and remarkably consistent across the US, Canada, and Australia: To attribute structural macro-economic problems to lack of educational productivity (e.g., levels of literacy, technical/scientific expertise), and thereby shift the responsibility for negative aspects of economic restructuring onto teachers, schools and, ultimately, students and communities.

Teachers’ Work is a Global and Local Issue

How are teachers and teacher educators to respond? Literacy education is by definition always a social and political matter, tied up with the distribution of power, knowledge and competence in increasingly complex and difficult economic and cultural conditions. To say that literacy education is teachers’ work and to suggest that pedagogical issues cannot be divorced from industrial issues is not a simple advocacy of the historical claims of trade unionism: better wages, working conditions – though it probably is that as well. It is far more simple and far more complex than this. In industrial terms, it is indeed about maintaining and protecting the relative ‘power’ of teachers in deciding about the shape of literacy education and the literate. But in postindustrial terms, it is the issue of how to remake of literacy education to address new contexts and conditions, while having to secure and use contracting state funding.

My colleagues at the University of Queensland and I are working with Thai teachers and teacher educators from the community of Chaing Rai, a provincial city just south of the Golden Quadrangle, where one can stand on the banks of the Mekong River and see the point where Thailand, Laos and Myamar meet. There we are working in collaboration with local teachers’ colleges. Over a shared meal the teachers talked about the complex and unprecedented problems they faced: migrant students who brought different and unfamiliar linguistic and cultural resources to the classroom, a significant student body from various indigenous communities who struggled with mainstream educational culture, and the first generation of unruly Thai youth, who seemed more concerned with MTV and Nike culture than with traditional values, beliefs and practices. At the same time, the Thai economy is undergoing structural change that is generating hardship across all social classes and regions. Like their counterparts in Latin America and Africa, the teachers themselves are being pushed to look for augmenting income just to make ends meet. Many of the educational problems we affiliate with New Times are shared with our colleagues in postcolonial and rapidly industrialising nation-states: heterogenous and diverse student populations; the disenfranchisement of students of diverse, non-mainstream cultural backgrounds; shifting, risky economies and job markets; and the impact of multinational media and popular cultures on youth. I would add to that one other characteristic of New Times: the changing and, in many sites, at risk status of teachers and teaching.

As we finished dinner, one the teacher educators turned to me and asked: "Have you heard about ‘quality assurance’ and ‘school-based management’? Apparently, some Thai educational systems had headed in these directions, emulating Western economic rationalism, corporate managerialism, and, indeed, instructional methods. My sense is that this is an inappropriate approach that simply won’t work. As attempts to apply Western approaches to community health and development and, indeed, functional literacy have shown, however global and universal the problems of New Times appear, their solutions must be profoundly local, culturally appropriate and negotiable. If there is indeed a lesson from educational theory and practice in the 1990s, it is that problems of discourse and practice by definition can only be addressed locally. There are no universal solutions, whether of the old colonialist modes, the postwar "technology transfer" sorts, or of the latest "universal methods". What we might add is that this very Western tendency to define educational problems as technical and systems problems and not as cultural, economic and social ones, may lead us down blind alleys, missed opportunities, and indeed, poor investment of our scarce time, resources and money.

The international readership of Language Arts works under a diverse range of systems of school governance, ranging from the Canadian provincial systems that balance school district models against guaranteed state funding, to the complex chequerboard of US state jurisdictions and school districts, from the centralised UK national system, to the state-based Australian systems, to the Thai and Mexican systems now operating under the unbrellas of IMF and World Bank "structural adjustment" policies. In most, teachers are experiencing first hand the signs of work intensification – teaching more and increasingly diverse students with declining resources, taking up administrative and community responsibilities without additional financial or institutional support. Yet in each case the nexus of power is different, in each case the challenges of reform require local action.

The cultural and economic influences and pressures on teachers' work I have described here are likely to persist well into the next century. The push for deskilling and intensification in a predominantly feminised workforce of literacy teachers will continue. Where this is the case, a vocabulary for talking about education, work and social change should be an essential part of every literacy educator's survival kit. A critical analysis of community and institutional change is required to combat the separation of conception from execution, and a reliance on 'teacher proof' curriculum and mechanical classroom formulae. It is required to evaluate, debate and critique curriculum documents, standardised testing and performance indicators. It is required to assess and shape the impact of local "devolved" school-based management. It is required to engage with and debate the impact of national, regional and state educational policies around literacy and every other aspect of schooling. Finally, a critical analysis is required to analyse and negotiate working conditions, career paths, and social relations in classrooms and staffrooms.

The message for literacy educators and teacher educators is that this can’t be left to the sociologists and the teachers’ unions. To teach effectively is not a matter of just learning a set of scientifically derived methods or approaches in teacher training programs, to be cyclically upgraded through engagement with resources like Language Arts and through in-service training or credentialling. This is only the case if we assume a logician’s axiom of ‘all things being equal’. In the schools in the postindustrial ‘West’, ‘all things are never equal’. Just mastering a method isn’t good enough – and it might simply leave us vulnerable to deskilling and obsolescence as our working environments and communities change.

References

Bernstein, B. (1972). A Critique of the Concept of Compensatory Education. In C. Cazden, D. Hymes, & V. Johns, (eds). Functions of Language in the Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Buckingham, D. & Sefton-Green, J. (1996). Cultural Studies Goes to School. London: Taylor & Francis.

Carrington, V. & Luke, A. (1997). Literacy and Bourdieu’s Sociological Theory: A Reframing. Language in Education 11(2): 96-112.

Edelsky, C. (1996). With Literacy and Justice for All. 2nd ed. London: Falmer Press.

Fairclough, N. (ed.) (1993). Critical Language Awareness. London: Longman.

Freebody, P. & Welch, A. (eds.) (1993). Knowledge, Culture and Power. London: Falmer Press.

Gee, J.P., Hull, G., & Lankshear, C. (1996). The New Work Order. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Green, B. Hodgens, J. & Luke, A. (1997). Debating literacy in Australia: History lessons and popular f(rictions). Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 20, 6-26.

Hall, S. (1996). The meaning of New Times. In D. Morley & K. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Routledge, London. (pp. 223-238).

Hasan, R. & Williams, G. (eds). (1997). Literacy in Society. New York: Longman.

Lingard, R., Ladwig, J. & Luke, A. (in press). School Effects in Postmodern Conditions. In R. Slee, S. Tomlinson & G. Weiner, eds. Effective for whom? School Effectiveness and the School Improvement Movement. London: Falmer Press.

Luke, A. Land, R., Van Kraayenoord, C, & Elkins, J. (1997). A Critical Appraisal of the Year Two Diagnostic Net: A Research Report. Brisbane: Queensland School Curriculum Council.

Muspratt, S., Luke, A. & Freebody, P. (eds). (1997). Constructing Critical Literacies. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66:60-92.

Taylor, S., Rizvi, F., Lingard, B. & Henry, M. (1997). Educational Policy and The Politics of Change. London: Routledge.