Record: Harriet Pattison, Rethinking Learning to Read (Shrewsbury, UK: Educational Heretics Press, 2016)
Summary: Pattison’s name and work will be familiar to long-time readers of this blog. She has worked closely with Alan Thomas for many years now, employing surveys and interviews to support normative arguments for the value of informal (or what they sometimes call “osmotic”) learning. In 2008 Thomas and Pattison published a book titled How Children Learn at Home
This time around Pattison is able to draw on the experiences of 311 respondents, all of whom answered the call in 2009 and 2010 to fill out an 11 item online questionnaire. Pattison advertised the questionnaire in many online and print venues frequented by UK home educators. The 311 responses, some from outside the UK, summarized the experiences of some 400 children. Pattison acknowledges that such a methodology does not allow for generalizations to all UK home educators, but she was clearly pleased both with the number of responses she got and the depth of insight her respondents offered to her open-ended questions. She attempts in this book to distill some “naturalistic generalizations,” or observed commonalities that emerge from the stories her subjects tell about how their home educated children learn to read.
After a foreward by Thomas that reminds us that historically mass literacy antedated mass schooling, Pattison provides an introduction describing her sample and the book’s themes. She then offers twelve chapters:
Chapter 1 briefly surveys home education in the United Kingdom, stressing the diversity of approaches families take.
Chapter 2 discusses the nature of learning, emphasizing especially the metaphors we use when talking about learning. She is critical of many of the metaphors of mainstream schooling, especially the notion of knowledge “acquisition.” In contrast, she much prefers a metaphor of “participation.”
Chapter 3 tries to define what reading is. Is it phonetic decoding? Many home educators seemed to think it was, and they were comfortable helping their children sound out words when necessary. Others, however, aimed for a more natural approach or no approach at all. Children of these parents just sort of picked reading up without formal instruction, and often parents couldn’t really explain how their kids learned to read.
Chapter 4 looks more closely at what has long been the central pedagogical debate among homeschoolers–deliberate instruction vs. child-directed learning, or what Pattison calls “structure vs. autonomy.” (p. 65) At first Pattison thought she’d be able to divide her respondents into these two camps, but as she read she found that the reality was a lot messier and more complex. Whatever a parent’s stated ideological orientation to teaching, in reality most families practiced a flexible pedagogy that adapted to the child’s needs at any given time. Again the concept of “participation” emerges as key, as children learned to participate in the general cultural of literacy present in the home. Parents tended not to “teach” in the classroom sense except when specifically asked for help by their children. Seen this way, reading for home educators is not so much a cognitive skill that must be acquired but a cultural practice in which one learns to participate.
Chapter 5 seeks to discover what actually happens in the homes of these families on a daily basis. These children are learning to read. How? First, reading aloud was a pervasive practice, though the rationales for doing it varied. Talking also was very important, as it introduced children to a world of rich vocabulary, storytelling, and interpersonal communication skills. Thirdly, many children learned to read at least in part from computers, games, toys, and television, though other parents deliberately avoided some or all of these outside influences.
Chapter 6 examines another standard metaphor in institutional schooling–the notion that learning should be on a constant trajectory of linear improvement. Children are supposed, in this model, to start with simple texts and gradually work up to more advanced fare. For some home educating families this was more or less what happened, but for many families children’s reading habits did not embody the easy->hard progression. Instead, many children just started reading whatever interested them. If they were interested in a book that was difficult, they would read it. If they then got interested in something that would be classed by outsiders as easy, they would read that. It wasn’t the reading itself but the worlds the reading opened up that mattered.
Chapter 7 deals with how home educating parents assessed their children’s reading. Basically, most home educating parents don’t really do a lot of formal reading assessment, so unsurprisingly many could not point to a precise time when their children had become competent readers. Some recalled a young child’s proud announcement that she or he could read a sign or picture book. Others recalled a child’s question about the meaning of a particular word she had just seen, or remembered the time the child picked up a familiar book and started reading it aloud just as mother had done so many times before. Many parents reported the experience of a child leap-frogging from being read aloud to by parents to reading a complex book like Harry Potter on her own. The common theme here is that there is no uniform structure or imperative that children reach a certain stage at a certain age. It all works out in the end.
Chapter 8 contrasts pevasive societal expectations that children should start reading at young ages and get progressively better with home educators’ views about waiting until a child is ready, about being comfortable with differences, about allowing children to take charge of the process for themselves. Homes rich with literary activity and verbal communication will in good time produce literate children.
Chapter 9 discusses the frequent report among respondents of widely divergent reading experiences among a single family’s multiple children. Rather than thinking of an early reader as gifted or a late reader as learning disabled or the product of a bad home environment, homeschoolers with multiple children remind us that a child’s own personal temperament and interests play a large role in when she or he begins to read.
Chapter 10 focuses on individuals in Pattison’s sample who had left formal schools or who had a special education designation. Some families who pulled their children from schools did so because of fruatration over the exclusive emphasis on phonics, which seemed to sap children’s interest in reading. Others reacted against the formalism and passivity of classroom reading insruction. Still others thought the school’s approach was what produced learning difficulties in children and pulled their kids out so they wouldn’t be labeled disabled just because they hadn’t learned to read yet. Others, in contrast, thought schools didn’t do enough to accommodate their child’s special needs. The anecdotes related in this chapter for the most part reinforce the idea that one-size-fits-all formal instruction in schools crushes children’s natural love of word and books, but that home education helps children recover and learn to love reading again.
Chapter 11 discusses motivation. Home educating families tended to wait on a child’s own motivation to read to manifest itself before initiating formal reading instruction. Sometimes children asserted a general interest in learning to read because they understood the social value of the skill. Other times children were motivated to learn to read because they were interested in a particular topic or even a particular book. Sometimes children who were late to read eventually came to embrace the skill just because they wanted to find out what happened next in a book the family was reading aloud together.
Chapter 12 wraps the book up with the claim that complexity best characterizes home eduators’ approach to reading. Parental strategies varied widely. Children’s experiences varied widely. Regardless of the theory or lack of theory, of the deliberate instruction or lack thereof, of the presence or absence of internal motivation, nearly every child in the survey eventually learned to read. All of this flies in the face of the dominant paradigm of research on readings, which conceives the practice as a cognitive skill that must be mastered by seqential, structured instruction. Against the universalizing narrative of causal educational inputs producing reliable literacy outcomes, Pattison advocates a postmodern recognition that the education of children is not a scientific process, hermetically sealed off from confounding variables. Child development is instead enmeshed in the “complex self-organising systems” that constitute our collective experiences (p. 188). Life is too complex for scientistic reductionisms. Meaning and order must be constructed out of this complexity by people themselves, including children. The overlapping complex systems within which each of us lives are dynamic enough to allow children to osmotically organize their experience such that they learn, among other things, how to read.
Pattison ends with a brief Afterword that critiques the chimera of objective research and expresses her own comfort with the conflation of scholarship and advocacy that is on display in this work.
Appraisal: This is now the third piece of research by Pattison that has been reviewed on this blog. As with the other two, this book enjoys the virtue of being clear and engaging. It also shares the limitations of Thomas and Pattison’s previous work. It sampling methodology, as Pattison clearly acknowledges, does not give us a complete picture of reading and home education. Pattison is well-known in the British home education community as an advocate. Here she uses her connections with various networks of British home educators to recruit subjects, all of whom are as committed as she to making home education look good. As she notes, her survey took place at the very time when British home educators were up in arms over the infamous Badman review, which had used shoddy methodology to arrive at some very negative conclusions about home education, resulting in recommendations that government regulate the practice more strictly. These survey answers, therefore, are not just disinterested records written by home educators trying to explain to a dispassionate researcher what they do all day. They are self-justifications, written to an ally during a time of perceived government attack as ammunition to be used to maintain British (and global) home educators’ right to be left alone. Pattison herself freely admits all of this.
Given that context, can we trust what these parents are saying? Are there other sides to the story that parents (or Pattison) have chosen not to divulge? Has confirmation bias tainted parents’ own recollections? It is impossible to know.
More importantly, in this book we only hear the voices of a self-selecting group of motivated, articulate home educators who are networked enough to hear about Pattison’s study and committed enough to the cause to voluntarily click on the questionnaire link and compose lengthy responses to her questions. How many British home educators never heard about Pattison’s study? How many of those who did hear about it chose not to respond? Would the families not connected enough to know about it or not committed enough to fill it out have had different experiences with reading? Again, it is impossible to know.
Acknowledging then that what we have here is a study whose motives (of both researcher and subjects) are at least in part propagandistic and whose sample is likely skewed toward the most connected, most articulate, and most successful of Britain’s home educators, what can be said of the overall findings? As with Thomas and Pattison’s earlier work, I think the results showcased here do a good job shedding light on the positive potential of home education as an alternative to formal schooling. Clearly in homes where loving parents create a nurturing environment of literacy, language, and child agency, children are going to learn how to read no matter how much or how little they are formally taught. I myself, though I went to school, learned how to read in the same way that many of the children featured here did. Doubtless many of my readers did as well. Pattison and the home educators she draws on to make her point are clearly correct that formal instruction in phonetic awareness, taught sequentially from the easy to the hard in regularly scheduled units keyed to specific ages, is not essential and can in many cases even be harmful. But what of children not fortunate enough to grow up in homes like those featured in this book?