Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents

Foreword

Foreword Guofang Li presents a fascinating study in this book, one that describes and analyzes the interactions, communications, and difficulties occurring among teachers, immigrant students, and their parents . It is not, however, a typical immigrant study that explores the plight of poor families interacting with schools and teachers. Li’s study includes white middle-class teachers in the school who are a racial minority in the community and Chinese immigrants who are a racial majority and who are not poor but middle-class or higher socioeconomically than the teachers. The Chinese families have economic power and they are enthusiastic about using it to improve their children’s chances for success. The difficulty is that there are significant cultural differences between teachers’ and parents’ views of what students should learn and how they should be taught (J. Anderson, 1995a; J. Anderson & Gunderson, 1997; Gunderson & J. Anderson, 2003; Gunderson, 2000). Teachers, parents, and other interested individuals all seem to want the best for children. The difficulty is agreeing on what constitutes the best. This is as true for literacy teachers and researchers as it is for parents and other community groups. Over the years what is considered the best in reading instruction has varied dramatically. Gunderson (2001) writes, “Schools and teachers are in many respects the instruments by which governments both national and local inculcate in their citizens the set of beliefs deemed correct and appropriate” (p. 264). Dick and Jane in the United States and in Canada represented mainstream societal views of family, gender, work ethic, and family structures to students, regardless of their backgrounds . In the 1960s the civil rights movement and the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speaking students helped to xi focus attention on the needs, abilities, and backgrounds of students who differed from the individuals found in reading textbooks. Considerable efforts were made to include minority students in reading materials and through busing in the United States to assure that they were distributed equally across schools in ways that were representative of the diversity of the overall community. Basal reading programs were designed to systematize the teaching and learning of reading involving materials that represented the diversity of students. Basal reading series were based on the notion that students should learn discrete, separate reading skills in a systematic and orderly fashion. In the 1960s and 1970s, basal reading series were used widely across North America to teach students to read. They were considered to be essential and, even better, to be based on scientific principles (Shannon , 1989). A number of revolutions in the way educators view the teaching and learning of reading began in the 1960s. Meaning, many such as Goodman (1967) argued, does not occur in any transcendental sense in text, but is a result of the interaction of a human being and a text. These and other researchers argued strongly that “real literature” was essential to learning, not the artificially constructed and stilted discourse found in basal readers. Others, like Read (1971), showed that reading and writing are not separate processes, but that they occur naturally in an integrated and interactive way. The educational approach referred to as “whole language” was in large part a result of these views. Whole language educators were convinced that children should be encouraged to explore language in meaningful ways, to read authentic literature, and to invent spellings. Delpit (1988, 1991) argued that whole language involves a focus on process, one that benefits students from the middle class but denies minority students access to the “power” code. Whole language as an early instructional approach became the focus of criticism in the 1990s from individuals who believed that early reading instruction should focus on systematic phonics instruction since phonemic awareness was found to be a predictor of reading achievement. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (U.S. Department of Education, 2002) mandated the teaching of phonics and phonics-based reading programs. It represents a politically conservative or traditional view of reading and reading instruction. The literacy research community has interestingly different views and approaches. Individuals such as Pressley (1998) have proposed “balanced” approaches, while others have developed views of xii Foreword literacy that situate it more broadly as comprising ways of thinking that are tied to different sets of values, cultural norms, and literacies (Gee, 1996). Some speak of multiliteracies or critical literacies existing within a multilayered context varying from the reading and writing of icons...