Chasing Shadows: Why There Cannot be a “Simple” Science of Literacy

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The rhetoric of the reading wars has become more than just an armchair academic debate, but is encoded now in the very laws, house and senate bills, and legislative policies of the majority of the states. In turn, these policies are powered by staggering sums of money such as the 90-million-dollar investment of Fulton County, Georgia in a revamp of the failed No Child Left Behind initiative of two decades ago since, according to district officials, “Some college programs don’t sufficiently prepare future teachers to teach reading.” And Tennessee plans to spend 100 million dollars on their Reading 360—a program which stresses the development of “strong, phonics-based reading skills.” In this address, I contest the narrow perceptions of what has been called the science of reading movement and focus rather upon another contender for the science throne—that of Developmental Science. Using examples from emergent bilingual children's early writing, I attempt to show that any “simple” model of reading not only wastes useful data about children's literacy performances, but conflates the data with static states of being which, in turn, reduce the conceptual complexity of what is happening in terms of literacy development. Developmentally speaking, my contention is that models based upon the science of reading demand a slavish focus on the alphabet and figural convention. However, Developmental Science challenges the literacy field to embrace the complexity of the developmental processes, and as Vygotsky further argued, “bring the child to an internal understanding of writing” in whatever language that may be.