Reading Lessons in Guinea, France, and the United States: Local Meanings or Global Culture?

Abstract

Is classroom practice becoming more homogeneous around the world, or will teachers continue to work very differently across different countries? This article addresses those questions by comparing firstand second-grade reading lessons in France, Guinea, and the United States. It shows that what reading lessons in each country have in common is not, as some have found in the case of middle-school mathematics lessons, whole-class instruction. Rather, what reading lessons in these three countries have in common is a “mixed method” of reading instruction, that is, the practice of combining explicit instruction in decoding and explicit attention to reading for meaning. Within that very general framework, teachers in France, Guinea, and the United States create distinctive lesson structures. Indeed, lesson structures vary so much within and between countries that what the lessons have in common might on the surface appear trivial. And yet, as I argue here, the common mixed method has had a powerful impact on reading instruction, particularly in Guinea. Although global models have little substance until local teachers act to give them meaning and structure, global models nonetheless inhabit and inhibit practice. World culture theorists, otherwise known as neo-institutionalists, argue that schooling takes similar organizational shapes around the world and everywhere features a centralized, compulsory, mass system and a converging official curriculum. Some scholars have extended the argument to encom-