Foreword
by Marie Clay
This is a book that is equally accessible
to student teachers
and to many stakeholders in education – old hands tired of
fruitless debates, boards of trustees, and evaluators of
educational outputs, journalists, diverse cultural groups, and
international educators who watch the changes New Zealand
makes to its education system.
It brings together research
analyses that are hot off the
press, with a blend of theories that count, including some
enduring perspectives from developmental psychology from
the last two decades (Au, Bronfenbrenner, Cazden, Delpit,
Dyson, Olson and Bruner, Rogoff, Valsiner, Vygotsky, and
Wertsch, to name a few) and some very interesting
autobiographical reports from several decades ago in the
Native School Service of New Zealand.
Most remarkable is the author’s treatment
of extreme views
on several issues. He supports a theory of learning to read
and write as complex activities. Therefore, he can argue that
teachers must build on to what is already familiar. And he
can insist that ‘great expectations, efficacy of teaching, and
excellence of outcome’ apply to all children, including those
from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Misunderstandings that block effective teaching are shifted in
discussion to conceptual solutions that encourage a wider
range of more flexible practices in classrooms.
This is a refreshing collection of sane
resolutions for a school to immediately apply to its discussion of day-to-day activities
in its playgrounds and classrooms! Such material is
particularly welcome in an education system that suddenly
resolved to 'close the gaps' in educational achievement and
just as suddenly
found that slogan to be unacceptable. This book’s title could be used inclusively to think about children learning from parents and teachers or teachers learning from children and colleagues and used by evaluators, administrators, the public, and politicians searching for ideas
about adapting classroom practices for children from different
cultural or language backgrounds.
I met Oskar for the first time in the
Prologue but have seen
him time and again throughout a very long career as a
teacher, a therapist, and a researcher. Keep Oskar in your
mind as you read this book. A child like him cannot wait until
tomorrow; the time for him to develop is, imperatively, today.
This is a remarkable book about our
current need to teach
children from diverse language and cultural backgrounds
more effectively. Stuart McNaughton leads us into issues that
will require a ‘meeting of minds’ if we are to understand where
new practical solutions might be found. He invites teachers to
abandon old beliefs like children not being ‘ready’ for school,
and he displaces the intolerable label of ‘children at risk’ with
the notion of schools that put children at risk.
Constructively, the text proposes ways to
solve old
dilemmas. Is this theoretical discussion? Yes, it has to be.
It takes apart things we do not usually question. Then, with
a clear view of the pros and cons of each issue, the author
constructs new inclusive solutions.
Specific practices are not recommended;
there is no
committed advocacy of ‘this is better that that’. Rather,
teachers are encouraged to widen their options, increase their
versatility, and find different routes to common outcomes.
What does the author mean? Part of his
argument is to
make us readers conscious that the questions ‘What does it
mean to you? What does it mean to me? What does it mean
to the child?' call for a meeting of minds if we are to become
aware of how differently we see things and begin to reach
some common understandings. Yet, in one sense, it is not
theoretical, for if it cannot be made to work in practice, it goes
nowhere.
As an independent appraiser of the young
child’s world, Stuart
McNaughton accepts that an understanding of the complexity
of minds in interaction calls for complex theory and complex
solutions. His comments arise from his own research about
cultural interactions with diverse ethnicities and from a
background in developmental psychology, behavioral,
analysis, and cognitive development. He focuses his lens of
analysis on literacy competencies in the early years of school
and recommends a simple but difficult change. We need to
hold expectations of excellence in acquiring literacy for all
children.
Marie M. Clay, Professor Emeritus,
University of Auckland, New Zealand
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