[Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: A piece I felt I had to write

[Judith Green]

Hi David,

Thank you for sharing this important piece.  Marie Clay’s work was the center of dissertations and informed work in important ways of engaging teachers in understanding supports and constraints of teaching as action as well as developmental phases of in situ and over time learning.  However, policy makers adopting it without support systems in the US and UK and resistance by commercial publishers of phonics and other structural approaches were instrumental in resistance and the demise of this process approach.

Just sharing from lived experiences as I watched this being deconstructed in ways similar to what you report by Hanford.  There is a rich research base in 3 countries on this process.  Not a sold story.

Judith

Sent from my iPad

> On Oct 28, 2022, at 7:36 AM, P David Pearson <ppearson at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> I posted the attached piece on FaceBook out of respect from one of our departed RHF colleagues, Marie Clay, whose contributions have been called into question in an APM series of podcasts by Emily Hanford with the umbrella title of Sold a Story.  I have listened to the first two, and I'm focusing on the second, which is mainly about Marie Clay's work. Hanford unpacks her account of Marie's contributions and goes on to tell us why they are misguided. To quote Hanford, "In this episode, I’m gonna tell you where this idea comes from. I’m gonna tell you what’s wrong with it."  I've embedded a link to the piece I posted on FaceBook, a medium which not all of us use. 
> 
> So I am taking the liberty of sharing it directly. Below is the introduction to it. If you like, you can read the whole piece here.  My piece is not really about Hanford. It is really my 15 year overdue piece about Marie's legacy in our field. That said, I think we all need to be aware of Hanford's reporting and its impact on policy.  
> 
> A note to the reader: I wrote the initial draft of this essay soon after Marie Clay’s death in 2007, but I failed to finish it in time for inclusion in a publication honoring her contributions to the field. And it has rested in a comfortable sinecure in the cloud since that time. About a week ago, I happened on an American Public Media podcast by Emily Hanford, one that cast doubt on the professional contributions of Marie Clay. Essentially, Hanford blamed Dame Clay for America’s dismal reading performance when Clay offered teachers an approach to promoting reading development that, at least according to Hanford, is just plain wrong. And it is wrong, Hanford added, because it is at odds with what we know because of recent advances in the science of reading. Time to right that wrong by restoring phonics first and fast to the top slot in our reading curriculum. 
> I was appalled and angered by this indictment for two reasons: (a) it is based on a limited portrayal of scientific reading research (dare I say, just plain wrong?), and (b) it was directed at scholar who has left us a rich, perhaps unparalled, legacy of understandings about the nature of reading acquisition, one to be celebrated not denigrated. At the height of my rage, I remembered this unfinished tribute. Thanks to the search affordances of our digital age, I found it—as I said, resting comfortably in the cloud. So, I got to work and finished it for this occasion (Finally met the deadline! Thanks for your patience, Marie). Today, I’ll forego a point-by-point counter to Hanford’s outrageous claims in favor of an argument for celebrating Professor Clay’s legacy. 
> -- 
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> P. David Pearson
> Evelyn Lois Corey Emeritus Professor of Instructional Science
> Graduate School of Education
> University of California, Berkeley
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