LEARNING DIFFICULTIES

Addressing and improving learning for those who experience difficulties with literacy

Addressing and improving learning for those who experience difficulties with literacy!

Chapter 1: Introduction

 

Literacy is perhaps one of the most researched areas in education.  Despite this there is no consensus regarding the best way to help those experiencing difficulty.  Class teachers make decisions on a day-to-day basis, some informed by research literature, some by past experience, some by problem solving unique to a particular case.  Whilst researchers and teachers share the same interest in an educational problem their respective orientations differ.  Halsey (1982) rightly observed that traditional research values precision, control, replication and attempts to generalize from specific events.  Teaching, conversely, is concerned with action, translating generalizations into specific acts, dealing with particulars outside statistical probabilities. 

Hargreaves (1996) suggested that teaching is not a researched based profession and the 'yawning gap between theory and practice' persists today.  Research can inform practice, but because of self-imposed constraints render it too narrow to serve as a foundation for practice.  Much research is esoteric, or too general, seen as irrelevant by most practitioners.  As Hopkins maintained:

'The traditional approach to educational research is not of much use to teachers ….. (Teachers and researchers) live in different intellectual worlds and so their meanings rarely connect.' (Hopkins, 2002: 37)

Clarke (1995) proposed specific solutions, advocating that research should offer information, inspiration, vision and support.  He argued that if research is carefully designed, findings are shared and practitioners are involved, teachers can use research to obtain information to evaluate local and specific questions.  They should find inspiration to improve pedagogy.  They might view that which is familiar in a new light through investigations of models, concepts and theories.  These arguments echo Stenhouse (1981) who called for researchers to justify themselves to teachers whom he proposed should be at the forefront of educational research.  Teachers need to ally themselves with researchers who support evidence and explanations of good practice if they are to receive and become effective consumers and evaluators of research. 

Professional responsibility demands that teachers should endeavour to consult research in selective and creative ways with a clear sense of applicability.  Commitment requires teachers to maintain and up-date their knowledge base, also to examine their own practice to generate functional knowledge of the phenomena they deal with.  In this respect, as Hopkins argues, classroom research provides an emancipatory alternative to traditional designs.  Through reviewing and extending strategies and skills practitioners become teacher-researchers, but the processes are different from those employed by larger scale research.  A concern about practice, after reflection, involves discovering how far theoretical ideas are applicable in context.  From this stance the teacher can develop findings that illuminate greater questions by rigorous attention to the detail of particular cases.  Quantitative methodologies are useful in illuminating aspects of the professional universe, but applicability is more likely to be found at the interpretive, qualitative and ethnographic end of the research spectrum. 

 

The topic investigated:

My interest in literacy research was prompted by the House of Commons Education and ...