Hegemony, Meaning And Ideology Through Structured Literacy In New Zealand Education System

Tuesday, 18 June 2024, 11:45 am
Opinion: Ian Powell

One of the big political influences on me has been Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). He was a courageous revolutionary and anti-fascist activist whose premature death was directly linked to a lengthy imprisonment, while in poor health, under Benito Mussolini’s fascist government.

Gramsci was also a remarkable and creative intellectual perhaps most noted for his insightful Prison Notebooks. Its contents were drafted on toilet paper before being smuggled out of prison.

One of his longest lasting theoretical insights was his use of the term ‘hegemony’. By this he meant that ruling classes were able to rule most effectively when successful in ensuring that their values became the values of the masses, either by consent or coercion.

Hegemony and literacy

Hegemony is a term that can be adapted for usage in various different situations, including how education systems teach literacy.

If the teaching of literacy includes meaning (combined with phonics) it can encourage enquiring minds more able to question hegemonic beliefs and positions.

It is a term that has a striking relevance to the national imposition by the National-ACT-NZ First coalition government of what is called ‘structured literacy’.

This is based on a prescribed synthetic phonics approach; it is the opposite of learning by meaning (in combination with other strategies and supported by quality texts).

Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching where words are broken up into the smallest units of sound (phonemes).

Children learn to make connections between the letters of written texts (graphemes, or letter symbols) and the sounds of spoken language.

Phonics has in various ways previously formed part of literacy learning in New Zealand. It can be a useful additional aid for some children. However, structured literacy places it at the centre; the be-all and end-all. Meaning is a casualty.

The government’s structured literacy policy was discussed in two different articles both published in The Post on 7 May. The first is by press gallery reporter Bridie Witton: Education gamble. The second is a more critical column (paywalled) by Dave Armstrong: Literal literary stake.

International literacy ranking

For around 30 years since 1970 Aotearoa New Zealand was ranked top or near top of the world in literacy for 15-year-olds.

This ranking was done by an international study known as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). However, since 2000, there has been a gradual decline in our ranking.

Structured literacy is opportunistically promoted to lever off this decline. It is a costly ‘one-size-fits- all’ experiment to ‘make New Zealand great again’.

It follows a deliberate misinformation campaign that Aotearoa’s children are doing poorly based on international comparisons (for context see below-mentioned comments).

This misinformation includes the accusation that literacy learning has been focused exclusively on meaning. As discussed both above and below, this accusation is false. Meaning was part of a broader strategy.

The irony is that structured literacy is essentially copying United Kingdom and United States policies. But neither country has ever achieved New Zealand’s 2000 PISA mean raw score. In fact, both are even well below New Zealand’s decline.

Understanding ERIC

So what was behind New Zealand’s earlier world-leading success. In a word it was ‘ERIC’ or, to give it its full name, the ‘Early Reading In-service Course’.

Teaching practices were disseminated through ERIC and supported nationally by a team of teacher and school advisors. Learning through meaning was a critical ingredient.

ERIC was underpinned by:

• children reading a wide variety of quality literature in various contexts;
• teachers’ systematic observation of a child’s behaviour; and
• deliberate and precise teaching of ‘functional skills’, including audio discrimination, visual perception of print, and decoding.

ERIC gave teachers a reliable tool that encouraged children to pay attention to error and understand the power of self-correction. Self-correction of perceived error creates a positive mechanism for self-improvement.

This was unique to New Zealand. I understand that no other country in the world has taught children in this unique way, neither previously nor since.

ERIC’s innovative designers deliberately did not follow other countries. Instead they based their design on:

• Aotearoa’s own developmental-cognitive research;
• a meticulous analysis of overseas research and learning theories;
• the experience of successful New Zealand teachers and practical ingenuity.

Aotearoa’s primary school teachers designing successful ERIC programme

In a nutshell, ERIC was a course for teachers designed by successful experienced literacy teachers and advisors, who were also academics/researchers. It was an impressive utilisation of the education system’s intellectual human capital.

These unique teaching and learning practices propelled New Zealand students to the top of the literacy world in 1984 and kept us there to at least 2000. Our literacy practices were confirmed as being on the right track.

They were also reaffirmed in the Ministry of Education’s own published research, Picking up the Pace, covering the years 2001-2005.

Abandonment of Reading Recovery

Meanwhile, in the mid-1980s, the internationally acclaimed Reading Recovery programme was gradually implemented in New Zealand. The main person behind its development was Auckland University’s Professor Marie Clay.

Reading Recovery was a school-based literacy programme designed for the lowest achieving children turning six years.

The objective was to enable them to reach age-expected levels within 12-20 weeks. As with ERIC, learning through meaning was an important component.

Gradually it was introduced to varying degrees in other countries such as the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.

In 2018 the University College of London published the results of research into reading recovery’s introduction to schools in economically deprived areas of London.

The outcome was long-lasting beneficial changes: London reading recovery study reveals positive outcomes.

One of the biggest casualties of the imposition of structured literacy is that both the training of reading recovery tutors and the funding to schools for this programme will cease.

Out with the proven; in with the unproven. The proven does not fit the new ideological educational policy hegemony; the unproven does.

Behind the literacy decline

Aotearoa’s relative decline in children’s literacy ranking can’t be isolated to a single cause. The word relative is important. Some other countries have improved their rankings which is a good thing.

The stifling impact on education of the previous National-led government (2008-17) of the poorly thought-out ‘National Standards’ would have contributed.

Primary schools were distracted by having to do work-arounds to mitigate bureaucratic compliance undermining good learning. This was a bad thing.

Restructuring of education the biggest likely factor behind New Zealand’s declining international ranking

But arguably the biggest factor behind the decline was the restructuring of the education system from the early 1990s. This fragmented the system, including by reducing the level of national coordination.

Critically important was the disestablishment of the role of school advisors who were responsible for updating and supporting ERIC.

These roles were replaced by an inexperienced Ministry of Education who unilaterally contracted ad hoc professional development and one-off research projects.

The outcome was the dwindling of teachers’ in-depth understandings of New Zealand’s unique classroom practices. Today, with the natural attrition of ERIC-trained teachers, only a skeleton remains.

It is unlikely that any students who started school in 2002 (ie, 15-year-olds in 2012) were taught by ERIC-trained-teachers. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is an important cause for the significant decline in our PISA results since 2012.

Structure literacy children books often lack a coherent story for meaning

Structured literacy uses recently published learning to read books for children. These books rely on decoding certain specific sounds and learn them before they can start to read.

Consequently they often don’t carry a coherent story line which is necessary for meaning.

Filling the vacuum

The gradual drift that led to the eventual abandonment of ERIC and its underlying premises, including the importance of meaning in the teaching of literacy was not by conscious design.

Instead it was the consequence of the fragmented and dysfunctional political and bureaucratic leadership of the country’s education system.

Education minister Erica Standford tailor-made for new ideological education bent

Inevitably this drift to abandonment meant that a vacuum was created. This provided an opportunity for ideological leadership ‘capture’.

The rightwing thinktank, the New Zealand Initiative (NZI), was tailor-made to seize this opportunity.

NZI is the successor to the highly ideological Business Roundtable which had been influential in Aotearoa’s shift to the destructive neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s.

All that was required was an education minister who shared its ideological bent. Erica Standford was equally tailor-made to fit this bill.

Newsroom political editor Laura Walters covers this nicely on 8 May: Who’s behind the government’s education policy . Her focus is on what she calls the man behind the new policy, Dr Michael Johnston.

He has the title of Senior Fellow at NZI leading its education work. An Australian graduate, Johnston was previously an academic at Victoria University.

Literacy teaching is an important part of the government’s education policy. Johnston is strongly opposed to what he calls ‘progressive education’ or ‘twenty-first century learning’.

Walters quotes him as asserting that:

Unhappily for the priests of twenty-first century learning, it looks as if they will soon be defrocked. The counter-reformation is underway.

Johnston has now been appointed to lead Stanford’s ‘Curriculum Refresh Ministerial Advisory Group’.

Standford has slowly but steadily outlined where government education policy is now going; what Walters’ cleverly describes as heading “…in a new old direction.”

This ideological journey includes the compulsory introduction of structured literacy supported by a controversial $67 million funding package.

This has led to concern that there is now an excessive reliance on a small number of narrowly focussed “fringe” researchers sharing the same ideology as the education minister and who are now “making hay while the sun shines”.

Johnston told Newsroom that since Stanford became minister the pair had spoken about “structured literacy and curriculum design and assessment, all sorts of things”.

He is pleased with the direction the government was headed. “Research published by me and others at the initiative is strongly in agreement with that direction.”

His work and the government’s general approach to education is similar to that of the Conservative government in the United Kingdom.

Back to hegemony

Antonia Gramsci’s use of hegemony to better understand how ruling classes rule is capable of a micro-level adaptation to how literacy is taught.

How it is taught is critical not just on the ability to read but also to the ability to comprehend. In other words, it is critical to the development of enquiring minds.

Using the understanding of meaning as part of literacy learning enhances the ability to question and even challenge existing mores that either are no longer applicable or were never justified in the first place. This is the antipathy of hegemony.

The imposition of structured literacy into New Zealand’s education system is part of a conscious endeavour to impose hegemonic control over how children are taught.

Depending on the extent of its ideological implementation it will also ensure that when these children become young adults they will be more likely to comply with the prevailing hegemony of Aotearoa New Zealand’s rulership.

[I am grateful for the advice of experienced children’s literacy expert and practitioner Dr Gwenneth Phillips on ERIC and how to learn literacy.]

© Scoop Media

Ian Powell

Otaihanga Second Opinion is a regular health systems blog in New Zealand.

Ian Powell is the editor of the health systems blog 'Otaihanga Second Opinion.' He is also a columnist for New Zealand Doctor, occasional columnist for the Sunday Star Times, and contributor to the Victoria University hosted Democracy Project. For over 30 years , until December 2019, he was the Executive Director of Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, the union representing senior doctors and dentists in New Zealand.

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