2002 Annual Report, Commission on Reading

At the annual meeting of the NCTE Commission on Reading, we addressed issues of concern to our profession and established specific strategies to promote the dissemination of knowledge and to influence professional practice. We are particularly concerned about the continuing politicalization intruding on teacher decision-making. One response to this concern is the initiation of a clearinghouse for communication among educators across the nation through a Web page that we are in the process of constructing with assistance from Headquarters.

Jane Braunger, Linda Miller-Cleary, and Connie Weaver agreed to orchestrate the development of a Web space with assistance from Kathy Egawa. Their plans include creating three separate pages, specifically:

(1)    up-to-date news on reading (political blurbs, social, etc.) potentially including the National Reading Panel statements from Elaine Garan, David Pearson, Pat Shannon, Arlette Willis, Michael Shaw, Jerry Coles, and Steve Strauss as well as the resolution drafted by the Commission in November 2000;

(2)    Commission-reviewed research articles receiving support from two commission members temporarily called Refereed Research for Decision-makers; and

(3)    a matrix for evaluating a variety of reading programs [potentially to be known as Programs at a glance].

We hope to be able to place these resources on the newly developed NCTE Web page in the near future.

The conference sessions sponsored by the Commission scheduled for Atlanta in 2002 will specifically address two issues: “Exposing False Claims about Reading and Reading Instruction” organized and chaired by Patrick Shannon and “Profiles in Courage: How Being True to Our Beliefs Defines Our Lives” organized and chaired by Ruth Rigby. In addition, we supported the proposal development for a day-long workshop on “Articulating and Documenting Growth in Reading.”

The Commission agreed to present to the Executive Committee a three- to five-page paper with our understanding of reading, its processes, purposes, and practices in order to contribute our knowledge in the debates in popular, political, professional, and policy-making conversations. These topics will organize the paper: What is reading? What is text? Why do we read? When do we read? Who reads? Jane Braunger, Yetta Goodman, Carmen Medina, Linda Miller-Cleary, Michael Shaw, and Rita Brause are working on the draft of this document for presentation to the entire Commission prior to the November annual meeting.

Since the Commission is concerned about teacher professional knowledge at all grade levels about reading and the processes and factors that contribute to learning how to read, we started to consider the NCATE standards for teacher education program accreditation. Currently the English language arts guidelines for grades 6–12 offer negligible attention to literacy per se. This is also true in the guidelines used in other subject areas (social studies education, mathematics education, science education). The Commission will explore NCTE’s roles in the development of standards across the disciplines, using the IRA’s role as the reviewer of elementary teacher education programs as a starting point.

The Commission’s discussions provided a cautiously optimistic perspective for the potential for having an impact on our profession. We resolved to continue working on these projects during the year.   

Rita S. Brause, Director