Vuh-ah-puh

Posted on 30/05/2022

Patrick Yarker introduces ‘Margaret Meek—A Literate Life’ by Judith Graham, freely-available as a FORUM e-book and an ideal entry-point into Meek’s extensive writing about literacy.

A friend helps pupils prepare for the Phonics Screening Check, the check which begins with a series of what the Department for Education calls ‘pseudo-words’ and which my friend says her pupils have renamed ‘bonkers words’. One pupil sounds out each of these in the requisite manner, coming at last to: ‘vuh – a – puh vap’. ‘Vap’ he says again, gazing into the air. ‘Evaporate.’

The inner drive is always to make sense of our encounter with the world, or our immersion in it. To make brute experience meaningful. Surely a prime aim of education is to sustain and enhance this meaning-making? If so, literacy, the induction into the symbolic order of written language as both reader and writer, offers the prospect of a huge empowering. Yet a pupil who sees a pseudo-word such as ‘strom’ and pronounces it ‘storm’ will be penalized for making an error rather than recognized for making sense. 

Shallow appreciation of the nature of literacy, and unsound understanding of what it is to become literate, ensure misguided policy. The scholar Margaret Meek Spencer, who died in 2020, worked to help practitioners and academics towards a more adequate, nuanced, insightful and humane awareness of what it means to learn to read and write, and to remain a reader and writer. In works such as ‘On Being Literate’ and ‘How Texts Teach What Readers Learn’, she recognized children as the meaning-makers they are. She valued their prior experience, respected what they could already do with language, and urged the importance of talking with them about what the text they were reading meant to them. She set store by what teachers discover as they help their pupils become more literate, and in doing so reminded teachers of the irreplaceable value of professional knowledge derived from experience, and of the importance of reflecting on it individually and collectively. She saw teachers as responsible experts, not state functionaries, bound to hold practice up to the light of their own informed scrutiny and to develop and augment it in the interests of their pupils. She endorsed the view taken by John and Elizabeth Newson (in their book Perspectives on School at Seven Years Old) that reading is ‘a necessary condition of liberty’.  She held literacy to be everyone’s entitlement, and hence, in an unjust society, a prize that would need to be fought for. Literacy aids liberation.

Margaret Meek wrote extensively: books and book reviews, academic articles and occasional papers, forewords, afterwords and introductions. She taught teachers, and researched with them. She interwove academic reading and reviewing with reading and reviewing books for children. The breadth and fruit of her scholarly work is critically surveyed in the e-book ‘Margaret Meek—A Literate Life’, written by Judith Graham, a long-standing colleague of Margaret’s at the University of London Institute of Education. FORUM is delighted to make ‘Margaret Meek—A Literate Life’ available as a free download. 

Reading and writing in school are all too readily suborned to the needs of a test. As pleasurable activities undertaken in school for enjoyment, self-expression or to fuel the play of imagination, they seem always under threat. Meek’s sustained and probing consideration of that mysterious achievement, literacy, and of the fundamental importance to it of story, remain vital in a period marked by particularly dogmatic and increasingly coercive policy in relation to the modes of language. Not content with mandating Systematic Synthetic Phonics as the sole method in English state schools by which children shall be taught to read, government is now attempting to prevent Initial Teacher Education providers from making students aware that any other approaches exist. All the more reason to remember and re-visit Margaret Meek’s wise legacy. Judith Graham’s concise and crafted overview is the ideal introduction. 

‘Margaret Meek—A Literate Life’ can be freely downloaded via this link:

Margaret Meek A Literate Life – Lawrence Wishart (lwbooks.co.uk)