to Jennifer, Joy, all -
This may be as uninteresting to you all as it is fascinating to me, but I
finally remembered (having a "senior" brain is Hell) the name of the giant
reading/writing author (along with Stauffer, Hansen, Martin, etc.) that has had
a HUGE impact on me through the years - James Moffett. He was so revolutionary
when he came out, but his influence deeply colored everything I read through
the 80s and 90s. I'm sure his influence is what made the early research by
Sulzby and Teale in emergent literacy in the mid 80s take hold and prepare the
reading world for Don Holdaway, Marie Clay, etcetera. He certainly understood
the reading/writing connection. I haven't reread Jane Hansen's When Writers
Read lately, but it was written with such a common sense brilliance, I'll bet
it greatly impacted the giants of that time Donald Murray, Donald Graves,
etcetera. Some of the early writing experts, while certainly knowing writing
inside and out, took a little longer to make the connection to reading/writing.
Jane Hansen might have been one of the first to articulately pull out the
connection and give it to the writing world as well as to the reading world.
I think that maybe the greatest lasting contribution of the Reading Wars will
be that noone, but noone, talks anymore about reading without talking about
writing, and pretty much the same thing is true that very few talk about
writing without talking about reading.
In the 70s noone really knew the connection--or at least talked about it very
little. Just look at the changes in The Reading Teacher by numbers of stories
sometime. There was rarely, really rarely, an article about writing there in
the 60s and early 70s. NCTE also was pretty straight writing, rarely
mentioning reading and not in a substantive way.
I know it's trite, but I can't help it: We've come a long way, Baby! When we
think of Four Blocks (of which I really know not so much) or any balanced or
comprehensive program today, we would never leave out the writing component!!
Take a look at something so basic as the name of what we talk about: LITERACY!
When I started reading research on emergent literacy in the early/mid 80s,
there was a lot of professional discussion about what to name it, believe it or
not! So we can probably all say thank you to Bill Teale and Elizabeth Sulzby
every time we talk about balanced literacy, comprehensive literacy, or any
other kind of language arts instruction in the world today, which inevitably
has the word literacy in its title.
In those days, the ONLY writing instruction was at the senior high level,
unless someone in Birkenstocks threw in "creative" writing on Friday afternoons.
And yet...we've only begun to scrape the surface of the reciprocal nature of
reading/writing.
Sunday afternoon thoughts, Bev
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