Autonomous and ideological teaching methodologies in Literacy
Joanna and Brian Street made a major contribution to the study of identity and education with a comparison autonomous and ideological teaching methodologies in their 1995 work The Schooling of Literacy.pdf (pg 75)
Autonomous Authority flickr photo by FeatheredTar shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license
The Streets argued that literacy gets embedded in community values and practices but society treated it as just schooling and pedagogy. They then described autonomous and ideological teaching methods that emerge from this paradox.
Autonomous Teaching
The Autonomous model views reading writing as neutral processes dependent on the variance found in cognitive and physiological functioning. These models assume a universal set skills relying mainly on decoding and encoding printed text. This had lead to a hierarchical taxonomy of schools and the “pedagogization” of literacy.
It was Brian Street who first proposed the idea of literacies versus Literacy
A great deal of the thinking about literacy…has assumed that literacy witha big “L” and single “y” [is] a single autonomous thing [with] consequences for personal and social development…. One of the reasons for referring to this position as an autonomous model of literacy is that it represents itself as though it is not a position located ideologically at all, as though it is just natural. One of the reasons why I want to call the counter-position ideological is precisely in order to signal that we are not simply talking here about technical features of the written process or the oralprocess. What we are talking about are competing models and assumptions about reading and writing processes, which are alwaysembedded in power relations
Ideological Teaching
Street went on to research “out-of-school” literacies. Street argued that the “objectivization” of literacy instruction was a hidden ideology. Educators and teachers needed to adapt a much broader term of literacy within the community. They called for a vision of literacies that was more multimodal, meaning combining a multiplicity and integration of communication modes like print, sound, and dance. This lead to the inclusion of social semiotic theory of multimodality into the study of education.
Technology, Ideology, and Education
Looking back at 30 years of edtech research since Street you see the debate between Autonomous and ideological teaching still play out. What is get rid of woke, DEI, and return to phonics but an ideological reaction to the ideas of folks like Brian Street?
You also have the pedagogization effect. Should gamification be brought into learning? What about popular memes. Do we need to schoolify out of school literacies?
Yet kids do make meaning in ways with technology available to school. Yet they may not be any more technology literate than they were thirty years ago.