Martha Dillner (University of Texas, Clear Lake, USA): I am the current editor of Reading Online, the online journal that contains the article “Further Notes on the Four Resources Model,” that many of us are responding to tonight. I'm writing from my home in Alvin, Texas, USA, near Houston. Peter or Allan, as we get under way, is there anything you would like me to ask you during the chat?

Allan Luke: I'm writing from Education House, State Department of Education, downtown Brisbane, Australia. It's a beautiful Brisbane day -- sunny, and I can probably see Peter Freebody from my window. The background noise you hear from me is the sound of bureaucrats doing bureaucracy.

I guess the only thing we'd like to get “asked” is how/whether teachers actually use the model, where it's implemented. I also think that Peter will have some things to say about a large research project he's done on literacy and disadvantaged groups and how the model might work with “at risk” communities, minority kids, etc.

Jim Brown (industrialist, Brisbane, Australia): Allan, are we here to discuss anything in particular? I joined in because of your position in education. What are your plans for the future, and what relationship does this have with the ideas of people like Ricardo Semler, the industrialist in Sao Paulo, Brazil?

Allan: I don't know Ricardo Semler's work, but I've been thinking recently about going back and reading Paulo Freire's writings -- before he died, he was made Superintendent of Schools for São Paulo, I think -- and the whole issue of trying to bring critical literacy into mainstream state systems is a current preoccupation.

Jim: Allan, you should read Maverick by Semler. It was a number 1 seller, rising from third and second worldwide. He had addressed large groups at the Cultural Centre here in Brisbane. I was very impressed with him and watched him on Lateline twice (the second time by popular demand).

Martha: Allan, how do teachers actually use the model?

Allan: When Peter and I began working on this a few years ago, we were getting sick and tired of “reading wars” -- and we could see that many of the various approaches to reading had a lot to offer. At the same time, we could see that teachers were getting sick and tired of being told that they were “wrong” and needed to embrace something new. We also wanted to see how the work we and others had been doing on critical literacy could articulate with a lot of existing practice.

Karen Hegeman (Theresa Primary School, Indian River Schools, New York, USA): Define critical literacy for me, please.

Jim: Yes, what does critical literacy mean for an industrialist's workers?

Jane Greenwood: This is important. I keep telling my bachelor of education students that they have to be eclectic and keep [their] eyes open for any approach that will help them and their kids learn in the most appropriate and helpful ways for their contexts....

Allan: Whew! [I would define critical literacy as] understanding how texts and discourses operate in powerful ways in social institutions, developing a capacity to understand what text....

Jim: Allan, would you like to translate that into everyday language?

Peter Freebody: I take critical literacy as referring to all those practices we undertake that show we know that there is an unstable relation between language and reality, and that therefore texts are ideologically motivated -- which means that teachers need to systematically pass that on.

Max Qut (aka Cameron Richards, Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia): That is a pretty wide definition.

Allan: I'm not sure that it's such a wide definition. For us, critical literacy is about understanding how texts construct the world, construct identity, position us in institutions -- and figuring out ways that we can argue back, reposition ourselves.... Teachers and kids can get their heads around this.

Max: But texts often do all this in very ambivalent ways...and at various levels that often contradict each other, Allan.

Allan: Absolutely, Max. And one of the tricks about the “critical literacy” stuff is that Peter and I and others have really tried to combat its packaging and commodification into a “method.” It's more, I think, about an understanding about discourse and language and society -- and developing an “attitude,” a standpoint and metalanguage for talking about texts.

Peter: Max, are you wanting to imply that the ambivalence and fluidity of these processes means they can't be taught about in a systematic way? Or is your concern elsewhere?

Max: I sometimes worry that people who adapt a model like your “four resources” may not appreciate the ambivalence of textuality that you are undoubtedly aware of.

Allan: Uh oh. Max, is this Derrida's endless play of difference creeping in here?

Max: Not at all, Allan. I mean this as a purely pragmatic observation. Kids who are caught up in the popular electronic texts of contemporary culture become all the more resistant the more they are told they are being socially positioned.

Jim: Who determines what the “metalanguage” is going to be?

Allan: Tricky one, Jim. One of the big debates we had with “genre” advocates in Australia about 10 years ago was the apparent push to “standardize” the metalanguage -- specifically, for all Australian approaches to use a Hallidayan grammatical metalanguage.

JD (aka Judy Diamondstone, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA): I agree with Allan's comment: it's more a “way in” to looking at language -- or rather, looking at language through Halliday's metafunctions (three ways in), looking at positioning/interacting as well as naming/representing. Elementary for Australia, but a huge leap for the U.S.

Martha: Allan, do you know where the model is implemented? In what type of classrooms?

Allan: In many, many Australian classrooms. Usually we advise that teachers can use it to suss out [to determine] whether their programs have “balance.” For example, we've actually found classrooms that did all critical literacy stuff and didn't engage with the pragmatics of what to do with texts in everday face-to-face contexts.

Jane: Many Queensland [Australia] work programs have embraced the model as a help in terms of the structure of what they do.

Maria Lourdes Ladrido (University of the Philippines, the Visayas): Allan, do you think it would be applicable in ESL classrooms, too?

Allan: Yes. The “pragmatic practices” part of the model was derived from ESL communicative and functional instruction. And the Brisbane-based ESL reception school does a lot of work around understanding popular culture and dealing with texts of identity.

JD: Do you have sites for the Brisbane-based ESL model?

Allan: Milpera State School runs an interesting mix of systemic functional grammar (which is used when we teach kids critical discourse analysis and genres), cultural identity work around NIKE texts, news texts, etc., while teaching coding and pragmatic competence using communicative approaches.

Karen H.: Can we get to some practical application of theory rather than just theory?

Allan: Sure. What it means in practice is that a year 2 or 3 classroom [primary level classroom] may have a strong coding orientation and even have this integrated with a whole language orientation to literature immersion or comprehension using shared book experiences, but it might not be engaging kids with critique, with second guessing the conditions under which texts were produced, with asking “What is this text trying to do to me?” For example, it may be a pretty acritical approach that subliminally and unintentionally is teaching an acquiescent relationship to reading and texts. The coding and meaning orientations are necessary, but not sufficient.

There are inverse examples, too. For example, I might be dealing with an adult women's literacy class that is pretty Freirian and consciousness-raising in orientation -- but, whoops, forgot to offer direct instruction at “word attack” or syntactic structures. More work with the code was needed.

Karen Moni (Graduate School of Education, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia): I have been able to use the model to explain to parents where young adults with Down Syndrome have particular problems when reading texts.

Peter: The application question for me relates to the conscious structuring of some parts of the day to deal explicitly with these resources, and other parts to explicitly work the new learning gained there into real-life textual work on real tasks -- a shuttle job back and forth, with some shared language for you and the kids to use to emphasize the “componentiality” of language and the need to orchestrate the components.

Karen H.: In the scheme of education, I am having trouble seeing the value to a six- or eight-year-old of trying to understand “what the text is doing” from their point of view.

Jane: [I'm] not sure [about that]. There is a good video of Jennifer O'Brien explaining to her Year 2s that some ad material for Mother's Day leaves some mothers -- poor ones, ethnic ones -- out of the picture. The kids get this clearly.

Allan: Karen, Jennifer O'Brien passes out Mother's Day flyers from K-Mart [a chain of discount stores] to Year 1 kids, has them do cut-outs, and asks the question, What is this piece of junk mail trying to do to you? The kids know. She then asks, Whose parents are shown here? Whose aren't? Simple questions about positioning, silencing, exclusion. Then they recompose the text.

Karen H.: Excellent. I was making it too complicated in my thinking.

Chip Bruce (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA): Allan, your examples suggest that the resources imply questions to ask, but not a curriculum formula.

Peter: Chip, a “set of interrogations” was how we originally wrote about this -- not a curriculum framework or a set of pedagogies. The issue was “Whatever your curriculum and pedagogy or school policy on literacy, ask yourself these questions.”

Allan: Chip's comment is apt: this is a heuristic template, not a formula or method. It's a way of interrogating programs and asking yourself questions about the normative requirements for literacy in new cultural, economic, and social conditions. Most “methods” sell us an approach and don't ask questions about what “does” and what “should” count as literate practice in dynamic and very uncertain technological, cultural, and community conditions.

Chip: Peter and Allan, interrogations could then lead to further interrogations, which in principle could involve students and teachers in redefining what's important to study.

Karen M.: The resources model allows me to map the strengths of my students and to focus strategies aimed at developing their weaknesses. For example, my students with Down Syndrome are good text decoders and text users, but I need to build their skills in participating in and analyzing texts. Allan, I agree I can interrogate my teaching and use critical literacy tools to then work on other aspects of literacy.

Sherry Macaul (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, USA): Might a community be limited by the books, magazines, and journals available in their bookstores, libraries, and newsstands? The Internet can open up new possibilities.

Jim: How do you deal with the values of the different student groups you are teaching?

Jane: Exactly. Do anyone's in particular get a guernsey [take precedence]?

Allan: Engage with them directly...get your own readings and reading positions -- with their ideological assumptions -- on the table...quit playing pedagogic god who has the definitive view of reading.

Peter: Jim, that's certainly been one of the issues about “critical literacy” here -- some groups resisting the idea, wanting to emphasize more vocational and “compliant” forms of textual work.

Karen M.: I start with their values and ideas, particularly with popular [...] and then work to include other representations of the issues they are interested in.

Marilyn Hudson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA): Allan, great point...especially with special ed. kids....

Max: What if their ideological assumptions are different to “ours” (as they usually are)?

Jim: What I actually meant was, different cultural/religious beliefs which come under discussion because [of] texts.

Allan: The problem with it is, that kids also need to learn that texts exist in social fields of power. In institutional texts, some texts have great weight, capital and power -- and others don't count much. Some readings are made to count by social institutions, classes, and groups, [while] others don't. So the “any reading goes” approach (à la poststructuralism) needs to be tempered with a little good Marxist political economy: a reading of the fields of power where tests are used. The kids need to see that that advertising text or that racist text sits in a social institution and tries to position you in particular ways in particular interests. Pierre Bourdieu's work is excellent on issues of power -- Peter and I use it a lot with our students.

Peter: The point for me is not the curriculum's “location” of educationally acceptable values, but rather a serious pursuit of the proposition that texts are representational rather than empirical, so to speak, and that a significant aspect of representing reality is ideological. That's “all” -- but it's an awful lot more than most literacy programs I have seen, even in senior years.

Jim: “A little good Marxist political economy,” [Allan]? What do you mean by that?

Allan: Texts are produced by authors in particular historical, material, and discourse conditions; they're read and their “uptake” is constrained by similar conditions. We can shift kids' attentions to the conditions of authorship and possible readers and readings. Simple questions: Who could have written this book? Why and to what end? In what kind of world? Who could have published it? Whose interests does it serve?

Similarly, we can flip this around to readership, asking kids, If you didn't like this text, what kind of person might have liked it? Who was it written for? Which gender? History? Culture? Who is its ideal reader? Who does it construct? [There are] lots of ways to approach this.

Jim: Couldn't the children then be encouraged by their teachers to create new cultural stereotypes -- “type of person,” etc., etc.?

Allan: Jim, if you're suggesting this could entail ideological manipulation, question back: don't reader response and whole language and other classroom approaches already ask kids to create new cultural stereotypes? It seems that it's our stock in trade.

JD: How do I get my user name to appear [in the real-time display of discussion in the chat room]?

Sometimes a “master narrative” does help -- I've used “changing times” to contextualize critical literacy concerns.

Karen M.: I prefer not to think of “master narratives” but more of starter texts or discussion texts. As a teacher, I can offer a representation and then it's out on the table for students to bring or find other representations that can be discussed.

Chip: JD, your questions are a good example of the need for multiple levels: the master narrative, and how to get the user name to appear. Sherry asked earlier about the Internet. It shifts the way we answer questions like these.

Karen H.: How so?

Max: Allan, you do not seem to distinguish a “racist text” from a racist interpretation of a text (especially in so far as you have ruled out looking at an author's “intentionally” -- even if only in a rhetorical sense).

Allan: Good point about the variable issues around what might count as a “racist text.” Point taken.

Margaret Hagood: But how does one go about showing students that texts are racial in their presentation if students don't see it as that? Connected to ideologies, if kids' ideologies are different than our own ideologies as teachers, does the model support getting students to think in ideological ways similar to the teacher's ideologies, or only to question their own?

Jim: Margaret, exactly what I meant.

Marilyn: Allan, when teaching language arts, we did similar things -- had the students writing with other perspectives (e.g., as the authors).... They developed greater understanding of the “types” of people.

Jim: What are “types” of people?

Karen M.: There is a possibility that students do produce new stereotypes, but the issue here is looking at the process. In composing or reconstructing texts from a different perspective, the students gain insights into how language and language choice construct a stereotype in the first place. I also think they gain some understanding of their own power to create and challenge what they read.

JD: The matter of stereotyping seems to me a question of what Halliday calls delicacy (a matter of levels again) -- big patterns break down into finer distinctions. But I appreciate the concern about ideological imposition on students.

Karen H.: But experience of the students involved is going to have to influence success in examination of text.

Jim: The teacher will always influence the discussion.

Karen H.: Jim, teacher influence is still bounded by the student's experiences. I.e., racism is defined differently in different parts of the world.

JD: I teach my students who are prospective teachers that intentions (writer's intentions) matter. In teaching and learning, they matter.

Karen M.: Jim, I think you're right. Part of the process is acknowledging this but also moving the teacher from center stage to being part of the discussion -- not always leading it.

Jim: The teacher will be able to put pressure on students in accordance with his/her own ideology (unless their ideology is that they shouldn't do that!!). I agree with Karen's last comment.

Sherry: How does the notion of new literacy studies connect to your model of literacy? Do your roles include the idea of text creator?

Peter: One of the premises of the so-called New Literacy Studies (NLS) is that we begin by looking at ordinary cultural practice and, in a sense, creep up on literacy through an anthropologist's perspective on cultural practices and technologies (including cognitive technologies). This was one of the starting points of our model. We tried to change the labeling completely as a way of changing the way we talk about these things -- starting out of school, looking naively at first, like the anthropologist.

Kevin Leander (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA): One way around authorial intention is to go after authorial audience. It sort of shifts the category from a psychology of the author to a sociological take.

Allan: To come back to my earlier point: some readings and interpretations have particular force and power, and others don't. Technically speaking, texts “racialize” people, they construct and position us as raced and gendered subjects. Jim's and Karen's points about the “uptake” are crucial. The problem is that some texts -- including racializing slurs, jokes, novels -- have particular effects of power. Some texts and readings can be quite destructive. But Max's point, we can question authorial intent but can't ultimately access it. The pedagogical point: perhaps this critical literacy “attitude” is about repositioning readers' relationships of power to texts and authors and contexts.

[Due to technical difficulties, a brief portion of the exchange was lost at this point]

Karen H.: Jim, then what happens in an examination of text when the teacher who is pressuring and influencing is themselves “a racist” in whatever context?

Jim: Blowed if know -- don't have exams.

Margaret: Peter, could you talk a bit more about the cognitive aspects of your model? How does it fit into the larger picture of the four components?

Peter: I don't “decide” what is ordinary cultural practice -- I go look at sites.

Jim: And interpret them your own way.

Peter: And then present what you've found for people to say, “No, they aren't the things I do when I'm engaged in literacy events,” if they wish. That's how we debate, not by implying that these “impositions” don't happen every moment of every day in legally mandated school education.

Jim: Peter, what you've “found” -- isn't that “what you thought you saw”?

JD: Peter is positioned. Each student is positioned. You are. That's the point of the lesson, isn't it?

Jim: As long as everyone remembers that!!

JD: If the teacher doesn't remember, the teacher isn't doing the critical bit. I've seen tapes of SFL teaching that were very much like the sort Karen wanted to know about and also like the sort Jim is concerned about.

Peter: So, Jim, which aspects of this model do you think I “just saw”? And where above have we not “remembered” that?

Jim: I am talking generally, not specifically. I am concerned about people who will just continue as in the past and force others to their own point of view. It seems to me (from my position, of course) that everyone has a right to their point of view and has the right to express it. This would be a positive change.

Sherry: How may we optimize the types and choices of texts that teachers, students, and learning communities have access to?

Karen M.: Sherry, by opening up our classrooms to as wide a range of texts as possible -- using student-developed canon where they bring in texts that have meaning in their lives, community texts such as local newspapers -- as well as the “official” canon.

Allan: Part of the effect of the four resources model has been to attempt to widen teachers' and programs' gaze from literature, and from textbooks and “school” work, to community texts, texts of popular culture, found print of all kinds.

Karen H.: So then, Allan, the rewriting and original “takeoffs” that we have our youngsters do would be in the vein of what you are talking about.

Sam: Karen, define original. Certainly intertextuality is the key.

Karen H.: Sam??? Tell me what intertextuality is.

Kevin: I'm interested in text production (realizing that this is a model of reading). What kinds of productions are you linking to this work?

Allan: Whew! Kevin -- big question. The relationship between teaching kids how to produce/reproduce conventional “genres of power” and teaching them to critique and deconstruct.

Mark D.: Allan, I'd be curious to know how successful you've been in your “widening” attempts -- that is, how do teachers in Queensland read your four models?

Allan: There may be some on line that can comment [in more detail], but we're building into Queensland state curriculum on several levels. The idea is that teachers have to “read their kids” and communities, use such tools as our qualitative year 2 diagnostic net, and make principled decisions about how to use the model to “balance,” to interrogate, the programs.

Karen M.: I work with English teachers in Queensland and they are taking up aspects of the model in their new trial senior syllabus, particularly using four stages -- these are deconstructing, composing, reconstructing, and explicating. The teachers I have been working with are excited about the opportunities to work with a broader range of texts than they have been traditionally used to.

However, there are some challenges in working this way -- texts don't fit into neat compartments any more and planning intertextual studies means changing the focus away from the text as the authority to looking at constructs in texts.

Margaret: Karen, are the teachers exposed in course work to ways in which texts can be used to get at the components of the four models? If so, how?

Karen M.: Yes. I use the four resources model to help students map out activities they might use with a short story. It is a useful tool because it moves beginning teachers especially away from just looking at decoding and comprehension.

Marilyn: Allan, with the variety of information on the Internet, do you feel there is a difference in the way we teach students to critique text?

Allan: Absolutely. Chip Bruce's work is excellent on this [go to online examples]. But we're able to convince very conservative parents that “critical literacy” is a new basic that their kids will need to survive in an infoenvironment. We're also teaching functional grammar and critical discourse analysis -- which enables us also to explain to parents that these kids are learning a lot of grammar. In other words, critical literacy can be explained as a “new basic,” and it can be used in conservative communities.

Jane: Allan, what worries me is that I don't think we are teaching functional grammar in anything like a widespread way -- the kids I got in Year 8 showed me that. There is a huge range of approaches out there and there seems little consistency at times -- from year to year in the same school, for example.

Allan: Just a quick note: Karen Moni, Peter, and I all use the model in teacher education as well -- we also teach all our student teachers “critical discourse analysis” (of various types -- no gospel!) to encourage a textual metalanguage. To allay some of Jim's concern, this isn't just about ideology critique or political correctness. It's about teaching kids how texts work and how, in semiotic economies and cultures, texts do things to people and that they aren't victims.

JD: Allan, can you include in the transcript citations or URLs for the resources you've mentioned?

Peter: Margaret, to respond to your question of a while back: I think literacy is an emergent technology that shapes the communal and individual environments in which it appears. David Olson's work shows ways in which cognitive processes are shaped by the onset of literacy learning. Is that what you meant? We've got about eight minutes to go. Do you think I could get Peter or Allan to make some sort of summary statements about what has been said so far?

Peter: OK. First, we took it that learning to participate in such a society involves enculturation on many fronts, certainly more than learning to sound out words, get meaning from sentences and paragraphs, understand, talk about, and summarize stories from primers, or chapters from textbooks.

Second, since this model first appeared, it has been applied to a range of areas, including curriculum frameworks, and Al and I have needed to note some cautions. First, the model is not a hierarchy or a model of sequential development in a curricular sense, even though, within themes, lessons, or phases, teachers may stage the focus of students in an explicitly known sequence, as an organizational platform or scaffold for the students.

Martha: Peter or Allan, any last statements?

Maria: I really didn't participate in the sense of saying something, but I did “listen.” Thank you very much.

Sherry: Thank you for a most stimulating exchange!

Karen H.: Great chat. Thanks all.

Allan: Thanks to all. There's a piece coming out on critical literacy and the model in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, first issue in 2000, with pieces by some of the people on line today.

Jane: Thanks, Peter and Allan.

Margaret: Peter, thanks. I am assuming that you agree with Olson's work.

Peter: Well, yes -- for the most part, although Brian Street has interesting comments on the Applied Linguistics web page on the new literacies -- worth a look.

Allan: Hold on, Margaret -- see Brian Street's critique of David Olson's position in Literacy and Theory and Practice.

Margaret: Thanks for the leads. Will look at both.

Allan: Olson tends to shift towards assumption of “intrinsic textual effects” -- while what Street calls the “ideological model” tends towards context. Michael Halliday sides with Olson -- contra those of us who argue for context. Have a look at Halliday's article in Hasan & Williams, Literacy in Society (published by Longman).

Maria: Thanks, Peter and Allan, Martha and all. That was great! Let's have more of this.

JD: Peter and Allan -- too quick! When's the next chat?

Jim: Yes, very interesting.

Marilyn: Allan...will you post more info. on the article?

Sam: Thanks, Peter and Allan. It has been interesting to watch the evolution of the four resources model from '90 through '99.

Karen M.: Thanks everyone

Karen H.: The transcript aspect of this chat makes the time extra valuable. Let's do more.

JD: Allan, are you unrepentantly anti-cog?

Allan: Now! I'm a born again cogsci person. JD, you're trouble!

Peter: We need to consider cognitive processes as cultural products shaped through practices such as literacy.

Allan: I agree with Peter.

JD: Agreed over here!

Karen H.: Absolutely, Peter.

Margaret: Peter, good clarification for incorporating cognitive processes into your model.

Jim: I'm wondering what assumptions you have been making about “industrialists.”

Allan: Last comment: retrospectively, people get hot over the issue of whether there is a “definitive” reading or “reading” position -- the old relativist versus definitive interpretation issue. Probably this is a key theoretical argument we won't resolve. But...why not make it an object of study for kids?

Thanks, all.

Peter: Yes, and stop pretending (or allowing others to pretend) that current liberal progressivist teaching is somehow free from ideological acculturation.

Sam: The model is important because it shows the way away from an “authentic” pedagogy to a possibility of a combination of pedagogies and curricula.