In the Research Conversations podcast series, researchers and teachers come together in conversation to collectively explore different aspects of engaging with literacy research. They draw on their diverse priorities, interests and concerns as they reflect on what their encounters with research are and reimagine what they could be.
You can listen to the episode or read the transcript below to consider their different perspectives when it comes to engaging with research.
“The bigger jigsaw”: The value of different perspectives in literacy research
In this episode, researchers Fiona Maine and Sarah McGeown discuss how bringing together different research methods and philosophies can create a richer understanding of children’s diverse and complex literacy lives.
Research from different disciplinary backgrounds is often perceived to be at odds with each other. But by looking at similar issues from different perspectives, they all have valuable insights to offer. Listening to the different types of research that’s out there and valuing this difference of research viewpoints can transform both policy and practice. Such recommendations can also make room for teachers’ professional judgements and enable them to think about what works best for their own contexts.
Listen to the episode here
Fiona Maine (FM): Hello, my name’s Fiona Maine and I’m a professor of literacy and language in education at the University of Exeter.
Sarah McGeown (SM): Hi, my name is Sarah McGeown and I’m a senior lecturer in developmental psychology and director of the Literacy Lab at the University of Edinburgh.
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FM: My research focuses on children’s dialogue and their thinking, particularly in literacy contexts where they’re engaging with visual texts – so picture books, films or videos. But importantly, I started my career as a primary teacher – well, it’s important to me – and I’ve spent over 20 years working with teachers to support their literacy learning.
SM: My background is in psychology and I have a specific interest in children and young people’s reading experiences. I’m interested in what motivates them to read, why they choose to read books or why they may not. More recently, I’ve been interested in reading across the life span so understanding about adults’ and older adults’ reading as well and how this can support their wellbeing.
So Fiona, really nice to see you first of all. I know that we were asked today to talk about our different sort of disciplinary positions and how that’s informed our research. So I thought maybe you’d like to start and then I’ll go after.
FM: So my research is based in sociocultural understandings about learning; that we’re situated in time and place and that the social world around us impacts on how we make meaning. So language is very central to that. People like Vygotsky, who gets cited often, but also people like Margaret Donaldson were very influential for me. Additionally, I’m drawn to philosophical ideas about learning, particularly around dialogue and dialogic space and that’s developed over time. So both of those angles were quite important to me when I first started investigating learning with 10-year-olds who were reading together in a book group.
Then later I found the work of Neil Mercer and he was massively influential and his idea of sociocultural discourse analysis where he was looking at what children were saying but also how they were interacting with each other. And that led me to Bakhtin and dialogue and the idea that ideas and dialogue are infinite. And then, more recently, Buber and his ideas about relationality and how we connect to the world. And that chimes with Louise Rosenblatt for me, who was also very sociocultural in the way that she was thinking about how meaning was made between the text and the reader.
That all sounds a bit ivory tower, doesn’t it? [laughs] But I’ve always got my teaching hat on, I think. And in a way, I think I’ve always got a composite imaginary class in my head of these key stage 2 children that I’ve taught over time – some of them are now in their forties. And so I think, you know, what would this be like for Hayley or for Paul or Shoshona? What sense can I make of my reading through imagining my class? So yeah, that’s pretty much where I come from. But I know that your background is different, Sarah.
SM: Yeah. So my background is in psychology, my undergraduate, masters and PhD were all in departments of psychology. And I think first of all, psychology as a discipline tends to have quite a strong focus on quantitative research. And in the context of literacy, we tend to focus on understanding the child and the skills and dispositions that support literacy development. And a lot of my research was very quantitative in nature and cognitive in nature as well. But in 2017 I had a sabbatical and I decided that I just wanted to do something completely different and broaden my sort of methodological expertise and just do research that I thought I would really enjoy.
So I got some internal funding for a project called Growing Up A Reader and this was a participatory research project where we worked in collaboration with children and young people to understand more about their reading experiences and what it meant to them to be a reader as well. And I just fell in love with qualitative research.
I was previously in the department of psychology but I’ve been in a school of education for about 10 years now. And of course, when you’re in a school of education you’re surrounded by other academics but who have got very different backgrounds – so maybe they’re philosophers or anthropologists or linguists or sociologists or they have professional experience from being teachers. And it just really opens your eyes to the different ways in which people think about literacy; research literacy as well. And I’m just really fascinated by how we can sort of come together and think about that.
One of the regrets that I have is that I have never been a teacher myself. So I applied to be a primary school teacher, I had a position accepted but at the same time I got a funded PhD studentship and I did that instead. But as much as possible, I’ve tried to be as closely connected to classroom practice as I can. I spent a huge amount of time in classrooms throughout my PhD and in the years after that. And one of the regrets that I have now is that it’s often my PhD students and postdocs that get to go into schools because actually you just being in school and doing observations and seeing things, you just get really great research ideas in ways that you often don’t get from reading an academic paper. So I’m jealous of your background in teaching. I really wish I’d had the opportunity to do it myself. I’m not sure I have the energy to take on a new career so late in life.
FM: That’s so interesting to me because I think that, particularly the field of reading and reading research has been quite heavily psychology-based, hasn’t it? And it feels like the traditions that sit behind it quite often are drawing on some quite significant psychological basis. But you’re right, it’s the complexity and the bringing together of the other viewpoints that I think just helps put together the bigger jigsaw. Because psychology is one part and it’s looking at the internal. But it’s when you’re in the classroom that you realise: hang on these little beings are all engaging with each other and they all have lives and experiences that are outside of what’s happening cognitively for them.
I think that all of the influential studies that were so important – the big psychology studies, the big experimental designs – have just led us to such fantastic but broad understandings that then we can look at in detail to think about, “okay what does this mean for in the classroom?” And that’s where the sociological views kind of seem to me to be so important around children in part of their social world and their families and their experiences. The things that are impacting on them are why they may or may not be successful readers. And successful in whose terms?
SM: Yeah, absolutely. To me, each disciplinary perspective is always going to add sort of unique insights into our understanding of the complexity of what is children’s literacy. And I think we do need to understand the individual factors and the contextual factors as well. We really do need to be coming together more as a research community, I think, in order to do this.
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about recently is about how we do interdisciplinary research and I think that there’s different approaches that we can take. I mean, one approach I suppose, is just thinking about an interdisciplinary collaboration within a single project. And just thinking I guess, well, what’s the added value of doing that? But also, what compromises do we need to make as researchers because often we have completely different research interests, completely different research priorities. And any research project that you want to do, you want to do it with a specific sort of focus in mind often. I feel like there’s that way of doing interdisciplinary research.
But another way, which I don’t think we’ve done well, is just coming together as a literacy research community and looking at the broad base of research that we have so far. I’m thinking about how we can synthesise this for policy and practice recommendations as well because we are very disparate, we’re often seen to be as at tensions with each other. But actually, I think that there’s a lot of commonality in terms of we have this shared interest in supporting literacy and we all have sort of unique insights to add to it.
FM: I think the idea of interdisciplinarity is interesting, but I also, from my experience, have come to realise that often, interdisciplinarity works at quite a superficial level where we’re all interested in the same topic. But necessarily because we’re coming from quite different ontological positions, when you start to drill down, you realise that actually psychologists are asking different questions to sociologists.
So although that seems a bit silo-making, the uniqueness of those ontologies means that they can pursue lines of inquiry, lines of research that actually offer something that speaks to the kinds of research questions that they would ask. That’s why they are psychologists and that’s why they are sociologists! And I think that’s why I find you quite interesting, Sarah, because you’ve got this incredible psychology background, but actually the way that you talk and the interests that you have feel … I don’t know whether you’d call them socio-psychology or if that in itself is a thing?
But I find the notion of interdisciplinarity really quite interesting and I don’t know whether there are unsaid hierarchies that people assume about which is real research. And of course, that comes through from policy – you know science of reading, evidence-based learning, what works? All of these are truths, aren’t they? They’re all leading to answers that are definite. When actually, all three of those words can be interpreted in much broader ways and much more inclusive ways that capture a range of research ideas and perspectives as you’ve highlighted.
But I wonder sometimes whether one of the challenges is that research that’s set out in one way – that’s coming from a particular possibly psychological position gets used as the answer. And it doesn’t necessarily translate [laughs] into when I’m thinking about my group of kids.
SM: Yeah, I agree. For me, there’s a lot now in terms of you know PhD studentships which are interdisciplinary and I think we can have sort of romanticised assumptions about what it means to be interdisciplinary.
GM: Yeah.
SM: When actually what we need to know is what are the sort of methodological considerations associated with working in this way? What are the compromises that we need to make as researchers to the research questions that we have? How easy is it to actually integrate completely different methodological approaches to answer the same research questions?
FM: Yes.
SM: I think that there’s a lot of challenges with interdisciplinary learning So my PhD research, a lot of my early research, looked at the effectiveness of different types of reading instruction – specifically looking at different types of phonics instruction. And I was interested in the short- and long-term consequences in children’s reading attainment but also looking at how methods of instruction change the skills that children rely upon as they learn to read.
FM: Mhmm.
SM: So my PhD supervisor was Rhona Johnson and at that time systematic synthetic phonics was being – her studies were being used actually and being cited very heavily in terms of kind of changes in reading in England.
FM: Yes!
SM: And I remember being at conferences and speaking with teachers all the time and just hearing them say, “Well, I’ll focus on like reading for enjoyment after. I just need to get phonics instruction done.” And to me these two things aren’t distinct from each other.
FM: Yeah, of course.
SM: I don’t see why we have to be seeing these things as very separate. I think that you can have phonics instruction which is really effective and at the same time create a culture where you’re developing a love and interest in books, words and stories; where you’re understanding your learners as well. I find that a lot of the narrative that’s told is sort of positioning us at loggerheads. And I can understand researchers who maybe aren’t psychologists feeling frustrated actually by the dominance that psychology has played and cognitive science has played to literacy development. But I think that we do need to open up more as a literacy community and just bring all of these insights together.
I think this conversation is great because I don’t think these conversations happen very often if I’m honest. And I don’t think we necessarily have the structures in place to allow these to happen. I don’t think journals even welcome, you know, interdisciplinary projects. You know we’ve got a whole kind of structural issues, I think, which has kind of meant that we’ve often worked more in silos. But I do think that we do need to be more open and talking in this way.
There are challenges. I think communication barriers is one. We use completely different terms, we use different theoretical frameworks, we use different methodologies. So you’ve got to be willing to sort of value interdisciplinary approaches and understanding others’ perspectives above your own and take that time to make the effort to do that. And I actually feel quite optimistic about the next generation of researchers because I think they’re being trained in a different way.
FM: Yeah.
SM: I think there are more studentships now which are focused more on interdisciplinary working and this will become the norm that from an early stage they are just exposed to more things. And I think for me being in a department of psychology and getting all of my training there, I had a very narrow focus on quantitative cognitive psychology. But even being in a school of education, you know, my PhD students attend talks on all different types of topics and I think that early exposure is really important before our ideas become entrenched and difficult to change.
FM: I wonder if there is more to be done in the training, the development of researchers around recognising where different research papers are coming from to really understand that, hang on this is coming from a psychological perspective so the types of questions that it’s going to be asking are these ones. These are coming from a sociological perspective, so the concerns there are going to be these ones. So how can we pull those two things together?
Because I think you’re making really sound points about listening to the different types of research that’s out there. Understanding that it’s coming from a different place. Not trying to homogenise it, but understanding its difference and recognising and valuing its difference, rather than trying to join it all together. You talked about everybody uses different terms. In some ways the harder thing is when people are using the same term that means something different for them.
SM: Yes! 100%.
FM: [laughs] Because you make this assumption that you’re all talking the same language and you absolutely are not. So I think sort of recognising the nuances of the different research perspectives … I think your second option about how to take forward interdisciplinarity that you mentioned earlier was a really wise one. It’s the places where we do all come together but recognise how we’re all looking at similar – I’m going to call them phenomena – but recognise that we’re looking at similar issues but we do all have different perspectives on them and they’re valuable. And they’re valuable because when you drill down into the classroom, those are all filtering through in lots of different ways – however subtly.
My challenge that I find – and I don’t know how we surmount this – is the policy one. You know you said, why do they concentrate on phonics first and then do reading for pleasure later? Because policy documents say phonics first and fast. They say that! They actually explicitly direct teachers in that way. And that’s tricky because of course policymakers aren’t researchers and policymakers choose to listen to the research that suits what they’ve already decided. I remember going to a conference years ago when Estelle Morris was the Secretary of State for Education. And she said just that. She said, “you’ve got to remember that policymakers start off with what they’ve decided and then find research that fits it” [laughs] rather than the other way around.
Governments are in for a short amount of time so they need to have fixed things. And we fix things by having definite answers and definite answers are related to research views that are about one truth – “it is evidence-based”, “the evidence shows this works”. And I think that reduces the opportunities for research to influence practice by minimalising that. It also does a disservice to the fantastic psychological research out there, doesn’t it? Because it often takes it in the wrong way and it often misinterprets it.
SM: I can see how those working in policy are looking for a simple message or one kind of clear thing to focus on. I think it does depend on how we talk about research. So if you’re talking about phonics and the evidence behind systematic phonics that you also in that same message, you talk about it within the context of developing children’s oral language skills and a love of reading, and you think about understanding the background knowledge that children bring to school. I just think that we need a community of literacy researchers who come from different positions to come together and to talk about the complexity of what’s needed, for example, in early reading instruction that does that.
I mean I’ve given talks before where maybe I’ve spoken only about phonics and someone said, “oh what about like reading for pleasure?” And I say oh yeah, I know that’s important, that’s a whole other area of my research. And now when I talk about one or the other, I always include the other one. I’m not saying that that’s all there is to reading, just you know phonics and reading for pleasure. But it’s almost like if you go down one track, you’re like, “oh, but what about all these other things?”
So we do need to at least when we’re talking to policymakers or speaking with practitioners let them know that this is one thing that we have depth of knowledge on and we’re sharing that knowledge. But this is something within the context of a much wider body of research which also speaks to this, this and this. And so they can understand and frame it more as, “I have a little bit of knowledge given to me by an expert but there’s a huge amount more that I need to learn.” And I think understanding that alone is important.
FM: I mean, wow, that’s just so well expressed. I couldn’t top that in any sense. [laughs] That’s brilliantly expressed because that’s it. Just because you happen to be talking about phonics doesn’t mean that you think phonics is the only way. It’s part of the picture.
So perhaps that’s our responsibility then. Yeah, as you say, as researchers to say, “I’m looking at this element. This sits within this much broader picture to which so many different perspectives have valuable things to offer.”
SM: Mhmm.
FM: It’s messy and somewhere along the line, messiness doesn’t fit with policy because you know, it just sounds woolly and well, what are we going to say? How will we know, actually? How will we know whether this has made any difference? Because somehow we’ve got to account for it. And those are challenging questions, aren’t they, for policymakers to grapple with. And as researchers maybe that’s our responsibility to make sure that we are presenting what we research as part of a much bigger picture which is multidisciplinary.
SM: Yeah. I do think that you and I are working in very different contexts as well, given the curriculum in England versus the curriculum in Scotland.
FM: Yeah
SM: So I think in terms of like the national primary curriculum in England, I think that it’s far more prescriptive I would say. Whereas in Scotland there’s a much bigger focus on teachers’ professional judgment, teacher autonomy as well. It’s so different. And I think the curriculum in Wales is actually quite similar to that in Scotland. So whenever we present research, it’s taken differently by people in policy. They’re not looking for an answer; they’re just looking for the sharing of research and how that fits within the kind of wider picture too. So I think we’ve also got to know our audiences.
Something else that you just said I’ve become quite interested in recently because I do a lot of kind of research practice partnership work and working collaborations with teachers and school leaders. And thinking about, you know, programmes or interventions happening at a sort of national level but more sort of local level concerns and priorities – and how do we find that balance between sort of fidelity to a programme or intervention and flexibility? So capitalising on teachers’ knowledge of their students, of teachers’ pedagogical expertise as well to optimise a programme or intervention in that setting. And I think if we have interventions or programmes which are just very concrete, very much about fidelity and delivering a standard, we’re missing out on the sort of professional expertise of teachers and that opportunity to improve things.
FM: Yeah.
SM: So I also think that these discussions are not just about drawing on the academic literature in these different disciplinary perspectives, but also – you’ll know as a teacher – bringing in your teachers’ expertise as well to these discussions and thinking about how we can adjust things.
FM: Absolutely. And that really has implications which from years of working in initial teacher education, I can happily say that the focus of teacher education when it is on critically reflective practice rather than answers, rather than “this is how you do it”, but enabling early teachers to engage with, understand, think about their own practice and what works for them. And it’s very heartening to hear that that is still something that is part of the Scottish way forward.
SM: Well, honestly Fiona, it’s been interesting and like really inspiring to speak with you and I think it’s actually making me think a little bit more. It’s given me a bit of incentive I think to actually think more about what I want to do in terms of sort of interdisciplinary thinking and working as well. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.
FM: And thanks too Sarah. I really have enjoyed it as well. And yeah, some great food for thought that I’ll take forward. Brilliant. Thank you.
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