What do we know about the mark on the wall?

What do we know about the mark on the wall?
Images, rules and prior knowledge







Peter Cleave





ISBN

978-1-877229-26-8



What do we know about the mark on the wall?
Images, rules and prior knowledge



Campus Press
26 Sycamore Crescent
Palmerston North

Thanks to Micah and the team
at Warehouse Stationery
Palmerston North



Bound by New Life Bookbindings
28 Avenue Rd
Greenmeadows
Napier


Contents
Introduction

1 Argument
Page 7

2 How do we tell our knowledge?
Page 11

3 Culture, competency and literacy
Page 15

4 When did we want to know more and why?
Page 26

5 Take the word literacy...
Page 34

6 One or two kinds of literacy and one or two anthropologists
Page 38

7 Gaps in the talk...
Page 47

8 Fusions and flags
Page 50

9 Memories are made of...
Page 53

10 Coming back to the mark
Page 59












Peter Cleave, D.Phil Oxon,

is a Member of Common Room, Wolfson College, Oxford

and lives in Aokautere,

Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Introduction

As the author I still have difficulty saying what his book is about just as I did with the original paper. That aside there appears to be some interest in an expansion of some kind so the book is offered on the basis that more would be or, perhaps, might be better

In this, the first edition, there is, rather obviously, an attempt to make a book out of a short paper. The book has also been kept short in several senses. Some topics are introduced and left hanging. It is not long.

The strategy has been to keep the flow of the original but to begin to set out distinct sections.

At the same time there is a sense in which this is offered as a taste of things to come. The questions of the paper remain with new applications suggested here including work on the internet and on memory. These will be followed up in later editions.

There is also, I think, a clear line of discussion perhaps best seen in the conclusion but there nonetheless! This short book might workn as a frame for a bigger book or simply for discussion purposes. The ideas are certainly big enough and there may even be a certain sense in being brief.

There is also a sense in which the work here is dated referring as it does to work done in TESOL in the early nineties. That literature could be updated. There is a question though as to which direction to take from here and there is also the fact that whatever the argument is attached to it will eventually date. The advantage, I think, of the work referred to is that it is of a very high calibre. While I am critical of parts of the corpus referred to I have great respect for this body of work.

Other applications for the argument might well be found. Work on memory from the early childhood area is one possibility but there are others such as developments in educational theory and practice over the last half century.

It may be though that no one major kind of example emerges. The book as it is or in any revision may just use examples from here and there. The theme may be a matter of constant return, going back again and again to questions of cognition and literacy,

Peter Cleave
Aokautere
December
2007






How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of grass so feverishly.

Virginia Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1919)


1 Argument

To think that we understand better now than then is the idea behind this book. It took form in a critique of the concept of ‘High Literacy’ as this term is used by Bereiter and Scardamalia in 1987 and developed in subsequent papers (c.f. Bereiter and Scardamalia
1987b, Bereiter 1992). But the idea might have been discussed with reference to other texts, other signs, other points or marks of distinction. Virginia Woolf’s ‘The mark on the wall’ (1919) comes to mind as does Janet Holst’s excellent article (1988) about this story. What was Woolf’s prior knowledge of the mark? Where did the story come from? How was it generated?

Holst’s article concentrates on the use of time in the piece. It is also interesting to ask about the way people ‘read’ and write about uncertain symbols.

The thrust of the academic literature, it seems to me, has since at least the early eighties been in the direction of knowledge generation especially as written text. This focus has produced the most readily available ‘answers’ and there is an easiness of genre and schema theory where knowledge is generated along predictable lines. Is the mark a sign? Is it part of a text or, as Wittle (1992) would have itan intertext?


Do we suppose that the mark is a message written on the wall? Do we suppose we know what writing is?

Bereiter and Scardamalia's first paper from 1987 has an explicit goal; ‘constituting’ new models of curriculum and instruction that can bring the benefits of high literacy to students who do not already come from highly literate backgrounds.

The discussion below examines the premises, explicit and implicit in the literature on literacy and cognition in the late eighties and early nineties. Some of the literature is dated and, as it were, trapped in this time as this was the period during which the original research for this work took place and also because the literature of that time was concerned with questions that I think, apply now or indeed universally. Occasionally there is an update as when research that, it seems to me, informs the matter in question and that, perhaps, opens new doorways such as the literature referred to on memory and early childhood language learning.

In particular there is a questioning of the focus on approaching new conditions of learning and the value placed on prior knowledge which has come to be the major preoccupation.

What follows then is a literature review concentrating firstly on the way literacy and cognition are used by writers and then on the relationship between prior and new knowledge. The latter is seen to be problematic in several ways some of which are to do with confusion in the uses of literacy and cognition. The discussion of prior and new knowledge may lead to a reconsideration of the goals of language research and the general set of premises now current in language research.

A typology set out by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) is discussed. This isolates three distinct learning situations (these might be variously described as ‘learning models’ or ‘learning cultures’) and sets up a critical distinction between ‘knowledge telling’ and ‘knowledge transforming’ situations. The latter is taken to refer to ‘High Literacy’.

The way literacy is used in language research literature is then reviewed with particular emphasis on the work of Resnick and Resnick (1977). It is argued that their notion of two traditions of literature is questionable in several respects. The confusion of cognition with literacy is a major difficulty and this leads to problems that we now have in, for example separating out the meanings of ‘higher literacy’ on the one hand and ‘accelerated cognition’ on the other. Cognition seems too easily to become literacy and vice versa in the research literature.

It is not so easy to see the entry points, where literacy starts to look like cognition, or the vanishing points, where literacy becomes something else. It is argued that the models of the mind that inform the literature are in some respects inadequate and in other respects not well understood. There is a need first to acquire new knowledge and then to deal with 'useless information' also bound up with our conceptions of literacy and cognition.

Bereiter and Scardamalia discuss other recent critical reviews of the literature notably Alexander, Schallert and Hale (1991). While many terms are very well reviewed by them some, like ‘prior knowledge’, are left virtually unscathed. It is a feature of virtually all the literature that knowledge may be divided quite neatly into ‘prior’ and ‘new’ knowledge as though people know things that they remember or have experienced. Genre and schema theory, it is argued, depend on this division. The supposedly ‘liberating’ and ‘empowering’ aspects of genre and schema theory are mentioned but not discussed at length.Campus Press Update

Review of: Works published in 2008 by Peter Cleave
Reviewer: Professor Paul Moon
Date: March 2008

In the past ten years, Peter Cleave, in conjunction with Campus Press, has been at the forefront of research into a range of topics relating to Maori in the modern world. This, in itself, may not be remarkable, but what makes Cleave’s works stand out are three things: the breadth of disciplines he draws on for his analyses; the range of subjects he explores; and his persistence in ensuring that the material he publishes is relevant to a wide spectrum of readers. At a time when much academic research is dominated either by drilling into obtuse areas, or by studying topics for which funding is provided, the latest collection of Cleave’s works to be issued by Campus Press provide a fresh and engaging perspective on issues affecting Maori.
This corpus of works covers topics as diverse as social work, Maori media, language, culture in the workplace, as well as Cleave’s groundbreaking work – now in a revised edition – ‘Rangahau pae iti kahurangi: Research in a small world of light and shade’. This wide-angle approach allows the reader to build up an impression of some of the thinking that either applies or ought to apply to current developments in these fields.

Some new titles from Campus Press (Est 1992) each priced at NZ 37.50 plus postage COD;
From the Depot Takirua, Second Edition
by Peter Cleave
Iwi Station: a discussion of print, radio and television in Aotearoa/New Zealand
by Peter Cleave
Papers on Language, Second Edition
Culture in the workplace: a book of exercises
by Peter Cleave
What do we know about the mark on the wall. A study of literacy
by Peter Cleave
Rangahau pae iti kahurangi: research in a small world of light and shade, Second Edition – most popular Campus Press book so far in 2008
by Peter Cleave
And from our back pages:
Papers to Conference- most popular Campus Press book in 2007
by Peter Cleave
Papers on Social Work - includes work on broadcasting
by Peter Cleave 
Papers of Contest, Second Edition
by Peter Cleave
 
And for a discussion on line of literacy in nineteenth century New Zealand by Peter Cleave go to;
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/01/said-heard-written-read.html
Find extended discussions of this in Iwi Station
And see the discussion of Brian Sibley's book on Peter Jackson in From the Depot Takirua, Second Edition

Forthcoming in puff books in April
Isis, the days of the voles
by
Benjamin Drum

Please order by email to puffmedia@yahoo.co.nz or Campus Press, 26, Sycamore Crescent, Palmerston North, New Zealand or telephone 0064 6 3537773


Title descriptions
Papers to Conference

Third Edition

A collection of mostly old but some new work

by Peter Cleave
ISBN

978-1-877229-17-6

The present collection starts with a paper on literacy in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the nineteenth century.This is the most recent paper. The collection finishes with a paper on literacy and there are one or two references to this subject throughout without literacy being a major theme.

In fact,the demand for his collection was largely to do with older work and this constitutes the rest of the collection. Some papers are so out of date as to be quaint. Others like the paper on Samoan and Maori may be old but they might have a current application.

One debate that may not be quaint or out of date may be the one discussed in the review of Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow from the early nineties about icons and symbols. We might well ask what happened to this discussion. We might well also ask what the conditions for a talk like this are in 2008.

The essay on the Pa Maori which is really just a review of Best's book may leave questions unanswered in the wider literature.

In the paper entitled Native Voice and in some of the journal work in Aotearoa, especially that found in Illusions in the nineties there is a discussion of new things happening in the arts in Aotearoa.

The discussion of o and a, the so-called case system in Maori is here through demand. It is also a discussion of commentators which is unusual in this area.

By contrast to the the work on literacy and the Pa Maori the social work papers won prizes and were published in international collections. In this sense the collection is a mix of the known and the obscure.

More on
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/papers-to-conference.html




Iwi Station. A discussion of print, radio and television
in Aotearoa/New Zealand

by Peter Cleave
ISBN
978-1-877229-27-5
This book is about communication and power from a tribal point of view in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the world at large. The tribe concerned is the iwi as distinct from the hapu, the sub-tribe or the whanau, the extended family.

The iwi is considered in several historical periods. In each there is a consideration of the communications environment of the iwi be that oral, to do with reading or writing or literacy or to do with electronic media including radio, television and the internet.

There are also two, at least, intense periods of change, the 1850s when Maori was displaced by English as the language of the majority and the period from the early 1990s until the present day characterised by the development of iwi radio and Maori television and the advent of the internet.

The discussion of the internet is really a series of questions. Does the internet allow increased specialisation as well as a greater internationalisation? Are Maori better able to identify common ground and communicate over more space and time than ever before? Is it now possible to find new ground? Does the internet offer freedom from the shackles of a small nation state?

All chapters are about the way that tribes manage communication in the context of a mainstream. Choosing the ground for communication is itself important in this context and there are recurrent issues of control and power.
For more go to
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/iwi-station.html


From the Depot-Takirua



Second Edition


by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-29-9

There was something of a moment in the late eighties and early nineties in Wellington theatre and over the years From the Depot Takirua has been there as an attempt to grapple with what happened.

This Second Edition of the book begins with an older essay containing reviews of work done at the Depot Takirua. Some of the original essays have been retained and new work on Peter Jackson and Maori Television has been included.

The moment at the Depot Takirua, if such it was, quickly became overtaken by other things. Matters were complicated and, it must be said, enriched by film. The workshopping of the warrior proceeded to the film Once were Warriors and elsewhere. Peter Jackson happened from the early nineties and there was a shift of attention and resources to film. A connection between the work of Peter Jackson and the kind of work work done at the Depot-Takirua is found in the writing of Harry and Stephen Sinclair.

With the advent of Maori Television it is possible to see people who were involved in theatre in the early nineties moving to film and then to television.

But there was a period in the early nineties at the Depot Theatre when things came together. The question now, nearly twenty years later, is how they might line up again in a comparable blaze of creativity or whatever. It might involve the same people. Stephen Sinclair features in the Depot-Takirua story as a writer just as he does in the Peter Jackson story.

The papers on Suzie Cato and on Maori Television are offered on the grounds that television, especially Maori Television, may be the place where things come together in a creative step like that which was made at the Depot Takirua all those years ago. The paper on the grotesque which features the piano is offered as a route taken, as it were, out of the kind of thing happening at the Depot Takirua in the early nineties but so far at least not taken further. Something similar seems to have happened with the warrior project, if that it might be called. These sit in the corners of our minds now like dead ends or cul de sacs. Will we come back to them and will new media like Maori Television be used to do so?

For more go to
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/from-depot-takirua-second-edition.html


Culture in the work place. A book of group exercises

by Peter Cleave

ISBN
978-1-877229-25-1

How do you work out how to work with other people?

This book is designed to help you do this. The first thing is to consider of culture in your workplace. Then to find better ways of working.

These are the things that matter no matter how removed they might seem from the job at hand. Religion, dress, diet, eye contact and body language. All of these things and more contribute to positive or negative work situations.

This book is not meant to be prescriptive or to tell people what to do in their own workspaces and with their own culture.

The exercises below are offered that they might allow readers to work out their own situations. The idea has been to keep it simple and to allow discussion to happen in a easy fashion.

For more
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/culture-in-workplace.html




Papers of Contest
Third Edition

by Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-28-2

The theme of this collection of papers is contest. There is a challenge in each paper.

The first paper looks at literacy in the nineteenth century in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

In the next paper conventional research is challenged with an idea of indigenous modes of inquiry.

The following paper looks at confrontational theatre and film in the 1990s.

The discussion of Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow considers images, symbols and the art of a place, a country, I suppose.

The review of Martin Blythe's book involves several of the themes so far considered as well as others and tries to describe an exciting analysis.

The consideration of the native, the outlaw and the frontier widens the perspective of the collection.

The rest of the papers in the collection take the idea of contest into different areas.

The discussion of Suzie Cato takes the discussion into mainstream media in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

By contrast the next article looks at work with perhaps more limited but nonetheless highly critical audiences and the construction of or the playing with a notion of the Pakeha-Maori.

The final paper is a consideration of the grotesque. This raises a number of questions that are left hanging and that, perhaps, is what happens in a collection with the theme of contest.
For more http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/papers-of-contest.html







What do we know about the mark on the wall?
Images, rules and prior knowledge

by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-26-8

There is a sense in which the work here is dated referring as it does to work done in TESOL in the early nineties. That literature could be updated. There is a question though as to which direction to take from here and there is also the fact that whatever the argument is attached to it will eventually date. The advantage, I think, of the work referred to is that it is of a very high calibre.

Other applications for the argument might well be found. Work on memory from the early childhood area is one possibility but there are others such as developments in educational theory and practice over the last half century.

It may be though that no one major kind of example emerges. The book as it is or in any revision may just use examples from here and there. The theme may be a matter of constant return, going back again and again to questions of cognition and literacy.







Papers on Social Work
Second Edition
by
Peter Cleave
ISBN

978-1-877229-21-3

These papers venture into several areas of social work but there may be some features that set the collection aside.

The first is an emphasis throughout on social work education. This interest is set out in in the first chapter where there is a comparison between local and European traditions. Work by Carola Khulmann and Peter Cleave appears early in the collection and is then taken further in subsequent papers.

One emphasis or theme which keeps coming up is to do with a ethic. This is touched in the comparison of social work in Germany and Aotearoa/New Zealand, looked at in the article, An ethic of empathy, and touched on again in the article on iwi social services.

Another theme is to do with indigenous ways of research. The paper on rangahau is the most discursive in the collection and the intention here is to take the arguments as far as they might go without necessarily coming to fixed conclusions.

Yet another pertains to the dynamics of small group work in social work learning and teaching. This work is perhaps the most widely published while some of the other papers are offered to a broader readership for the first time.

The consideration of broadcasting and social work is different from the other papers in many respects and, along with the paper on iwi social services, a little tentative in its conclusions These are both new areas of work for me and it shows. In later editions the intention is to refine and develop the arguments involved.






Papers on Language

by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-19-0

This collection of papers takes work from a variety of sources. The intention is to draw a fairly long bow.

There is some work on literacy which is nor about any language in particular. There is work on Maori grammar. And a paper on strategies for language retention. And there is recent work on literacy and oral communication in Aotearoa.

The transmission of an ethic through language and song is considered in another paper.

The Note on the two or three verb classes in Maori applies to the o an a categories and to the use of i and ki. They are short but hopefully important links which make sense, I think, of a range of questions that might come up.

There are also papers about voice and tone. There is even a paper about a song. These are offered in the hope that language might be considered in the broadest possible terms.










Rangahau pae iti kahurangi
Research in a small world of light and shade




Second Edition

Peter Cleave

ISBN
978-1-877229-23-7

Contents

1 Wahi Rangahau; Places of Inquiry 5
2 And on to the question... 11
3 Image and text 17
4 The critical scholars 34
5 Back to the house 41
6 Drama 47
7 What is being pursued? 51
8 Back to the image 56
9 Background to rangahau 63
10 Back to the whare again 75
11 Rangahau, ethics and social work education 78
12 Light, shade, action 88
Concluding remarks 102
Bibliography 106
Glossary 117