Reading the past .....

This week I've been reading my way through the parliamentary debate on payment by results.  I've also been looking at large part of the public commentary on the measures, including the representations made to parliament whilst they were still being debated.  One of the most striking feature of making my way through this material is how well the case is argued on both sides.  Yet in a curious way they also seem to be talking past each other.  Each side invokes the case it wishes to fight against, constructing a kind of shadow argument it then takes apart point by point.  There is a mobilisation of tropes and rhetorical strategies that makes the other side's position look untenable.  This leads to a schizophrenic reading experience as I find myself agreeing first with one side,  then the other.  Yet I also think this has got me closer to resolving some of the methodological issues I've been thinking about.  Not by coming down on one side or another, but rather by spotting the residual and unspoken issues that seem to the rest at the heart of the debate.

In this case one of the points that seems most striking is the repeated difficulty of pinning down what people mean by "reading".  I think there are two different versions in play: reading as the basic skill - the knowledge of letters and their combination into syllables and whole words which can be tested through reading aloud.  And reading as the voyage through texts that happens once the basic skill has been acquired, and the kind of knowledge that can be built by browsing in this way.  In the debates on payment by results these are variously invoked, with little shared understanding of who is really talking about which one, when.  This confusion seems to me to run through the opposition to payment by results; but it also runs through pedagogical thinking and the resources and materials currently in place to teach reading.  I find myself seeing something that those participating in the debate at the time rarely fully articulate.  If I can get this written up then I may finally be doing history

Some more on methodology

One of the best things about doing a blog is being able to write what you like as and when.  I do have a plan to write about Mrs Trimmer, but at the moment I want to stick with a bit more thinking about history and methodology.  I’ve been having some off-blog chat with Judith Green (See comments from Judith on the very first post below), touching on this issue, and she’s very kindly sent me a couple of papers which I aim to read this weekend.  But in the meanwhile, here’s the actual methodological problem I seem to be wrestling with in the process of writing up the interaction between “payment by results” and literacy pedagogy.

When I write social science, or ethnography, I’m normally structuring what I have to say around the concepts that have evolved from the data – so somewhere lurking behind the writing is a pile of unsorted stuff, which in the process of analysis has fallen into sharp categories, which I can now define according to a relatively explicit set of principles – probably turns out that way through a combination of learning to be an ethnographer of social context from Brian Street and learning how to formalise the relations between data from Basil Bernstein.  I know I get to quite tight theoretical formulations from applying Bernsteinian principles of languages of description to what I do.

But here’s the thing:  historical data doesn’t seem to be amenable to being used that way.  I’m beginning to see that “low-level description” has a clear function within the discipline in a way that I would reject in social science.  In other words, it’s the unboundedness of historical data that matters. And when it gets wrapped up in someone else’s too tight  categories, the lens distorts rather than liberates the data.  This is making the act of writing very hard because – just when I think I’ve nailed something, I end up checking whether I’ve got it right, and return to the data, which however I’ve defined the data set, then tries to creep back out into more than one category.  In other words, it is not the discursive unity of the past that surprises me, it’s its resistance to being pinned down.  It’s more diverse and contradictory than the big narratives we’d like to tell about it allow.  Positively post-structuralist in its resistance to staying in a single shape.