In which the reader considers the effect of affect on learning and performance, as well as the causes and consequences of learned helplessness.
‘… more stupid by every day …’ (in Goleman et al 1984 p. 47)
To those of us who read fluently literacy seems such a straightforward activity, as natural as breathing and as much a part of us as the parts of our own bodies. It is as effortless as walking and talking. It seems correspondingly ridiculous that anyone should have real difficulty with something so fundamental, so simple as reading and writing appear to be. Hence the temptation to assume a deficit explanation - how else to explain away such an apparently weird failing? This chapter reviews some literature and opinion on affect and in particular how it may influence literacy acquisition and performance. It considers attribution theory and learned helplessness both in general and in specific relation to deficit theories, chief among these being, of course, ‘dyslexia’ (a critique of which awaits in chapter eight). Teaching beliefs and their effect on learning are considered in the light of learned helplessness. Some alternative explanations to deficit theories are discussed, as are some alternative remedial approaches which circumvent the ‘pathology’ inherent in them.
Whatever the subject, there is always an elephant among us which we all agree not to notice. For example: In the debate on education we propose everything except a really large increase in investment in it. We worry loudly about climate change on the wide-bodied jet to Mauritius. We demonise benefit fraud but ignore tax avoidance. We claim our excessive girth is hormonal, while eating a large portion of death-by-chocolate. Thus it is with literacy failure - we scrutinise the victim’s biology for defects but leave more disturbing, more complex influences on his literacy to slumber on. One such influence is affect. In this chapter I am therefore going to discuss the causes and effects of affect, a complex of social and personal influences on literacy and learning, and, as usual, I will do this with adult students in my mind. These students were schoolchildren once, though, and their experiences are a clearly written signpost.
Let us wrench our attention away from those so enticing, and apparently so scientific, alibi explanations for poor literacy which so conveniently and comfortingly lay the blame on the victim of it. What might we begin to see? I think that foremost in the state of mind of most adult students (indeed a large number of adults not in our classrooms) there is a substantial degree of anxiety in respect of literacy. There is a great deal of evidence scattered throughout the literature (but left there disregarded) that the effect of affect on the learning and performance of literacy is a great deal more important than we have recognised (e.g. Andreassen et al 2006). Anxiety is frequently and clearly recognised (e.g. Everatt & Brannan 1996). It is everywhere noted that failing to acquire literacy is associated with searing anxiety all round. This anxiety is routinely portrayed as the result of failure, but no evidence is produced to back this assertion. We always describe anxiety as the cart, but it could just as easily be the horse. Anxiety could just as easily be a primary cause of failure rather than its result. It could, at least beyond the very initial stages of literacy failure, be prior to, rather than consequent upon, this failure. This is an unresolved, but absolutely fundamental issue. It is another elephant going unnoticed, often, it seems to me, almost willfully. Let us notice it clearly now.
I looked up ‘affect’ in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) and found the following: ‘An emotion or mood.’ For ‘anxiety’, the same authority gives the following: ‘Uneasiness, concern; a morbid state of excessive or unrealistic uneasiness or dread. (med.) A condition of stress accompanied by precordial tightness or discomfort.’ It is interesting that the dictionary recognises that there does not have to be very much reality behind the ‘morbid state’, indeed that it is usually ‘excessive or unrealistic’, and also that the medically defined condition may be quite disabling, even dangerous. (And see Horsman, 2000 and Van der Kolk et al 1996 for a review of very serious trauma and its sometimes overwhelming effects on mind. The trauma I am discussing is of a lesser, more everyday order but the chains of causation and effect are likely to be rather similar.)