Jessica Winter's Clown-Based Understanding of Early literacy

Jessica Winter is an editor at The New Yorker, where she also writes about family and education. She wrote an article for the New Yorker entitled, ‘The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy’. I’m spending time analyzing this article in a series of podcasts because it mis-describes reading instruction in a way that’s really hard to imagine. In so doing, it perfectly represents the mis-descriptions and un-understandings of the SoR movement. Normally I wouldn’t waste a lot of time on a clown like Jessica Winter. As stated earlier, a clown in literacy terms is one who thinks they know a great deal about literacy when in fact, they know relatively little. They know so little, that they don’t even know how little they know. What makes a clown a clown is that they go around making decisions, promoting policies, and advocating change based largely on personal anecdotes, I-think-isms, and selected bits of research. Now, if one limits one’s clownism to the privacy of their own home, clownery would not be a problem. But when clowns with large platforms, like Jessica Winter and Emily Hanford, use their large platforms to spread clownery like an infectious disease, we must waste our time and energy creating an intellectual prophylactic. This is time that could have been spent helping children to achieve their full literacy potential.