Radical
Statistics
None but our words: critical literacy in the classroom and community
Chris Searle
Open University Press: Buckingham, 1997, £14.99
Review by Ludi Simpson
Chris Searle's 25 years of inspiring word-making in the classroom and community has you sitting on the edge of your emotions as it sweeps from the teacher's perseverance to the students effective poetry of love and resistance. I thoroughly recommend it.
Chris's classroom techniques use poetry and literature from working class and anti-imperialist struggles, sometimes with the live witness of visiting authors and of parents. His students’ work - in the East End of London, in Sheffield and in Mozambique - express an empathy with El Salvadorean freedom fighters, a London tramp, campaigns against damp short-term council housing, and the grief and love that united Liverpool and Sheffield after the tragedy in Hillsborough stadium.
The students' literacy achievements are plain to see in this book, as is their commitment to the causes they come to understand, shown in their fund-raising following Guyana floods, for a Pakistani cancer hospital and their acting a play to expose local housing conditions.
Can this empathy, understanding and action be achieved also in numeracy teaching?
Jeff Evans and Ivan Rapoport (in Radical Statistics' new Statistics in Society book) develop the idea of numeracy skills required in the community by concerned citizens, and suggest a role for 'barefootstatisticians'. They suggest skills that are needed to investigate and provide statistical evidence to support local and community interests - a grasp of official statistics, formulating research design suited to practical problems, data production, scrutiny for accuracy, initial data analysis, and interpretation and communication of results.
What experience is there in the teaching of these skills within a context critical of society and aiming to change it?
Maralyn Frankenstein writes of using statistics of imperialist poverty from South Africa and elsewhere in maths teaching (Radical Statistics issue 56, Spring 1994). Dave Drew developed teaching packs for Sheffield Campaign Against Racism in the 1980s with statistical material that exposed racist myths. Julian Williams and George Gheverghese Joseph propose exercises for classroom maths based on 'Statistics and Inequality' (chapter in Multicultural Mathematics, Oxford University Press, 1993, ed. David Nelson et al).
In my own limited teaching, the points at which students grasped techniques and used them appropriately coincide with their understanding and empathising with the problem at hand - in this case the fair distribution of resources according to the demographic profile of local areas.
Chris Searle's unyielding efforts earned him national notoriety in the bourgeois press, and two sackings. But the support of his students and their community each time allowed the teaching profession to reclaim him. He is now a lecturer at Goldsmith's College in London.
Are there teachers of critical numeracy among the readers of Radical Statistics? What are your successful experiences with students? How has your independence been protected from the 'professional' and political biases of a standard expected curriculum?
Ludi Simpson
Cathie Marsh
Centre for Census and Survey Research
University of
Manchester
Tel: Mon, Thur,
Fri, +44(0)1274-642838.
E-mail:
ludi@man.ac.uk
