Access to truth by Nigel Pearn

October 2008, no. 305

Access to truth by Nigel Pearn

October 2008, no. 305

I grew up reading rubbish and then reread it all again when I got older and called it nostalgia. Rubbish is great. The most lucid (and mercifully brief) account of rubbish reading I have read is Peter Dickinson’s ‘A Defense of Rubbish’. He wrote it for Children’s Literature and Education in 1970, but a version is available on his website (www.peterdickinson.com). Children, Dickinson argues, need to have access to a ‘whole culture’ in order to build an authentically owned spectrum of value. They also need to have a sense of belonging, and a shared culture of rubbish reading may play a role in this. At one level, adults need to let children discover rubbish and non-rubbish for themselves rather than always prescribing and rating their reading. I am maintaining a dutiful sense of irony as I type this.

Nigel Pearn

Nigel Pearn is a teacher at Dodges Ferry Primary School, a beachside public school forty-five kilometres north of Hobart, on the top end of the Tasman Peninsula. He is currently working with teachers and students as part of an Aboriginal Expansion Program funded through Education Tasmania and the Federal Government’s Closing the Gap initiatives. Nigel is President of e:lit, the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia. He is interested in all aspects of students’ love of literature and growth in literacy, but has particular professional interests in school-level program evaluation and educational measurement; the interface between arts practices and literacy; building school/university partnerships; and the policy and practice of teacher professional learning. He is married to Sarah Kanowski, the editor of Island magazine, and is the father of two rambunctious, not-yet-school-aged children.