cultural literacy !

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Losing touch: pedagogies of incorporation and the ability to write

Megan Watkins* and Greg Noble

Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Penrith NSW 2751, Australia

(Final version received 9 May 2011)

The idea of ‘‘touch’’ is often used to point to the exemplary performance of skilful actions. While such a notion seemingly references the sensuous nature of that skill, it tends to mask the embodied acquisition of that capacity, implying intuitive ability rather than technique perfected through practice. Ironically, it also masks the significance of tactility in the process of developing this ‘‘touch’’. In the context of a child learning to write, this is especially important. This article explores the importance of touch in learning to construct written text. It argues that its physicality is profoundly ‘‘ecological’’: writing entails a variety of relations of touch with diverse material objects. These relations have to be ordered into what we call the line of touch, which produces the sensual continuity of subject and these objects necessary for the ‘‘grace’’ of textual production. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and recent theorisation of embodiment, this article considers the ways in which tactility allows the body to ‘‘remember’’ text embodying not simply the shape and directionality of letters when handwriting, but the knowledge of the letters themselves. This process represents a form of ‘‘muscular memory’’, ‘‘knowledge in the hands’’, in which children necessarily ‘‘lose’’ the awareness of touch to achieve the automaticity required for the task of composition. The relations and lines of touch also have a pedagogic quality. A child does not simply or naturally acquire the capacity to write; they are taught to do so, and the pedagogies that effect this process are instrumental to their embodied competence. Touch and the incorporation of the sensibility of this technology through iteration are crucial aspects of literacy practice, yet, as this article will examine, are undervalued within the theory and practice of literacy pedagogy.

Keywords: touch; pedagogy; embodiment; writing

Introduction

Between your thumb and two fingers place Your pen to write with comlines and grace; Your thumb first aloft, as highest bestowe, Your forefinger next, your middle finger belowe. Hold softly your pen, lean lightlie thereon, Write softlie therewith, and pause thereupon. For swiftness will come of itself anon, Ill tricks are soon caught, but not so soone gon. (From the Writing schoolmaster by Peter Bailes, 1590)

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Social Semiotics

Vol. 21, No. 4, September 2011, 503�516

ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online

# 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2011.591995

http://www.tandfonline.com

Metaphors of tactility are often used to describe the considerable ease displayed in

the performance of certain actions; a pianist who has a deft ‘‘touch’’ or a footballer

with a ‘‘feel’’ for the game. While such terms denote skill, they tend to mask the

process of their acquisition, suggesting an intuitive ability rather than a technique

perfected over time through practice. Ironically, such metaphors also mask the

significance of tactility in the process of acquiring this ‘‘touch’’. This is similarly the

case with phenomenologies of the body that emphasise an almost seamless meshing of subject and object in the acquisition of skill. Merleau-Ponty, for example, in

discussing a typist’s touch, describes this as ‘‘knowledge in the hands’’ but does not

fully explain how it gets there. While he considers this a ‘‘knowledge bred of

familiarity’’ and attests to the power of habit in the body ‘‘appropriating fresh

instruments’’ (Merleau-Ponty 1999, 143�144), this implies a pedagogy whereby acquiring a skill is simply learnt as a matter of course. Such physical capacities,

however, are not just learnt, they are also often taught. In the context of a child

learning to write and their production of text through the use of a pencil, this is an

important distinction. A child does not simply acquire the capacity to write, they are

taught to do so; and the pedagogies that effect this process are instrumental to their

embodied and sensuous competence.

Handwriting is a profoundly embodied activity, a form of labour. Indeed, Jarman

(1979, 16) argues that it ‘‘is primarily a physical process’’. This is not just because it

engages the senses, but because it requires particular forms of bodily control, posture

and movement. This physicality is also profoundly ‘‘ecological’’: it exists in relation to a set of objects and tools � the writing instrument itself, paper, a writing surface, and so on � in which touch is central but multifaceted, especially in the experience of learning to write. We might suggest that writing entails a variety of relations of touch:

the fingers grip the pencil, the hand and arm rest on the desk, the other hand, the

bottom, back and feet anchor the stability of the body through contact with an array

of surfaces, allowing the focus of energy to be on the fine movement of the nib or

lead. 1

Given that these relations of touch are organised to allow for this focus, there

is also what we might call the line of touch. As Young (1990, 183�184) argues, following Merleau-Ponty, touch produces a continuity of subject and object, but the

continuity goes much further than this dyad as not only do the fingers touch the

pencil, the pencil touches the paper, and so on. But touch also entails a continuity

between agent, medium and production of meaning; it is not just a continuity of

sensuality, but a sensuality that is functional for the production of acting upon the

world. 2

Moreover, these relations and lines of touch also have a temporal, indeed

pedagogic quality. It is through the pencil that the child feels the surface of the paper

and the shape of the letter, the word and the sentence in order to form these things.

This touch � and the grip of the instrument in particular � must be light and efficient, as Bailes’ sixteenth-century copybook demonstrates (Jarman 1979, 115).

These touches, however, do not come easily or quickly. Firstly, in learning to write

children often trace shapes and letters with their fingers. Secondly, as modern

research attests, children move through various types of grip � from the Palmar- Supinate (or clench) grasp, to the Static Tripod Posture and the Dynamic Tripod

Posture and the various forms of movement and posture they entail. 3

But this

acquired physical capacity is also profoundly intersubjective or socialised. Bailes’

copybook attests to the careful instruction and drilled repetition that teachers have

given their students over many centuries on the best ways to hold and use a writing

504 M. Watkins and G. Noble

implement, form letters and lines of text, to attain the ‘‘grace’’ � an elegance of action � required of the deft touch of the competent writer. With the current emphasis on computers in education, the temporal, intersubjective, physical facility

of handwriting is little emphasised. Students may now work more and more with computers but this technology is yet to replace pens and pencils in Australian schools

. . . if indeed it ever does entirely. Students are still taught to write using a pen or pencil but even when computers are used students are rarely taught to touch type,

which raises similar issues around pedagogies and technologies of touch. Writing

is, of course, a technology itself, but a technology understood as an ensemble of

objects, human capacities and social contexts. Technology, conventionally, is

conceived as artefactual rather than embodied and processual; an object to be

used rather than the skill involved in using it. This paper explores the importance of touch and the incorporation of the sensibility of these aspects of becoming literate

that are generally undervalued within contemporary literacy pedagogy.

Losing touch

Despite the profoundly socialised physicality of writing, once the skill has been

mastered, the grip of the pencil perfected and the shape and directionality of letters

no longer given conscious attention, we tend to lose the awareness of touch, our fingers holding the pencil, the pencil touching the paper, our fingers and hand

moving across the page and the many other aspects of touch involved in the act of

writing. We achieve a ‘‘functional automaticity’’ that allows us to shift from

handwriting to composition (Berninger et al. 1997, 652). While there may be

moments when we register and adjust these tactile sensations, shifting our body in

the chair or easing our grip on the pen as its touch leaves an imprint on our skin, a

sometimes permanent reminder of its contact with our body, we are rarely mindful of

touch when writing. If it is the case that we have little or no cognisance of touch, that we rarely feel the pen and are simply unaware of our body’s various points of contact

with the surfaces involved in the act of writing, how does touch remain central to the

process? What is touch and does it need to be felt? Tactility, it seems, has these two

dimensions, not simply touching but bodily awareness or proprioception of an

object, another surface. In his account of touch, O’Shaughnessy (2000) makes a

distinction between the two viewing touch and proprioception as ‘‘mirror-image

senses’’; mutually dependent yet quite distinct. As he explains: ‘‘one sense leading us

outwards beyond ourselves, the other taking us back into ourselves’’ (O’Shaughnessy 2000, 674). Yet, as an almost instantaneous process, there seems little point in

persisting with such a clear distinction. For Radcliffe (2008, 302), however, it is not

so much that these two dimensions are difficult to distinguish in terms of temporality

but that touch without proprioception would leave it impoverished as a sense,

phenomenologically void. Instead, he sees touch as a relation between touching and

touched, usefully employing a notion of boundaries that are often blurred to account

for the fact that either ‘‘one side, the other or neither maybe conspicuous’’ as surfaces

collide (Radcliffe 2008, 313). With developing proficiency in using a pencil, and with tool use more broadly, these haptic boundaries all but disappear. While touch may be

central to motor control because we need to hold and manipulate an object, skilful

manipulation � the deft touch � is dependent upon losing touch or at least the awareness of touching. In effect what the mind forgets, the body remembers, a kind

Social Semiotics 505

of muscular memory or motor significance. 4

This distinction is significant because it

allows us to see the difference between the significance of touch itself, and how we

use it to access the world, and the vast array of skills that touch enables, which we use

to act in and upon the world. The ability to ‘‘forget’’ the former allows us to

maximise our attention on the latter (Noble and Watkins 2003).

Numerous examples of this are evident in the phenomenological literature. Radcliffe, for example, recounts how a medical practitioner was struck by how his

stethoscope ‘‘vanishes’’ when examining patients, being alert to the sound of their

heartbeat or any irregularities that the instrument may detect rather than its cold

metal surface in his fingers or the rubbery tubes around his neck. Similarly, Sudow

(1978) describes how in mastering jazz improvisation on the piano it seemed like his

fingers were ‘‘making the music all by themselves’’. He may have acquired ‘‘the

touch’’ for jazz but to do so he had to lose conscious touch of the keys. Perhaps the

most famous example of this process is Merleau-Ponty’s account of a blind man’s

cane and how through constant use it becomes an extension of the man’s arm. As he

explains, ‘‘those actions in which I habitually engage incorporate their instruments

into themselves and make them play a part in the original structure of my own body’’

(Merleau-Ponty 1999, 91).

These examples of the mastery of different technologies demonstrate how, in each

case, object and body become one. Ihde (1990), in his analysis of technology and the

life world, represents one form of this process � what he calls embodied technics � in the following way: (I � object) � world. This, however, requires further explanation as the blind man’s cane and the doctor’s stethoscope are in a very different relation to

the world compared with the pianist’s hands on a keyboard or, for that matter, a

writer’s fingers gripping a pen. The use of technology in the first examples are

concerned with mediating the world, a means of heightening perception of the

outside world or the world within, a process of interpretation that Ihde terms

‘‘hermeneutic technics’’. The use of a piano keyboard or pen, on the other hand,

assumes a particular practice in the world requiring a different touch, a far more

sophisticated manipulation of the object concerned and the development of a

complex motor capacity. These capacities are about acting in and upon the world,

producing something such as sound or text and not just sensually experiencing

it. Ihde’s formula then equates to what we have called a line � in this case, a line of touch � through which human actions are mediated but to effect an outcome. This is akin to O’Shaughnessy’s argument for the special status of touch in that it provides a

different kind of ‘‘inner-outer’’ body-awareness because of the mediation of action,

and not just any action, but intentional manipulative action (1989, 39). Yet, in all these examples, this process of losing awareness of touch is central to

effective use of the object. Leder (1990) discusses this self-effacement as a process of

‘‘disappearance’’. While essential for the acquisition of skill, he details how

phenomenological engagement in the world is reliant upon an ‘‘absent body’’. As

he explains: ‘‘as I perceive through an organ, it necessarily recedes from the

perceptual field it discloses’’ (Leder 1990, 11). While he admits this is more obviously

the case with sight than with touch, to operate effectively in the world we need to

‘‘lose sight’’ of our bodily organs and the functions they perform. If continually

cognisant of touch, or indeed any sense or bodily function, our awareness can be

diverted from the acts we need to perform. These various corporeal operations

necessarily slip from view in the process of being and experiencing the world. That is,

506 M. Watkins and G. Noble

we are generally not mindful of their functioning. Such an awareness may only

involve low levels of consciousness, but this is sufficient to affect our experience of

the world or ability to perform in it. The effect is even more pronounced in the

performance of a skill especially those involving technical sophistication as in playing a piano or higher-order thinking as in writing a text. Here touch is crucial for motor

capacity, to produce the music or write the text, but necessarily given little thought

once this capacity is attained. Touch instead functions as an ‘‘absent presence’’,

backgrounded unless required (Leder 1990, 22). Yet not only is learning such

capacities rarely explored, so too is how we learn to forget. This absence is achieved

through a process of incorporation, whereby not only the tool but the expertise

involved in using it become a part of one’s bodily schema. As Ingold (1996, 179)

explains in his discussion of bodily skills: ‘‘In the flow of action, the body itself becomes transparent as do the tools attached to it, which � like the body � are as much a part of the user as they are used’’. This flow of action that comes with

effective tool use may involve much more than ease of execution, it may bring with it,

depending on the skill involved, ‘‘flow’’ understood in another sense. 5

Given little

thought needs to be applied to performance, as the ability to use the object has been

incorporated within the body itself, a kind of ‘‘cognitive’’ flow becomes possible,

whereby attention can be given to creative manipulation. In the case of jazz piano

this is experienced as improvisation, or in writing as the flow of composition.

Pedagogies of incorporation

What appears effortless, however, is predicated on the application of effort expended

over protracted periods of time to the point where the technology becomes

transparent and touch, an ‘‘absent presence’’. Leder (1990, 32) acknowledges that

this process of incorporation has a ‘‘temporal significance’’ but, as is generally the

case with phenomenological accounts of body/object relations, the pedagogic significance of the process is given little emphasis. Incorporation does not just

‘‘happen’’ over time, it is dependent on particular pedagogic relations between self

and object or between self, other and object. We may learn or ‘‘teach’’ ourselves to

use an implement and acquire a skill, but we may also learn because we are taught by

another. Incorporation and ‘‘losing touch’’ are themselves pedagogic processes. To

some extent this is implicit in Leder’s discussion of thematisation; that is the way in

which parts of the body are foregrounded as one acquires a skill. We give attention to

the placement and movement of parts of our body to perfect technique, touching an implement in particular ways until it ‘‘feels’’ right. In learning to write this involves

positioning the fingers in a certain way to grip a pencil correctly and move the hand

to produce different letters. Once this ability is acquired, the requisite thematisation

is no longer needed. It simply recedes unless a correction of technique is required.

Acquiring the ability to write, however, also involves different sets of pedagogic

relations. When a very young child first picks up a pencil or crayon to make a mark

on paper, they do not automatically grip the implement in the way in which they are

required to do so at school. It is generally clenched with their fist using the Palmer Supinate grip, or maybe held with the tips of their fingers. They can feel the

implement and this touch is thematised to the extent that they may even switch hands

until hand dominance is apparent, until it comes to feel right through regular use.

Feeling right, however, generally means not ‘‘feeling at all’’ or no longer being aware

Social Semiotics 507

of touching the implement but simply drawing or writing on paper. The pedagogic

relation evident here is that between child and object. Through manipulating the

implement in trying to draw, children are teaching themselves to hold and use a

pencil or crayon to acquire the right touch, which then becomes central to learning to write. Yet once a child starts school, and maybe even prior to this, a different

pedagogic relation becomes necessary. Intervention is required to correct grip with a

parent or teacher demonstrating the way a pencil should be held to write effectively,

to achieve ease of movement and to more efficiently form letters and lines of text. In

the process thematisation reoccurs, as the child must reposition fingers and embody

different movements to acquire a new touch. Yet in this case it is not left to the child

to initiate, it is orchestrated by another actively teaching the child to reconfigure their

placement of fingers to ensure they perfect the skill. Incorporation in terms of learning to write, therefore, involves a complex of pedagogic relations performed

overtime until such point as thematisation recedes and the focus becomes not so

much how to write but what is written.

As indicated, thematisation may re-emerge at stages of acquiring and refining a

skill but for some it may never retreat. In contrast to a notion of ‘‘disappearance’’,

Leder terms this ‘‘dysappearance’’ in that certain operations remain foregrounded

affecting performance. He casts this as ‘‘the absence of absence’’, but tends to

associate this dysfunction more with the body’s inability to perform ‘‘normally’’ when affected by pain or disease, times at which awareness is heightened as to what

the body can and cannot do. While he does make reference to dysfunction in the

process of learning, the relationship between disappearance and pedagogy is not

explored. Dysappearance, however, may be a function of poor pedagogy, a skill

either poorly learned or poorly taught wherein the embodiment of a requisite motor

capacity has not been perfected. Instead, through poor pedagogy, a body may

become accustomed to the inefficient use of an implement and with this maladjust-

ment the thematisation of certain aspects of tool use may remain constant, a continual state of ‘‘dys-ease’’ (Leder 1990, 85).

Touch, Montessori and muscular memory

This ‘‘dys-ease’’ with writing was evident with a number of students we encountered

in classes we observed during a study into the embodiment of scholarly discipline

(Watkins and Noble 2008). With a growing emphasis on computers in education, the

teaching of handwriting seems to be given far less attention than in the past and, while not necessarily our focus, we became concerned about the number of students

who had simply not embodied the skills to write effectively. They exhibited the kind

of ‘‘dys-ease’’ to which we refer, lacking the appropriate grip and fluid movement to

allow them to focus on the content of their writing. Yet it is not just the rise of

computing that is the problem here � it is part of a larger history in which handwriting, habit and scholarly discipline have become de-emphasised in teaching

practice and policy. The close instruction offered by Bailes has long since become

unfashionable. Before discussing these students, however, and the ways in which touch is implicated in their lack of skill, we want to consider some early techniques

for teaching writing and, in particular, the Montessori Method, a pedagogic

approach that privileges touch in learning to write that influenced Australian early

childhood pedagogy at the beginning of the twentieth century. While handwriting is

508 M. Watkins and G. Noble

given little attention in the current New South Wales (NSW) primary school English

syllabus (Board of Studies, NSW 1998) with only a one-paragraph explanation

followed by a page appendix showing the directionality for reproducing letters and

numerals, early Australian syllabus documents provided quite detailed guidance on

the teaching of handwriting. 6

The 1916 syllabus, for example, maps out the ways

in which letters should be introduced to students according to their common

characteristics and the way in which letters are combined in writing with additional information on style, slope, forming loops, spacing, heights, letter drill, combina-

tions, holding the pencil, correct posture, testing and fluency. In relation to these, the

Syllabus states that ‘‘much time and trouble will be saved in the long run if pupils are

practised in the forms so thoroughly in the beginning that their work becomes

automatic’’ (NSW Department of Education, 1916, 26): in other words, until

students no longer need to give attention to these aspects of technique because they

would have embodied the touch involved in forming letters, which allows them to

focus on composition.

The next syllabus issued in 1922 retained much of this approach but, in its

adoption of the Montessori Method of teaching writing, placed a much stronger

emphasis on the role of tactility in learning to write in the early years. It stressed that

children in their first year at school needed to practice along Montessori lines to

‘‘gain power of control’’ (NSW Department of Education 1922, 4). This entailed

students firstly learning the shape of each letter using strategies such as finger tracing

on sandpaper letters. Through repeatedly performing these activities students acquired, what Maria Montessori termed a ‘‘direct muscular-tactile sensation of

the letter’’, which she considered was far more effective than students simply relying

upon sight (Montessori 1912/1964, 276). As early as possible she was keen to

encourage the same automatic response as mentioned in the 1916 syllabus. Much of

the Montessori Method is reliant upon this automation of skills through the

development of a form of bodily know-how that she called ‘‘muscular memory’’.

Montessori viewed touch as central to the development of the muscular memory

required for writing; the incorporation within the fingers and hands of a knowledge

of letter shapes and the movement necessary to reproduce them. In discussing the

importance of touch for the young child in learning to write, she pointed out that

‘‘Indeed he [sic] sometimes recognises the letters by touching them, when he cannot

do so by looking at them’’ (1912/1964, 277). Yet it was not only a knowledge of the

letter shapes that Montessori felt needed to be embodied, control of the writing

implement also had to be mastered; the grip of the pencil and a kind of transfer of

understandings from fingers to the implement itself, a process dependent on losing

the awareness of touch to simply moving the pencil across the page. To promote this

form of muscular memory, Montessori followed up the tracing of fingers on sandpaper letters with the tracing of actual letter shapes with a small wooden stick

until this was replaced by a pencil.

Central to students acquiring this facility for writing through the techniques of

the Montessori Method is the pedagogy underpinning the approach. Rather than

stressing the role of teacher intervention, Montessori felt teachers needed to do little

more than observe as students engaged in these activities. In relation to handwriting

she explained that ‘‘We come to accept the phenomenon with calmness and tacitly

recognise it as a natural form of the children’s development’’ (Montessori 1912/1964,

291; original emphasis). Yet, despite Montessori’s claims to the contrary, there is very

Social Semiotics 509

little that is ‘‘natural’’ about this process. Apart from the teacher’s manipulation of

the pedagogical environment, there are also other forms of direct intervention.

Developing the different senses of touch the Montessori Method encouraged is not

simply about the pedagogic relation of child and object, the sandpaper letters and different writing implements. It involved the active intervention of another � the teacher � providing the guiding hand to ensure the child acquired a muscular memory for letter shapes by repeatedly engaging in exercises whereby touch is no

longer felt and the formation of letters and manipulating a pencil across a page

becomes automatic.

Such guidance in technique and the kind of emphasis that was evident in early-

twentieth-century syllabus documents on the importance of muscular memory for

handwriting seems no longer the case within many contemporary primary school classrooms. It does, however, retain a place in two inter-related domains: early

childcare and occupational therapy. In early childcare practice there remains an

understanding, partly due to the perceived significance of the link between learning

to draw, control of the pencil and learning letter shape (Stitzer and Hablitzel 2009).

This is often linked to remedial approaches found under the banner of occupational

therapy; as primary schooling de-emphasised the importance of grip, repetition and

posture, these emerged as ‘‘problems’’, especially but not exclusively among poorly

achieving students, and addressed as ‘‘learning difficulties’’ by either government agencies and local councils, or the proliferating businesses specialising in educational

remediation. 7

These business and services offer all sorts of aids, such as plastic

writing grips, ‘‘writing claws’’, oversized pencils, slope boars and silly putty, whose

aim is to develop fine motor skills, grip, wrist position and strength because many

children (including teenagers) do not acquire them through schooling. 8

There is a much stronger awareness in these fields of the movement through the

various types of grasp and the varying forms of movement they entail, from the

whole arm to the hand, and eventually to the fine movements of the fingers needed in dexterous writing (Get Ready For School 2009). While there is no single ‘‘correct’’

grip, there is a clearly delimited array of grips and postures that provide the stability

and dexterity needed for a deft touch (Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne 2005).

Educationalists who suggest that students will ‘‘naturally’’ find the right grip for

themselves, or who wish to emphasise the creativity of writing over the practicalities

of handwriting, seem to forget the sheer hard work of learning how to wield a pen or

pencil, and the importance of instruction and correction in acquiring these skills. It is

to the consequences of this we now turn.

The grace of writing

These issues around the bodily dimensions of literate practice, and in particular the

role of touch, were evident in studies of classroom practice we have conducted over a

number of years. Perhaps the most extreme example we witnessed, however, was a

nine-year-old student called Kenny, 9

in a Year Three classroom at a working-class

school in the western suburbs of Sydney that we observed as part of a study into habits of learning.

10 Despite being in his fourth year of school, Kenny seemed to have

no idea about an efficient form of grip. He clenched his pencil using the Palmar-

Supinate grasp, as though he was a beginner drawer with no seeming familiarity with

writing. He wrote moving his whole arm, rather than manipulating the movement of

510 M. Watkins and G. Noble

the nib of the pen with his fingers. Further, he could not manipulate the location of

his hand on the page via adjustment of the wrist. He agonised over each letter and

not surprisingly he was usually the last to finish his work, if he did so at all. Although

difficult, inefficient and uncomfortable, he continued to use this grip because it was

the style he had habituated. This example of Kenny disproves the assumptions that

children will ‘‘naturally’’ develop through stages of handwriting and that each child

finds an effective grasp for themselves. The example of Kenny also raises the crucial issue of the consequences of giving

limited attention to the role of tactility in learning to write. The grip Kenny used gave

him little dexterity in terms of the touch needed to manipulate the nib of the pen.

Given that the touch his clenched grip allowed was located in the hand rather than

the finger tips, it could not offer the ‘‘light’’ touch to which Bailes refers. This means

that he had little feel for the formation of letters and words in the production of

text. 11

Writing for Kenny was a slow and laborious activity; he had not acquired the

bodily capacity whereby it had become a transparent technology. With the enormous

effort involved in the mechanical forming of letters, Kenny had not developed that

sense of the link between symbol and sound that we have called the line of touch, so

crucial to the grapho-phonic understanding of language. Moreover, given his

preoccupation with the mechanics of writing, in activities where the focus shifted

to what he was writing rather than simply how he wrote, Kenny was further

disadvantaged, unable to concentrate on the content of his text. His poor touch in

the technical dimension of writing meant that he did not have the touch of grace of the competent writer � the elegance of writing-as-action � and he was not able to make that shift from the mechanics of handwriting to compositional fluency

(Berninger et al. 1997). Kenny’s lack of technical competence was not only evident

in the quality of the content of his writing, it was also revealed in the lack of

motivation he had towards writing. Kenny was not a poorly behaved student, but he

had little enthusiasm for school work. It was a chore to be completed under

sufferance and he had not internalised a strong orientation to learning (Watkins and

Noble 2008).

Kenny’s poor writing also demonstrated the consequences of a lack of teacher

intervention and correction. One of the lessons in which we observed Kenny was

devoted specifically to handwriting. The teacher had written a phrase on the board

that she asked students to copy and to follow this by practising writing single letters

in their handwriting books. This was an encouraging sign, for while Kenny was by far

the least capable, the students’ writing as a whole varied enormously. Many held their

pens with adequate grasp, but more often than not their writing was overly large with

poorly formed letters and they had little idea about directionality. This is not simply a matter of style, because it poses problems when students start to use cursive script

and has an impact on ease and fluidity of writing overall. Yet there was no

demonstration or discussion of posture, grip and the directionality of letters to be

written because, presumably, the teacher felt she could assume that Year Three

students already had this knowledge and capacity. But not only was there no

instruction regarding methods of grasp, there was no observation of individual

students to ensure that they were holding their pens appropriately and completing all

aspects of the work. Because Kenny was slow to get through the first part, for

example, he made little headway with his single letters, something that may have been

useful for his fine motor skills. His teacher, however, did not seem to notice this.

Social Semiotics 511

Indeed, Kenny’s teacher admitted later that she was unsure what to do to help

improve his writing.

Other students in the same study also showed a lack of ease in the physical labour

of writing that resulted in the absence of a graceful ‘‘touch’’. Braydon, one of

Kenny’s classmates, admitted that the required forms of posture in the act of learning

to write were too demanding: ‘‘you have to sit up straight . . . [it] hurts my back’’. As we have suggested, and as the literature shows, the grip on the pencil is closely linked

to the posture required to sit still and concentrate on writing (remembering that

posture entails different points of touch). The seemingly technical dimensions of grip

and posture have consequences not only for the mastery of writing as a particular set

of skills, but also impacts on the acquisition of wider forms of knowledge and skill.

Feder and Majnemer (2007) show convincingly that poor handwriting can create a

barrier to accomplishing higher-order skills such as spelling and composition, and

this is both because writing is a crucial medium of learning, and because it is

fundamental to the formation of a disposition to learning, a scholarly discipline with

a strong sense of the rewards of learning. Braydon said he found school ‘‘boring’’

(Watkins and Noble 2008, 42). This discipline is not some abstract, symbolic entity

but a set of physical capacities, including those around touch, through which a

human finds a ‘‘fit’’ with an activity and so exhibits a gracefulness in the act of

performing.

Eric, in another classroom in a middle-class school within the same study, also exhibited the consequences of a lack of intervention in the tactility of learning to

write. According to his teacher, Eric had ‘‘immature fine motor skills’’ that affected

his writing technically and compositionally. In discussing his writing, she added that

‘‘when your writing doesn’t come easy it is going to take longer’’, and Eric ‘‘rarely

completes things’’ (Watkins and Noble 2008, 39). But close attention to observing

Eric in class revealed a rather more complex set of circumstances. At first glance Eric

seemed to be a well-behaved student who did his work with little fuss. His posture

was unremarkable, his pencil grip adequate. Watching him for several hours,

however, it was obvious that for large chunks of the classroom time he did very

little work � his pen rarely touched the page � but, as with Kenny, his lack of effort was not recognised. He was often distracted and he fidgeted, but he was not noisy

and he did not disrupt other students. At one point Eric spent 45 minutes adding

only marginally to his writing task, and he completed only two comprehension

questions in 45 minutes. The lesson was run in conditions of quiet concentration,

during which the teacher could observe the students’ work, and, apart from minor

distractions, he appeared to be following the task. The teacher strolled around giving

advice as needed, but she seemed not to notice when she checked Eric’s work that he had not actually written much. The little time he spent in putting pen to paper meant

that what we have called the line of touch was unsustained, and this went unnoticed

and uncorrected by the teacher. Eric’s strategies meant that he failed to develop

productive literate capacities, which were demonstrated in poor reading and writing

levels.

Both Eric and Kenny had, by Year Three, developed physical habits that

were increasingly difficult to alter and, on the basis of our observations across a year,

were unlikely to be addressed effectively by their teachers. As an alternative to the

absence of teacher intervention, we want to consider a kindergarten class, from an

earlier study, in which a focus on handwriting was still seen to be crucial to the

512 M. Watkins and G. Noble

formation of literate bodies (Watkins 2007). Despite being located in a middle-class

school, none of the students could read or write when they started kindergarten,

partly because many had come from language backgrounds other than English, with

quite a few requiring English-as-a-second-language support. Rather than focus on a single student, we want to consider a particular classroom activity. Overall, Jane, the

teacher, had a clear teaching ethos based on the role of ‘‘structured steps’’ in the

development of skills. This ethos, and her emphasis on routine and whole-class

instruction, entailed a greater capacity for teacher observation and intervention. She

commented, for example, that a classroom, ‘‘can be too big because you can’t be

really observing what’s going on all the time’’ and had clearly organised the space to

maximise her ability to see what each student was doing (Watkins 2007, 776).

This practice was accompanied by an approach to handwriting that entailed an emphasis upon the physicality of the process. She felt it was vital for students to

habituate the shape and directionality of letters in kindergarten. She employed

activities that focused on fine motor skills as early as possible. She conducted group

activities in bead threading, play-dough moulding and cutting early in the year

to assist fine motor development, but she also ensured time was devoted to guided

drawing or writing exercises. Jane felt that a pedagogy centred around teacher

direction was necessary to habituate the appropriate techniques. Her guided drawing

sessions began with a discussion of the sound of the week, which was conducted alongside the sight word chart at the front of the room. Letters were presented in

sequences that provided a mix of vowels and consonants and differentiated between

their graphic representation. It is significant that in her method, the sense of touch

was aligned with other senses � drawing on the sight chart and oral/aural skills � and linked to other physical capacities, such as drawing, threading, and so on. During

one of the lessons in which ‘‘t’’ was the focus, Jane asked students for words that

started with the letter/sound, using items that were displayed on a ‘‘letter of the

week’’ table. Jane would repeat the word, emphasising the initial sound. She had individual students do the same and then had the whole class repeat this � an activity much enjoyed by the class.

Following this, students moved to their desks and engaged in a guided drawing

activity focusing on the directionality of the ‘‘t’’ shape. Jane asked students to follow

her as she drew a number of shapes that incorporated these strokes on the board. She

then asked students to watch her make the ‘‘t’’ shape with her finger and

had students follow by making ‘‘air-strokes’’. After this Jane drew a ‘‘t’’ on the

board and asked students to write five of these in their books, during which time she moved around the room correcting grip, posture and commenting on work. Over the

course of the year, Jane’s pedagogy entailed a sense of the relations of touch

(including posture and grasp), the line of touch (connecting grip to letter shape to

text) and the cumulative, temporal dimensions of touch and writing. This then

allowed them to apply themselves to their work for sustained periods, to ‘‘lose’’ the

touch they need for compositional fluency � the foundation for the incorporation of the grace of the deft touch of the emerging, competent writer.

Conclusion: finding touch

These examples, we argue, illustrate several things about the role of touch in the

development of writing. Touch here is not understood as a singular dimension of

Social Semiotics 513

sensory experience, but an array of aspects employed in the act of writing � the ensemble of relations of touch that includes the posture of the body, other sensory

experiences, the sustained sequence and concerted effort we call the line of touch,

and the temporal, accumulative dimensions of touch, including the intervention and

instruction of a teacher � in the incorporation of capacities for literacy � or, in some cases, the lack of such an acquisition that is of particular importance given the

current de-emphasis of the embodied nature of literate capacities in educational

curriculum and pedagogy.

While it has become politically fashionable to announce the death of reading and

writing in an age of computerised skills, we would suggest that the technical aspects

of writing are crucial both in graphophonic understandings of language and in the

development of compositional fluency. Moreover, it has become philosophically

fashionable to de-emphasise the teacher’s role in instructing children about ‘‘correct’’

grip. Yet we would argue that while there is no single grip, there are a delimited

number of ways a pen can be held effectively and productively, and that intervention

is absolutely necessary in guiding effective mastery of writing implements. Roberts,

Siever, and Mair (2010) found that direct intervention using an approach emphasis-

ing the motor skills of handwriting improved students’ legibility, speed, composition

and pleasure in writing, just as Berninger et al. (1997) had found over a decade ago.

The crucial point here, in a paper on touch, is that the category of touch needs to be

carefully deconstructed � while there is no single aspect of touch that makes children effective writers, the act of writing, and especially the temporal and pedagogic

process of acquiring the capacities to write, need to be broken down into their

constituent components, analysed, worked upon and reassembled to produce

effective educational action for the incorporation of literate capacities. This means

that practitioners need to examine the technical and embodied aspects of writing as

well as those that are social and compositional. Teachers need this understanding to

help students incorporate � to learn and then ‘‘lose’’ � the touch they need to acquire the ‘‘comelines and grace’’ of the competent writer.

Notes

1. Several academics we have discussed this with insist that they do not meet these conventions � they write in bed, lying on the ground in front of the television, or while they are out walking, and so forth. But they seem to have forgotten how they learnt to write, and focus rather on the ways they feel comfortable composing now as competent writers. They can write in such circumstances, we would argue, because they have already acquired the physical capacity to write, learnt under more conventional circumstances. In any case, these are not the ways children typically learn how to write.

2. We could also link this line of touch to O’Shaughnessy’s distinction between diverse modes of tactility, from momentary and extensive contact to active exploratory move- ment, but he is still preoccupied with tactile sense, not the role of tactility in the human production of the world. In this case, another set of categories is required.

3. Schneck and Henderson (1990) identify 10 different grips. 4. Maria Montessori uses the term ‘‘muscular memory’’ whereas Merleau-Ponty employs

‘‘motor significance’’ to refer to the kind of bodily know-how that is considered here. 5. Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi (2002) uses the term ‘‘flow’’ in a similar sense to how it is

employed here to signify the way in which one becomes immersed in an activity with actions seeming automatic � hence the word ‘‘flow’’.

6. For a more detailed account of the teaching of handwriting in Australian schools, see Watkins (2009).

514 M. Watkins and G. Noble

7. See, for example: ‘‘Developing a Pencil Grip Royal Melbourne Hospital’’ (http://www.rch. org.au/emplibrary/ot/InfoSheet_A.pdf), ‘‘How to Hold a Pencil � Tripod Grip’’ (http:// www.drawyourworld.com/grip.html) and ‘‘Getting Ready for School � Stages of Grip (http://www.getreadyforschool.com/preschool/pencil_grip.htm).

8. In the USA, handwriting difficulties are cited as one of the most frequently mentioned reasons for student referral to school-based occupational therapists (Roberts, Siever, and Mair 2010).

9. All of the names used are pseudonyms. 10. This study was conducted as a part of an Australian Research Council Linkages Project �

Cultural Practices and Learning � between the University of Western Sydney and the NSW Department of Education and Training examining the relationship between ethnicity and dispositions to learning. Findings from the study have been published in the report Cultural practices and learning: Diversity discipline and dispositions in schooling (Watkins and Noble 2008).

11. While there is some debate about whether there is a single correct grip, with many researchers claiming that variations of grasp that entail use of the fingertips can be equally efficient, and whether grip is the most important element of writing competence, there is clear evidence that the clench grip cannot offer this kind of dexterity (Schneck 1991).

Notes on contributors

Megan Watkins is Senior Lecturer in Literacy and Pedagogy in the School of Education and a member of the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney. She is the author of Discipline and learn: Bodies, pedagogy and writing (2011, forthcoming) and co-author of Genre, text, grammar: Technologies for teaching and assessing writing (2005). Megan has also published widely in the areas of affect, desire and the role of the body in learning.

Greg Noble is Associate Professor at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. His research interests include the relations between youth, ethnicity and identity, the ethics of ‘‘everyday cosmopolitanism’’, multicultural education, material culture and the sociology of intellectuals. His books include Lines in the sand: The Cronulla riots, multi- culturalism and national belonging (2009), On being Lebanese in Australia (2010), Bin Laden in the suburbs (2004), Kebabs, kids, cops and crime (2000) and Cultures of schooling (1990).

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516 M. Watkins and G. Noble

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