When reading about authentic literacy pedagogy in Cope and Kalantzis's book Literacies and when doing some research on authentic approaches to literacy such as the approach of Montessori schools, the use of Dick and Jane readers stood out to me.

Dick and Jane readers: A popular tool for teaching reading in authentic literacy pedagogy.

To begin, it is important to note that authentic literacy pedagogy emerged as an approach to teaching reading and writing that starkly contrasted that of didactic literacy pedagogy. Proponents of the authentic approach did not agree with didactic pedagogy's teaching of 'synthetic phonics' which focused on encoding and decoding words from part to whole. If phonics was to be addressed at all in the authentic approach, it would be 'analytic phonics' which moved from whole word down to word part in order to always keep the focus on meaning. 

So Dick and Jane readers were designed to facilitate the authentic "look-say" approach of learning to read. Dick and Jane books rely heavily on images to support understanding of written text. They repeat simple words and simple sentences so there is very little decoding to do. In fact, they are designed so that if a student doesn't know a word, they can guess based on meaning to avoid the decoding strategy of synthetic phonics and the didactic approach.

The strengths of this tool and the authentic approach to literacy pedagogy is ths focus on meaning. After all, reading is not just pronouncing strings of words correctly but extracting meaning from text. It also aligns with the fact that good readers recognize many words by sight rather than sound out words laboriously.

However, there are many draw backs to this approach to literacy and this tool. First, many critics say the texts are incredibly boring. A critic on Wikipedia states,

I learned to read in school of course and in my era you learned to read with ‘readers.’ They were full of the adventures of ‘Dick and Jane.’ Dick and Jane and their little sister Sally and their dog Spot. This was the dullest family in the history of Earth. And I couldn’t see the charm of reading about Dick and Jane. Oh boy they were boring. You know, the stories were stupid, even for a first or second grader.

Another limitation to Dick and Jane readers is their short, choppy sentences and word repetition that does not reflect authentic speech or authentic writing of texts in the real world. That's quite ironic, if you ask me, for an approach that supposedly centers on authenticity. However, this was necessary to eliminate the didactic, phonics-based approach of decoding words. The authentic approach, then, calls for learning virtually all words in the English language by sight since it does not teach the rules for making generalizations about words or teach word-solving strategies for unknown words (besides meaning). This is a third limitation.

A final limitation is that these books were designed to be about ordinary, familiar things that would align with a students' background and experience. Unfortunately, only the culture of power was taken into consideration.

Authentic literacy pedagogy does well in focusing on meaning. But it falls short by altering texts until they are no longer engaging or authentic, by not teaching students about how words work, and by assuming certain cultural experiences.