Several years ago, my mother sent me a Halloween card. The front depicted two ghosts; instead of saying “Boo”, they said “Oob.” The bottom of the card read “Dyslexic Ghosts” and the inside of the card read “Halloween Happy” rather than “Happy Halloween”. While the card was meant to provide some levity, it really got me thinking about the myriad of misconceptions and myths that exist today about dyslexia. Need more evidence? Check out these t-shirts and bumper stickers all poking fun at dyslexia and perpetuating myths about the reading disability. 

My intent with this post is not to come across as a stodgy person who can’t take a joke; rather my intent is to show how commonplace myths and stereotypes about dyslexia are! So commonplace in fact, that they’ve become fodder for jokes in t-shirts, bumper stickers, and greeting cards.

I plan to write multiple posts, in which I dispel the myths about dyslexia. I assume that many of my readers are parents, without formal training in education. Rest assured that many of the misconceptions about dyslexia are held by professionals and educators in the field. In fact, a 2010 article that I authored shows exactly that! In a research study of over 300 teachers, nearly 75% of participants incorrectly identified dyslexia as a visual impairment in which a reader sees letters and words transposed, reversed, or jumbled! For a link to that article, click here. Even popular media has misconceptions - watch this clip from The Cosby Show - where Theo meets with a learning specialist for a diagnosis with dyslexia.

There are far too many misconceptions out there about dyslexia.

Myth #1: Dyslexia is seeing words and letters backwards. Not true!

There is no way that I can write more eloquently about dyslexia than the experts - MaryAnne Wolfe, the Yale Center for Dyslexia, Literacy How in Connecticut, and the International Dyslexia Association. But let's be clear...Here is what dyslexia is.

Dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty in reading - it is neurobiological in origin (meaning it is rooted in the brain and different wiring in the language portions of the brain. The brains of dyslexics overactivate inappropriate portions of the brain and underactivate the appropriate areas of the brain (the Broca's and Wernicke's area).  

Dyslexia is NOT seeing words backwards / transposing or reversing letters / words / numbers. It is not a deficiency in visual processing. Dyslexia is a language-based reading disorder, meaning that people with dyslexia struggle with the sound components of language. 

I encourage you to look at the linked resources for more information on what dyslexia actually is - and to join me in vocalizing the truth about dyslexia. When I meet parents who tell me "my child is dyslexic", I often say to them, "What does that mean to you?". If I hear these misconceptions above, that when I steer them to my favorite resources above.  

Let me be clear that I believe these misconceptions about dyslexia are perpetuated by the disconnect between the research community and those working every day with children - teachers, pediatricians, etc. It's all well and good that the worlds of medicine, neuroscience, and reading research have come together to collaborate on dyslexia - but until we effectively deliver these practical messages to teachers in the field - our work has not met its true impact. Let's be real - it is very unlikely that we will ever have schools where we put children in MRI machines to get brain scans (and would we even want that?) so we need to find meaningful ways for the real meaning of dyslexia to influence teachers, families, and children.

More to come...

Leveled Libraries Be Gone!

Confession time. When I walk into a classroom and see books and libraries organized by levels, I cringe.

 

Like many things in the field of education, the trend towards leveling books by guided reading / Fountas and Pinnell / Lexile level may have begun with good intentions - trying to get the appropriate books into the hands of young readers. But like many other things, we've let the pendulum swing way too far - and we are officially in the land of over-labeling.  Here's why I find leveled libraries problematic....

1. The leveling systems were created to be used solely by teachers / librarians, NOT for children / parents.  Is there anything more defeating than a child saying, "I'm not allowed to read this book because it's a Level G and I'm a Level E reader". 

2. The difference between each level is relatively minor - and the leveling system does not take into account all of the other complicating factors of reading - background knowledge that a reader brings to the page, vocabulary, and motivation.

3. Levels do not translate into lifelong reading habits.  Think of yourself as an adult reader. When you go to the library, do you choose a book by its level? 

Don't believe me? Read more here - in these additional resources.  Author Donalyn Miller write that levels violate a student's academic privacy.  A statement by the America Association of School Librarians writes that "labeling and shelving books by its assigned label on the spine...threatens the confidentiality of students' reading levels." Even the creators of the leveled system - Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas - have come out saying that "the A to Z reading levels to be used in the way they often are". It's time to stop the madness and lose the levels.

Confessions of a Bad Teacher

The NYTimes is a buzz with reactions to the NYC teacher evaluation system - great op-ed here!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/confessions-of-a-bad-teacher.html?scp=1&sq=confessions%20of%20a%20bad%20teacher&st=cse

Question: How Might We Use Blogs and Other Online Spaces for Composing and Learning?

So can we think together, here, about how we might use wikis and blogs?

<--So that this
becomes alive ;)

A Blogging Workshop

For information on our blogging workshop, go to http://kbyancey.wordpress.com
You'll see there a summary of what we did today as well as some thoughts on responding and assessing blogs.

This is a project I'll continue to work on, so feel free to stop by this blog or the other one.

One Dimension of New Composing: Research

I seem to return to this topic frequently, but perhaps that’s just re-iterative practice/thinking. Here, on other blogs, and in several presentations, I’ve focused on new composing processes and practices, focusing on the interplay between different material practices–from post-it’s to track changes–that all play a part in composing. That’s a composing for the page and the screen.
At NECC in Washington, DC, I’ll focus on composing for the net by looking at blogging, and I’m working with teachers at the Fordham Literacy Institute on the same topic. For a preview, you can look at the google site I’m developing now: http://sites.google.com/site/bloggingalive/ I’ll have a site on blogger as well.

I’ve also been thinking some about how we research, and I’ll be talking about that at Computers and Writing–next week I’m looking at ways we have researched, historically, and then at how we research now, divided into three areas: academic; mainstream; and alternative. Interestingly, a good deal of what has become mainstream and academic–the moral equivalent of the truth–began as alternative. The war in Irag is a case in point: even Dick Cheney stopped looking for WMD once he left the halls of power.

Researching so we learn, critique, and synthesize is good: we all need to do this, and to be sure that the sources we draw on are credible. As important is the ability to create knowledge, and here I tend to look at sites where people can contribute; there are just-in-time opportunites like the i-reports we see on cnn–http://www.ireport.com/as well as longer-term opportunities like those promoted in the citizen science movement: e.g, http://www.cocorahs.org/. I also look at sites where lay folks are organizing the collection, synthesis, and distribution of knowledge. Patients Like Me–http://www.patientslikeme.com/–is one where people have gathered, organized, and shared information for the collective good in new ways. And interestingly, the medical profession, which has never gathered patient-informed data, is actually paying attention to this effort. These are other ways of creating knowledge.

I think that composition includes the visual, in some cases graphic communication like charts and graphs, in other cases re-mixes and mashups that can be simultaneously wise and funny, that other times aspire to seriousness and permanence. Art communicates understanding, so it’s another kind of composing that we teach. That’s an area that I hope to focus on in other presentations this year, one in September at http://http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolit.htmlGeorgia Southern.

All of which is to say that composing in the 21st century is a variegated, networked, material practice that we are still defining and mapping.

Composing: A Quick Historical Perspective

Reprinted from http://kbyancey.wordpress.com/2008/09/

When you look at the history of literacy, it seems located, largely, in reading–and reading, as we know, has served several purposes, many of which are designed by those in power. Reading at once provides a mechanism for sharing knowledge; for influencing the moral development (and control) of the populace at large; and for assuring a “prepared” workforce. Interestingly, in spite of the fact that in public education, reading and writing are usually taught together as two sides of the same coin, such was not the case historically. While reading was slowly being made available to larger and larger groups of people, writing was not.

Why not? Ironically, the invention of print meant that you needed to write less than before: print meant that many texts were available for reading, so you didn’t need copy what you wanted to read, assuming you could read; if you did need something composed, others–scribes and secretaries–could write for you and made their living doing so. Unlike reading, then, writing was a “professional” activity. Even to vote, once that become increasingly possible, all you needed to be able to do was to make your “mark,” the proverbial x. But mostly, if you could write, you could participate in new ways, and that, apparently, wasn’t very attractive to people who could have supported this enfranchisement of literacy–and agency.

In the early years of the twentieth century, this situation changed as writing began to be incorporated into the curriculum for K-12. But even then, even when writing became part of mass education, the focus wasn’t on writing, but on handwriting–so much so that according to Donald Graves, his class in writing was a class in the medium of handwriting–the labored process of letter formation, which formation anticipates the focus on form in writing, decried by Hillocks and others, that has dominated the twentieth century teaching of composing.

It’s also so that in the 1960s and 1970s, we saw a new conception of writing emerge, one that came to be called process writing, informed by research and enthusiastically adopted by many teachers throughout the curriculum and in classrooms including 5 year old and 50 year olds alike. At the same time, the promise of composing process seems to have been undermined by two factors, at least: (1) the formalization of process itself, from a variegated and diverse, context-situated practice, to a stage-bound model suitable for (2) tests designed by a testing industry that has thrived over the last thirty years, an industry that too often substitutes a test of grammar for writing and that supports writing in testing, when they do, as an activity permitted in designated time chunks, typically no more than 35-minute chunks. The 1977 Britton et al model of writing education, with students increasingly writing for an audience of examiners has never been as true as it is today.

Enter digital technology and, especially Web 2.0, and suddenly, it seems, writers are *everywhere*–on facebook and in chat rooms and on bulletin boards and in text messages and on blogs responding to new reports and, indeed, reporting the news themselves as I-reporters. Such writing is what Deborah Brandt has called self-sponsored writing: a writing that belongs to the writer, not to an institution.

As imporant, seen historically this writing marks the beginning of a new era in literacy, one where composers become composers not through direct and formal instruction but rather through what we might call a social co-apprenticeship. Scholars of composition (eg, Beaufort) have discussed social apprenticeships, which are opportunities to learn to write authentic texts in informal contexts. In the case of the web, writers compose authentic texts in informal digital contexts, but there isn’t a hierarchy of apprentice-mentor but rather a level co–apprenticeship where communicative knowledge is freely exchanged. Does (all) this matter, and if so, how?
The ways that we write online differ from the ways we compose in print: for example, what I’m writing and publishing here, online and in public, is basically part of a draft of a talk I’m giving at NCTE in November, which talk will be reprinted in Research in the Teaching of English and the NCTE Council Chronicle. In other words, the old model of publishing a polished draft as the conclusion of a process still works for some purposes, and like others, I continue to use it. At the same time, this model of composing is in contention and circulation with the composing model in this blog, where my publishing of this text in public is part of an invention process. Does this matter?

The materials of composing today seem almost limitless–words and images; paper and links; animation and sound. It’s not clear, to me at least, how we choose among these materials, and what the differences in their effects might be. (Why did I choose the image of Britton’s findings? Why not use a screen shot of my facebok page? Or an audio file where I provide an oral annotation of this text?) Does this matter?

One way all these issues matter, I think, lies in how we think about composing, how we understand it, how we conceptualize and define and theorize it. And by we, I mean all of us: students and seniors, scholars and i-reporters. Together, we can create the new theory of writing we are already practicing, a theory that includes multiple spaces and materials and media; networking; and reflection.