There are three types of reading: eye reading, ear reading, and finger reading.

The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning

Thus we begin by moving the teaching of writing from the training of a specific skill set toward an interpersonal art form that flows from students and builds communities. Then, through the reimagining of teaching places into “learning spaces,” we craft “studios” where all the technologies of school – time, space, tools, pedagogies – liberate and inspire rather than deliver and test. Then, using those recrafted technologies, we allow communication learning to flow.

 Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools.

Types of Reading

There are three types of reading: eye reading, ear reading, and finger reading. A child with dyslexia will never eye-read as well as his peers, and that, I hope to reassure you, is fine. Yet all children need to be exposed to vocabulary and ideas to be successful in school. If your child was blind, providing text as audiobooks or Braille would allow her to read with her ears or with her fingers. No one would ever claim that a blind person was lazy or stupid for not reading text with her eyes. When I listen to audio, that’s ear reading. When I speed it up to four hundred words a minute, four times the pace of standard speech—a skill you can learn about in this book—I am leveling the ​playing field for me. It’s not what the mainstream conceives of as reading. But it’s ear reading. It’s learning. It’s literacy. I am introducing these terms to address an underlying bias in our schools: that eye reading is the only form of reading. You can help move the needle on this limited assumption by using the terms eye reading, ear reading, and finger reading yourself and explaining them to your child. We need to celebrate children’s love of ideas and quest for knowledge and give them permission to not like standard books at the same time! When we give kids opportunities to gather information and explore ideas in other ways, they will thrive. Eye reading is what children are taught in school, but it is no better than ear or finger reading in terms of information absorption or comprehension.

The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning

Focusing on eye reading overlooks the real goals of education, which are learning, independent thinking, and mastering the ability to make new connections in the world of ideas.

Eye reading is a very valuable skill, and given it is the default for most education, it has a built-in benefit that ear and finger reading do not, but that is a social choice we make. Just as being able to walk up stairs is useful because many buildings do not have ramps, eye reading is useful because it is the standard way into printed material. If we got rid of all stairs, then being in a wheelchair could be a benefit, e.g., allowing you to roll through a marathon is easier than running it. However, the key point is that none of these choices is inherently better, but we choose to make one more favored. The trick is then to learn how to avoid putting a moral judgment on a social choice.

The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning

A central theme in this book is that we must question what we are taught is the “normal” way to do things, and instead integrate multiple ways for our children to access information.

The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning

Reading Differences and Shame

Content note: shaming, r-word, self-harm, suicide, ableism

Reading disabilities often match in intensity the level of shame associated with incest.

We should be measured by what we can do, not by what we can’t.

Shame cuts off connection and thrives on hiding.

Dyslexia is a particularly powerful form of shame, and it involves a lot of vulnerability.

Vulnerability can be defined as true courage.

Shame is a very lonely moment.

Dyslexia is a perfect storm of shame.

1. Arrives at the time you are first being evaluated
2. Made harsher by lack of explanation. Fail without context.
3. Reinforced by peers and institutions

“Retard” is a bullet sent at a child when it gets said.

Guilt is feeling bad about something you did, something you can fix. Shame is feeling bad about who you are.

I knew I was going to be on a bad list. There was going to be a good list, and I was going to be on the bad list, maybe alone.

I was proud because I changed the narrative.

Negative scripts: blame, contempt, comparison

The shame of special education.

Dyslexia is like a bad cellphone connection to the page.

Leadership is changing what people think is possible, or changing what they think is appropriate.

Source: Choose strength not shame: Ben Foss at TEDxSonomaCounty – YouTube

Dyslexia is not a disease, it is an identity. An identity is not something one cures; it is the basis of community and is an element of self you aim to understand and embrace. My hope is that you and your child will learn to own dyslexia, to understand it, and ideally, to celebrate it.

This book— and your mission as a parent— is about moving the model for your child from dyslexia as disease to dyslexia as identity, an identity we can all be proud of.

Most schools and reading programs designed for remediation of dyslexia are based on the idea that dyslexia equals brokenness. Their aim is to transform the child into a person who can read without problems. But I’m here to tell you that’s just wrongheaded. I’ve learned that if you make your primary goal teaching your child to read or spell just like every other child, you’re going to decrease your child’s chances of achieving success. It’s like telling a person in a wheelchair that she needs to put in more time to learn how to walk.

The key to my happiness occurred when I stopped trying to change my brain, and started changing the context around me.

One dyslexic friend of mine described his shame as “slow-drip trauma.” He felt unworthy and “not normal” every day. As an adult, he was treated for post-traumatic stress syndrome that was caused by his experiences in school.

Ninety percent of my injuries happened when I was in school and before I was talking about my dyslexia publicly. Hiding who you are can translate into self-harm. When I talk with my peers in the dyslexia movement, a majority of them had a specific plan for suicide when they were teenagers. I regularly meet dyslexic kids who cut themselves or worse when they were young. I am fine today, but the hiding left scars, figurative and literal, for many of us.

My friend Steve Walker, a very successful dyslexic entrepreneur, tells me all the time that you could not pay him enough money to go back to any type of school setting. He even says that he would sooner kill himself than go back to school. Yet in the same breath he will also say that you could not give him enough money to take away his dyslexia, because it is a part of who he is. Many times when I was in school or taking a standardized test, I rejected an accommodation because I was embarrassed and ashamed: I did not want to stand out, or I was frustrated that it would take too much effort to get permission to have my exam read aloud to me.

The majority of teachers and administrators are well-intentioned and look for ways to help your child. However, they often miss the most important point, which is that the goal is not to fix your child— your child is not broken. The goal is, instead, to play to your child’s strengths, support his weaknesses, and give him access to information.

In this definition, dyslexia is characterized as a “disorder,” as opposed to a characteristic. The word disorder suggests that something is “wrong” or that the person is broken. However, disability can be defined only in a particular context, which is to say if there was no such thing as written text, there would be no disability related to reading.

Often people discuss dyslexia in terms of it having been diagnosed, but that word reinforces the notion that dyslexia is a disease, a scourge, an imperfection, and that someday we can find a cure. As I said in the introduction, there will be no cure because there is no disease! Dyslexia is a characteristic, like being male or female, or from a certain state, or a graduate of a certain university. There’s nothing less than perfect inherent in any of those descriptions, is there? You can start changing this practice in your own house today, replacing the phrase “diagnosed with dyslexia” with “identified with dyslexia.”

Source: Foss, Ben (2013-08-27). The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Reading and Technology

If you are a dyslexic person or the parent of a dyslexic child, I recommend that you allow technology to become your new best friend.

The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning

For me, reading a book in the traditional way is like listening to a bad cell phone connection, but speech technology is like a landline: the transmission of information is clear and crisp.

The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning

Let’s augment everybody, let’s leave no mind behind.

The Future of Text 

Disabled ways of languaging are primarily about modality.

Crip linguistics frames language as a form of care work where we work collectively to provide access and co-construct meaning.

PsyArXiv Preprints | Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: Imaging a Crip Linguistics

People use languages in different ways. Some people use language to help find other people like them. Many people use language in specific ways because of how their body and mind work. Sometimes a person’s environment and material conditions forces them to use language in a certain way. However, when someone languages outside of what people think is normal, others can think that they are bad with language or are not as smart or are broken. We are trying to point out that no one is actually ‘bad with language.’ Our goal with this paper is to help people understand that no language is bad. It is okay to want to change your own language use if it will make you feel better. But no one should make you feel bad about your language. We need a bigger and more flexible understanding of what language is and what it communicates about a bodymind’s capacity.

PsyArXiv Preprints | Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: Imaging a Crip Linguistics

We are trying to point out that no one is actually ‘bad with language.’ Our goal with this paper is to help people understand that no language is bad.

PsyArXiv Preprints | Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: Imaging a Crip Linguistics

On the Problems of “Science of Reading”

“Science of Reading” particularly and #researchEd and bro rationalism more generally, remind us of this from Alfie Kohn.

The underpinnings of that ideology include: a focus only on observable behaviors that can be quantified, a reduction of wholes to parts, the assumption that everything people do can be explained as a quest for reinforcement, and the creation of methods for selectively reinforcing whichever behaviors are preferred by the person with the power. Behaviorists ignore, or actively dismiss, subjective experience – the perceptions, needs, values, and complex motives of the human beings who engage in behaviors.

Autism and Behaviorism – Alfie Kohn

The “Science of Reading” is not so scientific and not compatible with neurodiversity. Like behaviorism, it measures the surface, badly. It also steals the credibility of science to rationalize prior bigotries.

Behind SoR is a “who’s who” of behaviorism and traditional, “back to basics”, ed.

They all want pigeons.

According to Skinner, when we fail to properly correct behavior (facilitated by and through machines), we are at risk of “losing our pigeons.” But I’d contend that with this unexamined behaviorist bent of (ed-)tech, we actually find ourselves at risk of losing our humanity.

The Pigeons of Education Technology

On the problems with “Science of Reading”:

As a result, journalism frequently bestows unquestioned status to systematic phonics instruction while emphasizing other aspects of literacy learning far less. This instructional approach has come to be known in the popular press by the moniker “the science of reading,” even though actual research-based science of reading is far more nuanced and expansive. Furthermore, journalists often dismiss another approach to teaching called balanced literacy, an orientation supported by 59% of reading researchers that advocates for a robust range of literacy learning opportunities that include phonics, comprehension, writing, and other forms of literacy development in contexts that motivate young literacy learners.

The Science of Reading and the Media: How Do Current Reporting Patterns Cause Damage? – Literacy Research Association

We argue that reductive and singular models of reading fail to honor the cultures, experiences, and diversity of children. This confluence of research findings reveals an unequivocal need for caution as states, universities, schools, and teachers adopt assumedly universal and narrow approaches to teaching reading.

While science of reading advocates claim to be research-based, decades of reading scholarship have recognized reading as complex, multidimensional, and mediated by social and cultural practices.

Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading – Compton‐Lilly – The Reading Teacher – Wiley Online Library

• If the science of reading advocates only phonics instruction for all children, how can it address the various reading challenges faced by children?
• If NAEP scores have been largely unchanged for the past 30 years, why are science of reading advocates warning of a reading crisis?
• If decades of empirical research conducted by the world’s most accomplished reading scholars have increasingly documented the complexity of reading, why would schools, districts, and states adopt approaches that narrowly focus on phonics?
• If reading processes are distributed across neural networks in the brain, how can phonics be the singular and universal instructional approach for teaching children to read?
• If observations of young readers reveal that different kids attend differently to various aspects of text (e.g., letters/sounds, meaning, story elements, and language patterns), how could a primary emphasis on phonics be right for all readers?

Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading – Compton‐Lilly – The Reading Teacher – Wiley Online Library

We do not advocate for a particular approach to teaching reading; instead, we center children, arguing that HOW you teach reading MUST be determined by WHO you are teaching. Anything else is flawed. Reading is a “complex, multidimensional cognitive process situated in and mediated by social and cultural practices” (Moje, 2018, p. 2), and “teaching depends on knowing what students know and can do and then determining what they need” (p. 3). We base this claim on a confluence of evidence that presents reading as complex, involving multiple sources of information that are distributed across multiple neurological systems.

Complexities related to the teaching of reading lead to different children learning to read in different ways. Some like Tysha, quickly learn letter sounds. Other children are excited about stories and attracted to pictures; they might need particular assistance in learning how letters and words work. Some children read with stunning accuracy but can tell you little about what they read. All these readers need excellent, informed, and resourceful teachers.

Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading – Compton‐Lilly – The Reading Teacher – Wiley Online Library

The Science of Learning flattens the complexity of both learning and the brain, misplacing outsized importance on a limited view of “cognitive science” in its relationship to schooling. It’s also important for educators to understand where the evidence in “evidence-based education”, as “the science of learning” was known in a previous life, comes from and who it leaves out when we demand its faithful implementation in schools.

According to science, it’s actually impossible to understand what happens in a learner’s brain in any given moment.

There is No Such Thing As “The Science of Learning” | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth

The Science of Learning is misleading when it refers exclusively to cognitive science, memory management, and the brain, because it ignores all the unknowable and ineffable components of what happens inside a student’s brain. It positions The Science to be thoroughly researched, but it also doesn’t acknowledge a huge body of work that proves cognitive science is significantly more complex than they have portrayed it. 

Research increasingly recognizes that, as medical researchers Peter Stilwel and Katharine Harmon write, “Cognition is not simply a brain event.”(*) Drawing from their intuitive 5E model, we can better understand learning as a process of sense-making about ourselves in relation to the world that is:

Embodied – sense-making shaped by being in a body‍
Embedded – bodies exist within a context in the world
Enactive – active agents in interactions with the world
Emotive – sense-making always happens in an emotional context
Extended – sense-making relies on non-biological tools and technologies

There is No Such Thing As “The Science of Learning” | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth

But outside these important areas of agreement, we are concerned that the “science of reading” advocacy has been grounded in some very troubling patterns:10

• Failing to place the current concern for reading in a historical context.11
• Overemphasizing recent test scores and outlier data instead of longitudinal data withgreater context (for example, NAEP).12
• Misrepresenting the “science of reading” as settled science that purportedly prescribes systematic intensive phonics for all students.13
• Overstating and misrepresenting the findings of the National Reading Panel report of 2000, without acknowledging credible challenges to those findings.14
• Focusing blame on K-12 teachers and teacher education without credible evidence or acknowledgement of challenging teaching and learning conditions and the impact of test-based accountability policies on practice and outcomes.15
• Celebrating outlier examples of policy success (in particular, the Mississippi 2019 NAEP data16) without context or high-quality research evidence for those claims.17It’s time for the media and political distortions to end, and for the literacy community and policymakers to fully support the literacy needs of all children. Much of the legislation be- ginning to emerge is harmful, especially to students living inequitable lives and attending underfunded, inequitable schools.

Policy Statement on the “Science of Reading”, National Education Policy Center and Education Deans for Justice and Equity

As long as scholars, policymakers, and practitioners treat the science of reading as primarily about assessed reading proficiency, these other aspects of reading instruction are relegated to the periphery, if not ignored entirely.

We propose that a better central question for research, policy, and practice is, How can reading instruction best help students develop and flourish as literate beings in the ways that matter most? To be sure, the question, What works? remains part of this reimagined science of reading, but a bolder and broader vision is needed.”

What Matters Most? Toward a Robust and Socially Just Science of Reading – Aukerman – 2021 – Reading Research Quarterly – Wiley Online Library

We join prominent scholarly voices who have sounded the alarm over the trend to narrowly focus the science of reading on decoding (e.g., National Education Policy Center & Education Deans for Justice and Equity, 2020). Highlighting the “goal of moving the needle on students’ reading comprehension achievement” (Pearson et al., 2020, p. 247; see also Goldenberg, 2020) as some scholars have done may succeed in somewhat broadening the conversation, but a solid foundation for a robust and socially just science of reading requires more than even a decoding plus comprehension proficiency formula can provide. Here, we present the framework for a more expansive vision.

What Matters Most? Toward a Robust and Socially Just Science of Reading – Aukerman – 2021 – Reading Research Quarterly – Wiley Online Library

Further Reading