Danielle Scorrano: Welcome Dr. Maryanne Wolf to the READ Podcast.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf: It's a pleasure to be here, Danielle, but especially to be a part of the Windward community. I have so many friends there, to be able to give something back to the Windward school community.
DS: I'm so happy you said that. I mean, for me, to be here sitting with you is an absolute honor. And I know that your history with the Windward school goes back over years, truly. We appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. I usually like to set the scene when I'm recording over zoom, especially over the past year. I wish that our READ listeners can just see you right now, just glowing in the California sun. We’re both on opposite coasts and we're actually having a tea party right now, which I would never think that I would have. Why don't you tell me where you are, what are you drinking right now? Set the scene for us.
MW: Okay. Well, the scene is that I'm looking out over a truly beautiful garden. It's a drought resistant part of the garden with agave plants- blue, green, gray, agave plants, and then cacti, and then all around the side of flowers that I planted. My New England desire for color and my California side is all together, but I will have to say, I am drinking tea. Since, Danielle, you said you were going to have your cup and I'm having a specialty from a special friend in Switzerland who actually, it’s a NilGiri tea. It's very hard to get, but I thought since this is a special occasion, I'll drink tea with you.
DS: I love that. And you know what? It's funny, Dr. Wolf, this is my mug I just showed you before we recorded. It says “Birds have wings, humans have books.” It is an absolute dream that I'm drinking my favorite mint tea from Harney and Sons, which is a New York brand in this mug. I brought it especially for you. I'm actually sitting in a WeWork right now in New York City, as things are slowly opening up. I had to make sure that I brought the mug. So speaking of two separate coasts, I remember meeting you in person at several times at the International Dyslexia Association conference. Now, we're sitting in the middle of the pandemic, still thinking about the last year of deep loss.
And you know, for me, I recognize the deep personal loss that I've had and our world has had. And I've also recognized the privilege that was sort of provided me with this time of deep insights, rapid transformation and opportunities that have presented, you know, opportunities to speak with you that has reinvigorated my sense of purpose. As you reflect over the past year, how have you been professionally and personally during the pandemic?
MW: Well, it's a really interesting question. I will say that my response is evolving after the first shock of realizing what our world was going to have to endure. I think there's an attitude Danielle, which you you've actually just said. We seek to find the positive, even in the most negative circumstances. As I said, it's an evolving response. I'm literally just finishing an abstract for a paper that I will be giving to the Vatican as part of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Social Science Meeting. And they asked me a similar question.
And what I said was that I actually think that people know about two of the crises. The first of course, being the crisis of a world with the pandemic and many of us know the second crisis, which involves the inequities that have been exposed in our educational system, in our states, in our country and around the world.
And so this second crisis, I think, has both a negative, extraordinarily negative aspect, but also a positive lining, which is that we are seeing it. And we are confronted with the need to do something about it. But there's a third crisis, which I wrote about just literally yesterday, last night for this paper. It's the crisis in the teaching profession that I don't think people realize what an extreme strain it has been on teachers. And I have been looking at these surveys that talk about teachers experiencing some of the highest stress ratings among professions, and then a very discomforting statistic in which one, third of our teachers are questioning whether they should remain in the profession after experiencing this last year.
And I really am thinking about those three crises and their impacts on students and teachers and society. So I'm looking at both the positive aspect of recognizing the realities. And I'm also looking at the great challenges this is exposed for, especially us who must pick up not only ourselves, but our students with us brush our knees off and get back to work and help each other stand by each other, lean on each other, but go forward.
DS: I like how you brought about that collective aspect of going forward together and truthfully the challenges that you cite are insurmountable., I did actually want to reiterate to our listeners that how cool it is that you were an elected member of 80 scientists around the world to work with the Vatican to advance these scientific, educational, and humanitarian efforts. The ones that you mentioned, I'm looking forward to reading the paper, are extremely critical as we move forward, post pandemic. And as we think about literacy, you have been a researcher that I think we all have looked to a leader in telling the story of reading and how that intersects social justice, how that intersects global literacy, how, what that should look like in an everyday classroom. Following you, you have this unmatched ability and skill to communicate this across worldwide audiences. I want to thank you for that first and I, and again, thank you for continuing to put forth this work, to push for change and to drive change. And I want to ask a little bit more about literacy, but let's take a little step back for the 0.5% of the world that don't know Dr. Marianne Wolf. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and how you became interested in studying reading, dyslexia, and literacy?
MW: Well, um, as you know, and I think some of my audience knows. This has been a very unusual journey for me. I always believed that I would be a professor of English, literature and German poetry, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. That's what I thought I was meant on this earth to be. But after I got a master's, I did undergrad, actually.
I was very, very fortunate to be in a program that was at St. Mary's College, a woman's school that was connected in beginning its first excursions into being a coed program with Notre Dame. So actually I'm one of the few women who went to both an all women's school and attended an all male school and it fueled my desire always to defend my gender in times in which, especially when I was in school, the female voice or the feminine voice was really something that had to be fought for. And I continue to think it must be fought for, but the beginnings of my desire, if you will, to speak to the world came because I was put in that very unusual place of being one woman in a class of a hundred males. And that was a, that's a piece of the journey that. That has a connection to those courses were about philosophy, literature, theology.
And it fused for me that the fact that when we study anything, it's the multidisciplinary of different forms of intelligence that can help us all move forward. So the very beautiful, almost Renaissance like education that I had in those schools prepared me, to do something after my master's in English, literature and to go into the Peace Corps. I just thought before I do my PhD, I'm going to go somewhere and do something for others. You know, I've been educating myself all this time. So what, how could I use that for others? So there was a peace Corps, like program. And they sent you to places, usually in Latin America, I was slated to go to a native American reservation in the Dakotas. And then the very last minute, literally the last minute they said there was no money for me to go there and they were sending me elsewhere with this group. Because the school had been lost in this remote region or, you know, everybody had fled for various reasons and it was rural Hawaii, which I still laugh that I still laugh at because I was always politically be motivated by wanting to do the right thing for as many people as possible.
And the idea that I was being sent to why he was a terrible disappointment, like how can I be sent to Hawaii instead of the cold Dakota? I'm going to earn no virtuous points for that. The opposite was true. There were so many needs and the children and the families, you know, there were probably, I always say 10 languages, but it's a metaphor for all the languages in my classroom.
I don't even remember how many there were, but it was really an exceptional place. Most of my children were from Filipino families who were basically indentured to the two plantations, the pineapple and the sugarcane. And I loved my children to this moment. I can remember Carol and Teresa, I can remember hearing the Filipino families.
I can remember so many things I can't remember last year, but I remember that year was such poignancy because I taught my best. I taught literature. I taught stories. We won the Hawaiian storytelling contest, but I couldn't teach a fair amount of the kids to read. If anyone had told me that I was a great whole language teacher, I wouldn't have known what they were talking about, but that's really what I was.
I was using stories to ignite the imagination and it was a wonderful thing for many of the children, but I literally failed a fair amount of the kids. And that was it. That was the beginning of a complete transformation of my academic life. I'd always had a more or less, almost a double major in psychology because I was always interested in that, but I was interested in so many things in it. Literature was always dominating it. The, when I had that experience, it was just, it was it.
I could no more go back to study real code and poetry. That was an impossible, it was an impossible direction. It was blocked by the reality of those children and what literacy meant. That's when I discovered what literacy means in terms of social justice, it is the platform for meeting or not meeting the potential of a human being.
And so I didn't know a darn thing about programs that would specialize in reading. And I just literally went and there were three that said reading lab of some sort. And I chose Harvard knowing so little, but it said Harvard Reading Lab. So I thought, surely I can't go wrong. The first day, Jean Shaw, who was one of the greatest reading researchers, I went in and told her how much I appreciated her work. And I told her, I especially love to work on early child language. And she, at the end of listening to me said, um, you're talking about the work of Courtney Caszden and not me.
The first day was really hard. That was a very rocky start, but by the second semester I realized all these people in psychology at that time who had just begun to be interested in neuroscience. That was like the second transformation from then on I realized I needed to study literacy from the standpoint of the brain. And so I began courses in linguistics through the med school with Norman Geschwind and that was the beginning, Danielle. It was the move from English literature in the study of the beauty of the word and the realization that there are so many people who will never not only have access to the beauty of the word. They will not be able to have a platform for reaching their potential. The third transformation was really about understanding how the brain can teach us what in the world we have to do to teach reading, which was what I had failed. To do first of all.
DS: As you're talking, I almost just got lost in your story. It was like storytime with Dr. Maryanne Wolf. I almost forgot I was sitting on the other end of the microphone. I'm like I have to ask a follow-up question. What I find so inspiring about you, you talk about transformation and for your career, your trajectory has transformed from teaching to research, to looking at the reading brain and dyslexia, to moving to social justice and global literacy, and now digital literacy and you just said it a few minutes ago, was that you have been at the forefront of identifying literacy as a fundamental right. So as we look at literacy and the reading brain, what do you think people often have difficulty conceptualizing about reading? What seems to be these main misconceptions and myths about the way we read?
MW: Wow, good question. Danielle, because I remember when I wrote my first book for the public Proust in the Squid: The story and science of the reading brain, I realized that most people simply take reading for granted. They have no conceptualization that this represents one of the most complex uses of the most cortical and sub-cortical regions in the brain. They don't have a clue. They just think it's something that comes naturally. So the first sentence of that book still is on the top of my mind when I'm approaching an audience, because I have to dispel that myth that reading is natural. And the first line is, we were never born to read. And that's what I have to help every audience who isn't involved in the study of reading understand this is a profoundly, almost miraculous achievement because the brain wasn't set up to do that. And therefore I have to almost break down the misconception that anybody can do it. And the study of dyslexia has helped me help others realize the complexities of reading are why some of us learn differently.
The second myth involves dyslexia itself. I'm always confronted with people who say, oh, we can't use the word in our district or in our state that we don't talk about dyslexia. And I'll say why. And then there will be those who say, well, because a lot of the people who are our leaders don't believe it really exists, or they'll say, well, if you can't define it, let's just call it a reading obstacle or reading challenge or all these nice little words. The reality is that the study of dyslexia helps reveal the complexity of reading itself. I look at dyslexia as a continuum of different possible areas of impediment weakness in development that are usually physiologically and genetically in place well before they ever are entering the kindergarten door. I need people to realize that the brain is beautiful. That brain was here before we ever as a species learned to read. So the second myth that I have to dispel is that dyslexia doesn't exist. Then the third part of it is to think that that means that that child or that individual not only has average to even superior intelligence, that brain was meant to be here.
And so I have to dispel a lot of different thoughts that people come to their schools whether parents, or I have to talk to teachers who never been actually exposed to the idea that the dyslexia brain was here and is an incredible part of the species’ evolution before reading was invented. That brain is necessary because it does things differently from linear types like me. As I tell many and audiences, the species would not exist if everybody's brain was like mine, we wouldn't get out of the Savannah. And I couldn't find my way, this isn't very linear. Luckily, someone has some creativity within it, but that creative brain, especially in many of our individuals with dyslexia, those abilities to think in different ways, to see patterns, to see outside the box, that's an unbelievable necessity for a species. And that brain teaches us how, not just how complex reading it is, but how it can break down in different ways. But learning that helps us realize, Oh, all those parts are necessary for all children to be exposed, to are taught. Too with, you know, with this complexity in mind. So the three myths are about what reading is, what dyslexia is and that dyslexia can the study, the research and the teaching. What we learned about teaching dyslexia has insights for everyone. So I'd call those the three myths.
DS: Again, every time you speak, I just get lost in the story. Anyways, some of the things that you said that were really impactful for me was first when I read Proust and the Squid, I was so taken away by just the poetic and scientific way that you talk and tell the story of the reading brain. And one of the specific things that you said that resonated with me is the power of language- what and how we communicate what dyslexia is and what it isn't. And I was thinking back to an article that our current Head of School, Jamie Williamson wrote about how we define dyslexia as a learning disability. It's so important to identify the dyslexic brain as having these beautiful creative aspects to it and strengths, and also recognizing the way that people with dyslexia need to be taught to read. Because, you know, when you look at the research in reading education and reading instruction, there is a research-based way to teach reading. When you talk to classroom teachers about reading education and reading instruction, what are those key elements that you're saying beyond just the myths that reading must be taught, that it's not something that's natural, that dyslexia exists and that there is a neurobiological basis of it? What do you say to a teacher that's teaching reading in the classroom the next day?
MW: One of the things that I've learned is that the way we are taught to teach reading makes a lasting imprint upon that person. Many of our teachers who do not have a background in the science of reading or the reading brain have the sense that to go in a different path from the way they're taught is being disloyal to wonderful teachers who taught them a particular method.
So, I have to dispel another myth that there is one and only one way to teach reading for everyone and this involves absolutely everyone. When we look at what the evidence shows us, we can say with great certainty that children who have difficulties learn best or learn better with principles that we would call the foundational decoding skills that help open up the alphabetic principle to that child and that practice the letter sound correspondence rules that are often so difficult for children and individuals with dyslexia. So that is a must. But what happens is that if if a teacher has been taught, what are often called whole language or balanced literacy approaches, they look at those decoding skills that alphabetic principle practice as something that's antithetical to how they were taught and that they feel disloyal.
And one of the things that I must impress upon all teachers, whatever ways that they were taught, you can expand your knowledge. And that's what teaching should be about is the expansion of even better ways of learning and how to teach different individuals. And so even though I am even called these wonderful names about the ability to teach the science of reading, you know, phrases like that, I always am talking about poetry too. I wrote an article for the Kappa called the Science and poetry of learning and teaching to read. This is an article I would like everyone to have because it's accessible to everyone and it's inclusive of everyone. People have to understand that we do have a science and that it is informed by the reading brain, but that is not excluding the work on stories and authentic literature and the love of words.
Science shows us that the more we know about those words, the better we read them, the faster we read them, and the more elaborative our understanding of them is. So when I talk about the science reading or the neuroscience of reading or the reading brain, I try to do it in such a way that no one feels excluded, but that we all have something to learn.
So in California, I think there's a group of teachers who are so dedicated, but who believed that the science reading excludes them because they see it as a single, almost a unidimensional emphasis on phonics. And they believe that the unidimensional view should be on stories and the induction of the alphabetic principle.
And then there are those in the balanced literacy group who believe that if you put a little phonics and a lot of stories together, that you will have the perfect balance combination. That, too, I have to say is not the best that we can do. And so my hope is that we literally use terms like comprehensive, systematic explicit teaching of all the component processes that are involved in reading. And that has an expanded version of foundational skills. And it has an absolute inclusion of the world of story and literature and vocabulary within it.
We who studied the reading brain, we know that all those areas are being activated, but we must teach those foundational skills build to their automatic levels so that we can add all of this. So we're not excluding, we're gradually including and incorporating, but we have to be automatic enough to become ever more elaborative with all this knowledge. It’s a complex story at the base because the reading brain is complex, but at another level, it just breaks down this polarization that has gone on for far too long among teachers, we must come together and realize that together we will be better than if we are polarized.
DS: I like the way that you said that. As you were speaking, I kept thinking of the word integration that has been on some recent podcasts. I was listening to Dr. Brene Brown talk about integration. She says integration in one way is to bring whole and not whole in the whole language, but whole in bringing everything together. When you talk about how we can build this love of reading and story and literature I see that you're bringing in the science of reading as a vehicle, a vehicle to building the love of language and this love of reading and literature. And that's where I see the integration piece of it.
I want to say, I wish that some of our READ listeners with these would see you as you're talking about explicit and systematic instruction. And what I loved about the way that you were talking about these terms is you're emphasizing that language matters and the way that we are teaching and view teaching through the science of reading through the reading brain, through the body of evidence, this is how we should be teaching our students to read so that they could love the literature as much as we do so that they could go back to birds have wings and humans have books as my mug says. So I appreciate you breaking down those elements and how we teach our children to read, because as you said, truthfully, every child with dyslexia needs this form of reading instruction and it benefits all students. I want to switch to social justice.
When you were talking about your background, one of the reasons why it hesitated to ask the question is because I could close my eyes and just see the story of Dr. Maryanne Wolf, moving from your experience in Hawaii in the Peace Corps to now the Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA. And as I see those two experiences and picture how your life has unfolded in terms of social justice. I want you to help me understand how you conceptualize the intersection between literacy and social justice.
MW: Well, I'm so glad that you're asking this question and I'm also so glad that you began our time together in this interview with kind of autobiography of the idea that reading is a basic human right. Because the autobiographical aspect is that I saw the effects of what being non-literal meant in a village who couldn't go outside the circumference of their very tiny world because they couldn't read and they desperately wanted their children to do so.
It was an experience that was not just about social justice. It was about human development in itself. And I recognized that teaching and that had always been a goal of mine, but I meant to teach poetry to graduate students. Instead, I saw that teaching begins with a child's first experience, or you never reached graduate school, or you never reach a community college, or you never reach any of the goals that those wonderful sacrificing parents of yours have for you.
The base of education is literacy. I do not short numeracy. I do not short all the other topics that go into the educated brain, but it began to be extremely clear that without literacy, nothing else can be built upon that platform of learning for the child. And so from then on till now, I am committed to using my knowledge to ensure that children of prisoners families, in places where there are no schools and there are no teachers. As you know, I did some of the work in Africa in this in places where there were no schools. I want to be sure that I put my little, tiny tin cup of knowledge into play under the great cascade of human efforts to bring human development to its next stage for so many children and individuals as possible.
That's for me, what social justice and literacy is all about- bringing everybody who has a little tin cup, and we have our store of knowledge. And let's when we put all those tin cups together, we have a gigantic waterfall of effort to help all children and individuals.
