DS: The Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice is a new center. Correct? When did it open?
MW: Well, It's like, it only opened a year ago, but it was really two years. We've lost a full year with COVID. It’s a small group of us.
I have wonderful people. I'm working with Laura Reinhardt, Dr. Rebecca Gottlieb, and group of graduate and undergraduate students. But our tiny group is connected to people all over the country, whether it's The Windward School or the Cox campus and Atlanta Speech School, whether it's organizations like IDA or Canadian children's literacy or our partners in crime, we're working with the California State University or schools of education on a wonderful bill that we helped pass in which we're expanding how our teachers are learning in our schools of education between California State University and UCLA, and then we're working with our UCLA and Berkeley partners and Hastings law partners on literacy in prisons and changing juvenile delinquency laws.
Our tiny little center is really about a nexus of connections. How can we connect people to each other who are doing great things and how can, and this is the Margaret Mead. You know, one individual or three individuals or 10 individuals or a hundred individuals. We are touching all these lives. And the beauty of getting older, Danielle for me has been, I know so many people!
I just think of when I think of the people I know and have known here and there occasionally. I will tell someone who asked me, where can I take my child? Well, depending on where they are, it will be The Windward School or that school. When I just even think of New England and all the people like Ben powers, there's so many wonderful people and it's connecting them that the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse learners and Social Justice is about.
Then it's connecting us to the world too. As you know, part of my work was to help begin something called Curious Learning, a global literacy initiative. My colleagues in Boston are totally in charge of that. I am only an advisor now, but I help co-created at a moment in time when it was so clear to me that our knowledge was ready to be taken into places where otherwise the kids could never become literate. And we began. My colleague, Stephanie Gottwald and Tinsley Galyean are spearheading that around the world using actually in preparatory for another part of our talk together.
They're using a digital platform to take literacy and precursors of early literacy to, apps to children who have no schools, no teachers, as in South Africa. We'll never forget a hundred kids in a classroom.
DS: Wow.
MW: That was something, But, it's all connected. Danielle. This is the thing. When you work in literacy, you are about connecting people.
DS: You talk a lot about connections and you spoke a lot about different issues that you're working on currently related to social justice. I like how you segued into Curious Learning and that's with global literacy. When I had looked into your website and on Curious Learning as well, I found a statistic that was absolutely startling. So I want to read it out loud on the podcast so that everyone can hear it. And of course, if you want to learn more information to our READers, you can certainly go to Dr. Maryanne Wolf's website, as well as Curious Learning, but your website sites that the UN where they estimate that 800 million people around the world are illiterate. If we could decrease the number by 170 million, then we could remove 12% of the world's poverty, 12%. Those numbers are astounding because it's almost unfathomable to actually conceptualize a number of people that lack access to reading. And you talked about the digital platform. So I want to know more, what is this intersection between global literacy, digital reading and social justice?
MW: So Curious Learning began really almost 10 years ago with the collaboration with people at the MIT media lab and Cynthia Brazil and others All of them were looking at whether or not in places where there were no schools we could take something like an iPad or a digital device of some sort that was very sturdy and there had been an experiment and an initiative. I don't want to get into the weeds of the history, but there had been something of of a failed experiment or a mixed experiment years before. And those tablets were not successful, and they were not successful because the children didn't know how to read.
So he and Cynthia Brazil came to me and said, what could we do to change those tablets? Could we take a tablet that was much better? And that was aimed to teach children to read. Could we do that and show that we can make a difference? Well, then my colleague, Stephanie got involved, and Tinsley Galyeon came on board and I was sent actually to test children in Ethiopia and places in really remote villages. And we were to see whether the kids could actually learn on these digital devices and they could, they could learn up to a certain point. And so that was the beginning of the idea. That a digital device in whatever native language, the first language the child has, could help them learn how to read.
And so Stephanie Gottwald in particular, who is one of my later PhD students helped create an app called Feed the Monster. And now I think it's translated well over 45 languages. Well over 45 and the statistic you had actually was an older one from Curious Learning. When I came to California, I I'm no longer involved in the daily work of Curious Learning that I'm will always be a cheerleader and on an advisory board because they are showing that in connection with local organizations and it has to always have that connection. We can give children an opportunity to learn the precursors and the first elements of learning to read. And then the hope is that that will be the preparation for learning more and more. And I think here is learning is really deeply involved in, and working with the World Bank, they're working with the UN on how we can take these kinds of digital experiences and help those children who do not have those opportunities.
From my standpoint, I have to balance the fact that I am both an advocate of digital technology and a critic. It's a very unusual stance to have, but it is like everything else. It is dependent on the circumstances of the child and the environment, what you do. I believe that Curious Learning has shown how important educational technology can be used correctly in circumstances where it's most needed.
DS: That's a good point. And to clarify, when we're talking about providing the global literacy, particularly with Curious Learning, this digital platform is used to provide access to children who don't have the access to a high quality teacher education or a school, correct?
MW: None or very little. And yet I know that they are interested in it's used as a compliment in schools, preschools and schools. So it has gone beyond its original intent. It both includes that and there’s always going to be the emphasis is on the poor and the disenfranchised. That’s always that's going to be that emphasis, but how it can compliment what goes on in the classroom is also part of the evolving mission of Curious Learning.
DS: I like what you said, that you're both an advocate and a critic of digital reading. And I think we could probably go on for another full hour episode on digital reading alone, as I've been following a lot of your work recently, particular your books and, and the talks that you've been giving. When you say you're an advocate and a critic, what are those opportunities and challenges to digital reading as we have evolved based on this digital revolution?
MW: Right. Well, I think that it is never been more transparently obvious to people that teaching requires a human interaction. It is insufficient to just give digital platforms for learning for our children and the children who miss not only the interaction with their fellow students, they miss their teachers.
When it is working well, and of course there are places and times when it doesn't, but there's nothing more beautiful than the interaction of one human with another, that the beauty of being a true teacher is such an exceptional gift. I think it's now becoming so much clearer to people how important teachers are.
It anything, I would wish the experience of COVID could help us give more recognition to the profession.
I'm not neglecting the real issue here for me, which is the fact that different mediums have advantage and disadvantage to different cognitive linguistic and affective processes. There's been a lot of research now, even before COVID that shows us that the affordances, the characteristics of the digital medium are actually not good for learning to focus attention and learning how to consolidate in memory, what that information that's coming into that child's brain. We have to make these distinctions between what is information that is skimmed, or what is shallowly processed and what is information that gets the full part of cognitive linguistic and affective processes that what I call the deep reading processes involved. My colleague at UCLA, Patricia Greenfield says rightly that there are costs and there are promises made by different mediums and that the digital medium does this extraordinary job of helping us disseminate information, vast amounts of information that we absolutely need in the 21st century, but that the cost, and this is more where I come in the cost is into the time we need to allocate to the deep reading processes.
I mean, the act of making an analogy between our background knowledge and the content of the text that begins the process. I don't even want to use the word begin because it is so highly interactive and fast in the automatic reading brain. We're making this analogy between what we already know and what is different in the text and how, how we make sense of that. What are the inductive processes we use? What are the deductive processes we use? And then stepping outside the cognitive, are we able to take on the perspective of that author or if it's fiction take on the thoughts and feelings of those other characters. This requires what the theologians term call passing over perspective, which increases the development of empathy within that person.
So we're adding all these cognitive processes, we're adding these other impacted processes. And we're, if we're lucky, we have enough milliseconds to give to critical analysis, which is the sum of all of those processes. Critical analysis allows us to discern the truth now or to refute it. So that's where we're either susceptible to fake news or we're able to discern the difference between what is fake and what is real, what is true? What is not true? Well, the digital device, the digital medium advantages, the quick processing of a lot of information, but it disadvantages giving time allocating milliseconds to the more time consuming, deep reading processes. So on the one hand we who have to consume and are bombarded by all this information, we have to be able to shallowly process, but if it's the developing brain that isn't making the decision, what is the purpose of this reading? Is it something like my email and I'll do my little skim or is it something that I really need to concentrate on? Or is it something that I want to understand the feelings of thoughts of other or the contract, or is it a referendum or is it an assignment that requires my real deep processing?
Well, we know from the research that the majority of all of us are now skimmers. Skimmers are not going to get not only pieces of information, they won't have the time to consolidate it at the same level in memory. So the the digital device is extremely important. Look, Danielle, we couldn't have this conversation without it.
DS: Absolutely.
MW: There’s no binary here. There's no binary, but we have to know that we are not reading at the same level. Most of the time when we are skimming, we are neglecting, and in some cases, absolutely omitting, not just neglecting we're omitting pieces of knowledge that would help us comprehend at a deeper level the content.
And then there's the whole apperception of beauty. Now all of that, all of that, is threatened by the screen reading. But there's something else as much as I emphasize critical analysis and empathy, I don't want to forget saying that, that was part of the why I use Proust in my first book- There's an insight that Proust had into reading in what she said at the heart of it. The reader goes beyond the wisdom of the author to discover their own well, that really doesn't happen every day. That happens when we are reading at a truly immersive, the deepest level is the acme of reading. And that's when we have whether we call it the contemplative or reflective function, we, we are at a place where we are. We’ve processed all this information. We have felt what the author felt or what the characters felt. We have inferred the truth or the lack of it. And then that leads us to a place. If we're very lucky in which we leap into our own thoughts, that's the contemplative function. That's the generative function where insight is possible.
Well, my worry is that the more we become universal skimmers, the less likely we will use that contemplative function that's available to us in reading and what a loss to a life, to a society. If we become these narrowly processing, we process a lot, but we miss beauty. And we miss our own insights.
DS: Those are really interesting points. And as you were talking, I think we could continue to delve deeper into digital literacy. I want to pull back a little bit out of again. I think I'm just going to ask if you'd come on another episode, just to talk more about this and I think you will, but I'd have to say this is the best tea time that I've ever had in terms of really delving into these issues.
And before we start going further down with digital reading, I wanted to circle us back to what we were talking about in this episode as a whole and digital reading is definitely one major topic. We’ve also talked about your passion for social justice and literacy. And I wanted to end this episode by asking you a few rapid, but not so rapid fire questions from colleagues.
Now, just to give you a little insight. Last week, I was so excited to speak with you that I may have texted 10 of my closest friends at Windward asking for their thoughts. One of the questions that we had for you was, as you're thinking about your work and your career and moving forward, you've talked a lot about your work in policy. I was wondering if there's one area in education that you'd like to change and actually we'll spice it up a little bit. If you could create a policy platform that promotes social justice and equity through literacy, what would it be and where would you start? And in fact, how would you ensure that it reaches the hands of classroom teachers and ultimately students?
MW: So I've thought about this and it's not a quick answer. You might have a quick question, but it's not a quick answer. I'll say that it has several essential components. One is the zero to five campaign where all parents around the country, from the delivery room or even their prenatal classes, would include an emphasis on three things that are necessary for the development of language and reading. Every opportunity, but especially every night, a parent reads to the child, a parent every day talks and elaborates language and uses music whenever possible. There's a great book. That's going to come out from MIT Press called Of Sound Mind by Nina Kraus and that would be a book that everybody should read. There's so many different things that people should read, but that's one of them. I would want that campaign on zero to five, so all parents know, read, talk, and sing.
The second thing I want is a campaign, and we're trying to do that in California, is for early screening. Pediatricians at between three and five actually have a questionnaire, but the pediatricians would have their role. Pediatricians who work in Reach Out and Read would be giving well visit books all throughout this period to parents, so they're reinforcing this read, talk, and sing. And then at five, every single child would have, some form of a screener in which we look at areas of strengths and weaknesses that are involved in reading. And we actually have a grant with the Office of Special Education to work on that right now. The teachers would be trained to understand what the results of those screeners are for first grade teaching whether it's a child who's at risk for dyslexia or a child, who's had language impoverishment in their background, and we need to work on that. The screening would give information to help that first grade teacher from the start, change how they teach reading, not as a one size fits all, but as a more targeted set of ways of teaching our, our children.
The next part would be that all teachers from K to 12 to get a course on the beauty and the science, the poetry of reading, how it is learned by the brain and how it is taught in different ways across that K to 12. And they would be also taught about neurodiverse learners so that they are able as the eighth grade teacher or his 11th grade teacher says, “Oh my gosh, we've got to really stop everything and give this individual, this kind of work on these skills that went missing.” For some many of our older readers, they cannot be neglected, and I would also involve our police department. This might be the surprise. I want every police department to be able to say these juveniles were committing these misdemeanors are even crimes, but they have serious issues. They never learned. And if you look at the prison statistics, you see how many of our, of our individuals, especially in JD have reading challenges, learning challenges. They were dropouts really in fourth grade. We can never let that happen.
So our police departments have to be involved. That's why we're working with the Haskins wall and UCSFs people like Mary Lou, Timothy and others on these kinds of issues. I know Yale has a Yale prison project. I just met Zelda, a woman who started this. We cannot neglect a single child or youth in this campaign.
DS: Oh my gosh. Again, am lost in just the beautiful, poetic words and your impact, the inspiration that you're telling me about. I mean it's truly inspiring to learn about all the work that you are doing in truly just at the intersection of so many different types of fields and industries. I'm fully invested in this policy platform. I was vigorously taking notes and listening at the same time. To add a little bit to that question, I have one more question for you. What about any of those policy platforms perhaps make it more important because of COVID? Is there anything you'd like to add as we particularly moved in a post pandemic world?
I know you're working with a number of groups. I hear your name regularly pop up when we talk about the Haskins Global Literacy Hub. Is there any work that you're particularly invested in as we move to hopefully what we call a new normal or in this post pandemic world?
MW: Well, I I'm so glad you said that about Haskins Global Literacy because they are a group of reading scholars and heads of schools. There are so many wonderful people involved in that like Maureen Lovett, Peggy McCardell, and Ben powers. I mean, there's just so many people and it's just a wonderful group. What they are doing and hoping to be of some contribution to it. What that's about is that parents and educators, during this time can go online and see the developmental milestones and see digital activities that are free and in large part evidence-based that they can use. Middle schoolers and these older readers are often neglected. Well, we have activities like the word builder that Sue Sears and her group at California State University at Northridge have done through the Office of Special Education. All these activities are there. And I would really like people to know about that. I want them to know about organizations, like Bring Me a Book and Bring Me a Book Hong Kong. This group from Judy Koch is connected to the rotary organizations so that they are distributing books in different ways to kids who are living in environments where they don't have books and they have a little copy and they can choose books.
And that reminds me of the work of Lea Ann Borders, who is working on an app called Bookalicious, in which we're trying to get kids to have choice that inspires the love of reading. And so what they're doing is having a little avatar, but it helps understand what the child select. I don't want to use words like Lexile level, but what was their level of reading was their age and what are they interested in. And here is a group of books that you would like. Bookalicious helps promote a love of reading by giving them choice at their level, and it's connected to libraries is connected to publishers. Bookalicious is one and Rally Readers is another one, another app that's helping children, especially fourth grade on who have these problems and fluency. And this is one of these amazing apps. Again, I'm saying digital books, but not excluding anything in our armamentarium of resources that we want everybody to know about. But anyway, Rally Reader is one of the ones that I'm particularly interested in following, because fluency, as some of your audience knows is of extreme importance to me, because think back to the reading brain, it has to be automatic enough to add these deep reading skills. Th more we can work to ensure that children are becoming fluent by fourth grade, the less I have to work with the police department on the kids who really were the dropouts in fourth grade, because they were never fluent by then. So there's so many issues that, Danielle, that are all connected.
I want to thank everybody I mentioned. I leave too many people out. I just thought of the Cox campus and Comer Yates Yates and Renne Boyton Jarrett, who are working on the effects of adversity, diversity, and trauma on learning. There's so many amazing people in this world, working on policy, as you're calling it for policy, and for me, is what you do with what, you know.
DS: Oh, I love that. Yeah. And I appreciate you sharing all those resources and telling us about all the people that are doing this work. And again, it brings me back to the thought of integration. How do we integrate the expertise, the passion, the policy in the collective? Ok, the final question, closing up tea time with Dr. Maryanne Wolf. We have classroom teachers that regularly listen to READ, and if they were to join our tea time to grabbing their favorite cup of tea- Well, this is a two-part question, but speaking to those teachers, what would you tell teachers to do in their classroom tomorrow? And what about education gives you hope? Those are our final tea time questions.
MW: What I would tell the teacher tomorrow is, show off your love of reading and literature and take a pause or whatever time of the day and just stop and say, we're not going to do one thing this moment, but you're going to listen to a story that I'm going to read to you. And so I want them to do that. And then seeing that I would open it up to what are the words in there? How can, how can we learn from those words? And so I would use love as the mode of giving the science of reading to our children.
So now I'm going to end the whole thing with a quote from my favorite novelists. I'm stopping and I'm reading to you. I have two favorite novelists. One is Gish Jen, who wrote the books, The Resisters, World and Town and Mona in the Promiseland. She is an amazing, wonderful, wonderful novelist. But my other favorite is a more philosophically oriented one. Gish really talks about social justice. The Resisters is about social justice. It's amazing. Marilynne Robinson is my favorite contemplative novelist and she wrote something that was more philosophical. She writes works like Gilead. She did Housekeeping years ago, Gilliad, Home, Lila, and most recently Jack, but she also wrote a set of essays called the Giveness of Things.
And in the middle of one of those essays, she wrote something that is just right for today. “The greatest test ever made of human wisdom and decency might very well come to this. We must teach and learn broadly and seriously.”
DS: Oh, I am so glad that you ended with that. Wow. Wow. Dr. Wolf. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you for just providing the wisdom, the insights, the stories, the inspiration, bringing the world of reading and social justice and literacy and love and integration, everything, literature to us, It has been truly a gift to talk to you and to drink tea with you. I think it's just been one of my dreams. I appreciate you taking the time to be here.
MW: Well, Danielle, I will never forget receiving, I believe the first award for research by Windward years ago with Hugh Jackman and his beautiful wife on the stage that day. And will remember that I wrote three letters to the Windward community, and one of them was to you, Hugh Jackman. I wrote up to him because of his work on dyslexia with his wife in Australia. I want to just almost repeat the same thing. I am grateful to all of you for all the work you do every day, you are putting your tin cup of knowledge up. And together we put those tin cups up and we are going to change the world.
That's my hope.
DS: I love it. Thank you again. And we look forward to seeing all your work and following you and being inspired by you. So that is it.
