Reflections on Proust & The Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain: GUEST POST by Kelsey Dadey, Lead Instructor @ Redwood DAY School
Reading is an amazing journey full of growth, adaptation, and mistakes. Since reading is a cultural invention, it's important for us educators to remember that the brain is not naturally wired to read! Rather, the development of literacy (both historically and in each child) requires constant neuronal pathway formation through activation of all areas of the brain, repeated practice, quality exposure, and room to learn from failure.
Our distant ancestors used etchings in clay to communicate earliest forms of trade, as their brains actively rewired and built new connections between visual, memory, and auditory to understand those abstract records. Millenniums later, we are graced with an amazing capacity to communicate, question, wonder, and dream through literacy. Yet, our brains run the same rigorous gauntlet to form neuronal pathways that help us listen to stories, learn the structures of oral language, build phonemic awareness, decode new words, connect visual and tactile regions to write and manipulate texts, and eventually think deeply about what we read. Ultimately, the goal of building all of these skills is to "buy time" to think, infer, draw connections, and pose big questions. It's an incredible process, but one that inevitably has its flaws.
Literacy can be a door to new worlds and opportunities, but we also know that "the rich become richer and the poor become poorer" in the areas of reading, writing, and language. Children whose families engage them in conversations, use rich vocabularies, and take them on adventures through bedtime stories are significantly empowered with literacy from an early age. In contrast, many families are not able to access literature, may not have time to read or tell stories, or are faced with other challenges. Children who have less access to literacy at a young age are disproportionately behind their more fortunate peers.
Add to all of this the fact that some brains do not form the same way, and that makes teaching reading a colossal task. The dyslexic brain, as we know, is significantly different from the neurotypical brain, although there are still many mysteries about dyslexia yet to be solved. While people with dyslexia have astounding strengths in spatial thinking, pattern detection, narrative thinking, and dynamic reasoning, they need more time, practice, and explicit instruction to build neuronal pathways and support phonology, rapid naming, and/or comprehension. Programs that provide multisensory approaches to building phonological routines are vital to the success of readers with dyslexia. It's incredible to think that, "Despite the fact that it took our ancestors about 2,000 years to develop an alphabetic code, children are regularly expected to crack this code in about 2,000 days" (p. 222). What an amazing responsibility we have as educators, to help build pathways in the brain, to build inquirers in young minds, and to support children emotionally through this process!
The Story and Science of the Reading Brain is as thrilling an adventure as the stories we tell our students. Every reader is a character in this story, and has a mountain to climb as a developing reader. There will be triumphs, celebrations, moments of failure, and points where it feels impossible. But, with excellent instruction, literacy-rich lives, and dedicated teachers like ourselves, our readers can get that happy ending!