By Emily Urquhart
Last week, I encouraged my daughter, Sadie, 7, to cheat at school.
At least she saw it that way.
I’d suggested that during independent reading period she might occasionally listen to an audiobook rather than sight read.
Sadie has low vision but is not a braille reader, so she uses devices like a dome magnifier, an iPad, or a closed-circuit television (CCTV) to read regular-sized print. Sometimes, if the font is oversized (and no, large-print won’t cut it) she can hold a book inches from her face and make out the letters. Digesting her schoolwork aurally can provide a much needed break from this constant visual work-out. Besides, reading is reading, right?
Not according to everyone. My daughter isn’t the first person to suggest that listening is cheating. Adults say this all the time, incorrectly understanding listening to be a passive activity and by proxy suggesting audiobook fans are doing less “work” to achieve the same goal as sight readers.
First, I’d argue that reading is pleasure, enlightenment and access, not work. Second, as a folklorist, I know that stories were oral before they were written. We’ve been literate for 6,000 years, which is a long time, but only a fraction of our evolutionary history. The act of reading partly relies on brain circuits that originally evolved about 150,000 years ago to process language. So sight-reading is actually piggybacking on the pathways used for oral comprehension. This makes sense when you consider that humans have been telling stories since time immemorial, but the novel wasn’t popularized until around the 18th century.
What I wanted to know was how the sight-reading purists had infiltrated my daughter’s belief system when audiobooks and reading-out-loud have been an integral part of our life since before she could speak. My hunch is that it was an inadvertent side-effect of learning in a sighted classroom.
My daughter's sight-reading education is based on a rewards system, meaning that when she reaches a milestone (i.e. 50 books read) she can choose a prize. She does not receive rewards for audiobooks. This has set her up to value sight-reading over audio-reading. It’s also shaping her reading self-concept as she ranks herself against her sighted peers, despite working double-time to view the words in their home reading textbooks. All children compare their reading achievements and kids with disabilities are not immune to this practice.
This means that my daughter sees herself as an average reader despite the fact that she has listened to the entire Harry Potter series five times; that her favourite book is L.M. Montgomery’s emotionally mature, The Story Girl, and that last weekend she listened to Madeleine L’Engle’s, A Wrinkle in Time, on Saturday and on Sunday began listening to Mary Pope Osborne’s kid-friendly interpretation of The Odyssey—arguably the best way to digest this 3,000-year-old oral epic.
I’m proud of these achievements. But I worried. Could Sadie be forming an early reliance on audio when print will also be part of her education experience? I posed this question to University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham, author of Raising Kids who Read: What parents and teachers can do.
First, Willingham explained that there are two components of reading—decoding and comprehension. As my daughter memorizes letters, words and sounds and pairs them together to form sentences, she is decoding. What she brings to the table is her existing knowledge of the world—from the narrative flow of a story to the basics of science, math, history, literature and culture. And this feeds comprehension.
“When it comes to comprehension, for most adults, reading and listening are on par,” Willingham said. But, he pointed out, at my daughter’s stage, reading and listening are serving different functions. Listening to audiobooks helps build knowledge, which is integral to reading comprehension, while the visual act of decoding is a practiced way of becoming proficient at sight reading.
Back when Sadie began the process of learning to read, I asked her vision teacher what would come first for my daughter—reading or mastering her arsenal of vision tools. She’d let the question hover in the air for a moment so that I could find my own answer.
We were sitting together at a child-sized table as I learned how to use one of my daughter’s complex classroom visual aids. It’s a laptop that doubles as a table-top magnifier, connects to the smart board, and has an adjustable arm that you can point at the blackboard to have the image appear on your screen. As I tinkered, the answer came to me.
“She’ll learn to read and use her tools at the same time,” I’d said. “Because the two are inseparable for her.” The teacher nodded. I’d got the right answer.
Learning to decode is an important part of the overall process for a low-vision child who will be a visual learner, so I’ve relaxed my stance on the reading chart. As Willingham told me, “Once you know the notes, you can play music however you like.”
I did consider making an audiobook checklist with the aim of Sadie learning to weigh listening and sight reading in the same way. Then, I remembered an early summer evening when my husband and our two kids began a long road trip and we’d coasted into the night on the melody of Jim Dale’s voice recounting Harry Potter’s first year at Hogwarts. Four hours later, tear-stained and exhilarated, we’d pulled into the driveway of our holiday rental home.
Sadie, wide-eyed and rapt with attention in the back seat, couldn’t bear to have the story interrupted, and, truthfully, neither could her parents. So we left the motor running for a little while longer just to find out what happened next.
Looking back on that night, I realized that my daughter didn’t need a prize chart. She already knew the most important thing about reading: No matter what format, the story is the reward.
Emily Urquhart is a Canadian writer and folklorist and author of Beyond the Pale, a memoir about raising a child with albinism. We interviewed her about the book when it launched in 2015.
By Louise Kinross
After 32 years as a teacher-librarian, Shelley Neal’s life has come first circle.
“When I was a little girl in public school I remember being in Mrs. Harper’s library and reaching for a book on the shelf called Mine for Keeps,” Shelley says. “It’s about a beautiful young girl with cerebral palsy and it made me dream of being a special-education teacher.”
After seven years teaching at the Bloorview School authority, Shelley returned last year to teach in her childhood school library—the same one where she first read about a child with a disability.
This year she received the 2015 Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence for her work with students here from junior kindergarten to Grade 12, both in the class and the library. Shelley is married to Dr. Peter Rumney, physician director of Holland Bloorview’s Rehabilitation and Complex Continuing Care.
BLOOM: Why did you decide to work as a teacher-librarian with children with disabilities?
Shelley Neal: Because I love children and I love books. I want them to embrace each other and, in so doing, create a knowledge base that gives students more options in life. My love is for children and how I can engage and bring them into knowledge through books and text and literature, and, in that knowledge, create for them a freedom to think.
It’s almost a selfish thing to be in a relationship with children with different disabilities, because it’s so rich. As you bring out their giftedness, they’re bringing out your giftedness. It’s a real cycle, and out of that comes an incredible journey of relationship that empowers both people.
BLOOM: How did you work with the students in our school?
Shelley Neal: It was the greatest gig ever. First of all you have books, and books are a portal into different worlds and different thoughts, and then you have children—not children with disabilities, I just saw them as my kids. My question was ‘how do I connect these two worlds—the world of literature and books and thoughts—with children who are questioning and wondering? For the younger ones that was easy: by reading and singing and poetry and then saying: ‘I wonder, what do you wonder?’
For the older students I used text to connect them to the world and see their role and passion in the world. It doesn’t matter about disability because they are a whole person right the way they are. They still had that wonderment and we’d use the library, virtual or real, to engage them in discovering.
The middle school fiction is incredibly rich with universal themes of connection and hardship. I had children who were really hurting, coming through surgery and dealing with pain and conflict and all of that regular kid stuff like relationships. I needed to use text to create a genre to have a dialogue about that.
And then I had to figure out what to do with the reluctant guys who don’t want to read. I would use graphic novels to entice them into the text in a way that was fun and that they could glean information that was useful to their life.
One of the ways our kids learn is visually, so I also used TED Talks. One of the best was about a woman from New Orleans who painted one side of an abandoned house with chalkboard paint and wrote ‘Before I die, I want to…’ Then she left chalk there for people to share their hopes. I watched this talk with our high school children and they decided to create their own little chalk boards that they kept in the school, and that anyone could write on. I explained that they had to be sensitive because we have children who are dying with cancer, so, is there another saying we could use? They came up with ‘In my life I wish…’ I was able to get the raw materials for them and poor Peter helped them build this. Most people see him as a doctor, but I see him as a carpenter.
BLOOM: What kind of things did people write on the boards?
Shelley Neal: To sing opera on a stage, to learn to walk again, to go back to school to be with my friends. You saw some of the hurt and coming to new terms with what their body can do. But you also saw things like ‘to study about whales.’
BLOOM: What kind of changes did you see in the students you worked with?
Shelley Neal: It’s growth—growth in their understanding that they have abilities, and they have a brain to think, and learning how to connect them to deepen their understanding and knowledge. For beginning ones it’s literacy. In grades 1 to 6 they learn how to create a good question in their wonderment and to develop research skills. The older ones take those reading skills to a deeper level to empower them to read more complex text that brings up ideas.
BLOOM: What was the greatest challenge?
Shelley Neal: It was looking at each child’s ability and how to make access to information for them. So if I had a child with cerebral palsy who couldn’t hold a book, how do I allow them to access text? An incredible volunteer scanned all of our pattern books into this software called Clicker, so kids could access it through switch technology—with a click or the hummer switch or a head switch or eye gaze.
The other barrier was kids who hadn’t been successful in school. They hated reading and hated the library. I had to engage and empower them to develop a love of learning and show them reading is a skill that would help them. I used graphic novels and good Ted Talks as ways of making information accessible. Then we got into WordQ and SpeakQ, which allow a student to hear and read along with text that is too hard for them to read, but the thoughts are important because they can think really well.
BLOOM: Did you ever get frustrated because you weren’t able to find a way for some students to communicate?
Shelley Neal: The staff came together to learn what the child’s language is and how they communicate—whether a smile, an eye gaze, a motion of a hand or finger. The biggest thing for me was learning how to make my questions simple, so through a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response, I could start to see what was going on in the child’s world.
When I was frustrated I went back to the other disciplines and said ‘here.’ That’s the richness of Holland Bloorview. A whole team is there to enable this child. So the occupational and physical therapists would problem solve on how to position a child correctly or how to make a switch that works best and which part of the body has most consistency for hitting it. This award is a representation of a team, not just me.
BLOOM: What was most rewarding?
Shelley Neal: The greatest joy of a teacher-librarian, no matter what ability the child has, is to have them sit on your lap and engage in a story with you. That is the magic of library. When technology is too cumbersome or slow, let’s share a text together and read and question and think.
BLOOM: Have your thoughts about disability changed over the years?
Shelley Neal: Yes. I went from being a ‘goody two shoes’ who wanted to learn how to help people—where it’s all about you—to a deeper understanding of the power and resilience in the children. They are whole and capable, and my job is not to make it better. My job is to come alongside and learn with them and be honoured with the journey. I learned that these are incredibly powerful, amazingly resilient people—whether they were in junior kindergarten or Grade 12—and they have a lot to teach me about life. I need to stop and listen.
BLOOM: What advice would you give parents?
Shelley Neal: To surround yourself with an incredible team, and that’s not just the professionals, but other parents of children with disabilities. Love yourself, care for yourself, and be the strongest advocate ever. This is a tiring, long journey and you need to make sure to feed yourself.
With Debbie Sutherland, one of my Bloorview school colleagues, we birthed a respite program as a way of honouring and valuing the parents. They think it’s for the kids, but it’s for the parents to reconnect for four hours, to build themselves up. And now they’re connecting with other parents of kids with disabilities to create a valuable team.
BLOOM: What is next for you?
Shelley Neal: Last year at my new school we brought in whacks of technology and this year I want to build capacity with other staff members so it becomes second nature to them. The reason for my secondment to the Bloorview school was to build a skill set that I could take back to the board. In addition to technology, I bring back a deeper understanding of inclusion.
I’ll continue on with our respite program and then I’m getting set to retire. My next job is to use my harp, my music, to bring an environment of rest and healing to the sick and the dying.
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