College Degrees Challenge Students with Learning Difficulties

It may surprise you to learn that the U.S. ranks 14th among 37 developed nations when it comes to the percentage of young people holding college degrees. 

According to a study conducted by the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2011, only 56% of students in the U.S. that begin four-year colleges are likely to graduate.

If college presents insurmountable obstacles for almost half of all college students, you can imagine what that means for students with learning disabilities who already face challenges.

The postsecondary success rate for students with LD is half that of the general population; it’s estimated that only 28% receive a diploma.

According to the Institute for Higher Education Policy, the low graduation rate is largely attributable to educational missteps that begin in elementary school and continue through high school.

From kindergarten through 12th grade, students with LD experience “inadequate academic preparation when compared to their peers without disabilities; lower academic expectations; inferior pedagogy and services; and lack of full access to the core curriculum.”

Furthermore, with high school guidance counselors, teachers, and even parents focused on college admission rather than how to succeed when they get there, students with LD remain largely uneducated about the dramatically different culture they’re about to enter.

Even parents who graduated college themselves remain ignorant of the obstacles kids with learning disabilities encounter at the college level.

Read more of this article here

Dyslexic writing: The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice

Abstract taken from the paper written by Naomi Folb, a doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, researching dyslexic identities, writing and subjectivity.

ABSTRACT
Much of the research on dyslexia and writing explores dyslexia as a deficit.

When it is through the historically famous or in comparison to non-dyslexic people, the researcher starts with an idea of what dyslexia is and seeks to identify it; for example, by evidence of orthographic aberration in their writing.

The purpose of this study was to draw on critical theory from outside the dyslexia literature which rejects the principle that the relation between author and text is simple and transparent.

This is with a view to understand both the context in which the work was written, but also acknowledges the reader’s role in interpretation, or the ‘relation of address’.

Moving away from the assumption that the dyslexic must ‘overcome’ dyslexia to write, the research draws on autobiographical writing by contemporary dyslexic writers.

I argue that these reveal how mistakes and imprecision are connected with a love for language and the imagination.

While traditionally dyslexia has been depicted from the viewpoint of non-dyslexic people as a ‘suffering’, as in – one is thought to ‘suffer from dyslexia’ – these representations of dyslexia suggest suffering is not simply ‘there’, as something one ‘has’.

Dyslexic writing therefore provides insight, not into the pathology of the author, but what the binary of inclusion/exclusion means to them.

Sally Gardner: Dyslexia is not a disease

It always struck me as strange that as a child I should be saddled with a word that I could neither pronounce or spell.

I look back at my education with a sense of bewildered frustration, I had no idea why I should be shown a picture of a boat and when the picture was taken away I was, as if by magic, supposed to know what the picture spelt.

It didn't matter how many phonic nutcases shouted at me saying B-O-A-T. Even now I have no idea whether o goes before a or a goes before o. And does it matter?

In those days it was called word blindness. I wasn't diagnosed with dyslexia until I was 11. It was of no value in school that I was visually or emotionally intelligent. Still, in 2011, these qualities in a child are often overlooked in favour of academic intelligence.

I believe we waste too many children in this country by failing to see the gifts they have. Instead we see dyslexia as a problem.

The word associated with dyslexia in schools, that I absolutely hate, is special needs. Our special needs are that the non dyslexic world stop telling us how we should be learning or what magic cure they have for us.

It's not a disease. People need to see what it has to offer, and not look at it as a negative. It's a misconception that because you are dyslexic you don't like books. In fact, although I couldn't read them, I always thought words beautiful hieroglyphics that I longed to be able to translate.

The first book I ever read, at the ripe old age of 14, was Wuthering Heights. I think it was because everyone had given up on me that I finally broke the code.

Up to the age of 21, it seemed to me that everybody had a cinema in their heads and could see a book as you would see a film: playing out in their mind's eye.

I was studying theatre design at Central St Martins at the time, and working on The Tempest, when I first realised the director I was working with couldn't see a thing.

He was visually blind. I can't tell you how cross that made me. All those years I had been able to see in 3D in my head.

I had my own visual landscape and I realised that I was rich in an imagination that has turned out to be invaluable.

All those years of only being told I was stupid, thick. A moron, brain like a sieve. Still those negative voices haunt me.

Read the full article here: Sally Gardner: Dyslexia is not a disease - Telegraph

Sally Gardener: The dyslexic novelist

Sally Gardner was originally called Sarah, but as a child she couldn't spell her name. She knew that it started with an s, but the minute that was on the page the h would start to bug her.

Did it go before or after the r? "I know people say 'at the end' but I couldn't make it stay where it was supposed to go. I never got it.

My mother had a friend who was an actress called Sally who said, 'Look, darling, the best thing to do is Sally because the s is like a snake, you have a little a and two long lines and a y to catch it all.' And I thought, I can do that." She changed her name.

Gardner acts out the spelling of her chosen name: a snake action, the loops of the ls and the y rounding it all up, and you can see why it makes sense.

The word is almost a dance. The reason why words didn't normally make sense when she was a child, and can still completely fox her now, is that, like 10% of the population, Gardner is dyslexic.

In fact, Gardner, 51, falls into a smaller group, of about 4% of the population, who are severely dyslexic. As a child she says she was labelled unteachable, her reports called her lazy, and she spent time in a school for "maladjusted" children. She was bumped from school to school and hated every minute of it.

Her parents, both lawyers, were mystified. An educational psychologist told her that she was word blind; which she quite liked, as it made sense. Then they diagnosed her as dyslexic. "I remember thinking it so extraordinary for it to be called a word that I couldn't say or spell. Still can't."

Dyslexia is a learning difficulty, biological in origin, which often runs in families. It causes varying levels of difficulties in learning to read, write and spell. Short-term memory, mathematics, concentration, personal organisation and sequencing may be affected.

But Gardner is now a novelist. Her novel, I, Coriander, is published on Thursday and she's off to tour America.

She went from art school to a successful career in the theatre doing set design and then costumes, to illustration and writing children's books.

I, Coriander, her first full-length book, weaves between 17th-century London and a magical fairy world linked by a child named Coriander.

Read the full article here: The dyslexic novelist | Books | The Guardian

R.A.S.P. - What is a Dyslexic Writer?

There are far too few books that are written for dyslexics. The ones available tend to focus on recovering from the problem.

They offer guidance or reassurance that dyslexia, can be solved, or lessened. They point out the advantages, disadvantages, or what it looks like.

All too common, is the perception that dyslexics would be better off in a world without books, without language, without reading.

In November 2011, to coincide with Dyslexia Awareness Week, RASP released Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Literature by Dyslexic Writers.

The book is a compilation of work by contemporary dyslexic writers, both renowned and emerging, including but not limited to,

• Billy Childish (co-founder of the Stuckism Art Movement); 
• Andrew Solomon (winner of the 2001 National Book Award and finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and author of "The Autism Rights Movement"); 
• Thomas G. West (author of Thinking Like Einstein and In the Mind’s Eye. Watch his videos on YouTube); 
• Sally Gardner, (winner of the 2005 Nestlé Children's Book Prize Gold Award and, shortlisted for the British Children's Book of the Year in 2006); 
• Philip Schultz (winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry); and 
• Benjamin Zephaniah (included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008).

Some contributors have chosen to explore the concept of dyslexia through orthographic aberrations, while others have addressed their techniques for writing or discussed what writing means to them.

Together they bring attention to the structure of stories, images in words, and the authors’ love of language.

As such, this anthology is about more than the forgetting of letters. It is a testimony to the value of writing to dyslexics.

It brings to the fore notions of authorship, and authority.

It asks:

• who decides what dyslexia is? and 
• who authorises if whether dyslexics can write, or not? 

The book is considered to be of interest, not just to dyslexics, but also those interested in the relationship between identity and authorship as authority.

It provides a compelling read to all concerned with the limitations of representation and gives a voice to those who have been marginalised by literary traditions.

Visit the R.a.s.p. website here: www.r-a-s-p.co.uk

There are three books currently be distributed by RASP The Dyslexic Collective, Tal and the ABC and Pokkadots and Abucuses.

For more infomation about buying books from RASP email: sales@r-a-s-p.co.uk