[Dialogue] Re: Bending History

[Lucille Chagnon]

 from Lucille Chagnon in Wilmington, DE where the flowering trees and tulips
are in full bloom

 This will seem to ramble, but bear with me, it's all about Bending History.

      On Tuesday, April 26, at the National Conference on Family Literacy in
Louisville, KY, I am doing a Poster Session presentation that, up till this
morning, was titled  "You, Yes YOU, Can Start a Reading Revolution."  The
48x36 inch poster board summarizes the two major literacy breakthroughs that
I discovered 1987-88 when I taught my ten-year-old adopted twin sons, Dan
and Dave, to read.  Working with them only 15 minutes a week over 8 months,
they gained over 2 grade levels and a year later they were mainstreamed out
of special ed.  (At 27 they are doing extremely well in their chosen fields:
Dave, sales; Dan phlebotomy.)  The first and most important breakthrough,
which I learned from Dr. Renee Fuller, is to teach with capital letters
initially.   Lower case letters are extremely confusing, and many kids (some
say 80%) end  up consigned to special ed because of dyslexia, one symptom of
which is difficulty distinguishing the look-alike letters, bdpq and g.
(Back in the early 70s when she was Director of Psychological Services at
Rosewood in Owings Mills, MD, using manipulative/paper sans serif capital
letters, her staff was successful in teaching 24 of 26 institutionalized
youth and adults with IQs ranging from the 30s to the 60s to read with
enthusiasm and understanding.  Five were de-institutionalized and most had
their prognosis upgraded.  Her website, which has wonderful essays--most
written for homeschooling magazines--is ballstickbird.com).

    I'm reading Mathews' book backwards, and this morning I only had one
chapter to go  ( The New Movement ) to finish the last section.  In his
context for the Research Assembly of 1972, the words Whistle Point and
Avalanche caught my attention and pulled the literacy breakthroughs
together.   Sans serif upper case letters are the Whistle Point that can
cause an Avalanche (out with the word Revolution) by converting the initial
tutoring dyad to a triad where the tutor-turned-mentor works with the new
reader-turned-tutor as together they teach another new reader and another.
It's taking Frank Laubach's Each One Teach One to a Geometric Progression of
Learning:  Each of You Teach Two, if indeed all the parties are willing.

   And that is why I did a Google search on "whistle point" & avalanche.  Up
came the URL for the UIA website.  And, as you'll see in the first paragraph
below, it's all about the Research Assembly of 1972!!  For those of you who
want to check it out, the URL is
uia.be/strategies/stratcom_bodies.php?kap=43







      Global Strategies Project - Notes and Commentaries


      Commentaries from Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential

      9.  Collective strategy-making: designing a strategic array

      The following note describes the pattern of collective research used
at the Ecumenical Institute (Chicago) leading up to and including its 1972
Research Assembly. Perhaps without precedent, it involved the direct
participation of 750 people in a collective learning-research process
covering the social dynamics of the economic, political and cultural arenas
and their interrelationships.




  from Lucille:  What follows on the website pages is not a note but one of
the most lengthy pieces I've ever found on Google.  Enjoy!