[Dialogue] Lucille Chagnon on Literacy

[chagnon@comcast.net]

Lucille Chagnon here…

This is the first of the Dialogue postings that I have planned around my third literacy book, You, Yes YOU, Can Teach Someone to Read: A Step by Step How-To Book.  To begin to build a critical mass of community-based tutors who believe that teaching reading is not rocket science, one of my priorities is to get the word out to Movement colleagues and their acquaintances who may or may not have thought about teaching a child, youth, or adult to read. 

So as not to burden those of you with equally important priorities, some choices:

1) Below are the book’s Overview & Challenge and Endorsements--the latter with gracious words from two of our colleagues, Marilyn Crocker and David Lazear.  

2) My website, teachtwo.net,  contains several pages from the book.

3) If you would like to know more, please e-mail me personally, and I will send you representative pages—a lot or a little—in one of two ways: as an Attachment or in the body of a return e-mail.  Let me know which you prefer.

4)  For those who want a copy, it’s available from my publisher at  authorhouse.com   Once on the website, click on Book Store, enter Chagnon and you will  see a small picture of the colorful new 6x9 softcover.  Where AuthorHouse’s distributor has done its job, it can also be ordered through the computers of 25,000 bookstores worldwide; the price may be a couple dollars higher, but you don't have to pay the postage.  (I hesitate to send you to Amazon because what also comes up is my second literacy book, Voice Hidden, Voice Heard: A Reading and Writing Anthology, with an obscene price because it is out of print.)

Thanks to one and all for your support and encouragement across the miles.  Blessings on your own work and your passion for service.  I look forward to hearing from you.             Lucille

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YOU, YES YOU, CAN TEACH SOMEONE TO READ:  A STEP BY STEP HOW-TO BOOK
Lucille T. Chagnon

OVERVIEW AND CHALLENGE

A viable solution to the massive problem of low literacy:
Turn the Community of Need into the Community of Service.
Turn willing new readers, young and old, into community-based tutors.
Each of You Teach Two! 

This unique approach is based on the following premises synergistically combined:

•	In a print-saturated society like the United States, there are no non-readers.  There are, however, millions of hesitant readers who cannot read well enough to function fully in our society and realize their full potential.  Millions of people who can recognize STOP, GO, GAS, and BUS were never shown how easy it is to begin to build a reading foundation on those simple words.

•	All human beings are gifted; but we all use a small percentage of our brain power. Vast numbers of adults, who claim they cannot read, live caring and productive lives and find amazingly creative ways to compensate for their inability to decode print.

•	Adults and children who are told that they are learning disabled or unable to focus may come to believe that they are inferior—and even more if their teachers and family buy into the negative labels and do not understand and accept learning differences.  

•	It is possible to bring students with learning differences up to grade level in reading and even to teach individuals with IQs in the 30s to read with understanding and enthusiasm.  The well-documented work of Dr. Renée Fuller has proven that repeatedly over the past 35+ years.  With Fuller’s system of capital letters there are no reversals.

•	The most important factor in teaching someone to read is heartfelt listening.  Anxiety causes the brain to downshift.  Authentic listening dispels anxiety and creates safe space which accelerates learning.  When reluctant readers feel safe, they do not have to apologize or pretend.  An exciting new world of learning opens up where past performance makes little difference.

•	The most powerful teaching resource is the life experience of new readers. Once they feel safe and begin to reveal what interests them most, words about things they love will become sight words on which to build a reading vocabulary. As the motivation to learn becomes self-directed and self-reinforcing, they may discover books that can feed their interests and fire their imagination. 
  
•	We all learn best when we teach someone else; that is also true in learning to read.  Even young readers can teach other children from scratch, providing they believe that they can and have access to simple methods and a mentor, their former tutor, to guide them through the process—before, during, and after each tutoring session—until they are ready to try it on their own.

•	A vast corps of potential literacy tutors of all ages—today’s hesitant readers—exists in the very schools and neighborhoods where tutors are most needed.  Many adults are hesitant to work with volunteers from outside their community.  That condition can be reversed when interested individuals are trained to tutor their own children, siblings, and neighbors.  One committed and credible community-based tutor, eager to train others to pass it on, could start a landslide.

•	Encouraging new readers to teach two others in their lifetime creates a geometric progression of learning.  Frank Laubach’s call to literacy in mid-20th century, Each One Teach One, catalyzed the dissemination of excellent methods and the creation of a dedicated worldwide corps of volunteers, as did the groundbreaking work of Ruth Colvin, founder of Literacy Volunteers of America.  The call to universal literacy for the 21st century builds on that past and amplifies it, handing the skills of teaching—and eventually, mentoring—over to willing new readers, young or old.  Now, Each of You Teach Two! 

•	Authentic partnerships promote healing, increase self-reliance and creativity all around, and strengthen community leadership.  To begin to wipe out low literacy we must forego any beggar-at-the-gate perspective, any trace of a proprietary, client-oriented, failure  mentality.  We can and must develop mutually enriching partnerships between the haves and the have-nots and among service providers as well.  Young and old, degreed and certified or not, as we help each other learn we all grow in the sharing.  

•	If we but find the will, the simple learning technology exists to begin to wipe out functional illiteracy in our lifetime.  As literacy providers build more and more collaborative relationships with each other and with community-based tutors, we can tap the synergy of partnership.  Though unheralded, Septima Clark and Myles Horton proved that conclusively in the Deep South of the 1950s with hundreds of Citizenship Schools that quietly paved the way and prepared a people for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.   

If we care enough and dare enough, we can turn the Community of Need into the Community of Service.  Working together we can begin to wipe out low literacy.
Each of You Teach Two! 

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ENDORSEMENTS

I have never seen such a concise step by step approach to teaching literacy, nor one which is so inspiring and welcoming.  How can we not take on this challenge for our society?  –Beverly L. Stewart, M.Ed.,Pres./Dir., Back to Basics Learning Dynamics, Inc.

This step by step how-to book on teaching someone to read is splendid.  The text is clear, economical, to the point.  The procedure is innovative, intriguing,  provocative, and absolutely sound, founded on solid learning principles and a keen understanding of the blocks to learning and how to avoid them.  The work holds real promise.			                                        –Joseph Chilton Pearce, author, Magical Child

I have skimmed through the materials, stopped to read, marveled over pages and generally overall enjoyed every bit of what has been produced.  It is based on good theory; it is interesting, clever and engaging.  What Lucille Chagnon is doing is important, and I want to help. 		                               –Bernice E. Cullinan, Ed.D.
                                                      Past President, International Reading Association

This is an excellent train-the-trainer handbook for literacy capacity-building.  At a time when ramping up literacy is a key national education goal, Lucille’s book serves as a rich and user-friendly resource for community-based literacy efforts.  She offers practical, research-based strategies for teaching reading and for coaching new readers to become literacy tutors themselves.  She encourages a sensitive, facilitative approach that builds upon the learner’s strengths and authentic life experience, models reflective practice, and affirms the unfolding possibilities of exciting partnerships in literacy skill development.	                                      --Marilyn Crocker, Ed.D., Education Consultant 
                                                                           President, Crocker & Associates, Inc. 

Lucille Chagnon holds forth the vision of  wiping out  low literacy in our lifetime.  This book goes way beyond a mere vision.  It suggests how-to in ways that are authentic and humanizing.  Lucille demonstrates much of what current brain-mind research has discovered is involved in effective teaching and learning. The strategies and techniques presented in this book can indeed make the vision of wiping out low literacy a reality. 
                                                            –David G. Lazear, author, OutSmart Yourself!
                          16 Proven Strategies for Becoming Smarter Than You Think You Are


You, Yes YOU, Can Teach Someone To Read is an intelligent approach to reading instruction. If used as presented, many youngsters and older people can unlock the door to meaning.                –Miriam T. Chaplin, Ed.D., Professor Emerita of Education  
                 Rutgers University, Past President, National Council of Teachers of English