[Dialogue] Literacy work with refugees and others

[Chagnon@comcast.net]

Dialogue Colleagues,

   Since Lucia Ann, Evelyn, and Marge's recent e-mails (and others) about my literacy website and my 2005 literacy book went out to the Dialogue, let me use the Dialogue forum to reach out to others who may also believe that EVERYONE CAN LEARN TO READ.  (Rather than boldface, underscoring, or italics, I'm going to highlight with caps so my e-mail won't go from my Mac to different operating 
systems with strange symbols.)  

   My literacy WEBSITE is   teachtwo.net.  
It is so named because my third literacy BOOK (You, Yes YOU Can Teach Someone to Read:  A Step by Step How-To Book, AuthorHouse 2005) describes simple ways to create real Learning Partnerships.  Those partnerships are designed to launch a COMMUNITY-BASED GEOMETRIC PROGRESSION of learning in one neighborhood after another.  TEACH TWO, and those two may (no coercion) decide to teach one or two, and they in turn, etc.  
    Beginning that very first geometric progression of learning with a brand new reader doesn't happen overnight, but it can happen in a few months or less.  I encourage tutors to call themselves AND the hesitant readers with whom they work, LEARNING PARTNERS.  In so doing, they begin to build a level of self-confidence that will eventually allow readers who have reached a third grade reading level to consider helping their tutor teaching another child (or peer, in the case of youth or adults) what they have recently learned.  If the new reader/Learning Partner accepts their tutor/Learning Partner's quiet (no pressure) invitation, the LEARNING DYAD becomes a  LEARNING TRIAD.  Obviously, the new reader-turned-Tutoring Partner starts small, but I won't go into that because I think I have already repeated myself.  Those of you who are interested will find it all laid out in my book, You, Yes YOU, which is available through the computers of bookstores worldwide for under $12 or on my print-on-demand publisher's website (authorhouse.com) for a bit less; and for a lot less ($3.50) as an e-book which is really a downloadable 8 1/2 by 11 text of my entire 120+ page manuscript.
   As for the term LEARNING PARTNERS, I can't tell you how many of the hundreds of Rutgers undergrads in my Urban Literacy Practicum over eight years, told me that they learned as much as, or more than, their Learning Partners.  Those of you who have taught someone to read can attest to the life-changing power of that humbling and ultimately exhilarating experience.  After I taught my twin sons (now 28 and leaders in their jobs) to read at ten, three months later, with the first of Dr. Fuller's ten books, they taught a six-year-old whose parents are blind .  She, in turn, taught a six-year-old with the same book two summers later.  So much for an American Federation of Teachers' publication--Teaching Reading Really Is Rocket Science--touted by the US Dept. of Ed. a couple of years ago in their monthly newsletter.  How sad.
   
   Allow me one more elaboration, and that on the first bold-faced statement above, EVERYONE CAN LEARN TO READ.  I am midway through a state-funded 15-week literacy program at a Wilmington, Delaware day center for developmentally delayed adults.  I am there one hour a week, training and working with volunteer staff  who have begun to teach volunteer clients to read  with Dr. Renee Fuller's wacky Dr. Seuss-like books.  Much to her amazemement, back in the 70s, at Rosewood, the Maryland state institution for the mentally retarded in Owings Mills, Dr. Fuller, a physiological psychologist, and her staff successfully taught 24 of 26 institutionalized youth and adults, with IQs ranging from the 30s to 60s, to read with understanding and enthusiasm.  Four were de-institutionalized, and 20 had their prognosis upgraded.  The American Psychological Association devoted a long seminar to her work which is the content of her book, In Search of the IQ Correlation.  She found none, and since then she has developed a new theory of learning which she calls the Story as Engram.  Imaginal educators can relate to that.  Look up her website, ballstickbird.com  which contains wonderful articles she has written, mainly these days, for homeschooling parents.  I am going to e-mail to the Dialogue, for interested readers and the curious, the two-page proposal that the Delaware Division of Developmental Disabilities Services funded for the 15-week day center project.  They have asked me to do more training in the state.

    Thanks for the growing interest that the e-mails from colleagues attest to over the past weeks.  Send a lot of good energy to all the teachers and tutors out there who are paving the way with both tried and true methods and new approaches, and to those who haven't yet discovered how.  I was very much among the latter until Dee Dickinson and Linda McCrae-Campbell came to Chicago for the ICA summer of whole brain learning back in the mid-80s.  They ultimately changed my life and my professional focus.  I shall be forever grateful--and humbled.

Grace and Peace to all,
Lucille Chagnon
302-762-0282
      fax   -0285