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This week on “The Learning Curve," Cara Candal and Gerard Robinson talk with Dr. Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Dyslexia and Diverse Learners at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and the author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. They discuss American K-12 education’s approach to reading instruction, and how we can increase students’ enjoyment of reading for its own sake, as well as their performance on national assessments. She reviews the findings from her 2007 book, Proust and the Squid, on how reading shapes and transforms our knowledge and emotions. They delve into how technology is changing our attention spans and ability to digest and understand more demanding books and ideas, and the negative impact of smart phones, screens, and multi-media on the brains of young people. She differentiates between acquiring knowledge through the printed or written word and digitally, and how educators and parents should think carefully and constructively about the use of technology in schools and at home. The interview concludes with Dr. Wolf reading a favorite passage from Reader, Come Home.
Stories of the Week: How did the pandemic school shutdowns affect the seven million students in America who did not receive special education services – and what can we do about it? Schoolchildren in Florida are suffering from learning loss as a result of school closures in the wake of the tragic, category-four Hurricane Ian. Can we better prepare for school shutdowns after natural disasters?
Guest:
Dr. Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the newly created Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Previously she was the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is the author of Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain (2001), Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (2016), and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018).
The next episode will air on Weds., October 26th, with Miranda Seymour, a novelist and biographer of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
Tweet of the Week:
News Links:
Pandemic shut down many special education services – how parents can help their kids catch up
Mitchell Yell, University of South Carolina
Extreme weather has devastated schools around the country. Now their students are suffering https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/17/us/extreme-weather-schools-hurricane-ian-climate/index.html
Cara Candal
Gerard Robinson