Over the past thirty years, societies in general, and educators in particular, have made great gains in understanding and helping students who struggle to learn in the classroom.  Many gains are thanks to science and advancements in our scientific knowledge of the human brain and how it functions and processes information.  Understanding what is actually happening in the brains of struggling learners allows us to better help them learn—be that through different approaches and/or with additional supports.  Many other gains are thanks to inclusion and advancements in our societal attitudes and behaviours toward individuals with learning challenges.  Our values, beliefs, and preconceived notions affect our understanding and our willingness to help those who struggle.  A positive attitude, coupled with the belief that all students are worthy and capable of learning, empowers us to meet the needs of struggling learners.  How Difficult Can This Be? The F.A.T. City Workshop (Lavoie, 1989) reveals just how important science, scientific knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours are to understanding and helping students with learning disabilities succeed—in the classroom and in life.

I begin with a discussion of the latter (attitudes and behaviours) because how we, collectively and individually, think about and speak of students with learning exceptionalities is critical.  Language has the power to help or to hurt: “the language we use creates us and defines the world we live in.  The words we use also make a difference to how people see themselves, and how they exist in our world.  Words are powerful!” (Moore, 2016, p. 39).  Throughout The F.A.T. City Workshop, Richard Lavoie (director), shows just how important language is to supporting students with learning disabilities.  The film begins with Lavoie discussing and defining exclusion, arguing that “when we talk about disabled children, we talk about what he is not, rather than about what he is!”  Unfortunately, over thirty years later, this is often still the case.  Collectively, we are getting better at highlighting the positives while we seek out adaptations and modifications, but many individuals still focus on what needs “fixing” in the child.

During much of the film, I was like “wow, Lavoie is addressing concepts and using language far ahead of his time!”  But there were instances, specifically when he outlined his criteria for designating the “learning disabled child”—that is, the ones left after you take away the “mentally impaired and retarded,” the emotionally “disturbed,” the physically disabled, deaf, and blind, and those who had been denied an opportunity to learn—where his language revealed his time.  It is not that he was trying to be exclusive, but from today’s standpoint (where the words “retarded” and “disturbed” are socially unacceptable terms) his language affected how I received his message.  I had to adjust my lens and account for societal shifts in language before I could see that Lavoie whole-heartedly cared about, and was advocating for, the inclusion of children with disabilities.  He was doing his best to draw attention toward accentuating the positives; not dwelling on what learning-disabled children cannot do but instead on what they CAN do!

Lavoie advocates by walking participants through simulations, wherein he takes on his society’s bias—that learning disabled students are “lazy and dumb”; that they are unmotivated and don’t try hard enough; that they set out to “ruin classes and plans”; and that they are distractable and have low attention spans—all in the hope that participants would experience what it was like to be a learning-disabled child.   As I watched, I found myself cringing—the behaviours and language stemming for the bias were hurtful and demoralizing.  Sadly, this behaviour and language (fueled by the same underlying bias) is still evident in our schools today.  Some of what was said and done throughout the film’s simulations were, to a less blatant extent, said and done in several classrooms I observed during my observational practicum (the “lost-cause” attitude toward students, sarcasm, rhetorical questions, anxiety-inducing pressure, students being put on the spot/ridiculed when answering questions and/or reading aloud).  As a TTOC, I have overseen demoralizing behaviour and overheard hurtful language coming out of students’ mouths, as well as out of the mouths of teachers, support workers, administrators, and parents.  Said individuals would benefit from being put through the same simulations as the group in the film—perhaps at our district’s next professional development day!  Maybe then they would realize just how difficult it is to struggle with learning and understand that children with exceptionalities are capable of learning—they just need our support.  Collectively, we need to have the mindset that, “unless I presume competence in all people, I am the one who is disabled” (Moore, 2016, p. 34).  The slogan at the end of the film hit the nail on the head: “Learning Disabilities: The real challenge is educating those who don’t have one!” 

Moving to science and scientific knowledge, I was impressed with much of the information that Lavoie was giving participants regarding children with learning difficulties and anxiety (how it inhibits their learning and causes them to withdraw); processing (how the pace of the class is too fast and does not allow for adequate processing time, thus creating distractable students who disengage because they cannot keep up); risk-taking (how negative feedback without positive reinforcement kills risk-taking); perception (how everyone can see but not everyone can perceive and therefore asking a student to “look harder” or “try harder” is not the solution, explicit teaching is); motivation (how no student is motivated to do badly—all students want to do well but motivation only allows us to perform to the best of our ability); explicit teaching (how struggling students need direct instruction from experienced teachers and cannot be expected to “go in a corner and teach themselves”); reading comprehension (how it is a very complicated task that requires explicit instruction; we cannot assume that if a student understands every word in a passage that they will understand what the passage is saying—teachers must teach vocabulary and ensure that students have the necessary background knowledge to understand what they are reading); oral expression (how students with learning challenges often have dyssomnia—the tip of the tongue phenomena that makes word-finding difficult—as a result of the brain’s storage and retrieval system not functioning optimally, making speaking a cognitive task rather than an associative task); reading and decoding (how children who struggle to decode words spend so much energy decoding that they cannot comprehend or understand the content they are reading).  So many good points, each backed by current science and discussed in our program thus far.  

There was one part in the film, however, that did not jive with what we have learned and is not in line with current scientific research—that is, the information on auditory and visual capabilities.  Lavoie talks about how a learning disabled child will often come up to the teacher after receiving a worksheet and say: “I don’t understand this”; to which the teacher replies, “the instructions are right there, read them”; to which the student replies, “I did, but I still don’t understand what to do”; to which the teacher replies, “just read it, it’s all right there”; and this goes on until the teacher gets frustrated and finally tells the student what the instructions say; to which the student goes, “oh, ok” and sets off to do the work.  Lavoie claims that “these kids need to hear instructions first in order to understand what they are supposed to do!”  In an attempt to solidify his point, Lavoie walks participants through a “Can you translate this story?” activity, wherein they are asked to silently read a passage full of mis-spelled words.  When asked to translate the story, the participants are unable to do so.  Lavoie then reads the passage aloud, giving participants the information through their ears rather than through their eyes.  When asked to translate the story for the second time, the participants are able to do so.

The activity was intended to help participants relate to being an auditory (vs. visual) learner and Lavoie used it as grounds to argue that “you could have a learning-disabled student read something over and over again and they would not get it unless given some sort of auditory input.”  He went on to argue that, for this reason, auditory learners should have books on tape rather than in print.  The problem though, is that the passage participants were asked to read was incomprehensible—full of spelling mistakes and written the way a person who struggled to read would speak:

Won supporter dime wonder fodder over coat tree washer ladle bouy heroes wall king onus pompus from witty window hot chat 

Andy foulder chair retreat end tucker window ratcher end chapter dun.
Dentist popper campus trolling buy
“CHEESES PRICED!!” setee “husband shopping dun much hair treat?”
“donner buster got” sadist sun, George, “I canatoll ally idea nitwit ma window ratcher” 

Denis fodder loss distemper and tucker swish unpadded ladle judge tillers canvas ore 

Mural: Donor chapped on chair retreats. 

The activity had nothing to do with visual vs. auditory processing and everything to do with decoding.  Getting it through their ears (versus their eyes) is not the solution; rather, the solution is to learn how to decode words fluently and accurately enough to read and understand the passage as it is written:

Once upon a time walking on his property was a little boy he was walking on his Fathers farm with a little hatchet 

And he found a cherry tree and took a little hatchet and chopped it down. Then his father came strolling by. 

“Jesus Christ!!” said he “Whose been chopping down my cherry tree?”
“Don’t….” said his son, George. “ I cannot tell a lie I did it with my little hatchet”
Then his father lost his temper , and took a switch and paddled little George till his can was sore 

Moral: Do not cut down Cheery Trees 

The Simple View of Reading (from Gough, P. & Tunmer, W., 1986) tells us that reading comprehension is dependent upon word recognition x language comprehension:

Reading ability depends on both the lower level building blocks that drive printed-word recognition, including knowledge of sounds, syllables, letters, and meaningful parts of words, and the higher level aspects of language important for comprehension, including word meanings, phrases, sentences, and discourse (Moats, 2020, p. 2).

Scarborough’s Rope (in Moats, 2020, p. 15) clearly shows that proficient reading is dependent upon BOTH language comprehension (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge) AND word recognition (phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition of familiar words).  Skilled reading—fluent execution and coordination of word recognition and text comprehension—comes when language comprehension is increasingly strategic and word recognition is increasingly automatic.  So, contrary to what Lavoie claimed, visual capability is not the problem and auditory support not the sole solution.  The problem is unskilled reading and the solution lies in getting behind the “Science of Reading” movement and putting it into practice!

Together in education,

Ms. H

References

Moats, L.C. (2020). Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

Moore, Shelley. (2016). One Without the Other: Stories of Unity Through Diversity and Inclusion. 

Rosen, P. (Producer), Lavoie, R. D. (Director), Eagle Hill School Outreach., Peter Rosen Productions, & PBS Video. (1989).  How Difficult Can This Be? The F.A.T. City Workshop. [Motion Picture].  YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3UNdbxk3xs