Search

US students who are blind or have visual impairments do not read at the level of a third-grader with typical sight until, on average, halfway through the seventh grade. As a first step toward narrowing that gap, we investigated levels of linguistic awareness among teachers of students who are blind or visually impaired (TSBVIs) because research with general education teachers has demonstrated a link between teacher linguistic awareness and student literacy outcomes. We also examined the accuracy of dyslexia beliefs among TSBVIs and whether TSBVI linguistic awareness and dyslexia beliefs are associated with training and experience variables. A survey of licensed or certified TSBVIs (N = 236) in the US revealed that TSBVIs' understanding of linguistic concepts was comparable to that of educators in previous studies, and TSBVIs' overall beliefs about dyslexia were more accurate than those of other educators. Linguistic awareness was not associated with training and experience variables, suggesting linguistic awareness is not a focus of reading courses offered to preservice TSBVIs and they do not acquire it in the field. Master's degree attainment was significantly related to the overall accuracy of TSBVIs' dyslexia beliefs and years of experience working as a TSBVI was marginally associated with the overall accuracy of TSBVIs' dyslexia beliefs. Only years of experience diminished the misconception that dyslexia is a visual disorder. Because TSBVIs did not appear to know less about linguistic concepts and dyslexia than other educators, the reading achievement gap between students with visual impairments and students with typical sight is unlikely to be attributable to underdeveloped TSBVI knowledge.

Dyslexic children often fail to correct errors while reading aloud, and dyslexic adolescents and adults exhibit lower amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN)--the neural response to errors--than typical readers during silent reading. Past researchers therefore suggested that dyslexia may arise from a faulty error detection mechanism that interferes with orthographic learning and text comprehension. An alternative possibility is that comprehension difficulty in dyslexics is primarily a downstream effect of low-quality lexical representations--that is, poor word knowledge. On this view, the attenuated ERN in dyslexics is a byproduct, rather than a source, of underdeveloped orthographic knowledge. Because the second view implies a direct association of the error response with comprehension skill in populations of all ability levels, the present study evaluates these alternatives through a reanalysis of behavioral and neural data from 31 typical adult readers. If it is true that faulty error processing can manifest as dyslexia, a model in which error monitoring contributes directly to comprehension should outperform a model in which it does not. ERNs recorded during spelling judgments were used as a measure of error detection aptitude in path analyses of reading comprehension. The data were better fit by a model in which error detection aptitude was a consequence of word knowledge than a model in which it contributed directly to comprehension. The findings challenge the notion that comprehension difficulty in dyslexics is attributable to error processing deficits and are consistent with the hypothesis that comprehension difficulty in dyslexics is partially attributable to low-quality word knowledge.

Faculty (N = 156) at regional public universities (RPUs) in the United States were surveyed for self-reports of their primary academic identity (teacher, researcher) along with alignment of that identity with perceived departmental expectations and how their time is spent. Well-being and job satisfaction were examined as outcome measures of identity and alignment. The results are examined in the context of international concerns about neoliberalism in higher education, particularly with respect to academic identity. Participants were employed by RPUs in Illinois, a state with severe budget challenges, to assess the combined impact of neoliberalism and financial pressures on academic identity at traditionally teaching-focused institutions. Results of MANCOVA and MANOVA analyses suggested that participants who identify as teachers had greater overall well-being and job satisfaction than those who identified as researchers. Greater satisfaction was associated with alignment between identity and how time is spent. Implications and challenges to faculty work and strains on academic identity at RPUs are discussed.

Faculty (N = 205) at regional public universities (RPUs) in the United States were surveyed for self-reports of their primary academic identity (teacher, researcher) and qualitative descriptions of struggles related to their academic identity. Well-being and job satisfaction were examined as outcome measures of identity struggles. Participants were selected from RPUs in Illinois, a state with severe budget challenges, to assess the impact of financial pressures on academic identity at traditionally teaching-focused institutions. Responses were not uniform across faculty, with some reporting few identity struggles and others reporting difficulty managing, lack of institutional support, and feeling that something would need to 'give' eventually. Faculty who identified as researchers and who spent most of their time doing research reported the fewest struggles, while researchers who were not able to devote time to research most frequently reported distress. Implications and challenges to faculty work and strains on academic identity at RPUs are discussed.

A combination of public outcry and litigation halted or limited some of the Trump Administration's attempts to undermine asylum protection. Other policies went into effect and some remain in effect [...], The U.S. asylum system has endured four years of systematic attack. The Trump Administration attempted to dismantle the United States' system to protect asylum seekers through changes to case law, executive orders, presidential proclamations, internal agency guidance and sweeping regulatory changes, among other measures. The system largely ground to a halt after the Trump Administration co-opted the coronavirus public health crisis to effectively close the southern border to asylum seekers with its March 2020 Centers for Disease Control order. This catastrophic order was not even the last in a long line of the Trump Administration's efforts since assuming power to obliterate asylum protection. Building on the actions from 2017 forward, even in its waning days, the Trump Administration proposed and finalized numerous sets of regulations to undermine and eviscerate asylum protection.

Literacy is an increasingly important factor as schools focus on improving student achievement. Literacy skills in reading and writing are critical components needed for both access to the general curriculum and for successful academic achievement. A key component of reading and writing is word identification, a skill deficit for many adolescent students with learning disabilities. This article describes how we implemented Words Their Way, an explicit, inductive instructional approach to teach phonemic awareness, spelling patterns, and morphology to students in a ninth grade literacy class in an urban high school. The orthographic knowledge learned through word study is applied to word identification skills used in reading and writing. The article explains how we adapted this program for adolescents who are struggling with reading and writing. (Contains 4 figures.)

Share (1995) proposed "phonological recoding" (the translation of letters into sounds) as a self-teaching mechanism through which readers establish complete lexical representations. More recently, McKague et al. (2008) proposed a similar role for "orthographic recoding", that is, feedback from sounds to letters, in building and refining lexical representations. We reasoned that an interaction between feedback consistency measures and spelling ability in a spelling decision experiment would lend support to this hypothesis. In a linear mixed effects logistic regression of accuracy data, this interaction was significant. Better spellers but not poorer spellers were immune to feedback effects in deciding if a word is spelled correctly, which is consistent with McKague et al.'s prediction that the impact of phonological feedback on word recognition will diminish when the orthographic representation for an item is fully specified. The study demonstrates the importance of considering individual differences when investigating the role of phonology in reading.

The connections among language, writing system, and reading are part of what confronts a child in learning to read. We examine these connections in addressing how reading processes adapt to the variety of written language and how writing adapts to language. The first adaptation (reading to writing), as evidenced in behavioral and neuroscience data, is achieved through a universal constraint that language places on writing and through the tuning of reading procedures imposed by specific features of writing systems. Children acquire skill in reading through increasing specialization of procedures tuned to their writing system, while also acquiring more general (universal) procedures that serve language mapping and cognitive control. For the second adaption (writing to language), we present examples from several languages to suggest that writing systems tend to fit their linguistic properties, thus providing adaptive variation in writing-to-language mapping. We suggest that this writing-language fit facilitates the child's learning how his or her writing system works.

The George Washington University's Urban Initiative Professional Development School (UI-PDS) partnership used interviews, surveys, focus groups, and observations to research its effectiveness in preparing urban educators. The research conducted with UI-PDS preservice teachers and first year graduates, indicates they were well equipped to meet the challenges of urban teaching. They plan and implement lessons relative to students' diverse backgrounds, interests, and skills while engage in student advocacy and collaboration. This research also attempted to unravel the components of the UI-PDS program that contributed to these outcomes. Identified components included daily teaching responsibilities, on-site support, collaborative practice, and participant's personal attributes. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) affirms a right to education for disabled persons and aims to ensure braille instruction for blind individuals. However, there is evidence that braille instruction is often circumvented or abandoned early in CRPD nations because it is perceived as an inefficient learning medium for blind students. This perception persists despite insufficient empirical evidence and a lack of understanding of the efficiency of reading versus listening for learning in sighted individuals. We therefore investigated the efficiency of learning written versus spoken words in blind and sighted samples. Participants (23 blind, 20 sighted) studied the written definitions of 70 rare English words in successive rounds, presented in conjunction with written or spoken wordforms. Blind participants learned with equal efficiency across modalities, whereas sighted participants learned spoken words more efficiently. The findings indicate the inefficiency argument against teaching braille is groundless, both because braille word learning is not less efficient than auditory word learning for blind individuals, and because reading is valued in the education of sighted individuals despite its apparent inefficiency in that population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The learning account of the puzzle of ideography cannot be dismissed as readily as Morin maintains, and is compatible with the standardization account. The reading difficulties of deaf and dyslexic individuals, who cannot easily form connections between written letter strings and spoken words, suggest limits to our ability to bypass speech and reliably access meaning directly from graphic symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross–writing system research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience has yielded important findings regarding how a writing system's structure can influence the cognitive challenges of learning to read and the neural underpinnings of literacy. The current paper reviews these differences and extends the findings to demonstrate diversity in how skilled reading is accomplished within a single writing system, English. We argue that broad clusters of behavioral and neural patterns found across writing systems can also be found within subpopulations who display atypical routes to skilled English reading, subpopulations including Chinese–English bilinguals, deaf native signers, compensated readers, and distortion‐sensitive readers. The patterns of interest include a tradeoff between the degree of reliance on phonological and morphological processing for skilled reading, a shift in attentional focus from smaller to larger orthographic units, and enhanced bilaterality of neural processing during word reading. Lastly, we consider how understanding atypical routes to reading may apply to other writing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A community association in Wales offered an adult course in word and number power that included individual action plans, paired learning, and continual assessment of progress. Emphasis on the use of information technology proved popular and increased participants' confidence and self-esteem. (SK)

We are in the midst of a crisis of mental health for attorneys across all practice areas. Illustrating this broader phenomenon, this interdisciplinary Article shares the results of the 2020 National Asylum Attorney Burnout and Secondary Traumatic Stress Survey ("Survey"). Using wellestablished tools, such as the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory and the Secondary Stress Trauma Survey, the Survey assessed the well-being of over 700 immigration attorneys navigating the tumultuous asylum space. As the largest such study of United States attorneys to date, it is particularly timely. Between 2017 and 2021, the Trump administration's extreme policies, sweeping regulatory changes, and Attorney General decisions catapulted immigration law practice into the public spotlight and created deeper dimensions of stress in an already dysfunctional and traumatizing system. The Survey findings include much higher self-reported symptoms of burnout and secondary traumatic stress among asylum attorneys than previously surveyed populations, including immigration judges, social workers, hospital doctors, nurses, and prison wardens. In addition, female-identifying attorneys, attorneys of color, and solo practitioners reported higher symptoms of burnout and secondary traumatic stress. This Article explores the inherently traumatic nature of asylum seeking and asylum lawyering, briefly touching on the ever-changing landscape of asylum law and policy. In doing so, the Article considers specifically how these changes impact asylum attorneys as one subset of immigration attorneys and as attorneys exposed to trauma. We contribute to the literature around trauma stewardship and a need for selfcare, institutional care, and proactive measures to support those joining and continuing in the field. Further, the Article provides data to inform funders and other stakeholders about the need to normalize a culture of openly discussing burnout and secondary trauma within law school settings, nonprofits, government agencies, and law firms. Ultimately, this Article argues for a fundamental shift in legal education and the legal profession more broadly in terms of how we think, talk, and teach about the psychological realities of lawyering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical lawyering--also at times called rebellious, community, and movement lawyering--attempts to further social justice alongside impacted communities. While much has been written about the contours of this form of lawyering and case examples illustrating core principles, little has been written about the mechanics of teaching critical lawyering skills. This Article seeks to expand critical lawyering theory, and in doing so, provide an example of a pedagogical approach to teaching what we term "critical interviewing." Critical interviewing means using an intersectional lens to collaborate with clients, communities, interviewing partners, and interpreters in a legal interview. Critical interviewers identify and take into account historical and structural biases, privileges, and the role they play in the attorney-client relationship. This Article urges law professors and legal professionals to operationalize critical legal theories into practice, and ultimately to develop experiential pedagogies to teach these critical lawyering skills. This call to developing new pedagogies is particularly urgent in the wake of nationwide uprisings in response to the killing of George Floyd and others, as well as corresponding law schools' commitments to identify and dismantle institutional racism. In this Article, we first set forth the contours of the canonical client interviewing pedagogy. Second, we outline the tenets of critical lawyering--a lawyering practice animated by critical legal theories. Next, we advance the pedagogy of critical interviewing, building upon client-centered lawyering texts. We describe one methodology of teaching critical interviewing: the Legal Interviewing and Language Access films. Ideally positioned to use with virtual, hybrid, or in person learning, these videos raise a multitude of issues, including addressing bias and collaborating with clinic partners, interpreters, and clients. Finally, the Article considers areas ripe for further exploration within critical interviewing, concluding with a call for engagement with new pedagogical tools to teach critical interviewing, along with other aspects of critical lawyering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]