Reading

Tomkins and Steinbeck: What A Shame

Learning about the power of shame began as one of the most important chapters in my life and work. Dr. Gary David, a gifted jazz vocalist, epistemologist, philosopher, affect theorist-therapist and ultimately great friend mentored me into Tomkins. Beyond the theoretical correlations with my learning-work, Gary challenged me to apply Tomkins to learning about the

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PQs and the Visual Word Form Area

VWFA research does not directly validate PQs. What it does reveal is a neural architecture of reading that makes the kind of intervention PQs performs especially interesting. The most relevant finding is that the VWFA is not simply a photographic “whole-word recognizer.” With literacy, left ventral occipitotemporal cortex becomes increasingly tuned to the visual regularities

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Organic Phonemes and Invented Spellings

We are describing two realities. A tale of two language systems. One is the inside-out real life learned auditory discriminations that children non consciously make in order to bootstrap their participation in their real world language environment. The other is the outside-in abstractly analytical set of phonemic conventions linguists and orthographists have developed and reading

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After Decades of Literacy Improficiency…

I had been sharing images of the latest U.S. reading scores since 2003. Usually in the form of stop signs, like these from 2003, 2017, and 2023. Watching these scores remain so close to flatline for 20 years led me to create a video called “A Brief Tour Through Decades of U.S. Reading Scores“. 

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Children of the Code: The Code and the Challenge of Learning to Read It

“Children of the Code*” is a documentary project that explores the “Code and the Challenge of Learning to Read It“.   It’s based on over 100 interviews with field leading scientists and scholars (overview of interviewees, transcripts, raw videos). The series distills over 1000 hours of conversations into 130 video components organized into 10 chapters. For

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