Latest / Learn Literacy Podcast / 20. History of Dyslexia Part 10: Hinshelwood Recap

Transcript

20. History of Dyslexia Part 10: Hinshelwood Recap · Learn Literacy Podcast

• Cheryl Urbanczyk: Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of the Learn Literacy Podcast, where we focus on language for life by teaching literacy through language and structure. The purpose of today's episode is to provide a wrap-up and set of reflections on Dr. James Hinselwood's 1917 congenital word blindness text that we've been reading together over the past several episodes. I shared a lot during that time, but I thought it would be neat to do a recap and consolidate some things. Okay, so I'll start with a quick overview of the different chapters. and share some thoughts as we go along. as a reminder, Dr. James Hinchelwood was a Scottish ep ophthalmologist working, from the early 1900s He wrote his book in 1917 and the idea he had was to put his life work together. in this book on congenital word blindness. if you're just joining us, congenital word blindness is what people called dyslexia then. and they reserved the term dyslexia for an acquired injury or illness or or something like that. So he noted many cases and and has lots of information and compiled all these things together. so chapter one was called Acquired Word Blindness, and he uses this chapter to set the stage for the rest of the book. it was really important to him to start this way to document what acquired word blindness is. he shares some cases of people who lost the ability to read due to injury or disease or some something happening in their brain. And he was concerned with the variety of types of loss of reading from learning from reading letters, words, numbers, musical notes, that kind of thing. So today in our current context and conversation on reading, we pretty much only focus on reading letters and words. But then he looked at reading in a more broader fashion, like of any input the I is taking in that could be reading. whether it's musical notes, mathematical numbers, They were also concerned with anatomy, like what parts of the brain were injured and how that might have been impacting the loss of skills. And so some of the chapter he gets into technical details about that, which I somewhat glossed over because it's technical information and I I don't have the skill set to do a compare contrast to to modern day things, but they do mention the angular gyrus as being an area that's affected due to disease or injury in a acquired word blindness and that is one of the brain regions in neurodiverse people with dyslexia that is working in a different way that we find today. Hinshawood also talks about in this chapter re-education and could these people relearn to read. Some could and some could not. I I'm sure there's a whole host of factors and reasons for why they could or could not, depending on the nature of the injury or illness, how severe it was, and the skills people had to move forward. chapter two is called congenital word blindness, and here he sets up the stage for outlining what congenital word blindness is as a thing, meaning you have this condition from birth as opposed to acquiring it later in life. So here he is stating that for whatever reason some people are born. With great challenges in learning how to read, and he's using the concept of acquired word blindness to inform understanding of congenital word blindness, that people who have acquired word blindness have injury to certain areas of their brain that prevent them from reading, but people could be born with a brain structure and function. That is very similar to what it's like when people have brain injury, and that these affected areas make it very challenging for people to learn how to read just because of how how their brain functions and the neurodiverse profile that they have. So that's a conceptual overview. And he really stresses that they were able to figure this out because of the work on. Word blindness. He presents a bunch of case studies of different children with congenital word blindness and profiles them and their skill sets. He focuses on different forms of reading as well, like can they read music? Can they read figures? He uses the term figures to mean numbers and compares. skills along a range of areas in terms of letters, words, figures, and musical notes. He also gives information at that time about how multisensory components could be used and supported and he uses this term glossokinesthetic, which refers to The the use of the voice box, the articulation in your mouth, and how these features could support students to jog their memory, so to speak, of letters, words, pronunciations as a way to help them. He also is very clear on what he calls the purity of the symptoms. So in his definition, this purity of the symptoms of congenital word blindness is that it's not intellectual. and so he's saying that in other aspects of learning or, in conversation, that the child has no other concerns in other areas, let's say that, there's no overall intellectual concerns. there is that difference today where we know dyslexia can occur. with various intellectual profiles. Okay. He talks about another aspect of the purity of the symptom being oral instruction. How many of the cases he documented and even in that episode when we talked about Percy and his profile, that the student could be the brightest in the class if the instruction was all oral and the student could give their answers orally or take oral exams or or that type of thing. And the other aspect of purity of symptom that he mentions is that they do not learn to read. That they learn other skills quite fine and there's no problems there, but the inability to read is a key factor for him and that it's quite severe. Right. It's not just, they're struggling a little bit and need a little extra help, but it's in opposition to some of these other things or aspects of profile that the child has, right? That they have skills in other areas, quite able to learn orally and share information orally and that type of thing. So that's chapter two. Chapter three talks about hereditary congenital word blindness. And he gives some case studies of families where there's multiple children or relations in families where they have congenital word blindness. So this is an easy chapter to summarize because he's using that chapter to show the hereditary component to it. And we do know today that dyslexia has a hereditary component. But it is not deterministic, right? Then the last two chapters are just really fascinating. It's chapter four diagnosis and chapter five prognosis and treatment. So if we think back to 1917, we may think, wow, the diagnosis was so different, maybe, than what we were doing today, and how could they figure it out? And the chapter is quite fascinating because he does talk about some really interesting things that we see even as recurring themes today. One of the things he talks about in some detail is lack of precision and diagnosis, and that different people are talking about how do you diagnose it? What's the criteria, all that kind of thing. And we see echoes of conversations about that today. the International Dyslexia Association and Orton Gillingham Academy both Dated their definitions of dyslexia to incorporate more recent learning and and research evidence and so forth. And the definitions are complex and some people argue that the term dyslexia should just be used for the very small percentage of children who are very struggling as opposed to the fifteen to twenty percent of the population that has dyslexia as estimated by the International Dyslexia Association. So, Hinshelwood does mention this scale of severity in his diagnosis chapter. That where how how do you figure that out, right? If you do have this sliding scale of severity, at what point is there a cutoff, right? Especially as you move to more mild symptoms of dyslexia. it's how do you determine that one point on the scale where one point, away you don't have dyslexia and one point the other direction you do. So these are still current concerns today. So he reiterates again in this chapter that the conditions he's looking for for diagnosing dyslexia, that this purity of symptoms concept, that it's not related to intellect. So again, we have different information about the role of intellectual profiles and dyslexia today, but what he's saying in his book is that it's not related to intellect. You know, children can have learning on par with others in their class, but the but they do not learn how to read. so he's saying that the intellect is intact and the gravity of the defect is that they are not learning to read in in a way that's remarkedly noticeable compared to other skills. When he is talking about diagnosis, he does mention that that these children struggle to learn by instruction that works for other kids or cannot be taught by ordinary methods is his phrasing. So, you know, the ordinary methods he talks about them in his book at the in his day were the look say method or whole word memorizing and phonics. So this is something that we do see in conversation and in in definitions today that the the child with dyslexia is not able to learn to read with evidence based instructions that works for other children or instruction that allows other children to learn how to read. so there's a disconnect there. Other kids are learning to read and they're doing fine. The child with dyslexia is not and he is noticing that too. He reiterates again about auditory memory, that these children are able to hear and listen and remember things, and they have a good auditory memory for what's around them. And he talks about his own method of assessing students, which has a lot of similar components to what we do today. He asks them to write the alphabet, he asks them to name letters, he asks them to try to read from a book. He notes aspects of handwriting and spelling. And he does other assessments for mathematical numbers, musical notes and other things that we don't include. But aspects of what he was trying to do for assessment show very early signs of the same way we do the assessment today. we might do more things in phonological awareness, decoding maybe nonsense words and real words and more details and things like that. But at least, he tried his best to have a system in place to come up with a diagnosis based on a method of assessment using his expertise to have some standard way of applying his definition of congenital word blindness and looking for the purity of symptoms that he wanted to see. The other thing he stressed is that it's not pathological, meaning it's not, an inherent defect, but it is physiological, meaning there's a brain difference. And this is a big, big thing that learning disabilities advocates have really struggled with that. it's not that there's an inherent problem with a person with a learning disability. There could be a physiological difference or maybe something else going on under the scope of neurodiversity that is causing this. And so when we understand it from that lens and viewpoint, we can think about, the treatment methods, how can we help, all that kind of thing, as opposed to assuming that there's something wrong with the person, for example. So, that's what he talks about in diagnosis. the last chapter is prognosis and treatment. very rich chapter. You can go back and listen to any one of these individual chapter episodes if you want to hear the chapter read aloud with some of my thoughts added in. So really interesting thing he talks about in this chapter is the importance of reading. As a equity and life issue for people. He was very clear to say that regardless of social class or income, all children should have access to reading so that they can get gainful employment and so that they can realize themselves as people. So it's very interesting that the employment argument we all understand. We all need to work and all that kind of stuff. But it was very interesting to me how he added in that. People have a right to learn how to read for self-fulfillment, to further learning, to develop themselves as people. I thought that was really neat. And we know within the past years there's a lot of movements with, reading as equity, reading as a human right, reading as social justice, like all of that kind of thing. And he was advocating for that. Over a hundred years ago. He talks about the role of many of these students having compensatory strategies that mask their inability to read, like memorizing their primer book so that when it was their turn in the lesson, they would just know what to say because they had memorized it. And this is so true today that many children have very strong compensatory strategies because they have to figure out a way to do something because they can't read. And sometimes for some students, it's really hard to work around those strategies. You need a very detailed assessment to figure out what they are so you can teach them the skills that they need. Because there's some students who have been so good at memorizing things or compensating in other ways that when we get to teach them, the decoding and encoding. That they actually apply those skills as opposed to their compensatory strategies. He talks about the role of personal instruction, that these children must be taught one-on-one outside of the regular class. he states that it would hurt the self-esteem of the child, I'm paraphrasing here, if they were taught with the class, so it's it's better to teach them one-to-one or on their own. So he's showing such dignity and care for these children that that their emotional and social well being is very key and paramount to the process of of remediation and that They need special methods, And he in his prognosis and treatment chapter talks about using phonics-based strategies as opposed to the look-say memorizing method. So he was an an advocate of teaching phonics. he believed in individualized instruction. So one-to-one, yes, but individualized in the sense that you know there's not a program that's specific that every student with dyslexia can do this program and then they're magically great. That the teaching is tailored to the individual and supports them where they're at. He also talks about instructional methods that you have to take care not to introduce too much at once, to give breaks, to do a little bit every day as opposed to all at once. So to me, this is a modern parallel to the cognitive overload learning that's been happening recently, that we don't want to overwhelm kids, we don't want to burden their cognitive working memory. And so he is noticing and and giving this as strategies from that time that you give little breaks. he's also talking about multi-sensory strategies. He talked about the wooden blocks that had the letters carved in them that the children could feel, early echoes again to the use of multisensory, multimodal instruction, and how that sensory input is so important to strengthen. various aspects of learning and connections in the brain. And then he ends the book on a very hopeful note that if we can intervene early, because early intervention is another big thing that he talks about, we should try to support as soon as we can before that window closes. Even though it's never closed, remediation looks different with older students and it can take longer. But he is very hopeful. And that's such a great way for him to end with this hope that these children can learn. So if we do some comparing to then and now, what are we seeing as common themes between his book and what's happening today in the dyslexia environment is we see that reading is a human right concept that kids need to learn how to read and schools should provide that, and students should have the remediation that's supportive to them. Another theme is the dignity of the student and mental health and well-being aspect or trauma-informed practices. He understands that these children have a profile where unique individualized instruction must be provided in a setting, that. that does not display their weakness or inability to do things, for example in front of the rest of the class, but is in a setting that supports them. He also talked in one of his chapters about the role of interest and purpose and learning how to read. And he talked about a s a young man who taught himself to read because he was really interested in soccer and wanted to read the paper about the local soccer matches. So he taught himself to read and learn soccer terms so that he could do so. And a lot of our conversation today is around that same concept. where can we support the student with capturing their interest in text that we provide them, representative text, that kind of thing to kind of pull the student into the reading process with their interests and move them along that way. One of the things he mentions in his book is that dyslexia is not rare, that it's just not recognized. And I would say this is still true today. We are still working on a lot of education for teachers and for people in general about what dyslexia is and how to recognize it and red flags. And one of his goals with writing the book was to diffuse knowledge about it. And he talks about in the book how he always teaches his medical students about dyslexia, or called congenital word blindness at that time, so they could look out for it. we are finding today that many people might have misconceptions about dyslexia, that it's about, reversing letters and that type of thing, but that's not what it is. And so that knowledge is so critical, especially in teacher education programs, that they start getting this information about what the concerns are so that they can look for red flags or warnings or or that type of thing. And then he stresses that it's an approach that When you work with students, you individualize and you support them where they're at, as opposed to applying, a one-size-fits-all program. So these are some common themes. What are some things that we no longer do? I I would say assessing kids for reading in other areas like numbers and musical notes. although it would be interesting to start including some. Aspects of profile related, let's say, to math, because we know kids with dyslexia are neurodiverse, and that neurodiversity can affect other areas of learning. But for now, so much of our assessment is just reading-based only. And so in terms of wrapping up this overview, when I think about fast forwarding from nineteen seventeen to today twenty twenty six, when we look at the Orton Gillingham principles and, the structured literacy principles, so many of them are very common to what Hinschelwood was espousing, like individualizing. Okay. You look at the class in front of you, the group in front of you, the student in front of you, and teach to that. you don't teach from the program. That we know that the decoding and encoding process is what is needed to teach kids to read, not look say or memorizing whole words, right? That method is not supported by evidence. The evidence base supports teaching decoding. using graphemes, phonemes, morphemes, that type of thing. That we need individual teaching to meet the unique needs of the dyslexic learner. That the instruction that might work for everybody does not work for them. And so they need teaching to meet their needs. And this is what we need in schools today through structured literacy or in Gillingham in tier two, tier three settings. And not just more of the same of what they got in the regular classroom, but maybe slower. The use of multi-sensory, multimodal strategies, visual, auditory, articulation, touch, kinesthetic. He talks about all these things, these processes and ways of learning are still used today. Even instructional principles. Direct instruction, tell students what it is, work in small doses, right? Don't overwhelm. and ending on believing in students that and to be hopeful. We can all think about students that we've taught to learn how to read, other people I've interviewed, I know through my own practice. other colleagues that we know kids can learn how to read. We believe in them and we support them. And so, Hinshawood is saying that we always have to have hope for these students and that we can teach them to learn to read. So thank you for being here for this ra re reflection and summary of Dr. James Hinchelwood's 1917 book, Congenital Word Blindness. I hope you found it useful and learned a whole bunch of information. And so please share this with other people. You can like and subscribe to the podcast and keep tuning in. We'll be having some other areas of history of dyslexia coming up now that we've finished Hinschelwood. And I look forward to sharing that information with you then. Thank you.