Tanglde in Tetx: What I Want You to Know About My Dyslexic Self

• In Event: 42.067 - Voices of Students With Disabilities in Science Education

Abstract

The purpose of this session is for participants to vicariously enter into the lived experience two dyslexic learners—one who, because of the high level of parental support and professional interventions, came to view his dyslexia as a gift in a highly skilled STEM profession, and the other who, because of her low SES, lack of either parental support or intervention, dropped out of school, suffered profound depression, and found herself on welfare—until she, too, found the kind of support and intervention she needed. Conquergood (1998), wrote that the performance paradigm privileges “an experiential, participatory epistemology” (p. 27) and argued that only through shared emotional experiences can a performance achieve transformation. He called on ethnographers to write text which “interrogates, criticizes, and empowers” (1985, Denzin, 2003, p. 55). I take these directives very much to heart, as they resonate not only with my artistic self but, the science education researcher who has come to know and care deeply for the plight of the dyslexic teacher and learner.

The Disability Studies in Education AERA SIG aspires to 1) includes disabled people in theorizing about disability and 2) recognizes and privileges the knowledge derived from the lived experience of people with disabilities, regarding them as informed participants or co-researchers (AERA, 2015). In keeping with the mission of this SIG, I sat at the feet of those who live with dyslexia every single day. I asked them what they would have a science teacher know about them, and they flat out told me. Each individual, from age 9 to 70, told me a similar story—they have two choices: 1) Give up, or 2) Find a way through and up, refusing to become just another educational post mortem statistic. In short, you need both grit and perseverance to survive as a dyslexic in an educational system that privileges text over all other methods of communicating content.

I accept Conquergood’s call to action and have attempted to give voice to a diverse group of dyslexic teachers and learners who want very much to be heard and understood. Through semi-structured interviews, they were asked to share the following: their own personal experiences with learning science; what matters to them; how they would teach science to dyslexics, strategies they have used to hide the shame of being dyslexic and “stupid”; and what they might “invent” to ease the struggles associated with being dyslexic. As in previous work (Author, 2015), I chose to poetically transcribe participant interviews, employing Lunsford Mears (2009, 2019) gateway approach: the presentation of data in ways that create what Glesne (1997) called a “third voice” that is “neither the interviewees nor the researcher’s but a combination of both” (p. 183). In the final re-presentation of the data, I adopted a mixed-media approach, creating a collage of ethnopoetics, Readers’ Theatre scripts, meant to evoke the distinct and unified voices of the performers.

Author

• Merrie Koester, University of South Carolina