Visualizing Literate Dis/ability in the Science of Reading: Untangling Promises of Professionalizing Teacher Knowledge

• In Event: The New Sciences of Teaching: Theorizing Their Differences and Exclusions

Abstract

Objectives
As of 2022, almost all states in the U.S. have passed bills addressing dyslexia as it relates to K-12 education, pre-service teacher education, and in-service teacher professional development (National Center on Improving Literacy, 2022). Started as Dyslexia Initiatives focused on “a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin” (International Dyslexia Association, 2002), these policies are now shaping the discourse of the Science of Reading (SOR). Now, the SOR not only targets students with learning disabilities but functions as generalized theories and methods for reading instruction. This study asks what constitutes ‘science’ and ‘scientific evidence’ in the SOR. Particularly, it explores how claims of the child’s plasticity are integrated with teacher professional knowledge grounded on certain notions of science, evidence, truth, and knowledge.

Theoretical Perspectives
This study examines the interdisciplinary nature of scientific knowledge (Youdell et al., 2020) within teacher professional knowledge. It draws on sociologies of language (Aukerman & Chambers Schuldt, 2021; Flores, 2021) and visual Science and Technology Studies (Baker & Saari, 2020; Galison, 2014) to critically think about how teacher professional knowledge of reading instruction is constructed with particular notions of scientific evidence. Dyslexia and the SOR are outcomes of historical, cultural, and social discourses to construct the literate person, whose initial illiteracy is made intelligible through techniques of biology, neurology, and physiology all grounded on racialized systems (Artiles et al., 2016).

Methods and Sources
This study historically examines the social epistemes that guide scientific discourses of reading instruction. Centering questions of race in analyzing the changing meaning of ‘science’ in literacy teacher education (see Rosa & Flores, 2017), this paper questions how the ‘scientific study’ of reading development continues today without challenging the racialized epistemes grounding its visualizations of reading dis/ability (Flores, 2021). The analysis draws on peer-reviewed research articles, research reports, and news articles published between 2000 and 2022 that pertain to SOR and its pedagogical implications.

Warrants for Argument
The “racialization of literacy” (Watkins & Rury, 2021) continues in today’s education reforms through an apparatus comprised of structured literacy, evidence-based instruction, and the SOR. This apparatus shapes teachers’ perceptions by offering pedagogical implications to guide “all” students to read, while reinscribing distinctions (e.g., literate dis/ability). The epistemic authorization for today’s SOR reforms is produced through ocular technologies that visualize parts of the body previously considered invisible (i.e., the function of the brain when reading) (see Baker & Saari, 2020). The resulting visualization reinscribes racialized epistemes as central to teacher professional knowledge. While claims to directly see the child’s plastic brain functioning appear to contradict past racisms associated with fixity and biological determinism (Schuller, 2018), assumptions embedded in the apparatus of inherited literacy assessments continue to produce racializing and ableizing effects.

Significance
The study extends scholarship questioning the social constructions that make it possible to (un)see ‘race’ (Obasogie, 2014) in scientized practices of education. Researchers and policymakers should ask how the framings of scientific discourses in education contribute to socially just education by interrogating the intersections of science, racialization, and literate dis/ability.

Author

• Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University
  Presenting Author