From Percy to Peter

Jenni Beard

Description

Based on the experience of bringing-up a dyslexic child, this book deals with the myths and realities of dyslexia. By an experienced teacher of children of various ages.

Sujets

• Literacy

Informations

• Publié par: Waterside Press
• Date de parution: 02 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910979792
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

From Percy to Peter
A History of Dyslexia
Jenni Beard
Copyright and publication details
From Percy to Peter: A History of Dyslexia
Jenni Beard
ISBN 978-1-909976-67-2 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-910979-79-2 (Epub ebook)
ISBN 978-1-910979-80-8 (Adobe ebook)
Copyright © 2019 This work is the copyright of Jenni Beard. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by the author in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide.
Cover design © 2019 Waterside Press by www.gibgob.com with assistance from Esther North.
Printed and bound Severn, Gloucester, UK.
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH . Tel: [phone]; [e-mail] ; www.gardners.com
North American distribution Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd, La Vergne, TN 37086, USA. Tel: [phone]; [e-mail]
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
Ebook From Percy to Peter: A History of Dyslexia is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of Ebrary, Ebsco, Myilibrary and Dawsonera.
Published 2019 by
Waterside Press Ltd.
Sherfield Gables, Sherfield on Loddon,
Hook, Hampshire, RG27 0JG.
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Table of Contents
About the author v
Acknowledgements vi
Dedication vii
Introduction 9
The beginnings 11 Questions 13 What Happened After Percy? 43 The Pioneers 69
Grace Rattenbury 70
Macdonald Critchley 71
Helen Arkell 73
Alfred White Franklin 74
Gill Cotterell 76
Tim and Elaine Miles 78
Sandhya Naidoo 80
Maisie Holt 82 The Conference 85
The morning 87
The afternoon 92
The summing-up 101
Next steps 104 Class, Madness and Charities 107 The Word Blind Centre 117 A Taste of Research at the Time of the Word Blind Centre 163 The Final Conference 173 What Happened Next? 185 In Conclusion 193 One More Thing 199
Pre-school 200
Coping strategies for school starters 201
Practical day-to-day help 202
Coping strategies for the older learner 203
My personal coping strategies 204
Peter’s coping strategies 205
Index 206
About the author
Jenni Beard went to school in Surrey and Sussex. Her higher education took place at Whitelands College of Education, where she obtained her teaching certificate and Goldmiths, University of London, where she completed a diploma course in textile design. She undertook the British Dyslexia Association Diploma Course for teaching those with Specific Learning Difficulties (Dyslexia) before obtaining an MA in Biography at Buckingham University.
She has worked as an infants teacher, playgroup leader, night school teacher, textile technician, technical tutor, supply teacher, secondary school special needs teacher and university support adviser.
A mother of three and grandmother of four she is a gardener, knitter and lover of dogs.
Jenni Beard did not discover that she was dyslexic until her son Peter was diagnosed with the condition following which she came to realise that she too was affected by it, though it took some years after that for her to undergo a formal assessment.
Acknowledgements
So many people have helped me on this journey that I am bound to miss some out and to them my apologies.
David McLoughlin and the British Dyslexia Association for starting me on this course of study and thought.
The Buckingham University Biography Group and particularly Professor Jane Ridley for the tools and inspiration to write this work.
The pioneers of the dyslexic movement, Tim Miles, Sandhya Naidoo, Gill Cotterell, Helen Arkell and Bevè Hornsby who were kind enough to talk to me but also to all of those I met through their writings.
Davison School, Worthing for the giving me the courage to become a teacher.
Lastly, but of course not least, my wonderful children: Charlotte, Esther and Peter and my oldest friends and supporters Anthea Chambers and Penny Guy.
Dedication
In memory of Robert John Beard 1947–2018, husband, supporter and best friend.
Introduction
Word-blind, what can this mean? Not being able to see words, ignoring them, turning a blind-eye? Word-blind was the term used at the turn of the twentieth century and for many decades to describe dyslexic people. Many other terms were used to describe the condition, including dyslexia itself, but the group of people who came together at the beginning of the 1960s to act for dyslexic people decided to adopt the term word-blind and called their research and teaching unit the Word Blind Centre.
Discovering that you are dyslexic is an odd experience, a mixture of relief and irritation. All the little methods you have of remembering and organizing your life seem normal to you and you think this is the way everyone functions, but to find this is not so is isolating. Understanding that you are dyslexic may take years and for many adults this realisation may be the result of first discovering that their child has the condition. Undertaking an assessment resolves the question “Am I dyslexic or just thick?”
If you do take the plunge and get yourself assessed and discover, yes, you do have the condition there is relief but also anger. Knowledge does help you to understand why childhood was difficult and why it took years to come out of the “pea soup” that is a dyslexic child’s world but there is also a welter of “if onlys” to contend with. This book is mainly about children and luckily more of them are recognised as being dyslexic at an early age and for them I hope life is sunnier than it was before the Word Blind Centre.
This book is an attempt to document historically the place the dyslexic child has found within education. The Dyslexia Institute wisely recommends that a teacher of dyslexics has taught the average child before he or she can recognise the odd educational mixture that is the dyslexic child. Note “average” not “normal” because, as taught in the 1960s, there is no such animal as the latter; each child is an individual and will have his or her own strengths and weaknesses.
The dyslexia movement has sought to show that dyslexic people have a pattern of difficulties that are different to the average child but that they can be helped by basic good teaching. To view the dyslexic child we need to see where he or she fits within the history of education. The first documented account of a dyslexic child was in 1896 with a boy called Percy, but Percy can’t have been the first dyslexic child. Prior to Percy did anyone notice such children and, if they did, did they care? What schools were available, what literature was there to read, who was taught to read and write and who were the teachers?
All the works on dyslexia mention Percy but few go into detail about the research into non-readers between 1896 and the Word Blind Centre which started in the early-1960s. However, there was a lot of work on the subject; it just didn’t come under the title of word-blind or dyslexia and it takes a little imagination to realise that often the researchers were looking at dyslexic children as well as other non-readers. Alfred White Franklin was to pull together the many threads that made up the research into the word-blind and as a result, through the Invalid Children’s Aid Association (ICAA), called a conference in 1961 to look into the subject of dyslexia then called word-blindness.
This is jumping ahead, because to understand why Percy’s parents and teachers were worried about his non-reading it is necessary to look at schools in the late-Victorian period and how schooling progressed from that of the mainly religious-based establishments of the middle-ages to the huge institutions seen at the end of the nineteenth century. The researchers looking at non-reading children and how to teach them require a chapter of their own as do the people who were active in the dyslexia movement in the 1960s and beyond: see The Pioneers ( Chapter Six ). This brings us to the stormy 1961 conference ( Chapter Four ).
The Word Blind Centre ( Chapter Six ) is at the heart of this work but it was necessary to divert a little into some of the norms and pressures of the time which gave me Chapter Five , Class, Madness and Charities and another side-step into parents, friends and pupils. The concluding chapters review the work undertaken by the Word Blind Centre and what has come out of it. Chapter Nine asks What Happened Next? Currently dyslexia still appears periodically in the news and experts are still arguing, so there is no definite conclusion (my own thoughts towards the end this book must be seen in this light).
This book is also a group biography looking at not just at the syndrome dyslexia but the people who worked in the field, the detractors, and the physical space at Coram’s Fields that was the Word Blind Centre. Hopefully, those involved, be they dyslexics, parents or educators will feel less isolated when they see how old is the struggle and how worthwhile the cause. It is in no way a scientific work but references have been included by way of footnotes for those who want to look in more depth at any given aspect. With dyslexics in mind it is possible to read the chapters separately, to change the order or leave chunks out completely.
The beginnings
So to begin with, in November 1896, an article by Dr W Pringle Morgan entitled “A Case of Congenital Word-blindness” appeared in the British Medical Journal. 1 This initiated the research into dyslexia and all the arguments that were to follow. In it he described a 14-year-old boy “Percy F”, who could not read. Percy was a clever boy, a teenager he would be called nowadays. Pringle Morgan writes of Perc