An unusual balance of skills: dyslexia in higher education

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2003 by Jonathan W. Doering

DYSLEXIA is a singular condition. Concerning as it does brain processes, it is 'invisible'. Many dyslexics function entirely well in social and professional situations, to the extent that many lay people may be unaware that they have any condition at all. Yet dyslexia affects as much as four per cent of the British population, posing often severe obstacles to such things as learning, written expression, and personal organisation.

Of course levels of dyslexia vary, and even extreme dyslexia need be no barrier to achievement. Many figures in the public eye are now known to be dyslexic: the poet Benjamin Zephaniah; actors Julie Christie, Bob Hoskins, and Sarah Miles; the journalist A. A. Gill; comedian Eddie Izzard; and film director Guy Ritchie are all notable examples.

Educational opportunity is a powerful means to overcoming problems posed by dyslexia, yet sectors of the British educational establishment seem still to be forming a nascent attitude and approach where dyslexia is concerned. This is despite the fact that one of the foremost researchers in Britain, Professor Tim Miles of the University of Bangor, first encountered dyslexia in 1949 in a child thought to have aphasia. His growing realisation that this was a discrete condition led to developing research, and a paper, Two Cases of Developmental Aphasia. Whilst his work in Bangor and London was welcomed by patients and fellow researchers, other parties attempted to limit the concept: 'Initially some people wanted me to state that the condition was rare.... Now it's anything but rare!' Professor Miles identifies the three means of addressing dyslexia as research, assessment, and teaching, goals he has dedicated much of his career to achieving, although there was gathering momentum elsewhere as well: 'At the time, th e Americans were far ahead on teaching; we arrived independently at what was considered to be good practice'. Growing acceptance of the condition was not entirely untroubled, however; Professor Miles describes the first reports on the issue as 'not constructive'. The breakthrough came in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Warnock Report discussed 'special educational need'; in 1987, the British Government recognised dyslexia as a condition, although it seems to have taken until the present for a general dyslexia policy even to be conceptualised. Even now, professionals speak of how individual institutions fail in provision: 'In smaller colleges there is less support [than in larger institutions], and in some it's non-existent' is one comment. I remember as a student in the early 1 990s hearing of local authorities that were reluctant to recognise the condition, in order to reduce the amount of funding they would have to provide.

For many years dyslexia has been a concept that lay people in Britain were generally aware of, but often did not specifically understand. As stated in the Report of the National Working Party on Dyslexia in Higher Education, Dyslexia in Higher Education: Policy, Provision, Practice (1999) [hereafter called the 'Singleton Report']:

The popular image of dyslexia is that it is a difficulty with reading -- something to do with the misperception of printed words. This image may to some extent have been perpetuated by the continuing fondness of the media for the use of the antiquated and misleading term, 'word blindness' [... ] but [dyslexics.] difficulties are more likely to be due to limitations in memory and anomalies in processing certain types of language-related information. (p.25, quoting Frith, 'Brain, mind, and behaviour in dyslexia', in Dyslexia: Biology, Cognition and Intervention, C. Hulme and M. Snowling (Eds.); 1997, pp. 1-19)

Therefore, dyslexics' difficulties do not come from an inherent inability to read and write language, but rather a fundamental disorder in the brain which causes inputted information not to be processed and stored in a conventional, generally linear fashion. Information can be passed spontaneously and erratically between different areas of the brain, affecting memory or some other aspects of learning, irrespective of a subject's intelligence level and general learning abilities. This form of dyslexia is often 'developmental', appearing in subjects from birth, having a neurological root, and may be genetic. The other main form of dyslexia, acquired', is the result of some trauma or illness, causing deterioration in literacy skills.

I remember as a child watching a television programme where an actress discussed her dyslexia, and demonstrated how her condition necessitated that she wear specially-prescribed lenses to read her scripts. I remember there being pauses in her reading of text that were slightly longer than what one might expect if a non-dyslexic had been reading. This sort of awareness-raising report (of twenty years ago) was, I believe, good and useful in its time. Making the public aware that there was such a condition, some of the major implications of it for peoples' everyday lives, and how many people employed tactics to deal successfully with these implications, was a vital step towards general acceptance and support.