Update from Alan

It’s been a long time since our last blog and it’s down to me! It’s my turn. I said I’d do it and I meant to do it and then I really, really meant to do it. Still here I am at last.

 

The literacy research is going very well. From what was initially a trickle we’ve since had a flood of responses, about 250 to date, and from all over the world. From an initial glance at the replies it seems we’ve struck gold. For us it’s like a breath of fresh air. 

 

When you think of all the debate about what’s the best way to teach children to read in school undertaken by academics with years and years of training and research between them. And they are virtually all adamant that children in school need to be professionally taught to read or they’ll end up illiterate. They simply don’t counter the possibility of an alternative. Home educators are much more open minded. They are happy to explore all kinds of ways of becoming literate, many of which challenge so called professional expertise. And yet they are open minded enough not to deny that some children might need to be taught using professionally designed materials. 

 

We’ve already explored learning to read as part of our wider research but we can now focus on it much more widely and at greater depth. It will be some time before can share our new findings with you though we will be informally describing our first eyeballing of data at a talk we’ll be giving at HesFes in July.