Why the social model of dyslexia?

My summer office

Hello there all,

Dr Ross Cooper 2006 wrote, “We challenge the deficit models of dyslexia in favour of a social model that maintains that we are not ‘disabled’ by our dyslexia, but by the expectations of the world we live in.  There is nothing ‘wrong’ with being dyslexic per se". 

We would argue that dyslexia is an experience that arises out of natural human diversity on the one hand and a world on the other where the early learning of literacy, and good personal organisation and working memory is mistakenly used as a marker of ‘intelligence’. The problem here is seeing difference incorrectly as ‘deficit’.

Put in practical terms, for example, it is disabling to expect that everyone:

• thinks in the same way as each other, when dyslexic people are more likely to think visually than verbally (or laterally than logically, or intuitively than deductively….)
• learns to read in the same way; reading is about accessing meaning, the rest is merely strategy and there is always more than one way to learn anything.
• makes sense of information in the same way (they don’t, which is why multi-sensory information is easier for everyone to understand).
• can take in multiple instructions.
• can learn to take notes while trying to listen.”

Ta for reading:

Steve #UniqueDyslexic McCue