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Jeannine Herron has led a remarkable life. She is an accomplished neurobiologist, educator, research psychologist, software developer, author, and entrepreneur. In this episode you’ll learn about her involvement in the civil rights movement and how this led to directing the first Head Start program, her family’s year-and-a-half sailing journey to West Africa, her groundbreaking research, and her current work. Jeannine continues her relentless devotion to the cause of literacy for all, and her greatest hope is a “literacy revolution.” This episode is a fascinating look at a fascinating life.
Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children. The podcast features guests whose life stories are compelling and rich in ways that are instructive to us all. The podcast focuses on literacy as we know it (reading and writing) but will also connect to other “literacies” that impact children’s learning; for example, emotional, physical, and social literacies as they apply to teachers and children.
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Reading Horizons supports educators with powerful techenabled foundational reading instruction that helps all students reach reading proficiency by the end of third grade. For nearly 40 years, Reading Horizons method has aligned with the evolution of the science of reading, empowering over 500 educators with evidencedbased teaching strategies that prevent and remediate students reading difficulties. Reading Momentum begins with Reading Horizons.
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Hello everyone, and welcome to Teaching, Reading and Learning the Trod. I'm Laura Stewart, your host. The focus of this podcast is to elevate important contributions and contributors in education in order to celebrate, inspire, and inform all of us in this community. My guest today is Dr. Janine Harris. Janine has led a remarkable life. She is an accomplished neurobiologist, educator, research psychologist, software developer, author, and entrepreneur. She has truly done it all. In this episode, you'll learn many things. You'll learn about her involvement in the civil Rights movement and how that led to her directing to First Test Start program. You'll learn about her family's year and a half sailing journey to West Africa, her groundbreaking research, and you'll learn about her current work because she continues her relentless devotion to the cause of literacy for all and her greatest hope is a literacy revolution. This episode is a fascinating look and a fascinating life. Now please note for those of you watching this podcast on YouTube, there's going to be a camera angle missing, but it will not get in the way of this terrific conversation with the one and only Janine. Harry, I hope you enjoy this episode.
[00:02:11.710] - Speaker 1
Welcome, Janine, to the podcast.
[00:02:14.230] - Speaker 3
Hi, Laura. Nice to see you.
[00:02:16.560] - Speaker 1
It's so great to see you. I just have to ask you, I know this is a little off the topic, but I noticed that beautiful necklace that you're wearing. Could you tell me about that?
[00:02:26.950] - Speaker 3
Okay. Well, the glass in this necklace is glass from the stained glass window of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which was bombed and where three kids girls were killed. We were there three weeks before the bombing and attended Church in that Church. And I took my daughter down to the bathroom, which was destroyed in that bombing. And so when we came back for the funeral, I picked up some pieces of glass from the street and my father made this necklace for me.
[00:03:09.690] - Speaker 1
Oh, Janine, that's so special. We will be talking about your involvement in the civil rights movement in today's podcast. How lovely. Lovely. So, Janine, I just want to start by asking you a question that I ask other guests. What is a quote that you live by and that you return to?
[00:03:34.430] - Speaker 3
Well, I guess there would be two. One relates to our work, and that is by E. M. Forrester, who said, how do I know what I think until I see what I write? And that really got me thinking about writing and how important writing is to our thinking and the fact that we need to go back and look at our writing and clarify our thinking as we clarify the writing. Anyway, that's one quote and then a quote that I would litify. I guess it would be doing to others as you would have them doing to you. It's the main premise of all the world's religions which have gotten distorted by crusades jobs and a lot of magical thinking. But I think that's the essence of.
[00:04:31.800] - Speaker 1
What really the golden rule. That's interesting. You mentioned that, because when my kids were little, it might have even been like a Dear Abby or an Anne Lander's column. And some of our listeners won't even know what I'm talking about. But it was maybe from the local paper and it was where they had taken that basic idea of the golden rule and shown how it shows up in all major world religions in different wording. But it's essentially the golden rules.
[00:05:02.810] - Speaker 3
Right. Core.
[00:05:06.890] - Speaker 1
So, Janine, you have led a remarkable life. You have been a teacher, an activist, a research scientist, an adventurer, an editor, a writer, a developer. So I really want our listeners to kind of start just hear about your extraordinary journey. So I want to go back to where you began your teaching career, who was influential in your life, and then kind of go forward from there. So let's start with that.
[00:05:38.360] - Speaker 3
Oh, my goodness. Okay. My teaching career began in Ramola, which was in the West Bank now, but it was in Jordan at that time. In 1956, I was on a tour with my professor from Whittier College. Between my junior and senior year at Woodier. I was 19 years old, and we stayed at a Quaker school. Woodier was a Quaker school. We stayed in a Quaker school in Ramallah, and they had just lost one of their teachers. And so the principal of the girls school asked my professor if he knew somebody who might be willing to stay and teach in our group. And he suggested me and make the long story short, I stayed. He Telegraph have my parents and tried to reassure them because they needed to send their permission. Right. So they sent their message to Tel Aviv, which was across the border from the West Bank. And so I never got it. And their answer was, no, she shouldn't stay. She's too young. But I made the decision on my own to stay. And it was the best decision I've ever made in my life well, because I got very involved in teaching.
[00:07:17.830] - Speaker 3
I really loved teaching the girls. And also I met my husband, and we were married the very next few months in Beirut. We were evacuated out because of the Suez war. And so we had to hang out in Beirut waiting to see what would happen. And we decided to be married and came home not too long after that because of the strife that was going on and because it turned out I was pregnant. So it was time to come home.
[00:07:55.020] - Speaker 1
It's time to come home. And we'll talk a little bit about Matt in today's podcast as well. So who's been influential to you and your life, Janine?
[00:08:06.890] - Speaker 3
Oh, my goodness. Well, first of all, my mother and father, of course, my father was a pacifist in the First World War. I was raised as a Quaker. And he had very clear ideas about what was right and what was wrong. And he was kind of a Renaissance guy. He could build things. He was a teacher. My mother and father were both teachers. So that was a big influence on my life. Yeah. And in terms of my professional evolution, I think the first big influence on my life was Norman Geshwin, who was a neurologist in Boston in I was a student at Tulane Medical School getting my PhD. And he wrote a paper called Disconnection Theory in Disconnection Syndrome in Animals of man. And it was a blockbuster. It changed so much. And I don't know how I got it or why I read it, but it really hit me. And so we had a speaking program at the University of the Medical School, and I put in his name to come as a speaker. And he came to New Orleans and I caught him in the hall, and I was already interested in Dyslexia.
[00:10:01.320] - Speaker 3
This is 19. And I said, do you think Dyslexia is a disconnection syndrome? And he said, I don't know anything about Dyslexia, but I'll look into it. And of course, he became very influential in his work in Dyslexia.
[00:10:29.050] - Speaker 1
So you prompted him in that direction by asking that question.
[00:10:33.730] - Speaker 3
Maybe, who knows? So Norman Geshwin and then also Marion Diamond. Marion diamond was right here. I'm in the Bay Area, and she was at Berkeley, and she did such another blockbuster paper of work on plasticity in the brain. And she showed that an enriched environment actually changed the brain physically. And that was the first evidence that we had at that time, that the environment changed the frame physically. Oh, there were so many at that time. I don't know if you want to get into this, but early in the whole discussion, I was so lucky to be at the moment when we were really discovering so much about the brain. And there was such an exploration. There were the first split brain experiments, and I knew the surgeon who did the first split brain, Joe Bogan. And after that, we began to realize that the two sides of the brain did different things. And it was just a whole scramble to find out what was happening in the two sides of the brain and how things could get disconnected. It was a time when psychiatry and neurology didn't talk to each other. I did my PhD work at my postdoc work at UC San Francisco, and it was in the psychiatry Department, and there was really not much thinking about how the brain related to behavior and there was no word neuropsychology.
[00:12:27.750] - Speaker 3
So that was right at the beginning of everything. And it was very exciting.
[00:12:34.890] - Speaker 1
Can I just ask you a quick question? So you moved from to Lane to back up to and then you started this work in Stanford as a neuropsychologist?
[00:12:45.510] - Speaker 3
Well, this is what happened. My PhD adviser at Tuan was Larry Pinned. He was doing very interesting work in the lab with EEG. He's got potential with animals trying to stimulate brain. And he also had some chimps across the Lake Pontia train at the Delta Primate Center that I got to play with. But anyway, he got a grant to come to Stanford Research Institute and he moved and he said, Gee, I'm really sorry I can't be here at Too Lane to help you finish your PhD. And he said, but if you could take a year off by that time, I would have money and establish myself at Stanford Research Institute and you could come out there and finish with me. So I said, okay. And that's when we took our trip to Africa. I came and did my PhD dissertation there at Stanford Research Institute. And from there I went to UC San Francisco and did the post stop, right.
[00:14:02.500] - Speaker 1
God. Okay. So just I'm trying to get a sense of time here. Was this before or was this after you directed that Head Start project?
[00:14:14.470] - Speaker 3
That was after.
[00:14:15.840] - Speaker 1
So let's go back to that then. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about your involvement, yours and Matt's involvement, Matt's involvement in the Civil Rights movement and how that led to your Head Start project. Tell our listeners about that. That's an interesting chapter.
[00:14:31.270] - Speaker 3
As a young married couple, we were living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We were doing a lot of work with the peace movement because we both believe Matt was also a conscientious objector in the Korean War. We both believed in nonviolence. We've studied a lot of Gandhi and works about nonviolence. And we became very interested in what was happening in the south. We were just trying to stop nuclear testing and that sort of thing. I belonged to a group called Women Strike for Peace, and we did all kinds of very creative things like we collected baby teeth from the tooth fairy around the country to establish the fact that Strontium 90 from nuclear testing was coming down into the grass. The cows were eating the grass, and the milk was getting into our children's teeth. So that was a very influential way of trying to stop nuclear testing in the atmosphere. We also went to Geneva and the disarmament conference there with heretic King and some other notable people to try to lobby at the nuclear disarmament conference. Anyway, I was involved in the peace movement, and one of my friends in that group called me in the middle of the night one night and said, Janine, I'm in Jackson, Mississippi, and a man has been shot and I think people from the north need to come down here and be aware of what's happening in the south.
[00:16:17.150] - Speaker 3
So I flew down, I walked in Macdrever's funeral, and I stayed with people at Tuvalu College right outside of Jackson, which was a place where it was a black College, but it was integrated and there was a white Chapman and his chaplain and his wife who took me in. Anyway, eventually, in about three months, we decided to move to Jackson because my husband was a photojournalist and wanted to photograph the changes in the south. He had been very influenced by Dorothea Lange and the work of the farm security photographers, and he thought of himself as a documentarian. So we moved to the south, and that's how we got involved.
[00:17:10.070] - Speaker 1
That's so interesting. So then from there you went to Stanford.
[00:17:16.250] - Speaker 3
Yes.
[00:17:18.830] - Speaker 1
In between. Then you took the trip.
[00:17:22.370] - Speaker 3
Yes.
[00:17:23.160] - Speaker 1
Okay. We have to hear about that. Well, first of all, to go back, I just wanted to honor Matt in his photo journalism work. I know he was a very influential and renowned photojournalist in the civil rights movement. So just to give praise to Matt Heron. Yeah. He was a special man, wasn't he?
[00:17:47.190] - Speaker 3
He was an extraordinary man. And the reason that decision to stay is so important to me is because I got to spend the rest of my life right now. Almost the rest of my life.
[00:18:03.630] - Speaker 1
Yeah, you bet. Then you and Matt and your two young children now by this point decided to take a sailing trip to West Africa. Do I have that right?
[00:18:16.450] - Speaker 3
Yes. Well, that was the year that Larry Pinneo told me I needed to take off.
[00:18:22.220] - Speaker 1
Take off? Yes.
[00:18:23.890] - Speaker 3
Wait to come to California. So we had moved from Mississippi. There are lots of adventures I could tell you about there. But anyway, we moved from Mississippi to New Orleans, and that's when I got involved to a medical school. And from New Orleans, we sailed a 30 foot swoop with our kids from New Orleans to West Africa on the coast of West Africa for a year and a half. And we did a book we did a book about getting ready for the journey. And we wrote and we did a book called Our Big Blue School House, not Little Red School House, but Our Big Blue School House. And that was actually The Law, written by my 13 year old son as we went down the coast of West Africa. And it's really about how we educated the kids at sea. It was our attempt to do home learning.
[00:19:34.830] - Speaker 1
Janine, how old were your kids at this time?
[00:19:39.210] - Speaker 3
Melissa was eleven and Matthew was 13.
[00:19:43.180] - Speaker 1
Okay. So basically they were educated on your sailing trip. And he wrote the book about that called The Big Blue Schoolhouse. And then didn't you write a book called Journey of the Aquarius, which was the name of your boat? Yeah.
[00:20:01.750] - Speaker 3
And that was mostly about getting ready and the crossing, which took 26 days from Bermuda to the Azores. But we had lots of adventures on the way. It was really.
[00:20:18.190] - Speaker 1
Now you were going to take this gap year, so to speak. What inspired you to do that with the year that you had like to take a sailing boat to West Africa?
[00:20:28.690] - Speaker 3
Well, we, of course, have been involved in the civil rights movement, and everybody was talking about their roots in Africa and so on. And also my husband was a total adventurer, and he said, let's do something other people haven't done. Well, we were in New Orleans, so we couldn't very easily go into the Pacific. So he said, what about Africa? And we talked about it and said, well, yeah, why not?
[00:21:03.950] - Speaker 1
Did you know what you were doing? I mean, did you know how to sell or did you have to start to start from scratch and learn everything?
[00:21:11.410] - Speaker 3
We were very young, but we did a lot of talking to people. We talked to friends in New Orleans who were good sailors. And actually our dear friend Bill Seaman sailed with us from Florida to Bermuda. And Matt and Bill navigated on the way. Of course, we didn't have any GPS or anything like that, so we used the sextant and we dragged the thing behind the boat to tell us what our speed was. That's how the word knots came into business and into our language. Because when you throw this thing in the back of the boat, it's tied to a rope that has knots in it. And as you let the rope out, you count the knots. Isn't that great? I love it. I love the origin of words like that.
[00:22:13.420] - Speaker 1
I love that. And you do love that. I know you love that. Yeah. That is fascinating. Who knew? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Okay. After that and we could spend the whole podcast, I'm sure, talking about that adventure. But I want to get to your scholarly work and your research. So I know you were at UCSF doing research, but then you left and established a nonprofit called the California Neuropsychology Services. Do I have that right? Yes.
[00:22:44.050] - Speaker 3
Ucsf over ten years where we did Dyslexia research with Dyslexia research.
[00:22:50.250] - Speaker 1
What kind of research did you actually do? What were you involved in?
[00:22:53.560] - Speaker 3
We were looking at what side of the brain the kids were using. I was very influenced by ordinance work. And of course, we're intrigued with the two hemispheres of the brain. So first we looked at the difference in what we got in the EEG when people were doing a verbal task, speaking or reading compared to a spatial task, because we already knew that the two hemispheres were organized like that. But we wanted to make sure that our measure really worked. So we did it with right handers and left handers to see if we really showed a difference between right handers and left handers. So that's how I got involved with lefthanderson did a book called The Neuropsychology of Left Handedness with an edited book. Anyway, and we got into Dyslexia and did that for ten years. And I was really hoping that we would find the answer and there would be a very clear way of dealing with Dyslexia after that. And of course, we were dealing with very weak tools. Deeg is helpful, but it's nothing like if we had an MRI or a Meg system. Anyway, mother of one of the Dyslexic kids said, Janine, I've been coming back here.
[00:24:28.470] - Speaker 3
I've been coming back here for the last eight years, and my kids still can't read. And I realized that maybe I needed to do something more practical and get my feet wet in the actual education system. So I started California Neuropsychology Services. It was a nonprofit. I got grants from various foundations, and then I also gave conferences around the country because I realized that this was a very new field. Neuropsychology was a very new field. Professionals in the field, even psychiatrists and psychologists and teachers and all kinds of professionals needed information about the relationship between the brain and behavior. So we gave 53 day conferences around the country. And because I was doing that, I got to meet all these Giants in the field, like Marion Diamond and like Norman, I took Norman Geslin sailing on San Francisco Bay. Marion and David Huebal, who did such seminal work in outlining the visual system and showed the relationship between the development of the visual system and motor with caps. Anyway, it was fascinating to be able to meet those people and hear what they were passionate about.
[00:26:12.470] - Speaker 1
So, Janine, was that the main work of the California Neuropsychology Services was to hold these conferences to teach people about neuropsychology, about the behavior, the relationship between behavior in the brain. Was that the focus of the work, or were there also services to children? What was the main focus?
[00:26:33.010] - Speaker 3
No, there weren't services, but we did research in the schools. So the conferences really funded what I wanted to do, which was get my feet in the classroom. And that's when I began to see that I could be a professional who talked directly to people, teachers or to kids. But that if I got interested in this very new field with computers, maybe I could influence more people. So I started to think about a computer program that kids could use to learn to read. And that's when I developed the first program, which was for the Apple II, and I needed to have speech with it. So we devised a way to Velcro a tape recorder to the side of the computer. We did all kinds of things. But anyway, that evolved, and we got a grant from the Knight Foundation in the Los Altos schools. Los Altos is in Peninsula, south of San Francisco. And this grant paid for a writing coach, a writing teacher, to circulate among all six of the Los Altos district schools. And she turned their computer labs, which had Apple II computers, into writing labs. And she herself was a poet.
[00:28:09.450] - Speaker 3
I mean, I learned so much from March. Anyway, that was an adventure. And we started the very beginning of read, write and type. And the kids used paper keyboards to learn how to use their fingers on the keyboard. And she would come into a group that had been using it for a while, maybe late first grade or early second grade. And she would bring a whole bag of shoes, boots and ballet slippers and all kinds of shoes. And she'd plunk it on the table and she'd tell the children to pick one. And then she said, we're going to write about who you thought might wear these shoes. So she did such creative things like that. And she would tell teachers, look, don't do your prep work while your kids are in the computer lab. Go in there, because this is your opportunity to see what they're thinking. You look on the screen, and if they're writing, you can provide a little mini lesson in having a conversation with them about what they're writing. Or maybe this needs to be a new paragraph, or maybe I'm not quite clear about what you're saying here. So she would interact with kids as she walked around the classroom, and she encouraged teachers to do the same thing.
[00:29:41.500] - Speaker 3
And the beauty, the thing that grabbed me about computers was that you can give kids feedback. It's very hard to know what a kid is thinking when they're reading something. It's totally transparent and vague. It's very hard. And we deal a lot with that with our discussions about assessments. But with writing, you can see it right there. If they're trying to spell out a word and they're using some phone name incorrectly linking it to wrong letters or whatever, you can give them feedback right away. And the computer can do it automatically. So with rewrite and type, we factored in both visual so they could see hands come up on the keyboard and show them visually what letter. And it was always the sound of the letter type at. And then they could also hear it. So they were getting visual and auditory feedback for every mistake they might make. And so they over and over and over again be developing phony awareness and phonics as they actually physically constructed work.
[00:30:58.530] - Speaker 1
So Janine did that. I have somebody of questions on that. So first of all, was this one of the Small Business Innovation Research awards that you won to start this?
[00:31:10.170] - Speaker 3
No, that was before that. The Apple II stuff was all funded by grant. Got it. Okay.
[00:31:17.680] - Speaker 1
But you did receive several SBIR awards from the NICHD.
[00:31:24.120] - Speaker 3
And that's really how I had to transform myself from California Neuropsychology Services, which was a nonprofit, to Talking Fingers, which was a for profit because Small Business Innovative Research grants are only given to for profit. What you have to do is you have to develop a product and do research with it, which is exactly what I wanted to do. So I got into it not to create a business, but to do what I wanted to do. But that was the way.
[00:31:59.050] - Speaker 1
Yeah. I'm going to quote you. Here something you said about this whole thing. You said, I want to change the way kids learn. Parents and teachers need to understand that reading and writing go hand in hand. In fact, I think writing is the most powerful, the most active and the most interesting way to become fluent at reading. Students often see writing as a chore. They have so many things to say, but the mechanics of writing slows them down and stifles their enthusiasm. So that's kind of some underlying foundational principles that really drove you to work on read, write and type do talking fingers. Is that some of your thoughts around that?
[00:32:42.860] - Speaker 3
Exactly. I came across a book by Roman Balding called The Writing Road to Reading, and she just made a lot of sense to me, and she gave me kind of a framework for how to put readwritten, type together. I realized that little kids needed it to be as simple as possible. So rather than teach them a whole variety of ways to represent a sound, type just teaches one way. And if they have one way to represent every one of the 44 sounds in English, they can write whatever they can say. They may not spell everything perfectly, but they can write phonetically or, as some people say, invented spelling. And by doing that, they are over and over again developing a deep and automatic phonemic awareness. And that's the brainwork that we have to do in order to be skilled readers. But we cannot become readers just with our eyes and our ears. We have to change the motor system, and I can talk about that later if you want.
[00:34:04.510] - Speaker 1
Yes, I do want to ask you, though, like, I think about all the pieces we've talked about so far. So how was your deep involvement and commitment to equality and the civil rights movement? How did that funnel into this work of developing these writing products? Was there, like, a sense of access for children? Was there a sense of access for everybody?
[00:34:31.820] - Speaker 3
And of course, as soon as the Internet came in, it became much easier to make a wider distribution. And that was my hope to be able to make it available to all children, no matter what they look like or what they believe or what they're culting. Yeah. It has voiceover help in nine different languages. So it's been used a lot as ESL program, even with older kids, even with adults, it's been used.
[00:35:08.490] - Speaker 1
Janine, you mentioned early on you were interested in Dyslexia. What was the prompt for that? What was the thing that really got you interested in that.
[00:35:21.430] - Speaker 3
In Philadelphia. I got interested in it because of an organization called the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, which my husband did a story about. So I got involved there and I studied some with Glenn Coleman, and I realized that was not really my calling, but it provided me with some information. And then when we went to Mississippi, the first year, I worked with Snick, the Student Violent Coordinating Committee. I lived outside of Atlanta while Matt was on the road. Photographing And I worked in the Snake office in Atlanta. And then later that year, I got connected with two other people who wanted to one was Polly Greenberg, and she worked in the Office of Economic Opportunity. And this was a new federal place that was interested in starting Head Start. So as a result, we wrote a grant to the Office of Economic Opportunity and started the first Head Start in the country in Mississippi. And we had several thousand kids around the state because we were working with the civil rights movement who had contacts in all these little towns and communities. And anyway, that was quite extraordinary. But you asked how I got interested in Dyslexia.
[00:37:01.130] - Speaker 3
One day I was in one of the Head Start projects, and there was a little girl sitting on the sideline kind of watching everybody else. And so I went and sat next to her. She reached out to feel my hair because she never really sat next to a white person that she could try that with. And so we talked a bit, and then I said, what would you like to do in Head Start? And she thought for a minute, and she drew herself up and she said, I'm going to learn to read and write, and then I'm going to go home and teach my Daddy. And that really kind of hit home. How many people didn't know how to read and write, how important reading and writing is to our culture? We could talk about that. Look what's happening right now. Our culture is facing a dark time, I think, in terms of the intelligence of American communities. And we who are involved in reading are really on a bigger mission than we really know because we need to raise the entire intelligence of America, and we can do that if we taught children to read.
[00:38:32.810] - Speaker 1
Janine yesterday, I was speaking with another podcast guest, Dr. Anthony, Dr. Sean Anthony Robinson, and he was telling his life story, and I'm sure he won't mind me sharing it because he shared it on the podcast. But his life story, he was a non reader. He was undiagnosed dyslexic, and he struggled in all areas of his life. When he finally learned to read, when somebody finally took the time to literally just teach him, here's the sounds, here's how the sounds mapped to print. Here's how this whole thing works. It was like it opened up the world to him and he is very emotional about it. And he talks about this professor who taught him to read, and he said, he saved my life. He saved my life.
[00:39:26.530] - Speaker 3
Yeah.
[00:39:28.790] - Speaker 1
That's how important this is.
[00:39:32.190] - Speaker 3
And we need to change individual lives, and we need to change our whole culture. Our educational system is inadequate, and we need to have a literacy revolution the way they did in Cuba in 1961, where they sent young people into the mountains. Thousands and thousands. Del Castro said, we're going to change our literacy. And these kids went into the mountains, they lived with families, they milk cows, and these were urban kids. And we need to do the same. We need to have a total involvement in educating our young people, our young children. And we could do it if we just wanted to make that investment. We could have a domestic literacy Corps and just have the vision of changing things. That's what we need to do anyway.
[00:40:46.390] - Speaker 1
Janine, what's our first step in that? Janine, what are we getting wrong and what's our first step to write that?
[00:40:58.750] - Speaker 3
Oh, my goodness. It's not that we're getting wrong, but we're investing a lot in intervention at later years, which is much harder than preventing the problem from happening in the first place. And we now know how to teach reading, and we should be starting even earlier than preschool, but at least a preschool to get kids ready for this big adventure of reading and writing. Our emphasis is more on fixing things than preventing things. So that's just one thing. What was the rest of the question?
[00:41:51.750] - Speaker 1
Well, I think I'm hearing you say we have to adopt a prevention orientation rather than an intervention orientation. We need to start early, and we need to enact what we know. We know so much about the process of learning to read and learning to write. We need to put that into play everywhere. Is that what I'm hearing you say?
[00:42:14.010] - Speaker 3
Yeah, absolutely. Okay.
[00:42:19.810] - Speaker 1
I want to talk about what you're working on now because you have written a really interesting piece that I've had the privilege of reviewing called Getting to Auto Words. And so I want to talk a little bit about the premise behind that and what we need to learn or as educators? As educators, what are some common understandings? We need to have to really advance this enacting what we know part. So talk about getting to auto words with us.
[00:42:52.640] - Speaker 3
Okay. So one mistake we've been making is thinking that you can learn to read with your eyes and your ears. It's just clear now that you cannot develop the brain pathways and the systems in the brain that are necessary for skilled reading just using your eyes and your ears. The basis of it all is speech. The letters that we've invented stand for speech. The first thing that kids need to understand is that words they say are strings of sounds, and that letters stand for those sounds. And so at the PreK level, how do we do that? How do we make it simple enough for kids to get going with that? Another mistake I think we make is thinking that you have to walk before you run in the sense that skills are these isolated blocks of things. And I think we've gotten there because we wanted to assess them rather than that they were important to separate out in instruction. The skills that we think are necessary for reading, like owning awareness and phonics, need to be taught as kids are learning to write. And I'll explain what I mean by that. The Alphabet was first invented to represent speech, and it was represented to make speech visible.
[00:44:38.490] - Speaker 3
It was invented to enable people to leave something permanent down on a cave wall or in the sand or on a rock that someone else could read. So writing came first, and the Alphabet was used to make words visible, and that's really how we should teach it. And so there is work and coding, which I think is parallel to decoding. So for reading, we have a developmental sequence from decoding to reading. And in writing, we have a developmental sequence from encoding to writing or spelling. And I think both are two sides of the same breath. We take things in and we breathe out, and we have to do the same with literacy. They are both equal. And so another thing that I would like to change is the writing becomes an equal curriculum to reading, and then we put the same effort and interest and energy into teaching kids to write. And that's a word that it's like sight words, sight words have so many different meanings to people that we need a more precise word. That's why I wrote about auto works because I want to write about how the brain develops the pathways for instant recognition.
[00:46:23.610] - Speaker 3
But anyway, so writing means a lot of different things to people. Spelling means a lot of different things to people. And I'm using the word encoding, which may be something that people don't use very often, but I'm hoping that it will take its place in our educational language because I think it's equal to decoding. And I think really as children learn to use the Alphabet to construct words, the spoken words as they learn to segment words and then use letters to create those words in a visible way, either with tiles or with writing, they are doing the work that they need to do to change their motor systems into new pathways that recognize individual sounds as entities in themselves. Individual sounds rather than viewing a spoken word as a single sound. That's the biggest and hardest thing for children to do, and they need to do it at the preschool level, and they need to do it not with a whole lot of different exercises that focus totally on phone awareness, because phoneme awareness becomes meaningful when you attach a letter to it when you are able to understand that those sounds you're making with your mouth are represented by these letters, and you can put those sounds on paper with letters.
[00:47:58.770] - Speaker 3
This code that's been invented to represent speech anyway.
[00:48:05.130] - Speaker 1
Well, I have so many questions, and there's just so much there, Janine. So first of all, I love when you say two sides of the same breath. That makes it very understandable to me because we're taking in and we're putting out. Right. That's great. The other thing that I think is really I'd like to drill down a little bit more on, as you mentioned, the motor skill, the motor aspect of forming the sound. Can you talk about why that is so important that kids are aware of that?
[00:48:37.290] - Speaker 3
Right. And because they are literally changing the motor system in their brain when they're doing that. I think we've long regarded phonemes as sounds, and we talk about them as sounds in the classroom, and we say, what sound did you hear at the beginning of that word rather than what sound did you say at the beginning of that word? And it is a motor system that actually manipulates and changes segments and blends. It is the motor system that's responsible for that, and it's motor memory that helps all that stuff stick in the brain. The ears are important because you have to have feedback, but the ears are really telling you whether the sound you're saying is the right sound at the beginning of that word. And speaking, it's the articulation of the sound that your brain is actually using in order to be phoneme aware.
[00:49:45.430] - Speaker 1
Okay. So let's back up here because it feels to me like you're talking about two things that are kind of radical ideas in many ways. The first one is that we should go through writing to reading. I want to ask you in a.
[00:50:03.210] - Speaker 3
Minute that's the very beginning. I'm talking about that.
[00:50:10.510] - Speaker 1
Why do you think we've not done that?
[00:50:14.410] - Speaker 3
We've not known it?
[00:50:17.770] - Speaker 1
Why have we not done that? Why have we always gone from kind of the opposite direction?
[00:50:24.790] - Speaker 3
Because I think we think reading is so important and that writing is less important. As adults, we see ourselves reading much more than we see ourselves writing. But at the very early stages when the kids are learning this code, I think that it's more meaningful for them to be able to create and construct words from their own spoken words. And the way we've been teaching reading by recognizing the visual appearance of a word, is not programming in the right brain systems. And it's also an imperfect way to remember the word. And it's not empowering because the kids depend on somebody else to tell them what that word is in the first place. And when you teach them the code and they can encode or decode a spoken word, they are doing it on their own, and they're saying oh, I can do this by myself. And it's very empowering.
[00:51:33.850] - Speaker 1
It's very empowering. Yeah. I always liken it, too. We're teaching kids to fish rather than giving them fish.
[00:51:40.600] - Speaker 3
Yeah.
[00:51:44.510] - Speaker 1
But I just don't think that's anything. We just don't see that. We see most of the time we really focus on reading, and then writing is something that comes after or later or of less importance. The other idea that I think you've presented here that's a little radical is instead of saying, what sound do you hear? What sound are you saying? What sound do you say? But that makes so much sense, Janine, because you're talking about how the motor system is the conduit to the motor memory. Is that my understanding that.
[00:52:22.640] - Speaker 3
Yes. And I tried to explain in the paper that when you say the word cat, you are activating all these associations with cat like Meow and fur and fur and so on. And that's really a cat speech network. But when you learn to encode and decode the word cat, you have developed a different system that needs to be attached to the cat speech system. So you've learned a cat read write system, and that network needs to be linked to the Cat speech network, and it's the motor system that activates all that. So we even have Meg research that shows that the motor system is activated even before you recognize a word. And certainly a lot of experiments with Meg and other imaging systems have shown that the speech system is active when you're reading. There's no question about it. So why is that? It's because speeches is the generator.
[00:53:43.830] - Speaker 1
And Janine, I want to make sure to include a link to your book Making Speech Visible, because that's really where this is. And I'll put this in the Show notes. I'll put a link for our listeners in the Show Notes because that's really where you lay out in more detail.
[00:54:07.270] - Speaker 3
It is.
[00:54:10.210] - Speaker 1
Yeah.
[00:54:10.760] - Speaker 3
And like, with everything, your ideas change over time. So it probably needs a new addition. But anyway, it's got all of that in there.
[00:54:23.160] - Speaker 1
Yeah. Awesome. So let's go back to getting to autowards. One of the things I'll put a link to that in our Show Notes as well. One of the things I like about it is that you make a really nice analogy between learning to read and write and driving a car.
[00:54:42.490] - Speaker 3
Right. Well, I say that learning to read and write with just your eyes and your ears is like driving a car without a motor. And speech is the motor for reading and writing. And so I go on from there to explain how the brain establishes these systems that will enable the orthographic mapping that we're all talking about that allows us to instantly recognize words. And to get there, you have to have automatic owning awareness. So that is like the most important thing for early readers and writers in pre K kindergarten that they understand that the words they're saying, they're speaking what their mouth is doing. When they make those sounds, they don't need to know the muscles that they're using. I think it's helpful for them to know that some words have voices, that some sounds have voices and some don't have voices. And they can feel that that's really to point their attention to what their mouth is doing. And as soon as their attention goes to that place and they recognize that they're making different sounds with their mouths and they can link letters to those sounds, they're on their way. That's the biggest hurdle in those early grades.
[00:56:21.250] - Speaker 1
Really, Jeanine? It's the big AHA, isn't it?
[00:56:23.940] - Speaker 3
Yeah, exactly.
[00:56:30.290] - Speaker 1
When I think about what you've told us so far about your life and beginning your teaching career, people that influenced you, the civil rights movement, your research, your nonprofit, your software development, the books that you've written, what would you characterize as some of the greatest learnings from your career and from your life? What are some of the greatest learnings that you have?
[00:56:59.750] - Speaker 3
Oh, boy. Well, the first thing I had to learn as a 19 year old and when I made that decision to stay in a mall was that I am in charge of my life. And I decided then that I really wanted to take that seriously and that this is the only one we've got. So I think that was the first big learning experience. What was the question? People are moments of change. I think a moment of change was deciding to leave UC San Francisco and strike out on my own, which was very scary. Yeah. Because the institution itself is a blanket as a safety blanket. Yet I didn't feel like I was getting where I wanted to go with that. I didn't feel like I was making progress towards helping children to read, and that's really what I wanted to do. So that was a big decision. Of course, all the decisions that I've made with Matt over the years, lots of adventures we've had together have been learning experiences. How to survive in the wilderness, how to survive on a boat in the middle of and how important it is for kids to understand how families have to work together.
[00:58:49.970] - Speaker 3
Going out and mowing the lawn is one thing, but it's not something that shows kids the importance of how families have to work together and gives them a role in the family. I don't know. Ask me another.
[00:59:12.150] - Speaker 1
This is great. I'm just making notes. I mean, basically, you talked about agency. I'm in charge of my life. You talked about vision. It's important to have a vision and follow that, even if it's scary like you did. You talk about being adventurous and working together and continuing to learn. These are all wonderful things that you've learned in your journey. Janine?
[00:59:35.490] - Speaker 3
Yeah. Thank you.
[00:59:38.430] - Speaker 1
It feels like we know a lot about how kids learn to read and write about how the process that they go through and how we can best teach that what's standing in our way from realizing that vision of all children reading and writing. What's standing in our way?
[00:59:59.250] - Speaker 3
Well, of course, it's multiple things, but one big thing is teacher training. And I think teachers are not I'm hearing teachers say, why didn't anybody tell me this stuff when we talk about the science of reading or something like that? I'm thinking right now of the fact that teachers need a different way of being trained and that teachers, as Margaret said the other day, teachers don't have time to read books or read papers or read manuals and learn new curriculum and so on. This is a vision for the future. If we could put teacher training into small bytes, a video showing them a teacher's modeling good practices in a systematic way as a curriculum, not just hit or miss here and there, but in a systematic way so that they could see particularly PreK teachers and teachers that are people that are going into daycare. There's going to be a huge influx of federal money if this infrastructure goes through for PreK and childcare, and who's going to be the ones to be the teachers in those situations? And how can parents learn to help their kids at home when they can't go to school or be in person to person situations?
[01:01:53.750] - Speaker 3
So if we had video available on the Internet in curricular chunks so that teachers could look at a five minute video and then say, okay, I'm going to try that in my class tomorrow and I'm going to do it my way. But this is what I'm going to do and then see what comes next so that kids can go from simple, like from learning one sound to link with a letter rather than a whole bunch of different sounds, like starting with capital letters, because those are easier to write, like starting with just the upper case instead of trying to learn two different shapes at the same time. I don't know. These are all very, as you say, radical ideas, but I think I hope to stimulate new thinking about how to start kids out and also how to link a writing curriculum to a reading curriculum, because we don't really do that. They're not linked in any way, and they could be. So that's what I want to do.
[01:03:05.550] - Speaker 1
I love your vision. And I think what you're saying is when you said, why did anyone ever tell me this? I think sometimes about our struggling readers who finally get a very systematic, explicit approach, like you were just talking about going from least complex to more complex when somebody teaches them that these are sounds that map to print. And this is the big AHA, many of our children say, well, why didn't anybody ever tell me this?
[01:03:36.260] - Speaker 3
I know I worked with the fifth grader once back in the days California was totally whole language. And if you spoke the word phonics, teachers would just ran at you, practically throw tomatoes at you. It was horrible. And I worked with a fifth grader, and I said, okay, let's write the word fantastic. And she said, I don't know how to spell that. How do you spell it? And I said, we'll start with the first sound. What do you mean? What do you mean? What's the first sound? Oh, you mean a letter stands for a sound? Nobody ever told me that.
[01:04:20.470] - Speaker 1
I think all of us who've taught have had experiences like that. Where and I always, you know, I came up as a whole language teacher, and I really realized now that I didn't get to the point. And the kids are kind of like when we teach them how the whole thing works, they're like, well, you're getting to the point now. You got me. But then we as teachers ask the same question. Why didn't anybody ever tell me this? When we think about that explicit instruction, it's like, why didn't I learn this? And I do think what I see and I know you agree with me on this, Janine, is a lot of us feel guilt around that. We feel that we didn't serve our students well, but we've got to there's no shame. There's no blame. We just have to take this knowledge and embrace it. And then people like you and people like the Reading League, how are we supporting teachers, whether it's through those explicit videos that you're talking about, whether it's through long term professional development or coaching or whatever, how do we make up for all of this that we did just simply did not know?
[01:05:28.510] - Speaker 1
How do we write the ship?
[01:05:30.490] - Speaker 3
Yeah. Well, I think if a curriculum was available on the Internet that parents could use like SIBs could use, we could have a literacy revolution. We need to make it simple. We need to put it in the short bites and make it easy.
[01:05:54.370] - Speaker 1
I think you're the perfect person to lead that revolution, Jeanine. I'm just saying. What are you working on right now?
[01:06:07.970] - Speaker 3
I'm going to be starting a project in Mississippi. I've been going back to Mississippi a lot since 2017, and I'll be starting a project with Kelly Butler at Barksdale Reading Institute. We have some pre K classes in Greenville and also in Jackson, and we're going to use an encoding curriculum. Another thing about encoding to make things simple is what Linnaea ARY did with embedding letters into pictures that call to mind both the sound and the shape of the letter. So rather than just giving kids this shape that doesn't have anything to link it to in the brain, if you make the picture of a box and then put the shape of the letter into the picture, they think Fox. They think they see the shape of the Fox and it all goes together. It links together so we can make things a lot more efficient. I think there's a lot of ways that we spend a lot of time doing activities with kids that don't get right to the point of at all.
[01:07:32.400] - Speaker 1
Get to the point. Yeah. Why didn't you tell me this, Janine? Is this a pilot or is this a this will be kind of a pilot.
[01:07:42.110] - Speaker 3
I did write a grant to NICHD to do this, but I didn't get the grant. I have gotten five before, and they're very competitive and very difficult to get. And I just didn't get this one. But it will give me an opportunity to collect these video bids and try to create a curriculum from that. So that's my object in doing it. It will be a research project. There will be control classes, and we'll see how the kids who do encoding, whether they do better than kids who are doing business as usual. But I also want to collect the videos and try to put together a curriculum like this. And I will put together a draft using videos that I've already gotten and create a few here in my lab here in order to experiment with this encoding curriculum in these classes in Mississippi.
[01:08:48.450] - Speaker 1
Janine, has that started, or are you going to start at this school year?
[01:08:54.110] - Speaker 3
I'll be going back probably in September, October, and we'll work things out with Kelly and look for personnel. We already have two people to honcho these two projects, but we'll need other personnel and so on. So we'll work on that and we'll start the project in January from January to June, we are going to be.
[01:09:21.780] - Speaker 1
Really looking forward to hearing how that goes. Janine, that sounds like it's really exciting. Well, what you're doing is you're kind of putting your vision into play and testing that out. And I think it'll be wonderful to watch the process and then to see the results.
[01:09:43.640] - Speaker 3
Yes. Since I didn't get the grant, I'm actually going to be funding this myself. I'm going to be using money that I get from Matt. My husband died a year ago, my wonderful photo journalist husband. And he left behind an archive, an incredible archive of vintage prints and all kinds of exhibitions that he put together. And if I sell those, I will use that money because we both felt very strongly about education, and I feel like this would be a way to carry on his vision of the most radical thing we can do Besides getting into the streets, is to provide an adequate and just an equal opportunity for education for all children. But I would love to get some foundation support. So if you have any ideas about that, let me know.
[01:10:43.610] - Speaker 1
Well, you know what? We're going to broadcast this podcast out, and you never know who might listen and who might share your vision. Janine, we'll be getting this out, and people will know about your project and about your work and what a wonderful tribute to Matt. What a wonderful, respectful way to honor Matt.
[01:11:03.770] - Speaker 3
Yeah.
[01:11:06.470] - Speaker 1
Janine. What?
[01:11:09.830] - Speaker 3
I'm out on my screen porch, and one of my chickens has just escaped. She's learned how to fly. She's up on the fence. No way.
[01:11:21.540] - Speaker 1
Oh, my gosh. So your chicken has agency.
[01:11:24.830] - Speaker 3
Yeah, right.
[01:11:28.310] - Speaker 1
Your chicken is radical.
[01:11:30.010] - Speaker 3
Yeah, exactly. Go back.
[01:11:37.170] - Speaker 1
What gives you great joy and what propels you to jump out of bed every day?
[01:11:41.790] - Speaker 3
Oh, this works. I have a wonderful garden, just a regular 60 by 100 plot of land on a house outside of the edges of San Rafael. I have 20 fruit trees and a whole lot of vegetables. And what I like to do first thing in the morning is go out and stand in front of an incredible tomato plant that I have with SunGold little cherry tomatoes and sit there because that's a plant that gets the first light of the day, and the sun is on my back and I pick little yellow tomatoes and flop them in my mouth. I think that's what we need to do now. I've got two children, two chickens escaping. I think that's what we need to do. We need to enjoy every moment and have good things to look forward to every day. I'm 84 years old, and I appreciate every day. It's an honor and a privilege to enjoy this life.
[01:12:58.340] - Speaker 1
Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you for that, Janine. Now, I was going to ask you some kind of closing questions that I ask all of our guests, but do you need to go get your chickens?
[01:13:10.610] - Speaker 3
No, I'm glaring out, and they're looking down on the other side. It's okay.
[01:13:21.410] - Speaker 1
All right, so I'm going to ask you these kind of closing questions that we ask everybody. So who was your favorite teacher growing up and why?
[01:13:33.210] - Speaker 3
I guess my first grade, I went to a girls school in Berkeley. My mother taught there, so of course, she was my favorite teacher. She taught French, but my first grade teacher taught both. Now there's three of them up there. She taught first to fourth grade, so I was with her a lot. And that's one of the reasons I grew to love her, I'm sure, because I remember having Green blackboards around the class, and we would stand and we would practice writing and we would do a lot of writing. And I think I probably got my first impulses from her.
[01:14:18.610] - Speaker 1
What was her name?
[01:14:19.780] - Speaker 3
Mrs. Wallace.
[01:14:21.790] - Speaker 1
Thank you, Mrs. Wallace. What is a favorite book, either as a child or as an adult?
[01:14:30.970] - Speaker 3
That's a hard I like it doesn't.
[01:14:32.650] - Speaker 1
Have to be the favorite booking, but just be one of your favorite books.
[01:14:40.310] - Speaker 3
I'm rereading a book right now that I read some time ago. It's called The Swerve, and it's by Steven Greenblatt. It's an extraordinary book. It's so very well written. If you read the introduction, you are definitely hooked. He's talking about Lucretius, who lived 2000 years ago and wrote a book called on the Nature of Things. And the story that Greenblatt weaves is about a book Hunter who discovers this book that's been hidden away. But Lucretius was so advanced for his time in a culture that believed in demons and gods and magical thinking and so on. He was talking about the world being created of random atoms moving randomly in space, and he used the word Adam. He talked about the fact that it's enough to be appreciative of life and live an ethical life without worrying about heaven or hell or what may come after. It was a very radical book, and of course, it got buried away for thousands of years. But the reason called The Swerve is because it resurfaced at the beginning of the Renaissance and was an influence going from Dark Ages to the Renaissance because it came out of this hidden existence and was widely read and led to all the creative energy and spontaneity of the Renaissance.
[01:16:34.370] - Speaker 1
That sounds fascinating.
[01:16:36.060] - Speaker 3
It's a very interesting book. Wow.
[01:16:38.550] - Speaker 1
I'll definitely list that in the show notes so that listeners can find that. Is that what you're reading right now?
[01:16:45.670] - Speaker 3
Yeah, that's what I'm reading right now. I'm rereading it. There's so much to learn. This guy is so he's so well informed about the history and art and books and so on. There's another book that I'm rereading. It's called The Written World, the Written World, and it's about the history of writing and the major writings that have happened in different cultures over time. It's very interesting.
[01:17:26.310] - Speaker 1
Sounds so fascinating. And I'll put a link to that one as well. So, Janine, what do you have on your desk that symbolizes you or is dear to you?
[01:17:40.390] - Speaker 3
Okay. I don't think you can probably see this, but it's a glass marble that was made by my daughter, who is a glass artist, among many other things. And the glass itself is a lens that magnifies a vortex inside. I don't know if you can see it at all, but there's a white stripe inside it's part of the vortex of stripes that go down to Infinity. Inside that white stripe is Matt's Ashes, and that's one of the ways that I remember my wonderful husband. That's beautiful.
[01:18:31.200] - Speaker 1
I'm so glad I could see that. Thank you. And my last question to Eugene is, what are your greatest hopes for today's children?
[01:18:41.150] - Speaker 3
Oh, I want that literacy revolution to happen. I want them to become independent, joyful readers and writers. I think that we're facing a dark place in our country with a lot of magical thinking and a lot of uninformed thinking, a lot of disrespect for science and rational thinking. And I think it's very dangerous. And I think the education system needs to deal with it. And that's my hope for the future, that we can have a swerve of our own to a new Renaissance of people reading the thoughts and experiences of others to inform their own frontal lobes. So our frontal lobes get developed and we can see the consequences of our actions anyway.
[01:19:54.170] - Speaker 1
That is a worthy vision, Janine. It's such a worthy vision. Well, thank you so much for this time today. I have had the privilege of knowing you now for a couple of years because I'll just tell our listeners Janine and I are part of a small group of people in the field. We meet on a regular basis and just kind of talk about how we can create a more peaceful existence in this world of reading and world of literacy. You have enriched my life tremendously in the time that I've gotten to know you, Janine, and I appreciate and really value all the contributions that you have made and that you're continuing to make to teachers and children.
[01:20:38.930] - Speaker 3
Thank you. I love what the Reading League is doing and I'm amazed at how much you accomplish. Laura, it's wonderful.
[01:20:50.050] - Speaker 1
Thank you very much. All right, well, go get those chickens.
[01:20:53.560] - Speaker 3
Yeah, I will. I'm going to do some chasing. Okay. Thank you, Janine. Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye.
[01:21:05.650] - Speaker 2
A literacy revolution indeed. Janine is truly one of the most inspiring people I know who has made such important contributions to the field and just continues on with her work. So thank you, Janine. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to rate us and leave us your comments. We always love to hear from you and please share this podcast with others so we can just keep this conversation going. If you haven't yet joined us, please join the Reading League. We are a League and that means all of us are in this together. We offer so many supports for you in your ongoing development in your practice. We thank you for the work you're doing every day on behalf of children and literature. We'll see you next time.