Editor, Learning About Learning Disabilities 3rd Edition Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University	September 2005
	"We can help children who have learning disabilities, but the learning disabilities don’t disappear. It’s like a medical condition that has to be controlled—we can halt its progress, but it doesn’t go away. It’s the same thing with learning disabilities. The condition remains."

Can you describe your career path in the learning disabilities field?
Well, when I was about 26 years old, I was finishing my Master’s in psychology and I wanted to work with children. So I apprenticed under a psychologist and learned about assessments at a health center in our country [ Canada]. In that setting, I saw children with emotional disturbances and learning disabilities. I saw children who needed play therapy, and one autistic boy being trained to say his name. After that experience, I got a job in Vermont in learning disabilities while my husband was teaching at a liberal college.

When we came back, I got a job at the Vancouver General Hospital. I was tending to children as a child psychologist at that time. Sometimes they were flown in from the interior of B.C. [ British Columbia]. I saw a lot of children with problems. Most of them had learning disabilities.

I became very good at diagnosing learning disabilities using all the tests that I knew, but I increasingly got very dissatisfied and frustrated because I felt I wasn’t doing enough; that I only diagnosed but I couldn’t come up with ideas to help the children and teenagers. I felt I was merely objectifying with tests, what the mothers had long suspected were the problems that their children had.

So how did you resolve this frustration?
I decided to go back to school. Because my husband had a job at UBC, I couldn’t just up and say, “See you three years from now, honey!” So I stayed in town and went to the University of British Columbia. I went into education because I felt another degree in psychology still wouldn’t help me remediate the children with their learning disabilities, because interventions of learning disabilities are addressed in education. In my doctoral training, I took intensive practicum courses to learn to teach children and teenagers with learning problems because I was from a psychology background, not education. It was my good fortune to have been given a lot of responsibilities in the last year of my training. I held summer camps for children and teenagers with learning disabilities, organizing other people on how to handle them, while I myself took on a small group or dealt with a particularly difficult case individually—so I had tons of experience.

What did you do after you received your doctorate?
Well, about the time I finished my doctorate, I started applying for jobs. I thought I would just go and work in the school district. But then an acquaintance of mine saw me at the computer center—in those days, we didn’t have microcomputers, you had to go to the mainframe—and he asked me “What are you going to do now that you’re finishing?” I said, “What do you mean, what am I going to do? I need a job!” He graduated a year ahead of me and was an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University (SFU) at that time. He asked me what I specialized in and when he learned I was in learning disabilities, he told me that his faculty (Faculty of Education) was advertising for people to apply in the area of learning disabilities. He said, “Why don’t you apply?” I said, “Surely, your university won’t hire someone graduating from the rival university.” He said to just try. So I talked to my husband, who thought I might as well try. I had nothing to lose.

So I tried. But I didn’t expect to get the job because they had other candidates from other parts of the country. I really thought they wouldn’t hire someone locally—you know how people are, they rarely consider hiring local candidates. But to my surprise, I got the job! Once I got the job, the Dean asked me to develop the area of learning disabilities. The person before me had set up a theory course and a practicum course, but she couldn’t handle the practicum because she didn’t have experience working with individuals with learning disabilities.

And you had that experience ...
Yes! So when I got the job, I had to teach a theory part and develop the practicum. I wanted student teachers, as well as students from psychology, who were interested in dealing with children and teenagers with learning disabilities, to work on a sustained daily basis, with children or teenagers with learning disabilities. To this end, I set up a course where the university students had to sit down and learn informal assessment as well as remediate the children and teenagers. I wanted them to individually work with these children and teenagers with learning disabilities four mornings each week for one hour each day, so that they understood what these children were going through. You can’t just do it once a week; it’s a drop in the bucket as far as remedial efficacy is concerned if you only remediate once a week! You have to work at least three days a week to get some results. So I set up a very intensive lab course that is a semester long. Before the university students teach the children and teenagers with learning disabilities, I spent two months teaching them how to do informal assessments. You see, formal assessments are easy. You just give a standardized test. But an informal assessment is harder to devise, as any experienced teacher will tell you, because it’s designed to find the strengths and weaknesses of the child or teenager so that you can place him/her at the appropriate level for instruction. And before they’d remediate, I’d teach them the strategies. So they learned from me informal assessments and remedial strategies in decoding, reading comprehension, and writing, then I sent them out to practice informal assessments on the child or teenager that they would be teaching.

After the university students complete their informal assessments, I spent at least 40 minutes with each of them to show them how to interpret their test data and guide them on appropriate teaching strategies. They would then see my teaching assistant who helped them choose appropriate books and games for remediation.

What grade levels did this involve?
My university students could choose the grade level they wanted to work with. If someone said, I want to work with a grade 6 child with learning disabilities, fine. I want to work with a teenager, grade 10 or grade 9 or even grade 12, fine. They had the freedom to choose the grade level.

I had to negotiate with the school districts to provide the bodies. The schools would send referral lists of students with learning disabilities to me. I would take the ones I wanted, and the ones who couldn’t make it for the current year automatically came in the following year. It was very fair. You must remember I can only take in as many students with learning disabilities as I had university students. My class size was 45, so I could only have a total of 45 children and teenagers with learning disabilities. I rotated from one school district to another. I worked eight years for one and then went to another so that I wasn’t criticized for being unfair, favoring one school district over another. So the school districts were happy, because they got this free service. And the children and teenagers really improved, because every day, I and my two teaching assistants supervised the student teaching. If they didn’t do it right, we’d stop it right there and model for them. We made sure they kept daily records so that the children and teenagers could see that they were improving.

If within three days there was no progress, we’d start analyzing why not. We’d isolate the factors. Was the strategy not appropriate? Was the pacing not right? Was the material not right? That’s why, after four weeks, the children and teenagers with learning disabilities really improved a lot. Then we sent a brief report to the classroom teacher and resource room teacher describing the strategies we used and ask them to try to use the same teaching strategies.

It sounds like it was a very successful course for all participants.
I feel good that I created that course. But it was a really labor-intensive course both for me and for the students involved. The students moaned and asked if I could reduce it to three weeks, because it was just too time-consuming—they were also taking other courses! And then they kept asking if it could it be increased from four credits to six. We said no, sorry. Eventually as I got older, I cut the remedial lab down to three weeks.

Is there currently a lot of research going on in the learning disabilities field?
Oh yes, it’s very vibrant. There are always things going on. There are new areas and new directions.

Where do you see it going in the next 5-10 years?
I think there’ll be real inroads in the area of ESL (English as a Second Language) and learning disabilities. We have a lot of children and teenagers for whom English is not their first language, in both your country and mine. And they have learning disabilities. It’s very difficult to really diagnose their learning disabilities because their first language is not English. This is fast becoming a major area that we’ll have to deal with. Think of the poor teachers—they are flooded with children from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. On top of that, some of them have learning disabilities, and we’re only beginning to really grapple with this reality. Researchers have to help teachers to devise ways to precisely address this problem and then deal with it. There’s work beginning that’s really attracting more and more attention. So in the next 5 to 8 years, you’ll really see a lot of programs to help children who are designated as ESL with learning disabilities.

Besides ESL, are there any other “hot” topic areas?
There’s been a lot of very good research on early intervention, picking up children at risk in kindergarten and grade 1, and then working with them to help them to read. But as these children grow older, you’ve got to sustain that help. Once they learn to read, you’ve got to make sure they read fluently and that their comprehension and writing skills are developing. You just can’t pour a lot of money in the early grades, 1 to 2, and then think that they’ll be fine. They won’t be fine without sustained help. With all the emphasis or focus on early grades right now, older children, especially the ones in middle grades and then high school, are not getting as much attention as they should. You have to worry about them in high school and then as they try to get to college. Some funding is being given to key researchers for secondary students with learning disabilities. A famous leading researcher is a good friend of mine, Don Deshler, at the University of Kansas. He and others have been working on the topic of teenagers and young adults with learning disabilities for two decades. So again, that should come back more as a research focus in the future.

So we can manage learning disabilities, but not solve them?
We can help children who have learning disabilities, but the learning disabilities don’t disappear. It’s like a medical condition that has to be controlled—we can halt its progress, but it doesn’t go away. It’s the same thing with learning disabilities. The condition remains. You have to provide sustained help as the individual matures and goes through school, help them to go to college, and help them find an area in which they can blossom and find fruitful employment. It is our responsibility to help young adults with learning disabilities to become contributing citizens to our societies and to attain social and marital happiness.

In the latest edition of my graduate text, Learning About Learning Disabilities (2004), I invited a father with a severely dyslexic son to write the last chapter. He detailed the frustrations-filled and failure-prone journey of his son who really was restless and just didn’t find his way until he was in his late 20s or early 30s. Through circumstances, this young man discovered that he has a fantastic visual patterning ability, and so he became someone who works on electric boards. He’s gone on to do really well—he’s responsible for electrical boards that link electricity wires and outlets for northeast America. It’s a really poignant piece. I entitled it “Understanding Learning Disabilities Through a Father’s Perspective,” and it’s really written by a father. It’s a true story about his son. He’s a retired M.D, and he funds a training institute every summer with my colleague Don Deshler and others to train teachers to deal with students with learning disabilities. So what we need to do is to help individuals with learning disabilities to find an area in which they can excel, in which they’re strong, so they can find a worthwhile career.

… and not leave that discovery to chance.
That’s right. You see, if we all kind of tune in and try our best, we can help young children, teenagers, and adults with learning disabilities. We just can’t give up.

It seems to me that learning disabilities are more common today then in the past generations. Is that true, or is it just that we know more and are better able to recognize the problem?
I think that we just got better at recognizing and diagnosing the problem. I don’t think it’s suddenly increased. That wouldn’t make sense, because it’s not caused by environmental problems.

One of the buzzwords of today is “globalization.” Has globalization had any effect on the learning disabilities field, in either research or practice?
I think what is good is that it makes other countries like China begrudgingly realize that there is something called learning disabilities. Because I think in China right now, or at least before I retired—I should be cautious here because I haven’t been to China—that they are only interested in gifted ed. Right now, there’s interest among some Chinese students in French immersion, but I don’t think they’re interested in subjects like mental retardation or learning disabilities. And it’s understandable because their country is still in many ways very poor. When you hear of China coming along, it’s only in big cities like Shanghai or Beijing. The rest of the country, according to Canadian-Chinese friends of mine who go back to the villages to visit people, is still very backwards, very poor. They don’t have amenities that we take for granted. So for that kind of a country, you can understand that they don’t have the money to be concerned with learning disabilities. They have other priorities, like getting electricity in every household, clean and safe water.

Their needs are more basic ...
Yes, they focus on gifted ed because they can get more mileage out of it in their eyes. But Japan has been increasingly aware of special education. A good friend of mine who is a prominent leader in learning disabilities, Sharon Vaughn, was invited to Japan in the last five years. It means that they’re attending to research in learning disabilities. So I think that researchers in the U.S. and Canada have a good impact on developing countries.

…where they may not do the research but can benefit from it.
That’s right. A couple of months ago I got an email from a student in China asking me if I could give her a free copy of my co-edited book on “Social Dimensions in Learning Disabilities”. I think the graduate students are key. Some of them show interest. And that’s the result of globalization and also advances in technology. They can look on the internet and find out what the new books are on a particular topic and email you.

Otherwise you would be inaccessible to someone in a developing country.
That’s right.

Are you familiar with the No Child Left Behind Act in the U.S.?
I do know of it. According to my colleagues, it’s a pro/con thing.

That’s what I was wondering, if you had any opinion on it, either positive or negative.
I think that you can have it so long as you are willing to provide ample support for the teachers. I think it’s almost an intimidating order to a teacher who has 32 or 35 children or teenagers in their class, to say every one of them has to perform in your class, or that you won’t get funding next year if performance goes down. You have to be fair and give the appropriate support to these teachers, a teaching aid if there are numerous ESL students and a resource room teacher helping in the class if there are children with learning disabilities, or autism. You have to look at the class. You have to look at the area in which the school lies. Is it economically a good area, like middle class—then the children probably do well, because you probably have home computers and private tutors if they’re not doing well.

How important is a stable home environment?
For any child to do well academically, he or she must not only have a stable home environment but also one that values academic learning. If you go to another area, like working class, the parents may not value academic learning so long as the kid passes. And also, the parents are too busy working to support the family to really help the child with homework. Moreover, they may want to help the child but they can’t because they command only functional English! For that policy to work, I think that administrators and school boards and the politicians in that area have to understand the local needs. If your school is in a poor area, you have to give the teachers a lot of support. You have to give them extra teaching assistance, and you have to mobilize social workers to go into the homes to really sort things out with the parents. And if the mothers don’t work, even though they’re poor, then you have to teach the mothers how to help their children. Mothers who are ESL themselves can monitor homework completion, for example. It’s a multi-layered thing. You can’t sort of dictate from the top and say, “Everybody’s score has to improve or else no funding.” I find that really intimidating to teachers and simplistic in understanding the dynamic factors that contribute to students’ academic success.

And then on top of that, you say to teachers, now, you have to use research-based approaches to teaching. Who is going to translate to all these teachers those research-based approaches? Are there enough people there to translate them for them? I know my friends J.K. Torgesen and Ginger Berninger spend time giving talks to teachers about early reading interventions; Karen Harris and Steve Graham write teacher manuals to explain the use of writing strategies that they have designed and empirically validated. Harris and Graham also give numerous talks to teachers to show them how to use their writing strategies in class and in resource rooms. Don Deshler, Keith Lenz, Jean Schumaker and Ed Ellis too spend much time talking to teachers and training them on how to teach teenagers and young adults with learning disabilities. But there are other issues to attend to. For example, there are umpteen approaches to early intervention that have been published. How do you help teachers choose which one to use? Do you give them some choices, and say find one that you can feel comfortable with, that fits your teaching style? Can you help the teachers to stagger the teaching, because they cannot ignore constraints of curriculum and just do your research-based thing all the time! So it’s a very complex issue, and I well understand when my friends have very mixed feelings when they talk about it. I just feel very sympathetic to teachers because they’re the front-liners. In our province and in the other provinces in Canada, our teachers have a very strong union and they’re relatively well-paid, even though the government has not been good to them and hasn’t given them a raise in 10 years. But our teachers have always enjoyed a certain amount of respect. And I get the impression—and please correct me if I’m wrong—when I go to the States, that they don’t enjoy a good level of respect. Is this true?

I personally have a lot of respect for teachers because I know the circumstances under which they teach. But you may have a good point. It’s a very difficult field to stay in.
Well, I don’t blame them, because they have no support, and all kinds of pressure. Everybody blames them if the students don’t do well.

… and the compensation isn’t always there ...
They should have better pay. They have a real tough job. Especially increasingly, there’s so much immigration back and forth among all countries, Europe and North America. In the research school where I do my research, there are 26 dialects spoken. The children come from backgrounds where they have all kinds of dialects. In this particular school, the majority are Canadian-Chinese, Canadian-South Asian. And then you also have immigrants from Europe, Bosnia and from Afghanistan—you know, all the refugees—and then recently we have Mexicans, too. So it’s really unreal. But at the same time, within the same schools, they have a parallel stream called French immersion, so that parents who want their child to go to French immersion have free access to it. A lot of parents in Canada want their children to speak both English and French. If a young person wants to go into civil service, that young person must learn French.

Tell me a bit about the ABCs of Learning Disabilities.
My husband kept egging me to write a book about the course I created. So that’s why I wrote the little book, The ABCs of Learning Disabilities. But when I wrote it, I felt that it’s not just the practicum part that people should read about. They also should read about the theory and research part. So that’s why the book has two parts, which makes it more valid. If you look at textbooks in learning disabilities—and I respect all my colleagues in the states and Quebec who wrote similar textbooks—they don’t really pay as much attention to the research part. They’re not as thorough about describing up-to-date research. They’re quite general, and they move fast to the practical part—which I understand, because the practical part is important. But if you’re training students, you have to pay attention to the theory and research parts—especially the research parts. Otherwise, they can’t get into graduate school without being short-changed. If you want to prepare them to go further, to a Master’s, they have to have some grounding in research. At least they should understand what’s happening, which areas are sort of the hot areas, and why. But anyway, that’s my bias.

You also have Learning About Learning Disabilities, third edition, that came out recently…
Yes. That’s a graduate text, mostly for graduate students. I like that one. I wanted to make sure that students in master’s and doctorate programs have a real grasp of current research areas. Again, I maintain a balance between more basic and applied research. And here I’m very blessed—I have so many friends in the field that all generously contributed chapters.

So, Learning About Learning Disabilities covers both the theoretical and hands-on aspects of learning disabilities.
It emphasizes equally research and practice. It just doesn’t kind of tilt the book so that three-quarters of it is about practice, and only one quarter about research. It’s half and half.

What distinguishes the third edition from the previous edition?
I think it’s much more up to date. You see, I always feel that after 5 years, you have to revise any book because it’s no longer current. Even as you’re writing the book, new things are coming out in press. Some material you can’t get at because it’s at press, or when you write to the authors they don’t want to share it, and you can’t blame them because they want the book to come out first. Always, new things are coming out. And you really feel obliged to keep your readers current. So after 5 years, I feel embarrassed if someone quotes my book that is an old book, or a paper that I wrote 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago.

…because things have changed.
Yes. Seriously, I don’t even remember what I’ve written so long ago. And secondly, I will immediately tell the person, ‘No, no, you’ve got to get a source that’s much more current, published right now or at most two years ago, or not more than three years ago’. So that’s why it’s important to have a revised book out. You’re doing people justice. You’re being honest with people. However, a caveat is in order. Some papers are classic, they are good and remain so despite passage of time! These we should cite with impunity despite the fact they have been published a long time ago!

Do you spend much time in libraries for research or personal reasons, or for any other purpose?
Oh, yes. I still go to the library. There’s a lovely big community library here, it’s just gorgeous. I love going to libraries.

Librarians will love you!
No, honestly! When I was young, my oldest brother’s wife, she’s about 13 years older than me, she used to think that I should go into library science. I love reading, and so they thought I would become a librarian. My best friend is a librarian!

What else are you up to these days?
It’s very interesting to be asked this question! I took early retirement in 2002, because my husband is 10 years older, and he’s already been retired for five years, and I wanted to keep him company while he’s still in good health, and travel a bit. So I took early retirement—and the year I retired a got a huge Canadian federal research grant! And I didn’t want to do any more teaching or textbook writing, but Nikki Levy [publisher, Elsevier] won’t take “no” for an answer—she’s very good for me!

I basically just go two to three days to the school where I do my writing research. I spend time with my outdoor and indoor gardens, see my friends, spend time with my husband, go to concerts--jazz, early music, baroque--and we travel.

Have you been anywhere recently of interest?
Yes. We went on a jazz cruise—my husband is a jazz fan—and we went to the Western Caribbean, the wilder part. We like places that are not too commercialized or developed. We really enjoyed Roatan Island in Honduras, and Belize. It’s still quite wild. Roatan Island is really very enjoyable. The people are interesting, and the island is just a long narrow thing. You could sort of go round it in say 3 or 4 hours maybe. And you just get a feel of the people, their lifestyle, because they talk about it. And then Belize is interesting because of the Mayan ruins. So, we had a great time.

We postponed this interview because you were attending the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. How was it? Who was your favorite artist?
It was 10 days and it was very good. I enjoy Dave Holland and his band. He’s a bassist and lives in New York—of course, all of them do. I felt so relaxed, honestly, it’s just great!

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Bernice Y.L. Wong:
Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Wong’s focus is on building a “community of practice” with classroom and resource room teachers, her research assistants and herself. She researches in this “community of practice” context, emphasizing writing skills to increase learning in literature and social studies. She also researches the use of writing strategies to teach children the genre of opinion essays.

December 2002: Early Retirement
1975: Ed.D., Special Education Emphasis: Learning Disabilities; University of British Columbia, Canada
1969: M.A., Experimental Psychology; University of Victoria, Canada
1966: B.A., Psychology and History (double honors); University of Keele, Staffordshire, U.K.

This article by Joanna Drummond
j.drummond@elsevier.com