{"id":4080,"date":"2018-12-20T10:27:26","date_gmt":"2018-12-20T15:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=4080"},"modified":"2018-12-20T10:27:26","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T15:27:26","slug":"reader-come-home-the-reading-brain-in-a-digital-world-by-maryanne-wolf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/reader-come-home-the-reading-brain-in-a-digital-world-by-maryanne-wolf\/","title":{"rendered":"Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>How often do you read in a deep and sustained way fully immersed, even transformed, by entering another person\u2019s world?\u00a0 In her newest book, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World,<\/em>Maryanne Wolf cautions that, the way our engagement with digital technologies alters our reading and cognitive processes, could cause our empathic, critical thinking, and reflective abilities to atrophy.\u00a0 This in turn could undermine our democratic, civil society.<\/p>\n

Wolf, the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University and the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, has written a series of nine warm letters to her readers encouraging us to think about the perils of a changing reading culture and promises of supporting media biliteracy in young readers.\u00a0 She argues that we should teach students distinct ways of reading print versus digital sources and help them switch between these modes of reading.\u00a0 Drawing on evidence from across cognitive neuroscience and education and on her own experiences as a teacher, parent, researcher, and non-profit founder, Wolf\u00a0suggests helpful parenting practices, ways teachers can support reading and digital literacy, and how policy might increase the number of students who can fully immerse themselves in written thought.<\/p>\n

As important as reading is to our thinking today, we did not evolve to read and cannot learn to do so without support.\u00a0 It is through an elaborate process of neural recycling\u2014of repurposing brain areas that have evolved for other reasons\u2014that we are able to become readers.\u00a0 With whimsical analogies to the circus Wolf explains how the act of reading even a single word requires coordinated activation across many neurons in regions distributed throughout the brain. \u00a0She explains properties of attention, vision, sound, and affective processing in the brain that contribute to reading.<\/p>\n

Wolf then explores how digital reading may endanger deep engagement with text and empathizing with others by limiting our attention span and background knowledge.\u00a0 Surprisingly, we are reading more than ever before\u2014on average about a hundred thousand words per day. Because we are so overloaded with text, simplifying, skimming, and reading in short bursts are reasonable compensatory mechanisms. Wolf\u2019s concern lies in this skimming style of reading becoming a habit that we exercise across all content. She is troubled by the trends of decreasing empathic abilities among young people, increasing rates of attentional disorders, and increasing susceptibility to \u201cfake news\u201d\u2014all of which have occurred in parallel with a rise in digital reading, media multi-tasking, technologically mediated social interactions, and outsourcing of knowledge to the internet. Deep reading, on the other hand, causes people to take perspectives\u2014a process that requires patience and increases our knowledge of the world and our ability to behave morally.<\/p>\n

By fourth grade only a third of children in the U.S. can read deeply. Nearly half of African-American and Latino student are not reading at even a basic level. Wolf offers advice about countering this trend in the digital age.\u00a0Drawing heavily on The Big Disconnect<\/em>, Wolf suggests that before age five, children and parents should jointly read physical print-based books as often as possible and largely limit digital reading. Reading to children exposes them to the sounds, visual representations, and word-meanings in our language and builds their knowledge of the world. Schools can support reading by determining students\u2019 readiness to read and helping all students improve, including struggling readers who have been underexposed to text and readers with learning disabilities.\u00a0Phonics should unequivocally be a part of reading instruction. Teachers in higher grades should learn to teach reading since many of their students may not be proficient.\u00a0 Policy makers can help by investing in early childhood education, literacy, teacher professional development, and equitable access to print and digital media.<\/p>\n

Wolf concludes by proposing that, since the next generation will enter a job market primarily based on jobs that do not exist today, we need to support young people in building biliterate brains.\u00a0 That is, they need to learn to work effectively in both print and digital media.\u00a0As they develop proficiency in both deep and fast ways of reading they will also learn when and how to switch between these modes. \u00a0Schools should require courses that openly discuss the intriguing and harmful aspects of internet usage, and responsible practices.<\/p>\n

A democracy thrives on diversity of ideas, but if citizens are not able to use new technologies, critical thinking, and empathic skills to evaluate those ideas, society will not advance.\u00a0Wolf\u2019s strategies for supporting reading in a digital age help us improve as readers and help us grow a stronger, more civil democracy.<\/p>\n

Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.\u00a0<\/em>New York: Harper Collins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How often do you read in a deep and sustained way fully immersed, even transformed, by entering another person\u2019s world?\u00a0 In her newest book, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World,Maryanne Wolf cautions that, the way our engagement with digital technologies alters our reading and cognitive processes, could cause our empathic, critical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":4085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[47],"class_list":["post-4080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4080"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4087,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4080\/revisions\/4087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}