While she was teaching her child classes (7-10 year-olds), an English teacher noticed that in each class of fifteen students, there were three or four who just ‘couldn’t get it’. It wasn’t about their intelligence or understanding, because, when she asked them, they would reply, even better than the rest of the class. It was mostly in the writing and reading activities that these students repeatedly made the same mistakes, not showing much progress. Such students were typically quieter than the others.
There was one particular student whom she noticed early on in the 10-week course. She asked that the parents be contacted, and was looking for the explanation, but she only received the reply just before the final exam. The parents brought the ‘diagnosis paper’ to show that the child was dyslexic. The teacher was shocked and a bit disappointed at her own teaching abilities to recognize and act upon this particular issue. She started doing research, and completed a few online courses, she connected to other experts in the field and initiated a workshop to share her findings with her colleagues. Dyslexia is being treated in isolation in Morocco, like most other Learning Differences/Difficulties, regardless of the Inclusion Policy that was set in place in 2019. Most ‘mainstream’ teachers, especially the subject teachers are not familiar with the details and implications of this policy, and they have a vague idea of what inclusion is, or how to treat a student with a Learning Difference/Difficulty. It’s not only about reading and writing, it affects the students’ self-esteem and inhibits learning on many levels. It is particularly difficult among young Moroccan students because they start learning French and Arabic almost at the same time as English, which is a highly non-transparent language. It means that the spelling and pronunciation are not clearly related, and that there are many variations of graphemic representation for the same sound. Although the young brain has great plasticity, these circumstances cause even non-dyslexic brains to behave in a dyslexic manner for the period of first two-three years of language learning. So, the Teacher-founder of IncLDE has a mission to train all English teachers in Morocco to recognize these struggles, to be tolerant to them, and to introduce activities that will be appropriate both for dyslexic and non-dyslexic learners. She wants to empower the teachers to keep learning, because the scientific research on the brain gives new findings each year, and to give them a set of tools that will enable them to do so. She also wants to share some practical digital tools she has discovered on her journey that will make learning of English easier to all students, by using modern technology in the classroom or at home. |