This past weekend I was invited to create a vision board for 2023 with a wonderful group of friends. As a newbie to this type of goal setting or planning for the year, I was looking forward to the inspiration I would find in the giant pile of magazines that we’d collected.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that I wanted to include something about books. Making my way through a stack of professional books has actually been a goal of mine since the start of the 2022-23 school year. At that time, I set a goal of reading a professional resource for at least 60 minutes a week, and while this isn’t a huge amount of time, my to-read stack is decreasing in size (as a sidebar, I found reading The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler to be thought-provoking and profound)!
Not only am I enjoying reading these professional resources about all things education, I’ve found myself in a new book club and reading books for my own enjoyment. Before the last six months, I had never really viewed myself as an avid reader, but now I’m actively reading two books and will start a third soon. As I record these thoughts in this blog, I’m still happily shocked by this shift in my life. This is because I grew up hating to read the books assigned in school. Instead, I flew through all of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books, but at one point was told that what I was reading was essentially garbage and worthless.
One thing that has really come into view over the last handful of months is the fact that I thoroughly enjoy reading with my eyes and with my ears; it simply depends upon the context. For example, I recently purchased the printed book, Solito; A Memoir by Javier Zamora, as this was my last book club book. However, I quickly figured out that I wanted to keep reading it even when I didn’t have access to the physical book, like when I was driving or going for a walk. That meant I needed the audio version too. So I went ahead and purchased it from the Google Play Store (I find digital books cheaper here than on Audible), since it wasn’t currently available for digital access through my local library.
Viola! The reading no longer had to wait on my access to the printed book! I could read with my eyes in bed or read with my ears in the car or on the treadmill. The ability to choose the way in which I read the text allowed me to continue my engagement in the story with less restriction. Having these options allowed me to maximize my time, which is another part of my vision for the year.
What if we could engage our students in spending more time reading by simply offering them choices in the ways that they can access text? Recent research from the Journal of Neuroscience states that “while the representation of semantic information in the human brain is quite complex, the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical.” This means that when we are focused on building reading comprehension, we should feel confident in letting our students read with their eyes and their ears.
It’s in these choices that we may help our students see themselves as “avid” readers for the first time in their lives-- just like I’m experiencing for the first time in my late 30s. It’s a mixed feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction that I may not have realized could be fulfilled in this way, but it’s a feeling that is shaping my self-image and confidence in my intellect.
Plus, we must recognize that we will always have students with documented print disabilities that require access to digital and printed text in various formats to aid comprehension, and the Indiana Center for Accessible Materials (ICAM) is ready and waiting to help you provide these accessible materials at no cost to you. Reach out if you’d like more information on getting started!
There are ways to find accessible digital versions of text for all students, too. Firstly, you can check out audiobooks from your local library through apps like Hoopla and Libby. Other sites like Unite for Literacy and Open Library also offer audiobooks. There are paid options as well such as Epic, Books on Google Play, Audible, and more.
I look forward to the day where school libraries operate like our public libraries offering print, digital, and audiobooks for all students! Please like or comment if you too have visions of text versions for all students!