Experiences of teachers and trainee teachers who are dyslexic

By B. Riddick. 2003

90 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the current climate of inclusion, an important issue involves the inclusion of teachers with a range of disabilities. The Dyslexia in Higher Education Report raised concerns about the negative attitude of some teacher training departments to admitting and supporting students with dyslexia. This study interviewed a small number of practising teachers and trainee teachers with dyslexia about their experiences of teaching and training and the specific coping strategies they adopted in the classroom. They were all asked if (and how) their own experiences of literacy difficulties had influenced the way they taught children, and especially those with literacy difficulties. All the participants reported using a number of effective coping strategies and felt on balance the advantages of being dyslexic outweighed the disadvantages in terms of giving them greater empathy and understanding of children's problems. The majority felt their own very negative experiences of school had been a strong motivating factor in wanting to teach in order to give children a better educational experience than their own. Trainee and newly qualified teachers were fearful of being ‘found out’ by other members of staff and often felt low in confidence despite performing well in the classroom. Most would have welcomed constructive support and mentoring from experienced teachers with dyslexia. In a supposedly inclusive education culture, it is argued that a more enabling and open attitude to teachers with dyslexia should be adopted

Subfields: Education, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d702ddb4c3b1144aa975d78ef2524135a26fa199

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Linda Siegel
2. Urs Ribary
3. Ozcan Konur
4. Emily M. Livingston
5. E. Geva
6. R. Vukovic

In Safety Research

1. Linda Siegel
2. Ozcan Konur

Citations in the corpus

• Teaching disabled students in higher education (2006, background): “Riddick (2003) extended these studies to LD students and recent graduates of teacher education programs in Scotland.”
• Developmental dyslexia: emotional impact and consequences (2018, background): “…et al., 1999; Siegel, 2013, 2016); however, some individuals are able to attribute resilience (Shessel & Reiff, 1999) or empathy and understanding (Riddick, 2003), suggesting that with support learning disabilities do not have to be interpreted negatively or have negative emotional consequences.”