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LITERACY FOR ALL
Our Mission
At Literary Academy Collective (LAC) we believe access to literacy is the most pressing Civil Rights issue in New York City. Our mission is to design and support NYC DOE Public Schools that will allow children with dyslexia, language-based learning disabilities, and those struggling to read to achieve academic success.
Our partnerships with schools, families, community based organizations, and institutes of higher education aim to bring culturally relevant, structured literacy to students at the intersection of poverty, race and disability.
Our goal is to break the cycle of illiteracy for students with dyslexia, LBLDs, and other struggling readers.
Our Work
In collaboration with the Windward Institute, LAC partnered with two school districts and several schools in NYC, to mount three structured literacy pilots.
We provided in-depth professional development, mentoring and coaching in a proven structured literacy program to DOE teachers over two summers, then mounted a Model Classroom this fall.
What is Structured Literacy?
Structured literacy is an approach to teaching oral and written language. It's based on the science of how kids learn to read based on decades of research.
"The body of work referred to as “the science of reading” is not an ideology, a philosophy, a political agenda, a one-size-fits-all approach, a program of instruction, or a specific component of instruction. It is the emerging consensus from many related disciplines, based on literally thousands of studies, supported by hundreds of millions of research dollars, conducted across the world in many languages. These studies have revealed a great deal about how we learn to read, what goes wrong when students don’t learn, and what kind of instruction is most likely to work the best for the most students."
Dr. Louisa Moats
What is dyslexia?
"Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge."
