Unit One
Foundations of Literacy and Identity

In this unit:

We will read widely across foundational and contemporary research into literacy and the brain. We’ll focus heavily on two of our course texts (Maryanne Wolfe’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, and Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain), plus a range of peer-reviewed research articles and online resources. We’ll also build our own model brains and synapses using play dough and toothpicks (or whatever equivalent works for you), to help get a better sense of where literacy is taking place in our brains.

By the unit’s end, you should be able to:

  • explain to a non-classmate peer the basics of how literacy affects an individual brain

  • name and physically point to places in the (model) brain that connect to literacy activities

  • articulate potential gaps in the existing research on writing & cognition, in the context of currently published work

Synthesis/Reflection Essay #1 Assignment

Essay Grading Rubric

Sample Essays from Fall 2021:

  1. “The Privilege of Learning and Loving to Read”

  2. “How Dyslexia Affects Development and a Sense of ‘Self’”

Sample Essays from Fall 2020:

  1. “Brain Damage, Literacy, and Emotion”

  2. “The Acquisition of Language and Structural Neuroanatomy”

  3. “The Effect of Socioeconomic Status and Literacy on Individual Emotional Regulation”