Stop Using the Label 'Struggling Reader,' Author Jacqueline Woodson Advises via Ed Week

Jacqueline Woodson

Stop Using the Label 'Struggling Reader,' Author Jacqueline Woodson Advises

Ed Week: 2.05.2018 by Brenda Iasevoli

In January, author Jacqueline Woodson was named National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress. She  designed her platform—Reading = Hope x Change (What's Your Equation?)—to spark conversations about how reading can help young people create, as she puts it, "the world they'd like to live in."

Woodson is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a two-time Coretta Scott King award winner, and was named the 2015 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation for her memoir-in-verse Brown Girl Dreaming. She is the sixth author to take on the two-year role as the nation's premier advocate for young people's literature. The first National Ambassador, in 2008, was Jon Scieszka, followed by Katherine Paterson (2010-11), Walter Dean Myers (2012-13), Kate DiCamillo (2014-15), and Gene Luen Yang (2016-17).

Woodson talked with Education Week about how she plans to use her new platform. (The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.)

You have said that you'd like to use your platform as ambassador to steer people away from using labels like "struggling reader." What do you see as the harm in these labels?

Woodson: Any kind of qualifier can be harmful because who we are is not static. Our abilities are constantly changing. What does it mean to be a struggling reader? I know if I was raised in this day and age, I would have been labeled a struggling reader. But what I know now is I was actually reading like a writer. I was reading slowly and deliberately and deconstructing language, not in the sense of looking up words in the dictionary, but understanding from context. I was constantly being compared to my sister who excelled, and it made me feel insecure. What gets translated is 'you are not as good,' and that gets translated into our whole bodies. That's where the danger lies. 

So it's not what you read, or how fast, but what you get out of reading

Woodson: First and foremost, young people should be passionate about reading. In the 6th grade I still enjoyed reading picture books. It informed me as a writer. Even now, I tell people that if they want to understand how a novel is structured, look at a picture book. It's all there.   READ MORE >>