Starting in January 2009 I will be offering a new undergraduate
course, Literacy Mind and Brain, which will be 820-402 when the
schedule comes out. It will be meeting two days a week, with a third
honors section. 

I've created a course that might be one of the few of its kind in the
country: it attempst to link behavioral and neuroimaging research
about reading to educational practices. We know quite a lot about
basic mechanisms that underlie reading, how they develop, the brain
circuits that support skilled reading, the kinds of things that go
wrong when children have difficulty learning to read, the brain bases
of reading, the genetic anomalies that underlie many cases of
dyslexia, and so on. Very little of this research has had an impact on
educational practice however. One might ask whether we could improve
reading achievement among American children by drawing more upon this
research in deciding how to teach reading.  I am especially interested
in the challenges that confront poor and minority, particularly
African American, children when schooling begins--and how reading
research might help these children.

Here's a brief overview of the course:

Literacy is the ability to read and write. Reading is one of the most
advanced expressions of human intelligence, made possible by the
invention of writing systems. The reading process is complex,
involving vision, speech, memory, thinking and other capacities. There
are debates about how to teach children to read, and about why many
children have difficulty becoming skilled readers. Literacy levels are
lower in the US than in many other countries.  So we want to know:

How skilled reading works
How children learn to read
What reading science implies about how reading should be taught
What are the brain bases of reading
What are the causes of developmental dyslexia?  

Along the way we'll be looking at interesting issues such as

Whether people read the same way in different writing systems; 

"Mega Speed Reading", "Hooked on phonics", and other commercial
reading products: helpful or hoaxes?  

What dyslexia is and whether it has genetic and/or neural bases 

Plagiarism detection, automatic grading: can computers
"read" and grade student papers as well as professors? Detect
plagiarized papers?

In other words, it should be interesting and fun.

See you there.