Freedom Found

by michelle coppedge

Last year a thirteen-year-old girl was a finalist in a national poetry contest. Remarkable, especially when you consider that she has cerebral palsy, doesn't speak, and that three years ago she couldn't read. And the contest was for young writers, period — not young writers with disabilities.

Karen Erickson, director of Carolina's Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, knows this young poet because the girl learned to read and write using Adolescent Literacy Learning Link (ALL-Link). She and forty-two other students in seven states helped Erickson and collaborator David Koppenhaver, of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, complete a recent field test.

ALL-Link is an Internet-based service that uses popular culture to teach reading to adolescents with moderate to severe disabilities. At least 1.4 million U.S. students fall into this category, Erickson says.

"If you have severe disabilities, as many of these students do, and you don't learn to read in elementary school, you often don't get another chance," Erickson says. "People don't see these children as potential readers."

This is where ALL-Link comes in. As it instructs the student, the software helps the teacher or parent provide immediate feedback. So the adult doesn't need special training but learns to teach reading as the student learns to read.

"ALL-Link is for true beginners who are reading at a pre-first-grade level," Erickson says. The software serves adolescents with severe speech and physical disabilities such as nonspeaking cerebral palsy, but it also accommodates students with comparatively moderate impairments, including autism or Down syndrome.

Mark Crowell of Carolina's Office of Technology Development worked with Erickson on a development agreement with the Benetech Initiative, a Silicon Valley nonprofit. He says that ALL-Link is an example of non-traditional technology transfer. "The areas of literacy training and writing skills are consistent with the university's mission to find tools with real-world applications," he says.

As for the teenage poet, Erickson says, "She can't speak, but she is now able to demonstrate that she has profound thoughts by expressing them through poetry."

Funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The Benetech Initiative will launch ALL-Link as a subscription service in January 2004 under a grant from the Severns Family Foundation.