Grit, revisited

This past weekend at the Festival of Education in Potomac, Maryland, I had the pleasure of attending David Steiner‘s fascinating and highly unsettling talk on the state of American education. Among other things, his talk included a list of the Great Distractors:

• Critical thinking
• Growth mindset
• Grit
• Social and emotional learning
• Metacognition
• Twenty-first century skills
• Creative Thinking

To the extent that any of these items hold any truths, he noted, these are truths that 23 centuries of educational practice have long ago brought to light. Only in the U.S. do we think we need to (1) reinvent them and (2) exaggerate them until they’re nothing more than… Great Distractors.

One item on the list reminded me of this old OILF post, which I hereby resuscitate:

Social Deficits Correlate with Motor Deficits: Commentary on some recent “research” cited by the pro-FC organization United for Communication Choice.

 (Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommuniction.org.)

In a recent post, I critiqued the curious “facts” listed on United for Communication Choice (UCC)’s facts page. In what may be my final post on UCC, I’ll now take a look at the two most recent articles listed on its research page.

What distinguishes UCC from all other pro-FC websites is its compilation of all (or nearly all) the pro-FC, peer-reviewed publications out there—or at least publications that look peer-reviewed and can be interpreted by at least some FC proponents as FC-friendly. In all, it lists around 175 publications. We at FacilitatedCommunication.com have gone through them all and have included most of what are purportedly the more FC-friendly articles, along with our commentary, in the Research section of this website. We’ve also critiqued some of the most FC-friendly (or purportedly FC-friendly) articles in more detail here in the blog section. But before I add two more articles to that last, I want to place them in their broader context relative to UCC.

From Frankenstein to Facilitated Communication

What do Frankenstein and Facilitated Communication have in common? Both involve miraculous stories of word learning. 

In one case you have a nonverbal child who, supplied with some sort of facilitated communication medium, suddenly evinces neurotypical vocabulary (not to mention neurotypical grammar and conversational skills). In the other case you have a humanoid monster mastering his first language by overhearing, through the window of his hovel, conversations between his unwitting nextdoor neighbors.

A critique of United for Communication Choice’s “facts” page

Cross posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org.

I recently stumbled upon the “facts” page of the pro-FC organization United For Communication Choice and decided an annotated critique was in order. United for Communication Choice appears not to have conducted much activity on its site or elsewhere in the last year, but for a while it kept up a repository of pro-FC research, much of which we’ve critiqued here. In addition, it was a hub for criticism of a position statement against FC by the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA), and many of its “facts” are inspired by that position statement.

In what follows, I excerpt the most problematic of these purported facts (preserving the original boldface type and links) and insert my critiques below them in italics.