Education Week
February 6, 2018
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." 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.