Earlier this month, on 20 October 2024, the Madras Dyslexia Association (MDA) — a Chennai-based non-profit founded by parents of children with dyslexia — organised a ‘Dyslexia Awareness Walk’ from Besant Nagar beach. This event was one of many to mark ‘Dyslexia Awareness Month’ celebrated worldwide every October to raise awareness among locals, parents, and schools about the people who have it.
Speaking about the event, D Chandrasekhar, the founder of MDA, an alumnus of IIT-Madras and first generation entrepreneur, said, “These events are essential first steps towards enabling a ‘Dyslexia sensitive society’. They enable parents, schools and teachers to identify and accept this neurological condition paving the way to facilitate remedial sessions for children with dyslexia to learn coping strategies using multi-sensory methods. This ensures that the individuals with dyslexia lead a productive life instead of slipping through the cracks.”
MDA was founded in 1992 when a group of parents of children with dyslexia, educationists empathetic to the cause, and philanthropists came together to actively help children address this condition and raise awareness about it to the general public.
The organisation was founded to take a pragmatic approach to help children with dyslexia. For the past three decades, it has been providing remedial help and support to children with dyslexia and their parents through the Ananya Learning and Research Centre (ALRC). They have also been actively working towards spreading awareness to the community at large, helping schools set up resource rooms and conducting teacher training programmes.
Understanding dyslexia
According to MDA, “Since dyslexia is a hidden [learning] disability that does not allow the child to perform to his/her actual potential, the underachievement of an otherwise intelligent child is puzzling to both teachers and parents alike. Timely identification and appropriate help will ensure that these children continue their education and their potential is fully tapped.”
Children with dyslexia could face challenges in their academic pursuits (especially in their school-going years) due to difficulties in reading, spelling, writing and or maths, despite their average to above average intelligence. Most often, parents, teachers and peers focus on these areas of deficits ignoring the talents these individuals could be bestowed with.
Pradeep Thangappan, a dyslexic, entrepreneur and co-founder of Aerostrovilos Energy Pvt. Ltd — a startup aiming at manufacturing micro gas turbines for power-based applications — recalled:
“When I was in middle school [about 20 years ago], my father read an article in The Hindu about dyslexia. It was literally describing me. I did have a problem with maths and English, the reversing [of the letters] ‘B’ and ‘D’, and confusion between left and right [directions]. After reading the article, he wanted to get me tested [for dyslexia]. At the time, there was hardly any awareness. [But] At least now, my struggle had a name.”
For Pradeep, dyslexia brings a lot of strength and weakness. “To this day, I do have a problem with reading. I don’t think I can sit down and then read a book. I’ve never read a novel or a book to date because it’s difficult for me. I do make spelling mistakes even today. But I understand how things work. On a very process level, I can decipher how an engineering component would work. My strengths lie in figuring out niche problems where people are not able to find a solution conventionally. I can look at a problem and give it solutions in a way that nobody else can,” he said.
Pradeep was part of the first batch of ALRC, “a full-time pull-out remediation centre for children with Specific Learning Difficulties,” according to the MDA website.
“Remedial intervention is [usually] offered for children between the ages of 6 and 12, where the child is pulled out of the mainstream school and given a remedial programme based on a multi-sensory approach. This programme is offered to the child after an assessment of his/her strengths and needs using global standardised assessment tools. The remediation programme is offered for a period of one year at the minimum to two years at the maximum, depending on the intensity of the remediation required, after which the child is mainstreamed back to the regular school,” the website further notes.
Origins of MDA
Dr Chandrasekhar recalls attending a dyslexia remediation training programme in 1992 with his wife to help his dyslexic son. After the training programme, the participants met for dinner.
Speaking to The Better India, Chandrasekhar recalls, “The trainer who had come from England, Hazel Mckay, suggested that in order to undertake some serious action, it would be better to form an association and work together. Initially, the association had a group of trainees along with a few parents and special educators. Since I was personally involved in some social activities at that time, I volunteered for this good cause. We all got together and decided to form the MDA, and I was selected to be the secretary of the association.”
“My personal motivation for establishing MDA was the opportunity to meet professionals who could help my son. Initially, the MDA encountered a lot of problems. Firstly, there was a lack of clarity about what dyslexia is. Many parents were in denial that their children could have dyslexia. There was a lack of awareness in the public,” he shares.
“Many thought that we were supporting ‘dumb’ children. But we would overcome these challenges over time through our relentless awareness programmes, reaching out to the parents, schools and the general public through the media, while also actively providing special assistance to dyslexic children,” he adds.
What does MDA do?
Initially, MDA started with training teachers to help children with dyslexia.
Speaking to The Better India, D Chandrasekhar says, “After a couple of years, we opened a remediation centre, both part-time and full-time, for children and also got a few of our special educators trained to carry out assessments. We adopted many techniques from the United States and the United Kingdom, but over time, we realised that we needed to modify this programme to suit Indian children. Accordingly, our teachers employed a lot of innovation in converting these practices to suit our conditions. We have done a lot of developments in remediating through multiple sensory techniques using verbal, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile techniques.”
Today, MDA runs the full-time remediation centre for severely affected dyslexic children. They support 30 children at their centre besides providing part-time remediation to 50 children.
“We train the teachers on how to identify these children using a checklist. We also train the teachers how to use multi-sensory techniques and remediate the children from their problems in reading, writing, spelling, maths, and executive functions. We train the trainee teachers to show a lot of empathy and understanding to the children with dyslexia,” he says.
For teachers, MDA runs an e-shikshanam programme that is essentially a free even-week online course that helps primary school teachers support children with mild to moderate dyslexia. They also run a six-week Intensive Teacher Training Programme that helps teachers identify and support children with different levels of dyslexia.
Meanwhile, remediation sessions for children are done through the ALRC. This includes an Individual Education Program (IEP), which according to the MDA website, “is drawn out for the child based on his/her strengths and needs.” The IEP consists of “skill building, need-based and activity oriented learning”. Moreover, the ALRC also focuses on the ‘holistic development of the child’ with the aim to nurture their talents and interests — including co-curricular activities like yoga, music, dramatics, arts and crafts, and games, besides something called Hydra.
According to the website, “Hydra is one of the arms of MDA focussed on nurturing the natural potential of children. The team at Hydra consists of trained teachers and mental health professionals and works in technical partnership with Vidya Sagar [a Chennai-based non-profit empowering people with disabilities]. The environment at Hydra is caring and non-threatening. This encourages the children to let go of any stress and feelings of low self-worth that often accompany the condition of dyslexia. It helps them feel accepted for who they are.”
MDA also engages in Occupational Therapy, a key component of remediation. This focuses “on helping children with physical ability, sensory integration, attention, and concentration difficulty to enhance their skills along with self-esteem and performance in the classroom.”
Finally, you have counselling, where the ALRC partners with qualified professionals to provide counselling for children and parents as part of the personality development of the child. “There is an in-house counsellor who interacts with the child and the parent and also conducts periodic workshops for them. The teachers are also given orientation on child behaviour to help them handle different behavioural issues in the classroom,” the website adds.
Results
Speaking to The Better India, Chandrasekhar says, “One of the major misconceptions that people have about dyslexic children is that they are not intelligent. Actually, they are very intelligent with an IQ of more than 85. It is very easy to work with them once we take the right approach. MDA has removed the misconceptions by demonstrating the remedial programmes.”
Over three decades, Chandrasekhar claims that MDA has directly assisted more than 1,500 children in their full-time remediation centre, and provided part-time remediation for 3,000 children. “We have trained more than 2,000 teachers and conducted training programmes in over 400 schools. We have also set up resource rooms for dyslexic children in nearly 200 schools that benefit 10,000 of them year on year,” adds Chandrasekhar.
How far has our education system come in assisting children with dyslexia?
According to Chandrasekhar, “The education system has shown a lot of understanding towards the needs of dyslexic children. A lot of concessions are offered during public exams. Dyslexic children are eligible for all the benefits under the Disabilities Act. Yet, we have a long way to go. Awareness in schools is still very low, especially among teachers. While private schools easily understand the problems associated with dyslexia, it’s still not a priority in government schools.”
(Edited by Pranita Bhat; Images courtesy D Chandrasekhar)
