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—Sharon Dowling Cox—
SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Sharon has been a speech-language pathologist for the past 20 years. She has worked in a variety of settings,including 6 years in a preschool psychoeducational center and 14 years in public schools. She has had shorter-termexperiences in several private-practice settings, including a hospital and rehabilitative facilities. She was employed inher present position as an elementary school speech-language pathologist for 8 years before taking aneducational leave of absence to complete a specialist’sdegree in reading education.Sharon’s favorite reading from the Readers as Teachers and Teachers as Readers seminar was B
EFORE
W 
OMEN 
H
 AD
W 
INGS
by Connie May Fowler (1996) because the author tells her story so poignantly that Sharonstayed up all night reading the book and felt like a kid again.
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CHAPTER 9
 Dissolving Boundaries ThroughLanguage, Literacy,and Learning
Sharon Dowling Cox
The Reciprocal Sharing of Reading Lives
“Mrs. Cox, did you have to learn new vocabulary words when youwent back to school?” I paused momentarily, and the word
pedagogy 
came to mind. Tina, a fifth-grade student, asked thisquestion during a language lesson with one of her peers. We werediscussing strategies that could be used when taking vocabularytests and using what we already know about words to highlight theimportance of making meaning from what we read. As I reflectedwith these two students on the experience of my reentry intograduate school, I shared feelings of my initial resistance at havingto embrace the new word
pedagogy 
. More words popped into mindas I related strategies I used when I encountered difficult text andfound writing styles in journal articles and scholarly texts to bechallenging. When I confessed that I often used the dictionary tolook up unknown words to better understand what I read, bothstudents stared at me transfixed. This genuine conversation gavenew meaning to my prior efforts to explicitly teach new vocabulary.My students were helping me connect my learning with theirs. Atthis point, I began to feel as though the new words cameunexpectedly, like the wind swirling softly into our conversations.As if propelled by breezes, these words moved our thoughts,feelings, and experiences, settling around us as new understandingswere revealed.When I began to share my personal reading life with mystudents, I did not realize the powerful shift that had begun as my
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pedagogy took on new meaning. I knew that merging the disciplinesof reading and speech-language pathology was a new way for me toteach to the broad curriculum objectives designed to help studentsbecome more fluent in oral expression while fostering competencein language comprehension. However, I was learning that talkingabout books offered a more natural and practical forum forfostering overall language development, as compared to looking atpictures from a worksheet, which seemed a contrived way of teaching and learning.As a reader who teaches, I am now engaged in the process of targeting speech and language goals that have been established inthe students’ individualized educational plans (IEPs), whileintegrating my reading and readings from teacher- and student-chosen texts with our communicative interactions.I find the flow of instruction speckled with unexpectedquestions or comments from both students and myself. Theircomments often surprise me. I feel privileged to learn from theirhonesty and ingenuity:“This book is not really interesting yet.”“I visualize how the person in the story looks.”“She (Anne Sullivan) reminds me of Louis Braille becausethey both had to leave their parents.”“An adjective shows strong and intense feeling.”Boundaries were dissolving. Whenever I share myself as a reader, I engage with students more as individuals with whom Ishare an ageless common bond—we are allreaders. The traditional roles of teacher/speech-language pathologist as giver of knowledge andthe student as receiver seem to be dissolvingalong with the endless copying and papershuffling of worksheets on my part. There ismore spontaneous laughter and expressions of satisfaction as students make connectionsbetween school learning experiences and the reality of their livesoutside of school. Words have created these moments, fashioning
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Cox
I find the flow of instruction speckledwith unexpectedquestions or comments from bothstudents and myself.
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