In this episode of "Dyslexia Uncovered," we dive deeper into a theme that resonates strongly with our community—the intersection of identity and the social-emotional realities faced by those with learning differences. Our guest, Dr. Stephanie Haft, a newly minted Ph.D. and clinical psychologist, has dedicated her research to exploring the impacts of learning differences and ADHD on individual well-being.
Dr. Haft's work extends beyond the often-discussed realms of childhood and adolescence, focusing on underrepresented groups. Her insights shed light on the broader psychological factors affecting our community and others, highlighting the diverse challenges and resilience among those living with dyslexia and related conditions.
Join us as Dr. Haft shares her extensive knowledge and helps us understand more about the social-emotional landscape that shapes our lives.
Continue the Learning
Access Stephanie's systematic review of learning disability stigma and stereotype threat.
Share your thoughts and follow your host on X @OdegardTim
In this episode of "Dyslexia Uncovered," we dive deeper into a theme that resonates strongly with our community—the intersection of identity and the social-emotional realities faced by those with learning differences. Our guest, Dr. Stephanie Haft, a newly minted Ph.D. and clinical psychologist, has dedicated her research to exploring the impacts of learning differences and ADHD on individual well-being.
Dr. Haft's work extends beyond the often-discussed realms of childhood and adolescence, focusing on underrepresented groups. Her insights shed light on the broader psychological factors affecting our community and others, highlighting the diverse challenges and resilience among those living with dyslexia and related conditions.
Join us as Dr. Haft shares her extensive knowledge and helps us understand more about the social-emotional landscape that shapes our lives.
Continue the Learning
Access Stephanie's systematic review of learning disability stigma and stereotype threat.
Share your thoughts and follow your host on X @OdegardTim
Tim Odegard: [00:00:00] Hey there, everybody. I'm back with another conversation. But it's not sunny outside. In fact, it's storming. And there's lightning here in Middle Tennessee. I keep joking with people that I'm going to start putting out ASMR recordings. And the thunder and rain outside my window are the perfect backdrop for that.
Tim Odegard: So just sit back. As we emerge into a space of wonder and awe as we think about the universe. Oh goodness, if I keep this up, I'm going to break into my McConaughey impersonation. Anyway, it's been yet another hectic week here and it's not even over yet. Well, the semester is wound down and the university students have mostly gone home.
Tim Odegard: I've got some of my literacy fellows around the center helping me out with different projects. And, we are busy bees getting ready to start a two year training to prepare a group of educators to become literacy interventionists to work with members of our community and other children who need similar structured literacy interventions.
Tim Odegard: And I'm doing a fun end of year project, [00:01:00] too, with my second year kids in our center as they wrap up doing their reading intervention. We are planning to do an art project next week as we start to fill the center with art created by members of our community to display aspects of who we are to the world.
Tim Odegard: And all of these little kiddos are ready to help us out with that. So I was chatting with them and I just got so happy Listening and watching as they explored ideas and ways they can bring them to life And I can't wait to help them make these a reality Anyway, that's a little of what's been going on and i've been doing this week and i'm excited to share , yet again, another conversation, and today we're going to continue a theme that has emerged around identity and the social emotional realities facing members of our community.
Tim Odegard: And as we continue this theme , today's guest is going to be. The one, the only, Dr. Stephanie Haft. She is a clinical psychologist and a mental health researcher. [00:02:00] She has focused her efforts on understanding the impacts of learning differences and ADHD on the social emotional well being of individuals. And she just received her PhD, but has already amassed an impressive publication record.
Tim Odegard: Now, I highlight here that she's done research on LDs and ADHD. But she's actually much more expansive and looks at other communities we might say are marginalized.
Tim Odegard: As you will hear, she has considerable knowledge about psychological well being and factors that impact our community. So, without further ado, please join in the conversation with Dr. Stephanie Haft.
Tim Odegard: Thank you so much for being here today, Stephanie. How are you today?
Stephanie Haft: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
Tim Odegard: I don't know that much about you and your backstory, so could you start off by telling me a little bit about yourself?
Stephanie Haft: Yes, absolutely. So I'll start from the beginning, which is growing up in the Midwest, in [00:03:00] Ohio, and then I came to Southern California for college, then moved up north to San Francisco, where I worked at UCSF and became interested in research.
Stephanie Haft: That's where I first encountered research with learning disabilities and dyslexia as well, and then went to graduate school at UC Berkeley. I'm actually just getting my PhD next week in clinical psychology, so wrapping that up. And I've been doing a clinical internship at UCSF. So I'll be starting my career in mental health research in different areas.
Stephanie Haft: And that brings me to present day.
Tim Odegard: So what made you interested in working with Fumiko Hoeft. What drew you to that? Was it just Fumiko being the brilliant scholar she is? Was it something more? Was there a personal interest in it for you?
Stephanie Haft: Yes, absolutely. So I think it started with a bit of a personal interest.
Stephanie Haft: So I mentioned I grew up. And a suburban Midwestern town, it was relatively homogenous and got a full scholarship to go to [00:04:00] school in Southern California, encountered a lot of people, a lot of stories, a lot of identities that were very different from my own. And so through that process, I'm just.
Stephanie Haft: Leaving my town, going to college, I became really interested in differences in human behavior. So how people grow up differently, how people act and think differently, so very broadly. And that led me to the field of neuroscience. When I was looking at different neuroscience labs, I came across Dr. Fumiko Hoeft's lab at UCSF. What I really liked about her lab is that she really applies the neuroscience. And that includes her research with learning disabilities and dyslexia. A lot of neuroscience can be just looking at brains, but not really relating that to practical application.
Stephanie Haft: And I really liked that she does that. Her lab was an educational neuroscience lab, and she studied things like dyslexia. Not only did the brain imaging, but was [00:05:00] able to draw that to how that impacts education and learning. So that's what led me to her lab.
Tim Odegard: That is really interesting. I know her. She's a friend and a colleague, and she really is standout when it comes to doing that translational work and trying to think more about what the application might be than just staring at brains all day, which can be fun in its own right. I've stared at a few myself over the years. So I'm curious, you mentioned the word identity and different identities, and that's a theme that's emerged as I've been having conversations with those of us who have dyslexia , and you've done some research around some of the implications of societal views of LDs.
Tim Odegard: And how that might impact our identity . What have you looked at as far as kind of identity and kind of social messaging around LD labels and how that can impact the individuals in these different communities?
Stephanie Haft: Yeah, so this is a really big topic. I'm glad it's coming up in a lot of your conversations. When I started off the [00:06:00] research, there wasn't too much looking at the socio emotional or mental health side, dyslexia, learning disabilities, that label. And so a lot of what I did is just summarizing the research.
Stephanie Haft: I wrote an article that just did a big search. I found about 16 studies that looked at identity related stigma or stereotype threat and how that's related to academic outcomes or self esteem or anxiety. And what that showed is just that, yes, there is this relationship where of stigma from the identity can lead to psychological challenges.
Stephanie Haft: It's not only having the identity, but how conscious you are of stigma that might be associated with that identity.
Stephanie Haft: for someone with a learning disability that can relate to anxiety. And I think, though, that the story is not all negative, and so a lot of the work I did with Eye2Eye, which is a near peer mentoring program for youth with learning disabilities or ADHD, showed [00:07:00] that it is possible to have positive associations with the identity, and that can really help in creating a community and buffering maybe the negative effects of stigma.
Stephanie Haft: So there's both sides of the story in terms of identity.
Tim Odegard: Yeah. My understanding from reading the research was a lot of this was driven by what we call in social psychology stereotyping. Was the stigma being driven by these negative stereotypes that were being portrayed in various outlets of society that were being internalized and then leading to some of these negative consequences on members of LD communities?
Stephanie Haft: Yeah. So the question is, what about the identity is drawing that stigma?
Tim Odegard: Yeah. And the role of stereotypes in particular, because stereotypes are a social construct, when as a society, we apply general traits that may not be true to every person in a community that we think are globally true of everybody.
Tim Odegard: We often think about the negative stereotypes, because in social psychology, you make a distinction between positive and negative stereotypes, both have negative [00:08:00] consequences. We can talk to the positive, was it really the focus of yours? We know from Asian communities, for example, who are often thought of as being the model minority, that when they are portrayed as a homogeny, having to fit as, People that will excel in math and sciences and will be professionals and will work really hard at those pursuits.
Tim Odegard: It really is limiting to members of that community and there's been public backlash with the portrayal of a stereotype even in positive terms from certain communities across the United States and elsewhere. So one of the things that really struck me was you were highlighting that the portrayal of negative stereotypes for different LDs, us being lazy, us being dumb.
Tim Odegard: Us being, just another word for dumb stupid, us not being capable of learning, which are wholeheartedly Not true can be a mechanism that when we internalize those we could think that they're true of us Which is what drives stereotype threat, which is what drives some of the negative associations So I was just curious [00:09:00] as to what role you were identifying the stereotypes to have when you were looking at your systematic review
Stephanie Haft: Yes So a couple of studies that I found and I think this just also goes and a lot of the qualitative work I've done too and doing these studies and talking to different individuals You Is that one of the mechanisms related to stereotyping is teachers and other people having reduced educational expectations or reduced academic expectations.
Stephanie Haft: Consciously, subconsciously, explicitly, or implicitly believing that if you have dyslexia, you have a learning disability, that you will not achieve as much kind of academically and life and lowering expectations accordingly. And I think that. Students with these identities, with these labels, feel that lowered expectations begin to internalize that, and that obviously doesn't feel good.
Stephanie Haft: That's one of the main mechanisms I found. I also, this was just from conversations, I [00:10:00] did do some focus group or qualitative work on stereotypes and dyslexia. And, you mentioned stereotypes can be positive, and yet, like the model minority stereotype, they can still have negative effects. A lot of students with dyslexia said that they felt like there was this expectation that because they had dyslexia they were super creative and that put a lot of pressure.
Stephanie Haft: And of course you can be very creative with or without dyslexia, just the nature of a stereotype though having that automatic expectation can cause a lot of pressure.
Tim Odegard: Yeah. We don't often talk about the stereotypes in general and the negative consequences on the psychological wellness of individuals from the dyslexic community or other LD communities.
Tim Odegard: And we often don't think about potentially what harm it is to portray us with positive stereotypes as being limited to just five or six gifts. I've got a piece that's talking to that where I actually review the psychological science behind this. I cite your research in particular. But I also cite the recent metas on all of the mental health outcomes that [00:11:00] are not looking in our favor, where we have much greater likelihoods of experiencing mental health challenges as a result of these things, and that even what would be seen as positive, although the research hasn't been done to my knowledge, I'm not aware of anybody who's looked at the potential impact of the positive stereotypes that say that there are gifts in a finite list of them.
Tim Odegard: Which are limiting and also a stereotype on our community, but it's interesting because you're saying that in the qualitative interviews, that was coming out in your conversations.
Stephanie Haft: That's correct, yes. And yes, I'm not aware either of research on kind of positive stereotyping and dyslexia. And yes, I did hear a number of students say in these interviews just that they felt pressure in both ways.
Stephanie Haft: Both from the negative stereotypes and the positive.
Tim Odegard: Yeah, and I've just lived my life. And so I often find fellowship with people who are similar to me, who have a similar, what we could call it from a neuroscience standpoint, a behavioral phenotype, a similar set of characteristics or neural realities to use Singer's way of thinking about it.
Tim Odegard: And these [00:12:00] neural realities is it's hard for us to read and spell words. We know that across alphabetic languages, at least, that we are persistent in our spelling difficulties typically, even in response to intervention, although they can get better. Okay. And we're often disfluent even in response to intervention.
Tim Odegard: So we can hear ourselves from across the room. And part of that conversation is how limiting it has been for us to think that we have to live up to the expectations and that the adults around us or society thinks that somehow we're supposed to have some superpower that we can portray. And it's supposed to be on this list that's listed on our Center for Disabilities website for our university, which often those will list these superpowers.
Tim Odegard: Or some book that somebody else has written, maybe not even from our community about us. It's interesting and that there's actually qualitative research and there might actually be some peer reviewed research that would come out, test that hypothesis. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this isn't representative of a larger community of us, but it does seem to be representative of the conversations I have.[00:13:00]
Tim Odegard: So thank you for all the work that you've done in that. I have another question to go back to that eye to eye work you've done. That's come up a couple times too. Diane Lyon highlighted her strong hope that we would have peer mentorship. Rebecca Gottlieb was, she identified a mentor in the eye to eye network when she was in college and which was really helpful for her and she highlighted that it was impactful for her as well as the mentees.
Tim Odegard: And you've done research on this. And so I was just curious about what your research identified when it came to eye to eye. And then the other question really is the mechanism of why and how it seems to work.
Stephanie Haft: So I'll start by just talking about the eye to eye research in general. And I'm not sure our listeners are familiar with eye to eye, so I'll start with a little bit of just what it is.
Stephanie Haft: Near peer mentoring, meaning that you are matched with mentors who might be a couple years older, but who have similar labels as you do in terms of learning disabilities, ADHD. And so this is implemented in some middle schools, high schools, and colleges [00:14:00] across the country. You meet weekly, and I was fortunate enough to be able to observe a lot of the eye to eye mentoring sessions.
Stephanie Haft: And it's not always sitting down across from each other face to face and talking about your identity. A lot of it was creating our projects together. that allowed the mentees, the mentors, to share whatever they felt comfortable with, whatever was coming up. So one of my favorite art projects that they did that I actually got to participate in was creating your ideal learning environment.
Stephanie Haft: And so you had a box and you had art materials and the students got really creative, adding in foam on the sides to because maybe they got distracted by sound. For me, I think I put a bunch of light in my room because when it gets dark, I get really sleepy and I'm not learning well, that was a great project to have conversations just about how we all learned best that maybe is affected by a learning disability, maybe not. Through this week to week mentorship, it's meant to help promote a positive sense of [00:15:00] identity in mentees about their learning disability and ADHD, just a positive sense of self esteem generally.
Stephanie Haft: And then to create a community and to create connections. It's not academic mentoring, which is important. It's not sitting down working on homework. And yet, anecdotally, a lot of teachers and students have observed that it did improve academics from improving the kind of socio emotional sides.
Stephanie Haft: So anyway, that's just about eye to eye generally, and I'll go into our research, which was a study where we looked at mentees going through the eye to eye program. That's the first group, and this runs the academic school year. The second group was individuals, so students with learning disabilities and or ADHD, who were not in the eye to eye mentoring program from similar schools.
Stephanie Haft: And then the third group was just students without any learning disability or ADHD and then not in eye to eye. And so I think what was great about this research study is the ability to compare those three groups to really tease [00:16:00] out what could be the influence of the eye to eye program specifically.
Stephanie Haft: One of the biggest things that we found was a reduction in depressive symptoms over the course of the year in the eye to eye mentees, but actually a significant increase in the students with the labels who were not in eye to eye. So suggesting that the academic school year, as it goes on, those depressive symptoms are increasing.
Stephanie Haft: And I think for all the reasons we just talked about could be the case, the stigma, stereotyping, all of that.
Tim Odegard: In the neurotypical group, or your group without the LD, ADHD, they didn't change in the depressive symptomatology over the year.
Stephanie Haft: Yeah, there was really no changes throughout the year that kind of remained stable, and self esteem, too, improved in the group that was mentored and stayed the same for everyone else, and this was not in, I think, the original publication, but another Piece that we found as a reduction in sense of stigma associated with the identity.
Stephanie Haft: So I think we would call [00:17:00] that internalized stigma. So that's a big piece as well.
Tim Odegard: And that wasn't an outcome that you reported in the original. You also reported peer relations. I'm actually presenting on the mental health challenges that face my community now as I've been going out and presenting around dyslexia for the past couple weeks, and I'll be continuing to do this.
Tim Odegard: Your study is one that I highlight as well as a recent study by MacArthur that looked at. for large longitudinal data sets that started at 5 years of age and went up to either 9 and 11 to look at the relationships between externalizing, internalizing conditions at 5, then predicting reading at 7, and then reading at 7 predicting these other types of more social adaptive behaviors, thoughts, things at 9 or 11, depending upon the sample.
Tim Odegard: And I present yours as possibly a way of intervening, but the initial study that's using more cognitive behavioral techniques incorporated into intervention isn't showing promising outcomes so far, as far as the initial study. COVID impacted the initial study that was funded by [00:18:00] NIH in this area. I didn't do this, other researchers and scholars did.
Tim Odegard: But. The sample sizes didn't get to their target, but they weren't able to show a reduction in anxiety because they were thinking that it was the anxiety that was then creating an avoidance tendency towards the learning, and it was this vicious cycle that was happening. So their mode of intervention was to use more of a cognitive behavioral therapy kind of approach with educators adopting these types of techniques to try to reduce anxiety.
Tim Odegard: in the academic setting so that they would approach the academics and they weren't able to show a reduction in anxiety. They weren't able to show an approach or any kind of outcomes in the group that actually received the additional anxiety types of interventions as part of what they were doing. But that makes eye to eye and the results that you found that much more remarkable.
Tim Odegard: Your study did show with a very similar sample size actual outcomes that had meaningful differences. So kudos. And you did it with, I think, private foundation funding opposed to federal funding.
Stephanie Haft: Yep, the Oak Foundation. We're very [00:19:00] lucky to be funded by them.
Tim Odegard: Yeah, so shout out to the Oak Foundation. Thank you for supporting Stephanie and Famigo's project there because it means a lot to our community.
Tim Odegard: I often say it and I want to get to your thoughts on this because you are being trained as a clinical psychologist and I have a respect for mental health professionals and I don't want to stigmatize reaching out. My son has received cognitive behavioral therapy. We've had him in those sessions. We've attended those sessions, and it's been really transformative.
Tim Odegard: So what would you say the distinction is between a near peer mentorship versus a more traditional clinical approach to addressing some of these challenges that we face?
Stephanie Haft: Yeah, great question. I have a lot of thoughts on the limits of cognitive behavioral therapy and addressing stigma. I think specifically with near peer mentoring, actually I would view it as similar in a way to a basic therapeutic relationship in that what we found in the study was that the positive changes were related to perceived mentorship quality that the mentees are perceiving.
Stephanie Haft: This looked at them responding to statements such as, my [00:20:00] mentor cares about me my mentor takes time for me, my mentor is approachable, engages in conversations that are helpful. This looked at them responding to statements such as, my mentor cares about me, my mentor takes time for me, my mentor is approachable, engages in conversations that are helpful.
Stephanie Haft: So it really was that relationship piece. I think that the activities that they are doing are really meaningful and I think the kind of secret sauce is the relationship between the mentors and the mentees. And I guess in terms of your typical individual psychotherapy, a lot of research shows that one of the biggest predictors is the relationship between the therapist and the client, right?
Stephanie Haft: If you trust your therapist, if you don't think they're helpful, then you're not going to benefit from therapy. So in that way, there's a little bit of similarities, but obviously in individual therapy, the content of the skills, Also plays a huge role and I think with the near peer mentoring, it really is strongly that relationship piece.
Tim Odegard: Yeah, that makes sense. When it comes to these stereotypes, do you think that being able to be in community and see so many different faces and see so many different talents, hear so many different stories, Do you think that just seeing [00:21:00] themselves represented as a heterogeneous group of people that come from all different places and don't just fit the stereotypes that they might be perceiving positive or negative, do you think that adds value for us?
Stephanie Haft: I definitely think so. Yeah, I think that helps just break out of the one size fits all approach that is part of stereotyping. I think not only for individuals within those groups, but individuals who are allies of the community. And I think of eye to eye because that's a big community I've been a part of, even though I myself don't have a learning disability or ADHD and was really welcoming and I was able to observe that.
Stephanie Haft: So I think the heterogeneity is really valuable, just not only for folks in the community, but for family, friends, and allies to, to help break out of that stereotype mode.
Tim Odegard: Yeah, it's challenging. I am grateful that I get feedback. One of the things that they've been responding in response to this podcast has been, it's opened their eyes to aspects of their own children, for example, if their [00:22:00]parents that they hadn't seen, or they're able to see aspects that they thought weren't true of others like them, they're hearing come up in the conversations.
Tim Odegard: The ability to see aspects of ourselves that don't necessarily fit the stereotypes just by having conversations like this one, so thank you for having it in plain sight. And that's different than a one on one therapeutic approach because you can't quite see that aspect. You can't normalize things the same way.
Tim Odegard: You can't show the diversity in the representation across the community. It's not a knock on, a therapeutic approach as much as it's just not an affordance of that modality of trying to intervene, whereas a near peer mentorship would have that, whereas it probably wouldn't be ideally suited for all aspects of what a person's going through, especially if they're dealing with more entrenched, severe forms of mental health issues, I would imagine.
Tim Odegard: So with that in mind, I've been really curious because recently, in the last two years, MacArthur and colleagues published a very interesting set [00:23:00] of longitudinal data where they were looking early in life at five, and those early emotional topics that they were measuring, depression and internalizing, And some other things like peer relations, we're not predicting reading at seven, but reading at seven was predicting internalizing and externalizing behavioral issues, mental health challenges, as well as peer relations and some other factors.
Tim Odegard: My curiosity is that we also like to get into the complexity of these conversations as well. And nuts think that it's a one size fit all. I wonder, since you've got clinical training and you think about early childhood, if you And additional risk indicators. Do you think that there might be an aspect of our neurobiology or tendencies for some co occurring conditions that might make my community more vulnerable than others to certain mental health issues?
Stephanie Haft: Yeah. So I think what you're pointing out is also part of this chicken and egg debate on mental health, neurodevelopmental disorders or disabilities. and how [00:24:00] intertwined they are, and which is coming first. And I think what some of the research shows is suggesting a little bit more maybe of that the neurobiology piece is coming first as part of learning disability or disorder that leading to further mental health problems, but then of course the mental health problems can exacerbate it.
Stephanie Haft: And so I think in terms of vulnerabilities, The first vulnerability is a lot of the environmental and social things that we've been talking about. So even from a young age, I think the current research is that kids can pick up on stereotypes as young as five. That's been shown mainly in, in terms of racial stereotypes, but just the general cognitive ability to perceive that.
Stephanie Haft: And so I think that those social pieces and vulnerabilities can be present from a young age. If you're getting pulled out of a reading class. early in kindergarten or first grade, you're now vulnerable to stereotype threat to stigma, which can cause mental health problems. I think that in terms of the more of a kind of a [00:25:00] cognitive or neurobiological piece, I think with learning disabilities, ADHD, there are some challenges in terms of attention and executive function.
Stephanie Haft: And I do think that attention and executive function challenges. can make it really difficult to disengage from the type of negative thought that perpetuate anxiety. And so an example of this is ruminations going over and over something in your head. Say like at age six or seven you are called to read out loud and you say a word wrong in class.
Stephanie Haft: I think for all of us, no matter what, that might cause, a spike of embarrassment or shame. Some of us might then, leave the class, go home, forget about it. With rumination, that's someone who is going over and over again in their head, replaying it, maybe not sleeping, and that can spiral into anxiety.
Stephanie Haft: And I think that with a certain neurobiology that can come with, [00:26:00] Neurodevelopmental disorders, there is that executive function challenge of kind of disengaging from something, switching from thinking about that to something else, shifting your attention. And so I think that's a little bit more of the neurobiological piece that can make someone more vulnerable to anxiety or to negative thoughts.
Tim Odegard: That would make sense. I'm just not aware of research that's done that mechanistic kind of a untangling of those factors quit yet.
Stephanie Haft: I'm not aware of some either. The reason I brought that up is more from doing a lot of clinical work. So I've been seeing therapy patients mainly for anxiety and depression over the last six years and then seeing the stuckness in thoughts and actually a lot of these folks that I do see have learning disabilities or ADHD.
Stephanie Haft: So it's a little bit of anecdota there. I think there's kind of bits and pieces of the evidence, but maybe not a coherent story yet on that.
Tim Odegard: Yeah, it's interesting. I got interested in the mental health and possible mechanisms for changing mental health because of my clinical [00:27:00] experience when I would do the reading intervention through my training early in my career.
Tim Odegard: It resonates with me about some of the children will have rumorative thoughts.
Stephanie Haft: Yes, and I do think another piece not as often talked about but is part of a more cumulative risk from an environmental perspective is thinking about intersectionality. I've spent the last year working in a hospital for children and adolescents who are below poverty level, and I've spent a lot of this time doing diagnostic assessments.
Stephanie Haft: It's for school evaluations for IEPs and 504s and seeing the intersectional pieces of low socioeconomic status. And I do think from a young age, there is a risk for folks from lower resource backgrounds being underdiagnosed and then not receiving the resources. So again, this is a little bit more risk factors from a structural or environmental lens.
Stephanie Haft: And yet, I think it is an important risk factor.
Tim Odegard: As this comes up, I've got some curiosities around this, and I'd be curious [00:28:00] to hear what you're saying is, as we're delving into intersectionality, as we're starting to identify the overlap between different communities, how can we model in plain sight being constructive in a conversation?
Tim Odegard: So that it's challenging when you're talking about a topic to So I'm going to talk on that topic, but not feel as if you're alienated or isolating other aspects. I often will highlight that I come from a very blue collar working class background that definitely did not help my chances early in life.
Tim Odegard: My son had a different environmental context. He did receive identifications. He did get intervention that was sustained and intensive. That set him up. He also got mental health resources that were provided because of our access to those facilities. So I can only model in myself so much. What are you experiencing?
Tim Odegard: What are you thinking as you start your journey into trying to work in this space? Not just at LDs, but you're expanding. How can we have meaningful conversations in society without us taking people that are already [00:29:00] marginalized and then pitting us against one another?
Stephanie Haft: Great question. I think that in terms of more of an academic or a research space, just always qualifying who is a part of this research.
Stephanie Haft: Did it involve all English speaking students? And not even saying that means it may not include this group or this group, but just being really descriptive about who is in the research and maybe just acknowledging we didn't capture this group of people and here's why it may or may not be different for this group of people.
Stephanie Haft: An example of this, I think, which is another area of research I did, and I'm currently doing on a more clinical level, is I'm in San Francisco, and at the hospital I see it's 80 percent bilingual. So 80 percent Banish English bilingual. And in terms of a lot of the academic research on dyslexia, there's a lot of confusing guidelines on how to identify that in kids who are bilingual and growing up speaking two languages.
Stephanie Haft: And it's because of course, they were not included in some of the original research that [00:30:00]creates it. the guidelines and, the standardized scores. And so that's just a limitation that now we are addressing. And it's not to say that prior research was not important and that stands in stark contrast to any bilingual kid with dyslexia.
Stephanie Haft: It's more of just acknowledging, hey, that research has limitations. Now we are going to expand it because we have the tools to do so. I think it's more of just an attitude of always growing and adding more to the pile in terms of research rather than villainizing research for being non inclusive.
Stephanie Haft: I think that we just have a lot more tools at our disposal now to be more inclusive of different groups with our research and with our conversations.
Tim Odegard: We're trying to be more inclusive and represent the population. But then trying to do the hard work of translation and then implementation is where I'm finding room to be curious and grow and come with humility.
Tim Odegard: For example, in California right now, which is a challenging state to try to think about how will it roll out a state law? How will it screen children? What will the screeners be? How will they be selected? How will we not over and under identify?
Stephanie Haft: Yeah, definitely.
Tim Odegard: I [00:31:00] had some interesting feedback on something recently where I was talking about growth mindset and one of the challenges of having a positive stereotype is that it encourages a fixed mindset .
Tim Odegard: opposed to through my efforts, I can achieve and develop strengths, a person was pointing out that emerging research, at least one study has shown that may not work for all groups and that a growth mindset might not be overall generally predictive. And I was wondering if the limitation is thinking about structural barriers, because growth mindset is based on the idea that you would be able to adopt.
Tim Odegard: Ever more appropriate approaches to meeting your needs and through your efforts, you would be able to develop skill sets. For example, if I was forced to just be in a leveled reader program where I was forced to just read books over and over again, or my son had been subjected to that. That's not growth mindset in the way that Angela Duckworth and others have identified.
Tim Odegard: It is, we're actually using better approaches and techniques and better leveraging our skills and talents to store something other. I wonder if. Part of the conversation is going to be acknowledging structural inequality [00:32:00]that limit the ability for us to work in effort across our communities in the same way, and how do we remove those barriers to create equity?
Stephanie Haft: Yeah, this is a great question. I think what you're bringing up is what I referenced earlier on from an individual therapy level, some of the limitations of a CBT, cognitive behavior therapy, which is very much focused on change and changing our thoughts. And I view growth mindset as a part of that on changing your outlook and changing your thoughts to push forward.
Stephanie Haft: And I think what you're highlighting though is that there are often very real limitations and structural limitations in particular that we often cannot affect change at an individual level. Like I cannot and you cannot go out and just change these structures, in a few weeks. And so what I think is emerging as A really valuable therapy orientation, but I think could be adopted by any one person, too, is acceptance strategies.
Stephanie Haft: And a different therapy [00:33:00] modality that grew out of CVT, but is very different, is something called acceptance and commitment therapy. And it has been really valuable for folks such as those with terminal illnesses, or chronic pain, or chronic diseases. These very real things. things that it's hard to have a little bit of a growth mindset on or change your thinking to be more helpful to you on.
Stephanie Haft: And it really teaches acceptance strategies. And I think that acceptance strategies can be very misunderstood. And I think, this is when I was thinking about this conversation and thinking about stigma and stigma that those with dyslexia face. I think CBT strategies are part of it. I think acceptance pieces, though, are a really big part of it, of accepting that the system isn't built for you.
Stephanie Haft: And that does not mean approving. And I think people often confuse that acceptance means approval. Acceptance just means acknowledging what the reality is and finding your place in that and [00:34:00] connecting to your values within that, but just naming what the reality is. And so before you can change something, you have to accept it.
Stephanie Haft: So this gets at both your points. Yeah, sometimes I don't think having growth mindset is the best, right? If you, again, have one of these chronic pain or terminal illnesses or dyslexia, accepting that is what you have and that this is what the system looks like, I think that gives you Some piece just like naming the reality.
Stephanie Haft: This is where we are. This is how things are. And then from there going on to think about what are my values and is it within my values to become A part of some advocacy work join some organizations to change the structural piece, recognizing that I can't change it on an individual level.
Stephanie Haft: That is what I think are really a less talked about component of, terms of mental health work is, is really this acceptance piece. And again, that can stand a little bit in contrast to growth mindset sometimes.
Tim Odegard: It could. I [00:35:00] find that that resonates in two different ways with me. One, my own personal experiences and the conversations I have on our own realities.
Tim Odegard: And Judy the Singer, the person who coined the term neurodiversity, has come up with another term back in 2020 called neurorealities. She feels like what neurodiversity has turned into has been this, almost a fairy tale, of everybody has a superpower endowed at this neurominority, which then becomes this positive stereotype.
Tim Odegard: But they don't own up to the realities of this group of people and what they're having to deal with. And when I talk to parents and I just say, go talk to your child. Why are you talking to me? Go talk to your child. They might say this, that, and the other. And then they'll email me back after they've seen me out in public or they've reached out to me and said, my kid said the same thing.
Tim Odegard: And normally it is grounded in this. We have to face every day the realities we live with. So the phrase that I've used on this podcast, The rules of the game are set, so we have to figure out how to play within those rules based off of what we have. And then, [00:36:00] as I like to remind you, when you can now change the rules, and you get into positions of power work collaboratively and be more inclusive to figure out how we're going to reconfigure the rules of society.
Tim Odegard: And so that's a way that I've tried to develop a sense of agency around this kind of aspect of acceptance. So that's from a personal experience. What resonated when you were talking about that was, I will also say that you mentioned chronic pain. You're reminding me of, this reminds me and maybe comes out of part of the tradition of the work that Jon Kabat Zinn did around mindfulness.
Tim Odegard: And that aspect, there is a lot of acceptance that happens through the work that he modeled for chronic pain patients. But also the growth part of that is, is if they are committed and they will uphold their contemplative processes, their meditative processes their thoughtful way of engaging with the world, they're taking the time out.
Tim Odegard: And that actually is growth because they're developing aspects of themselves to have these affordances to reconfigure [00:37:00] how they're going. I don't know that he would agree with me that it's the same of what maybe Duckworth is talking about or Carol the Wek is talking about growth mindset, but they do seem to be adjacent ideas that you are developing tools, you are having this ability to expand your toolbox and use these new tools to come to a different way of perceiving and then, based on his decades of research, having very real outcomes as far as your well being and other aspects.
Tim Odegard: So am I off base there about some of the foundational work of where this comes from of acceptance therapy?
Stephanie Haft: Oh no, not at all. And I agree with you that I think you can almost apply the growth mindset in terms of growth mindset of your own acceptance skills or mindfulness skills. And I think another aspect of mindfulness that's really important and related to this is the ability to step back from your thoughts.
Stephanie Haft: So again, CBT is a lot about changing your thoughts. So I have, this negative thought of I'm going to go to this place and, people [00:38:00] will judge me. What's the evidence for that? What's the evidence against that? What's a more realistic or helpful thought? CBT is all about working with and changing that thought.
Stephanie Haft: Sometimes with things, like chronic pain or like dyslexia, you might have thoughts or very real thoughts. Limitations that, and there's not much to change about them and mindfulness is a lot about just stepping, stepping away from it a little bit. I think about the difference between, you're wearing glasses, but having your thoughts as like a pair of glasses that you see the world through.
Stephanie Haft: Like I have dyslexia and you're seeing the world through, everything is about that. Mindfulness instead being like taking off the glasses, putting it in your pocket, and that's still a part of who you are. And, you're so much more, you don't have to see everything through that. So again Jon Kabat Zinn's work and a lot of mindfulness is just the ability to look at your thoughts rather than from your thoughts.
Stephanie Haft: And I think similarly, the ability to look at your identity, whether that's dyslexia or something else, [00:39:00] rather than from your identity.
Tim Odegard: Yeah, , that would be the basis that I understand from that work. , I had a thought when you were talking and it reminded me of why I got into dyslexia research.
Tim Odegard: What would it be like to be one of those very special children , or adults, who were to get the intervention and you're responding, but your growth and rate still isn't there? And then also, on the flip side, even if you do respond to intervention, where are we still seeing the realities of having differences ?
Tim Odegard: Which is why I can say that we get to be accurate, but many of us still aren't 100 percent accurate. And we're always pretty much not as fluent as anybody else around us . And our spelling is often still lagging way behind, and that's even with the best response intervention.
Tim Odegard: But there's two things there is, with intervention, we can develop a lot of the literacy skills . But there's still some new realities that as of today, many of us will still face, which is we're still not going to have the literacy skills up to where we our peers [00:40:00] would be.
Tim Odegard: So I think there's an aspect of both growth mindset and an acceptance mindset in both of those.
Stephanie Haft: Yes, I think so as well. And as you're talking, I'm thinking about a couple individuals that I work with, some who do have dyslexia, some who have ADHD. And I think that hopefully as the world moves forward for adults in the working world, it becomes More of a safe or brave space to share those identities, thinking about some folks from work who still have some struggles related to some of their limitations in those areas, and they really own that identity and they've said it from kind of day one.
Stephanie Haft: Hey, I have this. This is what this means for me, just so you're aware. And I really valued that. I admired that. And I think that it has seemed like a positive working environment for them because we're all open and sharing that. And I know that not every workspace is that way, unfortunately still in 2024.
Stephanie Haft: And so I do think that there is, , , as you mentioned, a combination [00:41:00] of some of those acceptance or growth mindset strategies.
Tim Odegard: Yeah, it's a really interesting space. And one of the things that's been the most surprising to me as I've done this podcast has been how much conversations have lingered on adult identity.
Tim Odegard: That then relate down to our childhood, and that the nexus of this was in childhood. But we've lingered on this adult identity and a lot of this longer than what I thought we would have in these conversations. And I think it's because many of us are closeted.
Tim Odegard: Many of us either have found ways to adapt and we're okay, so we don't find it as something that we identify as much with. And so it's in the background, and there's this new curiosity that I have around why we don't have a strong advocacy group driven by adults with dyslexia or other types of learning differences as we might have in other spaces.
Tim Odegard: And I'm wondering if it's part of what you're talking about, the stigmas, the fact that If [00:42:00] we have to method act our way into normality, at least from a public perspective, then why would we heap that stigma on us? I just think there's a lot going on, but it's just been surprising to me that I've lingered so much.
Tim Odegard: So you're sharing with me now that And in your clinical practice, you're working with individuals who are working through in a safe space, the lingering aspects of what they experienced in their childhood and they continue to experience as they're struggling in the workforce to find spaces to be as productive as they'd like to, to fit in like they'd like to.
Stephanie Haft: Yeah, that's right. I think it's a very safe place. And I think that part of what's coming up for these folks is what you mentioned of, In childhood experiences of being with a group of people and having to read out loud, and maybe a few words don't come out quite right, and getting laughed at, part of it is, again, that kind of unlearning or relearning of, now we're sitting in a seminar, they're asked to read something out [00:43:00] loud, maybe a word comes out wrong, we're all, we're not going to laugh at them, we're going to encourage them We're all still on our first cup of coffee too, it's a very different place and I think that does take a lot of learning into adulthood, still, to undo those prior experiences, akin to a trauma, whether it's a capital T trauma, the fact is that past experiences stay with us, we learn things from them, so.
Tim Odegard: I've had other people from the dyslexia community use that label. And I like to say that I don't like to get yardsticks out and start measuring my group is more marginalized than yours. There's certain realities that we all face with and systemic structural differences are real and glaring and have been around a long time.
Tim Odegard: So it is challenging to have these conversations because I could get labeled as trying to take the mic away from some other group or saying that my trauma is with a little t or a big T. Childhood sucks for those of us with dyslexia. Yeah. And I don't think anybody would argue with [00:44:00] that. No. And I don't want to compare that my suck is worse or better or worse than anybody else's.
Tim Odegard: That's why I was saying that it's hard to come into this space, have these conversations. Be authentic. Have people honestly believe that my, my job here isn't to take away from your needs and your rights and your development of equality and equity, but it's to at least have a little platform where when the, we can have our space to have community come together, have shared experience, and create a social narrative around our lived realities.
Tim Odegard: And I don't see that space being carved out. For people with dyslexia or similar types of learning differences or ADHD. I could be wrong, but I'd love to see it more, happening more. But the reasons you're talking about is there's real adults. And there are these children and there's also families with parents and children who are going through the same struggles and it's challenging and we don't often talk about it in plain sight.
Stephanie Haft: It is. It is. And I think the [00:45:00] reason for that, just extending further what you're saying, is because it can be hidden a lot of the time. As far as I think other forms of identity, for better or for worse, can often be present. Observed without someone stating that that's their identity or it can be inferred sometimes correctly or incorrectly and I think that for folks with learning differences it often has to be disclosed or it's identified for them, being pulled out of a classroom, being labeled with something on their IP or 504.
Stephanie Haft: So it's really different because it's possible to hide it in a lot of ways.
Tim Odegard: Yeah. It's challenging. It's definitely a space that I didn't think I would wind up in at this point in my life and in my career. But it's just where I feel drawn to at this point. And I think it's because as I started getting into different roles and started to see things, I started to realize that Neurominority voices weren't always being projected.
Tim Odegard: They weren't [00:46:00] often being considered. So something as simple as being on a panel Selecting curricula for a province in Ontario and just saying, where's my accommodation? You're sitting here selecting reading interventions for people with dyslexia and related disabilities and like the adults in the room here, it's supposed to be a lot of reading.
Tim Odegard: So as a person with dyslexia, what's my accommodation? Am I going to have extra time? Am I going to have this? And I just normalizing that it's okay to ask for those in plain sight just seems like something that could be modeled. And honor that. It's like, I want to do this and I think I'm a good fit for this.
Tim Odegard: I have the domain expertise to help. And I've been invited to do this for those reasons. Am I going to now be excluded and not able to do this? And I will say that for some service for our U. S. federal government, I was excluded from because I said, I can't do this to myself again and do this amount of reading.
Tim Odegard: And they're like, well, we don't have any accommodations for you. We can't give you extra time. We can't change the format of how we deliver [00:47:00] these documents to you. But yet I had the domain expertise as a academic, as a research scientist, but then because I voiced my needs, it's Oh you can't meet that turnaround.
Tim Odegard: So we'll go on to somebody else. And that's challenging . And that's a reality, right? So I had to accept that. So at this time, as I come out, as I honor and hold boundaries to get what I need, so I don't, Continue to model bad behavior, which is staying up for hours upon hours to do something that I want to do to give service back to the community.
Tim Odegard: That's going to come with some realities and maybe I can start to change perceptions and make people think, Oh, who are we excluding? by not having accommodations for these heavy reading loads that we're asking people to do, who are we excluding when we don't have these other opportunities and if we don't come out and acknowledge ourselves, they don't even know that they're excluding us based on those to begin with, which is a challenge.
Stephanie Haft: Yup. Absolutely.
Tim Odegard: Yeah,
Tim Odegard: Where are you, [00:48:00] where do you see the future? Where do you want The world to go when it comes to some of the topics we sit on around mental health and LDS and just in general.
Stephanie Haft: Yeah. Great question. So I think a lot of my research has moved. I'm still very much interested in this.
Stephanie Haft: I think it's a really important conversation. And I've moved to other forms of stigma and marginalization. I mentioned a lot of my research now is on immigrant youth, immigrant families people of color, communities of color. marginalization. And I think there's a lot of pieces.
Stephanie Haft: There's a thread that remains the same in terms of stigma. And the influence of stigma, the negative, detrimental impacts of stigma on dyslexia and on other groups. I think in terms of where I would like things to go, I guess my mind is turning to How familiar are you with universal design for learning?
Tim Odegard: I'm okay with it. I know a little [00:49:00] bit. But why don't you explain?
I'm not an expert in this. Dr. Nicole Oatsby, I've worked with her at Stanford, and she's wonderful. This is her area. But I think just the principles of universal design for learning, which are why don't we just create systems that work for everyone rather than systems that need to be adapted or adjusted for certain people? And, that's a very broad answer to your question, but I think that can apply to a number of domains. In terms of seeking mental health treatment, that's something that is super stigmatized in a lot of communities, and in particular in communities that face a lot of stigma for their identity. Dyslexia and otherwise. Why don't we make mental health care just more widely accessible, that it's like going to your primary care, which is not really that stigmatized. It's just something you do regularly for a checkup, and if you need follow up, you need follow up, and if you don't.
Stephanie Haft: So. Applying [00:50:00] that universal design for learning principle of just designing structures in multiple ways, in terms of access to mental health care, in terms of our educational systems, all of that that's, of course, an ideal goal, but not something one individual can do, but I do think it's more.
Stephanie Haft: When I think of the future, I think more of this kind of systemic level, structural level.
Tim Odegard: One of the promising things to me when I think about that is, is the work that it'll take to do that will be more inclusive work to begin with. So getting different diverse groups together,
Stephanie Haft: and that's
Tim Odegard: been the most powerful work as I've served in different diverse groups now.
Stephanie Haft: Yeah. And I think that, people like to say what they will say about Generation Z, Gen Z one piece that I've observed, though, is just like how much more normalized advocacy work is. I'm like, it's kind of part of what you do, part of your day to day. So I think I do have a lot of hope, not just for that generation, but since [00:51:00] And that's the generation that I work most closely with and who's doing a lot of the advocacy work and shifting things, taking everyone else's lead.
Stephanie Haft: That does give me a lot of hope.
Tim Odegard: I like to end on hope, so on that note, I just want to thank you for taking time out of your day to speak with me and speak with this community and all the work that you do for everybody
Tim Odegard: you've always been such a promising bright light and I'm excited to see where you go.
Stephanie Haft: Thank you so much. And thank you for having these conversations.