Jennifer Fisher, is Associate Professor of Dance, University of California, Irvine, and co-editor of When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders with Anthony Shay, Assistant Professor of Dance and Cultural Studies at Pomona College.  The book offers a progressive vision that boldly articulates double-standards in gender construction within dance and brings hidden histories to light in a globalized debate.  In the original article below Fisher looks at the Tom DeLay’s appearance on “Dancing with the Stars.”  You can watch the video of his appearance here.

It would be easy to say that Republicans shouldn’t dance because they are out of step with the times, so I won’t say that. Exactly. But sometimes, dance metaphors are really useful—like when you’re confronted with the image of former house majority leader Tom DeLay, who shook his booty as a contestant on this season’s “Dancing with the Stars.” It has to make you wonder if dancing doesn’t always reveal more than we suspect it might. It’s true that the popular TV series has traditionally been used to boost the image of fading or disgraced “personalities,” along with some merely adventurous athletes and soap stars, but this had to be a first. It was not only a moment designed to sell the products in commercials between the action (because it is, after all, television), it was one to make us ponder who should be dancing and who should not, bless their publicity seeking hearts.

I used to get a big laugh when I invited my dance history students to imagine a world in which then-president George W Bush had to study dancing in order to look powerful on the ballroom floor. That’s what world leaders from Louis XIV to George Washington had to do, in an age when a manly image did not exclude the wearing of silk brocade breeches and mastering the art of the pirouette. Alas, guys just don’t dance now if they want to be taken seriously as world leaders—they have to keep both feet on the ground, like John Wayne would have if he’d held elected office. A shame, really. Leaders in many locations in Africa, of course, have always danced to look powerful, taking up space, keeping their own rhythm, ruling a whole bunch of people not afraid to move.

But in today’s American political climate, nearly every man fears looking dorky while dancing—just picture Bush in that youtube clip trying to “get down” with between an African drummer and dancer on Africa Malaria Day. It’s no wonder it’s impossible for my students to imagine a conservative man in a suit who can let his hair down and boogie in flashy clothes like John Travolta. Could a solid but goofy looking Republican dip his partner? Let his backbone slip? Bust a serious move? The very idea was hilarious. And yet, in an odd twist of fate, this fantasy became reality on “Dancing with the Stars”. Tom DeLay actually became the poster boy for Republicans gone wild. When he made his first entrance as a contestant, wagging his nether regions and playing air guitar to the strains of “Wild Thing,” it was hard to know where to look. Maybe the intent was to look fun and vulnerable. He only succeeded in looking out of step.

Of course, because there is always a need for “news of the very weird” somewhere between the real news and the sports, we had been prepared for the event. Journalists must have burned the midnight oil winnowing down the number of catch phrases to describe it—“Republican Steps Left,” “The Hammer does the Hustle,” and, more to the point, “DeLay dances back into the limelight.” After all, no one mistook Delay’s decision to compete on a TV dance competition as a bid to master another skill or find his next career as a comedian. “Dancing with the Stars” is all about gaining visibility for the “stars” (the personalities) and, for the producers, it’s all about selling products with personal tales of triumph over the odds. Very quickly, dance metaphors in the press pointed to the real subject—partisan politics and a possible comeback for the disgraced politician. “DeLay dances all over the leaderless GOP,” one said after DeLay was interviewed, and “Delay cha-cha-ing back into the GOP fray.”

Stephen Colbert came up with a joke about how DeLay “gerrymandered” the bones in his feet in preparation for the competition—not a great laugh but a reminder about the fact that the former congressman had been accused of gerrymandering schemes and was indicted by a Texas grand jury for breaking campaign finance laws. “DeLay is no wild thing,” his reviews said, and surely they were referring to his terpsichorean skills rather than trying to counter the allegations that shadowed his political career. Or were they?

In the process of covering this painful (for dance lovers) DeLay dance debut, a lot was revealed about perceptions of dance, as well as the fear most men have of dancing. A few examples: An ABC interviewer started out by pointing out that DeLay’s daughter is a professional dancer, but DeLay himself was a very serious guy, so how did he put the two things together? Strike one for the seriousness of dance. But that wasn’t the point. DeLay answered that conservatives can also let their hair down and have fun. Strike two—we’ve all seen Bush wave his hands in imitation of dance and Obama sway with the instincts of the adept, so we know not everyone has success letting their hair down. Strike three was a rhetorical slip when Delay responded to, “Why go on Dancing with the Stars?” He said, “I love dancin’, I’ve been dancin’ all my life—I haven’t danced for about 20 years, but I love dancin’.” Yes, congressman, but are you or have you ever been a member of a dancing party? Dance-wise, he should have taken the fifth before he proved so inconsistent a witness.

But, you say, give the guy a break—he gave dancing a try, big-time. At least you might have said that after seeing him struggle in that “Wild Thing” number (check youtube if your stomach is strong). Does that make him part of that maverick breed of American men who don’t care about the “real men don’t dance” stereotype? It’s a very brave category of individualists who choose to dance despite the obstacles for men. It takes a man who is secure of his masculinity to let go of the iron man mentality and embrace his softer, more bodily articulate side. Now, they are brave, bucking macho trends and creating new visions of what men can do. Is Tom DeLay one such guy? Nah. In a pre-show interview, DeLay exhibited the classic timid male fear of sequins and pink and, although there was much kidding about developing his “feminine side,” this seems more of a gimmick that a growth experience for the man who’s house when he was a bachelor used to be known as “Macho Manor.”

You want to give him credit for wearing a sequin lined vest for his first cha-cha appearance, and for the sheer nerve of risking choreography in an arena where he couldn’t hide his incompetence. But then you feel an agenda somewhere, based on the knowledge of DeLay’s past views and inflexibility. Somehow, his dancing doesn’t look like he’s learning how to go with the flow or make a move in the right direction. It looks a whole lot more like faking it to get attention. “The body never lies,” Martha Graham said famously. But the jury is still out on that one.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University and the author of many books, the most recent being Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide.  Sunstein presents evidence that shows that when like-minded people talk to one another, they tend to become more extreme in their views than they were before.  He offers a path forward that can help us halt the drift tward unjustified extremism and broaden civic engagement in the public sphere.  In the excerpt below we learn about group polarization.

When people talk together, what happens?  Do group members compromise?  Do they move toward the middle of the tendencies of their individual members?  The answer is now clear, and it is not what intuition would suggest:  Groups go to extremes.  More precisely, members of a deliberating group usually end up at a more extreme position in the same general direction as their inclinations before deliberation began.

This is the phenomenon known as group polarization.  Group polarization is the typical pattern with deliberating groups.  It is not limited to particular periods, nations, or cultures.  On the contrary, group polarization has been found in hundreds of studies involving more than a dozen countries, including the United States, France, Afghanistan, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Germany.  It provides a clue to extremism of many different kinds.

Consider four examples:

1. White people who tend to show significant racial prejudice will show more racial prejudice after speaking with one another.  By contrast, white people who tend to show little racial prejudice will show less prejudice after speaking with one another.

2. Feminism becomes more attractive to women after they talk to one another – at least if the women who are talking begin with an inclination in favor of feminism.

3. Those who approve of an ongoing war effort, and think that the war is going well, become still more enthusiastic about that effort, and still more optimistic, after they talk together.

4. If investors begin with the belief that it is always best to invest in real estate, their eagerness to invest in real estate will grow as a result of discussions with one another.

In these and countless other cases, like-minded people tend to move to a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk.  Suppose in this light that enclaves of people are inclined to rebellion or even violence and that they are separated from other groups.  They might move sharply in the direction of violence as a consequence of their self-segregation.  Political extremism is often a product of group polarization, and social segregation is a useful tool for producing polarization.

In fact, a good way to create an extremist group, or a cult of any kind, is to separate members from the rest of society.  The separation can occur physically or psychologically, by creating a sense of suspicion about nonmembers.  With such separation, the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.  Deliberating enclaves of like-minded people are often a breeding ground for extreme movements.  Terrorists are made, not born, and terrorist networks often operate in just this way.  As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.  But the point goes well beyond such domains.  Group polarization occurs in our daily lives; it involves our economic decisions, our evaluations of our neighbors, even our decisions about what to eat, what to drink, and where to live…

Manuel Castells is University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as well as Research Professor of Information Society at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona.  He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at MIT and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University. In his new book, Communication Power, he analyses the transformation of the global media industry and argues that a new communication stystem, mass self-communication, has emerged, and power relationships have been profoundly modified.  In the excerpt below, Castells shares a personal anecdote about discovering the relationship between power and communication.

I was eighteen years old. My urge for freedom was bumping against the walls that the dictator had erected around life. My life and everybody else’s life. I wrote an article in the Law School’s journal, and the journal was shut down. I acted in Camus’ Caligula, and our theater group was indicted for promoting homosexuality. When I turned on the BBC world news to find a different tune, I could not hear a thing through the stridency of radio interference. When I wanted to read Freud, I had to go to the only library in Barcelona with access to his work and fill out a form explaining why. As for Marx or Sartre or Bakunin, forget it – unless I would travel by bus to Toulouse and conceal the books at the border crossing, risking the unknown if caught transporting subversive propaganda. And so, I decided to take on this suffocating, idiotic, Franquist regime, and joined the underground resistance. At that time, the resistance at the University of Barcelona consisted of only a few dozen students, since police repression had decimated the old democratic opposition, and the new generation born after the Civil War was barely entering adulthood. Yet, the depth of our revolt, and the promise of our hope, gave us strength to engage in the most unequal combat.

And there I was, in the darkness of a movie theater in a working-class neighborhood, ready to awaken the consciousness of the masses by breaking though the communication firewalls within which they were confined – or so I believed. I had a bunch of leaflets in my hand. They were hardly legible as they were printed on a primitive, manual copying device, soaked with purple ink that was the only communication medium available to us in a country blanketed by censorship….So I decided… distributing a few sheets of paper to workers, to reveal how bad their lives really were (as it they would not know it), and call them to action against the dictatorship, all the while keeping an eye on the future overthrow of capitalism, the root of all evil. The idea was to leave the leaflets in the empty seats on my way out of the theater, so that at the end of the session, when the lights came on, the moviegoers would pick up the message – a daring message from the resistance intended to give them enough hope to engage in the struggle for democracy.

I did seven theaters that evening, moving each time to a distant location in another workers’ lair to avoid detection. As naïve as the communication strategy was, it was no child’s game, as being caught meant being beaten up by the police and most likely going to jail, which is what happened to several of my friends. But, of course, we were getting a kick out of our prowess, while hoping to avoid other kinds of kicks. As I finished that revolutionary action for the day (one of many until I ended up in exile in Paris two years later), I called my girlfriend, proud of myself, feeling that the words I had conveyed could change a few minds which could ultimately change the world. I did not know many things at that time. Not that I know substantially more now. But I did not know then that the message is effective only if the receiver is ready for it (most people were not) and if the messenger is identifiable and reliable. And the Workers Front of Catalonia (of whom 95 percent were students) was not as serious a brand as the communists, the socialists, the Catalan nationalists, or any of the established parties, precisely because we wanted to be different – we were searching for identity as the post-Civil War generation.

Thus, I doubt that my actual contribution to Spanish democracy was equal to my expectations. And yet, social and political change has always been enacted, everywhere and at all times, from a myriad of gratuitous actions, sometimes uselessly heroic (mine was certainly no that) to the point of being out of proportion to their effectiveness: drops of a steady rain of struggle and sacrifice that ultimately floods the ramparts of oppression when, and if, the walls of incommunication between parallel solitudes start cracking down, and the audience becomes “we the people.” After all, as naïve as my revolutionary hopes were, I did have a point. Why would the regime close down every possible channel of communication outside its control if censorship were not of the essence for the perpetuation of its power…Why did students have to fight for the right to free speech; unions to fight for the right to post information about their company (then on the billboard, now on the website); women to create women’s bookstores; subdued nations to communicate in their own language; Soviet dissidents to distribute samizdat literature; African American in the US, and colonized people around the world, to be allowed to read? What I sensed then, and believe now, is that power is based on the control of communication and information, be it the macro-power of the state and media corporations or the micro-power of organizations of all sorts. And so, my struggle for free communication, my primitive, purple-ink blog of the time, was indeed an act of defiance, and the fascists, from their perspective, were right to try to catch us and shut us off, so closing the channels connecting individual minds to the public mind. Power is more than communication, and communication is more than power. But power relies on the control of communications, as counterpower depends on breaking through such control. And mass communication, the communication that potentially reaches a society at large, is shaped and managed by power relationships, rooted in the business of media and the politics of the state. Communication power is at the heart of the structure and dynamics of society.

In Notebooks from New Guinea, author Vojtech Novotny colorfully illuminates life in the rainforest. Novotny provides an engaging look into the natural history, people, and cultures of one of the last wild frontiers in the world, as he studies and researches the local biodiversity.  Today Novotny has provided a visual component to his fascinating anecdotes and experiences. The images below are a collection of photos from Novotny’s remote research station in the rainforest and on site, as Novotny and his team studied the environment and culture of New Guinea. Read other posts in this series here.

In Notebooks from New Guinea, author Vojtech Novotny colorfully illuminates life in the rainforest. Novotny provides an engaging look into the natural history, people, and cultures of one of the last wild frontiers in the world, as he studies and researches the local biodiversity. The Q & A below kicks off our week-long series on Novotny and the adventures he has faced as a Czech scientist living and working in Papua New Guinea so be sure to check back throughout the week.

OUP: How focused is your research on New Guinea’s environment in comparison to your focus on the people of New Guinea?

Vojtech Novotny: Although a few of my colleagues prefer the solitary pursuit of biological knowledge in the seclusion of their study, a majority of contemporary research is rather a socially intense undertaking. Our research explores the extraordinary diversity of rainforest trees in New Guinea pollinated, attacked, and protected by an array of often intriguing insects, many of them still unknown to science. This research can also be seen as an interesting social experiment, where remote rainforest villages are unexpectedly visited by an improbable ensemble of Papua New Guineans and expatriates, speaking as many as ten different mother tongues and with education ranging from six years of primary school to a PhD degrees, all of them inexplicably interested in apparently worthless plants and insects in the villagers’ backyard. It is no coincidence that many researchers who originally focused only in New Guinea biodiversity, have gradually broadened their interest also to social and cultural themes. It is such an obvious thing to do here on this, biologically as well as culturally fascinating, island.

OUP: Has working in a remote lab with fewer amenities than other scientists have access to, affected your quality of work?

Novotny: Nowadays it is easier to obtain access to a high-tech laboratory than to an undisturbed ecosystem available for ecological studies and experiments. Our New Guinea laboratory is in the best possible position for our research. It is surrounded by the island’s vast rainforests, while the research gadgets of the latest fashion can be always accessed through overseas collaboration. A bigger problem is the lack of intellectually exciting milieu, since your colleague working on some unrelated, yet a stimulating problem is rarely able to pop into your lab since the nearest such colleague is hundreds of kilometers away. No Skype conversation can fully replace those informal discussions during tea breaks over coffee, or in the evenings over vast amounts of beer.

OUP: How has your Czech heritage influenced your research, your writing, and your overall experience in New Guinea?

Novotny: Coming from a small, strange tribe with a language and culture nothing like those of your neighbors is an advantage in New Guinea, as it helps to blend in the crowd of similarly afflicted citizens. Moving to live in Papua New Guinea is perhaps easier from a small country, such as the Czech Republic, where you can expect that the random impacts shaping your life trajectory will sooner or later propel you beyond your country’s borders anyway. Why then not to take life in your own hands, pack you bags and leave for New Guinea immediately? Leaving a big country is a bigger decision than leaving a small one. I am curious myself whether my thinking about New Guinea is influenced by the fact that it is being done in the Czech language, but this question is probably best left for the English speaking readers to answer.

OUP: As a speaker of the English language, why do you choose to use a translator for your written works?

Novotny: My English is good enough to report on bare facts of life, as I do in my research papers on rainforest ecology. Writing essays is different, as their form is as important as substance. Somewhat ironically, my translator David Short can reproduce my Czech writing style in English better than myself. Inexplicably, speaking perfect Czech is a rare skill among native English speakers. A lot of interesting writing in Czech, as well as in other small languages, thus never makes it to the English speaking audience without being seriously damaged in the process.

OUP: What role have the indigenous people of New Guinea had on your research?

Novotny: Our research is being done in a large part by Papua New Guineans. While some research teams gain competitive advantage in their field of research by owning for instance a particularly large DNA sequencing machine, or having a particularly bright theoretician in their midst, our secret weapon is a team of 18 indigenous research technicians, able to stage research expeditions in the most remote corners of Papua New Guinea’s rainforests. Our research is thus shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of our New Guinea staff. We have been promoting indigenous researcher teams for ecological studies in tropical forests for many years, but with a limited success. This is probably because while a brand new DNA sequencer can be easily bought off the shelf in your local supermarket, and a bright theoretician obtained from the nearest university, assembling a research team from rainforest dwellers is not an entirely straightforward exercise.

OUP: What other books should we read on this topic?

Novotny: Alfred Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago remains, almost 150 years since its publication, one of the best accounts on biological field work. Peter Matthiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall is an excellent record of traditional life in New Guinea, while Paige West’s Conservation Is Our Government Now and Bob Connolly’s Making ‘Black Harvest’ has updates on this lifestyle coping with modern influences. Saem Majnep’s and Ralph Bulmer’s Animals the Ancestors Hunted is a unique first-hand account of local animal lore written by a New Guinea villager. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel was partly inspired by New Guinea. And, as a final non-sequitur, James Watson’s The Double Helix is still perhaps the best description of how science is being done, whether in USA or New Guinea.

OUP: What do you read for fun?

Novotny: My eclectic tastes include travel writing by Bruce Chatwin and Ryszard Kapuscinski, fiction by Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, Douglas Adams as well as by my compatriots Bohumil Hrabal and Franz Kafka, and, last but not least, Max Cannon’s Red Meat Cartoons. Most recently, I have enjoyed Michael Frayn’s novel Headlong.

Sarah, Intern

Daniel and Jason Freeman have written a groundbreaking new book defining paranoia’s impact upon not only the mentally ill but the population at large. Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear describe how exaggerated anxieties regarding terrorism, crime, and illness distress one out of four individuals today. In this excerpt from Paranoia, the Freemans look at several social issues that have instilled paranoia in society throughout the century.

In the late 1980s the psychologists Jerry Mitchell and Arlyn Vierkant discovered a battered cardboard box in a store room of Rusk State hospital in east Texas. The cardboard box turned out to contain details of more than 500 people who had been admitted to the hospital in the 1930s. Around 150 of those 500 were suffering from severe mental illness.

Mitchell and Vierkant decided to compare the stories of those 150 patients from the 1930s with the stories of 150 patients with similar problems from the 1980s. In so doing, they were exploiting a rare and fascinating opportunity to compare paranoid thoughts across half a century.

What they found was that, to some degree at least, people’s paranoid fears reflected the times they lived in. So patients from the 1980s believed they were under threat from the Secret Service, the Mafia, the Soviets, or—a little bafflingly—from lesbians. Telephones and houses were bugged. Radar and computers were being used to control people from afar.

Clearly radar and computers weren’t going to feature in the accounts from the 1930s, but neither did the Secret Service, for example. These kinds of powerful organizations or groups were noticeably absent from the fears of 1930s’ patients, though God and other religious figures were often an element (east Texas has always been a heartland of fundamentalist Christianity). One possible explanation for this change is the advent of television, which brought a whole new world—and a whole new world of threats—to a generally poor, rural, and isolated population. Before television, the threats people perceived were likely to come from more personal, parochial sources.

This focus on the ‘fear figures’ of the day is reflected in an account written in 1911 by the celebrated Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. (Bleuler was the man who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’ and who treated the legendary ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky when he fell ill with the condition.) Bleuler wrote: ‘The Freemasons, the Jesuits, the “black Jews”, their fellow-employees, mind-readers, “spiritualists”, enemies invented ad hoc, are constantly straining every effort to annihilate or at least torture and frighten the patients.’ In the early twentieth century it’s Freemasons, Jesuits, and ‘black Jews’—all groups then rumoured to be conspiring to bring down society. By the 1980s it’s the Mafia or the Russians. Today it’s MI5, the government, or Al-Qaeda.

(Some of our fears, on the other hand, have proved remarkably resilient. Witches, for example, were for many centuries prominent—and malevolent—figures in the popular imagination, as we can see in the quote from Robert Burton on page 21 above. And in the twenty-first century, witches still seem a force to be reckoned with. In one survey, 21 per cent of Americans said they believed in witches. The figure is lower for the UK and Canada, 13 per cent, though this is still higher than one might have guessed. Surprising though these findings might seem, they are as nothing when compared to the hold that ghosts apparently continue to exert over us. In the same survey, 40 per cent of Britons, 37 per cent of Americans, and 28 per cent of Canadians professed a belief in haunted houses.)

Both the Rusk State hospital study and Bleuler’s work focus on the paranoid delusions of people with serious mental illness. But most of us have paranoid thoughts from time to time. Who are we scared of?

If I walk past strangers in the street and they’re laughing, I always suspect they’re laughing at me. Paul, aged 21.

At work, if I’m restocking the shelves and other staff members are nearby, I sometimes think they’re joking and talking about me, but I know they aren’t really. Doreen, aged 58.

I once thought a housemate was trying to steal my possessions because I often caught her in the corridor near my room. I got really wound up about this and ended up locking some of my valuables in the garden shed. I began to have other thoughts—like she was trying to poison me because she was always asking me to eat food she’d cooked and giving me new foreign alcohol to try. Liz, aged 24.

If I’m sitting on the tube and I catch someone’s eye repeatedly, I wonder why they keep looking at me. Chris, aged 30.

These comments are taken from a survey we carried out on a randomly selected sample of the general public. People in the street, as you might say. It turns out that, when it comes to our own personal bogeymen, the range is as diverse as you could imagine. Strangers, workmates, housemates, friends, family—you name it, we’re afraid of them. And sometimes we don’t even have a particular person in mind; instead, we feel a general, non-specific sense of threat.

Incidentally, it might seem from this discussion that there is a clear distinction between the sorts of persecutors conjured by people with severe mental illness and those of us with ‘everyday’ paranoia. The former group tend to worry about external, remote, impersonal threats; the latter about people closer to us. Of course, like all generalizations the reality isn’t so neat. People with, say, schizophrenia are often fearful of family members or neighbours. And many people without mental illness distrust the government or other state agencies. What we can say for sure though is that paranoia will point the finger at anyone. Everyone is a potential threat.

The Complete Writing Guide to NIH Behavioral Science Grants provides simple and clear explanations into the reasons that some grants get funded, and a step-by-step guide to writing those grants. This volume is edited by Lawrence M. Scheier, President of LARS Research Institute, Inc., and an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at Washington Univeristy, and William L. Dewey, a Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the School of Medicine and former Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Below, Scheier was kind enough to answer some questions for us.  Click here for part one.

OUPblog: What is the most common mistake people make in submitting grant applications?

Scheier: Not getting a peer review internally or not collaborating with other scientists who can improve the grant. Too often, young investigators hole themselves up in some remote part of a laboratory and never come out for air. This leads to insulated thinking and this can hurt your chances of getting grants. The reason the investigator holes themselves up is because they feel threatened by colleagues who are competing for the same coveted markers of success, funding and publications. When I worked in one laboratory for an extended period of time, we had reams of longitudinal data sitting around. So one day, I decided to write down every idea I had for a paper and ways to mine this data. I even drew pictures of models that we could test and linked the models to the basic questions addressed by this lab, which dealt with drug prevention. Down the road, the time came for me to move on with my life and I left that book with all those pictures and abstracts and said to my colleagues, these are some really good models to test and that link with the overall themes of the Center and research. Now, many years later, bit by bit, each of these models is making their way into publication or has been made part of a grant to explore how drug prevention works. The point is that collaboration will go much further toward helping your career advance than holing up in an office and trying to write top notch grants solo. So the most common mistake people make, and this is particularly true of young investigators, is not to collaborate.

Related to this point, many young investigators don’t’ get assistance from more senior investigators or collaborators in the field. When I wrote my first grant, a NIDA First (R29) award my score was not in the top 10% and I was not funded. I still thought the grant was a solid piece of writing and while not my best work, still reflective of good science. So I sent the grant to one of my consultants on the grant, a very polished researcher who was heavily published and heavily funded. He wrote back a nice critique and pointed out that many essential “elements” of the grant were missing. Had I included them in my first draft, he felt I might have had a better shot at funding. Then I took all of his important comments and revised the grant, which was funded on the second submission. The point is that I reached out to a more senior colleague and asked for a review of my ideas, the writing style I had used to articulate my ideas and whether the grant contained good science. In all three cases, this consultant made comments that enabled me to make fine improvements without losing the “context” of my own thoughts. This is critical and can be the difference between a successful career where you get really good mentoring and a career that has you languishing trying to figure out how other scientists get funded all the time. You must realize that you are looking for a jumpstart to your grant writing career and usually the best way to get that is to ask a more senior (and successful) grant writer to look at their style, the way they express their ideas, how they shape their grants, and so forth. So asking for supervision, getting an internal review, even by someone who knows nothing about your area, is often the ticket to learning about whether you are expressing yourself in a clear and concise manner.

OUPblog: If you could only tell people one thing about NIH grant writing, what would it be?

Scheier: If your career is invested in soft money or obtaining financial support from agencies like NIH, then you need to study the “Beast” as the saying goes. Put your mind to learning what makes other people successful grant writers. First and foremost learn the trade from the inside, participate in grant reviews, talk up a storm among your colleagues, and listen to the wisdom of the sages. Once you get funded, never stop looking for more funding opportunities and don’t rest on your laurels. You will be remembered for your last grant, your last stage show, not your first.

OUPblog: With an increase in NIH funds coming due to the stimulus, what should researchers know about grant writing?

Scheier: You have to be poised to respond quickly to a Research Funding Announcement or Program Announcement as we witnessed with the Stimulus Funding. For many research groups, there was no more than a month to prepare for this windfall of funds and in many respects this is not enough time to write your best grant. Consider that Center applications take some groups 3-6 months of preparation time and so the Stimulus funding is not looking for well thought out Center applications, but much smaller projects that have a quick turnaround time. In this respect, your team must be well prepared and take the time to read the requirements of the grant. One interesting side bar to the Stimulus funding from the Recovery Act, is the grant format changed stylistically. That is, the sections for Approach, Significance, Background, and Preliminary Studies were no longer emphasized and new areas of concern were outlined that needed to be addressed. Careful preparation and advance scouting by the grant team would have noticed this subtle change and the group is then able to restructure their grant accordingly. This is the sign of a prepared group that prides itself on being a veritable grant machine. It is important to recognize that a well positioned group heavily invested in grant writing does not see the newly formatted grant style for the RC-1 Challenge Grants as an obstacle but rather a “challenge” and they make fast headway to recalibrate and re-orient their writing style.

Good grant writers are always thinking of funding mechanisms and ideas to match the mechanisms. At times, I write down grant ideas and then later, expand them writing a paragraph or two, or even outlining an abstract. Then if the right funding mechanism comes along, I am well poised to take my basic ideas and expand them into more fully fleshed out grants. There are new changes on the horizon at NIH in terms of how many pages grants will be (referring primarily to the core research areas) and there are hints the current 25 page PHS or SF424 application will shrink from 25 pages. Nevertheless, you must be prepared to write rapidly and address the pressing public health issues of our times (or point toward future concerns). You must focus on improving your writing skills as grants become increasingly competitive (more grants awarded and more people looking for extramural funding). You must at all times keep your finger on the pulse of science and have at your fingertips the necessary resources to submit grants. It pays every once in a while to read over the NIH website and keep monitoring any intended changes to the grant process. Don’t let your Contracts and Grants group or Research Support Services have exclusive access to this type of information. Make sure you too are current and have a grasp, however primitive, of what is required to submit grants.

OUPblog: How will the increase in funding affect the NIH? Will anything change?

Scheier: This is really a big question that has to sit and percolate until we see how NIH deems fit to spend the stimulus money. NIH has been seeking ways to grow to meet the health demands of our nation. So it is unquestionable that some funds will be used to support more “infrastructure” growth in various states and these funds are slated to promote “better health care” and foster additional medical research with this windfall. NIH has to grow internally to meet the demands of new scientists and NIH has to find ways to keep an entire cadre of younger early career scientists professionally engaged and funded. It is absolutely clear that we need more scientists down the road to keep pace with new developments in health care and basic medical research. To do this, NIH has to grow in ways never before considered, increasing the size and throughput potential of peer review, perhaps create new institutes and centers, develop new RFAs to keep pace with science and discovery and find new avenues to pursue age old questions regarding the human condition. To keep pace even with these few recommended areas, NIH requires additional monies, monies that have not been allocated in the past. Even though the budget for NIH has been growing steadily over the past decade, this growth has been met with increasing challenges, more costly science and other “economic” factors that mitigate the growth in true dollars spent. In many respects, the budget for NIH is just keeping up with inflation.

Now, with the new mandate by the current administration, we can foresee new funds to push the scientific horizons and promote new medical research in areas that have traditionally not been funded well in the past. This will mean NIH has to draw up a new plan to find ways to develop new treatments, fuel the path to find new medical discoveries that help “improve people’s health and save lives.” This can eventually promote science as an important agenda for our entire country. In the short run, we may see a burst of funding and new “challenge grant” activity. However, in the long run, NIH might become a larger part of government spending, a larger component of our nation’s governance as we put medical research and health care (prevention) front and center in our nation’s public health agenda. If there are any changes that we can anticipate, it would be accounting for expenditures and funds in grants, and perhaps a revision to the computation of Facilities and Administration costs (also called “indirect costs”) at Universities and private research think tanks. There seems to be an “air” of accountability in research that will grow to ensure the public’s monies are well spent and directed toward the intended science.

OUPblog: What’s the biggest thing that separates a successful grant application from an unsuccessful one?

Scheier: This is an easy question to answer and comes down to “clarity of thought.” This is one of the most compelling reasons I chose to utilize a quote from Albert Einstein at the beginning of Chapter 3. At some point in his illustrious career Einstein said, “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.” When you are as deeply immersed in science as many NIH funded investigators are, it is essential that you take the deep thinking, the detailed and technical laboratory procedures, and make them clear as a bright sunny day. If your area is studying family systems and social interaction in drug etiology, you need to spell out to the reviewer why looking at parent-child dyads and communication is the single best method to unravel the causes of teenage drug use. If your area involves synaptic transmission and disruption of signaling events by drug consumption and you use rat models; then you need to spell out why the model is appropriate, what are alternative methods, and why the particular assay method you select is best suited to find answers to the research questions you pose. I say this because the reviewer is looking for ways to critique your methodology, and because of their own expertise, that same reviewer can anticipate your research hypotheses. The reviewer is usually quite familiar with the extant literature. Spending pages upon pages reviewing the existing science sometimes “bores” reviewers because they are part of the science, have published in the same journals on the same ideas. They want to be “excited” by something novel and innovative that helps the science grow. Remember, science is a very conservative process and to borrow from historian Thomas Kuhn, we are all in the midst of making a paradigm shift, we just are caught up in the normal day-to-day science. The process of science is slow moving and any advances, or what we call technical advances, are slow to mature and take hold in the mind’s eye. Knowing this, scientists should be more patient, spell their ideas out more carefully, and go to greater lengths to find ways to embed their ideas in the context of the human condition. So, going back to my earlier point, clarity of thought is essential in the unraveling of “good” science and a successful grant application is one that highlights the novelty while at the same time tethering the science to what is “known.”

The Complete Writing Guide to NIH Behavioral Science Grants provides simple and clear explanations into the reasons that some grants get funded, and a step-by-step guide to writing those grants. This volume is edited by Lawrence M. Scheier, President of LARS Research Institute, Inc., and an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at Washington Univeristy, and William L. Dewey, a Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the School of Medicine and former Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Below, Scheier was kind enough to answer some questions for us.  Be sure to check back next Monday for part two of this interview.

OUPblog: What is the purpose of the National Institute of Health?

Lawrence M. Scheier: The National Institutes of Health, often called the nation’s premiere medical research agency, is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the primary Federal agency for servicing and conducting medical research. The NIH is composed of 27 Institutes and Centers, providing leadership and financial support in each of the 50 states. It employs over 18,000 people with headquarters located in Bethesda, Maryland. A nice historical piece that details the origin of the NIH can be found here. The NIH serves as stimulus to medical research and health care to improve the quality of our lives, extend life expectancy, and learn more about how the human body works, including tremendous discoveries in genetics, vaccinations, detection and treatment of diseases, bioterrorism, immune system regulation and function, cancer studies and rapid response to disease outbreaks like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Based on the most current budget information, NIH funded over 28 billion dollars in medical research, supporting 50,000 competitive grants awarded to more than 325,000 scientists encompassing 3,000 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions. The full range of the NIH scientific enterprise is worldwide with international collaborations addressing emerging public health needs that go far beyond the US borders.

OUPblog: Who qualifies for grants?

Scheier: Many grant announcements specifically list what types of business enterprises or research groups qualify to receive federal support through NIH. There is a section in each Program Announcement or Research Funding Announcement titled “Eligible Institutions/Organizations” that lists qualifying institutions. In their most recent announcement for Stimulus funding (Recovery Act Limited Competition: NIH Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research [RC1]), the NIH listed the following in the RFA under Section III Eligibility Information

• Public/State Controlled Institutions of Higher Education
• Private Institutions of Higher Education
• Hispanic-serving Institutions
• Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
• Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCCUs)
• Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions
• Nonprofits with 501(c)(3) IRS Status
• Nonprofits without 501(c)(3) IRS Status
• Small businesses
• For-Profit Organizations
• State Governments
• Indian/Native American Tribal Governments (Federally Recognized)
• Indian/Native American Tribally Designated Organizations
• County Governments
• City or Township Governments
• Special District Governments
• Independent School Districts
• Public Housing Authorities/Indian Housing Authorities
• U.S Territory or Possession
• Indian/Native American Tribal Governments
• Regional Organizations
• Other(s).

In this particular RFA, Foreign Institutions/Organizations were not permitted to apply. Whenever there are special eligibility qualifications, these are listed on the PA or RFA under “Eligibility Information” for institutions and there is also a section that designates eligibility for “individuals.” This latter section refers helps qualify whether the application is intended to stimulate submissions from new investigators or younger “junior” Ph.D.s or M.D.s that are trying for their first application. Some RFAs and PAs are specifically intended to stimulate research collaboratively and detail this by outlining Multiple P.I.s or specialized mechanisms to create collaborative centers. It is always important to read these sections carefully to make you’re your institution is qualified and that you as an individual are qualified.

OUP: What are the elements of a successful NIH grant application?

Scheier: This is a trick or “tricky” question. First the question asks “What are the elements …” where the word “elements” is used in the plural case and refers to more than one element. If you think about this for a minute, we generally use the word element when we agree that something is complex and can be broken down into its constituent parts. If we think of a grant as a complex writing tool (or product), then sure, there are certainly “elements” of a grant. The trick part is that when you look at a grant, it is a single cohesive document (made up of parts, mind you) that expresses a position about science or education. In the book we reinforce the need for a grant to be unified, written in a coherent and practical manner and always striving for synthesis. So the trick part of this question is to find the grant’s “elements” while at the same time preaching “synthesis.”

My initial response to the question then is to look carefully at the review process for the required “elements” of a grant. In this respect, an investigator is always hard pressed to make sure these required “elements” comport with the reviewer’s mindset. So we can turn to the reviewer’s criteria to find the required elements. In addition, an investigator must make sure the grant meets with the requirements of the PA or RFA. If the funding announcement is special, like the recent Challenge Grants, the investigator must be careful to read the requirements and make sure the actual writing and sections of the grant comport with the RFA (or Program Announcement). The RFA or PA will have different “elements” that need to be satisfied. Finally, an investigator has to make sure that no matter how well written, or how superb the science, an application must also directly attend to the mission and goals of the parent Institute or Center. This final “element” is critical and in some cases the sole reason that funding is so hard to get. The investigator must keep their finger on the pulse of science at their respective funding source.

From this brief overview, you can see that the question is tricky because there are so many ways to configure the “elements” of a grant and then say which are critical to a “successful NIH grant application?” If we look at things from the reviewer’s mindset there are a few critical elements they are evaluating as they read a grant. Reviewers receive instructions that help guide them during review. There are generally four basic “required” review criteria (for most grants), and these are: “Significance,” “Approach,” “Investigator,” and “Environment.” Each area is usually spelled out in the RFA and PA in terms of basic criteria so all reviewers are usually on the same page. So for instance, if the discussion during a grant review is about “Approach” reviewers are usually talking about methods, assessment, design, sampling, data collection, administration of a treatment and so forth. When the reviewers are hotly engaged in a discussion about the Environment they are probing whether the applicant’s institution is supportive and can really offer the type of instruction, physical space, mentorship and so forth that may be outlined in the grant. The grant may not contain sufficient funds to fully compensate an individual and the applicant has to find alternative funds to keep their position even if the grant is awarded. Stating this at times and in a positive manner, can convince reviewers the applicant has sufficient “resources.” So in this case, an important “element” of a Fellowship application (F31 or F32) would include reference to alternative support and training mechanisms.

In addition to the four stated review criteria, there is another essential element of a grant that falls under “Additional Review Criteria” and that is “Protections for Human Subjects (and this element also extends to Invertebrate Animals but any grant that uses secondary data analysis or does not involve human subjects review, would not have this requirement). A grant can be the most well written product a review team examines, but if it is missing this critical “element” the heavy gavel can come down and a low score result (the committee would express a “concern” with the application). Many times a young investigator does not pay sufficient attention to human subjects concerns, IRB review or data safety and monitoring plans and even with good science, an application suffers during review. Here again, an important “element” of a grant is to think about the myriad of ways a grant can be “examined” during review and suffer is some aspect of the application is not addressed.

If an investigator covers all these sections adequately, reviewers then have a sound base from which to judge the scientific merit of an application. Then, the elements are all in place and the reviewer takes a step back to see the “whole” or synthesize the science and determine if the grant is one of the better ones he or she has read. In our book we carefully review each of the major review criteria, but there are also other “elements” of a successful grant that we cover. These refer to the writing style, formatting, and overall grammatical structure, the synthesis, presentation and the manner in which an investigator hammers home the core issues of a grant, which we call the “science.” We cover this in the book in several chapters but nowhere more poignantly than Chapter 3 (A brief guide to the essentials of grant writing). Consider if an application is not scored or receives a very low (poor) score and is subsequently revised and resubmitted. We cover this procedure (revision and resubmission) in great detail in Chapter 18 of the book. I point you toward this chapter in particular because it is essential that an investigator consider the most important “element” of a successful revision is whether he/she has addressed the comments of previous reviews. If you submit a revised grant, which is more than likely if you are a new grant writer and you have to produce multiple submissions to get your “First” grant, then you have to consider the content of your revision. It is essential to realize that if a reviewer feels “slighted” and that their comments were not taken to heart, this can spell the death knell for a grant during review. In this case, the most successful “element” of a grant is the detail provided in the Introduction (response to reviewers from previous review). An Introduction can either be three pages or one page, depending on the grant mechanism. Usually an R01 revision is allowed three pages, while an R03 small grant mechanism is allowed one page. Either way, the Introduction is where the applicant shapes the response to the reviewer and provides an overview of how the application has changed. So in this brief example, a Revision has to include several elements, one of which is an overview of how the grant has changed to incorporate the reviewer comments.

If we take a step back and consider this notion of “elements” from a reviewer perspective, then the most significant element is synthesis (we also call this “organization” in the book), whether the grant is written clearly and coherently, and whether the applicant spells things out so the reviewers does not have to dig deeply to find the major points. If we think of “elements” from the funding agency perspective, then the single most important thing is whether the grant fits the overall mission and goals of the Institute or Center and whether the applicant spells out these components. Regardless of how well a grant fares during review, it still must pass muster during the Advisory Council Review. This is where a handful of experts and senior scientists address whether the grant fits with the overall mission of the Institute or Center and specifically whether the grant addresses pressing research and public health concerns at that time.

OUPblog: What is the most misunderstood aspect of NIH grant writing?

Scheier: Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of NIH grant writing is how easy it can really be, and how fun. Remember, the challenge of grant writing is tied inextricably to your professional aspirations. If you are a clinician who practices and sees patients all day, then you are not honing your grant writing skills regularly. If you jump into grant writing to expand your professional horizons, then sure, getting a low priority score can be disconcerting and even dissuade you from pursuing grant writing activities. On the other hand, if you are a research scientist in some laboratory and you know full well that your survival rests with your success in grant writing, then developing effective grant writing skills is a “sin qua non” of your profession. Even though you may not have acquired the best set of skills in graduate school (where your focus was on your terminal degree), you have at your fingertips the most comprehensive training guides to help you write grants. These come in the form of books, like the one we edited, government assistance accessible through the web, manuals, and work experience. All told, these ingredients and training resources should position you to be more competitive as you write your first grant. So, the message here is to make grant writing not a task, but rather a part of your professional growth. So when you get your first grant, it is rewarding and fulfilling. In the end, you want grant writing to be positive and reinforcing, not depicted as drudgery. Many groups have parties after they write grants (whether the grant is successful down the road during review is not important, just that the group finalized an important task). Other groups build their relationships around collective and collaborative writing and use grants as opportunities to cement their relations. Some grant organizations bring on board consultants that help them shape the grants and these opportunities expand the group’s potential, thus opening new collaborations and pushing scientific horizons. If we look at grant writing with a stronger professional flair, then we see it can be fun, rewarding and challenging in the same context.

OUPblog: What is the biggest secret to grant writing you’ve discovered?

Scheier: In a nutshell, “Preparation.” Once I bumped into a colleague that had an illustrious career, very successful grant writer, heavily published, and a really smart guy, with vision backed by hard work. He said to me, “You know people want to get Center grants and funded for multiple years, but they spend so little time on the one thing that will help them get funded, the grants they write.” I took this to heart and decided to spend much more time on each grant, making sure they were polished and accurate, both historically and from a scientific point of view. I would submit each and every grant thinking it was my best piece of work and not take it personal if the grant was not received well by reviewers, but rather take to heart the comments made by reviewers. In fact, I would use their critiques as a means to improve my own thinking and writing. Then grants became a challenge rather than an obstacle and I grew as a person, submitting better grants and helping others to write better grants. My funding percentage increased and I found myself more helpful to other groups that used my grant writing skills to improve their lot as well. So the secret you will learn from any grant writer is preparation and using your time to make the grant a really solid work. In many cases, ideas developed for grants mature into themes used for chapters or even an entire prospectus for books. So you have to see the “work” that goes into a grant as part of your overall scientific development.

Professor Aaron Ben-Ze’ev is the President of the University of Haifa, and Professor of Philosophy. Ruhama Goussinsky, Ph.D is a lecturer in the Human Service Department in Emek Yisreel College and University of Haifa in Israel. Together they wrote In The Name of Love: Romantic Ideology and Its Victims which looks at how the idealization of love arms it with a destructive power. A major case study of the book concerns men who have murdered their wives or partners allegedly ‘out of love’.  In the excerpt below the authors look at the common assumption in wife killing; that it is rooted in masculine possessiveness.

If you leave me now, you’ll take away the very heart of me – Chicago

My heart would break in two if I should lose you – Elvis Presley

The various explanations offered for the phenomenon of the murder of wives share one common assumption, according to which the motivation for violence against wives in all its forms, including murder, is rooted in masculine possessiveness. Although the existing explanations disagree about the acquired or inborn essence of male possessiveness, they share the view that an act of murder is the embodiment of the murderer’s personality (as if to say: tell me who the man is, and I will tell you what the woman’s chances of survival are).  Sexual jealousy and anger are two emotions that, according to the common view, trigger wife killing.

Another assumption that unites most of the explanations is that in terms of motives and emotional dynamics, murderous violence is not distinguishable from other manifestations of violence against women.  The prevalent view considers murder the end of a path and the climax of a history of violence that preceded it, not a separate phenomenon.  However, unlike violence that is not connected to as specific behavioral stimulus on the woman’s part, 20 years of research has pointed systematically to the fact that many cases of wife killing are connected to the threat of abandonment, and they take place in response to the woman’s effort to end her relationship with the man.

Theories that refer to male possessiveness but overlook the context of potential abandonment cannot answer the question of why certain men murder their wives instead, they lead one to ask: ‘how is it that so few men kill their wives?’

Our conclusions support the consistent pattern of findings that have demonstrated that the phenomenon of wife killing often revolves around the woman threatening to or actually separating from her dating or marital partner.  However, they also led us to diverge from the assumption that the murder of female partners is a phenomenon that can be explained by a single, central variable such as male possessiveness. The findings point to the need to understand the murder of women partners as a phenomenon anchored in a certain constellation of factors that combine and create the ‘conditions for murder’. From this point of view, the murder of the woman cannot be explained only as the embodiment of the murderer’s possessive personality; rather, it must be seen as the result of an interaction between the specific person and the specific context.  Conditions of murder may be created when a relationship characterized by deep emotional dependence of the man on his wife, when love is experienced in terms of paternalism and shared identity, when separation is seen as loss of personal continuity, when masculine identity is defined in terms f power and control, and when a rigid personal disposition accompanies the dangerous realization of Romantic Ideology’s central theme- ‘without you I am nothing’.

Deciphering the context in which the idea of murder ripens until it is carried out illustrates that understanding the motivations behind the act in terms of ’sexual jealousy’ or ‘masculine possessiveness’ is extremely simplistic and partial.  Although conceptions of ownership and paternalism, and emotions such as jealousy and anger all play a role in the full range of factors that produce a readiness to take the life of a conjugal partner, it is more accurate to consider the motive for murder in terms of conditions that are propitious for the development of murderous violence, rather than in terms of one central personality variable.

The basis of the potential for murder can be characterized in dimensions of space and time.  In the spatial dimension, in terms of content, the murder of wives is, as noted, the result of a combination of factors.  A certain infrastructure gives rise to the potential for murderous violence.  There are conditions of risk, many of which are part and parcel of Romantic Ideology, that combine and act together: when the woman is the man’s whole world; when separation from her is conceived of as a loss of identity, of self; when reality is emptied of other sources of significance; when the conception of masculinity, which dictates power, honor, and control, turns one’s dependence on the woman into an experience of weakness and impotence, grasped as a humiliating blow to masculine pride; when the feeling of need is joined to rigidity of personality; when rigidity is combined with aggression; when aggression is justified by Romantic Ideology; and when love legitimizes the worst sort of actions, in the guise of a desirable social ideal.  When all of these combine, conditions of high risk are present.

In the temporal dimension, the murder must be seen as the climax of a dynamic process, during which a psychological readiness matures, specifically, the willingness to take the wife’s life.  Our findings point to a dynamics of progress toward the deed over a period of weeks and months.  That period is marked by continued affective states such as jealousy, anger, fear, depression, and despair, which shape a very powerful emotional framework for grasping reality.  In this emotional context, the idea of murder ripens, gathers a feeling of realism, and advances toward implementation.  That advancement involves certain or vague knowledge about what is going to happen, anxiety about the anticipated end, a feeling of sitting on a barrel of explosives, predicting imminent danger.  Something horrible is about to happen.

The day of the murder is the day on which a spark ignites the explosive mass. As mentioned, the psychological willingess was already in place, and therfore neither the cirucmstance surrounding the day of the murder, nor the emotions accompanying the act can offer insight into the reason for the murder or shed light on the place from which it emerged.  The traces of anger, as well as the traces of the murder, lead backwards in time…

Marc Marschark is a Professor and Director of the Center for Education Research Partnerships at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college of Rochester Institute of Technology, and Honorary Professor in the Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh and School of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.  His book, Raising and Educating a Deaf Child: A Comprehensive Guide to the Choices, Controversies, and Decisions Faced by Parents and Educators is a guide through the conflicting suggestions and programs for raising deaf children, as well as the likely implications of taking one direction or the other.  In the excerpt below Marschark looks at why some deaf children are much better readers than others.

Perhaps more than any other area, the reading and writing abilities of deaf children have been the focus of attention from educators and researchers for decades.  Taken together, the results and conclusions of relevant studies provide an enlightening, if disappointing, picture of deaf children’s skills in this regard.

Many of the errors that deaf children exhibit in reading and writing are the same as those made by people learning English as a second language.  A variety of programs therefore has been been developed to instruct teachers of deaf children in methods like those used in teaching English as a second language…  Although their reading behaviors and their writing may look similar to second-language learners, we need to remember that most deaf children will come to school without true fluency in any language.  As a result, second-language learning methods may be inappropriate or only address some of deaf student’s needs.  While the priority should be to ensure that deaf children acquire first language fluency during the preschool years, teachers still have to teach them to read and write in English, regardless of their prior language experience.  So, we might as well face up to the issues.  First, we have to take into account the variation among deaf children and the influences of early language environments, types of hearing loss, and factors like parent and child motivation.  Considerable resources and effort devoted to improving deaf children’s literacy have gone into trying to teach them the skills and strategies that work for hearing children, even though it is apparent that deaf and hearing children often have very different background knowledge and learning strategies…  Perhaps as a result, despite decades of concerted effort, most deaf children in this country still progress far more slowly than hearing children in learning to read.  This means that deaf students leaving school are at a relatively greater disadvantage, lagging farther behind hearing peers, than when they entered.  At the same time, there are clearly many deaf adults and children who are excellent readers and excellent writers.  What accounts for the difference?

A variety of sources claim that deaf children of deaf parents, on average, are better readers than deaf children of hearing parents…Why? Deaf children’s relative lack of early language fluency when they have hearing parents clearly plays an important role in their reading difficulties, and several investigators have found a relationship between deaf children’s ASL skills and their reading levels…These studies have all been correlational, however, demonstrating that high or low levels of performance in one of these domains are often accompanied by similar levels in the other.  Similarly, other investigations have shown a similar link between speech and literacy skills in deaf children with deaf or hearing parents who use unspoken language…In some of those studies, the contributions of greater residual hearing and speech skill have not been distinguished, but the larger point is that early access to fluent language is central to deaf children’s gaining literacy skills.  For those children who are not able to benefit fully from spoken language, an early foundation in language through ASL or another natural sign language would appear to be a promising alternative.  But the situation is more complex.

…there are other differences between deaf and hearing parents other than their primary mode of communication.  The two groups may have very different expectations for their deaf children in terms of academic achievement.  They also may differ in their ability to help their children in reading-related activities, and we know that children whose parents spend time working with them on academic and extracurricular activities are more motivated and have greater academic success.  Is there some reason to believe that it is parental hearing status rather than early language fluency that enable some deaf children to be better readers?

In an earlier book, Psychological Development of Deaf Children, I reviewed 30 years of studies concerning the reading abilities of deaf children of deaf parents as compared to deaf children of hearing parents.  The results were surprising because I fully expected that deaf children with deaf parents would always come out on top as a result of their early exposure to language.  Well, deaf children of deaf parents have been shown to be better readers than deaf children of hearing parents in some studies, but others have shown no difference.  Importantly, none of the studies to date have considered the reading skills of parents, and those investigations that have included deaf parents largely have been conducting in places known for having relatively high numbers of educated deaf adults.  It therefore seems likely that any generalization about a link between children’s reading abilities and parental hearing status per se will be extremely limited.  After all, if 50 percent of deaf and hard-of-hearing adults read below the fourth grade level, how can they be good reading models for their deaf (or hearing) children?

Indeed, it now appears that regardless of whether their parents are deaf or hearing, deaf children who are better readers turn out to be the ones who had their hearing losses diagnosed earlier, had early access to fluent language (usually via sign language), and were exposed to English.  At the same time, having a mother who is a good signer appears to be more important than whether she is deaf or hearing or the precise age at which a chld learns to sign, as long as it is early…Regrettably, there is no single predictor of reading success that applies to all deaf children, and the combinations of factors that positively and negatively influence reading development are not yet fully understood.  It may be, for example, that different environments lead to different strengths and weaknesses (for example, big vocabularies but little grammatical knowledge) depending on when, where, and from whom children learn their first and second languages.  Thus, deaf children of hearing parents tend to have better speech and speechreading abilities thatn deaf children of deaf parents, but those abilities do not seem linked to better reading or other academic achievement even though they would seem to support the phonological part of reading… Furthermore, while it is tempting to assume that a deaf child’s early exposure to language through their deaf parents would provide a considerable advantage in learning to read, this advantage may be offset by the fact that ASL vocabulary and syntax do not parallel those of printed English…