Issue 19: Dystinct Report – Flynn & Ava Eldridge’s Interview with Professor Pamela Snow

Dr Pamela Snow has authored or co-authored over 200 publications, comprising refereed papers, book chapters, monographs and research reports. In 2017, she was a member of the National Year 1 Literacy and Numeracy Panel, convened by the then Federal Minister for Education, the Hon. Simon Birmingham.

In 2020, she established the Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab in the School of Education at La Trobe University with her colleague, Professor Tanya Serry. The SOLAR Lab is a platform for research, teaching, advocacy and postgraduate supervision on a wide range of topics pertaining to developmental language and the transition to reading, writing and spelling in the school years.

Dystinct reporters Flynn and Ava Eldridge have a chat with Pamela about her work at the SOLAR Lab and her life.

The Interview

Dystinct reporter Flynn & Ava Eldridge has a chat with Dr Pamela Snow.

Excerpts from the Interview

What is the SOLAR lab, and where is it based?

SOLAR is an acronym. It stands for Science Of Language And Reading. We study the scientific research around human language systems - how we talk and understand language, words, and sentences. We also study how humans learn to read. It might surprise you to learn that we think of oral language as being something that is quite innate for humans. But it's something that humans have evolved to do over probably a couple of hundred thousand years that we've had language as a form of communication; Our brains have really specialised for that. Human brains are very specialised for language, more so than even our chimpanzee relatives. We're genetically quite similar to chimpanzees, but we're very different in terms of how we live our lives, and language is a big part of that. But reading, writing, and spelling are not things that our brains have evolved to do on their own. We call those biologically unnatural things for humans to do - things that we have to be taught how to do.

The Solar Lab is not a physical place. It's a virtual platform, a part of the School of Education at La Trobe University. I live and work in Bendigo. Professor Tanya Serry, who is the other director of the SOLAR Lab, lives in Melbourne, and we have other colleagues as well at the SOLAR Lab.

What is your position in the Solar Lab?

I'm one of the directors with Professor Tanya Serry. We established the SOLAR Lab back in 2020. I also have another title, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, which means that I study how humans think and how they learn.

Is the SOLAR Lab funded by anyone? If so, which companies support you?

We earn some of our income by running online short courses for teachers, psychologists, and speech pathologists. In that sense, we fund ourselves to some extent. We also do some work for different Departments of Education. They employ us to do projects for them that bring in money. We also have been very fortunate to receive a large philanthropic gift of money, 2. 5 million from the Bertelli Foundation. The foundation saw us as a good cause, and we've also had some government money for research. We don't have any commercial businesses that fund us. But we do bring in quite a lot of money to the university.

What are you currently researching at the SOLAR Lab?

We're researching ways to get good knowledge about reading and reading instruction into the hands of teachers and how to improve the knowledge that teachers have about this thing that we sort of take for granted a bit. Reading is such an everyday part of our life that it's easy to think that it's easy for everybody. But as you know, it's not. So, a lot of our research is about how to help teachers become more knowledgeable about the reading process, helping them to use teaching approaches in their classrooms that make it easier for most, if not all children to be successful with reading, writing and spelling. We are researching ways that teachers can spot the kids in the classroom who are struggling a bit, and we like those kids to be spotted early and given extra help early. Then we're looking at the kind of help kids get when teachers realise that they're struggling and falling a bit behind where they should be. We've also got somewhere around eight or ten graduate research students whom we supervise. But most of our work is about strengthening and improving what's going on in schools and also helping schools that want to change the way they teach reading.

We noticed you have researched low literacy rates in youth offenders. What are you finding about schooling and kids in prison?

I've done quite a lot of research over the last 20 years or so on young people who are in the youth justice system. Most of the young people who get in trouble with the law are sort of around the 14, 15, 16 age range. Some of them commit crimes that are so serious that they have to spend some time in a detention centre. And some of them commit crimes for which they have to be supervised in the community. They might have to meet with a parole officer once a week, and they're often given extra support as well. Often, these kids have really tricky stuff going on at home. The kids who get involved in breaking the law often come from families that are struggling a bit financially or families that are not very tight or emotionally bonded together, where there's a lot of stress.

When kids are breaking the law, that's usually a sign that things are not going well in their families. The research that I've done on that group of young people tells us that they often have difficulties with their language skills. They're not very good at sitting and listening and taking information in. And they're not very good at putting words together in sentences to get across their ideas and thoughts. This creates all kinds of problems for them in lots of ways, for example, when being interviewed by police.

I've also been very interested in their reading, writing, and spelling skills because the more time you're spending breaking the law, not being at school, and being suspended or expelled, the less time you're learning. And these are kids who are often very weak when it comes to reading and writing. One of my passions in this space is that we should be making sure that all children are learning, reading, writing, and spelling to a very high level of ability right from the start so that we're protecting the ones whose home lives are tricky and disorganised where they might be more likely to leave school early. We want everybody to have the chance to have good academic experiences at school. And as you know, it's hard to succeed with the academic side of school if you can't read, write and spell pretty well.

We have an international audience. Is this a unique Australian issue, or is it worldwide?

It's worldwide. A lot of research on the language and literacy skills of young people in the youth justice system has come out of Australia. Australia has contributed quite a lot of the research relative to our population and how many people are researching in this area.

There's also been a lot of research coming out of England on young people in the justice system and their language skills but less research out of America, which is interesting. I say that it's interesting because America locks up a remarkable number of young people. They take a much more hard-line approach to young people who break the law and commit crimes, and they're more likely to send them to detention centres and lock them up than we are here. We tend to take what we call a more therapeutic approach to young people who break the law. We try to remember that just punishing these young people might not be the best thing in terms of producing a good outcome. The research evidence tells us that just locking these kids up and punishing them doesn't actually turn them into good kids. Unfortunately, countries like America have taken a more punitive punishing approach, and they haven't done much research on the complex stuff that's going on in kids' lives in the way that we have in Australia.

We have noticed you have a blog. What is your blog called? Is it popular?

My blog is called The Snow Report. That was an easy decision for me to make, given my surname. But I do tell people if they go looking for it, that they need to put my name and Snow report into a Google search because if they just search for the snow report, they're going to find out where it's snowing in Australia. My blog is a place where I sometimes write opinion pieces about things that are going on in education. I sometimes write about issues that people are talking about a lot. Sometimes, I write about something that I think is pretty complex, where I know teachers are not going to be able to get access to scientific journals. What I like to do is to pull together some recent research and write about it for teachers so that they do not have to be disadvantaged by the fact that they can't go to those journal websites and, download the journal articles and read the research for themselves. There is also a comment section down the bottom where people can disagree or agree with me or have a bit of a debate with each other. It's really just a communication platform, I suppose. I just like to see it as an information source for teachers, in particular, parents, psychologists, and speech pathologists.