Re-Encountering the Right to Read: From Seminar Discussions to Collaboration: “The Social Production of Disability … Beyond the Models of Disability”

By Professor Tanya Titchkosky and Katherine Lili Chen MA Student, on behalf of Wendy Pope, PhD Student, David Miller MEd Alumna; Qi Lucy Gao MEd Student -- Social Justice Education, OISE University of Toronto and Encounters with Disability Studies 2025. Read their paper "The Social Production of Disability in Encounters with Ontario’s Right to Read Inquiry: Beyond the Models of Disability" here.

In the Winter term of 2025, we found ourselves together in a small graduate seminar -- “Encounters in Disability Studies.” It was a new course based on the edited collection DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies. Together we explored the ways in which disability appeared and disappeared. Of special focus were cultural assumptions that frame
disability as easily identifiable, readily remedied, and dissolved into normalcy. We turned our attention on how cultural assumptions make disability appear but only as in need of intervention: control, cure or containment.

This sense that we could re-encounter normalcy as it played a role in making disability appear and disappear led to many student presentations on actions and programs that aimed to solve the problem of disability. One such solution was the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Right to Read Inquiry (2022) with its various ways to document a failure to
read -- including videos (OHRC videos) of parents testifying, sometimes in tears, that their children failed to read. SJE MA student Katherine Chen presented the Inquiry Report to the class, drawing attention to its emphasis on early screening, “evidence based” approaches to reading, and interventions as key solutions to reading difficulties.

Chen’s presentation outlined how the provincially implemented solution involved recognizing the condition of dyslexia by twice a year testing of all children in kindergarten and grade one. The other solution was to inform teachers that there is a “science of reading” which, according to the Inquiry, means that there is one correct way to teach reading,
positioning alternative methods as unjust to children’s right to read and severing them from their life chances. Chen’s presentation highlighted how the approaches taken in the Inquiry expanded the authority of experts while positioning reading difficulties as problems located within the child. What was needed was an examination of the sociocultural contexts and structural features of schooling that shape how these difficulties are produced.

Katherine Chen’s presentation, along with Prof. Tanya Titchkosky’s interest in reading as a socially produced identity, brought the class into new ways to encounter reading, reading problems and so-called solutions. This re-encounter became increasingly important, particularly in relation to how people, especially children who struggle to read, understand themselves and their life chances. A science of reading and mass medical diagnosis of children couldn’t be the whole meaning of reading today. Those in the seminar hoped that the Right to Read Inquiry and its reported solutions could be re-thought.

And, it had been.

In 2024, Christine Caughill published, “Managing the Problem of Dyslexia: A Review of the Ontario Human Rights Commission Report of The Right to Read Inquiry,” a critique of the Inquiry Report and its 157 recommendations. Caughill raised concerns about Inquiry’s reliance on medicalized understandings of dyslexia and its implications for education in Ontario. Shortly after, Natalie Riediger, an Associate Professor of Nutritional Science, published a paper, “The Ontario Right to Read Inquiry and the Social Model of Disability,” a critical rejoinder to Caughill’s paper. Riediger defended the Inquiry, framing it as an example of the social model of disability in action and cautioned against critique. Both of these encounters with The Right to Read Inquiry and Report were published in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies.

People from the DS seminar continued to discuss these papers alongside the Right to Read report, it became clear to us that a response was needed. The work that began in the seminar carried beyond it and became something we chose to continue together. With Chen’s meticulous work of uncovering the cultural assumptions in the Right to Read Inquiry and
Report to ground us, members of the seminar course meet over the summer of 2025 to continue to examine how disability was made to appear. This led to writing together exploring the meaning made of disability in the Inquiry and Report, as well as in Riediger’s rejoinder. Restricted versions of disability as well as reading were revealed.

What began as classroom discussion and shared concern grew into a collaborative effort that took shape as this paper we now share “The Social Production of Disability in Encounters with Ontario’s Right to Read Inquiry: Beyond the Models of Disability”. We hope you enjoy reading the various ways the meaning of reading and of disability can not only be identified and addressed but, more importantly, re-encountered and re-thought as matters of social
justice.