What is a Wild Fig?
An Understory Tree
The Wild Fig Tree is an Understory Tree. Understory Trees act as resourceful survivors living in the deep shade of the forest canopy. These vital, smaller trees make up the mid-layer of the woods. Many Understory Trees spend decades growing slowly, in the shade of giants, adapting deep green leaves to soak up every bit of light and forming an intimately connected underground network.
One Special Understory Tree is The Wild Fig Tree
Instead of reaching up, the young Fig begins as a vulnerable seed up in the canopy and sends long aerial roots down, deep into the ground. This growth adaptation provides uniquely structured support that allows the Wild Fig Tree’s horizontal branches to extend outward and survive across massive areas. They thrive, with challenging root networks, in dense forest environments. They bear year round fruit even when food is scarce.They are the sacred “Tree of Life”, honored in cultures and inspiring art around the world. Their persevering power creates new paths, breaking through cliffs and traveling miles to access water.
And What Does A Wild Fig Tree Have To Do With A Reading Studio”?
The brains of those with dyslexia develop and process in unique and challenging ways as well. Because reading is a modern cultural invention, our brains have not evolved built-in “reading centers”. Instead, typical brains must connect and retrain areas evolved for vision, speech and sound to process text. These highly efficient regions are reduced and less active in the dyslexic brain. To make up for this they reroute processing pathways like the roots of a Wild Fig Tree, to farther reaching, more wide-spread regions. This causes reading to take significantly more time and physical effort, but these adaptations also give rise to unique cognitive advantages. The dyslexic brain is highly optimized for global, big-picture thinking, for example.
Dyslexia requires a systematic specialized form of training for reading. The reliance on less efficient brain pathways is not “hardwired”. Targeted, intensive training allows neuroplasticity, where new neural highways can be formed creating both new, more efficient pathways, as well as optimizing the global far reaching ones. Traits that begin as vulnerabilities can be the very sources of our most inspiring power; just like our Wild Fig Tree, breaking the mold and casting a new one.
Structured Literacy is an explicit, systematic, and cumulative approach to teaching reading that is highly effective for all students, but absolutely essential for individuals with dyslexia. Orton Gillingham is the foundational pioneer of the Structured Literacy framework. It directly affects the neurological processing challenges associated with dyslexia, by systematically building and reinforcing the necessary neural reading networks.
We chose the Wild Fig Tree to represent the power within each individual. There are no mistakes in nature, just bounty when we all embrace our unique brand of brilliance. If the system doesn’t fit, build a new one.
Wild Fig Reading Studio is here to provide the resources that will allow children’s roots to strengthen and give their branches room to expand, unencumbered.
