Boosting Family Literacy: Author Maya on Writing & Education

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Maya Smart, author of "Reading for Our Lives," to discuss her inspiring journey into literacy advocacy. In this interview, we explore how her experiences as a mother and literacy expert shaped her approach to writing and education. Read on to uncover valuable insights on empowering parents and educators in fostering early literacy skills.

Author Maya Smart

Chrysta: Thank you so much also for taking the time. I'm very excited to talk to you about it because I loved your book. I've obviously been writing for you for a couple of years now and I really love the way you are passionate about literacy and the way that you talk about it and you make it so accessible, especially in this book. And so our thing that I really wanted to chat with you about is one is about your process in the book and then you as a mom, which is obviously our story with Zora, is in there a lot in the book and more things for parents asking a few more questions about expanding on things that you wrote about in the book and suggestions. Great. I actually, I was listening to it. I do better with audiobooks. I have a toddler and since sitting and reading right now, and it was so funny because I was like, my partner is not in literacy and I forget to sometimes communicate things to him was like, do we do this? Are you doing, is that why you do that? I was like, oh yeah, explain. He was so good in gracious. He was like, oh, explain why to me like that. He was like, I just thought that was like you being a preschool teacher.

Maya: I love that. It's so funny. Dads are really into it. I, I've been on a few podcasts where dads were the hosts and it's just an interesting vibe that they bring to it. I think sometimes they're not that they're counted out, but they're not directly thought of first. Even in my own mind when I was writing the book, in my mind my imagined reader is like this busy mom with a little kid who's doing all the things and didn't even think of it so much in terms of partnership within whatever kind of family organization you have, but it's like all hands on deck.

Chrysta: I know you talk about being a mom and trying to get Zuora passionate about reading as being a part of the inspiration for your delve into literacy, but were there personal experiences or observations that…inspired you to jump into the role of writing a book?

Maya: It started out as just my personal interests and just questions and I've had a blog since she was a toddler, so we've moved several times, but when we were in Richmond, Virginia, I started a blog and I wrote about all kinds of things like time management and why I don't cook and just whatever I was interested in. It was very much that early mommy blog era, but then as I learned more about reading and realized that so much more went into it than what we realized, then I started writing blog posts about really detailed specific things that I wasn't sure if anyone else was interested in, but I really wanted to it and just kind of follow my own curiosity around some spelling and reading things….I'd gone to conferences and in the back of my mind always wanted to write a book but didn't know if it would be a novel or if it would be a biography or I hadn't really found my topic.

Then by the time covid hit, I'd narrowed down, I'm really interested in reading. I was on the library board literacy coalition board, volunteered in an early childhood program with the YMCA and all these different things and I'm like, literacy is my thing. I'm serious about it.

Chrysta: Would you share some of the challenges or obstacles you faced during your own literacy journey or while fostering literacy and others either for yourself or for Zora or just through the process of trying to help other people?

Maya: For me, it was reading was easy and a pure pleasure, but as a parent I wanted to know the details and I wanted to be proactive and I wanted to make the path as easy for my daughter as possible, but I found that there was just so little information.

There was this huge margin for error. I felt like with parents, I had friends who had older kids and one child would be a great reader and love it, and then another one would really struggle and that parent did the same things with both childs. I just had all of these questions about, well, what are we supposed to do? And then I wasn't even after taking, I took a course in the foundations of reading instruction and even after taking that course, I wasn't totally on top of things for Zora because that course focused on K through 12. The education research is done in traditional classrooms, so it was all with older kids, and so I felt like there was still a lot of missing information on what to do with little kids, and so I had to read from all these different disciplines and areas to try to piece it and patch it together, and my book is kind of like what I wish I had known. I would've done more just talking with her and talking about letters in particular

Chrysta: I really liked, there was a part in your book where you're talking about there's all these studies that get done, but they're written for academics and they're not getting, and that was a big portion of part of Read the Room and our mission. I went to graduate school and I was seeing all these amazing studies and all of these things and I knew they weren't getting into classrooms…It's like how are we getting information that is really important into the hands of the people who need it? Instead of it just…everyone at UT patting themselves on the back for making a discovery, being like, well, this is what teachers and my parents should be doing. You're like, “Great. Did you tell them?”

Chrysta: Is there a pivotal moment that motivated you to become an advocate for literacy? I mean, you talked a bit a few minutes ago about wanting to make sure that Zora could read, but I know for some parents they're so STEM oriented or specifically math. Was there a moment where you were like, yeah, this literacy is where I want to put a moment where it was like, this is where I need to be, it's got to be literacy?

Maya: I think it was reading news articles, then it felt like it was the same article year after year in different communities that say, Black kids struggle. There are these reading achievement gaps and black kids are always on the bottom and lower socioeconomic kids and other Hispanic kids or whatever the divides were, and it just didn't sit well with me. I think particularly as a Black mom, because I think sometimes people read those headlines and they think that something is wrong with the kids. They think that they're not reading because they're Black and we know it's not that it's all these other things. They're having disparate access to books, to quality instruction to in some cases food and the basics and all of these things. So I wanted to be someone who is continually directing people to the root causes and it's never the kids. It's sort of the environment that we've put them in, the resources that we've given them and what we've told their parents about how to help them.

I believe 99% of parents would do all that they could to help their kids thrive when it was made simple and easy for them to do it. If the answer is pay for expensive tutoring, then of course 99% of parents aren't going to be able to do that. If the answer is become a master of systematic phonics, instruction yourself and teach them, okay, most parents can't do that either, but I think most parents can do, but the things that need to be done with the littlest kids, every parent is capable of back and forth conversation and teaching words and letters and some of the basics. I just want it to be someone who shared that and got the word out.

Chrysta: Yeah, it's really, I think one of the best parts of another really part that I resonated with me… just remember that it was an act of joy and love to be doing these interactions was such a refreshing way, especially as again, someone who is a teacher and also works in literacy but who has a small child. Hearing it and being like, “oh yeah, that's right. That's right. I don't need to stress enough.” It was a very welcome, refreshing approach to hear.

Maya: Oh, thank you so much.

I felt like there was a lot of research that says just talk to your child, have these little back and forth conversations and that those turns are important. It's not just you talking at them all day. It's not you filling them with words. So that was something I wanted to emphasize. I'd never heard prior to taking your graduate school course, I'd never heard the words like phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, and so I felt like that was something really important to tell parents about. And I think for the most part I just called it sound awareness in the book.

So there were certain things where I'm like 95% of knowledgeable people on this topic think that it's uncontroversial, that kids need to know the sounds within words in order to match the sounds to letters like it's alphabetic language. So the process was kind identifying those topics that I felt had good strong research support for, and then grouping, sort of ordering them. And the general, the tricky thing is that a lot of these, as you know from teaching, a lot of these things are interrelated, so you may, I separated letters and their shapes and names is in a different part of the book than the sounds, but in reality, especially with parents who aren't trained in this in depth, you're teaching all these things at the same time and that's fine, but trying to separate the thread so at least people could think about them separately even if you kind of nurture them together.

Chrysta: Right. Yeah, I think that was great. There was the part where I honestly, while I was listening to the book, I went, “oh my God, yes!” It was when you were saying that you didn't need to teach them in alphabetical order

Maya: And that's something I'll add to the paperback version of the book. I talk, I get a little more, it was hard for me to figure out what the end point was. I didn't feel super confident telling parents what part of phonics they should teach. And so where I've landed in the, now, it's been three years since I wrote the book, is parents are perfectly capable of teaching basic phonics. And to your point, starting with the letters that help them be able to read a word that they understand, I feel like is a big milestone for kids. They're getting connecting it and it builds confidence and interest and motivation. So I think the book will get into that. The original one spends a lot of time on spelling, but when I look back on it, I was like, I could have said a little more about helping kids to read the words,

Maya’s Website

Chrysta: What was the most surprising thing you learned or encountered while working on reading for Our Lives?

Maya: Think the most surprising thing was how little preparation and support teachers get for learning, for teaching reading. So I think parents assume, and not even just teachers, but teachers, librarians, early childhood, not just K 12 teachers, but teachers every grade level and librarians. And it's like, I thought that I didn't know these things, and it was sort of like, oh no, most people don't know these things. And there are some academics who know a lot about some of these things, but even they don't know about the thing that the other person know. It was like we just needed more connections and also just translation to practical things. So that was the biggest surprise for me that there wasn't more just general or even more specialist awareness. It's not just parents that don't know, teachers don't know either they haven't been trained.

Chrysta: How do you hope your book will impact the conversation around literacy and education in communities?

Maya: I hope that the book will build confidence in whoever reads it, that they can have a real meaningful impact on the entire lifelong trajectory of a child. So that doing very basic things very early in kids' lives makes this outsize impact. So if after reading my book or listening to interviews or reading interviews like this one, if people are like, oh, I can make a difference and it's super important that I do, and the earlier I start the better, then that's all I could dream for as an author.

Chrysta: Okay. Are, oh yeah. So are there any additional projects or ideas you're looking to explore to further the cause of literacy that stem from your work on this book?

Maya: I started a course, I did an initial launch of it in January. It's called Reading Made Simple, and it's a course for parents and it covers some of the same material that's in the book, but because it's a course and it's online, I'm able to update it more frequently. The book is, it is what It is, it takes you all this time to write it and then it's like another year before it comes out. So you've learned more things and there's this constant sense, oh, I wish I could have put this in or, oh, I wish I could add that, but the book is like, it's printed, it's gone, it's out of your hands. So the course allows me to do a couple of things like update things as I learn new things, but it also allows me to interact directly with parents so I can hear their questions and just answer things live.

And the questions that people have are things I never would think of on my own, but once I hear them and I'll dig into it if I don't have an answer then and research it. And for example, one of a dad in the course was talking about how he uses chat GPT to help him communicate better with his toddler, and it just struck me as just such an unusual use of technology. But he's a super engaged dad who sometimes, but he's an adult and he's talking to a 2-year-old and sometimes he can't find the right way to communicate for his child to understand. And so this technology is helping him rephrase some of his ideas for a two year old's consumption. So it's just things like that I never, it's like thought would never ever in a million years occur to me, but then once he mentioned it, then I'm like, okay, what are some other uses of technology and parenting?

Chrysta: So you talked about what if you could just give one literacy tip to parents and educators, what would it be and why do you consider it the most crucial?

Maya: I think sometimes we get so focused on print and decoding and mapping sounds to letters that we forget that kids need just this giant bank of words and just understanding of the world and ideas and concepts. And so my one bit of advice is that you should always be aware that reading is a child's ability to recognize words in print that they already understand in spoken language. So you have to speak to kids and build the vocabulary and build their knowledge or else the words on the paper aren't going to make sense because I think there's just so much focus on decoding and many kids will get to the point where they can sound out words but they don't understand them. That is the challenge. When we have these standardized tests and things, they don't have the context, they don't know the topics, they don't know the vocabulary, they don't understand the ideas. It's like particularly with little kids focus on spoken language, spoken vocabulary, the back and forth conversations that build those neural pathways. And then when it's time when they get older and start paying attention to print, they do need to be directly taught how the sounds and letters map to one another. But you have to have both. And I think people sometimes are missing that.

And that is the same no matter how old they get. My daughter's 12, we had a whole conversation yesterday about what it meant to purse your lips.

Chrysta: Oh?

Maya: Yeah. I was like, “yeah, so-and-so like pursed her lips and blah, blah, blah.” And [Zora]’s like “pursed her lips, pursed her lips.” And then she said, “I read that in this book.” And then she gave me three examples from the book of someone pursing their lips and as she read it, she just sort of skimmed over it like whatever. But then when she heard me say it, then she was like, oh, this is a real thing that people say. It's not the quirk in this book then. So we've learned this new thing, had a conversation like pursed our lips.

Chrysta: Yeah, I love that. And it's funny too because your kids will remember. I have one more question for you, which is what was your favorite thing about writing this book?

Maya: My favorite thing about writing the book was having my daughter see me write the book. So I think she found my work kind of mysterious when she was little as I was a freelance journalist. So I don't think she had much awareness even that I was doing any work. And so for me it was, I don't know, is there something about she, my daughter's just my biggest motivation in general. So the topic of the book is inspired by her and wanting to help her and support her. And then the actual finishing of the book, it is more meaningful for me because she saw me in Covid sitting there typing. And then when she was older in fourth grade, I guess when it came out, she was at my book launch, heard the speeches, had her stand up, she got a round of applause at the thing.

So later she said, I heard her or she told me, she was like, well just said in passing, well, I know I can write a book. So it's sort of like I've made it accessible for her, this ability to kind of focus on something that you think is important and deliver. So I think, I don't know, I just find motherhood incredibly motivating. I didn't want to be, I also find it incredibly challenging and I only have one child, so I'm just amazed by people who have multiple kids and do a good job with it. But I think that it can be very hard to focus on professional pursuits and fulfill your personal sense of what you're here in the world for, aside from being a parent. So I'm proud that I was able to keep pushing this thing forward.

Chrysta: Yeah, I love that. I just had a realization though actually, because you were named after an author and obviously so was Zora. If Zora has a child, she could name her Maya, and then it would still be doubly true for author. She'd be named after two authors, not just one.

Maya: Oh, right. I didn't think of that. Yes.

Chrysta: But now you have to, if she ever decides to have children, you have to give her a nice list and be like, this is the tradition. Now here's a list.

Maya: Here are the authors I find acceptable now for my grandchild's name.

Chrysta: Yes, exactly! That was all of my questions for you. Thank you so much.

You can buy Maya’s book Reading For Our Lives here.

You can also visit her website with more tips and ideas on reading at MayaSmart.com.