Building Classrooms Where Both Gestalt and Analytic Learners Thrive

Shifting from fixing deficits to sharing power

Schools promise “literacy for all,” yet only honour analytic pathways. Gestalt learners are cast as deficits, public SLTs are starved, and equity remains rhetoric. True change demands struggle, solidarity, and revolutionary hope.

Introduction: Two Language Pathways, One System

Education has long carried the banner of universality. We are told, again and again, that schools exist to bring literacy to every child, that language is the great equaliser, the key that opens all doors. On the surface it feels unimpeachable: who could argue against literacy for all? Yet beneath this promise lies a quiet sleight of hand. What the system calls “literacy” is not a neutral skill but a particular pathway—an analytic one. Children are taught to break words into phonemes, to segment and decode, to treat language as a puzzle of interchangeable parts. This pathway is presented as natural, the default, even the only way to learn.

Those who process language differently—who take it in as wholes, who recall phrases and rhythms rather than fragments—find themselves positioned outside the frame. The gestalt pathway is not recognised as legitimate; it is recast as deficit, dysfunction, or delay. The child who scripts a line from a film, or who reaches for meaning through a remembered phrase, is rarely seen as engaging in language at all. They are treated instead as failing to measure up.

Here lies the contradiction we must confront. The system proclaims universality, yet its very design excludes those who do not conform to its chosen mode. The universal promise of literacy for all is in fact a false universal—one that masks exclusion under the cover of inevitability. What has been declared the natural way is, in truth, a constructed one, maintained because it serves the system’s demand for standardisation and control. To name this is not to undermine literacy, but to make visible the gap between promise and practice, and to open the possibility of something broader, truer, and genuinely shared.

The Stark Divide in California

Across California, the divide could not be clearer. Families with means can purchase the services of private speech-language therapists, some of whom have trained in Natural Language Acquisition and can dedicate hours to a child’s evolving relationship with language. These sessions are attentive, nuanced, and sustained—the kind of care that makes progress visible, that honours both analytic and gestalt pathways. Yet this level of expertise does not float freely in the world; it is commodified, priced, and rationed by ability to pay. The child’s access to recognition, to flourishing, is tethered to their family’s income.

In the public schools, the story is inverted. Here the SLTs are burdened with impossible caseloads, their labour stretched thin across hundreds of students and multiple school sites. They are pulled toward the most immediate, measurable tasks—articulation drills, compliance with paperwork deadlines—whilst the deeper collaborative work of supporting literacy is pushed aside. The school system treats them less as professionals than as functionaries, their knowledge enclosed and their autonomy stripped. What could be transformative practice becomes alienated labour.

This is not an accident of poor planning. It is structural. Capital has hoarded the conditions for attentive care in private practice whilst starving the commons. And at the same time, the political assault on public workers has intensified. Under Trump, the promise of Public Service Loan Forgiveness was gutted, and income-contingent repayment plans—once a fragile safety net for those entering service professions—were dismantled. For many young therapists, the economic calculation is now impossible: to work in the schools is to shoulder unpayable debt for a career that offers neither recognition nor stability. The pipeline of committed public SLTs narrows, not because the need is gone, but because the system makes it untenable to serve.

This is the class contradiction in sharp relief. On one side, families who can purchase commodified expertise; on the other, the working-class majority left with a starved public system, its practitioners proletarianised and exhausted. The unevenness is not incidental, not a temporary imbalance to be corrected with better budgeting. It is the predictable outcome of a system that privileges private capital while systematically undermining the public sphere.

Reframing Through PTMF and Critical Theory

If we shift the lens, the picture looks different. The Power Threat Meaning Framework invites us to move away from the old fixation on deficits—on what a child supposedly lacks—and towards an understanding of power. Who holds it? How is it exercised? What meanings does it impose? Within this view, the challenge is not that gestalt processors are somehow broken, but that the system has been built to deny their way of making meaning—then monitise “the solution.” The task is not repair but redistribution: to share power, to let different pathways into literacy be recognised as valid.

Critical Theory sharpens the point. Analytic modes are not simply “natural,” they are socially constructed as the norm. This construction serves particular ends: it allows schools to measure, sort, and standardise. It renders visible what can be easily counted and dismisses what cannot. The child who decodes syllables on a timed test becomes “proficient,” whilst the child who builds a story from remembered phrases remains unseen. Inclusion is claimed in rhetoric, yet exclusion is enacted in practice.

Here we encounter the contradiction at the heart of the system. Schools insist they are inclusive, yet they organise themselves around a literacy model that actively reproduces exclusion. Ideology does its work here: what is presented as objective science is in fact a dominant mode of production in literacy, one that aligns neatly with capital’s needs. Standardisation produces data, data feeds accountability, accountability justifies austerity. The gestalt pathway, resistant to atomisation, cannot be easily enclosed or monetised. And so it is cast out of sight, its learners left to be categorised as “behind” and held in a state of perpetual remediation. To reframe through PTMF and Critical Theory is to make this machinery visible, and to see clearly that the invisibility of gestalt processing is not a neutral oversight, but a function of power.

The Role of the SLT in Schools

Within the school walls, the speech-language therapist is too often cast in the narrowest of roles. They are summoned to correct an /r/ sound, to tick off goals for articulation, to manage compliance with timelines and forms. In this reduced vision, the SLT is a technician, not a collaborator—a worker whose expertise is channelled into the smallest and most measurable fragments of language. Yet their training equips them for something far broader. They know how language develops, how it intertwines with identity, literacy, and relationship. They could be at the centre of reshaping how classrooms recognise both analytic and gestalt pathways.

Here is the contradiction: SLTs are needed as advocates, as bridge-builders across systemic gaps, yet the very structure of the institution confines them to bureaucracy. Their labour is alienated. What could be transformative practice is stripped down to paperwork and drills, work that satisfies the system’s hunger for compliance but leaves little space for genuine support. The profession itself becomes hollowed out, its practitioners frustrated and burnt out, while students remain underserved.

Yet even here lies possibility. To be fluent in Natural Language Acquisition is to hold a kind of counter-knowledge, a praxis that resists enclosure. An SLT who understands gestalt processing and dares to bring that knowledge into IEP meetings, into co-planned lessons, into teacher training sessions, is already refusing the technician role. They are reclaiming their position not as a fixer of deficits but as an advocate for meaning-making. Within a system designed to narrow their scope, this act of resistance—however small—can widen the circle of recognition. It is not enough to solve the contradictions, but it signals a path forward: SLTs as agents of praxis, refusing to let their work be reduced to fragments, insisting instead on the whole.

The IEP as Vehicle for Change

The Individualised Education Program (IEP, and it’s various equivalents around the Global North) is, on paper, one of the most powerful tools available in the school system. It is not advisory, not a set of suggestions to be taken up at a teacher’s discretion. It is a legal contract, binding on the district, enforceable by law. And yet in daily practice it is treated as something far more fragile—another folder of paperwork that can be shelved, half-remembered, or circumvented when resources run thin. Teachers skim it, administrators reduce it to compliance checkboxes, and students are left with promises that do not materialise.

This tension reveals a deeper contradiction. The IEP proclaims enforceable rights, yet is lived by families as contingent, precarious, often ignored. Its very existence makes visible the gulf between law and practice, between the formal recognition of need and the actual delivery of support. In theoretical terms, the IEP is a site of struggle. It is where the contradictions of the education system gather most tightly: the rhetoric of equity against the reality of scarcity, the promise of recognition against the daily experience of erasure.

For families and advocates, this makes the IEP more than paperwork. It becomes a weapon—one of the few they can wield to force systemic concessions. To demand that the written word be honoured is to insist that the state be held to its own commitments, however reluctant. Each IEP meeting becomes an arena where power is contested, where the façade of inclusion is tested against the lived needs of the child. To name the IEP as a site of struggle is not cynicism; it is clarity. Only by recognising its contested nature can we use it to press open the cracks in the system, and through those cracks, carve the beginnings of change.

What Collaboration Could Look Like

If we are to move beyond critique, we must ask what collaboration could look like in practice—not as an abstract ideal, but as something material, rooted in classrooms and daily routines. Imagine a literacy block where stations are co-designed by teachers and SLTs. One space might focus on phonics and decoding, supporting those who thrive on analytic tasks. Another might invite students to build stories from remembered scripts, to collage meaning out of the phrases and rhythms they already hold. Here, both pathways are recognised in dialectical relation: not one superior to the other, but each necessary to the whole.

The same shift can be written into the IEP itself. Goals need not reproduce the hierarchy where analytic decoding is the measure of progress and gestalt meaning-making is ignored. Instead, they can be co-planned to reflect both modes, valuing the child who builds understanding through scripts as much as the child who sounds out phonemes. To write such goals is to challenge the structural privileging of analytic processing, and to inscribe recognition into the very documents the system cannot legally ignore.

Training is another front. Too often, SLTs hold knowledge of NLA in isolation, siloed away from classroom teachers. But when that knowledge is collectivised—when teachers learn to recognise NLA stages, to support scripting and re-scripting as part of literacy—the classroom ecology changes. Suddenly, what once appeared as “nonsense talk” or “avoidance” becomes legible as language in motion. This shared understanding can transform not only practice but culture.

It is vital, however, to resist framing this simply as “best practice,” as if collaboration were a matter of professional polish or technical improvement. To do so would miss the stakes. Collaboration of this kind is praxis: the collective work of teachers, SLTs, and families standing against a system that demands conformity, that insists only one pathway to literacy is legitimate. To collaborate in recognising both analytic and gestalt modes is to enact solidarity. It is to refuse the enclosure of language and to insist, instead, that education belong to all who enter it.

Conclusion: A Shared Future

The language of schooling is saturated with promises: every child will thrive, no learner will be left behind, literacy is a right not a privilege, no child left behind. Yet we know, and have always known, that these promises fracture on the ground. Gestalt processors remain invisible, their ways of making meaning dismissed, their futures narrowed by a system that never saw them clearly. The contradiction is stark: the rhetoric of thriving for all set against the continued exclusion of those who do not conform to the dominant pathway.

To acknowledge this is not to surrender hope. But the hope we need cannot be the soft hope of reform—another training, another initiative, another round of pilot projects destined to wither under the weight of the same contradictions. The hope we need must be revolutionary: a hope grounded in struggle, in the refusal to accept the false universal as final. The IEP, the labour of the SLT, the practices of the classroom—each of these is a site where contradiction sharpens, where the gap between promise and reality is laid bare. And each can be leveraged to demand something more: the redistribution of resources, the recognition of all modes of learning, the transformation of schools into places where universality is more than a slogan.

What should have been done decades ago must be done now. Not piecemeal, not as an afterthought, but as a collective insistence that no child be written out of literacy, no pathway denied recognition. This is the struggle before us: to move beyond accommodation towards solidarity, beyond inclusion-as-rhetoric towards education as a common good. The work is urgent, the stakes are high, and the future will be shaped by whether we rise to the contradiction or allow it to deepen.