The dyslexia ecosystem

It is all too easy, in everyday interactions in dyslexia, to see the interactions in a semi-adversarial fashion--parents competing to get more support for children, researchers competing to get more support for their theories, schools trying to get more money for their programmes. Such a set of analyses may be described as 'zero-sum'. If one party gains, the other one loses. If, by contrast, one views the dyslexia community as a complex, inter-dependent 'ecosystem', a much more positive view emerges. It becomes clear that there are solutions for the system as a whole that are in a sense optimal for the system as a whole, solutions that are 'win-win', that is, all parties gain and none lose. In this article I develop this concept of the 'dyslexia ecosystem', and outline targets that would lead to progress for the ecosystem as a whole.