ADULT LITERACY CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

Adult Literacy Curriculum Development



Adult Literacy Curriculum Development

Introduction

Through all my experiences with people struggling to learn, the one thing that strikes me most is the ease with which we misperceive failed performance and the degree to which this misperception both reflects and reinforces the social order. Class and culture erect boundaries that hinder our vision and encourage the designation of otherness, difference, deficiency. Some of my basic orientations toward the teaching and testing of literacy contribute to our inability to see. To truly educate in society, then, to reach the fall sweep of our citizenry, we need to question received perception, shift continually from the standard lens. (Rose, 1989, p. 205)

Mike Rose speaks to my experiences both as a student and as a teacher. I think first of the ways I have failed students in my hurried evaluations of their literacy, but I realize that even my failures have taught me an immense amount as a teacher. To keep learning, I must keep assessing myself. I must have "failures" to be able to recognize and know success. I must misperceive in order to perceive. I like this passage because it reminds me to think differently about literacy, how I teach it, and how to recognize it in its most nascent forms.

Adult Literacy

The story recorded here is one of students' successful formulation of literacy as measured in test scores, reading interest inventories, and written artifacts. It's also one of success for me as a teacher, taking a huge risk to revamp an entire developmental reading program for my university. It took a great deal of risk to try to sell a pedagogy of critical literacy to instructors and graduate assistants with minimal amounts of training in literacy in general and absolutely no comprehension of constructivist approaches to literacy (Atwell, 1998; Johnston, 1992; Noguchi, 1991) let alone any understanding of the domain of critical literacy (Bee, 1993; Brady, 1995; Ellsworth, 1992; Freire, 1995; Giroux, 1993; Lankshear & McLaren, 1993; Shor, 1996).

The other risk occurred in the classroom with my own students. Attempting to evoke a pedagogy of questions (Freire, 1995), bring students out of "intellectual Siberia" (Shor, 1996), and deal with resistance (Bigelow, 1990; Ellsworth, 1992; Lather, 1992) was not easy. In some ways these actions paralleled the professional development work I undertook with the other instructors and graduate assistants. Unlike some of the other instructors, my students were able to navigate the process of critical literacy and come to a measured level of "conscientization" (Freire, 1995), working through false consciousness (Lather, 1992) and resistance (Ellsworth, 1992; Lather, 1992) to obtain a new degree of control over their literacy development, histories, and futures. To say the least, learning more about the possibilities in enacting critical literacy with a "remediated" population of students was an important experience for me as a teacher.

The current status of basic skills, "remediated" courses in English, reading, and mathematics has reached a critical juncture in the history of developmental studies programs in higher ...