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DEFINING THE CULTURE OF LITERACY: INVESTIGATING THE INTERFACE OF INSTITUTION AND STUDENTS by John S. Nixon A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) May 1988 UMI Number: DP23134 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL U SERS The quality of this reproduction is d ep en d en t upon th e quality of the copy subm itted. In the unlikely event that the author did not sen d a com plete m anuscript and there a re m issing p ag es, th e se will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved, a note will indicate the deletion. Published by P roQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in the D issertation held by the Author. UMT Dissertation Publishing UMI D P23134 Microform Edition © P roQ uest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United S ta te s C ode P roQ uest LLC. 789 E a st E isenhow er Parkw ay P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089 This dissertation, w ritten by John S. Nixon under the direction of h..hf. D issertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted b y The Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re quirem ents for the degree of ft.b. D O C TO R OF PH ILO SOPH Y Dean of Graduate Studies April 28, 1988 DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairperson ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter INTRODUCTION .................................... 1 1. LITERACY: DEFINITIONS, PROBLEMS, SOLUTIONS . 5 2. LITERACY EDUCATION: A PEDAGOGY AND ITS PROBLEMS . . .......... . ............... 27 3. DRAMATISM: DEFINING A COMMUNITY COLLEGE AND ITS STUDENTS ......... '. . .............' 55 4. STUDENTS, INSTITUTION, AND LITERACY: A DRAMATISTIC ANALYSIS . . ............ 92 WORKS CITED .............. 142 APPENDIXES APPENDIX A, Student Survey . . . ............. 147 APPENDIX B, Competency Based Adult Basic Education Curriculum ............. 158 APPENDIX C, Instructor Survey ................... 165 APPENDIX D, Subject-Verb Agreement Exercise . . . 174 APPENDIX E, Application for Employment ..... 177 APPENDIX F, Employment Communication Activities . 180 APPENDIX G, Student Newsletter ................ 184 iii! LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. ABE Student Demographics Fall, 1987 , Survey* ..... ........................... 97 2. Health Competencies..............................123 3. At the Doctor's Office......................... 128 4. At the Clinic .......................... 128 5. Instructor Survey ....................... 136 1 Introduction The following work is an effort to relieve a personal and professional frustration. The frustration is the per sistent and elusive problem of adult illiteracy. As a member of American society, I recognize that adult illit eracy is a problem because, by national consensus, the inability, however defined, of a significant number of adults to adequately comprehend and produce written lan guage is ethically, economically, and politically bad. As an educator working in an adult literacy program, I also recognize that adult literacy is a problem, in part, because we in the profession cannot always agree on what constitutes literacy or illiteracy. And, while consensus on an optimal pedagogical framework may exist, as I later argue, we do not understand adequately the social and cul tural dynamics necessary for bringing students and schools together, which is certainly prerequisite to effective curriculum and instruction. The social and cultural dynamics that inform the interface between educational institution and literacy student are the raw materials of this study. If educators and literacy students understood each others' attitudes and motives, the resulting process of identification might 2 lead to a redefinition of the culture of literacy and more effective literacy education. The purpose of this study is (1) to rehearse the problem of adult illiteracy, (2) to rehearse current theory and practice in literacy education, and (3) to demonstrate and argue in behalf of a methodology for studying the interface of attitudes toward literacy. These attitudes represent the motives for literacy and literacy education held by the institution as they interface with the motives for literacy and literacy education held by the students. Kenneth Burke's Dramatism is my primary source for an inquiry methodology. In the final chapter, I will expli cate and apply Burke's theory to the drama of literacy education: the Agents, educators and students; the Scene, community, home, school; the Acts, life in and out of the classroom; and the Agencies, materials and methods of curriculum and instruction. The study begins with a discussion of the contexts and definitions of literacy and the literacy problem. The first chapter concludes with a brief presentation of a philosophy of literacy education, a pedagogical framework for solving the literacy problem, which is generally accepted as effective. Chapter two asks why, with a pro fessional consensus on an educational solution, the literacy problem is still with us. Burke's Dramatism offers a perspective through which we can understand the 3 breakdown. Chapter three briefly rehearses Burke's Dramatism and lays out the components of the literacy drama for a pilot study--the Scenes, Agents, Agencies, Acts, and Purposes of the institution and students. Chapter four applies the methodology to the drama of literacy education. The value of this study, the value of a Dramatis tic method for studying attitudes toward literacy, lies in the possibility of attitudinal interface between institution and student. The primary hypothesis of this study is that Dramatism is a productive tool for discovering and ana lyzing interfaces and dichotomies between institution and student. Applying Dramatism to literacy education at a community college reveals two secondary hypotheses, (1) a dichotomy between a widely agreed upon and professionally supported philosophy for literacy education and actual classroom practice, and (2) a dichotomy between intentions brought to the literacy classroom by many literacy instruc tors and intentions brought by literacy students. Adult education programs are too often planned with no understanding of the attitudes and behaviors of the. students they intend to serve. A successful literacy pro gram must incorporate strategies that reach into communities of nonliterates and meet the needs that both literates and nonliterates perceive so acutely in their daily lives. The successful program must also include a strategy for developing the level of identification necessary for shared motives. It is at the interface of attitudes, revealed Dramatistically, that this might occur. 5 Chapter 1 Literacy: Definitions, Problems, Solutions The bilingualists insist that a student should be reminded of his difference from others in mass society, his heritage. But they equate mere separateness with individ uality. The fact is that only in private-- with intimates--is separateness from the crowd a prerequisite for individuality. (An intimate draws me apart, tells me that I am unique, unlike all others.) In public, by contrast, full individuality is achieved, paradoxically, by those who are able to consider themselves members of the crowd. Thus it happened for me: Only when I was able to think of myself as an American, no longer an alien in gringo society, could I seek the rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality. -Richard Rodriguez, Hunger Of Memory A study of literacy should begin with a working definition of literacy (and its opposite, illiteracy) before moving on to tackle literacy problems and solutions. Defining literacy, however, is no mean .task'; certainly it is no mere dictionary exercise. Kenneth Burke, however, provides us with an appropriate approach to definitions. Among the many building blocks of Burke's Dramatism is a cornerstone he terms the "paradox of substance." Substance, in philosophical tradition, refers to the intrinsic essence of something--in other words, its unique identity. Burke, however, recognizes an odd self- difference in the term substance. Substance differs from 6 itself because it includes a sense that denotes what a thing intrinsically is, its unique identity, and a sense (etymologically derived) that denotes a thing's support (from the Greek: a standing under). The paradox, then, is that: The word "substance," used to designate what a thing is, derives from a word designating what it is not. That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymo logically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. (Burke, Grammar 23) Burke sharpens the paradox still further when he refers substance to the notion of context: "And a thing's context, being outside or beyond the thing, would be something that the thing is not" (Burke, Grammar 23). The "paradox of substance," with its senses of context and difference, should inform any attempt to define literacy. Much current research in literacy emphasizes the social, cultural, and political foundations of literacy, leaving considerations of literacy technologies, the cognitive and motor skills required to comprehend and produce written language, in a subsidiary role. Possessing the abilities to read and write, then, are not as important as what one does with those abilities. The notion of literacy activities thus becomes an operative phrase, and definitions of literacy become humanly, dramatically framed --people performing acts purposefully in a scene. 7 For the purposes of this study, I am adopting a work ing definition of literacy that emphasizes the uses of literacy in Dramatistic contexts. Frank Smith, in an essay on childhood literacy, offers a definition that suits my intentions we'll: I interpret literacy as the ability to make full sense and productive use of the opportunities of written language in the particular culture in which one lives. (Smith 143) , : Avoiding direct reference to literacy skills in his definition, Smith emphasizes a conscious knowledge of the purposes and actions available through written language in a particular human context. For Smith, the "substance" of literacy centers on the human drama through which it is manifested--people, purposes, actions, scenes, and so forth. Adults who choose to return to school because they recognize deficiencies in their abilities "to make full sense and productive use of opportunities of written language" are responding to the "substance" of their own motives. Their motives are deeply rooted in infinitely variable attitudes, purposes, and scenes. Understanding these motives is the key to defining and treating defic iencies . The "substance" of literacy is also informed by the notion of "difference," and literacy deficiencies might be characterized as the differences that constitute illiter acy. It is somewhat ironic, in the manner of the "paradox 8 of substance," to name the problem of literacy illiteracy, since, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word illiteracy was invented before the word literacy. As the Oxford English Dictionary states it, literacy was "formed as an antithesis to illiteracy." The earliest usage for literacy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from the New England Journal of Education in 1883, claiming primacy for the state of•Massachusetts. This stands as, perhaps, the oldest cllaim about the necessary relationship between context and literacy. However, illiteracy, the Oxford English Dictionary points out, had been worried about as early as 1669, and not only by educators. The illiteracy of "rustics, clergy men and Mohamet" is noted by a variety of social commentators long before the first mention of literacy, again providing evidence of the necessary connection between notions of illiteracy and particular contexts. One last anecdote from the Oxford English Dictionary: just as Massachusetts was developing its claim for literacy,, a citation from 1880 establishes a relationship between illiteracy and politics: ". . . that literate voters are induced to plead illiteracy so that the briber may know which way they vote." Clearly, any attempt to define illiteracy is at best a highly contextualized enterprise (noticing that bribed voters could feign illiteracy warns us that the tasks of defining and assessing literacy and illiteracy are very challenging). My point in citing evidence for a contextual sense of illiteracy (and literacy, also) is to provide a context for a discussion of the Illiteracy problem facing America today. Usually expressed in crisis terms, the illiteracy problem is very difficult to pin down; yet, while defi nitions and research differ widely, all those concerned with the issue agree that illiteracy is a real problem. In his book, Illiterate America, Jonathan Kozol presents the extreme view of illiteracy in America: Sixty million U.S. adults--one third of our adult population--cannot read a daily paper, a book, a welfare form, the Bill of Rights, a housing lease, a road map, the antidote instructions on a can of kitchen cleanser, the word of God within the Bible, or the word of man within the verse of Milton or the tales of Tolstoy or the United States Constitution. Twenty-two percent of adults cannot write a check that will be processed by their bank. The same number can't address an envelope to reach its destination. Forty-ninth out of 158 members of the UN in our literacy levels, we are also twenty-fourth in books produced per capita. The Soviet Union ranks fifth from the top in literacy. (16) Although some argue that claims as extreme and alarming as Kozol's are exaggerated and politically motivated (to win support for increased funding for educational programs), such claims may not be far from the truth, depending on how we choose to define illiteracy. 10 In Its most simple, public definition, illiteracy means the inability to read and write a simple communica tion. Having already addressed the weakness of such a definition, I would also assert that it is generally agreed that illiteracy in this simple sense is low in this country. Another popular term used to describe the problem is functional illiteracy, a lack of basic reading and writing skills needed to perform productively in society. Although this definition suggests contextual criteria would inform a part of its meaning, the use of functional illiteracy, without considerable qualification, hardly serves to clarify. Who is to judge what it means to perform productively? Clearly, for many Americans func tional illiteracy separates them from much of society and limits their ability to make informed choices. But for others, the effects may not be so severe. As Smith's definition of literacy suggests, literacy needs vary widely with each individual. In the end, it may not prove fruitful to discuss the literacy problem in terms of illiteracy. Illiteracy is an emotionally and politically charged term that too easily masks the complexities of the literacy problem. Defining the literacy problem in terms of the many contexts in which literacy expectations are defined and literacy activities are evaluated is probably the most productive strategy for developing an understanding of the problem. A 1980 report 11 by the National Institutes of Education defines several contexts for discussing literacy expectations and problems (45-46). First, the report makes the point that American society is a moving target, it changes technologically and culturally. Examples would be the evolution of the computer, with its own literacy requirements, and the fact that specialization in the workplace has discounted the need to read for general information. Secondly, the report finds cultural pluralism as a major factor in defin ing the literacy problem, citing a 1978 estimate that twenty-eight million people in the United States lived in households with language backgrounds other than English. This figure is certainly higher now, and many of the immigrant groups, particularly Hispanics, the largest group, bring with them weak educational backgrounds. A third contextual factor addressed in the report relates to Smith’s definition of literacy. The educational goals of individuals are a very significant component of the literacy problem. Identifying the kinds and levels of literacy that are important to people in various social, cultural, economic contexts is difficult but necessary to any discussion of the literacy problem. Robin Varnum, in a recent article on the current literacy crisis, summarizes the complexities of the literacy problem, particularly as they relate to changing literacy expectations in American society: 12 Thus the concept of literacy which is characterized in these recent reports is vastly more sophisticated than those concepts which were current in 1880 or 1920. This is necessarily so because of progress which we have made since these earlier eras both in our economy and toward the realization of our democratic ideals. If there is a literacy problem today, it lies not in a disparity between domestic and international performance levels. It lies rather in a disparity between the achievements of today's students and the heightened expectations of our present society in its current state of technolog ical and political development. (160) Not only are the complexities of contemporary American society challenging to the discussion of the literacy problem, but the historical legacy of literacy in America also confuses the issue. The National Institutes of Education report gives some focus to the literacy problem in its summary of research conducted in the 1970s : There is a fundamental lack of consensus on what we mean by literacy because of the confusing and sometimes contradictory data on the extent of illiteracy in this country. No matter what definition we use, a' small group of persons, predominantly poor and members of minority groups, currently fail to do well in school and often drop out when schools are unable to serve them. Most data on trends over time indicate that literacy is not diminishing but may actually be increasing with higher achievement by younger students and the extension of schooling throughout society. (46) With the achievement of younger students increasing, but with more and more adolescents dropping out of school, the focus of the literacy problem seems to hit the young adult population, particularly minorities and immigrants. 13 This group is also the focus of my study, and before turn ing to a specific discussion of the literacy contexts, problems, and solutions affecting this group, I want to cite one final study which looked at the literacy of young adults ages 21-25. A 1986 research report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress begins with a definition of literacy that matches, in spirit, the Smith definition cited earlier. For the NAEP study, literacy means "using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential" (Kirsch and Jungeblut 3). In assessing the literacy of young adults, the NAEP study characterized their skills in terms of three "literacy scales" representing "distinct and important aspects of literacy": Prose Literacy--the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information'from texts that include editorials, news stories, poems, and the like; Document Literacy--the knowledge and skills required to’ locate and use information contained in job applications or payroll forms, bus schedules, maps, tables, indexes, and so forth; and, Quantitative Literacy--the knowledge and skills needed to apply arithmetic operations, either alone or sequentially, that are embedded in printed materials, such as in balancing a checkbook, figuring out a tip, completing an order, form, or determining the amount of interest from a loan advertisement. (3) 14 The NAEP assessment found that six percent of the young adults could not perform such "routine and uncompli cated tasks" as filling out a job application and locating "net pay" on a wage and tax statement. On more complex tasks, such as writing a letter to explain an error in a monthly credit card bill, which only thirty percent could do successfully, performance plummeted. The major con clusion of the NAEP study finds that: It is clear from these data that "illiteracy" is not a major problem for this population.. It is clear, however, that "literacy" is a problem. Sizable numbers of individuals are estimated to perform within the middle range on each of the scales. Within these broad ranges, individuals are neither totally "illiterate" nor fully "literate" for a technologically advanced society. (4) We seem to have developed a new culture of literacy, or literacy context, that demands skill levels necessary for survival in a complex, technological, and democratic society. At least, the "substance" of literacy is heavily informed by the contexts of technology, speciali zation, cultural pluralism, and the education system itself. A final conclusion from the NAEP study reflects these factors: As a society, we will have to develop and apply appropriate intervention strategies to meet the diverse needs of these young adults. Strategies must be tailored not only to help those whose literacy skills are most limited, but also to upgrade the literacy skills of those who demonstrate low to moderate levels of proficiencies.In addition, we must find ways to expand the 15 number of those in our population who are able to perform society's more challenging tasks. (5) In order to find ways of reaching the adults who could benefit from literacy education, we must have a clear understanding of who these adults are, what they can do now, what they want to do in the future, and why. In addition, we must understand what the adult education system is offering now, and what it might offer as a solution in the future. Adult literacy education in the United States has progressed slowly, plagued by problems of insufficient service capacity in formal programs and of attracting and retaining sufficient tutors and learners in volunteer programs on the one hand, and by adults who, by outside measures, are in need of literacy education but who do not take advantage of it on the other hand. Some of these difficulties could be overcome by broadening our percep tion and understanding of literacy and literacy education. To properly evaluate the problem of adult literacy in the United States and to develop successful educational programs, it is critical to view literacy, in the manner of Smith and the NAEP study, as a culturally shaped set of activities or practices exercised by individuals and groups in a variety of different ways and engaged in, to varying degrees, by literates and illiterates alike. For example, reading aloud is an important group activity in 16 many American families. Young children and adults who do not read participate in and enjoy this activity. Reading and writing may be private, individual activities, e.g., a woman reads a letter from a friend and writes a response. Or they may be family activities, e.g., the father reads aloud from a mail order catalog and, after everyone has expressed preferences, fills out the form for the selected items. Or they may be activities carried out by small social networks, as when adults who lack reading and writing skills seek out a more skilled friend or family member to assist them. These literacy helpers assist with tasks such as reading and answering mail, writing out shopping lists, reading stories aloud, deciphering bus and train schedules,; looking up numbers and addresses in the phone book, interpreting labels and instructions on bottles of medicine, and filling out government, employment, and insurance forms. Most illiterates in our society understand enough about the functions of literacy in American culture to know when they need to use it: they simply cannot accomplish the literacy activity without assistance. The least functional of the illiterates are those who have little or no ready access to others' assistance. Thus, in many cases, literacy must be thought of as a shared activity, a family or community practice, rather than as skills possessed and employed by individuals. This sense 17 of sharing should also extend to the literacy classroom, where the teacher and student must identify with each others' worlds in order for communicating and learning to take place. Among the literacy researchers I have read for this study, all seem to agree, at least in theory, that a successful literacy education effort must have identifi cation between teacher and learner as its foundation. This hypothesis and the reasons for its validity, as well as the reasons for its inevidence in adult education pro grams, is an important part of this study. The notion of shared worlds should incorporate outreach and teaching strategies that reach into communities of illiterates and meet the needs that both literates and illiterates perceive so acutely in their daily lives. Instruction must focus on improving illiterates1 access to the reading and writing activities they value, through a combination of basic skills instruction and enhancement of existing patterns of informal literacy help within the illiterate's family and neighborhood. The United States is a highly literacy-oriented culture. We use literacy to accomplish a large number of functions, many of which are conducted orally elsewhere in the world. And we place a high value on literacy; lack of technical literacy skills is often a source of great embarrassment to nonreading or nonwriting adults. Yet 18 literates and illiterates alike must function within this culture of literacy. Most illiterates participate in literacy activities, but, collaboratively with their helpers, at a distance once removed from actual reading and writing. Although they lack the technical skills of reading and writing, they may have functional knowledge of literacy activities and an understanding of the social meaning of literacy in American society. They possess attitudes toward literacy. The skills with which illiter ate adults compensate for their inability to function with written language are, in fact, living.skills that permit them to work, raise families, and lead lives that are successful in their terms. It is important to distinguish among these three dimensions of literacy activities--technical skills, functional knowledge, atid social meaning--if we are to understand the culture of literacy and to develop adult education programs that build upon illiterates' existing skills and knowledge and which enhance or create positive attitudes toward learning the technical skills of reading and writing. An individual is technically engaged in literacy activity if he or she is directly comprehending or producing written communication. Other participants in a literacy activity may not be technically engaged with writing, but may nevertheless be functionally engaged. Although they are not directly involved in reading and 19 writing, they do understand and take into account the existence and functions of writing for the specific pur pose . The variety of responses to receiving mail in a small rural town illustrates this distinction of technical versus functional knowledge. (This is the retold recollec tion of friend and colleague Ramon Reza, who grew up in San Benito, Texas.) Many acults in this community were technically illiterate, that is, they could not read or write. Nearly all, however, comprehended the importance of mail. Some functionally knowledgeable, but technically illiterate individuals kept all their mail until visited by a person who could serve as a literacy helper--often someone from the local parish. This literacy helper sorted through the mail and assisted with responses to important pieces. Others had learned to differentiate junk mail from personal mail and selected out the pieces that they would hold for interpretation. These people could be characterized as functionally knowledgeable, possessing marginal technical reading skills. On the other hand, there were some members of the community who simply threw out all their mail unopened. They were ignoring the importance of mail in American culture and were choosing not to be even functionally engaged in this literacy activity. Their attitude toward literacy was quite clear. 20 The social meaning of literacy derives, in part, from a society's assignment of value to written language. Religious practices and liturgical uses of writing provide many examples. It is an honor, for example, to read the scripture in a Christian worship service because of the direct relation between the reader and the text the congregation holds sacred. Additionally, the ability to read and write well have strong positive social and economic value. Literacy expertise is highly rewarded in the United States. Attorneys, for example, are sought for their skill in reading and writing a particularly arcane, complicated, and important type of document. Again, perception of the social meaning of literacy activities represents knowledge often shared by literates and illiterates alike. In fact, illiterates in the United States are demonstrating their awareness of the social meaning of literacy by refusing to come forward and enroll in adult literacy education programs--they recognize the stigma of admitting they cannot read and write. Many have been able to hide their lack of skill and manage their lives fairly successfully by using family or community literacy helpers. They are not willing to face the embarrassment of public admission or of having to ask a stranger for help. The challenge facing the adult educator is to become a learning partner with the literacy student 21 and not a stranger— somehow the teacher and the institution must share a world with the literacy student. Individual differences in recognizing and accepting various social meanings of literacy can bring about significant differences in the choices individuals make about acquiring and/or using literacy skills. Thus, the learner's often complex or ambivalent attitudes toward literacy must be taken into account in structuring adult education programs. Stephen M. Reder, in a research report on functional literacy, describes the significance of multiple social meanings for literacy in the differing attitudes to reading and writing in English and in Slavonic in an isolated Alaska village: Literacy was first introduced through Russian priests who established a missionary church. In that tradition, the reading of the scrip ture, in Slavonic, is an essential part of the worship service. The native language was retained, however, for secular uses and most communication continued in the tradi tional oral mode. Native lay readers were trained in Slavonic and continued to read the sacred texts in a rote fashion long after the missionaries had left and the villagers had lost the ability to actively comprehend the language. Literacy assoc iated with Orthodox practice came to be regarded as "native" to the village and its readers highly respected. The Orthodox church and its literacy practices — largely restricted to reading for Mass--are viewed as a force for community coherence and native cultural integrity. When public education was introduced into this village by the U.S. government early in this century, however, literacy took on a different {social} meaning. Teachers encouraged full-time use of 22 English, eventually leading to near-extinction of the native language. The schools, the American government, and the new, English- based Baptist church all stressed the importance of active use of English writing for a whole new range of literacy practices, including conducting village business. English, and especially English reading and writing, came to be associated with forces that were destructive to native tradition. The influence of these negative associations can still be seen today. Even though English literacy has gradually pervaded many aspects of community life, villagers continue to prefer to conduct much of their business orally and are extremely reticent to display their English literacy skills. Adult literacy programs have tended to attract few in this village for this reason. (23-24) Clearly, no sense of identification, no sense of a shared world exists between the villagers and the adult educators. In addition, as this example suggests, educational planning and program efforts must consider not just tech nical literacy skills, but the functions of literacy in a community and its social meaning for community members. In contrast to the negative social meaning that characterizes English literacy in the Alaska village, my '** * ; own experience in working with Hmong immigrants in an adult education program over the past six years reveals a different attitude toward developing new literacies with strongly positive social meanings. For these refugees from rural Southeast Asia, literacy in their native language is spreading at the same time they are acquiring oral and written English. The Hmong find themselves in an environment where, for the first time, they perceive 23 widespread uses of literacy activities. Among their own ethnic group, they now need Hmong literacy for personal correspondence with widely scattered family members. Further, the Hmong believe that practice of Hmong literacy enhances their English-as-a-second-language learning, in both speaking and writing. And, to get ahead in American society, they feel they require technical skills in English literacy. Since they are newcomers, lack of literacy skill is not yet stigmatized for Hmong adults. As a tiny minority group in the United States, the Hmong recognize English literacy acquisition as an imperative if they are to succeed in their adopted country. However, many illiterates manage quite well with little technical ability to read and write. They can rely on their families, neighbors, and community organizations to assist them. Often the relation between a literacy helper and an illiterate is reciprocal: one provides reading and writing services, and the other baby sitting, errands, or other personal help. For most illiterates living within a stable community environment, literacy problems are not in themselves totally debilitating. It is isolation from trustworthy helpers that incapacitates them. Local neighborhoods provide services and shops where business can be conducted orally and forms taken home to fill out with helpers. Ethnic neighborhoods are a good example: their residents 24 are able to minimize the need for English-language literacy in daily life. Outside of such a neighborhood an illit erate adult has no personal resources to acquire the literacy help he or she needs. And the stigma of illiteracy makes seeking help from strangers a highly unattractive and difficult task. Illiteracy thus often means that adults operate within confined circumstances, whether by choice or necessity. Literacy survival skills--use of familiar helpers, spontaneous acquisition of literacy, coping strategies such as use of audio tapes--can be stepping stones to literacy education. By integrating illiterates' coping strategies, taking account of their attitudes toward literacy, and exploiting the literacy-assistance networks, literacy education can be made more effective for and more widely accessible to adult illiterates. The burden of this challenge falls to the educational institutions. Communities have offered mixed responses to educa tional intervention. Literacy education may be perceived as disruptive to the community, as in the Alaska village; as critically important, as among the Hmong; or as valuable, but not essential or worth the personal risk, as it is for most illiterates living among their family and friends. In each of these contexts, educational institu tions must find ways to understand, identify with, the attitudes, needs, and interests of the adult learner. 25 I would speculate that in the case of the Alaska villagers adult literacy education would be much more effective presented in a way that supported, rather than challenged, traditional life. For example, collecting and recording old people's native stories (a la Shirley Brice Heath in Ways With Words), which would become literacy texts for the younger people to relearn, or creating bilingual books to retain the native language as English reading and writing are learned. For the vast majority of illiterates--bilinguals as well as native English speakers--educational intervention will have the most immediate impact and be most readily accepted if it takes place within the context of the adult learner's world, and this can only occur when learners and educators share their respective worlds, when they can identify with each other. Frank Smith, in the essay cited earlier, describes a pedagogical framework, or context, for successful literacy education that is shared by most literacy teachers and researchers today: For written as well as spoken language learning to occur, it is essential for that which is demonstrated to be something that learners will want to do and will expect to be able to do. Therefore, children must perceive themselves as part of the particular language-using community, as "members of the club." Vicarious learning can take place only when learners fully assimilate into their own behavior that which is demonstrated, when they can identify--to use another 26 venerable and recently overlooked psycholog ical concept--with what the other person is doing. I call this process engagement, as immediate, direct, and invariable as the transmission of power and movement through the mechanical meshing of gears. (151) Although Smith's view reflects a consensus among contempor ary researchers and educators on a framework for a solution to the literacy problem, the problem is still with us. The notion of identification, however touted as theory, does not appear to have much impact on literacy education practice. As Smith makes clear, identification is a necessary process in the enterprise of literacy education, and, if we are to understand how it should work and why it has not worked to any significant extent in literacy educa tion, we should explore and evaluate the contributions of several other contemporary literacy researchers who recognize both the theoretical power and practical failure of the identification process in literacy education. 27 Chap tier 2 Literacy Education: A Pedagogy and its Problems It was dark when I arrived at my office this winter morning, and it is dark again as I wait for my last writing student to step out of the shadows in the corridor for my last conference. I am tired but it is a good tired, for my students have generated energy as well as absorbed it. I've learned something of what it is to be a childhood diabetic, to raise oxen, to be a welfare mother with three children, to build a bluebird trail . . . to bring your father home to die of cancer. I have been instructed in other lives, heard the voices of my students they had not heard before, shared their satisfaction in solving the problems of writing with clarity and grace. . . . I hear voices from my students they have never heard from themselves. I find they are authori ties on subjects they think are ordi nary. . . . It is a matter of faith. Faith that my students have something to say and a language in which to say it. -Donald M. Murray, "The Listening Eye" In his discussion of how children become literate (also cited in the previous chapter), Frank Smith links three words, demonstrated, identify, and engagement, which I think are significant, and significantly related, to understanding the process of literacy acquisition and learning: For written as well as spoken language learning to occur, it is essential for that which is demonstrated to be something that learners will want to do and will expect to be able to do. Therefore, chil- ___________dren must perceive themselves as part of________ 28 the particular language-using community, as "members of the club." Vicarious learning can take place only when learn ers fully assimilate into their own behavior that which is demonstrated, when they can identify--to use another vener able and recently overlooked psychological concept--with what the other person is doing. I call this process engagement, as immediate, direct, and invariable as the transmission of power and movement through the mechanical meshing of gears. (151) The three terms are significant, at.least in part, because they represent human action, constitutive of the overall act of becoming literate. And as human actions, they occur in a social scene. In the context of literacy education, to engage, to demonstrate, and to identify are acts that may be seen as stages, or levels, of the liter acy development process, and these social acts should be explored and explained dramatistically. Before attempting to develop a dramatistic method for analyzing the literacy development process, I will rehearse briefly the work of others, including Smith, who have attempted to define and explore the process and its constitutive acts and stages. My intentions for this chapter are to present and argue in behalf of a philosophy and pedagogy for adult literacy education that is a synthesis of natural (uncon scious) acquisition and consciously learned craft to argue that the success of such a literacy program is dependent upon identification between student and teacher. 29 Building upon the definition cited at the beginning of this study, Smith contends that literacy development reflects a natural acquisition process rather than a con scious learning process: My two main points will be that children in the first few years of their lives know how to learn to read and write because written language presents them with prob lems similar to those they solve with spoken language. . . . (143) In Smith's view, the process of natural literacy acquisi tion is dependent upon shared attitudes and motives (Smith's notion of identification) for the uses of written language between acquirers (Smith is writing about child literacy acquisition but maintains the same principles apply to adult acquirers) and literate adults who demon strate literacy acts. This perspective stresses the social and cultural nature of literacy development, and, through an emphasis on the acts of identification and demonstra tion, interaction becomes the primary pedagogical strategy. Summarizing his position, Smith states: Thus, literacy is both individual and social--individual because the impetus must come from the child, but social because literate others must provide the demonstrations that engage the child as a literate member of society. Children do not become literate in a vacuum. On the other hand, children cannot antici pate society's uses for literacy (and perhaps would not become literate if they could). Literacy develops because the child sees what reading and writing can do, and because it is relevant to the child's own creative and constructive __________ purposes_.__(15.1)___________________________________ 30 The concept of a process of natural literacy acquisi tion, which is heavily dependent upon scene and interaction, has become the dominant force in literacy research and • experimentation. A literacy pedagogy based upon the notions of identification (in both the psychological sense and in Burke's rhetorical sense), demonstration, and engagement has proven quite effective in a number of recent studies of children and adults, including those by Graves, et al. (1982), Harste, et al. (1984), Heath (1983), Elsasser and Fiore (1982), Anderson and Griffin (1983), Bissex (1980), and Calkins (1983). These researcher/teach ers have conducted case studies, often combined with ethnographic research of a larger population. Their work reflects a larger movement toward research and analysis in the humanities, the social sciences, and in science from perspectives that are variously identified as contextual- ist or interactionist. (An informative article placing these "new" inquiry methods in historical perspective is Janet Emig's "Inquiry Paradigms and Writing," in her book The Web of Meaning.) As Smith presents it, and those cited above practice it, a natural literacy pedagogy appears almost hostile toward the notion of direct instruction. If the learner is able to identify with the purpose of a particular literacy activity, and the activity is well demonstrated by a literate other, then the learner will engage in the 31 activity herself, acquiring the written language codes and conventions required for the activity. This scenario seems to leave little room for direct instruction of language codes and conventions. Indeed, in its extreme form, the natural pedagogy denies the value of formal instruction. As a spokesperson for this extreme view, Smith asserts that: There are several critical differences between demonstrations and formal instruc tion. Demonstrations provide opportunities for learners to engage in the purpose of the activity, to share an intention with the demonstrator, whether to construct a story, locate a hamburger, or discover what someone else is thinking or planning. Usually, there is little or no awareness on the part of either demonstrator or child that teaching or learning is taking place. Both concentrate on. the purpose rather than on the process, and conventions are employed in context. Formal instruc tion, on the other hand, is self-conscious, particulate, and metalinguistic. It makes written language the object of reflection and analysis and fragments superficial aspects of behavior or of a product. It does not involve participation in a pur poseful process. .The amount of conscious awareness, if any, that a child requires to learn to read is an issue still open to debate. In my view, research has failed to show any necessity. (150) Taken as a generalization, Smith's natural pedagogy, built upon the acts of identification, demonstration, and engagement, represents a framework for literacy education that enjoys wide acceptance among literacy researchers, if not the more vocal practitioners, as evidenced by the studies cited earlier. However, mainstream adult literacy 32 education efforts, as judged by ray own experience in the field, have been affected little by Smith's well reasoned arguments or by the success stories chronicled in recent research. The reasons for this are many (I hope some may be revealed through dramatistic analysis of literacy education), but one reason certainly must center on the notion that the teacher, as demonstrator, should not intervene in the literacy acquisition process with direct instruction. This particular nuance of a natural pedagogy may appear naive, if not threatening, to many teachers. Louise Phelps, in a forthcoming essay, challenges the "myth" of a natural pedagogy by reinforcing its valid and productive characteristics, and challenging some of its more naive and Edenic tenets: The myth of natural literacy has a powerful emotional appeal and persuasive support in research and theory. But I am disturbed by the implications of accepting it uncritically, without qualification or limit. I see, for example, dangers in regarding the teacher as simply facilitating the activities of a relatively autonomous learner, leaving no creative role for authority, codified knowledge, direction, formal instruction, or curriculum. This position simply reverses a previous one, which pictured an active, powerful, purposeful teacher and a passive learner. (9) Phelps argues that literacy, as a cultural practice in Western society, has a "surplus of meaning" not accounted for by the "myth" of natural literacy acquisi tion, and that cultural instruction in the language codes 33 and conventions, which make up the surplus meaning, must become a part of literacy development. In order to fully describe the pedagogical framework for literacy education that enjoys general acceptance today, at least through theory and research, I need to pursue Phelps' criticisms and qualifications of natural literacy further. Under standing a framework for successful adult literacy education is prerequisite to exploring and understanding why the framework has either not been adopted widely or has not met with long-term success where adopted. In a companion essay to the Smith essay cited earlier, Yetta Goodman summarizes the pedagogy of natural literacy learning in a manner which highlights its limits (as defined by Phelps): Building on the work of Halliday (1975), K. Goodman and I extended to literacy learning the idea that learning language is learning how to mean. The child learns how to mean through written as well as spoken language. Initially, as children interact with literacy events and imple ments in their culture, they grow curious and form hypotheses about their functions and purposes. They discover, as they are immersed in using written language and watching others use it, that written language makes sense. It communicates or says something. As this generalization begins to develop, children also become concerned with the organization of written language in terms of how it makes sense. They begin to find stability and order in the form of written language in the everyday context of its functional use. As these two generalizations are develop ing, children discover that they can make sense through written language as they use 34 it themselves. They develop control or ownership of the strategies of compre hension and composition similar to those they have used in oral language. . . . (102-103) « Goodman's picture of literacy development parallels the acquisition of spoken language (as well as current theories of second language acquisition). In this model, a pedagogy of natural literacy mirrors the kind of cul tural instruction that nurtures language acquisition in a child's home. The teacher becomes the mother or care taker, who interacts with the child, demonstrating language use so the child can reinvent language for herself. Direct, formal instruction plays almost no part in this process. Teachers playing the role of caretaker provide students with multiple and varied opportunities for participating in literacy events through identification, demonstration, and engagement (see especially Harste, et al., Calkins, and Heath, whom I cite below). Phelps' first criticism of natural literacy centers on the role of the teacher. Developing the comparison of child language acquisition with natural literacy acquisition, Phelps asserts: By assimilating the classroom to the home and the teacher to the caretaker, the myth of natural literacy places the teacher in a strange and paradoxical position. The caretaker is pictured as a totally naive representative of her culture, who needs no special training or conscious knowledge to provide all that a child needs to learn a native language--namely dialogue with 35 significant others in practical situations. If literacy is learned, even in the class room, the same way, then teachers must themselves be lost in the natural attitude. At the very least, they must act as if they are; and one wonders why they need to know, what they are doing. Indeed, how can the teacher simultaneously participate naturally in these interactions’and also enact the critical spirit that codifies, rationalizes, and questions a cultural tradition? (14) Extending the analogy of child language acquisition in the home, Phelps proceeds to question the concept of culture implied by natural literacy. She claims that "within the myth of natural literacy the only salient context is the familial, conceived as a supportive inter personal matrix for literacy experiences and projected into the school setting" (15). Thus, the context for literacy development in the classroom is quite positive and nurturing, never the scene of domestic traumas or childhood strife. The teacher becomes a caring listener, responding, to students who are active, capable, and curious. This Edenic classroom is well documented in several recent ethnographic studies of child literacy development. One report of a multi-year literacy develop ment study, Lucy Calkind.'; Lessons From a Child, describes the natural literacy epiphany of an elementary school teacher, Mrs. Howard, this way: The day Susie and her classmates brought their treasures into school and interviewed each other to learn their stories was perhaps the single most important turning point in the study. As we move on through 36 the next two years, it will be evident that never again would Mrs. Howard try to motivate children by assigning them to write on her topics. Instead, her role changed. She started seeing her task as helping the children know their lives and ideas were worth writing about. She became a listener. Often she'd meet the children before school as they tumbled off the school bus. Perhaps Diane had a map of her summer trip; Geoff, an invitation to Eric's birthday party; and Craig, plans for Blackie's new rabbit hutch. (27) In addition to the fact that not all children (and certainly not all adults) live in a state of personal and social harmony and joy, studies like Calkins of the natural literacy process seem to give little account of the connection between home literacy activities and school literacy activities. More often than not, in the applica tion of a natural literacy pedagogy, home literacy activities supplant school literacy, to the exclusion of not only the codes and conventions of school language uses (academic discourse, standard written English), but also to the exclusion of knowledge and skills of content area disciplines (science, history, and so forth). In all fairness to the natural literacy ethnographers, however, this apparent weakness in the theory (Phelps calls it a myth) may have more to do with the subjects of the studies--preschool and primary school children. Indeed, other studies employing a natural literacy, ethnographic pedagogy have demonstrated significant transfer between the subjects of ethnographic study undertaken by students 37 as a means of stimulating identification, demonstration, and engagement) and the academic subjects of the school curriculum (reading, writing, and the content areas). Most of these studies have dealt with older children or adults. Probably the most comprehensive study of (American) literacy acquisition and use, employing ethnography both as the research method and literacy pedagogy, is Shirley Brice Heath's Ways With Words. Heath examines the ways children learn to use language in two working-class communities in the Piedmont region of South Carolina and how these uses of language either conform or conflict with those, considered acceptable in mainstream public schools. She calls the studies "ethnographies of communication" and • in the last section of the book outlines a number of ways teachers and students can act as ethnographers to become more aware of how they themselves use language and how it may, perhaps, be used differently by those around them. While Heath is vulnerable, I believe, to Phelps' criticism that natural literacy pedagogies treat context as a source of meaning and meanings as a source of good, which just is not the case in the real world (even the context of school as an institution is not always benevolent), her study does demonstrate how the use of the child's world as the content of literacy activities can transfer to the conscious study of the forms and functions of language. 38 Heath worked with a local K-12 school district, instructing and encouraging teachers to organize their curricula around students1 ethnographic explorations of families and communities, past and present. The goals of the new curricula were: (1) to provide a foundation of familiar knowledge to serve as context for classroom information; (2) to engage students in collecting and analyzing familiar ways of knowing and translating these into scien tific or school-accepted labels, concepts, and generalizations; and (3) to provide students with meaningful opportunities to learn ways of talking about using language to organize and express information. (440) Believing that natural acquisition of literacy has its limits, Heath wants to transfer the developmental energy the "engaged" child brings to bear on the literacy activities discovered through ethnographic investigations to the context of meta-linguistic investigation and knowledge. In short, Heath sees the value of direct instruction in the school setting, and, more importantly, she recognizes that successful direct instruction is dependent upon the acts of identification, demonstration, and engagement. As Heath summarizes this realization: The children had learned to observe, record, categorize, and analyze ways in which people spoke and the ways in which they used their language for writing and reading. Gathering information from familiar community members, they had con- textualized reading and writing in their community life and in their own daily existence at home and in the school. They had come to look on school reading and 39 writing as attached to that done in the wider world. Learning to read and write in school was now linked to reading and writing labels and bills in the country store, the cafeteria worker's set of recipes, the church bulletin, or a notice of a local baseball game. Perhaps most important, they defined themselves as readers and writers. . . . Their develop ment of analytic concepts to describe and explain their experiences and the social behavior of those around them had increased their vocabulary of scientific terms about language, enabled them to recognize and label discrete features of language such as sounds, endings, and styles, and to apply these concepts in listening to dialect poetry, conversations, radio and TV programs, and oral story-telling. (432) Here we are reminded of Phelps 1 notion of the "surplus of meaning" in her criticism of the natural literacy "myth." Extrapolating from the work of David Feldman, in his book Beyond Universals in Cognitive Development, Phelps distinguishes between a universal domain of development, which would include language acquisition and literacy acquisition, to the limits of natural literacy, and a cultural domain, which would include those features of literacy requiring direct instruction, such as the codes and conventions of academic discourse. (Actually, Phelps cites from Feldman a third, more sophisticated domain, "dlsciplined-based achievement," which is elitist and might include the practitioners of Deconstructionism, for example.) Phelps summarizes her claim for the necessity of direct instruction in literacy education through the work of Feldman: 40 Taking literacy to be cultural, in Feldman's terms, implies craftsmanship and a corres ponding need for instruction. Literacy involves what Jerome Bruner has called "amplifiers" of human thought and action, in which Feldman includes "all the symbol systems, models, tools, technology, and artifacts as well as the variety of cul tural institutions and their products." These require cultural techniques for .transmitting them, usually through institu tions evolved for that purpose. Feldman argues that such instruction should be based on the metaphor of the child as craftsman, understood in a developmental sense. (20) Natural literacy acquisition, expressed as ideal by Smith and Goodman, may leave the acquirer with a conscious knowledge of the power and uses of written language and may represent certain universal cognitive characteristics (as the analogy with child language acquisition suggests), but it may not encompass culturally specific codes and conventions of written language. These may be learned through instruction. (Determining the effects and limits of instruction may be problematic, however, as Smith and Goodman argue in the cited articles.) It is important to remember, however, that establishing- a natural literacy environment, informed by the acts of identification, demonstration, and engagement, is prerequisite to success ful direct instruction, the value of which may be limited to a small set of grammar and mechanics rules. Heath makes this point clear when she summarizes the feelings and actions of the teachers who worked with her in South Carolina: 41 Through their experience in becoming and leading their students to become ethno graphers of a sort, they saw themselves as developing the special potentials and skills of children from Trackton, Roadville, and townspeople homes. Their central role was to pass on to all groups certain traditional tools and ways of using language. A critical component in the process was allowing children to articulate how what they knew related to what the school wanted them to know. School was a new context in which Roadville, Trackton, and townspeople children had to reformulate to different degrees their home habits of handling knowledge and their ways of talking about knowledge. They had to integrate new content from school into a reformulated organizational pattern. The tightly interwoven nature of language and context made it especially necessary for teachers to tease apart and make as speci fic as possible aspects of the language and context of both home and school domains. Critical in the thinking of these teachers was that their approach was not a remedial one designed for poor learners. Instead, they felt that the attention given to different ways of talking and knowing, and the manipulation of contexts and language benefited all students. (418-419) In Heath's study, literacy was achieved through full participation in and identification with the activities and relationships of a group, including students and teachers. The school setting was a projection of a nurturing home environment, and all the participants had ownership of the learning enterprise. The key actions of identification, demonstration, and engagement are synony mous with the notion of ownership, which is also a notion fundamental to child development. As Phelps asserts, "Ownership comes easy to the child . . . because children's 42 literacy is generally integrative with respect to the cul ture” (19). But what about adolescent and adult students? With the onset of adolescence, reflective and critical thought become a part of the cognitive repertoire, and the beneficence of schools, teachers, literacy, and even one's culture is often challenged. Phelps argues that: It is absolutely essential for the growing person to rebel through and perhaps against literacy as the quintessential representa tion of all that cultural tradition means in Western society. The learner may be fighting for survival, simultaneously in revolt against his own increasingly criti cal consciousness and against the forces that both deny and urge it upon him--the schools. Such a situation presents a complex, sensitive, and little understood dilemma for the teacher through high school and early (or delayed) adult development. (19) A fundamental assumption of a natural literacy pedagogy does not seem to hold up with adult students. Ownership, which may be seen as the summation of identifi cation, demonstration, and engagement, is not impossible with adult students, but it is certainly more difficult to achieve. The challenge of ownership in a literacy pedagogy for adults is compounded by the notion that a sense of ownership (of the literacy activity/curriculum) is prerequisite to the success of direct instruction, which is also necessary to the literacy program should address not only the adult's critical consciousness but also, once and if a sense of ownership is achieved, the 43 challenge of integrating direct instruction. Again, those who argue exclusively for natural literacy acquisition, such as Smith and Goodman, contend that direct instruction plays a very limited role in the development of literacy. As Phelps states her more synthetic view, "The problem is to discover exactly how to integrate instruction in such formal modes with the continuing natural modes of learning and their contextual support" (22). This is a formidable project; however, a few researcher/teachers have discovered such an integrative approach to adult literacy education and have met with success. One example of a successful, integrative adult liter acy curriculum comes from a Bahamian community college experiment conducted by Nan Elsasser. Teaching advanced literacy to a class of women at the College of the Bahamas, Elsasser implemented a writing curriculum based upon the works of Lev Vygotsky and Paulo Freire. Vygotsky, the cognitive psychologist, and Freire, the liberatory literacy teacher and scholar, address the decentered, critical consciousness adults bring to literacy development, using it as a motivational strategy through which students develop the requisite sense of ownership (of the literacy activity/process). Both scholars emphasize the impact of external social reality on the literacy development process. According to Elsasser: 44 Vygotsky’s work clarifies the complex process of writing. He postulates that learning to write involves the mastery of cognitive skills and the development of new social understandings. According to Vygotsky, we categorize and synthesize our lives through inner speech, the language of thought. In inner speech, a single word or phrase is embroidered with variegated threads of ideas, experiences, and emotions .... Vygotsky explains that to transform the inner speech symbols to written text, this woman must consciously step outside the shorthand of her thoughts and mentally enter the social context she shares with her reader. Only from this common perspective can she begin to unfold the mystery of her thoughts to create written prose. (116) In developing a literacy pedagogy, Elsasser combined Vygotsky's theories on internal learning processes with Freire's emphasis on the learner's environment and his assertion that the goal "of a literacy program is to help students become critically conscious of the connection between their own lives and the larger society and to empower them to use literacy as a means of changing their own environment" (116). While the natural literacy pedagogies applied to children focused on the child's jworld as a benevolent environment and experience, as in Calkins, Harste, and Heath, Freire's pedagogy, with its focus on the environment, asks students to investigate their environment critically, with the ultimate intention of changing it through literacy acts. Thus, the ideal natural literacy pedagogy asks students to describe their nurturing environment to the ends of understanding and 45 acceptance, while Freire's notion of natural literacy development, as adapted by Elsasser, asks students to describe their often less than nurturing environment to the ends of understanding and change (control). Elsasser explains her adaptation of Freire with an example: . . . one woman beaten by her husband may think she has simply made a bad choice and must bear her lot with dignity. Another woman may think her husband would stop if she could live up to his expectations. When they talk with each other and other women, these two discover that brutality is a social phenomenon; it is widespread in the community. As they read, they learn that many aspects of their problem are rooted in the social realm and can best be attacked by pressing for legal changes, battered women's shelters, more responsive attitudes on the part of the police. Through continued discussion, these women realize how they can use literacy to win those changes by swearing out complaints in court, sending petitions to public officials, or writing newspaper articles and letters to the editor. (117) Elsasser's pedagogy meets Phelps' "ownership" challenge to adult natural literacy development by replac ing the myth of beneficence with social reality. Adults possess strong feelings about their personal and social lives, and these feelings can be transformed into the intentions of literacy acts. Such a pedagogy encourages students to bring their culture and personal knowledge into the classroom, help them understand the connections between their own lives and society, and empower them to use reading and writing to control their environment. 46 A second challenge to adult natural literacy develop ment is the notion that once students are immersed in natural literacy, through identification, demonstration, and engagement, how can we integrate direct instruction on the culturally specific codes and conventions necessary to effective written communication. Recognizing that only a small portion of the rules,and conventions that make up a particular code of written English may be available to the student through direct instruction, I believe that once ownership of a literacy activity is achieved, integrating direct instruction and having students receptive to it is not difficult, and Elsasser provides supporting evidence. Her curriculum has three phases, "Phase One" includes the use of generative themes, a cornerstone of Freirean pedagogy that represents the act of bringing students' lives into the literacy development process (Elsasser worked with the theme of marriage). During "Phase One" the instructor and students develop identification (shared worlds), and, through demonstration of literacy activities, they become engaged in their own literacy development: By the end of Phase One . . . they have an idea of their individual differences and a sense of the common ground they share. Although they still rely on personal experi ence as a source of knowledge, they are beginning to recognize how the outside society affects their lives. This awareness has improved their writing. They use more detail. They separate ideas and events into paragraphs. They sustain a third- person perspective with greater skill. They ___________clarify generalizations with examples. (123)____ 47 "Phase Two" of the curriculum continues the decenter ing process of translating "inner speech" into written communication, but now the students become more conscious of the form of written language and begin to discuss, catch, and correct errors ("Women also start to discover punctuation rules. Although I have not stressed punctua tion as such, they observe patterns in the reading, and they hypothesize the rules themselves") (123-124). In addition, Elsasser introduces rhetorical forms through more direct instructional delivery ("Encouraged by their confi dence and advancing skills, I begin to introduce the idea of rhetorical forms: cause and effect, definition, comparison and contrast") (124). Limited direct instruc tion becomes possible and successful because the students are engaged in a literacy activity for which they feel ownership, and they recognize a need to master the lan guage codes and conventions that make written, public communication possible. "Phase Three" of the curriculum represents Freire's concept of "cultural action for freedom" (126). The students combine all they have learned to create public communication, letters to the editor, an open letter to Bahamian men, and so forth. Elsasser1s experiment was successful’ , in her own words : At the end of the semester all these women passed the College-administered English exam. Most received "B" grades on the essay 48 component. Further, they decided to continue meeting throughout the next spring in order to read about women in other countries, broaden their under standings, and write a resource book for Bahamian women. (127-128) The experiment was also successful as a demonstration of the power of a "qualified" adult, natural literacy acquisition process. Elsasser’s curriculum incorporates "natural" literacy acquisition, based upon identification, demonstration, engagement, with direct instruction on the "surplus of meaning," which each culture defines. In addition, the curriculum not only addresses the "problem" of adult critical consciousness in literacy development, it capitalizes on it by turning literacy into a means of expression and a means of effecting personal and cultural change. Phelps summarizes the challenge of adult liter acy development (a challenge I believe Elsasser, for one, has met) using three levels: At the first level the natural attitude prevails. Literacy involves biologically based and contextually motivated acquisi tion, and learners direct their own reinventions of cultural codes. The growing person is deeply embedded in situational matrices, although these are not always benevolently meaningful and supportive. The model for cultural instruction in this mode of literacy is that of interactions within the home, projected into school and other settings .... The second level of literacy is that of craft and skill. Here literacy is a cultural domain verging on a disciplinary one, with a body of codified principles of performance. Mastery involves attention to form and technique as instrumental and then re-naturalization of these as tacit. . . . The third level is that of critical con sciousness in Paulo Freire's sense. At this level thought becomes reflexive and brings into question all meaningfulness, including that of literacy itself. Criticism struggles to reconcile its positive values and its negative tendencies toward skepticism and an empty rationalism. (25-26) The experimental literacy program at the College of the Bahamas represents a pedagogical framework reflecting the spirit, if not the letter, of the theory of natural literact acquisition, whose application has enjoyed considerable success among children in research studies, combined with the psycho/socio exigencies of adults, as defined by Phelps, Vygotsky, Freire, and others.* With general consensus on the validity of a pedagogical frame work for adult literacy education, at least among researcher/teachers, why is illiteracy still a problem among adults in this country? Or, more appropriately, why hasn't the adult education profession adopted/adapted such a framework more widely? Exploring these questions is, in part, the subject of this study, and we can begin to develop a Dramatistic context for such an inquiry by turning again to Smith's notions of identification, demonstration, and engagement. Smith argues that in order for (literacy) demonstra tions to be successful--in order for the student to become engaged--the student must be able to identify "with what — t------------------------------------------------------_______------------------------_ 50 the other person is doing" (151). I suggest that identifi cation is the key term in the process of adult literacy education. Both natural literacy acquisition and the possibility of direct instruction (teaching the surplus of meaning) are dependent upon identification between teacher and learner. Smith refers to identification as a psychological concept; it is also a rhetorical concept of considerable importance. Burke predicates successful demonstration and teaching on identification: Here is perhaps the simplest case of persuasion. You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by identifying your ways with his. (Rhetoric 7 o 7 o ) Thus, a concept of shared worlds is not only essential to literacy education, it is also the foundation for rhetoric. Burke’s rhetoric is concerned with motives and how they develop from language. His ultimate goal is social harmony, which would be the product of complete identification, but he recognizes that the notion of identification exists because disharmony exists (Rhetoric 22). I suggest that if people were not apart there might not be a need for adult literacy education. It is the separation between people--the separation between teacher and learner--and their (educators, primarily) ignorance or denial of the importance of identification to the 51 literacy development process that has inhibited the acceptance or prevented the success of the adult literacy education framework described here. Freire's pedagogy is in large measure a reaction to the division among people Burke speaks about. Freire argues that it is very difficult to sustain communication among people of different cultural, social, or economic communities. In the context of social division, which Freire characterizes as class struggle, literacy education efforts, sponsored by the ruling class, follow "the banking concept" which "anesthetizes and inhibits creative power" (Pedagogy 135). "Knowing, whatever its level, is not the act by which a Subject transformed into an object docilely and passively accepts the contents others give or impose on him or her”(Education 101). In this framework, the student is only expected to internalize existing, alien knowledge; frequently, from Freire's perspective, this means internalizing the objec tives of the dominant groups in society. Consequently, without identification literacy development is either not possible, or it is an act of subjugation, leaving the learner devoid of the creative power real literacy can provide. Sounding a lot like Burke, Freire explains that identification, teachers and students sharing worlds, is requisite to literacy acquisition: 52 For the act of communication to be successful, there must be accord between the reciprocally communicating subjects. That is, the verbal expressions of one of the subjects must be perceptible within a frame of reference that is meaningful to the other subject. (Education 138) In the previous chapter, I used Burke’s notion of ' ’substance” to begin a discussion of literacy definitions. The notion of "substance" is also useful in a discussion of the process and state of identification. Burke offers one definition of identification, which links the term to "substance"; A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so. Here are the ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is "sub stantially one" with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct and consubstantial with another. (Rhetoric 20-21) Any inquiry into the process and state of identifica tion should be informed by the notion of "substance." And "substance" is a Dramatistic concept: For substance, in the old philosophies, was an act; and a way of life in an acting- together; and in acting together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstan- tial. (Rhetoric 21) 53 Identification is achieved or not achieved based upon the attitudes and motives teachers and learners hold for literacy. In order to understand the process of identifi cation as it relates to literacy education, we need to investigate the interface of attitudes and motives possessed by teachers and learners. Burke's Dramatism is an appropriate tool for such an inquiry. Burke's A Grammar Of Motives opens with a question, "What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it" (xv)? Burke goes on to say that an answer to the question "is the subject" of his book, and I would say than an answer to the question is the subject of this study. The inquiry problem is the inter face of attitudes toward literacy, and a successful interface requires a common language. I suggest that Dramatistic analysis offers such a common language. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains the challenge of successful interface this way: The problem of the integration of cultural life becomes one of making it possible for people inhabiting different worlds to have a genuine and reciprocal impact upon one another. If it is true that insofar as there is a general consciousness it consists of the Interplay of a disorderly crowd of not wholly commensurable visions, then the vitality of that consciousness depends upon creating the conditions under which such interplay will occur. And for that, that first step is surely to accept the depth of the differences; the second to understand what these differences are; and the third to construct some sort of vocabulary In 54 which they can be publicly formulated--one in which econometricians, epigraphers, eytomchemists, and iconologists can give a credible account of themselves to each other. (Interpretation 10) The value of this study, the value of developing a Dramatistic method for studying attitudes toward literacy, lies in the possibility of attitudinal interface. Adult literacy education programs are too often planned with no understanding of the attitudes and motives of the teachers or students they intend to serve. A successful literacy program should incorporate strategies that reach into communities of nonliterates and meet the needs that both teachers and literacy students perceive so acutely in their daily lives. It is at the interface .of attitudes, the state of identification, that this might occur. A Dramatistic inquiry into the interface of attitudes should begin with a definition of terms and a description of the participants in the "drama" of literacy education. The next chapter defines the terms of Dramatism as they apply to the literacy education "drama" of a community college. 55 Chapter 3 Dramatism: Defining a Community College and its Students To be sure, there is the individual. Each man is a unique combination of experiences, a unique set of situations, a unique aggre gate of mutually re-enforcing and conflicting "corporate we's," But he must build symbolic bridges between his own unique combination and the social pattern, instead of treating his uniqueness as the realm of an uncrowned king. He forms and implements his individual role by utilizing the bureaucratic body of his society. In doing so, he must "die" and be "reborn." -Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History In an insightful and rich essay on literacy acquisi tion that strongly reinforces the necessity of engagement in the process of literacy development, Bambi Schieffelin' and Marilyn Cochran-Smith make a case for an ethnographic approach to literacy research: The best way to investigate literacy as a cultural phenomenon that interacts with certain social processes is by adopting an ethnographic perspective. By ethnographic, we mean descriptions that take into account the perspective of members of a social group, including the beliefs and values that underlie and organize their activities and utterances. An ethnographic perspective allows the researcher to find out the mean ings of events for those who are involved in them. Since we are concerned with the variety of ways in which children do and do not acquire literacy skills, we must investigate what literacy means to both children and the adults with whom they interact. (Awakening 4) 56 Although I am concerned with adult literacy acquisition, the argument for an "ethnographic perspective" to any investigation still obtains and reflects a larger movement toward research and analysis in the humanities, the social sciences, and in science from perspectives that are vari ously identified as contextualist or interactionist. These perspectives have in common the method Clifford Goertz calls "thick description" (Interpretation 27). Kenneth Burke's "Dramatistic" method answers his question cited in the previous chapter, "What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it"? by attempting to account for all aspects of an action via the terms of the Pentad--Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose--and the interactions among them. The "thick description" of Dramatistic analysis offers a fruitful perspective for investigating the interface of an institu tion charged with teaching literacy and students who want to become literate. Burke derives Dramatism from his basic assertion that "man is the symbol-making animal," able to communicate symbolically via language (Language 16). This distin guishes man from other animals by the fact that language enables us to build symbolic models that become a "scenic" reality, serving as a context for our thoughts and 57 experiences. Burke builds upon this insight to further distinguish man from the rest of the universe by defining the difference between motion and action: This is the distinction between "action" and ' ■ r s.heer motion." "Action," is a term for the kind of behavior possible to a typically symbol-using animal (such as man) in contrast with the extrasymbolic or nonsym- bolic operations {ijiotions} of nature. ("Dramatism" 447) In Burke's universe, people act, things move. No symbolic transformation occurs when the wind rustles the trees outside my office window. But when I praise a student in class for writing an excellent essay, something exclusively human and symbolic occurs. My act means something to everyone in the class, and the substance (Burke's sense) of all human action occurring within a social scene is best apprehended by a methodology that recognizes and reveals something about the interaction among the "sym bolic worlds" of each student as she is transformed by language. Dramatism is such a methodology. Burke's world view is decidedly contextual and philosophical, as opposed to scientific. Dramatism is directed toward discovering the motives lying behind human action, so the Dramatist studies motivated behavior, in its infinite variety, rather than the facts (knowledge and understanding) of human existence. In this sense, science deals with motion, and motivation must be investigated by a method. Dramatism, that can account 58 for action. Burke believes that human action has its roots in language, and language is the fundamental tool by which humans symbolically communicate their conceptions of real ity to one another. As Burke explains: The method would involve the explicit study of language as the "critical moment" at which human motives take form, since a linguistic factor at every point in human experience complicates and to some extent transcends the purely biological aspects of motivation. (Grammar 318) Like its metaphoric antecedent, the drama, Dramatism focuses upon acts performed by various players. Just as in a drama, the act is central insofar as it reveals human motives. Dramatism employs a Pentad of terms used to provide a heuristic for investigating linguistic trans formations of experience. The Pentad consists of five terms, Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose. Burke offers this explication: Dramatism centers in observations of this sort: for there to be an act, there must be an agent. Similarly, there must be a scene in which the agent acts. To act in a scene, the agent must employ some means, or agency. And it can be called an act in the full sense of the term only if it involves a purpose (that is, if a support happens to give way and one falls, such motion on the agent’s part is not an act, but an accident). These five terms (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) have been labeled the dramatistic pentad; the aim of calling attention to them in this way is to show how the functions which they designate operate in the imputing of motives. ("Dramatism” 446) 59 Each of the terms of the Pentad stands in contrastive relationship to the other terms, held together by a common ground or substance. This common ground gives the terms "transformability." Thus, as Burke tells us, "Machines are obviously instruments (that is, Agencies); yet in their vast accumulation they constitute the industrial scene, with its own set of motivational properties" ("Dramatism" 447). The terms of the Pentad are also generative and, consequently, ambiguous. Because Burke believes "that the subject of motivation is a philosophic one, not ultimately to be solved in terms of empirical science" (Grammar xxiii), he is convinced that: insofar as men cannot themselves create the universe, there must remain something essentially enigmatic about the problem of motives and that this underlying enigma will manifest itself in inevitable ambigu ities and inconsistencies among the terms for motives. (Grammar xviii) For this reason, "what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise" (Grammar xviii). This places Burke at odds certainly with objectivist philosophers, but he is also not a radical subjectivist. He does not claim that reality is subjective, but rather that we can know reality only linguistically, by way of contrast and variation. That is to say, we-may not agree 60 upon what something is, but we agree upon what it is not. The Pentad incorporates the dialectic of scope and reduc tion, the merging and dividing of terms, leading to an understanding of human motives. Each term of the Pentad can be viewed in relationship to the other terms. Each term is "transformable" into another as the context or ground of our attention changes. Just as machines may be seen as either agencies or scenes, Burke asserts that: Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great central moltenness, where all is merged. They have been thrown from a liquid center to the surface, where they have congealed. Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown forth as a new crust, a differ ent distinction. (Grammar xiii) Through this metaphor, Burke argues that each distinction travels back to "the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor" (Grammar xiii). In an earlier chapter, I discussed Burke's notion of substance, and its importance to Dramatism cannot be overstated. Like the "intentional object" of phenomen ology, substance refers to the pure context surrounding the act, providing us with a framework within which the Dramatistic Pentad may be applied dialectically. A dialectical approach is important because "the nature of the mediated necessarily differs from the nature of the 61 Immediate, as a translation must differ from its original" and "the embodiment of an ideal must differ from the ideal, and a god incarnate would differ from that god as pure spirit" (Grammar 262). Through the relationship of substance and the dialectical process of Dramatism, Burke arrives at the concept of "dialectic substance," which derives its character from the systematic contemplation of the antimonies attendant upon the fact that we necessarily define a thing in terms of something else. Dialec tic substance would thus be the over-all category of dramatism, which treats of human motives in terms of verbal action. (Grammar 33) The Dramatistic method begins with a search for key terms. Burke defines "ancestral terms" as terms that reveal substance; "derivative terms" are terms that stand in some sort of rational relationship to ancestral terms, transforming them by revealing a multitude of dialectical possibilities. The ancestral term for the Dramatistic method is "act," as Burke notes: The dramatistic approach is implicit in the key term "act." "Act" is thus a terministic center from which many related considerations can be shown to "radiate," as though it were a "god-term" from which a whole universe of terms is derived. ("Dramatism" 445) In any Dramatistic analysis, "act" may not be self-evident. The Pentad is always placed within a certain "Circum ference," or scope, which defines the stage upon which the drama_is__performed . Rurke_explains_ , that_: -------------------- 62 the concept of scene can be widened or narrowed (conceived of in terms of varying "scope” or circumference). Thus, an agent's behavior ("act”) might be thought of as taking place against a polytheistic back ground; or the over-all scene may be thought of as grounded in one god; or the circum ference of the situation can be narrowed to naturalistic limits, as in Darwinism; or it can be localized in such terms as "Western civilization,” "Elizabethanism," "capitalism," "D day,” "10 Downing Street," "on the train ride," and so on, endlessly. Any change of the circumference in terms of which an act is viewed implies a corresponding change in one's view of the quality of the act's motivation. ("Dramatism" 446) The notion of Circumference is central to Dramatistic analysis, defining its scope and focus. As an example of its role in Dramatistic analysis, let us suppose that I am a college English instructor, teaching a basic writing course. I have just told a student that he is dropped from the class for nonattendance. The Act may be viewed in terms of the immediate situation: a man (instructor) engages in the act of uttering certain words to another man ("you are dropped from the class"). With a slightly larger Circumference, the Act may be defined as that of providing education about acceptable school behavior; my dropping the student becomes negative feedback. Enlarge the Circumference a bit more, and the Act may reflect my insensitivity to the personal exigencies of the student. Another change in Circumference may lead to the discovery of my own biases against the particular student or a group with which the student is identified. Clearly, 63 Circumference defines the context of any Dramatistic analysis. Ultimately, the Circumference of any analysis may be enlarged to consider its absolute implications; however, we usually apply the method to a more limited Scene. The notion of Circumference demonstrates how inter related are the terms of the Pentad. Acts occur within Scenes, and Scenes may shift, changing the nature of the Act. If the Scene in my example above encompasses two people, the Act involves me as an Agent. However, if we widen the scope, the Agent may become the educational bureaucracy, an inhuman entity, with both me and the dropped student serving as objects of an entirely different Act, the Act of an anonymous complex of rules and proced ures working its inexorable will upon those within its Scene. Burke uses the term "ratio" to describe the correspondences among the terms of the Pentad. As noted above, the dialectical method of Dramatism requires that one of the five, terms will be ancestral in a given situa tion, functioning heuristically to discover the central motive of a given Act. The ancestral term is linked to another term, which corresponds or modifies the ancestral term in some manner. In the example of the dropped student, Scene becomes the ancestral term, operating inextricably with Act. As we enlarge or reduce the scope 64 of the Scene, the Act also shifts. Thus a Scene-Act ratio refers to a kind of correspondence in which the quality of the Act is determined by the nature of the situation. Also on the notion of a Scene-Act ratio, Burke comments: Insofar as men’s actions are to be interpreted in terms of the circumstances in which they are acting, their behavior would fall under the heading of a "scene- act ratio." But insofar as their acts reveal their different characters, their behavior would fall under the'heading of an "agent-act ratio." For instance, in time of great crisis, such as a shipwreck, the conduct of all persons involved in that crisis could be expected to manifest in some way the motivating influence of the crisis. Yet, within such a "scene-act ratio" there would be a range of "agent-act ratios," insofar as one man was "proved" to be cowardly, another bold, another resource ful, and so on. ("Dramatism" 446) The Dramatistic method includes an initial search for the ancestral term, followed by a determination of the terms most closely corresponding to it. Each term influences the term with which it is placed in ratio. Each ratio constitutes a unique relationship, and the nature of relationships is determined by Circumference. Thus a Scene-Act ratio might stress the appropriateness of the Act for the Scene. The Act-Agent ratio might stress the effect the Act has on the Agent. In the example of the dropped student, by enlarging the Circumference we may examine the perspective of the college administrator who looks at my Act of dropping the student as validation of my obedience to school regulations. Dramatism is a 65 complete heuristic, with twenty possible ratios existing among the five terms and depending upon alterations in Circumference. (Burke discusses ten ratios in A Grammar of Motives.) As an open-ended heuristic, Dramatism offers infinite perspectives for analysis. As Circumference is enlarged or reduced, each of the twenty ratios may be investigated, and the quality of each term may shift radically. The notion of substance, however, gives focus to the Dramatistic enterprise. Since Dramatism deals with human action in its infinite variety, the dialectical method may not reveal absolute, epistemological reality, but it may reveal contextual, praxeological reality. As Burke explains: So, in sum: The transformations which we here study as a Grammar are not "illusions," but citable realities. The structural relations involved are observable realities. Nothing is more imperiously there for observation and study than the tactics people employ when they would injure or gratify one another-- and one can readily demonstrate the role of substantiation in such tactics. To call a man a friend or brother is to proclaim him consubstantial with oneself, one's values or purposes. To call a man a bastard is to attack him by attacking his whole line, his "authorship," his."prin ciple" or "motive" (as expressed in terms of the familial). An epithet assigns substance doubly, for in stating the character of the object it at the same time contains an implicit program of action with regard to the object, thus serving as motive. (Grammar 57) 66 Burke implies in this passage that a dialectical dynamic may be established between the Pentad and the concept of substance itself. The Pentad, through the manipulation of Circumference and Ratios, offers insight into the ways value or quality enters into the play of language. Enlarg ing or reducing Circumference, shifting dominance among the ratios changes the quality or substance of motives, leading to the possibility of "transcendence." Burke defines transcendence by noting that: When approached from a certain point of view, A and.B are "opposites.” We mean by "transcendence" the adoption of another point of view from which they cease to be opposites. (Attitudes 336) Here we have Burke's motive for the Dramatistic enterprise he defines in A Grammar of Motives. . The substance of motives can be teased out through Dramatistic analysis, and, once apprehended, this exposure of perspectives may lead to identification. Burke argues that through words alone a person can be consubstantial with another person. We identify with others, for example, through the substance of national or geographical origin; we identify with the substance of race, family, or ethnicity. Thus, Burke believes: To deal with problems of motives is to deal with problems of substance. And a thing's substance is that whereof it is constituted. Hence, a concern with substance is a concern with the problems of constitutionality. (Grammar 337-338) 67 In a Dramatistic universe, we might explain motives as the living of perspectives, which are informed by substance.. Transcendence is the sharing of perspectives and Burke's hope for man. Having briefly rehearsed the basic tools of Dramatism, I will shift to a presentation of the "drama" of adult literacy education, beginning with Pentadic descriptions Of a community college and its students. As I claim in chapter two, the possibility of transcendence, or identi fication, is the hope of literacy education. By investigating literacy education Dramatistically, as it is "played" by the institution and the students, we may learn a great deal about the successes and failures of institutions and students alike. We also may learn how the interface of the two may lead to identification and successful literacy education. With Act as the "terministic center" of Dramatistic analysis, a Pentadic description of adult literacy educa tion in a community college should begin with a sense of what it means for an adult to become literate in a formal educational setting. This is to say, the pivotal Act in a Dramatistic analysis of adult literacy education is the Act of becoming literate. Yet, it is the act of becoming literate itself that stands as an unknown in this study. In the first chapter, I discussed literacy and illiteracy, presenting a widely accepted definition of literacy. In 68 the second chapter, I rehearsed current theory, research, and practice in literacy acquisition and education, con cluding with a pedagogical framework that incorporates both natural acquisition and conscious learning. The conclusions of both chapters represent idealized generali zations, whose "substance" is more epistemologically based than praxeologically based. Dramatistically, I do not believe it is fruitful to consider Act as the cumulative process of becoming literate unless the term is well qualified by ratios (Act of becoming literate and the Scene of the classroom, for example). The Act of becoming literate may not even be an Act for some who participate in the drama, since so many adult literacy students fail or drop out of programs. Act, as the cumulative process of becoming literate, may be the ancestral term for this study, but individual Dramatistic analyses should reduce the circumference of Act to real instances of praxis in the overall process of becoming literate. I suggest that the remaining terms of the Pentad, when applied to literacy education in a community college, make sense only when defined praxeologically. In dealing with Scene in the drama of adult literacy education, the Circumference should first be set around the school. The community college "scene" has long included literacy education. The community college, constrained by an open admissions policy to enroll any 69 adult who desires instruction, has long been the primary provider of adult literacy education in American society. Since its inception at the beginning of this century, the community college has been viewed as a second chance for adults to learn what they failed to learn in the public schools. In addition, the community college has borne the brunt of providing English language and literacy instruction to the nation's immigrants, who often arrive in America with very little or no schooling. This popula tion has increased dramatically over the past twenty years and has greatly exacerbated the challenge of providing literacy education to adults. Before narrowing the scope of "Scene" to one community college in California, it may be helpful to present summaries of the history of community colleges in California and the evolution of their mission. The history of California's community colleges can be divided into four periods of development: (1) 1900-1930, extension of secondary schools, (2) 1930-1950, junior colleges, (1950- 1970, community colleges, and (4) 1970 to the present, community learning centers. Community colleges are a relatively recent addition to the spectrum of secondary and postsecondary educational institutions in California. In 1907, the Legislature first authorized high school districts to offer college level course work. By 1917, 16 high schools in the state were 70 providing college level courses in mathematics, English, modern languages, history, economics, and technical subj ec.ts . As early as 1919, the Legislature expressed concern over the mission of the two-year college, and, as a result, appointed a special committee on education to study their roles. The committee recommended that the colleges provide courses of study in civics, liberal arts, science, and technology. In 1921, the Legislature first authorized the forma tion of junior college districts; then in 1927, joint high school-junior college districts were approved. By that time there were 3.1 public junior colleges. Enrollment in the fall of 1928 had grown to about 25,000 students. This thirty-year period of secondary schools extension provided the first tentative steps toward a new form of higher education. Junior colleges evolved slowly, develop ing within the structure and resources of existing secondary and postsecondary institutions, unlike universi ties that began as separate institutions with a well- defined role and clientele. Junior colleges at this time operated simply as an extension of high school programs. They prepared students for senior postsecondary institu tions, offered some vocational training, and provided some 71 remedial education services. General literacy education for adults, however, was not yet a part of their mission. From 1930 to 1950, community college evolution was marked by a large growth in the number of institutions and students, as well as the development of an institutional identity separate from secondary schools. The Depression caused reductions in the level of state financial support for junior colleges, but high unemployment rates, immigra tion, and changing technical training needs contributed to an increase in junior college enrollment. By 1947, there were 45 junior colleges with 107,000 students. In 1947, the Legislature commissioned a report on higher education4 The Strayer Report, as it was known, made the first explicit statement about the "open door" policy of junior colleges by asserting that the colleges should provide equal opportunity for post-secondary education to all adults and youth over 18. The report further stated that the objectives of the colleges were to provide: (1) terminal (occupational) education, (2) general education, (3) college and career orientation and guidance, (4) lower division transfer courses, (5) adult education, and (6) removal of matriculation deficiencies (remedial education). This new policy stressed the importance of access to higher education for all students and opened the door for 72 the community colleges to provide basic literacy instruc tion to those adults who had not received it in elementary or secondary schools. In the twenty years spanning 1950-1970, two-year colleges witnessed a sixfold increase in enrollment; realized the complete separation from secondary education; established an official place in the tripartite California system of higher education; and received official recogni-: tion that they had become ’'community” colleges'. As junior college districts separated from the secondary school system, some jurisdictions established agreements about which segment would provide adult (non credit) education programs. In San Francisco, San Diego, and Santa Ana/Orange, for example, the junior college districts became the sole providers of adult education, while in Los Angeles the adult education programs were offered exclusively by the unified school district. Those community college districts, including Rancho Santiago, serving Orange and Santa Ana, that offer noncredit, adult education have had to develop comprehensive literacy education programs. In the late 1960s, the name "junior” was changed to "community" to give official recognition to both the breadth and local character of the community colleges. Other changes occurring during these years included the development of faculty senates in community colleges; the 73 formalization of student services and counseling; and the establishment of outreach programs designed to bring disadvantaged students, adults, and ethnic minorities (underrepresented in other segments of higher education) into the community college system. Since 1970, enrollment in community colleges has more than doubled, reaching a peak of 1.4 million students in 1981. At that time, 21 percent were full-time students enrolled in credit courses, 67 percent were part-time students enrolled in credit courses, and 12 .percent were enrolled in noncredit courses. This' significant growth in community college enrollment over the past 17 years has also accented a basic and problematic dichotomy for the institutions. While the community colleges are a part of the tripartite higher education program in.California and carry many of the trappings of higher education insti tutions, they also must meet the needs of an ever growing academically underprepared population of native and non- native English speakers. Although today literacy education (often referred to as remedial or compensatory education in the community colleges) has become a major instructional effort at most community colleges, it is not promoted as a primary mission of the two-year institutions. Indeed, as originally conceived and discussed above, the missions 74 of the community colleges did not specifically address basic literacy. As Cohen and Brawer point out: Community colleges developed during the twentieth century as a distinctly American educational form combining several missions. They were designed to fit into the educational mainstream reaching from kindergarten through gradu ate school by offering four types of educational experiences: capstone educa tion for those who do not progress much beyond secondary school; the first two years of college for those who go on to baccalaureate and graduate studies; occupational training for those who seek employment; and casual, community-based education for those who want.to pick up an occasional course. As community colleges evolved, they assumed the role of expanding access for everyone who might otherwise be excluded from higher education: women, the poor, minorities, and the ignorant. (209) In a recent California higher education master plan study, the primary mission assigned to the community colleges is to provide "accessible academic and vocational education toward associate degrees, transfer, or employ ment" ("The Challenge of Change . . . "). The same study makes a strong case for the notion that although literacy education is important and that the need for it will probably continue to increase, it should supplement and supplant the transfer and vocational missions of the community colleges. Yet in spite of formal mission statements, literacy education is a dominant force at community colleges today. The evolution of clientele has caught both the institution 75 and its instructors largely unprepared, and adequately serving the underprepared student has become the most difficult challenge facing the two-year colleges today. As I will point out in a discussion of instructors as Agents, instructors who have grown up with the community college often find the change from a primary mission of the two year transfer program to a de facto, primary mission of literacy education unsettling (Agent-Scene and Agent-Act ratios, with instructors as Agents reveal a great deal about the weakness of literacy programs). Rancho Santiago College, in suburban Orange County California, has not escaped the changes affecting two- year institutions. Located in central Orange County, Rancho Santiago serves an area of almost 200 square miles and a population of approximately 400,000. Founded in 1917 when Orange County was a sprawling agricultural community where half of the adult population, reflecting little cultural diversity, earned a living through farming or ranching, the. then Santa Ana College (the name was changed to Rancho Santiago College in 1984) was an exten sion of Santa Ana High School. In 1971, the Rancho Santiago College broke away from the Santa Ana Unified School District, forming its own community college dis trict. Today, the college district is characterized by economic and cultural diversity, with less than 10 percent of the land and 2 percent of the population dedicated to 76 agriculture (according to 1986 Orange County Chamber of Commerce data). Included in the district are the county's worst poverty pockets (primarily in Santa Ana, where 15 percent of the adult population earns less than $7000 a year, according to Orange County Social Services Agency data for 1986), the city with the highest per capita income (Villa Park, where the average yearly household income is just above $35,000), and the county's largest concentration of minorities (Santa Ana and east Garden Grove, where 45 percent of the population is Hispanic, 14 percent is Asian, and 5 percent is Black, according to 1980 census data). The College district is rapidly shift ing to a majority of low income, minority residents. Reflecting the rapid growth among all California community colleges in the 1970s, Rancho Santiago nearly doubled in size of faculty (from 278 to 459, full and part-time), facilities (adding more than 130,000 square feet), and students (from 11,000 to 19,000, full and part- time) between 1971 and 1974. During this time of growth and change, the college made hiring and other budget decisions based upon a strong and successful tradition of two-year transfer programs. It was not until the late 1970s that the college began to realize that the rapid growth did not represent a significant increase in the number of full-time, transfer students, but rather a marked increase in part-time and older, underprepared 77 students. Actually, the ratio of full to,part-time stu dents has steadily declined since 1975, with a net loss of 18 percent in the last 12 years.- In addition, an increasing number of the new students were non-native English speakers. Suddenly, the college had to change directions and begin to shift mission priorities. An English faculty and curriculum, for example, that had long focused on freshman composition and a variety of literature courses was now asked to deal with English as a second language curricula and reading and remedial grammar and composition courses. By 1975, literacy education had become the primary focus of the language arts curricula at the college. Significantly affecting Rancho Santiago's literacy education efforts is the rapid change in ethnicity occurring in the area. In 1970, the district population was 81 percent white and 19 percent minority, of which 17 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent Black. The minority percentage at the time was lower than the state average of 27 percent and slightly higher than the county rate of 14 percent. A significant change occurred in the 10 years between 1970 and 1980. The district minority population increased to 41 percent as compared to 21 per cent for the county and 34 percent for the state. This increase occurred primarily in the Hispanic community which nearly doubled to 31 percent. Another emerging 78 ethnic group during this period was Asians. This increase can be attributed to the influx of Southeast Asian refugees who continue to settle in large numbers in the district. As the ethnicity of the area has changed, so too has the economy. The areas surrounding Rancho Santiago's major educational sites have among the lowest per capita income levels of any cities in Orange County, with Santa Ana having the lowest of all 26 cities in the county. Over 25 percent of the residents in the City of Santa Ana are classified as having low incomes within 150 percent of the poverty level. In Santa Ana 19.2 percent of Hispanics and 27.6 percent of Asians are below the poverty level. These people are among the very poor, falling below 75 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. Along with the influx of immigrants and the declining income levels comes a very high dropout rate from the local high schools. Presently, the dropout rate, expressed as net attrition, grades 9-12, is just over 50 percent in the Santa Ana Unified School District. Thus, not only are the immigrant parents in need of literacy education, so are their American born children who do not complete high school. As the sole' provider of adult '■ education in the cities of Santa Ana and Orange, Rancho Santiago College has experienced a significant increase in the types and numbers of sections of literacy courses. 79 Rancho Santiago attempts to meet the challenge of literacy education by offering English as a second lan guage, and basic reading and writing courses via two instructional delivery modes, credit and noncredit courses. Credit courses are offered for college (AA degree appli cable, often transferrable) credit. Noncredit courses are the community college equivalent of adult education and carry no college credit. In principle, those students functioning at the lowest literacy and second language acquisition levels would be served by the noncredit pro gram, while those students functioning at or above a "high school" literacy level and who desire college credit would be served by the credit program. In practice the distinctions between credit and noncredit students have more to do with proximity to instructional delivery sites and students' immediate goals than they do with literacy levels. This is particularly true of the basic reading and writing courses, which overlap skill level for skill level between credit and noncredit. English as a second lan-, guage courses, however, follow a vertically articulated track from noncredit through credit, and students are placed in the courses through assessment. In addition, we should keep in mind that not all English as a second language students are literacy students. However, given the demographics of Rancho Santiago's clientele, with the increasing population.of Hispanics, mostly Mexican 80 immigrants with little or no education, a significant percentage (over 50 percent) of the English as a second language students are in need of literacy development. While both the credit and noncredit literacy programs of the college have grown and changed significantly over the past 10 years in response to the shifting demographics, this pilot study of a Dramatistic method of analysis focuses on the noncredit program, which features the greatest concentration of literacy students. The noncredit division of the college, largely comprised of adult high school diploma programs, has grown at the expense of the college credit programs (from 10 percent of total program in 1974, to 32 percent today). Not only has Rancho Santiago felt a downward trend in terms of entering stu dents' skills levels (from an average 10.4 grade level reading equivalency in 1975, to an average 8.3 in 1986), leaving a greater share of the educational program to the noncredit division, but student achievement has declined across all programs, as measured by grade point averages, course withdrawal rates, and earned credits. This trend is not unique to Rancho Santiago, as Cohen and Brawer note: Guiding and teaching students who are . underprepared for traditional college- level studies is the single thorniest problem for community colleges.. Some institutions seem to have given up, as evidenced by their tendencies to award students certificates and degrees for 81 any combination of courses, units, or credits--in effect, sending them away with the illusion of having had a successful college career. Others have established special instructional and counseling services for students with lower abilities, strategems designed to puncture the balloon of prior school failure, but in most programs in most institutions, expectations for student achievement have declined. (211) The "Scene" of Rancho Santiago College includes a large multi-ethnic, low income community. The literacy needs of this community are significant, and the college is charged with providing literacy education to all adults in the community. This is a significant challenge, not only from the perspective of sheer numbers, but also, as suggested earlier, because the role of primary provider of literacy education is a relatively new one for the insti tution and its faculty. Cohen and Brawer ask several key questions; Clearly the colleges are devoting a major portion of their instructional effort to poorly prepared students. But several questions remain, ranging from program effect to institutional purpose: Do such , programs really teach people to read and write? Should poorly qualified students be segregated in special programs or should they be allowed to enter regular classes? How does compensatory education affect the college staff? Can a college devote such a great proportion of its effort to remedial studies without jeopardizing its standards and its place in higher education? How many times should the public pay the schools to try to teach the same competencies to the same people? (212) 82 Thus, Scene provides an important backdrop to con siderations of the other Pentadic terms. The primary delivery site for the noncredit, Continuing Education Division of the college is the Centennial Education Center, a satellite campus. Centennial Education Center opened in 1980 and represented the college's first major outreach effort to the growing minority community. Located in south Santa Ana, Centennial is set in a regional park and is comprised of six buildings, housing sixteen classrooms, counseling and administrative offices, and child care facilities. The surrounding population is over 80 percent ethnic and language minority, reflecting a majority of Hispanic residents. Centennial is an attractive facility, and the surrounding community has embraced its presence and purpose. Focusing on the literacy education efforts of Rancho Santiago's noncredit program at Centennial Education Center, I will briefly rehearse the character istics of the primary Agents in the educational drama, the instructors and students. In the noncredit division of the college, the adult basic education program forms the front line in the battle against illiteracy among adults in the community. Because the community is comprised of so many non-native speakers of English, the majority of adult basic education students have matriculated from the English as a second language program, which helps students develop aural/oral 83 comprehension and production skills. It is interesting and sad to note, however, that the adult basic education program (for the entire Continuing Education Division of the College, not just those enrolled at Centennial) is only one-eighth the size of the English as a second language program. That is to say, the ESL enrollments in 1986-87 reached a peak of 16,000 students, while the ABE program served approximately 2,000 students. These figures are significant because they point out an obvious weakness in the literacy education effort. Although the majority of ABE students are second language learners, the ABE curriculum targets English literacy skills, rather than the aural/oral skills targeted through the ESL program. The community Scene, as noted earlier, reflects a large population in need of literacy education, and yet the college is not able to recruit literacy students in numbers representing their cohort in the community. The Agent (student)-Scene (community) ratio demonstrates a significant underrepresentation of people willing or able to take advantage of the literacy program offered by the college. Students appear willing to acquire (what they believe to be) English language competency, but they do not seem willing to extend their educational pursuits to basic competency in reading and writing. -This study does not attempt to investigate the drama of the unserved 84 community, but the unserved cohort does represent another problem of literacy education, which may also be a problem of identification. The inability of some members of the community to identify with the opportunities schooling and literacy may offer combined with the strong sense of identification these people share with their friends, families, and culture may result in an almost insurmount- • able fear and loathing of school, as the "establishment." As Michael Holzman argues in more dramatic terms: The English class will qualify them for the GED class, which will qualify for the wordprocessing class, which . . . but wouldn’t it be easier just to get pregnant again and qualify for both more welfare money and a form of tacit approval from the neighborhood? Or become a drug addict, or become a prostitute, or do all these things? Not much of this is explicit. But people understand these things, understand their necessity, and see them as the externalization of that despera tion which is the consequence of a reasonable analysis of life for those at the margin. To reject all this, to live a life different, no matter how slightly, from those around one, is to reject those around one, to risk being rejected by them. (29) The cohort from the community who chooses to take advantage of literacy education, who for whatever reason takes at least a first step toward identification with schooling, is well represented by adult basic education students in the noncredit program at Centennial. As Agents in the drama, they share the demographics of the college district presented earlier. For purposes of this 85 pilot study, which uses people, programs, and data from the 1986-87 school year, the ABE students at Centennial numbered just over 300. They are 70 percent Hispanic with the rest a fairly even mixture of other minority ethnic groups and Anglos; their median age is 25; 65 percent of them are male; half of them indicated upon enrollment that they do not have a high'school diploma; their median family size (household) is five; and over half indicated an income range of $0-6999. Probably the most revealing statistic, in terms of the intentions of this study, is the attrition or dropout rate of the ABE program. On an average, 40 percent of the students who enroll during any given semester drop out before the end of the semester. At the very least, this statistic provides justification for an analysis of the literacy education "drama" played out at Rancho Santiago. Most ABE students study ESL in the college's non- credit program prior to enrolling in ABE. Matriculation from ESL to ABE is dependent upon a grade level equivalency reading level maximum of 6.0. Students who score above a sixth grade reading level equivalency (on a standardized instrument, usually McGraw-Hill1s "Test of Adult Basic Education") may enter the adult high school diploma program or enroll directly in the college credit program. Learn ing to read, write, and compute is the main focus of the ABE class, and, one must assume, the goal of the students. 86 ABE Instructors as Agents represent a cross section of the educational community. Of the eight instructors assigned to teach ABE, four are part-time instructors who also teach full time at elementary or. secondary schools, or teach other college classes on a part-time basis. Among the instructors, the average tenure - teaching ABE is four years , while the average- tenure among’ .them in the teaching profession is 16 years. These instructors have expressed satisfaction with their ABE assignments, and many of those who also teach children during the day have commented that they prefer their evening ABE assignments over their day jobs because the adult students are so motivated and appreciative. I asked the eight instructors about job satisfaction, and those who also teach at public schools during the day commented that working with the adult students at night was particularly rewarding because the students are so motivated and appreciative. These teachers seem frustrated with their day jobs because so much of their teaching time is consumed with student con trol activities rather than learning activities. As one part-time ABE instructor commented: In my evening (ABE) class, I am able to encourage interaction among the students. We are able to have varied teacher- centered and student-centered activities to develop skills, self-image, and maybe friendships. It's o.k. to make a mistake in the ABE class; everyone feels comfort able . 87 Although the ABE program employs a single, comprehen- aive curriculum (described below) , each instructor is free to bring her own teaching style, techniques, and materials to the classroom. As I will argue through Dramatistic analysis in the next chapter, this "indivi dualization" of the curriculum has some impact on the process of identification, which may or may not occur among students in an ABE class. In addition, the success of student-instruetor/program identification also relates to the philosophy of education held by the school and individual instructors. As discussed in chapter two, a dichotomy often exists between a "natural" approach and a "teaching" approach to literacy education. This dichotomy might also be expressed as "top down" versus "bottom up" approaches to teaching and learning, with natural literacy acquisition representing the former and direct teaching representing the latter. When the purpose(s) students bring to class for becoming literate do not match with the curriculum and instruction the program and teacher offer, identification is very diffi cult to achieve. The Purpose (student)-Agent (instructor) and Purpose (student)-Agency (curriculum and instruction) ratios provide significant insights into the identifica tion process. 88 For this pilot study of a Dramatistic method for investigating a literacy education program for adults, Purpose centers on the reasons or goals students have for desiring to become better readers and writers. Through interviews and surveys of ABE students (see appendix A), the reason most often given for the importance of reading and writing centers on self-esteem. (Out of 110 students, 72 indicated that "to feel better about myself" was the most important reason.) Feeling better about oneself ranked above the more pragmatic goals, such as getting a better job and making more money, as the primary purpose for becoming better readers and writers. If we were to enlarge the circumference of this study to define the institution as an Agent, the institution's Purpose might be described best as pragmatic--an important mission of the college is- to provide basic education (literacy) to those who need it so they can become "produc tive" members of society. In this scenario, instructors and curriculum and instructionn, as Agencies, would "act" upon students who may bring a different primary Purpose to the "drama." This conflict may also be a factor within the circumference defined for this study. The motives of the Agents (instructors) and the Agencies of curriculum and instruction, as defined by institution and instructors, may not be in harmony with the Purposes the students bring to the ABE program. The Purpose (student)- 89 Agency (curriculum and instruction) ratio also reveals strengths and weaknesses of the ABE program. We may view curriculum and instruction in the ABE program as an Agency of the instructors. The ABE program is open entry and open exit, meaning students may enroll at any time during a semester, based upon mandatory assessment and enrollment limits. The curriculum is competency based, which the California State Department of Education defines as "a performance-based process leading to demonstrated mastery of basic and life skills necessary for the individual to function proficiently in society1 1 (''Evaluation Study . . ."4). Students progress through various levels of the curriculum as they demonstrate mastery through criterion-referenced tests. The curriculum is defined around a comprehensive set of life skills (such as, the ability to interpret recipes, bills, food packaging labels, under the competency category of consumer economics) and basic skills competencies (such as, read, comprehend, and answer questions about information contained in a sentence or paragraph; see appendix B) and is horizontally articulated with the ESL program for non-native students and vertically articulated for all students to the high school diploma program. (Chapter four presents the ABE program and curriculum in more detail.) This concept of ABE curricu lum is significant as it relates to the Purposes students 90 bring to the program. Again, the Agency-Purpose ratio offers a useful perspective on the literacy education drama. I began this chapter with a reference to the work of Schieffelin and Cochran-Smith. In their essay "Learning to Read Culturally," they examine ethnographically three disparate examples of literacy as a cultural and social phenomenon. They reach two conclusions that I think support my intentions for this study. First, they affirm the necessity of identification and engagement in the literacy acquisition process by asserting that "for an individual to become literate, literacy must be functional, relevant, and meaningful for individuals and the society in which they live" (22). Secondly, Schieffelin and Cochran-Smith argue that an ethnographic approach to the investigation of literacy is best: What we wish to impress on the reader is the importance of an ethnographic approach to studying the complex relationships involved in the acquisition and evolution of literacy. Without serious consideration of what literacy means and does not mean for those people who are introduced to it, it will be impossible to make sense of the ways . literacy organizes and is organized by different social groups. (22) I agree that the most interesting and insightful research on literacy has been ethnographic. I also agree that investigating human behavior praxeologically may be the only way to know human reality. Dramatism may be viewed 91 as an ethnographic approach, and it seems well suited to the investigation of literacy education in a community college. In the next chapter, I attempt to apply a Dramatistic method of inquiry to the literacy education "drama” outlined above. 92 Chapter 4 Students, Institution, and Literacy: A Dramatistic Analysis "When all of this land belonged to one latifundo," said another man in the same conversation, "there was no reason to read and write. We weren't responsible for anything. The boss gave the orders and we obeyed. Why read and write? Now it's a different story. Take me, for example. In the asentiamiento {land reform}, I am responsible not only for my work like all the other men, but also for tool repairs. When I started I couldn't read, but I soon realized that I needed to read and write. You can't imagine what it was like to go to Santiago to buy parts. I couldn't get oriented, I was afraid of everything--afraid of the big city, of buying the wrong thing, of being cheated. Now it's all different." - by "A Sower of Words" (from Cultural Action for Freedom, by Paulo Freire} Burke maintains that "Dramatism suggests a procedure to be followed in the development of a given calculus, or terminology" (Grammar 59). The procedure involves the search for a "representative anecdote," a representative case of human motivation, which may lead us to an under standing of human action in a given situation. The situation at hand is adult literacy education and the community college, specifically the interface of attitudes held by those who are motivated to become literate and those who are charged with delivering it, reflecting 93 varying degrees of motivation for the charge. In order to discover a representative anecdote for this interface, one must analyze human contexts, actions, and attitudes that are "supple, and complex enough to be representative of the subject matter they are designed to calculate" (Grammar 61). In addition, as Burke contends, the "motivational calculus," or representative anecdote, must demonstrate adequate scope, as well as simplicity, since it is a reduction and reflection of the subject matter (phenomenological reality). Dramatism, itself a repre sentative anecdote of human behavior, meets the requirements Burke sets forth, and I will attempt to use Dramatis tic analysis to explore the interface of students with institution, instructors, and curriculum. Recalling from earlier chapters that adult literacy education is successful when the motives of instructors and students coalesce, when they identify with each other on the values and purposes of written language. In this concluding chapter I will investigate the scene of literacy education at- Rancho Santiago College from the perspective of the Agents, instructors and students, who play the primary roles in the drama. In the second chapter, I cited the successful experiment in literacy education of Nan Elsasser and Vera John-Steiner, who combined the work of Vygotsky and Freire to create a truly top-down model of curriculum and instruction. By top-down 94 I am referring to pedagogies that.begin with the interests and concerns of the students, their semantic intentions, and eventually move "down" to the limited, more particular concerns of language skills that are' available to direct instruction. So Elsasser and John-Steiner began with an assessment of the issues and problems about which the Bahamian women felt most strongly; had the women read about it and discuss an issue of importance, and, as they began to realize the power of written language to change their lives and their environment, they became receptive to acquiring and learning language skills. Conversely, literacy pedagogies that begin with, and focus on, the details of language and language skills reflect a bottom- up approach, which may or may not lead to, or connect with, the "top" concerns and interests of the students, Clearly, the top-down approach aligns with Freirean pedagogy, and the Freirean approach and biases inform this pilot investigation of a Scene of literacy education. I will return to Freire later in this chapter, but here I want to set up the notions of a pedagogical preference and an hypothesis for this pilot investigation: the instructor Agents at Rancho Santiago College and their attendant curriculum and instruction are successful to the extent they promote a top-down approach to literacy education. 95 Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate through this pilot investigation that Dramatistic analysis is a valid and useful method for studying the interface of institutions, instructors, and students in the drama of literacy educa tion. In addition, I hope to begin a description of a representative anecdote of the literacy education drama that "calculates" and reveals the components necessary for harmonious interface (identification) between teach ers and learners and that may also support an hypothesis that promotes a top-down approach, to literacy education. Adult Basic Education students at Rancho Santiago College are not recruited, in the sense that the college does not actively pursue outreach efforts in the community to attract them (this situation has more to do with the fact that the college is at its enrollment "cap" set by the state rather than a lack of interest in serving stu dents). Consequently, these "literacy" students, by taking the initiative to find the college program and to enroll, demonstrate motivation to become literate. I presented a profile of student demographics in the last chapter, and it is important to recall that the majority of the ABE students are first generation immigrants, mostly from Latin America. As ABE students, they are still second language learners, albeit "advanced," whose personal histories reflect very little, or unsuccessful, formal education, either here or in their homelands. They represent the economically oppressed of Latin America, and any value or purpose they may hold now for literacy and formal education is informed by a heritage that clearly subordinates the unrealized power of written language to the daily challenges of sheer survival in a hostile environment. As the student Agents engage in the Act of becoming literate, they bring with them several Purposes, as well as varying expectations of what should constitute effec tive teaching and learning, the tools of curriculum and instruction, or Agency. Before turning to an exemplar of the ABE student population at Rancho Santiago, I want to describe in more detail the general characteristics of the ABE student population. Figure 1 presents the significant demographic data on these students. Typical of the ABE students is Carlos, a 26-year-old Mexican immigrant who has lived in California for five years. He is married to another first generation Mexican immigrant and works full time as a maintenance man in a local factory to support his wife and three children. Carlos began as an evening custodian at the factory and has worked his way up the system to a skilled maintenance position. His wife works part time cleaning homes. Two of their three children attend elementary school in Santa Ana, while the youngest stays home with his mother, or is cared for by a sister-in-law who also lives in Santa Ana. 97 ETHNICITY AND GENDER American Indian 3 Black (Non-Hispanic) 10 Asian 53 Pacific Islander 2 Hispanic 240 Philippine American 1 Other Non-Caucasian 13 White 33 AGE AND RESIDENCY Under 18 21 18 140 19 248 20 200 21 to 25 687 26 to 30 433 31 to 40 365 41 to 50 142 Over 50 142 Total Males Total Females 206 150 Resident less than 12 months 65 Resident more than 12 months 2041 FAMILY SIZE AND INCOME Size 1 person 484 Size 2 persons 221 Size 3 persons 231 Size 4 persons 252 Size 5 persons 183 Size 6 persons 106 Size 7 persons 73 Size 8 persons 36 Size 9+ persons 52 Size Unknown 776 EDUCATION High School Dip. 238 G.E.D. 68 Proficiency Cert. 29 Completion Cert. 22 Foreign H.S. Dip. 412 No H.S. Diploma/ Unk. 1520 Fig. 1. ABE Student Demographics Fall, 1987, Survey* ^Discrepancies in totals reflect voluntary nature of survey questions. From rural Mexico, Carlos completed five years of primary school and has studied ESL, part time,, in the noncredit program for three years. When he began, Carlos was placed at the lowest beginning level of the ESL program. He could read and write with minimal competency in Spanish but could neither understand nor speak any English. During his three years in the program he progressed through six levels (courses) of the competency based curriculum. He has since matriculated to ABE, where the 98 curricular emphasis shifts from aural/oral comprehension/ production to literacy. In response to several student survey questions (appendix A), Carlos states that he wants to become a better reader and writer for personal and practical reasons: because I like to prepare myself to be something better to be someone in life, to be or do something important to feel myself good about myself. The reason is I want to get a better.position in my company or wherever I be and the best way of getting good work opportunities is studying learning a career or skill. I want to learn more because I am a father and my sons will need my help in the future. That’s why studying is so important to my own benefit. Carlos continues, expressing his reasons for learning to read and write in terms relating more to self-concept: Studying here is not important is that important to me, or being an ABE student. What is important is getting a education. With a education I'll be able to accomplish more things in life. Be able to understand more in United States. I want to be some body in United States. The purposes Carlos expresses, centering on self- concept, family needs, and work, are consistent with the findings of a survey I conducted among 100 ABE students. As detailed in appendix A, I asked the 100 ABE students, all of whom responded, four narrative response questions: 1. Describe the ideal ABE classroom. What kinds of textbooks, activities? What would the teacher do? How many hours per week would you study in class? What would 99 you study, and what subjects would be most important? 2. Why do you want to become a better reader and writer? What goals do you have as an ABE student? Why is studying here important to you? 3. Describe the kinds of reading and writing you and your family do at home. 4. As an ABE student, you attend class several hours each day of the week. Describe what you do in class, explaining what you think are the best activities and assignments. Your answer to this question should include not only what you do, but also what the teacher does. In addition to these narrative questions, I asked the students to respond to five multiple choice questions on the same topics, attempting to validate responses and add additional data. At least in the context of their present situations in American society, the ABE students attach significance to the values and functions of written communication. This is to say, these students believe learning to read and write competently will, improve their lives personally, socially, and economically. They have chosen to attend school because literacy education is a means to consciously articulated ends. These quotes from other students who responded to the survey reinforce the intentions expressed by Carlos: 100 "Because, reader and writer is very important for any kind of communication about job, letters, notes. And reader because, if each of one cannot read no one's understand what I want to say." "I study in this school, because I want graduate from school and get a good job or go to college to get a career." "I want to become a better reader and writer because of self reason. And the thing's that I want to do in life. My goal are to become a good cosmegology--and a business person." "I want to become a better reader writer because I need it; if I am a good reader and writer, I can help my kids to do their homework; I'd improve my knowledge in important field as geography and history what I enjoy a lot reading." The Purpose-Agent ratio reflected in the responses of these students is simple and harmonious; however, the circumference of this pilot study is the larger Scene of literacy education at Rancho Santiago, so the calculus of the Act includes multiple Agents. The other significant Agent I want to consider is the instructor. As outlined in the previous chapter, the instructors assigned to teach in the Continuing Education Division's ABE program represent two career paths, those who chose, literacy education as an assignment and those who were 101 reassigned to literacy education from so-called tradi tional "junior college" English education. With the curricular shift at community colleges moving more and more "traditional" English instructors into ESL and ABE, many instructors who began their careers teaching lower division Literature and composition courses are now teaching literacy level courses and are, at best, nostalgic for the bygone days of the "junior college" and are, at worst, hostile toward their current pro fessional situation. As discussed in the previous chapter, during the years 1971 to 1975, Rancho Santiago experienced signifi cant growth and change. Not only did the college credit program expand, but the college also assumed responsibil ity for the noncredit, adult education program within its district boundaries. Taking on the adult education function resulted in the reassignment of five full-time college English instructors to the then new disciplines (at Rancho Santiago) of adult basic education and low level English as a second language. In addition to the reassigned instructors, other full-time instructors have been hired over the intervening years as demand for literacy education has increased, and these instructors have not been "recycled" college English teachers, but instructors trained in literacy education and dedicated to the discipline. For some of these instructors who are 102 now "forced" to teach literacy, illiteracy is a disease, and the cure is an intensive dose of basic skills, not necessarily related to the students" lives or Purposes for becoming literate and thus reflecting a bottom up approach to literacy education. One of the displaced "English" instructors is Chuck, who began his community college career in 1967 as an English instructor at (then) Santa Ana College. Chuck was hired by the college after completing his Master's degree in English and was assigned to teach a combination of freshmen composition and introductory literature courses. Needless to say, his students and his assignments have changed significantly in the past 20 years. Agreeing to participate in my literacy education survey activity (appendix C), Chuck responds to a question about the importance of learning to read and write better in quite direct terms : It is important for adults to become literate--able to read and write--in American society. Adults must be able to read numbers, facts, and general information. Many adults are very much in need of basic skills to survive. These skills include reading, writing, and spelling. In addition, English only laws are becoming more prevalent. Con sequently, adults must learn to read and write English, the language of the land. Beyond the political and elitist implications of Chuck's opinion, it also seems to ignore the context of the students' lives and the real and relevant Purposes 103 students might have for becoming literate. Indeed, his statement is quite empty, offering very little to support the notion that literacy is either valuable or desirable. This attitude, which seems to decontextualize literacy as it applies to students, is particularly common among those instructors who have not chosen literacy education as a career, but rather find themselves teaching literacy involuntarily. Among the other "reassigned" instructors who responded to the same survey question, one followed Chuck's line of reasoning, commenting that: Vocal speech sounds in English are becoming laws in many states. Con sequently, adults must learn to read and write English, the language of the land. Finally, a literate person in America must be able to receive both individualized and group instruction in grammar, usage, and mechanics. It is also interesting to.note that Chuck's and his colleague's argument for literacy centers exclusively on skills (with an emphasis on direct instruction, not acqui sition) , ignoring not only important aspects of Purpose but also the whole notion of cultural literacy, a notion to which I will return in a discussion of Agency. One might suspect that a "traditional" English instructor would give some weight to a great books/significant names and events approach to literacy education. However, it is important to remember, I think, that the same English instructor might also argue that a firm grounding in 104 reading, writing, and spelling is prerequisite to develop ing cultural literacy. Contrasting with Chuck’s opinions are the views of ABE instructors who choose to teach ABE because they find literacy education rewarding--more rewarding than lower division composition and literature. Representative of instructors in this category at Rancho Santiago is Nancy, who was hired in 1980 and whose previous professional • background includes teaching reading at the elementary level and teaching ABE to adults part time. Nancy repre sents well the ABE instructors who enjoy their careers in literacy education. These instructors recognize the importance of their students' lives as the primary informing factor in developing curriculum and instruction. Nancy responds to a question from the survey about the importance of learning to read and write quite differently than Chuck: To function adequately in American society today, an adult must be literate. Most pre-literate or semi-literate adults are severely hampered by their inability to read. Grocery shopping, laundry, searching for a better job or a needed service all require the ability to read. There is also the possibility of being cheated on contracts or other legal documents if a person is unable to read and comprehend. Everyday activities like banking, paying bills, driving, and reading directions can't be per formed effectively or efficiently. Self-esteem suffers! Literacy must be developed around the needs and wants ___________of_aur_s.tuden.ts------------------------------------- 105 Nancy's argument clearly reflects an awareness of and concern for the Purposes of becoming literate that match well with Carlos's and other ABE students'. A Purpose-Agent ratio that features the student as Agent would indicate a good chance for identification in the Act of becoming literate when Purpose reflects Nancy's views, and probably a poor chance for identification when Purpose reflects Chuck’s views. The literacy student who enters Chuck's class, anxious to apply reading and writing to the social, cultural, and economic communication "problems" he faces, may bring considerable motivation, including motivation to receive direct instruction on language principles and structure, which reflects the pedagogical norm in most countries. However, he may quickly lose his passion for literacy as Chuck makes little or no attempt to connect literacy, principles and structures included, to the student's world. On the other hand, I know as colleague and supervisor that Nancy's ABE class is filled with reading and writing activities addressing the real communication "problems" of the students. As the administrator responsible for the ABE program for the past three years, I have observed the differences between Chuck's and Nancy's approaches to literacy instruction many times. Two brief anecdotes from my 106 experiences with Nancy and Chuck will demonstrate in Dramatistic terms the contrasts between their respective top-down and bottom-up approaches. For the past two years, Check's assignment in the Continuing Education Division has been two classes of low level ABE, which meet for two hours each, Monday through Friday. Enrollment in the classes is held to 25 students, and consistent with the demographics of the whole program, the majority of students are Hispanic. They have matric ulated into ABE by passing the exit assessment (criterion referenced post-test) of the highest level ESL course (Intermediate ESL III). Upon entry into ABE, students take a standardized (English) reading test, normed against bilingual populations, and generally score between a second and fourth grade level equivalency. These students are still acquiring English comprehension and production skills, so many of the instructional activities may be considered advanced ESL activities. As an instructor/ Agent, Chuck brings a sense of Purpose to literacy educa tion that places high value on language skills, as evidenced by the survey response cited earlier. This sense of Purpose is reflected in the types of instructional materials and activities, his Agencies, that he brings to the ABE class. Typical of Chuck's instructional materials is a handout on subject-verb agreement (appendix D), which presents the particular grammar point through a 107 presentation of six rules, followed by two pages of 40 sentence exercises. The exercises ask students to select the correct form of the verb, for example: "Too much candy (has, have) not been good for our teeth. Today, archers (shoots, shoot) arrows at targets." This instructional activity, taken directly from Chuck's syllabus, is significant to a Dramatistic analysis of the ABE class in several ways. The activity does not allow the students’ world to enter into the instructional Scene. Through this type of activity, which is all too common in the field, the student is asked to learn and apply grammar rules to meaning (semantic intentions) that has little relationship to the Purposes for literacy held by the students. In Chuck's class, the students are given the handout; Chuck presents and discusses the rules; and the students then complete the exercises individually. By observation and discussion with students, I would say that only occasionally does Chuck correct and discuss the exercises with the students. It is important to note, however, that this type of language activity is consistent with the Purposes for literacy education expressed by Chuck--to master the skills requisite to proficiency in reading and writing. Another important aspect of Chuck's use of a-contextual grammar exercise would seem to contradict the point that I just made about mismatched Purposes. 108 Part of the survey of the 100 ABE students (appendix A) asked them to respond to several questions about literacy pedagogy by ranking several response choices. Three questions and the students1 rankings are pertinent to my argument here: What kinds of activities do you feel are most important/useful in the ABE class? (36) A. Spelling and Grammar exercises. (28) B. Math problems from everyday situations. (34) C. Reading books and articles that you select. (68) D. Discussing things that are important to you. (32) E. Writing about things that are important to you. (74) F. Studying the rules of writing and grammar. Why is learning to read and write better important to you? (20) A. To earn more money. (68) B. To get a better job. (23) C. To be able to help my children. (72) D. To feel better about myself. (40) E. To participate more in community and government activities. Do you learn best by . . . (29) A. Demonstration--:teacher demonstrates an idea, rule, skill, or activity. (27) B. Lecture--teacher talks about an idea, skill, or activity. 109 (25) C. Drill--students practice an idea, rule, or skill over and over. (78) D. Participation--students and teachers create the learning experience, rule, idea, skill, activity together. The Purposes for literacy suggested by the above survey responses support the Purposes expressed in writing by the same students. However, the students seem to place a high value on studying and practicing the rules of grammar and mechanics. They appear to prefer this type of pedagogy over other activities that might relate more closely with their own existential Scenes. This finding ostensibly would seem to support Chuck’s notion of appropriate pedagogy for the ABE classroom. This inter pretation of the survey results would also appear to contradict the rankings from the last question, in which the notion of participation, students and teachers creating learning experiences together, received the highest number of first rank responses. The apparent contradiction between the students’ desire for grammar rules and exercises and their desire for participatory pedagogy may not be a real paradox. As I noted earlier, students from Latin America and Asia who have experienced school in their native countries are usually conditioned to a pedagogy that emphasizes rote learning of rules, combined with extensive and repetitive 110 practice. It is to be expected that these students would reflect their own educational "conditioning” in a survey. Yet, in spite of their stated preferences, these same students do not like an ABE class that features a lot of activities like Chuck's handout on subject-verb agreement. Indeed, my observation and interview show that many stu dents drop out of Chuck's class precisely because they grow tired and frustrated with handout after handout (Chuck has an enrollment attrition rate far above the average, and we attempt to interview students who drop to determine the reasons). Chuck's classroom does not reflect participatory learning, which ranked highest in the student survey. It reflects a bottom-up approach, which, at best, only partially fulfills the students' expectations for Agency. In Chuck's class, the students may be getting the rules and exercises they expect, but they are not getting anything that relates to their own lives and the significant challenges they face as strangers in a strange land. These students want both, and what might seem like a paradox of expectations can actually become a paradigm for literacy education, providing stu dents with acquisition opportunities through a top-down pedagogy, combined with conscious learning opportunities directed at a limited range of language skills. Ill The expectations students hold for the Agencies of literacy pedagogy combine the desire and need for language skills with the desire and need for real help, coping skills in the idiom of adult education, with surviving in a new country and culture. While Chuck has one of the highest enrollment attrition rates among all of the ABE instructors, Nancy has one of the lowest, and I turn now to Nancy’s class to demonstrate a pedagogy that resolves the apparent paradox implied by the survey results. Nancy's assignment is the same as Chuck's, and her students reflect the same demographics and skills levels. The differences between Chuck’s and Nancy's classes lie not with the students but with the instructors' notions of Purpose and Agency for literacy education. Nancy begins her lesson planning with the student rather than with the skills and competencies of literacy. While Nancy, too, is concerned with the students' abilities to read and write in English, she subordinates any direct teaching of the skills of literacy to the content of student interest and "coping" problems. This top-down approach to literacy pedagogy is very similar to the literacy project conducted by Nan Elsasser with Bahamian women, which I discussed in an earlier chapter. Such a top-down approach also reflects the work of Paulo Freire, whom I also discussed earlier - 112 and to whom I will return later in this chapter. An example.or two of Nancy's lessons illustrates a successful top-down approach. One competency category defined in the ABE curriculum is employment. (I describe the ABE curriculum in more detail later in this chapter.) Any number of published textbooks offer a variety of activities and materials on employment, from dialogues on interviews, practice with employment applications, to problem-solving exercises on work safety. From my observation and direct teaching experience, the most common approach to lesson planning is to mix and match various activities from published materials (appendix E), creating a tailored package for any given group of students, without first discussing with students the general topic of employment or "problems" with employment that the students might be experiencing. When Nancy and a few of the other instructors plan a lesson around a competency category, they begin with the students. Nancy's first activity for the employment unit is to have the students describe their employment experi ences and aspirations, both in small groups and as a class, with no outside materials to supplement the dis cussion. Once the students are comfortable sharing their experiences, Nancy attempts to focus on specific ques tions, problems, and interests, having the students read, discuss and write, as a first attempt at solving or 113 answering particular questions or problems. Only when the class has defined a set of problems and questions on employment does Nancy begin to bring in outside, published materials for the students to work on. These materials would certainly include activities relevant to employment, such as an employment application, or even a set of dialogues on specific communication situations in the workplace (appendix F). In addition, Nancy might supple ment the lesson with grammar exercises, not unlike the one cited above from Chuck's lesson, but such an activity would always be in response to particular language prob lems the students encounter as they attempt to solve or work through their own employment concerns. Thus, what might have been perceived as a paradox from the survey results becomes a harmonious ratio between Purpose (why become literate) and Agency (literacy pedagogy). Another lesson strategy that Nancy finds quite effective is the class newsletter (appendix G). Again, students begin with their own ideas, concerns, and interests, and they acquire and practice literacy skills by writing meaningful content. One of the most successful "editions" of an ABE class newsletter featured brief articles on immigration amnesty, an important topic for many of our students. The articles in that issue were both descriptive and persuasive, providing useful informa tion to students about the procedures for applying for 114 amnesty, as well as commentary on the law itself. With both examples of ABE lessons from Nancy, most of the students who participate are totally engaged in the activ ity, and they acquire literacy skills through their own problem solving and demonstrations from Nancy. Nancy’s literacy pedagogy reflects a harmony of ratios among Agents and Agencies, Agents and Purposes, and Agencies and Purposes, for both instructors and stu dents. Instructors and students identify with one another through the enterprise of literacy education, resulting in motivated action by students and the acquisition of the communication skills necessary to carry out the action. Such identification and engagement does not often occur in Chuck’s classes, to which his enrollment attrition rate attests. Student attrition rates are only one measure of success or failure. ABE classes are open-entry/open-exit courses that carry no grades or credits. However, stu dents successfully exit ABE by achieving at least a sixth grade reading level equivalency on a standardized instru ment. Comparing scores over four semesters (1986-1987 calendar years), reveals that 74 percent of Nancy’s students who attempted the test achieved or exceeded the exit score, compared with 53 percent of Chuck's students (of course, I cannot prove a cause and effect relationship, but I believe the comparison is significant). A top-down approach to literacy education has proven effective in the 115 work of Nan Elsasser, Shirley Brice Heath, Paulo Freire, and in the current practices of Nancy and, I hope, many of her colleagues in adult education. As argued above and in previous chapters, successful literacy education is in part predicated on identification between student and teacher. Viewed Dramatistically, however, the calculus of the Act of becoming literate includes more than multiple Agents. Shared Purposes may go a long way toward achieving identification between Agents, but we must also investigate the Agencies involved in the Act, the curriculum and instruction of literacy education. Not only do Agency-Agent ratios reveal a lot about the successes and failures of literacy education, as suggested by the anecdotes on Chuck and Nancy, but they also enlarge the circumference of the investigation. The curricula of literacy education are not just a product of the classroom teacher. The curricula are most often an institutional synthesis, reflecting state and local priorities and social and political trends in general. Before moving to a more detailed presentation and analysis of the Agencies of ABE, I want to rehearse the context, politically and philosophically, of ABE curriculum and instruction. I began this study with a working definition of literacy borrowed from Frank Smith: 116 I interpret literacy as the ability to make full sense and productive use of the opportunities of written language in the particular culture in which one lives. ("Creative " 143) This definition suggests several notions that should inform any discussion of literacy pedagogy. The first notion centers on the term "ability," which implies the acquisition and application of some skills and/or knowledge. The ability to comprehend and produce written language is a necessary part of being literate; thus, teaching (or facilitating the acquisition.of) comprehen sion and production skills is a necessary part of any literacy pedagogy. A second notion important to literacy pedagogy is suggested by the phrase "productive use of the opportunities," which implies that literacy has practical value as a tool or resource a literate person may use in appropriate situations. This also implies that literacy may be without meaning unless it is connected to the daily needs, interests, and activities of those to whom it is available. Consequently, literacy pedagogy should stress the application of reading and writing to the actual life experiences of students, as in Nancy's lessons. A final notion from the definition worth drawing out is from the phrase "in the particular culture in which one lives." This implies that one knows something about one's culture. This is to say, in order to recognize an "opportunity" for using written language one 117 e ■ t must have some knowledge and understanding of the context in which one finds oneself--opportunities cannot be found in a void. Somehow, literacy pedagogy must deal with the notion of culture. The skills of reading and writing are substantive only in their application, and their applica tion can only occur in a dynamic human context, which is culture by definition. Defining culture in the context of literacy pedagogy, however, is more problematic. Curriculum and instruction, as Agency, in the broad, national Scene of literacy education reflects several, distinct points of view. The "English-Language Arts Framework” (1987) from the California State Department of Education for grades K-12 begins with a statement that clearly defines one view, I believe, of the meaning and function of culture in literacy pedagogy: We are in the midst of a revolution--a quiet, intellectual revolution spinning out dramatic insights into how the brain works, how we acquire language, and how we construct meaning in our lives. Psycholinguistics, language acquisition theory, and research in composition and literacy unite to present new challenges for students and teachers of the English- language arts and to suggest the need for a fresh look at literature, the core of the discipline, and strategies for teaching listening, speaking, reading, and writing. While the public schools' Framework does not directly inform the literacy curricula of Rancho Santiago's ABE program, i t_does_reflee.t_a_general_trend_and_point_of______; 118 controversy in literacy education today, which is at the core of the "drama" played-out between literacy students and the community college. It would appear that revisionism has struck the history of the "back to the basics" movement in the public schools, redefining it to include literature as its "core," the very emphasis against which the movement originally reacted (remember the plethora of literature and humani ties electives offered in the public schools at the expense of the "basics" during the sixties and early seventies). Recalling the Purposes for becoming a better reader and writer that Carlos gave, helping the family (live in the community), getting a better job, and improving self-esteem, it is interesting to compare them with the "overarching goals" of the California Framework: To prepare all students to function as informed and effective citizens in our democratic society. Language permits people to gain access to the knowledge that makes us culturally literate, and one of the most important ingredients in becoming culturally literate is familiarity with significant works of literature in which the great themes, events, and ideals of the culture have been recorded. To prepare all students to function effectively in the world of work. In this age of technology, full participation in the work force requires effective lan guage use. Effective language use is at the very core of lifelong learning strate gies that will permit people to become versatile and to adapt to jobs in the twenty-first century which will require sophisticated technical, scientific, and ___________manage r . ia l_s k i 11 s..________________________________ _ 119 To prepare all students to realize personal fulfillment. Effective language use also permits people to develop a full sense of themselves as individuals. Through the reading of Anne Frank's diary or the musings of a contemporary author, individuals find answers to their questions and experience a connection with the past and present. By being exposed to the greatest and most powerful literary works, people are given effective models for speaking and writing that enable them to express themselves as individuals within a culture. The purposes of the California Framework clearly parallel Carlos's Purposes; however, I am not convinced that Carlos's expectations for a literacy pedagogy (to which I will return) would match the literature centered Framework. As I said above, we cannot take advantage of literacy "opportunities" without the skills of reading and writing. Similarly, we cannot take advantage of them in a cultural void. But should Carlos's cultural literacy be constructed on a foundation of the "great books,” or should it be constructed on the existential foundation of Carlos's daily life in American society? One might suspect that the cultural literacy movement directly influ enced the development of the California Framework. Some in the profession would have us believe that a literacy pedagogy should be constructed on a foundation of a relatively constant cultural heritage. From this point of view, cultural literacy stresses knowledge over skill, suggesting that without the necessary background knowledge of literature, history. people, and science we 120 could neither comprehend nor produce written language. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., is a major force in this movement, which, as evidenced above, has already had an impact on public education. Hirsch presents in his recent book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, a list of nearly 5,000 names, concepts, historical persons and events, and scientific and literary works and terms that every literate American should know in order to achieve the levels of communication demanded by modern society. Hirsch argues that we have become a nation of nonthinkers because of the adoption of certain Enlighten ment values. He claims that in this century social scientists have accepted and extended Rousseau’s notions about the natural development of children, and educators have embraced Dewey's view that education should emphasize creativity and problem solving, not "content." As a result, according to Hirsch, we have fostered a nation of people who, if they can read and write at all, have nothing to say. Their thinking is underdeveloped because they have no information with which to form opinions, no larger framework within which to deal with ideas, events, and challenges. Hirsch argues the obvious when he claims that compre hension and production are predicated on background knowledge; however, just what kind of knowledge is requisite to cultural literacy and how such knowledge is 121 acquired are really the important and controversial points of Hirsch's manifesto. Not only does Hirsch seem to reject the widely accepted (with the qualifications I outlined in chapter two) and well researched notion of natural literacy acquisition, but his brand of cultural literacy is patently elitist and "a piece of more or less naked power politics," as one reviewer asserts (Steiner 108). If Professor Hirsch were an Agent in the "calculus" of literacy education, his Purpose would not coalesce with Carlos’s Purpose, or with the Purposes of any of the other students for that matter. Hirsch does not seem interested in the existential culture of literacy learners, nor does he seem interested in the possibility of the learner as contributor to the "canon" of cultural literacy (although he does allow for the evolution of the canon, with new, "important" items added to the list and incumbent items, suddenly found less important, dropped from the list). Leaving the controversy of content aside, Hirsch's Purpose for cultural literacy is to have the members of society fluent in an extensive set of background knowledge, and his Agency in such an enterprise would be direct instruction, beginning with the target knowledge, rather than the student. This represents a bottom-up approach to learning, or, what Freire calls the "banking concept" of teaching and learning, which I discussed in an earlier chapter (and to which I will return). A top-down, natural 122 literacy approach to achieving Hirsch's Purpose would have students "discover" the entries from his list on and from their own territory, buying into the background knowledge by seeing its usefulness in their lives, just as Nancy's students might "discover" some aspect of grammar as they attempt to express their own semantic intentions in a newsletter or in a letter of application or complaint. . This brief rehearsal of Hirsch's concept of cultural literacy, with its emphasis on received knowledge rather than acquired skill or created knowledge, is intended to provide a sense of broad social and political•context to trends in literacy education (like the California Frame work, which reads as a misinterpretation of Hirsch, with the public school English teachers seeing only the "great books" from Hirsch's list) and also to demonstrate the similarities and differences between the cultural literacy of Hirsch (and the California K-12 system) and the liter acy curricula of ABE programs in California, the real Agency in my calculus. In the previous chapter, I cited the California Competency Based Adult Education, ABE Curriculum Framework (appendix B). This framework serves as the curriculum guide for all state funded ABE programs in California. The ABE Framework is comprised of lists of "life skills" competencies, tied to broad competency 123 categories, such as family, transportation, housing, food, education, and work, as the example in Figure 2 on health competencies illustrates. The students will show orally, in writing, or through' demonstration that they are able to: 1. Fill out medical health history forms. 2. Interpret immunization requirements. 3. Interpret medicine labels, including information on possible side effects. 4. Identify the difference between prescription, over- the-counter, and generic medications. 5. Interpret product label warnings, signs, and symbols. 6. Discuss appropriate first aid procedures. 7. Interpret work safety manuals and/or safety procedures required in the workplace. 8. List health problems related to drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol and/or identify where treatment may be obtained. 9. Recognize facts related to family planning. 10. Identify child rearing practices and/or community resources available to assist in the development of parenting skills. 11. Locate medical and health services in the community. Fig. 2. Health Competencies The Framework is thoroughly application oriented, stressing that all language skills instruction should be embedded in content. Indeed, recognizing that the vast majority of California ABE students are immigrants, the writers of the Framework state that a primary goal of ABE instruction is acculturation, and that the life skills competencies are intended to represent the cultural knowledge necessary "for a literate person to function competently in American society" (California CBAE Curriculum Guide 14). This sounds a lot like Hirsch, but 124 the emphasis is ostensibly on the existential life of the student, not on the alien (certainly to the immigrant) culture represented by a list of 5,000 items of background cultural knowledge. Clearly, a list of competencies that features skills such as using a telephone directory, using street and travel maps, and interpreting information associated with alien registration is of far more interest and value to the struggling immigrant than a list of major figures in Occidental history. Also ostensibly, the competency based ABE curriculum, as Agency, would seem to coalesce well with both Agent (student) and Purpose (stu dent) , as well as with Agent and Purpose defined in the instructor (Nancy), who enjoys the ABE instructional assignment and who demonstrates a great deal of empathy with her students. As discussed above, Nancy’s approach to using the competency based curriculum is to begin with the student. If the lesson involves using the telephone, Nancy begins by discussing the "skill" with her students, soliciting from them the problems, questions,- and interests they have in using the telephone. Only after defining specific skill areas and problems for the competency does she begin to assemble instructional materials and activi ties, always incorporating basic skills (language, math) where appropriate. The prospects for identification between students and instructors who share a common sense 125 of Purpose seem brighter with the ABE curriculum as Agent than they would with a cultural literacy curriculum a la Hirsch. Not all instructors, however, share Nancy's approach to applying the CBAE curriculum, leaving at least one question about the efficacy of such a standardized curriculum unanswered: Is an Agency defined by life skills competencies, competencies representing life in America today but defined outside the Dramatistic circumference of any single literacy classroom, sufficient to promote identification between teacher and learner and to result in literacy acquisition? Clearly, we cannot expect first generation immigrants, most of whom are struggling just to maintain adequate food and shelter, but who come to the ABE class because they see potential in written lan guage to help them solve some of their very real problems, to identify with a George Eliot novel. How different is it, however, when the same students are asked to identify with the competency of maintaining a checking account or filling out a rental agreement form? I suggest that both the CBAE curriculum and Hirsch's cultural literacy, when presented as "content" to be learned (as opposed to interpreted or discovered) by students, are both manifesta tions of Freire's "banking concept" of education and rep resent bottom-up approaches to literacy education, just as Chuck's discreet grammar lesson represents this approach. 126 Examples from two interpretations and applications of an ABE competency category will further illustrate and define the differences between top-down and bottom-up approaches to Agency in the Act of literacy education. Chuck does not feed his students a steady diet of grammar lessons. He follows the same CBAE curriculum guide as the other instructors and works with his students on the various coping, or life skills, competencies. I previously cited as an example the short list of health competencies for an intermediate level ABE class. Most instructors include dialogue activities as a way to introduce various communication situations attendant- to a coping skill category, particularly with beginning and intermediate level students, who are still acquiring English compre hension and production skills. Chuck, and most of his colleagues, use dialogues created or duplicated from texts long ago, which are available in the Centennial Education Center Resource Center. One dialogue commonly used, and used by Chuck, deals with a visit to a doctor's office as shown in Figure 3. Nancy has commented to me on more than one occasion that this dialogue is quite inappropriate for our stu dents and that it certainly should not be used to introduce students to communication skills and problems attendant to seeking medical care. I believe her point is well taken, and I interpret her concerns to reflect her 127 bias against bottom-up pedagogy and the "banking concept" of education, in general. Nancy argues that most of our students do not have their own doctors. Most of them go to clinics, do not see the same doctor each time, and have to wait in line, even with appointments. In addition, most of our students cannot take time off from work to rest, especially those who are nonunionized, and many of them cannot afford to have prescriptions filled. Of equal importance is the lack of cross-cultural sensitivity reflected in the dialogue. It does not reflect the fears some may have about going to a doctor, or the problems some of the limited English speakers may have in explain ing their illnesses. For Chuck, or any other instructor, to use this dialogue as an activity in class is to demonstrate a conflict not only between the Purposes instructors and students may hold for literacy education, but also a conflict between their respective expectations of Agency. Using such a dialogue represents the delivery of meaning, or background knowledge, that the students neither need nor want. To resolve such conflict, Nancy again begins with the students and their immediate Scene. Nancy may not write all of her own materials in her attempt to relate instruc tion to her students' problems of daily living, but she at least searches for materials that have importance and 128 relevance to the students’ lives. As a counter to the dialogue in Figure 3, Nancy used that shown in Figure 4 which is also available in the Resource Center. Mrs. Garcia: Nurse: Mrs. Garcia: Nurse: Dr. Smith: Mrs. Garcia Dr. Smith: Is Doctor Smith in? What is your name? Do you have an app o in tmen t ? No, but I'm very sick. My name is Mrs. Garcia. My friend told me to see Dr. Smi th. Let me speak to the doctor. (Returning to the desk) Dr. Smith will see you after the next patient. What is your trouble, Mrs. Garcia? I have a bad pain in my chest. I cough all the time. Your lungs seem clear. I'll give you a prescription. Have it filled at the drug store. You need to keep quiet and get some rest. Fig. 3. At the Doctor's Office. Receptionist Felicia: Receptionist Felicia; Receptionist Felicia: Receptionist Felicia: Receptionist Felicia: Re c ep t ion i s t; Felicia: Receptionist: Felicia: Receptionist: County Clinic. May I help you? My son is very sick. His head hurts. It's hot. What? Oh you mean he has a fever. What's his name? His name is Pablo Ramirez, R-A-M-I-R-E-Z. Has he been here before? Excuse me, can you repeat that please? That's OK. I'll check his record. We don’t have a record for Pablo Ramirez. He needs to come into the clinic. Can you speak slower, please? He needs to come in. Can he see the doctor? Yes, bring him after one o'clock. The clinic opens at one. When? (loudly) After one o'clock tomorrow. Oh, one o'clock. Does anyone speak Spanish there? No, I'm sorry. Fig. 4. At the Clinic, 129 While offering nothing magical or pedagogically revolu tionary, this dialogue does contain issues that confront many students, including communication, new surroundings, filling out forms, and time conflicts with work. Nancy's selection of this dialogue is the result of discussing medical care with her students before any formal lessons were planned. The dialogue .becomes a productive spring board for other class activities, such as reading, writing, and discussing the problems of communication, paying for health care, the availability of adequate health care, and so forth. Thus, the use of this type of dialogue can lead students to real life problem-solving activities that require the acquisition and use of literacy, reflect ing harmony among the ratios of Purpose-Agent, Purpose- Agency, and Agent-Agency for both students and instructor. As Agents in the Act of becoming literate, Carlos and the majority of his student colleagues express Purposes that focus on immediate problem-solving needs. They indicate through survey questions (cited above) and discussions that their uses for reading and writing center on "daily living," shopping, paying bills, using forms, working, and helping their children. These general cate gories certainly coalesce with the competency categories of the CBAE curriculum, and I believe it is possible, as demonstrated by Nancy, to present or use the CBAE curricu lum in a manner that allows students to create learning 130 experiences from their own "daily living" problems, incorporating CBAE competencies when their application would be useful in solving particular and real student problems. However, the competency based curriculum framework is partially based on the notion that the competencies represent necessary "cultural" knowledge and must be presented (and learned) as a package; at least that is the stated intention of the curriculum writers at the state level. Consequently, while the Purposes of both student-Agents and instruetor-Agents may coalesce, the Purposes of state curriculum writers, as Agents (acting in the same drama but from outside the local Circumference), do not coalesce with either instructors' or students' Purposes. And the Agency produced by the state educators, the CBAE curriculum, does not make a harmonious ratio with either student-Agent or instructor--(at least those align ing with Nancy) Agent. The CBAE curriculum, when implemented as intended by the state, does not promote identification between literacy learner and literacy teacher. It is significant to note again that this Agency, which may militate against identification and engagement, is a product of Agents working outside the Circumference of the literacy classroom. Of course once instructors are in the classroom, the state "Agents" are not there to monitor the implementation of any curriculum on a daily basis, and instructors often 131 choose to interpret curriculum frameworks to match their own Purposes and possibly even those of their students, as is the case with Nancy and some of her colleagues. Expec tations of Agency by students and instructors are an important factor in the "Calculus" of the literacy class room (harmonious Agency-Purpose ratios, representing shared Purposes between instructors and students, should yield identification in the Act of becoming literate), and it may be useful to rehearse in more detail, from the perspective of cultural literacy, the two basic and opposing approaches, top down and bottom up, to "deliver ing" curriculum, before taking a last, analytical pass at the Agency expectations and practices of Rancho Santiago students and instructors. The two dichotomous approaches to instruction are well rehearsed in the works of Paulo Freire. In chapter two, I presented the basic tenets of Freire's pedagogy as they applied to the literacy education experiment in the Bahamas, and I cited Freire's complaint against the kind of literacy education that represents cultural hegemony, using his metaphor of the "banking concept" of education. Friere also uses a dietary metaphor to present his case against literacy pedagogies that simply "feed" content to passive students: This "nutritionist" view of knowledge perhaps also explains the humanitarian character of certain Latin American adult 132 literacy campaigns. If millions of men are illiterate, "starving for letters," "thirsty for words," the word must be brought to them to save them from "hunger" and "thirst." The word, according to the naturalistic concept of consciousness implicit in the primer, must be "deposited," not born of the creative effort of the learners. As understood in this concept, man is a passive being, the object of the process of learning to read and write, and not its subject. As object, his task is to "study" the so-called reading lessons, which in fact are almost completely alienating and alienated, having so little, if anything to do with the student's socio cultural reality. ("The Adult Literacy" 365) Freire characterizes the learner in this passage virtually as an Agent without Purpose. As a- receptacle for received knowledge, this Agent is well suited to become the object of Hirsch's brand of cultural literacy (at least the Hirsch who speaks of that "immutable core" in his cultural literacy canon) and as the object that mustj receive English as the only legal language of the land, a la instructors like Chuck. But of course the Agents in the literacy education drama do possess Purpose, and as creative Agents they are really hungry for participation in the "drama" of cultural literacy. After all, Carlos and his colleagues have real cultural problems, and they see written language as one means to solutions. Solving problems is action, and cultural action should result in cultural change. This is what Freire's preferred literacy pedagogy is all about. It is truly an act of knowing, 133 through which Agents are able to look critically at the culture which has impacted them, and to move toward reflection and positive action upon their world: Learning to read and write ought to be an opportunity for men to know what speaking the word really means: a human act implying reflection and action. As such it is a primordial human right and not the privilege of a few. Speaking the word is not a true act if it is not at the same time associated with the right of self-expression, of creating and re-creating, of deciding and choosing and ultimately participating in society’s historical process. ("The Adult Literacy 369) In a recent article, Ross Winterowd distinguishes between the two types of cultural literacy, as they relate to literacy pedagogy, by defining Kultur and culture: Kultur is a given, stable, immutable, and of unquestioned value. It is what institu tions "pass on" from generation to generation, in terms of canons, collections, and societal norms. Manifestations of Kultur are Julius Caesar in the eleventh-grade literature anthology, and the literature anthology itself; the Getty Museum in Malibu; the Lincoln Center for the'performing arts. These are "given," donated, conveyed. They are pre-existent and for all practical pur poses eternal. They also, of course, belong to certain classes in society. Culture, on the other hand, is always becoming, being made. In Freire1s view, the cultured person is she who sees herself as a creative agent, not merely a partaker, a donee. ("Literacy: Kultur and Culture" 871) In the literacy classroom, "Kultur" may appear in the form of the "life skills" competencies of the State Framework, or even English mechanics and usage when presented as an 134 a-contextual, monolithic language code, a bottom-up approach. In the context of adult literacy education, Hirsch’s brand of "Kultur” is so far removed from not only the needs and interests of students, but also from their reading and writing proficiency levels, that it really would not be a factor in the "Kultur-culture" debate. Life skills competencies need not represent "Kultur," however, if they are presented as examples and instances of ever-evolving cultural codes, codes which may change at the hands of students and teachers. The pedagogy implied by this code, or meaning making process, represents what Winterowd defines as culture: Culture, then, has no hard-and-fast parameters, but is continually created by creators who reinterpret what is and was and who contribute their own works to the immediate future. Thus, the problem of cultural literacy is not so much one of compiling lists of works, as demonstrating through a dialogic and loving pedagogy that every human is part of the culture-making process. ("Literacy: Kultur and Culture" 874) In the context of identification, literacy should be defined culturally, not "Kulturally." When the Purposes expressed by the literacy students, which focus on the real life problem solving potential of literacy, coalesce with their instructors' Purposes, the resulting, harmoni ous Purpose-Agent ratios reflect Agencies with transparent and dynamic contents. This is to say, the "life skills" and language skills contents are not presented as 135 immutable cultural monoliths, but rather as cultural meaning to be interpreted and re-created and language strategies that may apply differently to different "prob lem" situations. This, then, becomes the top-down approach to literacy education. How does the ideal literacy education "calculus" compare with real classroom experiences at Rancho Santiago? Looking at Agency-Purpose ratios reveals how well the literacy pedagogy coalesces with the expectations of students and instructors. When asked to rate the relative effectiveness of methods of instruction, the majority of ABE instructors clearly preferred demonstration/participa- tion methods to lecture/drill methods, as seen in Figure 5. These instructors responded again and again through the survey and interviews that when students and teachers create learning experiences together, which incorporate rules, ideas, skills, the resulting experiences are successful--far more successful than when instructors talk about ideas, rules, and skills, and students practice ideas, rules, and skills, a-contextually. As cited earlier, students also responded that demonstration/parti cipation activities were the most effective learning methods. For the majority of instructors and learners, expectations for effective literacy pedagogy coalesce and reflect shared, existential Purposes. 136 What kinds of activities do you feel are most important/ useful in the ABE class? 8 A. Spelling and Grammar exercises. 8 B. Hath problems from everyday situations--figuring costs, measuring and so forth. 6 C. Reading books and articles that you select. 6 D. Discussing things that are important to you. 8 E. Writing about things that are important to you. 2 F. Studying the rules of writing and grammar. Why is you? learning to read and write better important to 4 A. To earn more money. 8 B. To get a better job. 6 C. To be able to help my children learn. 8 D. To feel better about myself. 4 E. To participate more in community and government activities. Do students learn best by 8 A. Demonstration--teacher demonstrates an idea, rule, skill, or activity. 2 B. Lecture--teacher talks about an idea, rule, skill or activity. 4 C. Drill--students practice an idea, rule, or skill over and over. 8 D. Participation--students and teachers create the learning experience, rule, idea, skill, activity, together. Fig. 5. Instructor Survey. 137 Nancy, who has enjoyed considerable success as an ABE instructor, as evidenced by the high number of students who have successfully matriculated from ABE to other programs and by years of positive testimony by her stu dents, describes an ideal literacy pedagogy (Agency), which again reflects the Purpose and Agency expectations of Carlos and most other ABE students: The ideal literacy classroom has a feeling of acceptance and success. Students should feel comfortable and welcome. The climate of the classroom is one of the main compon ents of a successful literacy program. The students represent all ages, cultures, and varied socio-economic backgrounds. The one common denominator is their feeling of past failures in the classroom. Building the student's self-esteem is many times more important than teaching her a subject. The materials available in the classroom should be adult materials that relate to the lives of the students. Appropriate materials are extremely important in motivating an adult. The activities in the classroom should include both individualized skill development and group activities designed to meet the students' literacy and life skills' needs. The learning should incorporate what a student already knows and move toward greater understanding of what she wants to know. It is significant to note, I believe, that Nancy includes "individualized skill development" in her description. While the majority of. ABE. students rated demonstration/participation methods superior to lecture/ drill methods of instruction, they also indicated through the survey and interviews that "working on grammar and spelling," for example, were very important activities. 138 This suggests that part of an existential, problem-solving pedagogy may or should deal with direct instruction, at least on the knowledge and skills the students require to "solve problems." Nancy's inclusion of "skills' development" does not violate the harmony of the Agency- Purpose ratios because once the students are engaged in the real-life learning activity, locating and taking advantage of community health services, for example, the state of identification between instructor and students may allow for successful direct instruction. This phenomenon is supported by the experiences of Elsasser in the Bahamas, cited in chapter two, and also aligns with Phelps' levels of literacy development. As one ABE student expressed it, literacy skills and solving one's "cultural problems" seem to go well together. "X like spelling. I like reading activities. Practice working on every day problems. I like grammar." Although almost the opposite of Nancy's description of an ABE class, Chuck's description of an ideal literacy pedagogy (Agency) also is in harmony with his own Purpose for literacy education: The ideal literacy classroom has "adults" enrolled in it who are eager to learn. The classroom has a large study area with a teacher desk and student desks. Regular attendance is important, as many students are waiting to take the class. The materials for this class are based on selected learning packets activity packets (LAPS) prepared by the instructor, using 139 the program curriculum guide. Students must read below 6.0 to enroll in the class. Assignments are made in class so that each class session contains a complete lesson. The weekly schedule should be as follows: Monday--reading and spelling Tuesday--writing and spelling Wednesday--math and spelling Thursday--social studies and spelling It is important that spelling receive special emphasis each day. Clearly, while Chuck's own Agency-Purpose ratio is harmonious, it is in almost direct conflict with the generalized students' Agency-Purpose ratios. As noted earlier, Chuck's classes consistently have among the highest drop rates in the program. Spelling, as "Kultur," is not very compelling. From this brief Dramatistic analysis, the beginnings of a "representative anecdote" starts to emerge. With Act as the center of a literacy education "calculus," Agent-Act becomes the primary ratio. In order to achieve the requisite state of identification between teacher and learner, Purpose-Agent, Agency-Agent, and Agency-Purpose ratios for both students and instructors must be in harmony, resulting in harmonious Agent-Act ratios and most probably successful literacy acquisition. Dramatis tic analysis allows the literacy education investigator to view and define all the separate elements of the calculus. Thus, we can describe and understand the interface between institution and students; we can 140 describe and understand the success of Nancy and her ABE students; and we can describe and understand the failure of Chuck and his students. Agreeing upon a definition of literacy and the problems of illiteracy and agreeing upon an effective literacy pedagogy is only half of the battle. We must also understand the human drama of literacy education, something quite different from abstract definitions and pedagogies. If we can combine an understanding of accepted theories of illiteracy and their proposed treatments with an understanding of the social dynamics involved in literacy education, we should be in a good place to effectively address the very real social problems inherent in adult illiteracy in America. Works Cited 142 Works Cited Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984'. ■ "Dramatism.M International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences" Ed. David L. Still. New York: Macmillan and the Free Press, 1968. ■ ---. A Grammar of Motives. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. A Rhetoric of Motives. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969. Chlkins, Lucy McCormick. Lessons From a Child. New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books, T983. "The Challenge of Change-A Reassessment of the California Community Colleges." Commission for the Review of the Master Plan for Higher Education. Sacramento: March 1986. Cohen, Arthur M., and Florence B. Brawer. "Functional Literacy for Community College Students." Rpt. in Literacy for Life the Demand for Reading and Writing. Ed. Richard W. Bailey and Robin Melanie Fosheim. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1983. English-Language Arts Framework. Sacramento: California State Department of Education, 1987. "Evaluation Study Report: Investing in Change, Competency- Based Adult Education in California." Sacramento: California State Department of Education, 1987. Feldman, David Henry. Beyond Universals in Cognitive Development. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1980. Fiore, Kyle, and Nan Elsasser. "Strangers No More: A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum." College English. 44:2, 1982. 143 Freire, Paulo. "The Adult Literacy Process As Cultural Action for Freedom." Rpt. in Thought and Language/ Language and Reading. Ed. Maryanne Wolf, Mark kT * J *■■■' - - - .... * — ‘ •/ * McQuillan, and Eugene Radwin. Cambridge: Harvard College, 1980. ---. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Seabury, 1973. ---. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1970. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Goodman, Yetta. "The Development of Initial Literacy." Rpt. in Awakening to Literacy. Ed. Hillel Goelman, Antoinette A. Oberg, and Frank Smith. New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books, 1984. Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms" Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Holzman, Michael. "The Social Context of Literacy Education." College English. 48:1, 1986. Kirsch, Irwin S., and Ann Jungeblut. Literacy: Profiles of America's_Young Adults. Princeton: National Assessment of Educational Progress/Educational Testing Service, report No. 16-PL-02, 1986. Kozol, Jonathan. Illiterate America. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985. National Institute of Education and Center for Educational Statistics. Children's English and Services Study. Washington, D.C.: 1980. Reder, Stephen. Functional Literacy Project. Portland: Northwest Regional Laboratory, 1980. Schieffelln, Bambi B., and Marilyn Cochran-Smith. "Learning to Read Culturally: Literacy Before Schooling." Rpt. in Awakening to Literacy. Ed. Hillel Goelman, Antoinette A. Oberg, and Frank Smith. New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books, 1984. 144 Smith, Frank. "The Creative Achievement of Literacy." Rpt. in Awakening to Literacy. Ed. Hillel Goelman, Antoinette A. Oberg, and Frank Smith. New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books, 1984. Steiner, George. "Little-Read Schoolhouse." Rev. of Cultural Literacy, by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. The New Yorker, 1 June 1987. Varnum, Robin. "From Crisis to Crisis: The Evolution Toward Higher Standards of Literacy in the United States." Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 3, 1986. Winterowd, W. Ross. "Literacy: Kultur and Culture." Language Arts. 64:8, December 1987. Appendixes 1 4 6 Appendix A Student Survey Appedndix A Student Survey SURVEY ON LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE Please answer toe following questions, circling the best responses (letters - may be more than one) for each question. 1. What kinds of reading do you do outside of school? 57 A, Daily living - shopping, paying bills, using forms, preparing good, and so forth. 5 mr rates - i 1 h o u r - 5 15 - 6 l i h o u r s - 1 20 it it _ 2 2 " - 2 30 1 ? tt _ 12 3 i " - 1 40 tt tt _ 1 4 " - 1 45 H tt _ 2 5 " - 1 55 It t t . . 1 5 :4 5 " - 1 6 " - 2 7 tt - 1 4 0 - " - 1 55 B. Entertainment - reading books and magazines, TV Guide, rules of games, and so forth. 5 minutes - 1 1 ' hour - 8 10 tt tt _ 1 1* hours - 1 15 it tt _ 2 2 tt _ 4 20 tt tt _ 4 3 si 2 30 tt it _ 6 3 : 4 7 ■ * 1 40 tt tt _ 1 4 it _ 3 45 tt tt _ 1 5 tt 2 50 tt tt _ 1 60 tt _ 1 20 C. Religion - Reading connected with church. 5 minutes - 1 1 hour - 1 10 tt tt _ 1 2 hours - 3 30 I f I f — 3 21 i t _ 1 3 tt _ 2 4 it 1 5 i t _ 3 6 » • _ 1 7 tt „ 1 14 tt _ 1 148 40 D. Work - any reading connected with your work. 5 minutes - 2 1 hour - 2 15 i t n _ 3 1:10 hours - 1 20 n n _ 1 2 n - 4 24 i i it _ 1 21 1 ! _ 1 30 i i it _ 4 3:20 It _ 1 40 H n _ 1 5 II _ 1 45 n i i _ 1 7 15 45 I t _ 1 " “ 1 II - 1 42 E. Interpersonal Communication - reading letters of any communication from family and friends. 10 minutes -r 1 1 hour - 3 15 it i i _ 7 1} hours - 2 20 ii •i _ 2 2 n _ 2 24 i i ii _ 1 3 n _ 3 30 ii it 8 3:20 i i 1 35 i i n _ 2 31 n _ 1 40 it ti _ 1 8 i i _ 1 1 0 i i _ 1 40 i i _ 1 20 F. Reading to others - reading stories to your children for example. 10 minutes - 1 1 hour - 20 i t i i _ 4 1:10 hours - 30 i i n _ 3 2 ft — 45 n n _ 1 21 - 3 If - 3:50 If 8 ft _ 2. Next to the categoires you selected above, please estimate the number of minutes you spend on each, each week (just write the minutes next to the letters you selected). What kinds of activities do you feel are most important/useful in the ABE class? A. Spelling and Grammar exercises. B. Math problems from everyday situations - figuring costs, measuring and so forth. C. Reading books and articles that you select. D. Discussing things that are important to you. E. Writing about things that are important to you. F. Studying the rules of writing and grammar. Why is learning to read and write better important to you? A. To earn more money. B. To get a better job. C. To be able to help my children learn. D. To feel better about myself. E. To participate more in community and government activities. Do students learn best by... A. Demonstration - teacher demonstrates an idea, rule, skill, or activity. B. Lecture - teacher talks about an idea, rule, skill or activity. C. Drill - students practice an idea, rule, or skill over and over. D. Participation - students and teachers create the learning experience, rule, idea, skill, activity, together. 150 1. Describe the ideal ABE classroom. What kinds of textbooks, , activities? What would the teacher do? How many hours per week would you study in class? What would you study, and what subjects would be the most important. I think this class is very usefull for aldult students, because almost those students are very busy the days, they are working, some are busy with their family and some have their business. So that they can not continue about their education. They have to go school at the evening to improve the culture and education is very necessary for every body. I think to go school every day from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. it is enough. Go to school listen to the teacher explains the lesson or they teach some things, we can get many good things. Any subjects we study in the class or in the book are the most important but the best we have to remember or practic in every day, we feel studying that have result if we need to study language we have also go to school to practic, to write, read and understand about it. Language is the most important for foreign people too. 1. I want to be a better reader and writter, because so, I can understand well the importants things That I read and what I write, also wish to reach the goal that I want, that is to be a teacher. 2. Principally in this room; we keep on reading fiction storys and another kind of storys in different Books; about subjects I like to get more Grammar and Math. I think that the Idea of a.b.e. classroom is a very nice thing to work on. And the tesxtbooks and activities are wondeful. The teacher help us alot he spends time with us explaining things that we dont know. I will try to study very hard because I need to learn alot of things that I don't know. The Subject that is very important is learning so that you can become and be someone in your life. I would like spelling. Reading activities. Practice in discussing evry day problems. I would like grammar. 151 - ABE class increase my vocabulary riding and writing - to teach somthing vocabulary, reading, writing, pronuntion - I come 3 hours everyday - English, and my subjects are get a good job and comunication. I would like to study Twelve hours per week in the class. I would study Reading. Because I could speak with any person. I study 12 hours per week. I special study newpaper and. I in class study different subject. 1)-Well ABE class for me is the key for High school subject. Where we can learn all the most important things. To go to Hish school subject. 2)-The textbooks that we use are o.k. for me. 3)-To give us a test every thrusday to see what we have learn during the week. 4)-The hours that we study I feel is enough. 5)-Math, reading, writing would be great for me. I like to study History, because I tink it is very important, talk about the pass and about all the difrends religions, It is quiet. We have dictionarys. I study 1 hour a day. English and Math are very important to me. All of the subjects are important to me. It is very easy for me to study in class because of enviroment. in the classroom I like it here. I want to get my dipolma than go on to college courses. I want to become a nurse. It is impatant to me to get my diploma. 1) I like ABE because. I have the opportunity to learn and remember many things. 2) I study 3 hours every night = 12 hours per week. 3) The most important thing is class distribucion and the teachers. 2. Why do you want to become a better reader and writer? What goals do you have as an ABE student? Why is studying here important to you? Because I needed for graduation from school, I need reader and writer, because went the mail came I have to reader and see what it's. Sometimes to writer a letters to a job or an special I need this for more beter spretion to the people. I study in this school, because 1 want graduate from school and get a good job or go to college to get a carer. Studying here is not that important to me, or being an ABE student. What is important is geting a education. With a education I'll be aball to accomplish more things in my life. I want to be somebody. Because, reader and writer is very important for any kind of communication about job, letters, notes. And reader because, if each of one can read no one's understand what I want to say. The goal what I have in ABE is to get more facility and instructor can guide me in any way but always truth. 1. I want to become a better reader and writer because of self reason. And the thing's that I want to do in life. My goal are to become a good Cosmegology - And a Besiness Person. I want to become a better reader and writer because I need it; if I am a good reader and writer, I can help my kids to do their homework; I'd improve my knowledge in important field as geography and History what I enjoy alot reading. For my is very important to be here studing because here I can learn all what I need and what want especially to read and write. because I like to prepare mysell to something better to be someone in life, to be or do something inportant to feel myself good about myself. the reason is. I want to get a better position in my company or wherever I be and the best way of getting, good work opportunities is studeing y learning a career or skill. I want to learn more because I am a father and my sons will need my help in the future. That's why studying is so importnat to my own benefit. I want to become a better reader and writer, because is very important for me future and I want to help my (my) son with his homework when he don't understand, what he has to do. Is very important to study ind in this school becuase I need to study English class. I like to become a better reader and writer becose I want to learn and understan a good Inglsh. My goal as an ABE student is to knowelen of Math, to get a better job. Like a student of ABE I love this class because it has like a really like to know, Math, English and reading. 1)1 want to become a better reader and writer, because It's necesary for me as an immigrant. 2) My goal as an ABE student is, lern as much as possible, than get a High School Diploma. 3) It's important for me because, I want to settle down in this country, and become an American Citizen someday. 1) Want to become a better reader and writer because, if I know how to read and write I can get a better job and better comunication. So, if I learn how to read and write it will be easier to graduate from highschool. 2) My goals ass a ABE student are, getting better preparation to go for my highschool diplomma. 3) Wy is studying is important to me, because the more education you have the better oportunities you got. So I want keep studying hard so someday I will be ass all those important people who are enyour what they have done. 154 3. Describe the kinds of reading and writing you and your family do at home. It might be useful in answering this question to think of categories, like entertainment, religion, family business, and so forth. I live along but my intreiment it is read telephone bill, when I driving need avility to read rapilly in the freeway. When I get home read magazing. Sometime read the newspaper for looking for job. I like to read America history something intraiteiment. About ABE reading speed it is the most emporton when I fill out in aplication for jab or for school at the college to they give you by the time if you not have abillyty for read fast you can't finish the test. My gold it is wants to be student at the college? We. always read letters and bills, only. I have little girls at home, what I like most to read with them some stories, and beside of helping my family, I alway revewing my home work from school, because every day and seconds that I set here in class I don't want to miss any portion of my class, because I want to improve my education, and move on and on until I can reaches my goal. Since I been here three mounths I have learn alot of things like I have been in this country since four 4 years ago. I like to read Became I like to get my education and I like to do fui tink to my family Became of that maybe I can help my family and maybe I can look for a job. In my home every vory works, theme can study, yust Im studing now. At home usually I read some short storys from some books which I've been enjoying with a dictionary. When I found some new words I wrote them down some pieces of paper and the other side I wrote its mean them I put them together into a box and pick one of them up, if I saw its mean I have to read that word exactly, if I saw word I have to read its mean. I think that is a good way to remember exactly vocabulary. Now I can read book without dictionary but I've been continueing that way. I would like to study engihish class! Becuss I want to learn engihish emportanet for me. Why you want to learn: Because I want to know ? in my ? What are you study? I am study engilish! What are you doing? My father want to open the business in my house. What kinds of your business? Any kinds. Must of the reading and writing that we do at home is in Spanish, some times I read the news paper, some times I read a book to my son when he goes to sleep. We only read and write in english when we get the bills or when we are filling up and application. Im a cook so some times a need to read to follow te recipies. I like the ABE class because is one of the first step to become a high schools student with a lot of orientation. First at all everything we study in this class is very important to keep studying in high school subject, for intance math, gramma, vocabulary reading. 1) I think in ABE class every thing is ok But I think we need more gramar 2) What I like to do at home is, I like to read the newpapers and some magasines. 3) Referent to Mr. Booker. I think he is a good teacher. 156 4. As an ABE student, you attend class several hours each day of the week. Describe what you do in class, explaining what you think are the best activities and assignments. Your answer to this question should include not only what you do, but also what the teacher does. What I do in class is studying vocabulary reading and many other entercsting things which I thing are good for increase my knowledge in the English lenguage and it can help me to understand more and guide me in the American culture. Well my goal is that I want to be better I want to read write and be able to spress my self the right way. I think that this class is realy good the teachers are the best; they help, a lot they realy are helping us to increase our knowledge and I feel realy good about them. (Thanks) According to me, the best activities and assignments are reading and Math sometimes I feel bored and sleepy but I try because I want I could hear and speak English fluently. Usually in the class 1 have much time that didn't work anymore because the way which the teacher teachs. I don't like the way he teach so much. Once in a time a lady teacher replaced him. She was very good teacher. She explained the lesson very clear and happy. I like her very much. It seems she teachs ABE class in the afternoon. Well, I hate to compare the class but I need to do righ now. When 1 was in the morning class, that teacher always put more emphasis an every students I think that teacher like each students understand all. The first problem we have is in grammar. Right now. because how the students gave the answer is they don't understand English, also in that class only speak English. We never spoke Spanish "or'1 other language. That time we were study social activities, U.S. History, Comunities activities. Math, gramar, reading all kind of book, we had every week a text about the stuff we had do all week, in alway let alot homework. I like that way. I hope to have more stuff to study in A.B.E. Thank you for try to help us. 157 We need more Practice on reading and writting. The vest activities that we do is math. The assistent teacher talks too much with the students. In, class we do study different subjects, wich are very interesting: The best activities and assignments are all about math, especialy fractions, wich the teacher trie hard for us to understand. 1) We learning several day but I like to learning all week and you know we have working and I like study. 2) I put attention and I do what the techer splain and also I learn what the teacher say and I feel well because I think I have good teacher. Well, I just get started to be a ABE student. Far as activities and assignment sould be read, writing, spelling etc. To better not only me but to the rest of the class too. The teacher ok, from what I have seening for the short time I've been in here. -Most of the time we do Math, English, Reading Writing and Spelling. General students attend math with more enthusiasm. Many students don't pay attention to the others activides. After 8:30 p.m. teacher still in the classroom, but is no students to teach. What I do in class is studying vocabulary reading and many other enteresting things which I thing are good for increase my knowledge in the English lenguage and it can help me to understand more and guide me in the American culture. 158 Appendix B Competency Based Adult Basic Education Curriculum 159 '•yjij* uu Basic Education Appendix B Competency Based Adult Basic Education Curriculum SU BJEC T FIELD A N D C O U R SE N U M B E R : Adult Basic Education 402 C O U R SE TITLE: Basic Education - Intermediate C O U R SE DESCRIPTIO N/G O AL: Introduction to the review of basic sk ills at the intermediate level (4-5). Stresses development of the sk ills of reading, writing,, spelling, speaking, listening, arithmetic, and citizenship in order to function successfully in society and derive the personal benefits which would contribute to the development of the students' potential. Emphasis is placed on the identification of facts and terms and the ab ility to solve problems in the areas of consumer economics, community resources, health, occupational knowledge, government and law. L E C T U R E H O U R S P E R W E E K : 15 PREREQ UISITE: Beginning Basic Education or equivalent. i 1. C O U R SE O BJECTIVES A N D C O H T E N T OUTLINE: I. Life Skills Competencies A. Consumer Economics The students will show orally, in writing or through demonstration that they are able to: 1. Interpret recipes 2. Use the English and Metric system 3. Interpret advertisements, labels or charts to select the best buys for goods and services 4. Compare price and/or quality to determine the best buys for goods and services 5. Compare methods of purchasing goods and services Including cash, check, money orders, charge, and/or lay-away 6. Interpret classified ads and/or other information to locate housing 7. Interpret lease and/or reotal agreements. 8. Interpret housing laws including tenant rights 9. Interpret personal and/or family budgetary information ' 10. Plan for major purchases 11. Interpret b ills 12. Interpret food packaging labels 13. Identify the resources available to the consumer when confronted with misleading and/or fradulent tactics .14. Interpret .product guarantees and/or warranties • 15. Interpret directions in product owner manuals 16. Relate maintenance procedures for household appliances and/or personal possessions A-2 160 17. Identify and/or use the forms associated with banking services 18. Interpret regulations necessary to obtain a driver's license 19. Compute mileage and/or gasoline consumption 20. Read and interpret maps B. Community Resources The students will show orally, in writing, or through demonstration that they are able to: 1. Use the telephone directory to locate Information including rate and telephone services 2. Interpret telephone billings 3. Interpret telegram rates and/or procedures 4. Interpret transportation schedules and/or calculate transportation fares 5. Use maps related to travel needs 6. Identify and use the forms associated with the postal services 7. Explain how to gain access to and make use of public agencies, f a c ilit ie s , and services available in the community 8. Interpret information associated with alien registration, passport, "green card" 9. Identify the process of tracing a lost letter or parcel 10. Interpret a postal money order form 11. Interpret information about*permit and license requirements 12. Interpret information related to recreational f a c ilitie s and entertainment activities 13. Locate information in entertainment and recreational materials such as T.V. schedules and movie listings C. Health The students will show orally* in writing, or through demonstration that they are able to: 1. Fill out medical health history forms 2. Interpret immunization requirements 3. Interpret medicine labels, including information O n possible side effects 4. Identify the difference between prescription, over-the-counter, and generic medications 5. Interpret product labfel warnings, signs, and symbols 6. Discuss, appropriate first, aid procedures 7. Interpret work safety manuals and/or safety procedures required in the work place 8. List health problems related to drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol and/or identify where treatment may be obtained 9. Recognize facts related to family planning 10. Identify child rearing practices and/or community resources available to assist 1n the development of parenting sk ills 11. Locate medical and health services in the conmunity 161 D. Occupational Knowledge The students will show orally, in writing, or through demonstration that they are able to: 1. Interpret information included in a Social Security application and discuss benefits and deductions 2. Interpret job descriptions and/or identify sources of information about jobs 3. Cite attributes, s k ills , and/or education which may lead to job ■ advancement 4. Recognize and u tilize occupational signs, charts and directions 5. Interpret work safety manuals and/or safety procedures required in • the work place 6„ Prepare a job application or resume 7. Recognize appropriate standards of behavior for employment E. Government and Law « The students will show orally, in writing, or through demonstration that they are able to: 1. Interpret housing laws including tenant rights and anti-descrimination •• laws .2. Interpret a voter registration form 3. Identify and u tiliz e inflorraation services.in the community 4. Interpret com m on legal forms, rules and/or ordinances 5. Identify how to apply for and use Legal Aid. and Legal Services 6. Identify and interpret Small Claims Court procedures 7. Interpret laws affecting door-to-door sales 8. Complete the short form of the income tax 9. Compute and/or state the purpose of sales tax II Basic Skills A, Computation The students will show orally, in writing, or through demonstration that they are able to: 1. Compute averages 2. Compare methods o f purchasing goods and seryices including cash, check, money orders, charge, and/or lay-away 3. Prepare personal and fami.Ty.;bd<jget 4r Compute mileage and/or gasoline consumption 5, Add, subtract, multiply, and divide using decimal fractions 6, Perform multiple operations using decimal fractions 7. Add, subtract, multiply, and divide using mixed fractions 8. Solye practical problems encountered in everyday life situations using the operations listed above. B. Reading Within the vocabulary range of the Lists I and II of the Functional Reading W ord List for Adults, the students will show orally, in writing or through demonstration that they are able to: 1. Recognize and use visual and context clues, phonic analysis, prefixes and suffixes, roots and stems, and syllabication to assist in identifying and determining meaning of new words 2. Read, comprehend, and answer questions about information contained in a sentence or paragraph 3. Identify the main idea of a paragraph 4.. Identify words which have the same . or opposite meanings as • words in a given sentence or paragraph 5. Read, comprehend, and answer questions on a job application, the California driver's handbook, a voter registration form, a clothing label or tagy classified ad, highway map, travel schedule, medicine bottle label, or u tility b ill. 6. Locate and use printed information from sources such as telephone books, catalogs, newspapers, maps, schedules, etc. - 7. Use a dictionary to check pronunciation, spelling and meaning 8. Identify the sequence of events in a given selection 9. Identify and choose the correct meanings of possessives,' homophones, homographs, arid words ■with- multiple meanings 10. Interpret and follow written directions 11. Identify and use tables of content and indexes 12. Use reading as a learning tool C. Oral Language The students will demonstrate that they are able to: 1. Relate clear sequential directions for completing a specific task 2. Participate’in discussions/state opinions/solve problems in classroom and/or r|n community work, or personal settings 3. Describe an object, event, or experience using appropriate organization, delivery, content, and language D. Written Language Within the vocabulary range of Lists I and II of the Functional W ord List for Adults, the students will demonstrate that they are able to: 1. Write complete sentences and incorporate them into notes, short paragraphs and letters 2. Use capitals for beginning sentences, proper names and title s 3. Use periods and question marks; commas in series, addresses, and dates; and apostrophes in contractions and possessives 4. Alphabetize words, forms, letters to the second letter E. Citizenship Skills The students will show orally, in writing or through demonstration that they are able to: 1. Recognize and observe the obligations of good citizenship, e .g ., jury duty . 2. Participate in community activities 3. Register to vote 4. Yote in school, local, state and federal elections E V A L U A T IO N I. California Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS) Adult Life S k ills, Level B II. Teacher made inventories and criterion-referenced tests and tasks III. A B L E (A D U L T BASIC L E A R N IN G E X A M IN A TIO N ) Levels I and II IV. T A B E (Test of Adult Basic Education) Level M V. Pre- Post tests which accompany learning materials fYI. Nelson Silent Reading Test M E T H O D OF•IN ST R U C T IO N - Review of basic sk ills and objectives of beginning level. A bilities in each general sk ill area as well as functional competencies are assessed upon entrance into the program. Students enter the program at their own level and progress at their own rate. Teachers develop a course of study to meet the needs of each student including participation in individual, peer, small group, and class a ctiv ities. Levels are discussed individually with students as they enroll. As sk ills are mastered, progress is recordedaand the next step initiated. Students are kept informed as to achievement and objectives to be accomplished. Subject matter units are not followed in any particular order but depend on the needs and objectives of each Individual class and student. A regular sequence of developmental sk ills Is followed. The time allotted to each subject area differs for each student depending on individual needs. Ability in the sk ills is demonstrated by actual completion of designated tasks. Tasks include r e a l-life simulations, worksheets, games, role-playing, discussions, and demonstrations. It is to be emphasized that this outline is to be used as a guide. The course content for the intermediate basic education student should be adjusted to meet the needs of the individual student and the individual class. 164 Appendix C Instructor Survey Appendix C Instructor Survey SURVEY ON LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE (INSTRUCTOR RESPONSES) Please answer the following questions, circling the best responses (letters - may be more than one) for each question. 1. What kinds of reading do you do outside of school? 8 A. Daily living - shopping, paying bills, using forms, preparing good, and so forth. 30 minutes - 1 .1 hour - 3 10 B. Entertainment - reading books and magazines, TV Guide, rules of games, and so forth. 1 hour - 2 1$ hours - 1 2 " - 1 10 C. Religion - Reading connected with church. 30 minutes - 1 1 hour - 2 2 hours - 1 21 " - 1 4 " - 1 10 D. Work - any reading connected with your work. 1 hour - 1 2 hours - 1 15 " - 1 20 " - 1 10 E. Interpersonal Communication - reading letters of any communication from family and friends. 15 minutes - 1 3 hours - 1 20 " " - 2 30 " " - 1 F. Reading to others - reading stories to your children for example. 40 minutes - 1 1 hour - 1 2 hours - 1 5 " - 1 166 2. Next to the categoires you selected above, please estimate the number of minutes you spend on each, each week (just write the minutes next to the letters you selected). 3. What kinds of activities do you feel are most important/useful in the ABE class? 8 A. Spelling and Grammar exercises. 8 B. Math problems from everyday situations - figuring costs, measuring and so forth. 6 C. Reading books and articles that you select. 6 D. Discussing things that are important to you. 8 E. Writing about things that are important to you. 2 F. Studying the rules of writing and grammar. 4. Why is learning to read and write better important to you? 4 A. To earn more money. 8 B. To get a better job. 6 C. To be able to help my children learn. 8 D. To feel better about myself. 4 E. To participate more in community and government activities. 5. Do students learn best by... 8 A. Demonstration - teacher demonstrates an idea, rule, skill, or activity, 2 B. Lecture - teacher talks about an idea, rule, skill or activity. 4 C. Drill - students practice an idea, rule, or skill over and over. 8 D. Participation - students and teachers create the learning experience, rule, idea, skill, activity, together. 1. In a paragraph or two, describe the Ideal literacy classroom - who is in it, what is in it, what goes on in ft? The people in the literacy classroom would include a heterogeneous groups of students at all levels of proficiency (up to perhaps a minimum standard) from all backgrounds, including native and non-native speakers, a skillful instructor, and an instructional assistant, A wide assortment of workbooks, texts, and other instructional materials at all levels of readability (non-reader - 8th (at least)), appropriate to the adult learner in terms of content and format, would be readily accessible. Long tables with chairs (as opposed to individual desks) would be preferred. Tape recorders and computers with accompanying tapes and software would also be available. The activity in the classroom would include both individualized skill development and group activities designed to meet the students' literacy and life skills' needs. The learning would incorporate what a student already knows and move toward greater understanding of what he/she needs to know. The ideal literacy classroom is comprised of a wide variety of students and a teacher who is willing and able to deal with them both collectively and on an individual basis. Students might be from many different countries (including the U.S.) and have widely dissimilar educational backgrounds and abilities. This divergence makes many kinds of learning possible. Shared experiences and previously learned skills which are shared enable them to improve reading, math, grammar, logic skills. Hopefully, they can then get better jobs, have increased self esteem and function more confidently and effectively in our society. This classroom should have a wide variety of reading materials, maps, pictures, a science and math center, areas for group interaction and some space for individual study. Hopefully, there's a lot of interaction occurring among students and many varied teacher-directed activities to develop skills, self-image and maybe friendship. It should be a place where it's o.k. to make a mistake. Hopefully, you'll learn from it! The ideal literacy classroom has "adults" enrolled in it who are eager to learn. The classroom has a large study area with a teacher desk and student desks. Regular attendance is important as many students are waiting to take the class. The materials for this class are based on selected learning activity packets (laps) prepared by the instructor. Students must read below 6.0 to enroll in the class. Assignments are made in class so that each class session contains a complete lesson. The weekly schedule will be as follows: 168 Monday Individual and Classroom 1. Reading/Spelling^ 2. Questions/Answers Tuesday 1. Wr itin g / S pellin g* 2. Questions/Answers Wednesday 1. Mathematics / Spelling^ 2. Questions/Answers Thursday 1. Social Studies/Spelling^ 2. Questions/Answers ♦Special emphasis will be given to "spelling" each session. The ideal literacy classroom has a feeling of acceptance and success. Students should feel comfortable and welcome. The climate of the classroom is one of main components of a successful class. The students represent all ages, cultures, and varied socio-economic backgrounds. The one common denominator is their feeling of past failures in the classroom. Building the student's self-esteem is many times much more important than teaching them a subject. The materials available in the classroom should be adult materials. For example, a person reading at the second grade level should not be given a second grade book that was developed for children. Appropriate materials are extremely important in motivating an adult. 169 2- In a paragraph or two, describe the kinds of reading and writing you do everyday - you might generalize by categories - worlTT entertainment j religion, household management, parenting, and so forth. : My everyday reading include 1) work-related reading, such as students' writing, memos from colleagues; supervisors, and classroom materials, 2) functional reading, such as menus, newspapers, cookbooks, frozen food directions! Signs in stores, on the street, utility bills, etc., 3) recreational reading with my daughter (age 4J). Several times a week I participate in recreational reading such as novels or short stories and professional journal reading. I enjoy reading and try to spend as much time as possible doing a variety of reading. This includes the daily newspaper and a variety of magazines. Novels, especially historical fiction and biographies are among my favorites, as well as short stories (lack of time!) Food and cooking are of interest to me so I read many food related magazines and cookbooks. Religious publications and those dealing with family life are also among those I read. Educational and curriculum materials are some of my work related readings. Work-related writing might include lesson plans and curriculum development as well as correction notes on student assignments. Other writing might include personal letters and business correspondence. (Specific enough, John, or do you need titles, etc?) The daily reading assignments are as follows: Work 1. Class Roll Sheets 2. Textbooks a. U. S. History I & II b. American Civics c. Economics d. Government e. Psychology f. Family Living g. World History I & II h. Anthropology i. World Cultures I & II 3. Newspaper (The Register) 4. District Mail 5. Textbook Information from Publishers Bible Study 1. Holy Bible + Aids I usually read a variety of materials each day. The materials include two newspapers, educational reports and articles, magazines, and the bible. I usually write reports, memos, curriculum proposals, letters (business and personal) and checks regualrly. I read one or two books a month and numerous journal and magazine articles on a variety of subjects. 171 3. In a paragraph or two, explain why it is Important for adults to become literate in American society. To meet the ever-increasing demands of American life, it is imperative for adults to become literate. The complexities of all aspects of American life - in the workplace, at home, with regard to handling family matters, etc. demand a higher degree of literacy than ever before. In the workplace, more and more jobs demand that employees be able to understand written communications, and respond in writing as well. With the rapid technological changes that are occurring in America today, more employees need excellent literacy skills to maintain or change careers several times. At home, managing a household requires numerous literacy skills ranging from reading operational instruction manuals for appliances to under standing changes - tax laws and consumer issues. Deficient literacy skills prevent a person from making informed decisions on all aspects of everyday concerns. Family life can become very trying when parents lack the basic skills needed to communicate with their children's school and teachers, or to provide important tutoring with homework. In addition, functioning as an informed citizen becomes impossible for someone who cannot read the newspaper or understand the voting process. This is probably the most tragic consequences of all. We cannot remain a truly free and democratic nation unless we are a nation of literate, well informed and actively participating people. To function adequately an adult must be literate (in today's American society). Most pre-literate or semi-literate adults are severely hampered by their inability to read. Grocery shopping, laundry, searching for a better job or a needed service, all require the ability to read. There is also the possibility of being cheated on contracts or other legal documents if a person is unable to read and understand. Everyday activities banking, paying bills, driving, reading directions) can't be performed efficiently. Self-esteem suffers! It is important for adults to become literate— able to read and write— in American society. Adults must be able to read numbers, facts, and general information. Many adults are very much in need of basic skills to survive on the job. These skills include reading, writing, and spelling. Vocal speech sounds in English are becoming laws in many states. Consequently, adults must learn to read and write English, the language of the land. Finally, a literate person in America must be able to receive both individualized and .group instruction, geared to an arbitrary level of ability. 172 A person needs to be literate in order to function in our society. Reading and writing are essential skills necessary in daily living. A functionally illiterate person would surely experience a feeling of failure, inadequacy, or low self-esteem when faced with his inability to perform basic skills. Thus, the individual's feeling of self-worth would be negative and detrimental to the total person. 173 Appendix D Subject-Verb Agreement Exercise A p p en d ix D S u b je c t- V e r b A g reem en t E x c e r is e SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT DO NOT WRITE ON THIS SHEET RULE 1 - A verb agrees with its subject in number Examples: a. The mailman has brought you a package. mailman (one person) has brought (singular verb) b. The packages have been sent, packages (two things) have been sent (plural verb) NOTE: Two subjects connected by the word and usually require a plural verb. c.. The boy and hia slater have tickets for Disneyland. boy, slater (two subjects) have (plural verb) RULE 2 - The following list of words are singular and require a singular each everybody nobody somebody either everyone no one someone one everything neither something none Everybody has his own sleeping bag. everybody (singular) has (singular verb) Is anyone going to the cafeteria? anyone (singular) is going (singular verb) RULE 3 - Some subjects end in £ but are singular in meaning. These subjects take a singular verb. news mumps athletics dollars two-thirds physics cents three-fourths politics measles five hours economics pounds civics the United States mechanics Examples: a. Ten dollars is too much to pay for lunch. ten dollars (singular) is (singular verb) b. Four hours seem s long enough to prepare for the test, four hours (singular) seems (singular verb) RULE 4 - The pronoun you always requires a plural verb. Examples: a. Do you have a ten-speed bicycle? i ? s verb; anybody anyone anything Examples: a. b. 174 T7$ SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT (Continued) b. Sharon, were you at home last night? have, were (plural verbs) RULE 5 - Here and there are usually not subjects. Examples: a. There are only five boys on the camping trip. boys (plural subject) are (plural verb) b. Here Is my little sister. sister (singular subject) is (singular verb) RULE 6 - Words Joined to the subject of a sentence by such expressions as the following! do not affect the number of the verb or subject. Examples: a. Mrs. Jones, as well as her daughter, is an excellent skier. Mrs. Jones (singular subject) is (singular verb) b. The boys, accompanied by the girls have planned the dance. boys (plural subject) have planned (plural verb) c. The team, along with the coach, left on the bus for the game. team (singular subject) left (singular verb) as with together with as well as accompanied by not including r l?(. 176 Appendix E Application for Employment Application for Em ploym ent name 177 PH ILLIPS INSURANCE COMPANY APPLICATION FOR EMPLOYMENT N am e________________________ Appendix E Employment Activities D ate_______ Address. City___ Phone. S tate. Zip. Soc. Sec. No.. Education Please circle the highest y ear you com pleted. High school 9 10 1112 C ollege 13 14 15 16 C ollege Post-Grad From to From to From to _____ D eg ree. D egree. Name of co lleg e. Employment History List job history. Begin with last (or current) employer. Employer From To Type of Duties Starting Salary Ending Salary 1 Reason for Leaving 1. Name • Address a n d Phone No. Supervisor 2. Name Address a n d Phone No. Supervisor Personal References (Do not list relatives or former employers.) N am e Address Telephone I state that all the information in the ________ : ____________________ ab o v e ap p licatio n is true. Applicant's signature Date Consumer Form 1 1 Consumer e n d Careor Mathematics Consumer Forms a n d Problems Masters * Scott. Foresman an d Company Employment Test name 178:' Northgate M anufacturing Co. Test for Employment N am e. Solve e a c h problem a n d circle the letter of the correct answer. 1. 83,406 - 75,639 2. 483 x 95 3. 9252 + 36 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. '*9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 374 + 839 + 1405 + 712 27.49 + 8.95 + 51.08 503.6 - 82.41 64.95 x 0.06 15.13 + 1.7 «1I+71 2 3 |- 1 6 | 8 | x 20 15+2J Sue m a d e a purchase that totaled $23.46. She g a v e the clerk $30. How m uch c h a n g e should Sue receive? 14. Mike works as a delivery person. One w eek his tips for e a c h d a y w ere $5, $11, $8, $7, a n d $14. What w as his a v e ra g e am ount for tips e a c h d a y that w eek? 15. Jo an bought a sofa for $485. She m a d e a dow n paym ent of 20%. What w as the am ount of the dow n paym ent? a. 8777 a. 45,635 a. 261 a. 3290 a. 87.52 a. 421.19 a. 3.987 a. 9.8 a. 1 1 § a 7j| a. 160| a. 6| b. 7877 b. 45,885 b. 249 b. 3410 b. 86.92 b. 321.5 b. 3.897 b. 7.8 b. 11} b. 6 b. 168 b* H c. 7767 c. 46,215 c. 247 c. 3330 c. 88.02 c. 421.21 c. 4.027 c. 7.9 c. 12} c. 6 Ji 12 c. 1613 c. 12 d. 12.233 d. 44,685 d. 257 d. 3320 d. 87.32 d. 411.19 d. 3.787 d. 8.9 d . 124 d. 62 d. 186 d. 121 a. $7.64 b. $6.54 c. $17.54 d. $7.46 a. $45 b, $6 c. $9 d. $8 a. $97 b. $20 c. $505 d. $388 Consumer Form 2 179 Appendix F Employment Communication Activities Appendix F Employment Commup'tg,atioa Activities In th e U.S. H a Chau came to the United States in 1982. In Vietnam he had worked as a bus driver. W hen Ha arrived, he studied English for nine months, and then he got a part-time job as a kitchen helper in a restaurant. For three months, Ha worked and srudied English. W orking as a kitchen helper, Ha didn’t make much money, but he got a lot of experience and improved his English. After six months, Ha got a full-time job as a cook in a bigger restaurant. He liked the new job, and the pay was better, too. Think about these questions: 1. How can a pan-tim e job help you? 2. W hy do people change jobs? [ Discussing Problems C o n v ersa tio n 1 Som is asking his friend about a problem. Som: Jim , do you have a minute? Jim : Sure. W hat’s up? Som: I want to take an evening class. W ho should I talk to about changing my hours? Jim : Talk to your manager. Than' ' "in U sefu l E x p ressio n s 1. Finding out who to talk to about a problem ■ W ho do I talk to about changing shifts? caking my vacation? getting a personal-ieave day? a mistake on my paycheck? the work schedule? P ractice Practice finding out who to talk to about a problem. Change the problem each time. Example: a mistake on my paycheck B W ho do I talk to abouc a mistake on my paycheck? □ Talk to your supervisor. B Thanks. 1. my work schedule 2. changing my hours 3. getting a personal-leave day 4. taking my vacation 2. Arranging to talk to som eone B Excuse me, Mr. Jones. Could I talk to you a minute? □ I’m sorry. I’ m busy right now. B W hat would be a good time for you? □ How abouc tomorrow at 2:00? B Okay. See you tomorrow at 2:00. P ractice Practice conversations like the above with a partner. 3. Stating your problem W hat can I do for you? W hat's the problem? I'd like to change to the day shift, have Sundays off. I think there’ s a mistake on my paycheck, the work schedule. I need tomorrow morning off to go to the dentist. C on versation 2 Later that morning, Som scops his manager in the hall. Som: Excuse me, Mr. Stern. Could 1 talk to you a minute? Manager: I’m sorry Som. I'm busy right now. How about later this aftcrmxm? W,wt be a itood time for you, Mr. Stern;'' M anager: How abouc 3:00 in my office? Som: Gtxid. I ll see you at 3:00 then. C on versation 3 At 3:00, Som goes to Mr. Stem's office ant! knocks on the dcxir. Mr. Stern: Come in and sit down, Som. Som: Thanks, Mr. Stern. Mr. Stern: Okay. W hat can I do for you? Som: 1 need to work the day shift on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mr. Stern: Why do you want to change shifts now, Som? Som: I want to take an English class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Mr. Stern: 1 hat s a good idea. I’ll check, but 1 think it should Ik okay. Som: 1 hanks a lot, Mr. Stern. 1 really appreciate it. Mr. Stern: No problem, Som. HI get back to you tomorrow, okay? Som: Gixxl. Sec you tomorrow then. W rite T for true ami F for false. I. Soin's supervisor can’t talk to him in the morning. 2. Som anddus supervisor are going to meet at 2:00 this aftern.xm, 3. Som wants to change shifts. 4. Som wants to work Tuesday anti Thursday evenings. — ^ ^ r- Stern W (H tt'il Som tomorrow if he can change shifts. Appendix G Student Newsletter 184 A p p en d ix G S tu d e n t N e w s l e tt e r NOVEMBER 10-1987 STUDENTS PASS PROPIEHCY E X A M IN A T IO N - In o rd e r to receiv e a high school diploma from anyu school in California, you must p a ss a readinq proficiency examination, when you enrol! in high school s u b je c ts a t Centennial Education C en ter, you a re given a reading t e s t . If you s c o re 8.1 (th is means eighth g rad e f i r s t month reading ability) you m eet th e requirem ent. However, if you s c o re below t h i s , (8.0) o r less, you must enroll in Reading Improvement and p a rtic ip a te in th e c la s s until you have developed th e s k i l l s needed to p a ss th e examination. Many s tu d e n ts have made g r e a t p ro g re s s th is sem ester in th e reading c e n te r and have improved th e ir reading s c o r e s by se v e ra l y e a rs in .lust a month o r two. we a re proud o f th e s e s tu d e n ts and would like to recognize them. They a re listed below: Bui B ach Brenda Campos Alan Chang Ofelia Chavez Bertie Covington Martha Galvan Lydia Gil Manual Gutierrez Sansanee V. Maria Knepper Pan Lennon Daniel Lopez Corinna Miranda Taun Nguyen Mieg Nguyen Marcelina 0‘ Campos J o s e Gutierrez Bob M ao Ana Hernandez O U R STUOENTS PAPER HEEDS Y O U All s tu d e n ts in te r e s te d In helping on our new s tu d e n t new spaper a re invited to come to th e Reading C en ter on T hursday, a t 12 noon. M e need your a rtic le s a n d /o r your help! Please se e Bach Bui, Brenda Campos, Chris P itch ess, o r Ann U .scial. IN TERV IEW S iiiTH SUCCESSFUL STUDENTS Monica Ramos co n d u cted se v e ra l Interviews with s tu d e n ts who su c c e ssfu lly p assed th e proficiency t e s t . B ertie Covington snd M artha Galvan answ ered question f o r Monica. They b o th ag reed t h a t studying on th e com puter was a g r e a t help in improving th e ir vocabulary. Reading a lo t and searching f o r th e main jdea also helped. B ertie emphasized th e im portance o f reading all th e question on th e t e s t v ery c arefu lly . Che also s t r e s s e d th e need to c o n c e n tra te . B oth M artha and B ertie a g re e d t h a t th e ir time s p e n t in th e reading c e n te r , working on th e com puters, atten d in g th e vocabulary w orkshops and reading th e m aterials specifically assigned to them h as been a w onderful help. • CHINESE PROFESSOR ATTENDS C.E.C. Song Fan a tte n d s c.e.c. b u t it was n o t many y e a r ago t a h t he ta u g h t Chinese lite r a tu r e in his m other co u n try -ch in a. He also ta u g h t b reath in g e x e rc ise s in a b eau tifu l p a rk in Nanking, a c ity on th e Jiansu Province. He made many s tu d e n ts , and th e y made ex ecellen t p ro g r e s s and dram atically improved th e ir h ealth . This k n d o f Chinese tra d itio n a l and classic physical e x e rc ise is still n o t welcomed in th e U.S.A., according t o Song. Most do n o t realize th e b e n e fits o f deep b reathing. Song Fan is a tte n d in g c la s s e s in A.B.E. He is a s tu d e n t o f Jacq u e O'Lea's. PATRICIA ROCHA'S FAUORITE PO EM U PW A R D f t f f i R r s i c f r f a i j f GLAD FOR THE COUNTRY LANES, A N D THE FALL OF D E W . AFTER THE SUN. THE R A IN . AFTER THE R A IN . THE SUN. THIS !S THE N A Y OF LIFE "ILL THE H---------------- TILL W O R K IS DONE. ALL THAT W E HEED TO D O , " C R O W “ THE SKY.
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