[AAACE-NLA] Boomerang Brings Deja Vu

[tsticht@znet.com]

George: Interestingly, and probably not surprisingly, I have tended to place
Functional Context Education as the broader conceptually and empirically
based framework, and I have subsumed Paulo's work as part of the historical
sequence in the professional wisdom development of FCE from the Freedman's
Schools after the Civil War up to Paulo's work (see the second FCE notebook
below)

FCE is more broadly based since in Cast-off Youth we reviewed eight major
studies in the military on how to redesign vocational, job training courses
to accommdate lower literacy personnel. In fact, the phrase, Functional
Context Method was coined by Harry Shoemaker in 1960 to describe his work
on electronics training for the U. S. Army. I enlarged the term to
Functional Context Education to incorporate basic skills education into the
framework. By the way, Shoemaker went on to be a Diector of Training for the
old Bell Telephone company.

The first FCE notebook cited below also contains chapters integrating the
new literacies (multiliteracies), social basis of cognition, and the human
cogntive system development into the FCE framework. The FCE principles seem
to work across a range of educational contexts and they have more empirical
as well as professional wisdom supporting them than any other framework
thay I have sound.

A good reading of the Cast-off Youth book and the two FCE notebooks will
provide a solid understanding of FCE principles, theories of cognitive
development, theory of literacy as graphics technology, and case studies
applying FCE to integrated vocational, parenting, health and family
literacy programs.

Thanks for your comments!

Tom Sticht

FCE Resources online:

Functional Context Education: Making Learning Relevant (1997 edition).
Eight chapters including The Power of Adult Literacy Education, Some
Challenges of Diversity for Adult Literacy Education, Views On Contemporary
Cognitive Science, Introduction to Functional Context Education, Functional
Context Education and Literacy Instruction, and four case studies in
applying Functional Context Education to the design of programs that
integrate (or embed, contextualize) basic skills and vocational or
parenting education (workplace literacy, family literacy).
http://www.nald.ca/library/research/context/context.pdf

Functional Context Education: Making Learning Relevant in the 21st Century
(2005
edition).
Functional Context Education (FCE) materials available online in several
nations, the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) survey, National Adult
Assessment of Literacy (NAAL) survey, FCE in historical perspective,
(1860-Present) including Paulo Freire and Learner Centered, Participatory
Literacy Education. Methodologies used in adult literacy research for
determining what is relevant to youth and adult learners; five case studies
illustrating the application of FCE in parenting, vocational training, and
health literacy.
http://www.nald.ca/library/research/fce/FCE.pdf














Quoting gdemetrion at msn.com:

> Tom and others,
>
> I would still like to speak of context-based literacy as the underlying
> framework and functional-context theory as one important subset.  As you
> and others have mentioned, your early work was circulating around the
> time of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), with a somewhat
> different politics of literacy (ergo, context) than your early work on
> literacy in the military and workplace.  Then the more recent work on the
> new literacy studies coming out of the UK and brought to the US in part,
> by way of Juliet Merrifield.
>
> There are some very broad affinities among these three frameworks, but
> notable differences as well.
>
> Your early work is an important contribution.  Moreover, what I admire is
> how you have expanded on the contexts which drive your early work into
> all of the major areas of literacy, defined as a metaphor for the
> acquisition of knowledge, perhaps, one might say, through print-based
> resources, though I know the later phrase is contestable.
>
> I think what happened historically, is that you discovered your theory
> largely independently of other theoretical work on literacy in your
> empirical work in the government, while other trends very much were in
> the air with the anti-Vietnam war movement and the breakdown of
> colonization and the various liberationist movements that has spawned.
> Enter Paulo Freire, the Frants Fanon  of South America who very much had
> a strong appeal to progressive voices in North America as well as
> throughout the world.
>
> One might say that politically, your early work on functional-context
> theory was broadly in tuned with the modernization presuppositions of
> Post WWII United Nations effort as well as the Kennedy administration
> while Freire's work ushered in a very sharp counter-narrative to that
> then prevailing presupposition, which in a postindustrial guise has
> gained new birth (actually never left in recent times.
>
> hen we had the new literacy studies as sort of a liberal synthesis which
> opens itself to critique from both the literacy left and right.  Sylvia
> Scribner's 1984 essay, Literacy in Three Metaphors provides a schematic
> overview of the three schools.  I sought to build on this essay in my own
> article, Discerning the Contexts of Adult Literacy Education
> http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/george/discern/cover.htm and in a more
> exhaustive (some would say exhausting) way in Conflicting Paradigms in
> Adult Literacy Education.
>
> A final note; the fact that the Dean of adult literacy studies is still
> vigorously at work some 40-45 years after his original; research with as
> much energy and passion as ever is something to admire, well beyond
> anything I could possibly emulate.
>
> Keep it up, bro!
>
> Best,
>
> George Demetrion
>