[AAACE-NLA] Boomerang Brings Deja Vu

[Catherine B. King]

Hello Tom and George:

I haven't kept up with your work Tom, and have only been a remote
viewer here of late.  However, I was interested in your comment to
George about your work "subsuming" Paulo Freire's work?

Judging from what I have read of your work, and of Paulo Freire's
work, your own work may have come during and after his work
as an historical sequence and, in that sense, it "subsumes" Freire's
work.

However, central to Freire's work was the fundamental purpose
of literacy--which was not only to learn to read in the basic sense
of corresponding with written text, but to read as an avenue to
self-reflection, and through that self-reflection to an ability to
perform ideological critique.

The ideological critique, of course, is of the social, ethical, and
political powers that one finds oneself in, especially if we find
ourselves on the edge of slavery and of political destitution, as
many of Freire's students did.

In this sense, becoming literate (functionally or otherwise) is not
only to be able to "walk around" intelligently, or to "function,"
well within a given context, which is how I read your work when
I did read it, but to also raise critical questions about how that
context is shaped and what the power structures are that effect
our lives as we live in that context--in more concrete words, just
how does that work, anyway--that I am poor and on the bottom,
and someone else has power over me?

I am wondering if you now consciously incorporate such a purpose
or ability to perform ideological critique as an important "function"
of literacy and education as Freire did so that we can know further,
and besides some pedagogical similarities and historical sequencing,
just how your work subsumes his.

Regards to you and to George,

Catherine King

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <tsticht at znet.com>
To: "National Literacy Advocacy List sponsored by AAACE" 
<aaace-nla at lists.literacytent.org>
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: [AAACE-NLA] Boomerang Brings Deja Vu


> 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
>>
>
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