[AAACE-NLA] AAACE-NLA Digest, Vol 51, Issue 17

Mon Aug 27 15:24:16 EDT 2007

Sorry I didn't answer you sooner, but we were doing registration all this week, which means almost 70 hours of work trying to open some doors for people.  Still, it's my pleasure and my avocation to help new students get into class.  I always say that new students are just friends we haven't met yet.

Nancy, I admire your dedication to serving the learners in your program, despite inadequate and shaky funding.  I never meant to accuse you of forsaking your clients, and I'm sorry if you took my message personally.  After your flame-mail I guess I know how that feels.

To answer your question, I am a researcher, but primarily I'm a teacher, program administrator and advocate.  For more than a decade I've scraped to get by as I've worked in Adult Ed, teaching ESL at all levels, ABE and GED in workplaces, LEAs and CBOs.  I've taught in basements, in attics, near stamp presses; I've taught wearing gloves and sweltering in the heat; trying to help adults feel good about themselves as we sit in plastic kids' furniture in a room with no chalk.  I've brought men to the hospital and women to protective services.  

Yes, I do have a relationship with the "clientele", I'm not some stuffy academic; I'm not on the outside looking in; these are my friends and family.  

I was writing about the way that business interests have subsumed the agenda of adult ed, conflating it with an economic need rather than a human right. Perhaps I spoke too broadly when I said that "we in adult ed" have some part in it.  

Perhaps I should have said "almost all of the people that I have met through MCAE, MassALL, the Massachusetts DOE, UMass Boston and all the other associations I have met with, sat with, advocated with".  I have gone side-by-side with dedicated people who were fighting the good fight, and we have used Tom Sticht's numbers (and had him as a guest speaker) to help build support for Adult Ed in a neoconservative funding environment.  

You see, the transition was shoved down my throat too.

Still, when you ask if we were "ever given the opportunity to offer any sort of input otherwise, to anyBODY who gave a rip or had the power to influence the proposed changes???" I'd have to say that yes, we were.  David Rosen sent out notification when the WIA was being reauthorized and we had a chance for input.  We've worked hard to build a relationship with our legislators, and now they get it.  Our state reps and senators come to our registrations and literally open doors for these people, even when there are no cameras nearby.  

Who speaks for adult learners?  We do, and so do they.  In 2002, state funding for adult ed was cut in half in November.  This meant that ABE in Massachusetts would close its collective doors in December, leaving 27,000 students without classes and dissolving the professional field.  ABE programs started a call-in, with scripts to help learners speak to their state reps, and they clogged the phones.  Rallies were held across the state.  Full funding was restored.  One senator said that it was one of the most effective advocacy campaigns he had ever seen, and the learners came to believe that they could make changes.  I am amazed at the courage of low intermediate learners who called the Speaker of the House's office in English.  

I think we can make changes too.  That's why I have become a researcher.  But I'm still a teacher and an advocate for our clients.

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re:  Reply to Debbie Yoho in 51-6 (Nancy Hansen)

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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:20:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Nancy Hansen <sfallsliteracy at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [AAACE-NLA] Reply to Debbie Yoho in 51-6
To: National Literacy Advocacy List sponsored by AAACE
	<aaace-nla at lists.literacytent.org>
Message-ID: <361328.26311.qm at web34710.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Dear Kevin and other subscribers:

  You know, there's too little time/too much to say.  But I must speak to a couple of points you made in this post.  I'm giving my best brief shot, Kevin.

  I took some of your message personally.  Are you a researcher?  For how long?  Do you have a hands-on relationship of some sort or other with the clientele you said come from "socioeconomic realities of race, class, and gender" categories?  In other words, do you really know them?

  You wrote:
  << I would just like to broaden the focus a bit: Debbie rightly points out that ?business interests succeeded in highjacking the adult education agenda and recasting it as an ?investment??, but I would also argue that we in adult education bear some responsibility, since we went along with it. >>

  My comments come from long-term literacy administration involvement in the literacy field and I feel you are so wrong in saying that "we in adult education bear some responsibility, since we went along with it."  Not I!  I did not "go along" with any of the changes that occurred.  

  I have hands-on contact with these folks ... you know, the ones whose lower socioeconomic status and class designations leave more doors closed than open?  The ones whom need advocates to break down the wall and open the windows to opportunities??  Administrators like Deborah and I had the transition to the "highjacking (of) ... adult education" shoved down our throats.  We did not willingly "go along with it".  Far larger/heftier powers out there than us -- the small program administrators, who were doing the best job we could with the lot we've been dealt -- made that decision and told us to live with it. 

  I saw it coming.  When adult literacy was going to be tied to workforce funding, I heard the bell ring a death knell for adult literacy skill development, for believing that building life skills where reading and writing were truly "just the basics" for the learners served.  There is power in funding.  When there is inadequate funding?  There's less power to have an impact on any decision that is made.

  You wrote:
  << Adult Ed has bought in to the argument that its justification is an economic one. It?s a case of live by the sword and die by the sword ... >>

  Were any one of us, who are in service to the very lowest skilled learner, ever given the opportunity to offer any sort of input otherwise, to anyBODY who gave a rip or had the power to influence the proposed changes???  Not here anyway.  I'll let Deborah speak to whether or not input was allowed from HER, related to justifying the change to be for the sake of economics.  I have never "echoed the argument that education is an economic benefit to the public good".  Who exactly HAS done that?

  I did give way to the forces, in their steel-plated armor, who didn't give a darn if the beginning reader would be affected by their projected changes. The Powers made the changes anyhow.  Our agency continued to serve the best we could, with the resources we had.  We did not foresake our learners.  However, a lot who died by the sword succumbed to more dramatic "deaths" than I did.  At least I AM STILL HERE! 

  Kevin, the sad part is it's the adult learners who are wounded and not being served now who are the victims.  Researcher Thomas Sticht regularly pens the question" "Where are the learners now?  The statistics are low."  The adults are still there. The needy just aren't being served.  They have just become more invisible than ever.  We (Deb and I) never took responsibility and chose this for our men and women students.  I will not own that choice!

  << Those of us who work as adult educators and researchers need to move beyond the market rhetoric. Ours is a field bent on social justice, and we need to reclaim the moral imperative for lifelong education as a universal right. >>

  And ... how exactly, Kevin, are we, of a field that is so 'done in by the armored sword bearers' to "reclaim the moral imperative"???  Where is our power?  As dyslectic reader Archie Willard asked on this NLA listserv, who is speaking for adult learners in that place where power matters?  (NOTE:  Not one NLA subscriber had an ANSWER for this reader leader?!)  It's easy to say, standing from the outside looking in, that reading and lifelong education is a "universal right", but how does that happen?  Where is the power that will cause that change to occur?

  I believe that the rug has been pulled from under the CBO's around the nation - not of their choosing, but because the Powers could do it.  I think there are folks in the adult ed field who still believe in the advocacy of building life skills, to improve the quality of life of adults without reading fluency and the skills to communicate.  

  I'm of the opinion that we were powerless to stand against the soldiers who plowed into the literacy field in their steel armor heavily armed to kill.

On my wall, I have this message sent to me by another adult learner, Harry Seda of New York state, that reminds me why I am still here:

  Learning to do,
  Doing to learn,
  Learning to live,
  Living to serve.
  Yours for literacy,

  Nancy Hansen
  Sioux Falls Area Literacy Council
  sfallsliteracy at yahoo.com

Kevin O'Connor <OCONNOHJ at bc.edu> wrote:
  Dear colleagues,

I would like to follow up on Debbie Yoho?s post in Volume 51(6). It was an excellent and insightful analysis into the role that neoliberal globalization plays in the current state of adult education. I would just like to broaden the focus a bit: Debbie rightly points out that ?business interests succeeded in highjacking the adult education agenda and recasting it as an ?investment??, but I would also argue that we in adult education bear some responsibility, since we went along with it. 

Adult Ed has bought in to the argument that its justification is an economic one. It?s a case of live by the sword and die by the sword: we have echoed the argument that education is an economic benefit to the public good, and now we are locked into the cold logic of the neoliberal cost-benefit argument, an this argument makes aspects of a truly liberatory socially just educational dialogue impossible. 

As Michael Apple pointed out, ?Neoliberalism transforms our very idea of democracy, making it only an economic concept, not a political one? (2006). This market model replaces the concept of democracy, with its focuses on the goals of the community, with an economic concept whose focus is solely the choices of the individual. It assumes that the sum of individual goals will sum to a pursuit for the general welfare, and it takes for granted that each person strives in a supposedly equal race. 

But all individuals do not have an equal chance in this race; the erroneous conflation of capitalism with democracy overlooks the socioeconomic realities of race, class, and gender: ?Looking at education as part of the mechanism of market exchange makes crucial aspects literally invisible, thereby preventing critique before it even starts? (Apple, 2006). The market model deraces, declasses and degenders and calls it fair. Yet equal treatment for all is not fair; it ignores institutional and social prejudice and the ways that racism and sexism systematically exclude women and minority groups from truly equal participation.

Co-opting the rhetoric of the economic Right wing was a tactic that won additional funding, but it is a strategy that will cost adult basic education in the end, as it (and perhaps much public higher education) gets ?winnowed? down to an exclusive focus workplace skills, rather than lifelong learning, and critical literacy. Students are not mere capital to be refined in factory-schools; they do not exist only as workers but also as are family and community members.

Those of us who work as adult educators and researchers need to move beyond the market rhetoric. Ours is a field bent on social justice, and we need to reclaim the moral imperative for lifelong education as a universal right. We need to remember the other roles of our learners, and make them part of our advocacy without resorting to the easy answer of economic need. If we live by the sword, we die by the sword. If we do not speak of education as a human right, as a fundamental part of the principles of a diverse democracy, then who will?

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Kevin O'Connor
Doctoral Student, Curriculum & Instruction
Boston College
Campion Hall, Room 119C
oconnohj at bc.edu
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