NLA Discussion: Advocates' talk

[AWilder106 at aol.com]

Dear colleagues:

This is in support of Art from Georgia.  I think an interview on admission
(not intake) which creates a literacy history is a good idea.  Questions on
the Literacy History part of an interview would include those we know are
associated with the adult student's performance, like educational level of
mother, drugs or drinking of the parents or children, any previous testing for
a learning disability, the student's perception of the reading/writing
difficulty, other programs the student has attended, the student's ethnic
group, what the student wants to learn in a literacy class, and why,
strategies the student has used to compensate for low literacy, why the
student has chosen this time to enter class, trauma, etc. 

Some of these could be "hard" questions, written down ahead of time;  others
could be "soft" questions the answers to which would arise in the normal
course of a conversation.  Each question I posed above is tied to a body of
research which says this is important to know, either immediately for the
student's teachers, or in order to generate and test a pattern that would
start to emerge over multiple admissions, perhaps as  "Literacy History
Milestones."

I would also drop any language that suggested a medical model, hence the
change from Intake to Admissions.  Such a literacy teacher  would also probe
for cognitive states which influence brain structure, such as depression,
which can subtly alter the cortex.  Other non-genetic diseases do also, such
as fetal alcohol syndrome.  

There are probably  NLA writers out there now who know of other items of
importance to add.

Andrea Wilder