[NLA] Research in adult literacy education

[AWilder106@aol.com]

Dear Deborah,

Thanks for your wonderful email.  Apologies for only answering a part of it, 
very briefly.

Let me put this out for others to chew on also.  I think a good evaluation 
team should be knowledgeable about different aspects of adult literacy.  If 
you read Nancy Hansen's most recent post, you will get a good idea from her 
of the kinds of expertise she would find useful in evaluation, and if I were 
putting together an evaluation team I would take her circumstances into 
account.  So being "well-versed" in the field would be essential.   That 
would include different ways of being "well-versed,"--for example, being 
knowledgeable about the different ways adults learn how to read and write.  
Maybe teachers would be included, disability specialists, whatever, you can 
see in what way I am centrally tending.  How can you be objective if you 
don't know anything about a field?  Where you aren't objective, then you will 
be subjective.  (This may be where the chewing will start.)  

My reference on this is George Devereux, "From Anxiety to Method in the 
Behavioral Sciences."  My example is the biography of President Reagan of 
perhaps two years ago.  The writer couldn't get a handle on his subject, so 
he invented a character, he was up front about it, people got all upset, but 
this happens often in daily life, so a knowledgeable team would be required.  
I was kind of tickled about the strategy the author used, it was a creative 
strategy to fulfill a contract that he couldn't fulfill any other way, and a 
textbook example of the difference between projection and identification as 
psychological processes.  I'm in favor of identification, that is, someone 
knowledgeable being able to say "I recognize this because I have had to deal 
with this myself and so have the 20 odd [or whatever]  programs I have 
already evaluated."

Andrea

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