[NLA] program context of the Bob Steele Reading Center

[George E. Demetrion]

>From Catherine

Perhaps Nancy, George, Debbie, Archie, or others would comment on the
different social orders that develop in their programs.
________________________________________________________________-

Colleagues

This is a somewhat lengthy description of an extended essay titled
Motivation and the Adult New Reader:  Becoming Literate at the Bob Steele
Reading Center that I'll be placing on the NALD full document web site
before the end of the year.  I thought that including this entire section
was essential in laying out the context of the program.

We were far from a "total institution" like the military.  What follows
is a description of the environment of one community-based program in
Hartford CT in the early and mid 1990s.

As it is relevant to the ongoing discussion of research, in a latter
message, I'll post something on the methodology that gave shape to this
project.

Some of the formatting of the original document is lost in my translation
of msn to juno.

George Demetrion
_____________________________________________________________

Stimulation

Wlodowski (1985) defines stimulation as "any change in our perception or
experience with our environment that makes us active" (p. 51).  He
alludes to evidence from neurophysiology which "suggests that an actual
need for stimulation exists" and argues that "[s]mall or moderate changes
in arousal are reinforcing to us and cause us to direct our attention
toward those various forms of stimulation" (ibid.).  Along with affect,
Wlodowski views stimulation as an often, neglected factor required to
spark motivation during, or throughout a learning sequence.

 This factor becomes particularly important in adult literacy where the
"during" phase of learning may take three or more years, given, also, the
host of extrinsic and intrinsic factors that often act to subvert a
long-term commitment to literacy development.  
Drawing upon Wlodowski's categories as a heuristic, I will focus on three
sources of stimulation that permeated the Reading Center's  learning
climate during the period in which this study focuses.  These were (1)
the environment of the Bob Steele Reading Center, itself, (2) the
collaborative dynamic of both its group tutoring program and special
projects, and (3) an approach to instruction that drew upon "Vygotsky's
zone of proximal development."  My intent in this section is to draw on
Wlodowsky's typology of adult learner motivation in order to explore the
broader socio-linguistic culture of the Reading Center, which ultimately
impacted on daily instruction.  

The Physical Environment

The Bob Steele Reading Center was situated in Hartford's West Central
End, Parkville neighborhood, comprised largely of Portuguese, East Asian,
and Hispanic populations.  It was located in an attractive, restored
factory on Arbor Street that had once housed the Underwood Typewriting
Company.  The Center was easily accessible from the highway, which made
it a convenient site for the largely suburban tutors who felt safe in
this relatively secured building.  The Center was also close to major bus
lines, upon which many of the students depended.  The Center served not
only as an important site for adult literacy instruction in Hartford.  It
was a unique intercultural meeting ground where people with diverse
backgrounds participated in common goals and projects.  Given the social,
racial, geographical, economic, and educational segmentation so pervasive
in the United States between diverse racial and ethnic groups,
exacerbated by urban/suburban psycho-socio cleavages, such an opportunity
for this type of interchange served as an important cultural element in
building a dynamic learning climate. As observed by Trinity historian,
Michael Lestz, "not only is it [the Reading Center] a site for literacy
instruction, it is also a lively learning forum where people from diverse
cultural backgrounds collaborate in a stimulating array of learning
activities directly linked by design and content, to the teaching of
humanities in other settings" (Lestz, Demetrion, and Smith, Vol. I, 1994,
p. 4).  Through its group tutoring program, its writing and oral history
projects, and occasional college internships, the Center capitalized on
such energies.

Posters on the wall, eclectic furniture, tall ceilings and the
combination of open and closed spaces provided the physical backdrop to
an atmosphere of community and informality that sustained students and
tutors alike.  The accessibility of a full time staff person, a committed
group of tutors, many of whom volunteered at the Center for several
years, and a well stocked library consisting of materials from the
various adult education presses as well as the Center's own created
texts, provided additional support to sustain the physical environment. 
To borrow a line from the television program, Cheers, the Bob Steele
Reading Center was very much a place "where everybody knows your name."

Collaboration

 Literacy instruction at the Reading Center was fueled through an
intensive collaborative process that served as another critical source of
stimulation.  In the traditional LVA model, tutors volunteer to work with
students, one-to-one, typically two hours per week in various community
settings with minimal regular connection with the program.  In this way,
many people have learned to read who otherwise would not have had an
opportunity.  While large-sized ABE classes provide assistance to many
individuals, LVA's traditional model establishes a critical personal
encounter between learner and tutor, which is particularly vital for
students at a lower level reading ability who may require such intensive
nurturing.  This study has provided documentation in support of such a
thesis.

Despite its value, the one-to-one model remains limited in at least two
respects:  it restricts the number of instructional hours a volunteer
program can reasonably offer to a student and tends to isolate learners
from each other, though student support groups, popular within the LVA
network, partially offsets.  As reflected in such training manuals as
Reading with Children (Laminack, 1989) and Small Group Tutoring (Cheatham
and Lawson, 1990), LVA has embraced the collaborative model as a viable
alternative to the one-to-one approach.  Generally, this design,
consisting of units of one tutor to three-to-five students, is not meant
to replace the individual program, but to complement it.

Though the Reading Center embraced this general collaborative vision, in
several key areas, its small group-tutoring program differed from the
model suggested by LVA.  First, instruction generally flowed more from
materials selected, usually by the tutor, than from identified student
goals (Cheatham and Lawson, 1990, p. 19).  Second, the groups were more
tutor led than student driven as suggested in the participatory model
promoted by LVA (p. 4).  Third, the groups became permanent features of
the Reading Center, which provided the program with its essential
organizing structure (Demetrion, 1999a, 2000).  By contrast, the LVA
manual notes that groups may exist for shorter or longer periods of time,
not necessarily integrated as a vital feature in the overall fabric of an
affiliate's organizational culture (Cheatham and Lawson, 1990, pp.
10-13).
          
 Intense collaboration between and among students and tutors was common
both to the Center's small group tutoring program and the LVA model.  In
the Center's small groups, discussion was lively and often thought
provoking.  Learners felt free to fully express their views, ask
questions, and challenge tutors and each other (Demetrion, 1993, pp.
43-47, Demetrion, 1999a).  The groups were set up to enable learners to
cycle through the Center several evenings per week with different sets of
often, team tutors, each evening.  Each tutor or team of tutors provided
something unique in terms of teaching style and selection of materials. 
Many of the group participants also worked with individual tutors.  Such
variability, along with the increased tutoring hours over the traditional
LVA norm, occasionally up to ten hours per week, served as a continuous
source of stimulation built within the organizational structure of the
program.  One of the Reading Center's tutor pioneers, who worked with the
beginners level Basic Literacy group, offered the following observation:

"I very much enjoy the energy and challenge of the group.  It's exciting
to watch the students interact with each other and develop to the point
where they can graduate to the High-Level Basic Reading Group.  I love
the fact that some of them come early, sometimes just to socialize,
sometimes to read silently, sometimes to help each other with reading. 
The students have not only become friends, but also an informal support
group for each other.  This phenomenon probably would not have occurred
if the Reading Center small groups had not formed" (Demetrion, 1997c, pp.
21-22).
 
 Collaboration was also fostered through the various projects that the
Center developed, particularly in student writing and in the creation of
oral history narratives. (Smith, 1991, Smith, et. al., 1993; Lestz,
Demetrion, and Smith, 1994; Demetrion and Lestz, 1995).  Through these
texts, community building was no longer only dependent upon face-to-face
interaction.  Rather, through the spoken and written word, learners
throughout LVGH were able to develop a sense of shared consciousness and
empathy for and among each other.  The texts also contributed toward a
sense of collective identity among adult literacy learners which helped
to transform an amalgamation of isolated individuals into a group of
bonded people, linked together through shared experiences, common
purposes, and a remembered past. As expressed by one learner when asked
to comment on the Center's student-generated texts:

"It motivates you, you know?   It makes you want to keep going and feel
that some way you're going to learn something for yourself.  Sometimes
you don't  feel you can learn until you see other people do it?  So that
motivates you a little bit.  Well, a lot, I might say, a lot" (Demetrion
and Gruner, 1995, p. 60).
           
Such an emerging social identity played out at the Center in creative
tension with a strong individualistic orientation, which remains a
dominant value among many adult literacy students who seek both personal
empowerment and a deepened sense of shared identity with others (Fingeret
and Drennon, 1997).  Several students commented that while they learned
how to read more effectively through the close attention provided by an
individual tutor, the collaborative learning format created opportunities
to explore a wide array of topics that students found invigorating, as
they did the conviviality of the groups.  Through the small groups, the
student writing projects, and the program's oral history project, Reading
Center participants established a stimulating learning climate by
respecting, rather than eliminating the tension between highly personal
and richly collaborative sources of motivation.

Scaffolding

 A "scaffolding" approach to literacy, which represented the dominant
instructional methodology of the Reading Center, served as a potent
instructional stimulus (Demetrion, 1993, 1999a).  The scaffolding, or
bridging concept is premised on the Russian psychologist V.I. Vygotsky's
(1978) "zone of proximal development,"
defined as "the distance between the actual developmental level as
determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential
development as determined by problem solving under adult guidance or in
collaboration with more capable peers" (original italics) (p. 86). 

This study has drawn out many examples of scaffolding in the Reading
Center's ongoing instructional program.  Particularly pervasive were
"assisted reading" approaches where tutors worked with students to
corroboratively read a text.  This approach was based on whole language
reading theory precepts that at least a significant aspect of learning to
read is caught rather than explicitly taught through practice and
unconscious assimilation over time (Smith, 1979).  In this way, the tutor
provides a bridge through which even beginning level readers can sustain
a supportive fluent reading process through by to work with text in a
connected fashion.  The scaffolding paradigm, embodied in the assisted
reading approach, characterized the dominant student/tutor relationship
at the Reading Center as well as the organizational development of the
Center (Demetrion, 1993, 2000). 

It is important to come to terms with the ambiguity of scaffolding, since
it entails, in varying degrees, an element of shaping behavior in certain
proscribed directions.  It has, therefore, the potential of exacerbating
what Hal Beder (1991) refers to as a stigmatic view of literacy.  As the
eminent educational psychologist Jerome Bruner (1986) reminds us, "there
is a hidden agenda in Vygotsky's account, and it needs to be made
explicit" (p. 74).  Specifically, Vygotsky's "zone" was part of a broader
political/ cultural project to "modernize" Russian peasants roughly along
the lines among the more progressive (anti-Stalinist) tenets of the
Russian Revolution.  Thus, those more capable peers" who directed
literacy campaigns where Vygotsky developed his theory, had very much a
political agenda in mind in a desire to shape the consciousness of
Russian peasants.  The example illustrates that a conservative reading of
Vygotsky's zone can slide into a rationalization for elitism and
ethnocentrism defined by the value system of the more "knowledgeable"
adult.

 As a corrective to this tendency, advocates of participatory literacy
education maintain that learners have the right to exercise "active
control, responsibility, and reward vis-a-vis some or all of program
activities" (Fingeret and Jurmo, 1989, p. 18) in the areas of instruction
and program management.  The concern, expressed by Fingeret, is that
learners be allowed to draw upon their own social worlds in literacy
education, however "inadequate" those worlds appear to middle class
observers (p. 9).  As I have argued elsewhere, respect for learner social
and psychic experience should be built into any literacy program, but it
also needs to be acknowledged that learners also seek 
to develop literacy skills, in part, in order to move beyond their
current social status and cultural understanding (Demetrion, 1993, p.
33).

 There are some delicate spaces that need to be worked out between these
two positions.  It is all-too-easy to tip the scales toward elitism on
the one hand and a romanticized notion of participatory democracy on the
other hand, neither of which may serve the learner well.  What seems
critical in the stimulation of motivation is identifying and grounding
instruction at the student's learning cutting edge.  This is the
pedagogical strategy of Vygotsky's zone, that is simultaneously linked to
the most fundamental needs, interests, and aspirations of learners within
a broad range of personal, practical, aesthetic, and sociocultural realms
that emerge from intense dialogue among learners and between learners and
tutors/teachers.  Such an ideal was not always realized at the Reading
Center.  Still, it represented its most progressive pedagogical
aspiration, exemplified particularly in its small group-tutoring program,
and in its student writing (Smith, 1991) and oral history anthologiess
(Smith, et. al. 1993 and Lestz, Demetrion, and Smith, 1994).

A major reason why Vygotsky's zone represented a more dominant
pedagogical strategy than participatory literacy education, particularly
in its more radical sense, was that the Reading Center was still a place
that most students and tutors identified as school.  As such, traditional
teacher/student roles remained largely operative, particularly that of
the instructor in usually initiating and selecting lessons, along with a
common sense view among most students and tutors that whatever else
literacy development may entail, basic skill building, even among more
advanced learners, should play a vital role in the instructional process.

With its own particular slants, the Reading Center program embraced many
of the more progressive views of, and approaches toward adult literacy
education developed by LVA in the 1990s (Cheatham and Lawson, 1990;
Cheatham, Colvin and Laminack, 1993).  In addition, the program took some
additional leads throughout the LVA network with its extensive Basic
Literacy small group-tutoring program, the Connecticut Humanities Council
funded oral history project, and as a result of the various published
articles written about the program.

However progressive and student centered inspired, the work t the Bob
Steele Reading Center emerged within a learning environment very much
shaped by Vygotsky's zone in a place identified as school.  It was the
creative tension between such a traditional structural framework and a
commitment to a humanistic, collaborative pedagogy that served as an
underlying stimulus for learners, tutors, and project volunteers at the
Center.  Sometimes this learning atmosphere was aided by intensive
participatory approaches.  At other times, direct instruction proved more
of an effective vehicle.  In either case, respect for the learner, the
importance of collaboration, and a powerful commitment to learning as an
intrinsic value in itself, shaped much of the Reading Center program. 
This learning climate served as a powerful stimulus that infused the
daily operation.


________________________________________________________________
Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today
Only $9.95 per month!
Visit www.juno.com
_______________________________________________
NLA mailing list: NLA at lists.literacytent.org
http://lists.literacytent.org/mailman/listinfo/nla
LiteracyTent: web hosting, news, community and goodies for literacy
http://literacytent.org