[NLA] Re: NIFL Letter/One or Two Choices?

[George E. Demetrion]

Jon and others:

The effort in CT's First Congressional District was a collective effort. 
Carl Guerriere, Director of the Literacy Council of Greater Hartford got
the word out to various programs. Thanks to Carl's advocacy in
particular, Rep. Larson heard from several people and responded
appropriately.

On EFF as a consensus framework, that's not my perception, but the stated
purpose of EFF as articulated by EFF developers and NIFL's former
director throughout the 1990s.  I could cite chapter and verse, but will
refrain.  To argue otherwise would be an egregious form of revisionist
history.  Whether EFF should serve that purpose is another matter. 
However, any denial on the stated purpose of EFF in the goal of bringing
unity to the field through a quest for an agreed upon consensus based
upon the Role Maps and the Standards would be an exercise in bad faith. 
If there is any instability it is that of the incapacity of carrying
forth policy from one administration to the next and not in the EFF
framework or of the intention of its framers and developers.  I would
simply add that it is unconscionable for an agency like NIFL to boldly
proclaim an initiative like EFF as the means by which to bring national
unity to a fragmented field and then to marginalize or negate that claim
as the political climate in DC changes.  Far be it from me to be the
spokesperson about this.  Perhaps we can hear a voice of clarity from the
chief architect of the EFF project

On a related point, is the concern that whoever the new director is to
be, the focus of NIFL will be exclusively on reading.  That represents
not only a profound reduction on how literacy has been defined by a broad
array of scholarship stemming back to Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(sorry for mentioning this text in our quest for national unity on the
verge of a Presidential act of aggression on the sovereign state of Iraq)
and Sticht's research on workplace literacy extending back to the late
1960s.  Such scholarship and other literature has influenced a profound
school of adult literacy studies during the 1980s and 1990s, including
the work of Allan Quigley, Susan Lytle, Hanna Fingeret, Elsa Auerbach,
Tom Valentine, Hal Beder, Juliet Merrifield and others much of which has
enfused the operative assumptions of the EFF project.  How soon we
forget!  More fundamentally, how that which has been  viewed as valid and
legitimate scholarship on adult literacy education gets marginalized by a
neo-conservative onslaught on the verge of reducing literacy to reading
and defining reading as fundamentally an act of phonemic mastery.  All in
the name of science rather than, say, politics.

Thus, when you say, "things may become as different as day and night at
the Institute when a permanent director is installed,"  you've said a
mouthful.  This is not just a matter of internal managerial
reorganization, but of a profound political reconstruction of the
politics of adult literacy in the United States of America in an
administration on the verge of waging a preemptive war against a two-bit
dictator, for reasons that are far from clear or noble.

Things may be different indeed, during the next NIFL administration,
perhaps including a challenge of the constructivist learning principles
that have grounded the EFF project since its inception and the impact of
such learning on an array of complex family. workplace, and community
settings as articulated in the Key Activities of each of the Role Maps. 
Are these complex dimensions of contextual literacy learning off the
table now to keep the focus of NIFL sharply attuned to reading based on
the narrow definition of the phonemic first perspective?  This is more
than a passing concern.  It goes to the core of how adult literacy
education has been portrayed in a wide body of scholarly literature over
the past thirty years.  Is this scholarship now to be off the table too,
in the new era of scientific research?  One can draw that conclusion in
the USDoE's Strategic Plan in the section on research and its
three-sentence dismissal of 100 years of educational research.

One also wonders about Lincs and of the listservsvs themselves?  Are
they, too, up for radical change or even elimination in the new era of
enlightened reform and scientific-based research in the need to keep
focused on the new priority, reading?  Discriminating minds want to know.

How should the field respond to the new era, one voice or several?  I
recommend the latter.  While it is more than reasonable among those who
seek to effect immediate policy change to accept the dominant paradigm
articulated by the Administration, it becomes more imperative than ever
that a more radical voice speak unfettered as well in the capacity to
challenge (where warranted) the most fundamental assumptions of the
current DC vision.  Thirty years of scholarship and informed practice
demand no less.

Dialogue and serious engagement with the views of the Administration
where warranted.  Direct challenge, advocacy, and counterargument where
that is warranted as well.

Can the democracy of the United States of America stand such a  level of
public discourse as the land of literacy enters a new era or will
censorship, revisionist history, and newspeak prevail to bring silence or
conformity to that land?

Ms. or Mr. Director, whoever you may be, are you ready to engage the
field with serious discussion or will propaganda and neo-conservative
logic prevail?

Though my speech is sharp and polemic in this message, I am more than
willing to engage in serious engagement at the level of honest, open
discourse and of the probing of the broad range of scholarship that marks
the field of adult literacy education.  

George Demetrion
Sophocles5 at juno.com


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