[NLA] Re: Reading Instruction and Policy Advocacy

[Eileen Eckert]

Art,
I should probably let your comments sit for a while before answering, but 
here goes anyway. First, you don't have the corner on reality. This 
rhetorical strategy--if you disagree with someone imply that they're living 
in some dream world--may work on talk radio, but I hope we don't resort to 
it often here. I've been giving this a great deal of thought as I near the 
end of my sojourn in the ivory tower. Let me tell you a little about my 
experience, because I think it has bearing on this discussion. I came to 
teach adult literacy by accident, with a bachelor's degree in English 
Education and never having heard of the GED. Pity the poor students, but 
they were patient, we muddled through, and a few years later I went back to 
school to get a master's in adult education and ended up sort of sucked into 
the vortex of a Ph.D. program (some of you will no doubt recognize this 
experience). Life intervened, I moved west and went back to work in ABE/GED 
and didn't get anything done on the Ph.D., finally deciding if I was going 
to finish I needed to come back full-time. I learned a great deal while I 
was working full-time, but guess what? I'm learning even more from that work 
experience now that I have the luxury of time and a good library to help me 
make sense of it. I wish I could have had some of this time to spend on 
reflection/discussion/learning while I was working, but there was never 
enough money. With an agenda that covers all the perceived needs of adult 
and family literacy, and funding to do maybe 15% of that, somehow spending 
always starts at the top and very little of it trickles down to where the 
practitioners are. What good is it to have a policy if you can't implement 
it?

Second, about policy mandates, teacher preparation, and what/how teachers 
end up teaching students. There is no consensus. We discuss and argue 
methods and techniques while ignoring the underlying conflicts in the 
philosophy they're based on, and we wonder why we don't understand each 
other. That's why teachers need to learn how to judge for themselves. Many 
already do, but the push for standardization makes some understandings 
"righter" than others. I get to hear a sample of teacher preparation classes 
from my office at the university; actually, I get to hear professors' voices 
about 90% of the time, and often they are lecturing their students about not 
lecturing. A policy mandate that is implemented by people who don't 
understand it, who are merely paying lip service, is useless. And it's 
harder to influence because the decision and its implementation are several 
steps removed from each other. We're trying to get policy to take the place 
of learning, and to take the place of constituents making their needs known 
directly. If there's a policy that says teacher preparation programs have to 
instruct teachers in phonemic awareness, then the teachers themselves don't 
have to make their needs known; they can let policy do it for them. Mandates 
let people off the hook for grassroots advocacy because they are supposed to 
take its place (but they don't work). Mandates are an enemy of the 
democratic process--now I sound like a talk-show ;).

About students knowing what they need: we've all encountered the GED student 
who "just wants to pass the test," and my answer to that is to talk with 
that student, not once but on an ongoing basis, about their goals and 
objectives. I don't dismiss their short-term goal, or refuse to help them 
meet it, but I do try to help them expand it by discussing it with them. 
Brookfield's discussion of self-directed learning gets into the limitations 
and complexities better than I can.

Thanks for the thought-provoking comments.
Eileen



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