[NLA] Re: Reading Instruction and Policy Advocacy

[Eileen Eckert]

I've been waiting to see if anyone else was going to jump into the 
conversation, but I guess not. I'm following up on Art's message, still 
pursuing the policy question of mandating instruction based on phonemic 
awareness.

Art: I fully  appreciate this, your history and how you came to be here, and 
the foundation your philosophy towards adult ed is based on although I feel 
what you say here is just a sampling of the experiences that form the actual 
foundation.

Eileen: Yep, you're right. Student teaching in inner-city Boston, 
anti-apartheid work, Central America solidarity work and travel to El 
Salvador during and after the war (and meeting teachers and others whose 
work was truly revolutionary), community organizing in Bridgeport, CT, 
contact and conversations with "warriors for real welfare reform", 
relationships, reading Paolo Freire, and several pivotal work experiences I 
won't even get into here--yes, all those experiences and more have 
contributed to a passionate belief in the authority and responsibility of 
practitioners and learners to make their own decisions and learn from them, 
developing expertise from the ground up, and to an equally passionate belief 
that the more power is concentrated away from learners and teachers, and the 
more knowledge is frozen in the form of mandates, the less able the AELS is 
to capitalize on and build on the knowledge and skills of its participants. 
Everyone has a history and foundation for their philosophy; parts of it 
<may> lead to unsubstantiated beliefs, but that's addressed through 
"disconfirming experiences," reflective discussion, and other personally 
meaningful learning, not through some pronouncement from on high about the 
correct way of thinking, teaching, etc.

Another excerpt and response:
Art (on his practitioner research): But what did turn up was overwhelming 
evidence that every one of the 10 students I interviewed randomly and used 
as data for that report showed clear history of an unresolved emotional 
impact within a year of their assessment grade levels as determined by TABE 
when they entered our program.  I have also proven this out over the years 
since, now going on 7 years, that pretty much every adult student who finds 
themselves in adult literacy will have a clearly defined history of some 
emotional difficulty in early grade school that affected their progress, and 
in most cases it can be localized to a very specific incident.

Eileen: Art, this is fascinating, and seems to me to have implications for 
practice beyond your program. It looks like you found that learning to read 
is about more than just learning to read! What if there were a mandate that 
programs and staff have to focus on phonemic awareness? How might that have 
impacted your ability to ask your research question, gather and analyze 
data, and address your findings? And how might a mandate interact with your 
specific interests and understanding? (Again, because argument tends to be 
seen in polarities, I'm not against teaching phonemic awareness; I just 
think it's part of a bigger picture and that a mandate doesn't solve the 
problem of ineffective instruction.)

Another exerpt and response:
Art: I also worked with multitudes of children in a family literacy program 
here for three years where we addressed the problems children were having in 
kindergarten through middle school.  Many of these children were in the 
process of being diagnosed or had already been diagnosed as LD, ADD, ADHD.  
Without exception we were able to help these kids recover, regroup, and 
return to apparently 'normal' functioning, many of whom also excelled and 
passed up their peers in reading capability and were awarded 'most 
improved'.  This program
required that I interface with public school teachers, counselors, and
administrators, and involve myself in various professional case "reviews" 
that included those children.

Eileen: How did you do that? What was the role of phonemic awareness? What 
do you think the implications are for adult literacy?



_________________________________________________________________
Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. 
http://www.hotmail.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