[NLA] building policy vision (long!!!!)

[Eileen Eckert]

Hi Andrea,
In response to your post on my question about building a policy vision:

The question arose from my research but it's about individual and collective 
power and responsibility to make informed policy advocacy decisions. A 
little background, and I'll try not to make it too full of jargon: My Ph.D. 
work is in Adult Learning. It's different from adult education in that the 
focus is on how adults learn in and out of school, not on how educators set 
up programs and teach (not that the latter's not considered, it's more of a 
foreground/background thing). And the more I study, and the more research I 
do, the more I see that the two views (adult education vs. adult learning) 
<can be> and <often> (but not always) are very different.

You asked about key terms I think are central: Freire's definitely the 
foundation for me. I am concurrently further developing my understanding of 
his work, and integrating it with other work and my own experiences. I think 
I mentioned Davis and Sumara's chapter, "Learning Communities: Understanding 
the Workplace as a Complex System" from Sociocultural Perspectives on 
Learning Through Work (New Direction in Adult and Continuing Education, No. 
92, Winter 2001, pp. 85-95). That is having an impact on me, as it discusses 
the emergence of "self-organized" collective knowledge among the members of 
a workplace (in their case, teachers in a school). It's that 
"self-organized" part that seems to me to be a key: I found it in my 
research, I find it in discussions and my direct experience, I see 
indications of it in other remarks here (such as Art's comment about leading 
a horse to water). People <will> make their own decisions about what makes 
sense for them to learn and do, and trying to "get them to do" anything goes 
against that drive for self-determination.

On vocabulary: Yeah, there are a lot of assumptions about what terms mean, 
and there is a lot of variation in what terms mean, and there are a number 
of specialized vocabularies that not everyone is familiar with. Catherine 
addressed that better than I can. I think understanding also has to do with 
common philosophies. We make meaning from context using not only the literal 
meaning of the words, but our own background experiences and the worldviews 
that result from them (so the more we know about our own philosophies, the 
better we can compare them with what we encounter). An anecdote from Donaldo 
Macedo's "Literacies of Power":

"When I was working on Literacy: Reading the Word and the World with Paulo 
Freire, I asked a colleague whom I considered to be politically progressive 
and to have a keen understanding of Paulo's work to read the manuscript. 
Yet, during a discussion we had of the book, she asked me, a bit irritably, 
'Why do you and Paulo insist on using this Marxist jargon? Many readers who 
may enjoy reading Paulo may be put off by the jargon.'"

He compares this reaction to 2 others:
"Henry Giroux and I gave a speech at Massassoit Community College in 
Massachusetts to approximately 300 unwed mothers who were part of a GED 
program. The director of the program later informed us that most of the 
students were considered functionally illiterate. After Henry's speech, 
during the question and answer period, a woman got up and eloquently said, 
'Professor Giroux, all my life I have felt the things you talked about. I 
just didn't have a language to express what I have felt all my life. Today I 
have come to realize that I do have a language. Thank you.' And Paulo Freire 
told me a story of what happened to him at the time he was preparing the 
English translation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He gave an 
African-American student at Harvard a chapter of the book to read to see how 
she would receive it. A few days later, Freire asked the woman if she had 
read it. She enthusiastically responded: "Yes, not only did I read it but I 
gave it to my sixteen-year-old son to read. He read the whole chapter that 
night and in the morning said, "I want to meet the man who wrote this. He is 
talking about me."' The question I have for all those highly literate 
academics who find Giroux's and Freire's discourse so difficult to 
understand is, Why is it that a sixteen-year-old boy and a semiliterate 
woman could so easily understand and connect with the complexity of Giroux's 
and Freire's language and ideas, and the academics, who are the most 
literate, find the language incomprehensible?"

On the assumptions behind the question I asked about people's personal 
philosophies: I think we all make assumptions about the purpose and effects 
of our policy advocacy efforts, and we all use underlying, often unspoken 
principles to guide our actions. The more we examine them ourselves and try 
to articulate them the more likely they are to become more defensible and 
useful. Also, the more we hear about the assumptions, principles, and themes 
of others the more we can learn that ours are not universal, and therefore 
begin to question and examine them as our own constructions, not as 
immutable laws of nature. This is assuming that each person's understanding 
contributes to their advocacy, and that each person's advocacy contributes 
to the field as a whole.

Eileen

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