[NLA] Policy regarding the use of AELS

[AWilder106@aol.com]

Happy New Year, Nancy!

Thanks for your thought-provoking reply.

It seems to me that where we stand may not depend on where we sit.  

While my stance is "literacy for all," I translate it differently 
according to where I sit at the table. I expect everyone's stance 
ultimately is similar, but we come from different places in the adult 
literacy spectrum and since our places at the table are different, we 
understand our own stances differently though we may voice them in 
the same way.

How to create (number) "all"?  Well, somewhere I have to count,
and that brings me to the NALS and a series of combative emails last 
spring/summer.  
*How numerous is the population we are talking about?

After that I have to figure out programs and funding sources.
*Who is doing the work? 
 
This is a mighty complicated picture, there are multiple funding 
sources, federal, state, and local, also business, foundation, 
religious, military. (Others?) I need to get a picture of the whole.

I would call all this a system, but not official, unlike Tom's and 
others use of the term AELS.  Then I have to understand the links.
*What are the glitches in the system?  
*What prevents easy articulation?

The NLA argues for greater funding, and a steady focus on adult 
education.  The NLA aims to influence legislative and local 
funding bodies, folks who control money.  NLA strategy shifts according 
to what must be done to get money, hence the many discussions about
research and what makes viable research, sound teaching and learning, 
in whose terms, and how that effects funding--rhetoric and reality.

Back to the stance thing.  I wrote down what I am looking at, 
the direction of my vision.  Other people's visions are probably the 
same, but the goals differ depending on where they sit.  For example, 
you are particularly concerned with CBO's, their funding, and their 
dependence on a particular form of evaluation before funding is 
triggered.  Because you speak up so clearly and so frequently I can see 
that many of the arguments on the NLA come about because of radically 
different points of view, depending on where we all "sit."  

I think that unless we know the *context* from which people 
write to the NLA we have a hard time understanding why what 
seems so obvious to us exists only in the peripheral vision of 
others on the list.  I think this is a strength of the NLA, 
vision from many perspectives; it makes for some hot and eventually 
useful discussions.

Andrea