Keeping Adults Behind: Adult Literacy Education in the Age of Official Reading Regimes

Document Type

Review Article

Publication Date

12-1-2005

Journal / Book Title

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

Abstract

The Partnership for Reading (PFR) in the United States has recently thrown its hat into the ring of adult literacy research and practice. Its information about adult literacy comes, almost entirely, from the National Reading Panel's (NRP) data on children. Building its case from the NRP data, the PFR advocates for a narrow, school-based conception of reading, excluding from its recommendations several aspects of literacy development that have been determined by many adult educators, scholars, and practitioners to be vital for the successful development of competent readers and writers. In short, the PFR produces, legitimates, and disseminates knowledge that supports truths about adult literacy development that are either seriously flawed or need considerable contextualization. At stake in confronting and disrupting the hegemony of the PFR is no less than the pedagogical capacity to imagine and put into practice adult literacy initiatives that go beyond the strict confines of a federalized body of “official” and “scientifically proven” knowledge. As a challenge to the PFR's official knowledge, the author discusses two successful adult literacy initiatives that involve what he calls a critical integrative literacy—that is, a strategy of literacy development that merges the technical and contextual in the service of social change and individual power.

DOI

10.1598/JAAL.49.4.3

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