CHAPTER V

ADULT BASIC EDUCATION: MEETING SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS OF THE NEWLY LITERATE ADULT THROUGH READING

Gladys E. Alesi, coordinator, welfare education program, Bureau of Community Education, New York City

Registration for Operation Second Chance was almost over. A young man returned the instruction sheet to the teacher. "If going to school depends on this, count me out. Reading is something I just do not do. Not that I can't read. I can, but I don't." His air of bravado was the challenge we wanted. His was one of our first success stories.

In programs that offer a second chance to those who missed the first one, reading is the key to success. This fact is reflected in the title of the report on the East St. Louis, Ill., literacy program, "First, They Must Read." The newly literate adult may end up in the same position as our swaggering nonreader. Having gotten over the initial hurdles, he can read signs. He can read some of the words on labels, he can answer questions on applications, and he can even identify certain words on a basic list. He may now decide that this is enough for him. He may take the other road: continue to read until he becomes an efficient reader. It's up to us whether he becomes an artful dodger. It is not an exaggeration to say that all methods of literacy teaching depend for their lasting success on the provision of appropriate followup materials.

What is appropriate? The answer lies in understanding the social and psychological needs of the student and using this insight to prepare materials. Experienced teachers, preparing their own materials, have known this for some time. Textbook publishers are beginning to discover it, as is evidenced by the publication of several recent books.

Factors to give direction to the preparation of materials for newly literate adults are

1. The need for success,

2. The need for security,

3. The need for an improved self-image,

4. The need for purpose.

THE NEED FOR SUCCESS

Most adults beginning a program of basic education believe that their faculties for learning are impaired. In the relationship that develops between adult-student and adult-teacher, this conviction is soon verbalized. The teacher usually tries to convince the student that he can learn anything he wants to learn. Despite hearty en

couragement, unless the student sees for himself that he is making progress, he will succumb to doubt and frustration. In the initial literacy program, students are excited and delighted with even the smallest achievement.

In the next stage, they like to see the same continuous improvement. This can be achieved by providing small sequentially developed reading units, combining adult content with a linguistic approach. At this stage, instruction should be success oriented to the point of permitting the learner to work as fast as he can while continuing the principle of vocabulary control.

Adults discern even greater progress, if, within a limited vocabulary, they read consistently longer units. Spaced practice with supplementary materials at the same mature level as the reading lesson is needed.

To experience real success, however, the student must be able to pick books at random, and read them. He can do this if the schoolroom has a paperback library. Books chosen should be high-interest stories about recognizable people and places-simple biographical accounts of men and women who have overcome handicaps, jokes, and folk humor, and pertinent social and family problems-books that answer important questions.

It isn't useful to worry about refining the tastes of the student. It is possible later to go from simple accounts of people they know, to more significant biographical sketches of the great leaders of the past, and from these to books that provide insight into history, government, and science. At the beginning, it is sufficient to find easy library materials that will overcome the student's initial resistance. Success is a powerful stimulus.

THE NEED FOR SECURITY

In order to learn, the adult must feel comfortable in the learning situation. He must be respected for his maturity, accepted as a person of dignity, and made to feel at home within the school setting. It will soon be obvious, even to the least experienced teacher, that adults have had many problems contributing to their previous inability to attain success in school. The successful adult class cannot accentuate these problems by requiring students to move too rapidly into content

areas.

The key factors in joining the student and the book are identification and interest. In an exciting new story about life in an urban community, new readers can identify with Mr. Luckett as he experiences one failure after another in looking for something to replace the elevator operator job out of which he was automated. After one such failure he walks bareheaded in the rain, the tears streaming down his face. He is a failure. He is convinced of that. He must face his family. And he can no longer avoid dependency on the welfare department. This is a crisis students have experienced in their own lives. How he works out his problem is just as exciting as the outcome of a detective story. Its suspense may be just as unbearable. Identification may have its lighter side, too. Lawrence, a student in our basic education program, writing on "The Day I Found New Hope," tells of the meaning to him of what he learned in our classes. He proudly showed a math problem he had solved; he wrote some words that he learned to spell. He knows that this knowledge will help him get into a trade

program. Quite serendipitously, he learned that George Washington's grandfather was also named Lawrence. This identification was quite as important as the math and the spelling.

Newly literate students are frequently part of a group which has experienced failure, and isolation within the community. If they can read about a similar person who now enjoys increased status in relation to his peers, if the local color is genuine, if the vocabulary is that of the community they know, then they will read with vigorous involve

ment.

THE NEED FOR AN IMPROVED SELF-IMAGE

Basically the disadvantaged adult needs the kind of self-esteem that grows out of an awareness of his competency to cope with the ordinary problems of life. The cognizance of an adult male that he is incapable of supporting his family, and that he lacks the skills basic to achieving such independence, is degrading and demoralizing. Poverty and dependence on society for support generate an acceptance of poverty that is difficult to dislodge. One way to break this cycle is to develop social competence, or the student's ability to see himself in a self-help role. In classes for ADC mothers we have found persons really excited by activities such as writing a letter to request better street lights, or writing to a Senator about capital punishment-and getting answers.

In the story mentioned earlier, Jack Lee Luckett eventually does get a job; he finds work as chauffeur to a U.S. Senator. Jack Lee has enormous respect for his boss, but he reaches his own maturity when he ceases to ask the Senator's advice on personal problems. Jack Lee knows that he now can stand on his own.

The newly literate adult sometimes does not believe that he can be responsible for his own success in life. For him, the American dream has little meaning. Like the word "democracy," it is a hollow one. When he sees a man like himself finding answers, making decisions, speaking with his own voice, his faith is renewed. And he wants to read more about it.

THE NEED FOR PURPOSE

In an account of his early life, James Baldwin refers to a "connection, with life." He puts it this way: "I read books like they were some weird kind of food. I was looking in books for a bigger world than the world in which I lived. In some blind and instinctive way, I knew that what was happening in those books was also happening all around me and I was trying to make a connection between the books and the life I saw and the life I lived."

Students are motivated to progress if, by so doing, they can find the answers to real problems that they face. Some applications of this principle are:

The man who wants to get a driver's license does not need much urging to get him to try to read the driver's manual.

The woman whose new sofa has been repossessed because she signed something that says all of her equity is lost if she fails to meet even one payment on time, wants to find out why. If she has no "people resource" to go to, she'll read to find out how to keep from making the same mistake again.

The man who lives in a vermin-infested tenement wants to find out about housing projects. Who is eligible? How can his family move? Or, how can he obtain help in improving the place where he lives?

The parent who feels inadequate may not admit it, but he really wants help. In a story which I read to one of our classes, prior to publication, students identified with the hero who, knowing that his children are getting a "rough deal" in school, first feels unable to do anything about it. He finally overcomes his fears, and goes to a PTA meeting. One student said, "That's corny." However, he added, "I wonder if I would dare to do the same thing." The man in the book wants to show his child that he can help him solve problems, and stand up for his rights.

A mother came to a teacher with a story of how another bar has reached her neighborhood, which is already saturated with taverns. She could not contain her pride in being able to write her own letter to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, and showed their answer to her neighbors.

These are some of the needs that students feel, and often express, when student-teacher rapport has been firmly established. Many needs of the newly literate adult cannot be as simply met as the need to learn to drive is answered by the ability to read the driver's manual.

Rightfully, we want to encourage students to have a more positive outlook toward their own lives, to lose their feelings of isolation, inferiority, and frustration, and to view the future with a greater sense of optimism. Sometimes teachers feel impelled to tell "them" how to achieve these goals. Though this may be a sincere, spontaneous, reaction on the teacher's part, it never works.

The disadvantaged adult has been "preached at" before. His previous contacts with school may have been tinged with the same wellmeaning rosy haze of condescension. If this shows through, even the best materials will fail.

CHAPTER VI

NEW MATERIALS FOR THE UNDEREDUCATED ADULT William F. Brazziel, director of general education, Norfolk Division, Virginia State College

"Sound Colors." "Computer-based reinforcement." "Marker slits." "Environmental and experiential identification." Terminology from Operation Moonshot? Hardly. More likely the emanations from the planning sessions for the small-sized revolution about to take place in materials development for undereducated adults.

Undereducated adults range from 16 to 65; and their number totals 11 to 40 million, depending on who is doing the counting. Also, the traditional adult education classes too often enrolled the top half of the undereducated: those nearly qualified for elementary or high school certificates. We are just now coming to grips with the "real undereducated adult."

The main thrust is to provide materials which are carefully graded, but which have adult interest, or what is known as "psychological pull." Such writing provides as much self-teaching as possible, is not offensive to ethnic groups, and has "teaching power." There will be no second chance for most of the undereducated in the new classes. If the curriculum, including the materials, is ineffective, they will be relegated to the "economic slag heap."

The materials must have a psychological attraction for a person who is characterized as overly pragmatic, who has devalued book learning in the past, and whose interests and daily pursuits are outside the American mainstream. This person frequently has certain strengths, however; these include a sense of equalitarianism, respect for the individual, love of children and family ties of an extended nature, freedom from overcompetitiveness, a strong sense of humor, and a well-developed ability to relax and enjoy himself. Often the student is operating under the stress of poverty, which most secondand third-generation middle-income people cannot understand. School materials must incorporate the strengths of his existence, but not completely exclude the vicissitudes. They should portray role models of a new life with which he can identify and the attainment of which does not seem too remote.

Some of the most creative efforts we have seen in a long time are being made in the development of such new materials. Some can even be termed "revolutionary" ("bizarre" by their critics). The initial teaching alphabet system, words in color, a system labeled "Family Phonics," and an audiovisual approach called Audex, are all being given a trial in the reading program. One of the more interesting developments has been the transfer of defense industry effort, from a now slightly curtailed weaponry field. One of the first