Return-Path: <nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id j3G12JG29720; Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:02:19 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:02:19 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <BAY103-F41AE6EB98E2A872648FBCFC5370@phx.gbl> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "George demetrion" <gdemetrion@msn.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-4eff@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-4EFF:2972] the centrality of EFF X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Status: O Content-Length: 4738 Lines: 77 I think these are interesting issues. Thank you, Donna, George, Meta, and a couple of others for giving me something really interesting to ponder, and for giving me some new background materials. EFF is one reason I looked forward to reading George's book." I'll shamelessly take Andrea's statement to highlight the centrality of EFF in Conflicting Paradigms in Adult Literacy Education: In Quest of a US Democratic Politics of Literacy. Chapter 7 is titled, Equipped for the Future: Building the Infrastructure, which seeks to narrate the evolution of the framework from the ground up excluding a focus on the Content Standards. Among other things, Chapter 7 seeks to flesh out the tension, sometimes creative, sometimes otherwise, between the framework's pioneers’ policy and pedagogical aspirations, a tension that is further elaborated upon in Ch 8 on the Content Standards. Along the way in Chapter 7, there is a decent amount of discussion on the key EFF components Donna identified in her message. My perspective in writing that chapter was as an outsider, but one who has studied the documents and followed the development of EFF for some years. The objective in that chapter is to explain the evolution of the EFF infrastructure as fully as possible through a close documentary analysis of the resources. Along the way, there is a fair amount of description of the various EFF components (not to be confused with "components of performance" :). Chapter 8 is titled EFF Standards: Linking Pedagogy and Policy in Quest of a National Consensus. There is a fair amount of description of the development of the Content Standards in that chapter (pp. 179-189). Then the chapter shifts to a fairly extensive discussion of the EFF/NRS "Win-Win" Connection, which was simultaneously fraught with enormously potential conflict and potentiality, particularly if a resolution in which EFF standards would became the basis for the "second-generation" NRS. However, as it invariably does, politics intruded, namely the presidential election of 2000, which in my view gave the death-blow to EFF as a viable federally-based national vision, a status that was precarious as well for EFF even in the somewhat friendlier Clinton era. The summary reflection (pp. 198-204) is a long-view perspective, drawing out what I view as some of the core pedagogical values of EFF as well as its public philosophy, which, in its stated form, remained primarily implicit, but nonetheless grounded in the civic republican tradition articulated especially in the book written by Robert Bellah and his colleagues titled The Good Society, a discussion of which I might highlight in a follow up message. That public philosophy gets dealt with again in Ch 11 of Conflicting Paradigms titled In Quest of a More Perfect Union Through a Double-Vision Perspective of Hope and Skepticism. The phrase, "a more perfect union" is part of the Preamble to the US Constitution, which I identify as the underlying political value that I seek to build on in the book, a public value, I believe, through which a US politics of literacy can be premised upon. That at least is the hope, notwithstanding the skepticism. Notwithstanding its failures at the federal level, EFF has been the closest approximation to this vision, and has much to offer, perhaps in a somewhat reconstructed form to a revitalization of a national movement within adult literacy, which is now free from federal restrictions to better re-define itself on its own operating principles. This EFF-like vision in linking the pedagogy of the new literacy studies to a politics of progressive reform is the underlying dynamic that is seeking to break out amidst the Conflicting Paradigms in Adult Literacy Education. These Conflicting Paradigms are so powerfully in place in our contemporary setting that they manifest themselves as almost a built-in check in holding back the onrushing of the creative energies that are seeking to burst through throughout the various interstices through which a new paradigm could take hold--a paradigm rooted in a coherent public philosophy that speaks with power and convincingness to the exigencies of our reality in the contemporary setting in the USA. This public philosophy was largely missing in much of the public discourse on EFF in the past decade, but was presupposed in almost every turn. Now, with EFF out of power, but still viable as a coherent framework for effective pedagogy, it is also incumbent to articulate a corresponding public philosophy to give the framework the full coherence it is needed and to better establish it as a more viable national movement. George Demetrion
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