Return-Path: <nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id f940O1023305; Wed, 3 Oct 2001 20:24:01 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 20:24:01 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <156.1ef7735.28ed053d@aol.com> Errors-To: alcrsb@langate.gsu.edu Reply-To: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: AWilder106@aol.com To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-WOMENLIT:1643] Re: Silence X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Mac - Post-GM sub 146 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Status: O Content-Length: 1777 Lines: 36 Friends, This silence has given me a while to think and work. One of my concerns has been the PURPOSE of adult literacy. PURPOSE is important because one makes decisions on the way to fulfilling purpose, eg, Will this help me towards my PURPOSE or not? In my previous post I quoted Martha Nussbaum on "the cosmopolitan," the person she wants her students to become. This seems to me a good teaching Purpose. Now I am going to lift from another document, Juliet Merrifield's "Contested Ground," because there is a gap that needs to be filled, and it has to do with literacy per se. "Participation in the political process entails not only sufficient functional literacy to operate effectively within existing social and economic systems, but also the ability to make 'second order' rational and informed judgments concerning the desirability of social rule systems themselves. 'Functional literacy' has, therefore, to embrace not merely knowledge of rules and the ability to follow the rules, but also the capacity to think, to reason, and judge beyond existing social rules. (de Castell et al., 1986, p.11) p. 13 Simply, the purpose of functional literacy (as opposed to reading and writing simple text) resides in literacy as MEANING MAKING. It seems to me that 'functional literacy' can be understood narrowly or as broadly as we want. A student may want to pass the GED--that's functional, or have better job skills, that's functional, too. People have to be able to survive, after all. And having the literacy and thinking skills to live in a diverse world is clearly highly functional. I haven't quite squared the circle, but I have gotten further ahead towards constructing a coherent adult literacy PURPOSE for my own work. Andrea
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