Reflecting on the Links Between Literacy Practices and Community Development

Judy Hofer & Pat Larson
The Literacy Project:Ware Adult Education Center
North Quabbin Adult Education Center

Learning to work collaboratively with shared visions and goals is at the heart of people building better futures for themselves and their communities. Adult learning centers can foster the skills, awareness, knowledge, and experiences of working together effectively. Through group classes, management committees, potlucks, and community activities, learners may have the opportunity to problem solve, offer their opinions, make decisions, advocate, and listen to others of different backgrounds. As individuals experience being listeners and being heard, they become more willing and able to advocate on their own behalf outside the four walls of the classroom, be it with spouses, landlords, employers, teachers, neighbors, or politicians.

Many assessment tools used in literacy programs, even those which educators call alternative, usually focus on how to assess where students are in terms of their goals. Checklists and portfolios aim to give feedback to students and teachers about how students’ reading, writing, and numeracy skills have improved. While we have found these helpful, both of us have recognized that these accomplishments are not what make us feel passionately about our work.

We get our energy for continuing as practitioners in the field when we see Mary take the initiative to make coffee for everyone when just months before she was so shut down that she did not speak unless a teacher directly asked her a question. She began huddled within herself; now she gives us a hard time for not writing in our own journals. Or we look at Fred who started our program saying nervously that he hoped he could get a private tutor; now he participates on the long range planning committee. And Diane responds that the most valuable thing she learned from the other students in our creative writing class is that “it’s our differences that make it exciting and our similarities that make it safe.”

Or we might take some excerpts from Annette’s essay. It has virtually nothing to do with how much better her writing is. Rather it has everything to do with what she has learned about herself and others:

“There are two kinds of people. The ones that go out and read and write. Have the ability to handle anything that comes their way. Not afraid to do it. They have the confidence they need.

“There are also people that stay back in a closet. That can’t come out or are afraid to. But sometimes we see a little light in the dark. We are looking for more light. When we do we find it very interesting. We found out that we too have a very good mind and feelings about things.

“I found out there are many intelligent people in the dark closet after all. Have the same confidence. We need to come out of that dark closet. The light we see feels so good.” We need more of it. It’s like being blind and you can see.

We lack indicators to measure this type of growth. In fact, these measures of an awareness that working class people also create knowledge, of increased confidence, feeling greater control over one’s life, participating in groups and taking on leadership roles are actually trivialized because we measure our students’ progress in terms of narrowly-defined goals. Many participants in adult education come to us feeling they are failures, and that we the experts will fill up their empty minds with what they need. We want to set forth right from the start that people coming to an adult education program must take an active role in their own learning, and that working within a group will enhance that process.

COMING TOGETHER AS A GROUP
Very few of our participants have experienced being part of a group that shared a sense of purpose. In rural, dying mill towns of Massachusetts, with virtually no public transportation, few jobs, no community centers, and limited access to social services, getting a GED and improving reading and writing skills barely scratch the surface of what is needed for people to get out of poverty and exercise more control over their lives.
What is desperately needed is to provide participants with the opportunities, knowledge and skills to work together cooperatively, imaginatively, with critical analyses and tools for problem-solving. Recognition of the value of this type of group building is growing in the business world, with quality circles, leadership development, and the valuing of being a “team player.” Yet where does it enter adult learning centers? And even if these goals are explicit in our mission, how do we articulate these to participants, influence their own goals for themselves, assess progress in these areas, and move forward to then bring the larger community into the classroom and the classroom out to the larger community?

As we work with Component 3, we are attempting to develop language to “look back” and not only assess individual progress but also to assess what people do as a group/community — part of the continuum of literacy development for a community. This is one reason why it seems important to discuss how to assess not only what people do as individuals but also with groups.

Creating Tools to Measure Community, Too
Although literacy practices and community development may be difficult to measure in the traditional sense of assessment and testing, there may be indicators which show how an adult education center views community development and collaborative group efforts. The way we began this reflection was to frame the discussion in terms of such general questions as:

1. How can we develop alternative assessment tools which look beyond the “deficit model” of what should an individual be doing differently to one which looks at a person’s place in their community, whether the classroom, the adult education center, their family, their neighborhood, or their town?
2. How do we assess improvement and change as a continuous process not only for the individual but for the community of individuals?
3. How does a program establish a strong link between the community, its program, and the participants in a program?
4. How does a program meet participants’ personal goals while considering the needs of a community? How can we assess the value of both of these coming together so that a program achieves more “of its goals more often and more efficiently”? (Stein)
5. How do we assess if there is movement or change on a continuum in terms of community development by people participating in programs and by the program? (Stein)
6. How do we assess people’s movement from individual goals to group goals and collective activity? What has to happen to allow for such movement?
7. How do we bridge looking at how individuals function in a group and develop along a continuum to the idea of community development and collective action?
8. In order to assess community development, how do we define leadership development? (Fingeret)
9. How do we assess collective activity of a group with the group rather than just assessment with individuals?
10. How do we develop a language of assessment which takes into account the development of community and collaborative efforts at adult education centers which also speaks to the needs of funders?

Answering all the above questions is beyond the scope of this discussion paper. And some of the possible answers may be found only through what Janet Isserlis describes as “the interactive, dynamic, dialogic roles of both teachers and learners” in the on-going assessment of daily classroom activities and other center and community activities” (Adventures in Assessment, Vol. 2).

In the Framework for Assessing Program Quality compiled by Sondra Stein for the Association for Community-Based Education, Stein points out a growing need to assess the ways we work in groups in terms of problem-solving. Team problem-solving is growing in a number of jobs to replace the model of workers being individual cogs in a wheel. Thus, participants in adult education programs may need and want experiences in “team efforts”. Stein says, “Instead of looking solely at learners and trying to figure out what they need to do differently if we are unhappy with program results, we should also look at the conditions and processes that lead to those results and try to figure out what the program needs to do differently.”

By experiencing and participating in groups, people may come together around group projects such as community forums and other activities. For example, Tawny, who came to The Literacy Project at the end of 1990 and earned her GED in a few months, returned to the Center in October, 1991 to begin volunteering as a tutor. Recently Tawny said that when she first came to the Center she only wanted to work alone and focus on getting her GED. “Now look at me. I am helping organize workshops, coordinating a newsletter for the Center, and getting the local selectperson to come to some of our NEXT STEPS meetings.”

Other community projects such as organizing SHARE (a food buying program), publishing a community magazine, and starting a legal literacy program all grew out of discussions and dialogue which began in the classroom. The seed for the Legal Literacy and Advocacy Project which grew out of several different discussions during a nine month period, according to one of the advocates: “Somebody’s welfare was cut off — an elderly student. There was no explanation. Welfare just said, ‘That’s it.’ It was illegal, but she wasn’t aware that it was. We decided to go about helping her.”

After six months of asking questions and talking with Legal Service lawyers, two people started a legal literacy and advocacy project for people in the community. The group of four people who developed this project learned about keeping records and about dealing with various agencies. They also kept a journal of their activities through which they talked to each other about their experiences. One participant said she learned how carrying out a community project using teamwork is very different from the factory work she has experienced.

The stops and starts for such community projects illustrate that progress is not always linear, and that it takes time. For many people it may be recursive and cyclical with movement in and out of the private and public realms (Fingeret). For example, as we see Donna begin to speak in a group at the Center and break through the silence on an individual level, we also see the discussions in her class move toward community issues such as lack of jobs and lack of public transportation. In time, Donna wrote a letter to the local newspaper about the need for public transportation. At first it appeared that this was an isolated writing activity. But months later when nothing happened, Donna talked about the issue in a group again and began writing letters to public officials. She eventually organized a group meeting with the person directing the regional transit authority. Thus, there is movement and change both on the individual level and the collective level as a group comes together to speak out in the larger community. All this takes time.

For now, our challenge as educators and facilitators is to negotiate linking literacy practices to community development so that students — and staff — can benefit from a common sense of purpose.

REFERENCES
Discussions with participants at the North Quabbin Adult Education Center — Tawny Biegen, Mike Fernet, JoAnn Gonzalez, Donna Fernet and others.

Fingeret, Hanna Arlene and Danin, Susan Tuck (1991). “They Really Put a Hurtin’ on My Brain”: Learning in Literacy Volunteers of New York City. Durham, N.C.: Literacy South.

Isserlis, Janet (1992). What You See: Ongoing Assessment in the ESL/Literacy Classroom. In Loren McGrail , Ed., Adventures in Assessment: Learner-Centered Approaches to Assessment and Evaluation in Adult Literacy, Volume 2. Boston, MA: System for Adult Basic Education Support (SABES).

Stein, Sondra (1993). Framework for Assessing Program Quality. Washington, D.C.: Association for Community Based Education Evaluation and Training Project.

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This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 5 (October 1993), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1993.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.