Constructing Adult Literacies at a Local Literacy Tutor-Training Program (original) (raw)

2013, Community Literacy Journal

This study investigates how literacy was constructed at an adult literacy organization's volunteer tutor-training program. By drawing on qualitative analysis of training texts used during training, such as training evaluations, and data gathered from interviews with experienced tutors, it is possible to identify the assumptions about literacy constructed by the training program and tutors' training practices. Tutors seemed to present mixed assumptions about literacy: students simultaneously were given authority over their own literacy practices and literacy goals, while a sentiment of universally valued reading and writing skills was also present in terms of achieving fluency. By way of introducing my use of the term literacy in this study, I want to address what Thomas Smith notes as two varying understandings. In Smith's review of governmental policies' assumptions about literacy, he notes that current definitions of literacy and learning are being "pushed and pulled in competing directions" (35). Literacy is "pushed" in the sense that an increasingly diverse student population is prompting educators to recognize those students' diverse ways of knowing as kinds of literacies. In addition, literacy is "pulled" in the sense that reforms to education, such as No Child Left Behind, have seemingly narrowed definitions of literacy to a standard, universally applicable set of reading and writing skills. It is this pushing and pulling of literacy that I want to introduce, because I am curious about where community literacy organizations might fit within these two very different sets of assumptions about literacy. Recent research into literacy practices of student writers shows reading and writing abilities as inseparable from social, cultural, and generic contexts (Gee; Prior & Shipka; Berkenkotter et al.). Such an understanding of literacies as multiple and varied relative to their socio-cultural context suggests that teachers recognize the growing diversity of their students' varying reading and writing abilities. Brian Street and others refer to the understanding that literacy is always connected to social and cultural contexts as New Literacies. The concept of New Literacies "represents a shift in perspective on the study and acquisition of literacy from the dominant cognitive model, with its emphasis on reading, to a broader understanding of literacy practices in their social and cultural contexts" (qtd. in Smith 41). While a New Literacies understanding of language acquisition may now be the paradigm in most first-year composition courses, little research has been done to examine what role, if any, a New Literacies paradigm takes in community literacy programs. In what ways might literacy, as it is constructed in composition studies, align or diverge from literacy as it