LITERACY-with-PURPOSE OBSTACLES

LITERACY-with-PURPOSE

A TEACHING FRAMEWORK AND LESSON-PLANNING TEMPLATE FOR ESOL ADULT LITERACY

INTRO


	OBSTACLES


	That education is not an affair of telling and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory.


	-John Dewey


	COVERAGE


	The assumption that a topic should have been learned because the topic has been covered (taught) is one of the most powerful and pervasive ideas across the board in education. As Dewey points out, despite our professed beliefs to the contrary, we often practice what Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called the banking model of education in which students are treated as receptacles receiving, filing and storing the deposits made by the teacher [12]. Given a pedagogy based on the banking model, it is no surprise that faith in mere coverage of material persists.


	People [often] believe that telling someone an item of information (giving them an object) is sufficient to communicate it and even to teach it. If a course or a chapter “covers” a concept, then the student or reader is assumed to have been given that object. If they fail to demonstrate the knowledge specified by that object, they are taken to be ineffective learners (stupid, inattentive, or lazy).


	-Fischer & Bidell

If education were simply an affair of giving and receiving—of telling and being told—all of us would know the capitals of every state, how many atoms are in a mole, the formula for the quadratic equation and whether “you should go upstairs and lay down” is a proper English sentence.

(It is not: “you should go upstairs and lie down” is the correct variation).

Even as teachers who do not buy the banking model, who believe that knowledge is actively constructed rather than passively transferred, we are still frustrated when students fail to make progress and we are still challenged by students whose learning is so uneven and who fail to apply what they have already learned. Part of the trouble is that we often mistake evidence of learning in a limited context (or with teacher/peer support) with proof of learning in general, assuming for example, that a student who knows how to capitalize her own name will in turn capitalize all names. It is this confusion that may lead to frustration when learners make mistakes—frustration on the part of the teacher (I already covered this) and frustration on the part of the student (how does the teacher expect me to succeed in this new context and/or without the usual supports?).


	TRANSFER


	How do organisms use a skill or ability in a situation different from the one where they learned it?

This question of transfer is one of the most fundamental problems in education [2; 10] and is intimately linked to the issue of coverage as outlined above. Perhaps the most important thing to say about transfer is that it is not automatic [18]—take the skill of flying a plane: who wants to fly in a 747 with a pilot who only has experience flying

puddle jumpers? With respect to the skill of writing, a number of studies have reported that a simple change in the mode of test administration (pencil and paper versus on a computer) can seriously impact student performance. In fact, the writing ability of students used to writing with computers is significantly underestimated by paper-and-pencil tests. In one study, only 30 percent of students accustomed to writing with computers passed a paper-and-pencil test whereas 67 percent passed the same test when they wrote on a computer [20].

That knowledge and skills do not automatically transfer is consistently ignored when we as teachers place our trust in merely covering a topic once. A great deal of research in cognitive science tells us that for knowledge transfer to occur learners must understand when and how to apply what they have learned [18]. Research in cognitive science and developmental psychology tells us (as we would expect) that transfer happens most readily when two contexts are similar [2; 18]. More specifically, transfer is maximized when a) tasks have similar content b) there is opportunity for practice and support and c) the person has had time to consolidate the skill or knowledge in question [9].


	TEACHER NOTE


	Literacy-with-Purpose asks that we as teachers recognize that in spite of our personal educational philosophy, we may some times use teaching methods that emphasize coverage over understanding; moreover, we may some times expect learners to be able to magically transfer skills and knowledge across widely diverging contexts. In order to address these issues of coverage and transfer, Literacy-with-Purpose is designed to create lessons that revisit the same skills in a variety of contexts—thereby encouraging both teachers’ and learners’ to think strategically about the process of transferring skills.


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HGSE: COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT, EDUCATION, AND THE BRAIN