The book provides a historical overview of adult literacy theory, policy, practice, and research from the mid-1980s to the present. The main focus is a descriptive analysis of three distinctive schools of literacy: the Freirean-based participatory literacy movement grounded in oppositional politics and grass-roots community activism; the British-based New Literacy Studies that focuses on the ways in which diverse students utilize various literacy practices in their daily lives; and the U.S. federal government's focus on functional literacy linked to a 45-year policy emphasis on workforce readiness. These three schools of thought lead to substantially different implications over such critical areas as curriculum, assessment and accountability, and the socio-cultural role of literacy, policy, and political culture, which are discussed throughout the chapters of the book. This discussion includes a chapter on research traditions that closely parallels these perspectives on literacy education. Demetrion argues that unless values grounded ultimately in political culture emerge, it is exceedingly unlikely that the adult literacy field will be able to move from its current marginalized status toward that of achieving the level of public and policy legitimacy many believe it needs for its long-term institutional flourishing. It is argued that any settlement of this issue must be accomplished in the field of practice rather than the ground of theory, even as theoretical insight can help to frame the issues. Conflicting Paradigms in Adult Literacy Education: In Quest of a U.S. Democratic Politics of Literacy speaks to a wide audience, including not only the adult literacy community, but anyone interested in educational theory, practice, policy, research traditions, or political culture, and more fundamentally, in their intersection. Given the breadth of the topics covered, as well as the broad scope of the argument, the book is also meant for those who would like to gain a useful perspective on contemporary U.S. culture, through the window of these conflicting tensions within the field of adult literacy education.

The book provides a historical overview of adult literacy theory, policy, practice, and research from the mid-1980s to the present. The main focus is a descriptive analysis of three distinctive schools of literacy: the Freirean-based participatory literacy movement grounded in oppositional politics and grass-roots community activism; the British-based New Literacy Studies that focuses on the ways in which diverse students utilize various literacy practices in their daily lives; and the U.S. federal government's focus on functional literacy linked to a 45-year policy emphasis on workforce readiness. These three schools of thought lead to substantially different implications over such critical areas as curriculum, assessment and accountability, and the socio-cultural role of literacy, policy, and political culture, which are discussed throughout the chapters of the book. This discussion includes a chapter on research traditions that closely parallels these perspectives on literacy education. Demetrion argues that unless values grounded ultimately in political culture emerge, it is exceedingly unlikely that the adult literacy field will be able to move from its current marginalized status toward that of achieving the level of public and policy legitimacy many believe it needs for its long-term institutional flourishing. It is argued that any settlement of this issue must be accomplished in the field of practice rather than the ground of theory, even as theoretical insight can help to frame the issues. Conflicting Paradigms in Adult Literacy Education: In Quest of a U.S. Democratic Politics of Literacy speaks to a wide audience, including not only the adult literacy community, but anyone interested in educational theory, practice, policy, research traditions, or political culture, and more fundamentally, in their intersection. Given the breadth of the topics covered, as well as the broad scope of the argument, the book is also meant for those who would like to gain a useful perspective on contemporary U.S. culture, through the window of these conflicting tensions within the field of adult literacy education.

This book examines the literacy practices of exemplary adult education teachers working within critical literacy frameworks. It provides an in-depth look at the complexity of adult literacy education through the lenses of these teachers. An understanding of this complexity helps teachers design literacy practices in classrooms on a daily basis. This is an important book for there is considerable pedagogical and political attention focused on adult literacy education at this time. As the field of adult education continues to grapple with issues of teacher professionalization/certification, it adds a much needed teacher perspective. Appropriate as a text for adult education courses, this volume will also appeal to researchers, teacher educators, practitioners, and graduate students across the field of literacy education.

Adult Literacy in a New Era chronicles the history and development of The Open Book, an adult literacy organisation inspired by the legendary educationalist Paulo Freire, and other political educators. Using participants' own words and experiences, Ramdeholl analyses and investigates adult literacy policy and aspects of the program's history from its beginning in 1984 to its end in 2001. Offering new insights into methodologies of reading, writing, and learning, this book will inspire not only adult literacy students and teachers, but anyone concerned with changing public policy from the bottom up.

Living in an age of communication, literacy is an extremely integral part of our society. We are impacted by literature during our infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. This four volume set includes information from specialists in the field who discuss the influence of popular culture, media, and technology on literacy. Together, they offer a comprehensive outline of the study and practice of literacy in the United States.

Uniquely bringing together discourse analysis, critical literacy, and teacher research, this book invites teacher educators, literacy researchers, and discourse analysts to consider how discourse analysis can be used to foster critical literacy education. It is both a guide for conducting critical discourse analysis and a look at how the authors, alongside their teacher education students, used the tools of discourse analysis to inquire into, critique, and design critical literacy practices. Through an intimate look at the workings of a university teacher education course and the discourse analysis tools that teacher-researchers use to understand their classrooms, the book provides examples of both pre-service teachers and teacher educators becoming critically literate. The context-rich examples highlight the ways in which discourse analysis aids teachers’ decision making in the moment and reflections on their practice over time. Readers learn to conduct discourse analysis as they read about critical literacy practices at the university level. Designed to be interactive, each chapter features step-by-step procedures for conducting each kind of discourse analysis (narrative, critically oriented, multimodal), sample analyses, and additional readings and resources. By attending to the micro-interactions as well as processes that unfold across time, the book illustrates the power and potential of discourse analysis as a pedagogical and research tool.

Available in paperback for the first time, this milestone work offers an in-depth treatment of all aspects of the discipline and practice of social policy globally. Supported by a distinguished international advisory board, the editors have compiled almost 900,000 words across 734 entries written by 284 leading specialists to provide authoritative coverage of concepts, policy actors, welfare institutions and services along a series of national, regional and transnational dimensions. Also included are biographical entries on major policy makers and shapers. The editors have particularly striven to provide strong coverage of differing geographical and cultural traditions so that the variety of social policy, as both an academic discipline and a domain of governance, is reflected. Contributors draw in and make the necessary connections with social policy's associated disciplines to provide a rich picture of this vast and highly diverse field. Comprehensive and authoritative, the Encyclopedia has sought to open up rather than to foreclose the numerous areas in which there is on-going research, debate and, sometimes, serious disagreement and divergence in theory and practice. To this end, entries attempt to introduce a core or common ground of understanding before moving on to a wider discussion of debates regarding different conceptual and geographical approaches. The whole is integrated by cross-referencing and each entry includes a bibliography for further reading. There is a full index. The International Encyclopedia of Social Policy provides the most substantial mapping of the international study and practice of social policy to date and will stand as a vital storehouse of knowledge for many years to come.

The American adult education system has become an alternative for school dropouts, with some state welfare policies requiring teen mothers and women without high school diplomas to participate in adult education programs to receive aid. Currently, low-income women of color are more likely to be enrolled in the lowest levels of adult basic education. Very little has been published about women's experiences in these mandatory programs and whether the programs reproduce the conditions that forced women to drop out in the first place. Lorna Rivera bridges the gap with this important study, the product of ten years' active ethnographic research with formerly homeless women who participated in adult literacy education classes before and after welfare reform. She draws on rich interviews with organizers and participants in the Adult Learners Program at Project Hope, a women's shelter and community development organization in Boston's Dudley neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city. Analyzing the web of ideological contradictions regarding "work first" welfare reform policies, Rivera argues that poverty is produced and reproduced when women with low literacy skills are pushed into welfare-to-work programs and denied education. She examines how various discourses about individual choice and self-sufficiency shape the purposes of literacy, how low-income women express a sense of personal responsibility for being poor, and how neoliberal ideologies and practices compromise the goals of critical literacy programs. Throughout this study, the voices and experiences of formerly homeless women challenge cultural stereotypes about poor women, showing in personal and structural terms how social and economic forces shape and restrict opportunities for low-income women of color.

Reading, Writing, and Digitizing offers a new theoretical proposal concerning expert and novice readers and writers based on the psycholinguistics of literacy. This book has five specific goals. First, it presents a theory of meta-reading and writing that describes what literacy experts are able to do with written text. They do what the word “meta” describes: go before and after, into and around, beyond and beside written text to understand and create meaning. Second, the case studies presented reveal differences between literacy novices and experts in terms of their awarenesses about texts and their skills; these are clarified as the discussion unfolds. Third, the book provides an analysis of the processing mechanisms people use and the features that texts contain that make literacy possible. A fourth goal is to examine how experts understand and produce texts in both traditional and digital venues. Finally, the book ends with focused strategies for instruction that will be useful to any reader working with people engaged in literacy development. Readers of this book will be better equipped to support the literacy development of others through their enhanced understanding of the psycholinguistics of reading and writing and of the differences between literacy novices and experts.