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>For the last eight years, I have been teaching adult high school
>upgrading in a college in Edmonton. The students bring with them
>personal contexts which include backgrounds characterized by low
>self-esteem, poverty, abuse, learning difficulties and health issues.
>They are then expected to establish a career goal to be eligible for
>Student Finance Board educational grants and to take only those courses
>which will advance them quickly towards that goal. We then slot them
>into the appropriate English course, which is based on the Alberta high
>school curriculum, which is literature-based and written for 15-17 year
>olds. You can probably already see how some of this impacts the context
>in which I teach reading, writing, listening and speaking. Interested in
>hearing more at the conference?

I'm not likely to be at the conference, but I'd love to read, if not
hear, more.

From some years working as an adult literacy teacher and yet more years
researching and university teaching about literacy, I'm very interested
in what I've sometimes called the "literacy regime."  I mean the term to
point to all those arrangements of policy and administration that both
promote and constrain basic education work with/for adults.  Those
arrangements inevitably clash at various points with what teachers and
program organizers have to do, in detail, to bring off literacy work.
And they certainly clash with the life circumstances of learners,
including whatever impetus for learning there is within those lives.  The
"regime" notion is meant to clear some intellectual space for looking at
all those arrangements, from a vantage point within that detailed
teaching and programming work.

So, yes, I'm very interested in knowing more of where your work goes.
Keep me on your distribution list!

I might also mention that there is a new adult literacy journal (as yet
unnamed) in the process of getting launched in Canada.  Within a year or
so it might be a place to publish.

Richard



Prof. Richard Darville
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Dr.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6
613-520-2600 ext. 2808; fax 613-520-6641
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