Rethinking Literacy Education: The Critical Need for Practice–Based Change

?This book is challenging, useful, insightful, authoritative, and hopeful one that every adult literacy education policy and program leader, researcher, and practitioner should read. With this work, Allan Quigley has made a first–rate contribution to our field.? Jean H. Lowe, director, GED Testing Service Most efforts to eradicate illiteracy fail because they emanate from a political and social perspective that has little bearing on reality. In this thought–provoking book, B. Allan Quigley challenges the faulty assumptions and misguided agAndas that shaped past efforts at literacy education. Quigley offers a new view of illiteracy that starts with the learner and takes into account a broad array of work, family, and cultural considerations. This guide gives adult educators and trainers currently working in the field concrete suggestions and alternatives for their work, and provides them with historical and evolutionary frameworks that they can use to shape a new philosophy of adult literacy and improve their practice.

ILLITERACY THROUGH SOCIETY′S EYES.

1. Myths, Rhetoric, and Stereotypes About Literacy.

2. The Popular Perspective and the Media.

3. The Political Perspective and Literacy Programs.

HOW TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS VIEW ILLITERACY.

4. Rethinking Educational Approaches.

5. What Textbooks Can Communicate to Learners.

ENGAGING NONPARTICIPANTS AND DROPOUTS.

6. Understanding Attrition and Improving Retention.

7. Why Many Resist, and Ways to Recruit Them.

8. Grounding Programs and Policies in Practical Knowledge.

9. Literacy Educators as Leaders of Effective Change.

TAKING ACTION TO TRANSFORM LITERACY EDUCATION.

B. ALLAN QUIGLEY is associate professor and regional director of adult education at the Pennsylvania State University Center for Continuing and Graduate Education, Monroeville, Pennsylvania.

?This book is challenging, useful, insightful, authoritative, and hopeful––one that every adult literacy education policy and program leader, researcher and practitioner should read. With this work, Allan Quigley has made a first–rate contribution to our field.? (Jean H. Lowe, director, GED Testing Service)

?Quigley′s perspective on adult literacy is fresh and provocative. Rethinking Literacy Education impels adult literacy professionals to reconsider what they are doing and why.? (Hal Beder, professor, department of educational theory, policy, and administration, Rutgers)

?Valuable in encouraging literacy practitioners to be more proactive in challenging misguided public policy and damaging literacy rhetoric.? (Elisabeth Hayes, associate professor, department of continuing and vocational education, University of Wisconsin–Madison)