[Reading-hall-of-fame] Adult Literacy at Harvard 35 Years Ago

[tsticht at znet.com]

April 19, 2010


Adult Literacy at Harvard 35 Years Ago


Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education


There was a heady atmosphere for adult literacy education in the winter and
spring of 1975. I arrived in January as a Visiting Associate Professor in
the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) at the invitation of Jeanne
Chall, Director of the Harvard Reading Laboratory.


This year of 2010 is the 35th anniversary of my stay at HGSE and I have
reflected back on that year not least because my second daughter was born
that June at Boston Lying In Hospital. But as exceptional as that is, I was
also fortunate to be there when adult literacy was on the agenda which had
been established earlier in the May 1970 issue of the Harvard Educational
Review.  The special issue was on Illiteracy in America and the lead-off
article was by Paulo Freire, who had been a Visiting Professor at Harvard’s
Center for Studies in Education. His article was entitled, The Adult
Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom. Later that year his
seminal work on The Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published. While I did
not know Paulo when he was at Harvard, I later had the opportunity to work
with him for one week a year for eight years in Paris at UNESCO House where
we both served on the International Jury for Literacy Prizes.


The second article in the special issue of the Harvard Educational Review
was by David Harman, who was at that time a doctorial student. Later he was
an Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard. I knew David when I got to
the HGSE in the winter of 1975. From time-to-time he and I would meet for
coffee and a roll at The  Blacksmith Café and bakery, which was said to be
the home of Longfellow’s famous “spreading chestnut tree”.


David was very interested in promoting adult literacy education as a
functional skill. In this regard, he did a considerable amount of
consulting with the U. S. Department of Education (USDE) on adult literacy.
He worked there with Paul Delker, then the Director of Adult Education in
the USDE. The major outcome of David’s work with Paul was what became known
as the Adult Performance Level (APL) project. The APL called for teaching
adult basic skills within the functional contexts of adults’ daily lives,
such as in transportation, health, etc. The APL went on to perform the
first national assessment of adult literacy and reported that some 20
percent of adults were functionally illiterate and another 30 percent or so
were only marginally literate. These data helped spur the National Literacy
Campaign of the 1980s.


The same year of 1975 saw a major report of the prestigious Committee on
Reading of the National Academy of Education arrive with the title of
Toward a Literate Society. The book was edited by John (Jack) Carroll and
Jeanne Chall, and though it was concerned with the full range of literacy
issues at all ages, the book contained two important chapters on adult
literacy issues, bringing these issues into the consciousness of a wider
range of scholars and educators. Just five years later, in 1979, Carman
St.John Hunter of World Education and David Harman highlighted adult
literacy issues and brought out a Report to the Ford Foundation in the form
of a book entitled Adult Illiteracy in the United States. By then, David was
back home in Israel at the Hebrew University. The program officer at the
Ford Foundation was Gail Spangenberg, who later went on to form the
Business Council for Effective Literacy (BCEL) in the 1980s and the Council
for Advancement of Adult Literacy (CAAL) in the 2000s. In the late 1990s,
World Education and Harvard formed the National Center for Adult Learning
and Literacy to advance adult literacy education in the United States.


During my stay at the HGSE Jeanne and I made it a practice to meet once a
week if we could at a restaurant on Brattle Street on Harvard Street. I’m
not certain but I think the restaurant was called something like
“Cardello’s” (?). It had a floor covered with sawdust to catch drippings
from the large plates of food they served. Jeanne and I spent many hours
there eating and talking about literacy. Jeanne was especially interested
in a 1975 book I had edited called “Reading for Working: A Functional
Literacy Anthology” which reported on the readability of technical manuals
in military jobs,  and  the 1974 book I had published with colleagues
called “Auding and Reading: A Developmental Model.” She saw the
relationship of oral to written language as particularly important in the
development of literacy. Almost a decade later, in 1983, her book entitled
“ Stages of Reading Development” was published and she included data from
both books, including two figures from the Auding and Reading book to
illustrated the relationships among oral and written language.


This year, there is again an interest in adult literacy for functional
purposes in helping adult literacy students transition into post-secondary
schools or job training and from there into jobs that can support a family.
I am offering workshops that illustrate a variety of programs that help
adult English language and literacy get into good jobs. I am also working
on an oracy project with an adult literacy network in Ontario, Canada to
promote the development of oral language skills in parents and then the
intergenerational transfer of such skills from parents to their children.


Last year I visited the Harvard Square area and noticed that Cardello’s (?)
is now gone, but  the Blacksmith café where David and I used to meet is now
integrated with the Cambridge Adult School. The Square changes, but the
adult literacy work goes on.



Tom Sticht
tsticht at aznet.net