[Reading-hall-of-fame] Relevance is the Key to Learning

[tsticht at znet.com]

5/5/2014


>From Sailor Sam to the Voyage of the Mimi: Relevance is the Key to Learning


Tom Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education


In 2006, Samuel Y. “Sam” Gibbon, Jr. was awarded the Fred Rogers Award by
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington DC in recognition of
his forty years of work on children’s educational television. He was a
member of The Children’s Television Workshop, and a producer of the
internationally known TV shows for children, Sesame Street, the Electric
Company, and others.  I met Gibbon in the early 1970s in meetings convened
by the U. S. National Institute of Education (NIE) to develop plans for R &
D on language and literacy.


One of these meetings, in 1972, produced a report entitled, “Linguistic
Communication: Perspectives for Research”.  Gibbon was a member of the
study group that produced the report and I was among those invited to
present information to the study group about the R & D colleagues and I
were conducting. This R & D aimed to understand the reading demands of
military jobs, how to design more effective literacy programs for military
personnel, and how to design more readable and usable technical manuals and
other job-related documents.  Later,  the Linguistic Communication study
group made recommendations some of which fell along the lines of the R & D
my group was doing to understand literacy within the functional,
occupational, contexts of the Armed Services.


In October of 1975,  I was living in Monterey, California  where I had
arranged for a Conference on Reading and Readability Research in the Armed
Services to be held  at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School not far from my
house.  Gibbon was interested in the research to be discussed in the
conference and agreed to attend and participate as a commentator on the
papers presented. At the conference, given his background in educational
TV, Gibbon focused some of his comments on the development of literacy
education within the military services and suggested that television and
other electronic media might be usefully explored in literacy training in
all the Services.

About a decade later, in 1984,  the U.S. Department of Education gave a
grant to Bank Street College for a television series teaching science and
mathematics to be used in elementary schools. Gibbon was engaged as the
Executive Producer of the TV series which was called The Voyage of the
Mimi.  He supplemented the TV instruction using other media for instruction
including books and computers, thereby providing a multimedia teaching and
learning environment.

Just the year before, in 1983, I was asked to direct an R & D effort for the
U. S. Navy to develop a 45 hour course in reading and another 45 hour course
in mathematics for sailors having trouble passing correspondence courses to
qualify for promotion to higher ranks. In the development of these
programs, our team used a mix of media as Gibbon had suggested in the 1975
conference. We did not use TV, but we incorporated the use of a multimedia
mix of teachers, books, computers, and peer instruction.

Another, very important  instructional technique that Gibbon used in the
Voyage of the Mimi program was to integrate the teaching of mathematics and
science so that students could see how the math grows naturally out of the
questions with which the science was dealing. This made it clear why the
study of math is relevant to scientific investigation.

Similarly, in our Navy basic skills programs, we integrated the teaching of
basic skills (reading, math) within the functional context of the
job-related, correspondence materials that the sailors needed to study to
gain promotions to higher ranks. As with Gibbon’s use of functional context
education in the Voyage of the Mimi, this helped answer the ubiquitous
student question, “Why do I need to learn this?”

Today, there are many initiatives underway which follow the approach to
education used in the Voyage of the Mimi and the Navy work to 
“contextualize” basic skills instruction within the academic content areas
in both K-12 and adult literacy education. In 2012, the U. S. Department of
Labor provided $98.5 million for programs integrating  basic skills and
occupational skills training to enable adults to increase their educational
learning gains and earn industry-recognized credentials while completing
basic skills training;

In World War II, Navy literacy programs used a fictional character, Sailor
Sam, to show the relevance of basic skills education to military service.
>From Sailor Sam to Sam Gibbon and the Voyage of the Mimi,  the lesson is
the same: when instruction is placed within a functional context, and
students can see the relevance of what they are being asked to learn,
motivation to learn and persistence in learning is increased.

tsticht at aznet.net