Students Desire and Deserve The Opportunity To Make Literacy
What Lana’s profile suggests about adult education is not necessarily a matter of questioning goals. Successfully completing the GED exam or enhancing one’s employability are goals shared by students and instructors alike. Rather, Lana’s story compels us to question the ways of achieving these goals—the imperatives that underlie programming—and the kinds of interactions between teachers and learners, texts and worlds often marginalized. Finally, students like Lana compel us to ponder missed opportunities to learn about how we might better teach adults in ways that utilize perspectives and life experience they bring to the Replica Omega classroom, that is, to ponder how we do what we do with the opportunities we have.
The interests and experiences that adult learners bring to education can (and should) provide us with ample material, themes, and salient issues from which to fashion an effective, relative, and timely curriculum. And learner-centered curricula don’t have to come at the expense of current and traditional curricula but in addition to them. The people who are committed to high-quality adult education—the tutors, teachers, administrators nationwide—are the ones capable of improving adult education in the future, and they need reassurance because change won’t happen overnight. Change will come as individuals begin to write new ideas along side the old ones, to develop and initiate new curricula in addition to the old.
If just for a moment we step away from prepackaged curricula, we see other purposes for literacy and education that matter to individuals—students’ authentic interests in using language to re-story their lives and experiences Omega Replica Watches against the reductive labels and institutional language that have un-storied them. We see students who deserve the opportunity to “articulate the themes of their own existence” (Greene, 1978, p. 18). We see students like Lana who want to make sense of their own experiences and places in the world, to re-orient through language. For Lana, this meant composing stories and poems of personal hardship, as well as personal triumphs that provide hope and understanding. All students desire and deserve the opportunity to make literacy—their literacies—matter.
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