Two small centers at Penn are taking on the giant task of bringing the three R’s to the nation and the world. In a high-tech, academic way, of course.
By Samuel Hughes
“I’ve often asked myself a question,” the gentleman from India was saying. “Is literacy really necessary? If you look at the subject in a Western context, writing is only 4,000 years old. There was no writing before that time, so obviously there was no literacy. Was mankind less intelligent than it is now?”
There was an intriguingly subversive quality to those questions — not exactly what I was expecting to hear when I asked if I could have a few words with him on the stairs of International House. His card identified him as Dr. C.J. Daswani, a consultant for UNESCO, and given that he was in Philadelphia to speak at the International Literacy Institute’s Summer Literacy Training Program — a month-long talk-and-tech jam session that brings together highly-placed literacy advocates from around the globe — I was expecting to hear something more blatantly propagandistic. But I could tell that Daswani, a former linguistics professor who was recently in charge of planning the education of 70 million Indian children outside the school system, was leading me somewhere interesting. Especially after he looked down at my notebook and observed that “the human organism is not built for making these little squiggles on paper, or sitting before a screen and typing.”
He continued: “So should we say, ‘This is all bunk and let’s do away with it’? No. Because literacy does something. How it does it I haven’t yet discovered, but literacy gives you a very different perception and hold on time and space. You begin to see time and space very differently from when you were illiterate.”
He illustrated the idea with a few points that I was still digesting by the time he brought his argument around full circle: “In a benign human society, literacy would not be necessary. You need literacy in a society that is full of conflict and self-interest and people trying to do each other out. Literacy is the only way that you can safeguard your interests, through these complex laws and rules … And yet the concept of egalitarianism, for instance, also comes through literacy. That is why I think that literacy is important.”
The narrow, three-story Victorian building at 3910 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia is an unlikely-looking spot for some of the planet’s most cutting-edge, high-tech disseminators of the Word. The gold lettering above the door identifies it as the home of Penn’s Literacy Research Centers, which includes the National Center on Adult Literacy and the International Literacy Institute (as well as their embryonic high-tech offspring: the Penn Technology and Education Learning Lab, or PennTell). The two organizations are somewhat incestuously entwined, their staffs hopping from the national to the international fronts and back again with deliberate abandon. Dr. Daniel Wagner, the professor of education who serves as director of both organizations, often refers to them as a single entity: NCAL-ILI.
“What’s fascinating about NCAL-ILI,” he says, “is that there is an NCAL-ILI. It’s unique in the world, and certainly in university life, to combine a center located in a university, doing major work on the national level, with one that [works] with other countries in the world. They both synergistically benefit from the other. NCAL-ILI focuses not only on research but on practical applications. It’s got the backing of the UN and the federal government. That’s really unique.”
“What you have now in this building is really the two faces of the same interest in adult literacy education,” says Dr. Mohamed Maamouri, associate director of the ILI, who came to Penn from the University of Tunis. “You have a national center, NCAL, which has a very, very definite focus on technology — and the international program, the ILI, which over the last three years has become a recognized label in various parts of the world.”
The two organizations are not fieldworkers in the traditional sense, so do not expect to read heartwarming stories of NCAL or ILI staffers sitting down with the illiterate and teaching them to read and write and count. But they can provide fieldworkers with some pretty sharp tools and research to do their jobs. As NCAL’s mission statement notes, in unabashedly academic prose, the organization’s purpose is: “a) to enhance the knowledge-base about adult literacy; b) to improve the quality of research and development in the field; and c) to ensure a strong, two-way relationship between research and practice.”
“There are people here who work mainly on [high-tech] tools,” Maamouri explains. “We also have a connection with the field, and we have contacts with big organizations that lead to funding.”
That last effort is more than a matter of shaking the money tree, he’s quick to point out. Since some of those big organizations have a “definite interest in educational issues, sometimes in literacy,” he sees one of the ILI’s roles as helping to “inform some of these agencies and foundations towards the right moves.” He cites an example: “For the last 30, 40 years, the World Bank has been placing most of its money on primary-school education. We have been one of the very, very scarce voices at the World Bank meetings trying to promote a trend towards placing some of their funds and interest in adult literacy.” And their voice has been heard: After abandoning its funding of adult-literacy programs for several years, the World Bank recently resumed “selectively supporting” such programs in Africa, South America, and Indonesia.
In addition to hosting the occasional forum for policy-makers at the Library of Congress, NCAL has quietly cranked out reams of research papers on literacy-related topics, ranging from “Technology: New Tools for Adult Literacy” to “Early Warning Signs of Functional Illiteracy: Predictors in Childhood and Adolescence” to “What Works? Literacy Training in the Workplace.”
“We produce high-quality research papers and reports,” says Dr. Christopher Hopey, NCAL’s quick-talking, Boston-accented associate director. “I believe 15,000-18,000 people download those, or they buy them at cost, which is in itself like a small publishing business. That shows some impact, because you’re talking about a field that never really had a research base before us. You had lots of what I call propaganda papers — ‘Fight for Literacy’ and so on. But nobody was really saying, ‘How do you tie literacy into welfare-to-work programs, into employment programs? What does this mean for companies versus individuals? What does it mean to have a GED? Does it improve wages?’ Nobody really did those studies before us, and we’ve done a lot of that work, and people use that.
“Our research has shown that while the delivery of literacy has its problems in this country and internationally, it’s a worthwhile public investment,” he adds. “You’ll find a lot of people saying, ‘We already invested in these people once, and they failed — why should we invest in them again?’ I think we have made some very strong arguments” to answer those questions.
The two centers also, as Maamouri suggests, have a strong focus on technology. Perhaps NCAL’s most innovative project has been to develop, along with PBS and Kentucky Educational Television, a multi-media project called LiteracyLink. Its components include LitHelper (an on-line service for adult learners that will identify their individual skills and craft an individualized learning plan); LitLearner (new and existing materials for on-line GED instructional modules, which will be tailored to meet the needs of individual adult learners); and LitTeacher, a “virtual resource center” designed to improve the knowledge and skills of literacy teachers. One of the LitTeacher events is its series of satellite video conferences, which bring together adult-literacy educators around the country.
“I think it’s one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever been involved with,” says Noreen Lopez, who’s in charge of the PBS end of LiteracyLink, “and I’ve been involved with adult literacy for 25 years. NCAL developed the entire Web component, which is a huge component of the project. It was really starting from nothing and developing the whole design, both in terms of instructional design and the graphical look and feel of a program that would be appealing to people who might be initially afraid of the technology.”
NCAL has also created an award-winning Web site, Literacy Online (www.literacyonline.org) and an Adult Literacy Explorer CD-ROM. Two other on-line projects — Lit Kit and Learn@home — are in the works.
“NCAL has new links in the World Wide Web that offer fantastic opportunities for adult learners,” says Jo Ann Weinberger, executive director of the Center for Literacy in Philadelphia, whose staff of 50 serves more than 2,800 adult learners throughout the city. “I think it makes a fantastic contribution to the field. It opens up opportunities and windows for adult educators to individualize lessons for adults based on their goals.”
“The work they’ve done in technology, designed to recognize its role in facilitating adult learning beyond drill and practice, is particularly good,” agrees Maggi Gaines, executive director of Baltimore Reads. She describes NCAL as a “thoughtful group that has been able to integrate scholarship and practice.”
Since even NCAL admits that for the average adult learner, the promise of technology has so far been brighter than the reality, I ask Chris Hopey if it might not be wiser to put the money into, say, more teachers instead of all these cyber-bells and -whistles.
“No,” he says firmly. “There are a number of issues with adult learners. The first is that they have almost no time to spend with the teacher. They have families, children, jobs, lives, experiences — all of the stuff that basically says, ‘I’m lucky if I get to my teacher once a week. For an hour.’ So you could hire 10,000 more teachers, and the fact is that half would be sitting idle, because students couldn’t come to them. Technology offers an opportunity to reach them in their homes at 10:30, 11, 12 o’clock at night, on weekends, with the short times they have. Not only in their homes, but in local libraries.
“We have a huge retention problem in adult-education programs: a 67 percent dropout rate,” he adds. “Not because they’re not motivated to learn but because they have other things — their kids get sick, they can’t get transportation, they get a new job and have to work extra hours. And thus technology is that bridge, that mechanism, to break outside that box and keep those people retained.”
In addition, he says, “technology allows us to get out new materials inexpensively. New quality materials, new ideas. Teachers are limited to what’s on their shelf. If I give them access to the Internet or a CD-ROM, they quadruple that shelf 10 times over. There’s many more resources they can tap into. And they can also tap into what we call functional context for learners. We’re really trying to build a holistic approach to providing instruction.
“The fact is that adults are more interested in stuff that interests them. We can force kids into experiences. We can’t force adults.”
I’m sitting in a cinderblock room in Northampton County Prison in Easton, Pa., talking to Twila Evans, the prison’s educational coordinator. She a wiry, energetic, compassionate woman with a shock of white hair and alert blue eyes; I had met her when she participated in a Literacy-Link satellite video conference at WHYY-TV in Philadelphia. At one end of the room are half a dozen Macintosh desktop computers, which some of the prisoners use. (So far, for obvious security reasons, they do not have access to the Internet.)
I ask her if she’s seen a demonstrable gain in literacy since she began using computers.
“Oh, in terms of a willingness to communicate in writing, yes,” she says. “And that’s been one of the skills that we’ve had the least ability with, particularly with this population that has dropped out of school. And when we get the voice thing — where you can talk into the computer and you don’t have to get all hung up with your keys, and then do your editing — I think that will make even another whole leap.”
She introduces me to a prisoner named Angel, who is doing time for selling drugs. He’s a dark-eyed, wary-looking young man who has been in and out of prison for nearly half of his 30 years and is scheduled to be released in 2000. Having finally concluded that the only way to stay out for good is to learn enough to get a decent job, he enrolled in a computer basic-skills class funded by Northampton County Community College.
The computer, he says, really opened his eyes. “It’s more interesting. They’ve got a picture of the stuff. You know, a book, you just read a couple of pages and just throw it to the side. But a computer, it’s just there in front of your face real big, and you can find out more. I started investigating everything — I was like the police on the computer. I was going through everything — I looked up a lot of stuff on disks, things about my culture — Hispanic. I got my diploma for computers. It’s taught me a lot. If I didn’t have that, I’d still be reading at, I don’t know, I’d say a sixth-grade level.
“I didn’t take these classes to try to get out early,” he adds. “I took my classes to learn something, so when I get out I’ll be prepared for the real world. I learned a lot. Now, I go look for a job, guys that have experience on a computer or typing, I got experience in that.”
I ask Evans how NCAL has helped her raise the literacy level of her segment of adult society.
“They’re on the cutting edge,” she answers quickly. “They’re asking some of the uncomfortable questions that most of us maybe don’t want to think about, especially the public at large. Particularly when it comes to the cost of technology. It’s still fairly costly, at least for the average person. And yet when you look at it, even as a taxpayer, the better I prepare these guys to go back out into the community, the less of a burden they will be on any member of society. There are very few jobs out there that you don’t have to use some kind of technology.
“I don’t think you can do pure research out there,” she adds, “and [be unconnected with us] down here. Somehow you’ve got to be connected with what’s going on in the research field. NCAL has attempted to bring that practitioner and researcher together.”
Five years ago, the U.S. government released some good news and some bad news about literacy, based on the National Adult Literacy Survey. The good news was that nearly 95 percent of adult Americans could read at a fourth-grade level or better, proving that the most basic kind of illiteracy was relatively low. The bad news was that nearly half of all adult Americans scored in the lowest two levels of literacy — well below levels needed to be competitive in the global economy. In addition, nearly 25 percent of those adults who had an average of 10 years of formal schooling had only fourth-grade literacy skills.
While there are some 40-50 million adults in need of “retraining, up-skilling, or developing even the most basic literacy skills,” Wagner notes — roughly equivalent to the entire national school-age population — adult-literacy programs get a tiny fraction of the money spent on teaching and technology for schoolchildren. “This striking contrast between resources allocated and population needs,” writes Wagner, “is one of the best-kept secrets in American education today.”
A good 87 percent of adult-literacy teachers are volunteers. Some, of course, are fine, dedicated people. But as Chris Hopey points out, “Just because you’re a volunteer doesn’t mean you know how to teach. If you get an adult who has all the brain power but has a learning disability — dyslexia or something — how does a volunteer help that person? And how do you basically test them without testing them?” He and his colleagues at NCAL are hoping that the interactive aspects of the LiteracyLink project will help on the testing front, and lead to adult learners being matched with the sort of program they need. “We have a belief here that assessment can also be instructional,” he says.
It’s hard to know exactly how dire the literacy situation is around the globe, since as Maamouri points out: “Very little assessment has been done according to a strong, solid, scientific base.” Three years ago, the World Bank estimated that some 900 million people were illiterate, roughly half of them living in China and India. “Without new interventions,” noted a recent ILI report, “adult illiteracy rates in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are not likely to fall much below 40 percent by 2000.”
Literacy is not like pregnancy: You can be just a little bit literate, as millions of Americans can testify. A 1995 International Adult Literacy Survey of eight industrialized nations (including the U.S.) showed that while their illiteracy rates may be low, they had what Maamouri describes as “very important problems in low-literacy” — significant enough that one of the nations (France) did not want to make the results public.
“It reflects badly on their education policies,” he explains. “It also reflected badly on the social policies of their government, because it showed that a lot of the migrant people were marginalized. They thought it might lead to unrest and all kinds of problems with some groups. Literacy leads to those types of strong political repercussions.”
Not unrelated to all that is the politically-charged issue of diglossia, which one dictionary defines as “a situation in which complementary social functions are distributed between two varieties of a language, a prestigious, formal variety and a common, colloquial variety.” In the United States, the debate might center on something like Ebonics; in Arab countries, for example, the “standard” written Arabic is so different from the many spoken dialects that relatively few ordinary people know how to read or speak it.
“Diglossia applies to every country,” says Maamouri. “The only difference is whether it’s a mild case or an acute case. The Arabic is really an acute case. One of the characteristics of the diglossic situation is that people don’t see the differences in the two languages. They really think, firmly believe, that they only have one language, and that’s the language of the nation or of the national group.”
There is also the problem that countries face when more than one “mother tongue” is spoken — Spanish in the U.S., for instance, or any number of languages and dialects in places like India and many countries in Africa.
“It’s not just a linguistic issue,” notes Maamouri. “It’s policy and planning; it’s also cost. What’s the cost of literacy if you have to deploy people in x number of languages? At our literacy forum in Africa, there was a heated debate, because in the opening session with the Minister of National Languages and Literacy in Senegal, the whole speech was about the promotion of national languages. The old, axiomatic position that was taken is that the best way to teach children, and even adults, is to teach them in their ‘mother tongue.’ But what’s the ‘mother tongue?’ Is it a language? A dialect? What does it do to your whole system of education? It’s clear that, for the moment, there has been no successful answer to that issue.”
I ask Wagner if he’s willing to give a definition of literacy, and he demurs. “Literacy is a moving target,” he says. “Anytime you give a definition that constrains, you get into fights. We refer to literacy as the basic skills of reading, writing, and calculating.”
“I define ‘literacy’ as an empowerment kind of tool,” says Chris Hopey. “You know, if you go to Third World countries, it’s a human-rights issue. People would say that in this country we’re technocrats in terms of how we define literacy — as reading, writing, numeracy. But I think in Third World countries, or what they call the southern countries of the world, it’s a human-rights issue. Because it’s tied to the ability to vote, to democracy, women’s rights — all those things are really important.”
Anita Priyadarshini, director of the State Resource Centre in Jaipur, India, puts it this way: “Literacy gives people the power to question.”
After the ILI was created a few years ago, Maamouri recalls, he and Wagner realized that in many parts of the world, there was no place for people to be trained in the teaching of literacy. Higher literacy-education thus became one of the goals of the ILI. “You cannot just go to the field with volunteers and ‘each one teach one,'” Maamouri notes, echoing Chris Hopey’s observation. “It is a good idea but you might end up with people who are not trained or not good teachers. What literacy needs is the credibility of a really well-trained corps of teachers.”
That led to the creation of the Summer Literacy Training Program, co-sponsored by UNESCO and held in Philadelphia. (The ILI has also organized or co-organized regional literacy forums in places like Dakar, Senegal; New Delhi; and Manilla, and plans are being drawn up to hold another forum in Beijing next year.)
This year, 19 women and nine men from two dozen countries descended on University City in their saris and suits and t-shirts. The four-week program featured intensive technology workshops — the ILI firmly believes that even countries where the Internet is mostly still a dream should start preparing for the day when it becomes a reality — and talks on topics ranging from “Integrating Health & Basic Skills Education” to “Literacy and Development: Challenges to Dominant Paradigms.” And before the program had even finished, one could read summaries of each talk on the ILI’s Web site.
“The fact that you have a UNESCO- supported international literacy institution lobbying for adult literacy — that has tremendous impact,” notes C.J. Daswani. “People begin to say, ‘OK, if China is doing this, then surely it must be important; if India is doing this, it must be important.’ And if ILI wants to come in and be the lobbyist or the middleman, that helps a great deal. But it’s not just being the lobbyist and the middleman without the technical resource. We have the technical resource. We have academic faculty. And by getting people in from various countries to come together in a different context like this, a lot of learning takes place outside the formal lecture room. Bonds are made. And a lot of these people are currently in positions of power. I’m quite certain that, as they begin to face the problems in their own countries, they will look at each other and learn from each other.”
Dr. Joseph Okedara, professor of adult education at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, put it a little more dramatically. “The people here,” he said, gesturing at his colleagues seated around the conference room in International House, “they will be Apostles, to carry the message of technology and innovation to fight in the war against illiteracy.”
