A Conceptual Framework for Instruction
The following proposal outlines a conceptual framework for an expressive writing project that accommodates and builds on students’ lives and experiences. This framework forms a trajectory (see Figure 1) of potential writings, at once challenging, encouraging, and timely, as well as respectful and attentive to the complex lives of adults and is intended as a model for instructors to help students visualize/conceptualize their involvement with education and position learners’ lives, experiences, and interests at the center of all activities and learning that occur in the classroom.
Orientation is an organizing principle for the development of life-relevant material for literacy instruction. This organizing principle might also assist students and instructors should they choose to adopt or adapt any outside materials—other pilot or experimental programs and projects—for use in their classrooms. The points Omega Replica along the conceptual trajectory are conceived of as “nodes,” much the way a cultural geographer might consider a particular locale within a city to be a historical, cultural, or civic node: a place where different peoples, activities, and functions intersect. These nodes represent points along a chronological timeline as well as points along a perceptual interpretive timeline, both of which articulate with the conceptual framework of orientation, where students begin by exploring past experiences, working their way through the present and culminating in writing(s) aimed at articulating possible futures.
These nodes are also conceived as simple, broad questions that can be construed into more specific, focused inquiries by students and instructors. For students like Lana, this trajectory might become a model for liberatory literacy education, whereby students’ writing is geared toward recognition of social, cultural, and economic reasons for past, current, and future problems they may be struggling to understand. Quigley’s (1997) review of liberatory literacy education highlighted a number of successful programs nationwide, such as the famous Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, functioning, for obvious political reasons, outside the Omega Seamaster Replica realm of federal funding, and notes how the radical label has kept them, and this view of literacy education as a whole, on the sidelines of policy discussions and implementation.
Ultimately, though, policymakers play only a partial role in adult education’s future (Fingeret, 1984) while practitioners, a label which should also include adult learners themselves, play the leads. Change— philosophical, curricular, or pedagogical—begins with the people who make the field, and while educators in state-run programs can’t just simply stop teaching prescribed curricula, they can and should be encouraged and supported in augmenting those curricula with ideas for projects, assignments, and lessons that return some control of learning back to learners and create conditions where learners might begin to empower themselves by writing their own stories.
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