Recruiting and Serving Hard to Reach Adults

From LiteracyTentWiki

Today I am going to invite you to join me in thinking. I’m not going to make a speech or present an argument with lots of statistics. Instead, I’m going to ask a few questions, and suggest some answers from my review of discussions on the topic, from my interviews with adult learners, and from research. I would like you, as I pose these questions, to jot down some of your own answers, and to share them with us.

What is a think-together?

• Start with a problem
• Define it
• Consider alternative definitions of the problem
• Ask others what we know about the problem
• Consider possible solutions
• Ask others for different possible solutions

As I understand it, the problem that we are thinking about today, one that exists throughout modern industrial, English-speaking societies like yours and mine, as well as in poor and underdeveloped countries, is that there are large numbers of adults who have very low reading and writing skills, but who do not register for or enroll in reading and writing schemes or what we, in the U.S. call programs. A related problem of interest at this conference is how to serve these students well once they have enrolled, how to help them to persist and make progress.

1. Who are these Hard-to-Reach Low-literate Adults?

They:

• Need basic literacy skills, at least as indicated by the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and in the U.S. variation on that, called the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) and more recently, the (U.S.) National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL)
• Are native speakers of English who did not learn to read and write well, or at all, in school
• Often have specific reading disabilities or other learning disabilities
• Are not (yet) enrolled in a scheme (in the U.S., a program)
• Are often protective of their privacy (and pain or shame) – especially that they have difficulty reading, writing, or spelling
• Often have experienced humiliation in school or elsewhere where they have been called on in public to read or write
• Include young adults
• Include those who need numeracy, who are “math phobic”

2. Why are they “hard-to-reach?” (What does “hard-to-reach” mean?)

• They don’t always acknowledge to themselves or others that they have a problem with reading, writing or numeracy
  • Maybe they don’t have a problem because they have chosen work or relationships that don’t often require reading, writing or numeracy.
  • Maybe they don’t have a problem because they have developed successful workarounds. What are these “workarounds?”
    • A spouse who reads and writes
    • A group of friends, buddies, or mates who learn and teach each other in an oral culture
    • Avoidance of situations (e.g. jobs) where reading, writing or numeracy are required
    • Lies, excuses (I left my glasses at home) and bluffs (carrying a newspaper every day)
    • They get information from radio and TV
    • They hone their memory skills (e.g. a friend of mine learned to read in his fifties. At one point in his life he was an insurance investigator. He never wrote down anything about a claim until he got home and could repeat the details to his wife)
    • In driving a vehicle, they use landmarks instead of street signs
• These strategies, however, don’t always work. “Workarounds” are fragile. When they break down, it can be an emotional challenge or a crisis.
  • These low-literate adults may be offered a better job, a promotion, but cannot accept it because they know it requires reading, writing or numeracy
  • A child or grandchild asks to be read to
  • They are asked to read scriptures in church
  • They cannot read the ballot in a voting place
  • Because they cannot read a menu in a restaurant they always order what someone else has just ordered or something they know the restaurant will usually have, like a hamburger
  • They cannot use a computer, an Automated Teller Machine, a self check-in kiosk at an airport – in a society that increasingly requires using computer and literacy skills. So they have to wait in long lines.
• What are some other examples of “workarounds” that break down?
  • These are “points of shame” or frustration in the lives of adults who get by without literacy or numeracy skills. These points of shame or frustration are opportunities to reach these adults, to get them interested in doing something about their problem.

3. What strategies have been effective in reaching out to adults with literacy and numeracy difficulties, and getting them to enroll in literacy schemes (programs)?

• Literacy Ambassadors. These are people who have walked in the shoes of a low-literate adult, but have learned to read, write or do numeracy as an adult.
• Counselors or Teachers who have walked in those shoes. These professionals once had difficulty reading, writing or with numeracy themselves, and often did not graduate from school but pursued these basic skills later in life.
• Volunteer One-on-One Tutors. A one-on-one tutor relationship can assure privacy in instruction.
• Support Groups. These are usually led by a Literacy Ambassador. In a support group like this, the shame and frustration can be discussed and feelings can be expressed.
• Work with Vocational Rehabilitation Counselors. Vocational Rehabilitation Counselors need to be trained to look for clients’ need/interest in improving literacy skills, and that they know when and how to raise the issue.
• Allow Try-out Visits to Adult Literacy Classes. Some adults who are not ready to commit to enrollment might want to see what the classes are like.
• Frame adult literacy as a step out of poverty, as hope, not just as going for tutoring

4. Once Low-literate adults show up, how can we keep them enrolled so they can make progress?

There has been quite a bit of research on persistence in the U.S. and elsewhere. From the persistence research literature we know many things now about how to help students stick with a scheme long enough to make good progress. I am going to describe four essential supports based on research done by Comings, Parella and Soricone, but there is much more to read and learn on this beyond what I present today. Here are the four supports Comings and others describe:

1. Awareness and management of the positive and negative forces that help and hinder persistence. Positive forces include for example a desire for a higher income, getting or keeping a job, or reading to one’s children or grandchildren. Negative forces include lack of free time to study, changes in one’s work schedule, or poor health. These negative forces tend to push adult learners to drop out. From the time adults enter programs to the time when they either achieve their goals or drop out, both positive and negative forces are acting upon them. Any intervention by an ABE program meant to increase persistence must help adults to strengthen the positive forces and lessen the negative forces. For example, here are some support services that can decrease negative forces:

• developmentally appropriate early education for the adult learner’s children, or what some call “child care”
• transportation
• personal counseling, substance abuse counseling, family counseling,
• job counseling and job placement
• food
• clothing
• health and dental care
• safe shelter and counseling for victims of violence
• For those who have mental illness or mental retardation, long term substance abuse, and the related physical health challenges (diabetes, hepatitis infection, HIV, dental infections, TB, etc.) a lot of support is needed. Often they are also homeless, and each situation may be different, requiring a different configuration of services such as:
  • hospitalization, substance abuse treatment (and relapse treatment)
  • mental health counseling at the program/school site
  • temporary housing, and then permanent housing

As Comings and others wrote “Programs must help students to develop an understanding of the negative and positive forces that affect their persistence. Building on that understanding, each student must make plans to manage these forces so that persistence is more likely. The plans that come out of such an exercise should include strategies for persistence when the forces that affect a person's life cause them to drop out, and these plans must be revised as adults persist in their studies and these forces change.” Those plans might include the kinds of supports I mentioned above.

2. Self-efficacy. This refers to choosing a task or set of tasks to accomplish, and feeling able to accomplish the task(s). In this context, the tasks focus on successful basic skills learning. Adult literacy education programs can build student self-efficacy through:

• Mastery learning experiences, that is, being successful at easy and difficult learning and having authentic evidence of that success. This includes providing early successful experiences, ongoing success, and formal recognition of success such as certificates and celebrations
• Vicarious experiences. This includes having good role models, adult learners who have been successful, as I called them earlier “literacy ambassadors”. They also include positive support from teachers, other students and family members.
• Addressing physiological and emotional states. Tension and stress are often part of the experience of returning to school, and teachers can help students to reduce these by acknowledging them, providing writing exercises through life histories and dialogue journals that may reduce them.

3. Establishing a goal. When students enter the program a process of goal-setting begins and is continued throughout. For example, the goal might be: learning English, getting a high school (equivalency) diploma, learning to read a religious text, reading to children or grandchildren, or passing a job-related license or credential examination. The goal setting process includes breaking down the goal into measurable short-term objectives, periodically reviewing progress on attainment of the objectives and the goal(s), and acknowledging the small steps toward success.

4. Seeing Progress. The literacy scheme must provide sufficient intensity of instruction, support services, and formative assessment strategies so that students can make and see measured progress. These may include standardized measures, for example on tests, but should also include direct or authentic measures such as those contained in a learning portfolio. These must be measures that are understood and valued by the student.

A combination of these four supports leads to stronger persistence.

The persistence literature, particularly the research by Comings and others, also suggests that we look at student enrollment in a new way, that for adults learning basic skills, there is a significant number who enroll in a scheme, drop out, enroll again in the same or different scheme, drop out, and so on. If we measure their progress in a year, and if they drop out in that year, we have generally measured very slow progress or failure. But if we look at this pattern over time, for a large number of adults there is slow but increasing progress. Comings has raised an interesting question for schemes to consider: is there a way that these students can continue to be enrolled, and continue to make progress even when they can no longer attend class. He has invited schemes to look at:

• Extending their services, for example to include Saturday classes, or tutorials tailored to a student’s availability.
• Offering online, home study, or other distance learning options as an alternative to attending classes, perhaps as a blended learning model including both distance learning and face-to-face instruction.

The idea is that students would not have to drop out, but could change their enrollment option to something less intensive when there were circumstances in their lives which made it difficult to regularly attend classes.

1. Let’s return to the definition of the problem that I posed at the beginning, attracting hard-to-reach adult learners, is this the right definition for you of “hard-to-reach” students or do you have alternative definitions to propose?

2. From your experience as a tutor or administrator, or other practitioner, or your own experience as someone who has learned to read as an adult, or someone who has a family member who has learned to read, write or do numeracy or basic maths as an adult, what do you know about the problem?

3. What do you think might be good solutions to the problem?

Voices of low-literate adults:

“I was a low level reader and I would like you all to know how afraid we are to come in and get help. We know we need help. It's not just we think that we don't and we are okay. I can't understand how anyone can think that. I think fear is what holds a lot of us back. We put on this front that all is okay and life is good but we know in our heart we are not okay at all. We pray no one finds out about our secret of not being able to read books, street signs, menus, show marquees and so on. If we can do math it's a challenge just to add or subtract. There are so many of us who have tried to make our lives better for our families and ourselves.

Don't you all think it starts in first grade? I was left behind from the start, but I didn't know it until I got much older. I guess they called me slow; what happened to me I am really not sure. I am not slow, but I am dyslexic and never got the extra few minutes it would have taken to help me.

I went for help when I was 50 years old. It was very hard to find the help I needed. I think you need to focus on how hard it is to find help. I had to make six or eight calls before I found help, a lot of people will just give up. It's hard to find the help we need.

I am now 64 years old. I have two adult children now. I started at 50 years old learning how to read better and learn math too, I worked full time and lots of overtime too, It took me about ten years to get my G.E.D. and now I am helping others like myself. I tutor in reading, math and computers. The students come no matter what the weather is or how much snow we have. I have had health problems for the past few years but I only cancel classes when it's a lot of snow or it's way below zero. The students, they would come. It's me I can't make it at those times.

I know this is not much to go by, I just wanted to let you all know it's hard to find help and we are really afraid to look for it to for fear we can't learn, too.”

Thank You
Cecelia (Cece) Tilsley
Moraine Valley Community College
Palos Hill, IL

Posted to the NIFL Professional Development Discussion List on January 22, 2007. Lightly edited.

“I would like to respond to why people needing help in reading don’t attend school. One major reason is fear. Fear that people in the school will not understand why you’re so much different than they are. There are the disabilities of learning how to read.

I also feel it’s because of the way that some people are brought up. I was a young person living with two parents that were alcoholics. My dad worked. My mum was never around, always in a bar room. I was trying to raise four brothers and two sisters when I was 8 and 9 years old. My younger siblings were more important to me than school at that time. Also, I was always fearing when the cops came knocking at the door, knowing that they were here to take us away from our parents and that it was my responsibility to hide and protect them from the cops.

As I grew up I was winging it with a sense that I didn’t really need the help, until I was involved in an accident that took a life. At that time I also didn’t really have anything to live for – I tried to commit suicide several different times, realizing there was nothing out there for me. I went to doctors and counselors. I went to vocational rehab and she gave me the idea to go back to school. It gave me reasons to live and to show my sons that their father could accomplish something by putting his mind to it. So I suggest you work with vocational rehab people to get those people who are ready for a change in their life in the door of the classroom.

I also think you should allow people into the classroom to come to visit to check out how adult education works. It doesn’t mean you have to join, but to see if you would feel comfortable there. Make sure the learning time is welcoming and can get the fear to go away.”

John Ward
ABE Student
Windham Adult Education
Windham, ME

Posted to the NIFL/AALPD Professional Development Discussion List on January 23, 2007. Lightly edited.

Themes from the writings of adult new readers and writers in the United States

• Fear of being exposed
• Fear of not being able to learn to read and write or do maths
• How hard it is to find help
• Not having had the help in school that was needed to address dyslexia or other specific reading disabilities
• Work with vocational rehabilitation people to identify those who are ready to make a change

Recommended Reading

I'd like to recommend a book that learners at all these levels find tremendously inspiring: "Reading Changed My Life," which is published by Townsend Press. It contains three stories about adult learners who faced and overcame all the barriers that our students are familiar with. It is easy enough for the intermediates (roughly at grade levels 4-8) to read, yet of such high interest that college-bound students don't find it condescending. (Townsend Press has a fabulous line of books adapted for these intermediate level readers -- my class read their version of "Narrative of the Life of Federick Douglass" and adored it. It is pretty faithful to the original, too. You can find Townsend Press at http://www.townsendpress.com/ )

In a post by Wendy Quinones to the NIFL/AALPD Professional Development Discussion List on January 24, 2007.

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i. For more information about this go to http://www.ncsall.net . Type “persistence” in the search window. Also note that there is a great set of study circle materials about persistence that is part of that collection.

ii. Comings, John, Parrella, Andrea & Soricone, Lisa. Helping Adults Persist: Four Supports in Focus on Basics, Volume 4, Issue A, March 2000.

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