Democratic Literacy

This book provides a broad overview of some of the major trends and issues shaping the theories, practices, research traditions, and politics of adult literacy in the United States since the mid-1980s. If anything, these have been diverse, conflicting, and often irreconcilable. Impinging factors—from the global economy to urban poverty, from "functional literacy" to the "pedagogy of the oppressed," from demands for aggregate data analysis to alternative assessment design, from scientific-based educational research to practitioner-based inquiry—have been key prisms through which sharply jarring discourses have played out in this field during these years. The first eight chapters examine these issues through three distinctive interpretive frames: the participatory literacy movement, the New Literacy Studies, and the functional and workforce orientation of federal policy. Chapter 9, Research Traditions, closely parallels these schools of literacy. In these chapters, I adopt a strategy of critical description and historical analysis.

A grounding exploration of how our online prowess shapes the very essence of democracy

The release of U.S. census data in 1910 sparked rhetoric declaring the nation had a literacy crisis and proclaiming illiterate citizens a threat to democratic life. While newspaper editors, industrialists, and officials in the federal government frequently placed the blame on newly arrived immigrants, a smaller but no less vocal group of rural educators and clubwomen highlighted the significant number of native-born illiterate adults in the Appalachian region.