3/10

Update: I am in the middle of an ongoing project of reviewing the transcripts of the five other adult students about whom I DID NOT write in my dissertation. This has been an interesting process. There is a richness in these transcripts that really adds to the project in some important ways. As i go over these transcripts, I can't help feeling how much was left out of my dissertation project. This project has gone through so many stages--I have to keep convincing myself that this is all just part of the process and that the amount of time it's taking is completely normal, given all that I have going on. 

I think that carefully reading through Kathy Sohn's C's essay really clarified my project for me and how I wish I had had that essay to read while I was working on the project itself. In her book, she focuses, as I did in my dissertation, on three participants in the study--but she draws on all the participants, throughout the book, even though she's only focused on 3 of them. In the article, she focuses on the group of seven or however many there are. Essentially, she just draws a series of general conclusions/implications based on her case studies. Here they are (these fall under the heading "Literacy practices since college"):

• Literacy for the Appalachian women in this study served different purposes than it might in the larger population.
  
• Academic literacy in the form of expressivist writing enabled the women after some initial difficulties to tell stories they had not been able to tell, moving them from silence to voice.
  
• The women in this study illustrate the intergenerational effects of literacy in multiple directions. 
  
• The women in this study chose traditional occupations because not many nontraditional jobs exist in the immediate region, because a depressed economy does not offer many jobs for either gender, and because in doing so, they were able to preserve their families.
  
• Achieving academic literacy for working-class nontraditional women is a double-edged sword, fraught with obstacles that might seem insurmountable to traditional students, but one that ultimately liberates women from abuse and other ills.
  
• Academic literacy did not destroy community for the women in this study. They overcame poor public school experiences, constraints of gender, and dead-end jobs to get a college education, adapting academic literacy to their own purposes, and maintaining the common sense they valued. 
  
• Whether they got a job or not, the women continually praised the college for helping them to move from silence to voice.
  
• The women are making their voices heard by using literacy in their jobs, community, and homes. Knowing the power of literacy, they are invested in the concept of lifelong learning.
  

As I continue to work on this project and begin to shape an article which draws on all the case studies I conducted, I recognize the way that I shaped the dissertation, perhaps unfairly. I chose the three most...interesting? literate? I don't know what, participants in my study. I must have done this for a reason--perhaps because they had the most amount of writing to show me from outside of school. Yes, I think this may have had something to do with it. But I lost something there, too. There is a richness to the cross section of 8 participants that is lost. Those 8 participants more closely resemble the bigger picture and more accurately capture the adult student population than the three I chose to write about. How so? There are two moms in that group--both paraprofessionals. Both, admittedly, living at or near poverty. Both raising children by themselves--one the result of a divorce, another the result of a spouse's death. These women reflect important issues and are an important part of the study. There is also one non-native speaker. This is important. And there is one twenty-something. This is important. So, there is a richness that was lost in excluding these participants. I need to bring that richness back. 

So, I stand at the point now where I have two projects going on simultaneously:

1. Revising the manuscript for CE. Have not yet really begun this work yet.

2. Drafting the new manuscript, which, if I am to be honest, is the manuscript I should have written a long time ago, but didn't quite know how to write. Kathy Sohn has shown me how (I wonder who showed her). Currently, I have two more students whose transcripts I must summarize before I can begin writing. I've already begun mapping out my implications. The question this article will address seems to take me back to the question I was asking when I first conceived of the project: What do we need to know about the literate lives of today's adult student population?