Branch Article

In this chapter, I examine the literacy narratives students bring with them when they return to school as adults, and I examine the myriad ways students have experienced and come to define literacy throughout their lives. I make available alternative approaches to literacy that stem from my interviews with adults who have limited reading and skills. (16)

This is, of course, a significant inversion of the "power of literacy" as it appears in the often told and intentionally moving story of the adult learning to read and write. (17)

He's referring to the Mike Rose narrative and the narrative, and he captures it in the phrase "often told and intentionally moving story of the adult learning to read and write," which I cannot really work within with my project. He fleshes the project out a bit more here:

In that familiar narrative, an adult realizes that she needs to learn to read and write, whether for work or family or personal esteem. Some crisis or meeting provides her with impetus to return to school or find a teacher and doing so, after the requisite struggle and conflict, leads her to a successful resolution of the crisis, through learning. Literacy (and its teacher) saves the day again, giving birth to another productive adult. Or, if "productive" is too pragmatic, another engaged learner, another informed parent, another empowered citizen. The classroom, or its narrative equivalent, holds an almost sacred power, the ritualized site of moral, psychological, and intellectual development, a place of growth and nearly unbounded potential. And within that classroom, the student-teacher relationship works toward its inevitable outcome: The student becomes educated, the teacher educates, everyone is inspired. (17)

Boy, I couldn't have said this much better myself...

...all adult students have extensive histories with literacy that predate their return to school. If these interviews allow any generalization, it is that adult literacy students bring with them, in their return to school, vast and varied experiences with literacy (22).

That sounds awfully familiar....