Functional Context Education (FCE) is an approach to adult literacy education that had it beginnings in professional wisdom of teachers of adult literacy and later acquired an empirical base of research that has validated and extended the professional knowledge of teachers. Following is a brief outline of this transition of Functional Context Education from being based solely on professional wisdom to being based more on empirical research:

1861-1870 The education of freedmen during reconstruction following the Civil War. The teachers developed special materials that tried to reflect the post-slavery circumstances and aspirations of both children and adults. Though aspects of the materials reflected a middle-class conception of how freed slaves should live, the attempt was made to make the materials relevant to the current life circumstances of freedmen rather than impart a typical childhood education in reading and writing using the primers of the schools.

1911 Cora Wilson Stewart started the Moonlight Schools of Kentucky and explicitly stated that one should not teach adults as though they were children. She developed functional materials for teaching reading, writing, and math in the contexts of health, family care, farming, banking, citizenship, etc. for adults.

1917 World War I soldiers were taught reading, writing, and math using materials that incorporated aspects of camp life and military circumstances to make it easier for the men to related their experiential knowledge to the new knowledge they were to gain from book reading.

1943 World War II soldiers were taught reading, writing, and math using military contexts and two fictional characters, Private Pete and his buddy Daffy to help men relate to literacy learning during war time. Testing was introduced to measure learning progress, which was found to occur.

Late 1940’s Frank Laubach created materials for teaching reading in India which incorporated adult themes and concerns such as health and citizenship.

1960’s Paulo Freire developed methods for teaching reading in the functional contexts of adult’s lives and lead them to critical consciousness about their life circumstances and how they might go about changing their situations.

All the foregoing were based on professional wisdom without the benefit of much by way of what would be considered empirical research.

Late 1960’s into 1970’s Army’s Functional Literacy (FLIT) R & D program was first research program that introduced systematic methods for studying literacy practices of personnel in various jobs and job training programs, incorporated these practices into the design of job-related literacy programs, and compared the effectiveness of general literacy programs to job-related programs and found that the latter produced as much improvement in general literacy but three to five times the improvements in job-related literacy, which was what the programs were supposed to do. The FLIT program was not only based on the professional wisdom of earlier adult literacy educators it also incorporated concepts from cognitive science in formulating the practices of “reading to do” versus “reading to learn” based on research in psychology on a human cognitive system with various memory systems, and it incorporated both direct instruction based on behavioral principles of systematic instruction, pre-and post-testing of learning, and progression based on mastery, and instruction of a constructivist nature based on an extensive review of linguistic, computer science (e.g., artificial intelligence), developmental psychology, and experimental studies of reading. The program was externally and independently evaluated by the American Institutes for Research and implemented in several states indicating that the methods were generalizable beyond the R & D site.

1970’s – Present. Various research projects in cognitive science reinforced the ideas making up Functional Context Education principles that were based on professional wisdom at the turn of the 20th century. The principles were officially formulated in 1987 in a book entitled Cast-off Youth: Policy and Training Methods From the Military Experience. Research by Victoria Purcell-Gates and colleagues at NCSALL in the late 1990s confirmed the principle of transfer formulated in FCE and found that programs that used materials from the lives that adults live outside the classroom were more likely to stimulate the transfer of literacy from the classroom to the “real world” of the adults. Numerous projects in India and other nations have confirmed that making materials relevant to the lives of adults promotes greater participation and retention in programs than do academic oriented programs.

The foregoing, demonstrates the accumulation of educational knowledge about the teaching of adult literacy based on professional wisdom and scientific research over a period of more than a century. This body of knowledge has produced at its most generally applicable level a series of principles, not particular materials or techniques, that can guide the development of adult literacy programs.