The foregoing suggests that although the amount of reading practice may have dropped when the students left literacy training and entered job technical training, they nonetheless continued to practice reading job-related materials. This may have helped them maintain their gain in job-related literacy. However, since it is likely that they did not engage in as much reading practice as during the literacy program, this may have contributed to their loss of most of their gain in general literacy.

For adult literacy education, this implies that instruction should follow the principles of Functional Context Education including the classroom use of materials that are relevant to the student’s life outside the classroom, so-called “real world” or “authentic” materials, so that transfer of new knowledge and skills from the classroom to the world outside the classroom can occur and additional practice in literacy use can be encouraged, as discussed in Chapter 2 of this notebook.

NOTE: References cited in this chapter can be found online in Sticht, T. (1997). Functional Context Education (FCE) Workshop Resource Notebook. See Chapter 6. Functional Context Education and Literacy Instruction.
(www.nald.ca/fulltext/context/cover.htm)

Chapter 4

Functional Context Education in Historical Perspective

Harriet A. Jacobs (1813-1897)

One of the earliest accounts of teaching an adult to read comes from the work of the slave Harriet A. Jacobs (1813-1897). Even though it was unlawful to teach slaves to read, Jacob’s owner’s daughter taught her to read and write. In 1861, after she became a free woman, Jacobs wrote a book entitled, “Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself” (Jacobs, 1987/1861). In it she tells the story of how she helped an older black man, a slave like her, learn to read. She said, “ He thought he could plan to come three times a week without its being suspected. I selected a quiet nook, where no intruder was likely to penetrate, and there I taught him his A, B, C. Considering his age, his progress was astonishing. As soon as he could spell in two syllables he wanted to spell out words in the Bible. … At the end of six months he had read through the New Testament, and could find any text in it.”

Later in her life, after achieving her freedom, Jacobs taught school for former slaves in what were called the Freedmen’s Schools. These schools were set up after the Civil War when the U. S. Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands as the primary agency for reconstruction (Morris, 1981). In the Freedmen’s Schools it was not unusual for both children and their parents to be taught reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic in the same classroom at the same time. This was an early form of “family literacy” education.

Special textbooks were developed for the Freedmen’s Schools that emphasized practical affairs of life and the instilling of positive values. For instance, a lesson from The Freedman’s Second Reader, published by the Boston wing of the American Tract Society in 1865 first presents a list of words for sight reading instruction, but with some attention to phonics (e.g., What letter is silent in hoe?). It shows a drawing of an African-American family gathered around a table listening while the father reads. Beneath the drawing the text says: