At the Ohio State University, Professor Francis Robinson, a member of the psychology department faculty, was selected to head a new Learning and Study Skills program that would teach military personnel to learn better by reading. After reviewing research and approaches to effective study skills, Robinson came up with a formula for reading and study that has endured for two-thirds of a century. He developed what is called the SQ3R method of reading and studying. In this method, students are taught to first Survey the text and to raise Questions about the meaning of what they are reading, then they Read the text carefully, stopping now and then to construct and Recite to themselves summary statements of what they have just read, and to later Review what they have read.

The SQ3R method is today referred to as a “study skill” and sometimes a “reading comprehension strategy” and is one of several such strategies that can be subsumed under the label of “active reading strategies” which advise readers to take actions Before they read (as in Surveying and Questioning), While they read (as in Reciting) and After they read (as in Reviewing). Importantly, this general strategy can be applied to a wide variey of materials in Functional Context Education.

Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987)

Septima Poinsette Clark, the great civil rights teacher from the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee was an innovator in teaching adult reading and writing within the functional context of the civil rights movement to free African-Americans from the oppression of those wanting to deny them full citizenship. In this regard, she pre-dated the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire in developing a Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970).

Clark followed the analytic, “meaning-making” method in teaching word recognition and followed functional context education methods in using “real life” materials for teaching adults to read (Clark, 1986). On January 7, 1957, Clark and her teachers started the first Citizenship School serving adult African-Americans on Johns Island in South Carolina. Clark (1962) recalled that when the teachers asked the students what they wanted to learn, the answer was that, “First, they wanted to learn how to write their names. That was a matter of pride as well as practical need. (p. 147).

In teaching students to write their names, Clark used what she said was the “kinesthetic” method which she had learned from Wil Lou Gray, State Superintendent of Adult Education in South Carolina in the middle of the 20th century. In turn, Gray learned the writing method from Cora Wilson Stewart, whose books called the Country Life Readers were also used by Gray in South Carolina literacy schools in the 1920s. Following the lead of Stewart and Gray, Clark instructed teachers to write student’s names on cardboard. Then, according to Clark (1962), “What the student does is trace with his pencil over and over his signature until he gets the feel of writing his name. I suppose his fingers memorize it by doing it over and over; he gets into the habit by repeating the tracing time after time.” (p.148). She went on to say, “And perhaps the single greatest thing it accomplishes is the enabling of a man to raise his head a little higher; knowing how to sign their names, many of those men and women told me after they had learned, made them FEEL different. Suddenly they had become a part of the community; they were on their way toward first-class citizenship.” (p. 149).

It is astonishing to realize that across half a century, Cora Wilson Stewart, Wil Lou Gray, and Septima Poinsette Clark all used the same simple instructional technique to teach adults to write their names, that this technique was used by Clark in the development of the Citizenship schools of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and this technique eventually taught 10,000 teachers and registered 700,000 thousand African Americans to vote in the South. Amazingly, a simple technique used by adult literacy educators for teaching adults to write their names was instrumental in forging the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and 60s.