Chapter 6

Two Case Studies of Integrated Vocational and Basic Skills Education

Case Study #1: Workplace Literacy: Integrating Reading Instruction into Six Vocational Contexts

In work for the U. S. Army, I directed a team that developed the Functional Literacy (FLIT) program that replaced all general literacy programs that the Army had in place. As part of our work, our team looked at the existing Army adult literacy programs designed by adult educators in the local school districts and found that the programs used general materials like the old SRA kits (many of you will remember these), and Josephine Bauer’s Ready? Get Set! Go! Series. They used the United States Armed Forces Institute reading tests to measure pre and post program gains. This test was actually the Metropolitan Reading Achievement Test for children with a new USAFI cover on it. I still have a copy of one of the passages for measuring reading comprehension that said “Many a great artist’s work is produced from the inspiration of his own personal experience. It is said that the opera, Der Fliegende Holander, which translated means The Flying Dutchman, was inspired by a stormy voyage across the North Sea by the composer, Richard Wagner, etc.….” This was used with young men, many from inner centers of cities where opera attendance was quite low, who were about to go to war and fight for their lives, to measure their reading comprehension abilities!

In short, the adult educators had not done hardly anything to take into account the functional contexts in which these young men were engaged. They ignored the fact that these young men were in the Army and had to read some pretty complex technical manuals and that some of this reading was critical because it taught you how to stay alive in the midst of battle. Instead, they had just imported into the military classrooms the same materials they used in civilian programs and set out to work for six weeks, which is all the time the Army would give for adult literacy education.

Looking at this situation, our team decided that we needed to find out what Army men had to read, get copies of key documents and manuals, develop job-related reading task tests to find out how well men could read their job materials, and develop a six week curriculum that would teach reading using job-related materials instead of the SRA Kits and other general teaching materials that the adult educators were using.

The FLIT Curriculum. The FLIT team developed job-linked reading programs for personnel with reading skills from the 2nd to 6th grade levels who were assigned to become Cooks, Automobile Repairmen, Communications Specialists, Medical Corpsmen, Combat Specialists, and Supply Specialists.. The curriculum consisted of two separate "strands" of activities: Strand 1: reading-to-do and Strand 2: reading-to-learn. The reading-to-do strand taught personnel how to use their manuals as reference materials. Research at job sites had indicated that three-quarters of work reading tasks engaged working memory processes and involved looking up information, holding it in working memory to accomplish some job task, and then it could be forgotten. For instance, the automotive repairman might have to look up the proper amount of torque for tightening a lug nut. Or a supply clerk might have to look up the code for a piece of equipment to be ordered. A medical corpsman might have to read and follow the four life saving steps in a course on first aid. In reading-to-do tasks, then, the person does not have to learn the material - just locate, extract, and use it to accomplish a given task.