A third theoretical strand is androgogy. Students in ABE are, by definition, adult. This offers some very particular advantages. Another of those words with which to impress dinner guests or frighten the dog, androgogy is the teaching of adults, as opposed to pedagogy, the teaching of children. (Greek: agogos = guide; paidos = boy; andros = man. The sexism is not mine.) Martin (1986) provides a concise account of Martin Knowles’ theory of androgogy. The rigour of his theorising is debated but even so it remains useful formal background thinking about ‘basic ed.’ perhaps rather more than other ‘ed.’ According to Knowles there are four outstanding differences between adults and children in an educational setting. Adults, he says, have a stronger and more independent self-concept, greater life experience, a more palpable desire that learning be immediately relevant to life outside the classroom and a wish to learn which is motivated by maturely perceived needs arising from the above-mentioned life. In short, adults have a better idea who they are, what they want and why they want it. Adults in ABE are not usually motivated by fear, compulsion or duty. Adults in ABE want learning to be problem-centred (rather than subject-centred) because they are prompted by events in real life. They want, for example, to learn ‘better spelling’ - a rather specified problem - rather than ‘literacy’ as such. ABE students are not, generally, interested (at least to begin with) in the more esoteric fascinations of literacy. Adult students seek immediately practical techniques to deal with immediately experienced needs. Few can be expected to have much affection or desire for ‘education’ as such. How could it be otherwise?

‘Scholars have come, in process of time, to love the instrument better than the end; not the luxury which the difficulty encloses, but the difficulty … not what may be read in Greek, but Greek itself.’ (Smith 1809 p. 192) What good teaching must be about, in these older (and much better) words, is passionately to teach ‘the luxury which the difficulty encloses’ and not the difficulty itself.

I shall deal with my own ‘take’ on managing affect in ABE with the above theories in mind. First comes ownership and autonomy. We have decided that many, probably most, ABE students will be suffering at least some degree of learned helplessness and/or anxiety. The tuition situation itself may well make them feel even more threatened, incompetent and dumb. They urgently need to experience some personal power - to begin, and early, to own and control their own learning and literacy. They urgently need to begin as soon as ever possible to manage both, consciously and for themselves. This may not always be easy. Many students are, after their own educational mauling, thoroughly unused to the idea that they might have either the right or the ability to take, or to use, any such power. It may take time, and often demands a surprising amount of effort, courage and trust from a student, but developing confident autonomy in respect of literacy practices is easily the most important change we can help to bring about. Passivity and timidity must be turned into confidence and autonomy. Confidence is the all-important foundation. Literacy depends utterly upon it - it simply cannot be built at all until confidence is laid. (And see Charnley & Jones 1981 & Du Vivier 1992.)

Knowles insists that a ‘climate of adultness’ be deliberately engendered and assiduously maintained. By this he means that adults must be involved - must participate consciously and fully - from the very start and consistently thereafter in whatever involves them. They must be fully party to assessment of their own literacy needs, planning their own learning, their own learning strategies and procedures and the evaluation of same. Literacy tuition has to take place within a genuinely transparent democracy. Students need to have, and to know that they have, full voting rights. This implies that students be maturely informed. This, in turn, demands genuine understanding of what is taking place and why. It also demands thinking skills. It demands meta-cognition.

For the tutor this implies two things: first we have to understand ourselves as fully as possible. Why are we involved in ABE at all? What, exactly, are our approaches and orientations, our philosophies and methodologies? We have to be quite clear about why we do what we do, about our own theoretical fundamentals. Secondly, we have to be overtly clear about all this - we have to draw students into this knowledge such that they are also clear about the how and why. Students must be, and feel, empowered within a democracy. They must understand and trust the system, which must be transparent.