Crossing Critical Thresholds at the Bob Steele Reading Center: Transforming
Potentiality Into Actuality
(2000/2005 revised)

George Demetrion
gdemetrion@msn.com
(comments appreciated)

We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything (Dewey, 1938/1963, p. 49).

Introduction

The Deweyan quote points to a key factor in the development of the Bob Steele Reading Center as it grew from a germ of an idea in the mid-1980s to one of the more cutting edge literacy sites in the LVA network a decade later. That factor is the unleashing of potentiality as the underlying force that undergirded the transformation of the program through several critical incarnations. I linked such a felt sense of potentiality formally with Dewey's (1916/1944, pp. 41-53) concept of growth defined as the enhancement of experience through the exercise of critical intelligence as a compelling heuristic to both grasp and shape the Reading Center's organizational culture.

Growth on Dewey's interpretation contains two dimensions, a productive component through the "extraction" of maximum potential within a given situation, and an aesthetic component in the "consummation" of experience into art (Dewey, 1934/1989; Alexander, 1987). Such a self-realization ethic reflected some of the most profound aspirations of students and tutors at the Bob Steele Reading Center, which enabled many program participants to enact the "literacy myth" (Graff, 1979). The following conversation between a student and myself provides an apt illustration (Demetrion and Gruner, 1995, p. 58):

George: How strong is your motivation to continue?
Elaine: It's very strong.
George: What is the source that drives it?
Elaine: I want something. I want to do something; to have a goal. That's the motive. I want to go up in life.
George: You want to go up?
Elaine: To the top.
George: Where's the top?
Elaine: To be a nurse.