Chapter Seven

Humanistic Psychology and Adult Literacy Motivation

This study explores aspects of adult literacy motivation predominantly through qualitative documentation of learner experience and direct observation within a single program. It focuses on those learners who, for the most part, participated in the program for a year or more and who achieved some notable self-defined levels of success. Test scores and life skill achievements provide empirical support to buttress the more intangible aspects of learning and motivation teased out from the self-reported experiences documented in this study.

The findings, largely descriptive, are provisional. They presume to tell only a partial story of adult literacy motivation. They provide snapshot glances of individuals within the context of life histories very much "in process." What the study fails to examine is also noteworthy. For example, it does not attempt to assess the motivational dynamic of the many people who left the Bob Steele Reading Center before observable significant learning could have taken place. To adapt the terminology of Allan Quigley (1990a), the Center had many "resisters," for whom its learning climate had limited appeal. A more complete story of the Center would need to explore resistance along with the "success stories" stressed in this study. Nonetheless, considering how many students achieved notable learning outcomes at the Center and the relative paucity of studies that delineate this, it seems appropriate to explore some of the motivational dynamics, which have made this possible.

The View of Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi

This study has alluded to Csikzentmihalyi's (1990) concept of "flow experience," as an underlying source of motivation for literacy, which maintains, "the chief impediments to literacy are not cognitive in nature." Csikzentmihalyi argues, "[i]t is not that students cannot learn; it is that they do not wish to" (190, p. 115). This study takes a similar stance that the vast majority of non-reading adults have nothing wrong with their "mental equipment," while not ruling out of court something akin to learning disabilities among a small minority of adults exhibiting a range of reading difficulties. Constance Weaver grants a similar point, although she is compelled to add that "I cannot help suspecting that many of these so-called 'dyslexics' might be considered adequate to good readers if meaning and not word identification were the goal" (original italics) (1988, p. 397).