Chapter One

Theoretical Assumptions

Literacy, Motivation, Pragmatism, and the Politics of Reform

This study seeks to identify sources of motivation in adult literacy learning through a case-presentation analysis of the program the author directed from 1987-1996: the Bob Steele Reading Center in Hartford, Connecticut. The program was a centralized, staff supervised site within Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford (LVGH). It was founded in 1986 as a pilot project, as a contrast to the prevailing Literacy Volunteers of America (LVA) model where an individual student and tutor "match" meet in isolation from the community of learners and program staff, often in public places like the local library, community centers, or churches. The Center worked with about 100 students on a regular basis in English as a Second Language (ESL) and Basic Literacy (BL). In its nine-year history under my management, the program had developed an extensive small-group tutoring program. It had compiled several student-writing anthologies (Smith, 1991; Demetrion, 1995, and Demetrion and Lestz, 1995) and books of student learning interviews (Demetrion and Gruner. 1995; Johnson, Bender, and Demetrion, 1996). The program also completed a Connecticut Humanities Council funded oral history project that consisted of the life stories of 16 Basic Literacy students (Smith, Ball, Demetrion and Michelson, 1993; Lestz, Demetrion and Smith, 1994). Other work included pilot projects in portfolio construction (Taylor, 1992; Constantine, 1991) and a counseling and referral service through a college internship (Arrojo, 1993), though neither of these projects became institutionalized. The program was also a site for qualitative research resulting in a series of published and unpublished essays (Demetrion, 1993, 1997a, 1997b, 1998, 1999a, 199b, 2001b, and 2000). This study is a historical reflection that focuses on students who participated in the Basic Literacy program from 1990-1996.