Chapter 3: Literature Review

"Doing freedom" within an educational environment - what does this mean and how does it happen? This chapter looks at the barriers, struggles and contradictions to doing freedom within adult literacy education through an exploration of the literature about power, literacy and education. The purpose of the review is to deepen understanding about the power dynamics in teacher/student relationships. I am interested in how the positions and roles attributed to student and to teacher are shaped, maintained and disrupted.

I use Carol Gould's (1988) concept of freedom as self-development. She is an educational philosopher whose principle of democracy is one that is more participatory than representative, and is strongly based on human agency. Gould extends the conception of traditional forms of political democracy to contexts that include economic and social domains as well as the political domain. Her argument for this principle of democracy begins with the proposition of freedom as self-development, a term used in a way similar to educators' use of "empowerment". This freedom is grounded in agency, or the capacity for choice, and can be attained only through activities that individuals freely determine. Since we are social beings - individuals-in-relations - these activities involve other human beings. Gould argues that common activity is one of the conditions for self-development; it provides a social context for reciprocity and makes possible the achievement of ends that could not be achieved by an individual alone. Gould maintains that every person who engages in a common activity with others has an equal right to participate in making decisions concerning such activity. She argues that all humans are equally agents and they have "an equal right to the exercise of this agency and a prima facie equal right to the conditions necessary for its exercise as a process of self-development" (84).

This thesis is concerned with the conditions necessary for the exercise of agency within adult literacy education, and this is a key focus of this chapter. The necessary conditions are structured around the idea of "learning centred" approaches, introduced by Wendy Luttrell, a literacy practitioner and academic researcher.

Learning Centred Approach

Luttrell's (1989; 1996) work is used as a focus to look at the ways that teachers and students become positioned: teacher as authority, teacher with power and agency, teacher as caregiver; student as the deficit learner in need of empowerment and caretaking. Luttrell argues the existence of a "lopsided relationship" between teacher and student and suggests the imbalances are related to the learner-centred and caregiving approaches within adult literacy instruction. She introduces the idea of learning centred approaches to address the areas within adult literacy education that need to be problematized and challenged, outlining three key elements -dialogic instruction, mutuality, and community.