Adult Basic Education

This book provides a critically informed overview of adult education today with contributions by leading researchers and practitioners from across Canada. It examines the contexts of adult education today - the historical contexts that shape the practice; the philosophical contexts that underpin their activities; the socioeconomic contexts by which practitioners are informed; the community contexts in which they are located; and the practice contexts that their activities reveal.

This volume revisits, problematizes, and expands the meaning of quality in the context of adult basic education. Covering a wide range of relevant topics, it includes contributors from the realms of both policy and practice and encompasses both the major instructional areas-reading, writing, and mathematics-as well as larger issues of literacy, learning, and adulthood. Each chapter focuses on what improving quality in the field might look like through the particular lens of the author's work. As a whole, the broad scope of topics and ideas addressed will raise the level of discussion, knowledge, and practice regarding quality in adult basic education. In this book, the term adult basic education refers to the broad range of services for adults who wish to improve their literacy and language skills, including beginning and intermediate writing, writing and numeracy, preGED, GED/Adult Secondary Education, and ESL instruction that takes place in a range of contexts including schools, community-based programs, and workplace development programs. The volume is organized around three themes: *Accountability, Standards, and the Use of Documentation and Research; *Program Structures and Instruction; and *Rethinking Our Assumptions and Concepts. Coming at a time of increasing pressure to standardize, to be accountable, and to improve outcomes, and when calls for evidence-based practice are fueling stakeholders' interest in the relationship between research and practice at all levels of the system, Toward Defining and Improving Quality in Adult Basic Education is particularly timely for scholars, graduate students, and professionals in the field of adult basic education.

An invaluable guide to the pre-GED qualification test Covering the highest level tested by the Test of Adult Basic Education--readers with skill levels of grades 9-12--TABE offers comprehensive, direct instruction; test previews; and study skills material designed to be easily accessible by adult learners outside the classroom setting. Basic reading, writing, and math skills are taught by means of familiar, everyday items. Developed to help adults realize both learning and career goals, this book contains: Helpful charts and tables Practice exercises Pretests, posttests, and skills analysis charts Reading passages taken from real-life experiences And much more

Learning Trajectories, Violence and Empowerment amongst Adult Basic Skills Learners offers deep insights into the lives of marginalised communities and the link between learning, literacy and violence, not previously carried out in-depth in a small scale study. It breaks the negative stereo-types of adults who struggle to read and write, who are often labelled and stigmatised by dominant discourses, and in doing so exposes why and how Basic Skills Learners often find themselves in marginal positions. The structural inequalities many face from childhood to adulthood across the private and public domains of their lives are revealed and probed, thus challenging neo-liberalism claims of an apparently egalitarian social field. The learners’ narratives expose the contradiction, complexities and ambivalences they experience in their daily lives, and how they try to make sense of them from their structural positioning as basic skills learners in a society based on inequality of opportunity and choice. Applying a feminist, qualitative, longitudinal, ethnographic and participatory approach, the book offers a critical perspective, drawing on Bourdieu’s work as the theoretical framework, as well as using a range of feminist, sociologists of education, literature on the ethics of care and critical literacy pedagogy, including the New Literacy Studies. The author’s personal position as an ’insider’ with ‘insider knowledge’ of marginalised communities is also woven throughout the chapters and offers insights into the struggles, conformity and resistance faced by the participants in the study. The book contributes to the debate on the impact of violence on learning and its link to class, gender and basic skills as well opening up a discussion on the power of a critical curriculum to empower people across the domains of their lives. It will be valuable reading for trainee teachers, teachers, education and sociology students, postgraduate students, as well as literacy specialists, researchers, academics, policy makers and managers of public services.

This is a research report on the findings of the Partnership in Reading project. Its aim was to identify and evaluate existing research in adult literacy reading instruction and provide a summary if scientifically based principles and practices. Topics covered include: * Emerging principles, trends, ideas and comments * Reading assessment profiles * Phonemic awareness and word analysis * Fluency * Vocabulary * Reading comprehension * Computer technology and ABE reading instruction.