Although the need for staff development in adult literacy is no longer questioned, there is still an open debate regarding how to design effective approaches, how to coordinate the relationship between research and practice, and how to define the knowledge base that constitutes adult literacy education. This study examines these issues from the perspective of community-based literacy programs where literacy is defined by functions and uses in the social context of actual communities rather than in terms of discrete reading and writing skills. The vehicle for collecting information was a study circle support group comprised of practitioners from a community-based literacy program in Massachusetts. The purpose of this study is to identify guiding principles for designing staff development for community-based literacy programs through analyzing how practitioners identify important issues and articulate theory within their own descriptions and analysis of daily practice. Staff development principles were identified through analyzing the study circle process in terms of how the group defined its task, used different forms of talk, approached the use of expert texts and dealt with changing constraints of time. Findings reveal that practitioners need a forum to define their own staff development task and discuss how to blend theory and strategies with expectations, input and abilities of students inside a changing learning environment. When practitioners discuss their practice, they combine many forms of talk including story telling, hypothesis forming, self-observation, problem solving, strategy analysis, meaning making and topic discussion. This multi-faceted way of talking results in a rich, contextualized analysis of real-life problems that is different from the generalized theories and skills of traditional staff development. The following guidelines resulted from this study. Staff development should (1) build theory from practice, (2) focus on problem posing and solving, (3) be based on authentic experience, (4) be embedded in the social context of actual programs, (5) be on-going and flexible to incorporate emerging issues, (6) have program development as its goal, (7) be connected to a larger system that is working for structural change.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-9074 |
| Date | 01 January 1995 |
| Creators | Dixon, Joan |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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