ADULT LITERACY IN MINORITY LANGUAGE COMMUNITIES
Educators’ voices: reflect, explore, and connect
Bienvenidas/os
One of the premises to understand the meanings of literacy is to ask people what they understand about it within a specific situation. Equally important is to investigate the actual events associated with what literacy is intended to mean in specific events.
Therefore, the technology of literacy, needs to be understood within the boundaries of specific sociocultural and political ecologies and within the performative acts that show what literacy is used for, by who, under what circumstances, and what outcomes literacy goals produce.
In our graduate level class, future ESL/Language teachers, have reflected on how the meanings of literacy are co-constructed at different spaces, ranging from national statistics, and academic research to students’ voices (presented by some researchers) in ESL classrooms in the United States. In addition to these reflections, our colegas have been involved in a fieldwork project in an Adult Literacy Center in San Antonio.
The purpose of this project was not only to observe, participate, and reflect on the literacy events in ESL classes to adults, but also to create a specific curriculum project for these in classes in mind.
To what extent do the readings reflect their own personal literacy experiences in a second language, or those literacy events in their fieldwork? How do the readings can help to create a curriculum project for ESL classes? These reflective questions have been guiding blueprints for our work during the semester.
In this blog, all of our colegas, will post a reflection on a literacy issue that they found relevant to be researched after reflecting on the semester assigned readings as well as their fieldwork. For privacy purposes, names of institutions, and people referred as part of students’ fieldwork will not be revealed/posted.
We hope that these contributions make us reflect and act upon the dialectical process of adult literacy processes in San Antonio, Texas. Students will post their reflections using their NAME and KEY PHRASE to introduce their work.
Carlos Martin Velez Salas, Ph.D.
Instructor
Bicultural-Bilingual/Interdisciplinary Studies
College of Education and Human Development
University of Texas at San Antonio
U.S.A.
Email: cmartinvelez@gmail.com
