Lana's "learning Journal"

By Author: Alfred
Total Articles: 10
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While Lana's story is one of success in terms of accomplishing programmatic goals (she successfully completed her GED), it also reminds us more than ever that the conditions for working in adult education—for Lana's teachers—are far from ideal. Susan doesn't have enough time and support—although her husband, John, tutors her students in math—to overhaul the curriculum and her instruction. A great deal of time and energy is spent working with new students—a near weekly event in Susan's classes. Making students feel comfortable enough to come back again and again requires her full attention; those students who are farther along are better Omega Replica able to work without her constant shadow and suggestion. If the goal is to help students progress and successfully complete their respective programs, whether it's ABE or GED, adherence to a mandated curriculum is a fundamental instrument for gauging progress and success.

The curriculum, by necessity, carries the orthodoxy of success, and as Atwell (1998), ...
... echoing Graves (1984), reminded us, "even the best [orthodoxies] take initiative away from someone...limit someone's role" (p. 18). In this case, both the teacher's and student's roles are limited. Susan is excited for Lana, excited to have her in class, and wants to help find some sort of outlet for her work, but her formal training is in Physical Education, not the Language Arts, and the other students in the class represent a full range of needs. She doesn't feel qualified to do anything with Lana's writing besides read it and offer Lana her encouragement, which is no small part of teaching, but clearly the ideas and issues the writing takes up have little connection to the work of the class and program. The curriculum's promise of measured success co-opts innovative teaching, and its prescriptive formula for topics and concerns co-opts authentic learning.

Lana's short compositions, however, give voice to crucial themes drawn from her own experience— themes that configure, in dramatic Omega Seamaster Replica and imaginative language, where she has been and where she is currently. Her first short narrative "Transformation," relates an experience she says "she just had to write," an experience that needs management, interpretation:

My first visit to the Welfare Office! I nervously sit across from her at the big desk. She has her papers neatly arranged on its top; mine are sticking out of my stuffed shirt pocket. She picks up The Black Pen and starts asking The Questions. Name, address, phone number. I watch as she coldly changes me from a person to a case number. Scratch, scratch goes The Pen. Scratch. Race "White." Scratch. Sex I'm tempted to say "Sometimes," but I truthfully answer "Female."