North American adult literacy programs and Latin American immigrants: how critical pedagogy can help nonprofit literacy programming in the United States

Abstract

As nonprofit adult literacy programs are often the only options for low-income Latin American immigrants in North America, problems accompanying these programs affect the ability of immigrants to benefit from them. North American nonprofit adult literacy programs often struggle due to the difficulties inherent in using volunteer instructors (often from different cultural backgrounds than participants) who use curricula that often do not reflect students’ communities of origin. Hence, the outcomes of these programs can be problematic. One potential way to ameliorate these difficulties is found in the critical framework of Paulo Freire, wherein curricula are student-generated. The primary argument in this review essay is that trained community instructors (or Freirean-trained outsiders) – using Freire's model of instruction and curriculum development, working under a demand for true accountability for results from organizational administrators – could improve existent benign North American adult literacy programs into more empowering social resources for Latin American immigrant communities in the United States. The possibilities for such improvement are explored through analysis of positive and negative case studies within the larger literature on adult literacy.

Keywords:

• adult literacy
• critical pedagogy
• inequalities in education
• Paulo Freire
• curriculum

Notes

1. See the references for a comprehensive list – note that this includes 48 studies over a 42-year period.

2. For an introduction to the general literature on digital literacy, see Chase and Laufenberg (2011), Poore (2011) and Borawski (2009). For an introduction to specific work on literacy in use of wireless technologies around the globe, see Eshiet (2010), Sharples (2002, 2005) and Crabtree, Nathan, and Roberts (2003).