Illiteracy in America

SCLLN Adult Learners

Illiteracy in America

ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson featured a special series, “Living in the Shadows: Illiteracy in America” that examined the hidden phenomenon of illiteracy in this country: Part 1: Feb 25; Part 2: Feb 26.

Click on Title for Video or Story:

~ Illiterate in America
~ A Michigan City’s Literacy Crisis
~ Literacy Programs at Work
~ Living in the Shadows: Monica Baxley
~ Living in the Shadows: Roger Vredenburg
~ Silent Epidemic: Illiteracy in America
~ News You Can Use: Literacy Resources for Adults and Children
~ Out of the Shadows, Overcoming Illiteracy

Read On @ Your Local Library:

CalCat or WorldCat

Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America
E. Jennifer Monaghan, University of Massachusetts Press 2007

~ who learned to read in Colonial America? Who learned to write? Reading instruction was largely motivated by religion, while writing instruction generally had secular motives -slaves and other marginalized people were allowed to learn to read but not to write.

Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentucky's Moonlight Schools: Fighting for Literacy in America
Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin, University Press of Kentucky 2006

~ Stewart decided to open the classrooms in her district to adult pupils in 1911. Convinced that edication could eliminate the poverty that plagued the region, she founded the Moonlight School movement, ultimately designed to combat illiteracy. The movement's motto: Each one teach one.

Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared
Mike Rose, Viking Penguin 2005

~ Remedial, illiterate, intellectually deficient—these are the stigmas that define America's educationally underprepared.