READINGS ON ADULT LITERACY INSTRUCTION

I am enrolled in Ping Li's Adult Literacy class at Queens College this semester and we have hit the ground running in terms of talking about Adult Literacy Instruction. Through reading Hinchliffe's article, "Examining the Context: New Voices Reflect on Information Literacy" in Reference User Service's, I came across an even more important report: Presidential Committee on Information Literacy. This report was released on January 10, 1989, so to say it is outdated is putting it mildly. However, the report makes some amazing points and led me to a fuller understanding of what is mean by Adult Literacy Instruction.
To start, a person would need to define what it means to be information literate. The report says that to be information literate, "a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information" (1989, par. 3) However succinct this definition proves, it might be even more instructive if we look at the connotations of what it means to be information literate. The underscoring idea concerning information literacy has to be that the person that is information literate is a lifelong learner, or a person who is eminently interested in learning how it is they learn and replicating the results every time there is something they don't know.
It is obvious that learning how you learn is going to be an effective mental talisman against people who are trying to take advantage of you, however, as the report states the people who most need to be information literate are not and therein lies the crux of the problem. "Minority and at-risk students, illiterate adults, people with English as a second language, and economically disadvantaged people are among those most likely to lack access to the information that can improve their situation" (1989, par. 10)
Most troubling, though, I would have to say is the complete obfuscation of the importance that libraries play in the lives of people. Time after time, the importance of libraries is left out of reports and the impact that libraries have in people's lives is ignored. This is a shame because libraries in conjunction with schools are the first places that literacy skills are first internalized and digested. To assume that it is merely schools that are instructing our children is not only myopic but petty; the reality is that young people are learning just as much from their experiences in libraries as their experiences in normative schools.