B. Allan Quigley

Health literacy: expanding practitioners' horizons through collaborative research

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION (2003a). Prevalence of physical activity, including lifestyle activities among adults—United States, 2000 – 2001 [Electronic version]. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 52, 764 – 769. Retrieved August 2003 from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5232a2.htm CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION (2003b). Physical activity levels among children aged 9 – 13 years— United States, 2002 [Electronic version]. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 52, 785 – 788. Retrieved August 2003 from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5233a1.htm CITY OF FORT WORTH PUBLIC HEALTH DEPARTMENT (1998). The City of Fort Worth Community Needs Assessment: Summary and Recommendations. Fort Worth: Author. NATIONAL HEART, LUNG, AND BLOOD INSTITUTE (1998). Clinical Guidelines on the Identification, Evaluation, and Treatment of Overweight and Obesity in Adults. The Evidence Report. [Electronic version]. (NIH Publication No. 984083). Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Retrieved January 2003 from http://nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/obesity/ob_gdlns.htm PASTOR, P.N., MAKUC, D.M., REUBEN, C. & XIA, H. (2002). Health, United States, 2002 with Chartbook on Trends in the Health of Americans. [Electronic version]. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. Retrieved September 2003 from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus02cht.pdf TASK FORCE ON COMMUNITY PREVENTIVE SERVICES (2002). Recommendations to increase physical activity in communities [Electronic version]. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 22(4S), 67 – 72. Retrieved January 2003 from Guide to Community Preventive Services http://www.thecommunityguide.org/pa/default.htm US CENSUS BUREAU (n.d.). Census 2000. Retrieved January 3, 2003 from http://www.census.gov/ US DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AND US DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES (2002). Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 5th edn.. [Electronic Version]. (Home and Garden Bulletin #232). Retrieved January, 2003 from http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/DietGd.pdf US DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES (Last reviewed 2003, May 7). Physical Activity and Nutrition: Essential Elements to Prevent Chronic Disease and Obesity, At a Glance 2003. Retrieved August 2003 from http:// www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/aag/aag_dnpa.htm US DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES (Jan 2001). Healthy People 2010. Retrieved January 2003 from http://www.healthypeople.gov/document/tableofcontents.htm

Book Review: Conflicting Paradigms in Adult Literacy Education: In Quest of a U.S. Democratic Politics of Literacy, by George Demetrion. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. 320 pp.,

The field of adult literacy has more history than memory. Because not a single comprehensive history of adult literacy exists in print today in either the United States or Canada, it is virtually impossible to learn from the successes and failures of literacy’s past for purposes of practice, policy, or research. Meanwhile, the often heroic stories of literacy learners and teachers are lost and being ignored. Worse perhaps, and symptomatic of the hegemony of how literacy educators now live in the “practice-moment,” there are virtually no published or collected oral histories of local literacy programs in the United States or Canada. Therefore, without at least some documented history, with only minimal effort to reclaiming our past, we can only face the future with little or no memory of where we have come from, why, or how we can avoid the mistakes of the past. George Demetrion’s new book could change at least some part of this “normalization of forgetting” in adult literacy. His book is recommended reading for anyone interested in how we got to the state of literacy we see today in America. Demetrion sets out to give an overview of “the major trends and issues shaping the theories, practices, research traditions, and politics of adult literacy . . . since the mid-1980s” (p. vii). Beyond being descriptive, his conceptual framework consists of three paradigms: (1) the participatory literacy movement, (2) the new literacy studies, and (3) the “functional and workforce orientation” (p. vi). He has given us three new lenses for analyses. Herein lies one of the many strengths of this book. Participatory literacy, as he explains, is based on Freire’s critical pedagogy. The New Literacy Studies is explained in terms of “cultural anthropology and Vygotskian social psychology,” (p. 4) and the functional approach arises largely out of the U.S. federal government’s policy efforts to stimulate the economy and shrink welfare through literacy. Demetrion analyzes literacy developments through the past decades of the Bush-ClintonBush years. To do this, he brings data from the traditional literature and from the discourse on literacy Listservs. These nationwide e-mail discussions, as he points out, have captured the voices of practitioners even as policies were being created. Not surprisingly, the trends he finds are “often irreconcilable” (p. vii) across his three paradigms he gives us. He ends chapters and the book with his argument for “a middle ground politics of literacy based on a vision of democratic reform within capitalism” (p. 7). Although this may sound like modernist grand theorizing, early in the book he tells us that the National Institute for Literacy’s (NIFL’s) mid-1992 Equipped for the Future (EFF) project, “represents the closest approximation realized in practice on a large scale to the position advocated in this book” (p. 17).