posted on 2015-11-19, 09:15authored byAlan Huntington. Charnley
The thesis is in three parts. Part I deals with the conceptual background, principally the meaning and place of literacy in adult education, together with the purposes of various projects concerned with mass adult literacy and the organisation of literacy schemes in Cambridgeshire. Part II identifies and classifies Tutors' aims and suggests the possibility of adopting an ethological approach as an appropriate methodological means of analysis. Part III demonstrates how quotations from tape-recorded interviews with Tutors and Students may be analysed to reveal structures of evidence which indicate criteria of achievement. The findings suggest that, in the process of achievement, the improvement in skills was subservient to, and dependent upon, the enhancement of self-image. The criteria of achievement were, in order of importance: affective personal achievements, affective social achievements, socio-economic achievements, cognitive achievements and enactive achievements. Constituent sub-criteria within each group are listed, and it is argued that they are inter-related. Any grouping of criteria chosen and applied to any individual's progress will contain at least one of the prime criteria listed in the affective personal or social achievement domains, and these are synonymous with the general aims of adult education. These notions are set in the context of the United Kingdom literacy campaign and there is a contiguous discussion of the recruitment, training and use of volunteer tutors, the role of broadcasting, alternative systems of tuition and the need for counselling.