Reverberating Words and ‘Becoming Other than the Other’ in Adult Literacy: Bakhtinian Reflections on a Powerful Literacy-Influenced GED Academic Writing Framework

Abstract

While adult literacy programs have historically been marginalized within the US educational system, there is growing interest in making these programs more academically effective. Because of this, the General Education Development (GED) exam was recently revised to be more rigorous, especially in its assessment of writing. Although these changes provide the adult literacy field with new opportunities, they also now require the field to engage with the inherent complexity of teaching academic writing. This dissertation is my attempt to help the field engage with this complexity by 1) articulating a design for a multi-theoretical GED academic writing curriculum framework influenced by Gee (1996) and Lankshear’s (1997) concept of powerful literacy, and 2) using a Bakhtinian lens – a lens that centralizes the complexity of language and celebrates conflicting perspectives – to study the framework’s curricular implementation within an adult literacy GED course. Specifically, data analyses focused on the curricular implementation’s pedagogical tensions, as well as on how these tensions affected the teaching and learning of academic writing. Both qualitative and quantitative findings suggest that the two most salient (and related) tensions were between dialogic and monologic discourses and between centrifugal and centripetal forces. These tensions seemed to affect students by both promoting and constraining ideological becoming, as well as by inhibiting and improving academic writing skills. In addition, qualitative findings from a case study of a student who experienced the lessons revealed that lessons 1) encouraged multivoicedness, leading to productive revising, 2) fostered internally persuasive discourse, fostering ideological becoming, and 3) reified authoritative discourse, complicating critical literacy.