English That Works: Unsettling Literacy Sponsors in Adult Literacy Education

• In Event: Language, Law, and Literacy in School Policy From the 19th to the 20th Centuries

Abstract

Drawing from the California Adult Education (CAE) Oral History Project, an archive that has not been previously cited or utilized in existing academic literature, I analyze 12 oral history interviews to show how neoliberal policies of the 80s and 90s impacted adult education by reducing literacy to notices of functionality. Using the lens of literacy sponsors, I trace how powerful literacy sponsors designed neoliberal policies to expedite literacy acquisition for Vietnamese refugees and Latino immigrants, pushing them into low-paying jobs. I trace how these policies constrained educators’, the less powerful literacy sponsors, teaching contexts.

Author

• Karen Villegas, University of California - Berkeley