What is it like for you?: a phenomenological study: teaching adult literacy in a further education college under the auspices of the Adult Literacy Core Curriculum

摘要

This study is about the experience of teaching adult literacy in a further education college under the auspices of the Adult Literacy Core Curriculum (ALCC) between the years 2002 to 2005. A universal description was derived from the perspectives of five college lecturers, called co-researchers, who volunteered a vivid description of their individual experience of teaching adult literacy in this context. These descriptions were reduced, in terms of volume, and the resulting data created a single universal description of the teaching experience. The modified phenomenological reduction and analysis process used was based on an approach created by Moustakas (1994) to answer the fundamental research question: 'What -was it like for you?' In answering this question, this study presents the crux of what constitutes the qualities or nature of the professional experience, and brings to the fore, the meaning contained within it. This study identified that the qualities within teaching in further education are very much under researched and that rarer still is research from a phenomenological perspective about teaching under the auspices of the ALCC. This study sought to fill this gap where it found that the introduction of the ALCC brought with it a complexity in its defining of adult literacy as a set of functional skills within a socio-economic context, and that its use galvanized the humanism of co-researchers and their sense of moral obligation. It further found that the ALCC became what unified the co-researchers professionally and instigated a teaching culture in which some consideration was given to the social implications of what they taught. Teaching under the auspices of the ALCC thus became the platform of possibility from which institutions and central government can nurture the culture's need for support, and from which teachers themselves can question their role.