English that Works: Unsettling Literacy Sponsors in Adult Literacy Education

Karen Villegas

doi:10.29333/ejecs/1895

Authors

Karen Villegas University of California, Berkeley https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8295-0529

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/1895

Keywords:

Assimilation, adult education, literacy sponsors

Abstract

This paper documents how neoliberal literacies function as an insidious form of inclusivity and multiculturalism that reinscribe monocultural assimilation so that immigrants may become U.S. citizens. Nondominant “new citizens” are assimilated into low-paying jobs rather than divested from oppressive conditions. Drawing on archival data from the California Adult Education (CAE) Oral History Project, this paper analyzes 12 oral history interviews to query how neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 1990s influenced adult education by delimiting the possibilities of literacies. To address this question, one focus of analysis centers on the directionality of power from literacy sponsors, that is, those responsible for designing and implementing neoliberal policies aimed toward the rapid acquisition of functional literacy, to the literacy sponsors who teach within the framework dictated by neoliberal policies, and ultimately to the nondominant students which the analyses reveal are assimilated into these very literacies. Reducing literacy to mere functionality delimits the possibilities of leveraging literacy across multiple spaces. Neoliberal literacies here are understood as literacy frames and ideologies undergirded by neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 1990s. By modeling neoliberal policies, this study finds that educators employed practices that racialize students, shrink opportunities for critical thinking, and reduce the potential of literacy to functional forms.

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Author Biography

Karen Villegas, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Karen Villegas is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and Associate Director of the Dimensions of Culture writing program at the University of California, San Diego. Her work examines how the state shapes western education spaces to serve capital, conscripting learners into hierarchical orders through epistemological codes—codes rooted in the U.S. Empire’s histories of colonization, genocide, and slavery. Specifically, her research analyzes citizenship and nation-building processes by studying the ideological conceptions of language and literacy practices in adult, English as a Second Language (ESL) citizenship classes. Karen’s book project interrogates these codes by showing how they move through ESL classrooms—how students come to perform these codes, how they talk back to them, and how they gesture toward other possibilities.

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