George Demetrion

In this essay, the author looks to American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey for guidelines to shape the emerging field of teacher research.

As a program manager and curriculum developer, the author has spent most of his career at the ground level of adult literacy education practice. He has investigated how adult literacy students take on the process of learning to read and how teachers, particularly volunteer tutors, have sought to help them.

The following is an adaptation of a presentation the author gave on theorist/practitioner tensions in adult literacy education at the Literacy Pre-Conference of the 2005 Adult Research Conference in Athens, Georgia.

In this document, you will find:
- cover page
- programmatic premises
- instructional premises
- background assumptions
- appendices, and
- pedagogical principles

The author wants to emphasize with this document the importance of both stimulus-response behaviorist and intuitive-inferential constructivist
approaches in learning to read as a both/and rather than an either/or phenomenon.

As in learning anything complex, mastering the basics in this case, of how print literacy works, is indispensable.

What follows is a bibliographic review of the author's online and print based articles and book chapters from 1993-2004 on various facets of the pedagogy, politics, and science of adult literacy education.

This journal article discusses a study comparing competing perspectives of contextual literacy—literacy as practices, functional context education, and critical literacy.

This journal article examines one of the concepts of John Dewey, (1859-1952) American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer.

This historical analysis explores key aspects of the Bob Steele Reading Center in Connecticut from its inception in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.

This short monograph builds on and expands arguments made in Chapters 9 & 10 of the author`s book, Conflicting Paradigms in Adult Literacy Education: In Quest of a U.S. Democratic Politics of Literacy.