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Changing Work, Changing Workers: Critical Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Skills. Glynda Hull, ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 392 pp.
Changes in welfare policies in the United States have put pressure on educational programs to provide workforce retraining for adults, the assumption being that such schooling will help move people from welfare to work. However, worker education has too often been defined in narrow ways. Education is conceived as training in basic skills that provide a good match between entry-level jobs and the forms of literacy required for those positions. Literacy itself is defined as rudimentary forms of reading and writing, while literacy education is a curriculum in which primary-level basal readers are merely replaced by their adult counterparts. Fortunately, such a view of adult literacy education is seriously challenged by the essays found in Glynda Hull's edited volume entitled Changing Work, Changing Workers: Critical Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Skills.
The book consists of 14 essays by a wide range of scholars. The first chapter by Hull sets the tone for the entire collection. Originally published in Harvard Educational Review, it...