Barriers to Access

Again, our professor asked us to pose ourselves a question, and then to write an annotation of an article that might begin to help us answer the question. This time, I chose to focus on barriers to access. There is an entire body of work, it turns out, related to barriers to access and I can't get through enough of the literature fast enough. It's fascinating, this whirlpool of psychology and sociology and anthropology, of organizational systems, education theory, and policy.

Question: Should Adult Education practitioners concern themselves with participants’ barriers to access to educational activities, especially when those barriers may lie within the scope of social services?

Tilleczek, K., & Campbell, V. (2013). Barriers to youth literacy: Sociological and Canadian insights. Language and Literacy, 15(2), 77–100.

Tilleczek and Campbell, of University of Prince Edward Island, write concerning literacy deficits among young adults in Canada and the barriers to access and long-term success low-literacy individuals face as they transition into adult responsibility.  Although there is a body of work describing the level of literacy (or illiteracy, as it were) among Canadian youth, the authors assert that there is little studies of the barriers to literacy.  This paper attempts to address this gap in the literature and “examine how public education and youth literacy service systems must redress youth literacy and how these failures are socially organized” (Tilleczek & Campbell, 2013, p.94).   The authors conducted a review of sociological literature, domestically and internationally, on the topic of youth literacy, educational attainment, and workforce participation.  This review is further informed by interviews conducted with both youth and service providers, with sampling methods designed to account for diversity of experience, which “provided experiences and perspectives on the meanings of literacy and described the way in which they encountered barriers to literacy” (ibid, p. 82).  The final analysis provided by this paper included socio-demographics describing the sample, the common definition of literacy that rose among the interviewees, and the barriers to literacy described.  Indeed, the barriers could be classified into five major categories: culture/social, individual or self, family, work, and school.  From both the literature and the interviews, socioeconomic status, family circumstances, and limited supportive services from the K-12 system seem to be the most prevalent barriers to access and long-term success.  The authors conclude that “youth literacy holds complex and shifting meanings and skill groupings”(ibid., p. 95) and that youth and practitioners alike express value for attainment of literacy skills for long-term success.  The authors continue, “Youth literacy research could move past pathological individual foci on singular measurement which only reports trends… The literature and interviews here demonstrate the need for continued study” (ibid.)  Implied in this conclusion is a call to action to practitioners, that understanding the barriers is not enough, but that a redress of systemic deficiencies must occur within the existing systems.  This article, and this question, is of particular interest to me because my current work in youth and adult literacy is situated within the workforce development context, in the not-for-profit, social services sector.  Its implied call-to-action affirms our unique approach while emphasizing the need for continued scholarly research as the foundation of best practices.