Overview

The American adult education system has become an alternative for school dropouts, with some state welfare policies requiring teen mothers and women without high school diplomas to participate in adult education programs to receive aid. Very little has been published about women\u2019s experiences in these mandatory programs and whether the programs reproduce the conditions that forced women to drop out in the first place. Lorna Rivera bridges the gap with this important study, the product of ten years\u2019 active ethnographic research with formerly homeless women who participated in adult literacy education classes before and after welfare reform. Analyzing the web of ideological contradictions regarding \u201cwork first\u201d welfare reform policies, Rivera argues that poverty is produced and reproduced when women with low literacy skills are pushed into welfare-to-work programs and denied education.

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Reviews

Given the increasing gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S., there is a desperate need for the kind of scholarship that Laboring to Learn contributes to the field. There is no other text that I have encountered that so forthrightly and effectively engages the literature on adult education, the political economy of poverty, and questions of public policy. Antonia Darder, author of Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love

A vivid, intimate, and sympathetic portrayal of the hardships that the Project Hope women face in attempting to secure affordable housing, in coordinating their child care and their commutes to and from suburban shelters with rigid schedules, and in living with the memory or the present reality of domestic and sexual abuse... A rare window into the street-level practices of adult literacy education--American Journal of Sociology A masterful study documenting the punitive outcome welfare reform has had on low-income women. --Adult Education Quarterly

Author Information

Lorna Rivera is an associate professor of sociology and community studies in the College of Public and Community Service at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

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