The best pro­gramme and teacher can't help you if you are not present, in body and mind.

Stu­dents who learn to read and write are those who have the will to make the time and ef­fort; an in­gre­di­ent of suc­cess in any en­deav­our. In the fi­nal part of Against the Odds, Paula Lu­cie Smith looks at a par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult hur­dle for many lit­er­a­cy stu­dents.

Hur­dle: Time, en­er­gy and a mind not over­whelmed with wor­ry

The jobs avail­able to the non-lit­er­ate of­ten mean they must work long hours over which they have no con­trol. Time spent at class is time when they could be earn­ing a few dol­lars. On­ly when you can think be­yond the next meal can you think about ed­u­ca­tion, so for the re­al­ly poor the dol­lar has to come first.

The grip of pover­ty does not of­ten loosen over time. This, added to the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of adult­hood, can stretch out at­ten­dance at Al­ta over a decade.

So while Al­ta fol­lows the aca­d­e­m­ic cal­en­dar with a start in Sep­tem­ber and end in Ju­ly, once you have en­rolled at Al­ta, you will not be turned away. Some stu­dents leave to pick fruit in Cana­da for six months or work in cater­ing so miss from Christ­mas to Car­ni­val, but we wel­come them back, maybe ad­vis­ing that they go for ex­tra prac­tice at an Al­ta Read­ing Cir­cle.

Adult learn­ers have many de­mands on their time, so time spent in a lit­er­a­cy class must be rel­e­vant, must im­pact on their every­day lives, must em­pow­er them. Brazil­ian ed­u­ca­tion­al the­o­rist Pao­lo Freire in his ground­break­ing Ped­a­gogy of the Op­pressed, pro­posed ed­u­ca­tion as the prac­tice of free­dom rather than the prac­tice of dom­i­na­tion. This kind of lit­er­a­cy in­struc­tion trans­forms the stu­dent from ob­ject to sub­ject in his world.

Friere is god­fa­ther to the learn­er-cen­tred ap­proach of adult lit­er­a­cy with its em­pha­sis on en­gag­ing stu­dent in­ter­est and us­ing ma­te­r­i­al rel­e­vant to the stu­dent's life. The aim is to equip stu­dents not on­ly to func­tion in­de­pen­dent­ly in their so­ci­ety, but to trans­form their worlds. Lit­er­a­cy com­bined with crit­i­cal think­ing skills has the pow­er to trans­form lives. Freires' em­pha­sis on re­spect and nur­tur­ing of the spir­it is ob­vi­ous in an adult class where maybe it is not as ev­i­dent in a room full of chil­dren or teens–though of course, re­spect there is just as im­por­tant.

As I got to know my stu­dents, I was amazed that they could smile, laugh, be thank­ful and kind to oth­ers when the world had been far from kind to them. One Port-of-Spain stu­dent in her mid­dle years when faced with an ul­ti­ma­tum from the chil­dren's fa­ther that she leave Al­ta class or leave him, chose to leave him. She told the tu­tor that he was keep­ing her down, and Al­ta was tak­ing her up. While Freire was a pro­po­nent of di­a­logue-dri­ven ed­u­ca­tion rather than set cur­ric­u­la, Al­ta tries, and I think most­ly suc­ceeds, in mar­ry­ing the two.

We draw on stu­dents' ex­pe­ri­ence and start them think­ing about this, e.g. is beat­ing a child the best way to mould be­hav­iour? And so, Al­ta was a life skills pro­gramme long be­fore the cur­rent buzz about life skills in adult ed­u­ca­tion.

�2 Against the Odds by Paula Lu­cie-Smith was first pub­lished in 20 Years of Al­ta mag­a­zine, 2012.