Adult educators work at the intersection of many different systems, often serving communities furthest from power. Many adult learners show up in class with learning needs that were never addressed in the school system. Some are court-ordered into GED programs. Others are newcomers to the United States wanting to improve their English. Teaching adult learners, Earldine Tolbert likes to say, is “more than just getting a paycheck, you have to have a passion for doing it.”
Earldine has been a champion of the Right Question Strategy for over a decade. She first connected with the Right Question Institute when she was working as an adult literacy instructor and Workforce Development Program specialist at Temple University. A natural advocate, Earldine immediately saw the opportunity for her students to gain more confidence in their ability to advocate for themselves and their families.
We spoke with Earldine about the power of asking questions as a form of self-advocacy, and the unique role that adult educators play.
Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Tell us a little bit about what drew you to work in the field of adult education.
There was a friend of mine who happened to be a very good chef. I bought him this book on cooking. When I showed it to him, he just flipped through the book and put it over to the side. Later I said to his brother, “I guess Freddie didn’t like that book I bought.” And he said, “I’m going to tell you something a lot of people don’t know. Freddie can’t read.” And that blew my mind.
A campaign in Philadelphia to bring volunteer tutors in to be reading coaches had the most powerful training that opened my eyes. And as a result, I became a tutor. A program administrator told me that Temple University was looking for an instructor for their GED program. So I went and became involved for the first time in teaching a class, not in just one-on-one tutoring. That was my forte.
What brought your students into adult education classrooms?
People would walk in who had raised families, who had owned property, some of them even had businesses. There’s a different intelligence that has allowed them to be able to be successful in all these areas of life, but they needed to show they had credentials. Some people were in shelters and part of their life plan was to come in and get a GED. Or maybe a judge gave them community service and probation or whatever and they had a certain amount of time to get the GED.
There were all these unrealistic ideas about a time limit, six weeks, three months or whatever, for people who had other problems that kept them from being able to complete their education. The assumption, even for some people in the administration where I was working, was that these people were just lazy and dropped out of school because they didn’t want to do it. The fact that they decide, “Well, at this time in life, I want to get my GED, I want to get my diploma” — they’re not in it for the money. It has to be about passion.
My first student in a literacy program was a gentleman from South Sudan. I was told he was reading at a third grade level. When he came to our first meeting, he had a book about a woman who had escaped from Bosnia. And I said, “Are you reading that?” He said yes. Then I looked into his resume and saw that in the refugee camp in Kenya, he was a representative that went to the meetings. He was a tutor in Swahili and a couple of other languages. If I had started where I would have started if I thought he was that far behind, I wonder if he would have said something. Somebody brought him here for a better life. But just being here, he got stuck. That is one of the things that drives me to be an advocate for people who have a language barrier.
How did you learn about the Right Question Institute?
I learned it first in a voter engagement effort in Philadelphia. I can’t even explain to you how serendipitous it was, because that particular Friday we just wanted to get out of the office. But there was this opportunity to come in and learn about the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) and how to teach people how to ask the right questions. I took a class with Dan [Rothstein] from RQI on a Friday, and then another teacher and I used it in the class on Monday.
We really got excited [by the training] because it was campaign time. Obama was running for election. I had a lot of people in my class, some of them were ex-offenders and thought they didn’t even have the right to vote. They didn’t understand that they could do it legally.
My colleagues and I took our classes through the Question Formulation Technique, and explained to them the power of their vote. And I’d say we may have gotten 85% to 90% of the class registered to vote before the deadline the next day. It was just one of those golden moments to actually have some impact and see it within a little bit of time. We didn’t have to wait for the test results to come back to see what the progress was. It was just automatic.
This pointed out to me the success of showing people what happens if they start asking questions. RQI was responsible for helping me empower people to really know that they had the authority to ask questions about how things were going to impact their future — just from that simple technique.
How did you start using the QFT in your regular classes beyond the voter engagement program?
We had from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. to work with these learners. It was an adult enrichment program, it wasn’t just to get their GED. There were a lot of people who had come in from other countries and wanted to have a better command of the language.
The QFT became a staple in our curriculum for what we called “Learning 2 Learn.” It was a three-day orientation, and one of the things that we built in was the QFT. They had to learn how to respect each other’s names and culture and those types of things by doing different activities to raise their awareness. So the QFT was the key.
I found it necessary to continually bring that to the forefront — people need to know that they can ask questions. I don’t know why, but people just don’t think to question authority. A lot of people don’t want to ask questions because they think that it makes them look uninformed and sometimes even dumb. People are reluctant to question their doctors or even ask questions about their lease. You have to be able to be inquisitive when it comes down to your life.
What did you see as the impact on your students?
One woman named Dominique came to class and told us that her landlord had sold her building and gave her a pack of papers to sign. She hesitated, remembered what she had learned in class about asking questions, and asked him if she could hold onto the papers before signing them. He left them with her reluctantly and she started going through it. She discovered that the document would have forced her to vacate her apartment in 30 days. Dominique didn’t sign the documents and she was able to stay in her home.
When Dominique [told the class what had happened,] that was even more incentive for people to just go ahead and try it. There was one woman who had a son on the spectrum. A doctor wanted to change her son’s medication. She started asking questions. Well, why? What does it mean for my son? She said in the past she would have gone along with the doctor just assuming that he was doing what was best for her son.
After hearing Dominique’s story everybody started going back and asking questions. They were excited for her because she tried it in real life and it worked. They felt more empowered to ask questions on their own. They really had the right to do this. That’s what I put across to the class.
Was there anything challenging about applying the QFT in your class?
I think initially it was kind of awkward putting it out there because I was afraid it wasn’t going to land. It wasn’t what I was used to doing. It was awkward, but it was not impossible. Once I got used to weaving it into orientation, it was just easy buy-in, not only from my colleagues, but also from our supervisor. We used university students as our tutors and they appreciated it too because it was that out of the box thinking that really appealed to them.
The more I got into it, the more the adult learners embraced it. That whole section where they would get together and form their own questions and then change the questions from closed to open — they got so much out of that. It was so rich. Nobody was checked out. Everybody was engaged, across the board. I had some people that were only there because the judge told them to be there, but even they got involved and engaged. It really gave them something to walk away with that maybe some people in the hood or the halfway house or the shelter or wherever they came from didn’t know and perhaps they could demonstrate it.
What is something that you wish other people knew about the work of adult educators?
I would want people to know that for an adult educator, there is a commitment to go in and help people overcome that stigma of whatever stops you along the way. We’re not looking for graduates, we’re not looking for high grades. All we want is to be able to help these people navigate through life.
Find more resources about learning how to use the QFT in your own work.