Deborah Brandt and Sponsorship

Working with GED students using sponsorship as a topic of how the individual is connected to the larger community, and then bringing back a perspective, researched and questioned by the students, of how the sponsor (as even an individual sponsor exemplifies some educational paradigm, reflecting some values of the society), benefits from the individual might prove effective. We could plot some kind of projected trajectory of how a sponsorship could germinate into the blossoms sought by the sponsor, and how a mutually beneficial outcome might be achieved. This seems to be a model for exploring the ideological perspective on literacy without sliding into a critique. The students would be able to see their relevance to a larger need/goal (and hence choose to stay actively engaged or not), and also perceive their growing relevance as they continue along the path of (sponsored) higher education. This is one vision I might try to implement in my GED class, to see if the idea of sponsorship could incentivize and inspire further active engagement in educational goals and acquisitions, as consciousness of a mutually beneficial reciprocity is glimpsed.
I find that GED students are motivated by knowing the specific economic consequences of their investment in classroom participation. When it remains too general ("I want to get a job"), they can be pulled away by concrete distractions of day to day life, and disappear.
More urgently, how do I engage them in the questions of how education can be a pathway that has to be followed persistently, in the short time I may see them, so as to not slide into settling for partial solutions ("I got a job at TJ Max, I can't come to class anymore")? It seems that a dialogue about sponsorship, which is not loaded down by political or social weight, might work.