Adult Literacy in Canada, 2000 - 2010

Hey you. It's almost suppertime and the close of 2010. I'm midway through the Christmas layoff - doing only volunteer literacy work, and not much of that. What are you doing?

Listen. It's been a decade since a committee reported to parliament that 1) we knew how to meet the nation's adult literacy challenges, and 2) hitherto we lacked the political will to put that knowledge to use.

So, I was thinking, what's the decade been like?


What went right?
In many ways, it was a privileged decade. The economic hardship much of the country is now experiencing is only a couple years old. For most of the past ten years, Canada saw increased employment and investment. This meant there were discretionary dollars to put into programs and resources, as well as the increased likelihood of employment for those learners who had that goal.

There was also a flowering of adult literacy resources; from early easy-reads from PRACE and Grass Roots Press through to the Quick Read - Rapid Read - Good Read type novellas. The Terry Barber biographies were written and published, as were Judy Murphy's health books. In 2000, Pat Campbell's team gave us our own assessment tool: the CARA or Canadian Adult Reading Assessment. But an even more valuable tool was her 2002 Teaching Reading to Adults: A Balanced Approach which sometimes comes with video. (Just this fall I was able to sit in on a refresher workshop using this material, and found it still very useful.) We also saw the maturing of web 2.0 and all that implied for learning, sharing and distance support. I'm thinking of things like AlphaRoute or similarly accessible online resources and tools.

Still, I'm not sure how well the decade lived up to its promise. Looking back, three things stand out for me.


How did we define "Literacy"?
One is the public shift in perception about what "literacy work" means. Once, it meant helping people - adults, children, families - get better at whatever reading and writing they valued. You can still see this thinking in the 2003 introductory edition of Literacies.

I should say that the plural - literacies, not literacy - bothered me for a long time. Partly, it bothered me because I was introduced to literacy work by people who took for granted that literacy was something distinct from the imposed and curriculum-based reading and writing instruction we called schooling, and that the same literacy skills might look superficially different in different contexts. Partly, it was because I'm a white Anglo-Saxon protestant male with a WASP's discomfort with innovative noun forms. Partly, it was because I thought any cause which had to compete for funding and public support was foolhardy to not circumscribe it's own boundaries.

Gradually, I came to see that a lot of my colleagues were using the plural literacies to reinforce the argument for locally appropriate, individualized, learner-centered services and to undermine attempts to impose an one-size-fits-all literacy curriculum. But my last worry wasn't wrong. In the second half of the decade, literacy was reduced to how well adults and children did on particular set of tests, or how prepared they were for temporary, highly-demanding job placements. Because different age groups needed different tests, the literacy field fragmented between early childhood education (consistently misnamed "family literacy"), school-based literacy, and adult GED-prep classes. Somewhere along the way, the gates were opened and employers were invited to tell us what kind of reading and writing they valued, leading to "Workplace Essential Skills" gaining a special priority in what used to be the adult literacy field. The impact of WES thinking can be seen in the definition of literacy Café readers settled on in 2008: "A person is literate who can with understanding read, write, calculate, sign, solve problems and communicate with symbols to meet the needs, demands and desires of his/her everyday life."

The verbs read, write, and communicate with symbols are old hat, of course. Sign is an interesting addition. I assume it means "use sign language" and not "sign one's name" - but in either case it suggests the difficulties raised by trying to be inclusive. Am I less literate because I can't sign? Am I less literate because I can't read or write French or Chinese? Calculate is another interesting verb choice: were they thinking "read and manipulate numbers with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division" or something else? And, again, would I be less literate if I still found the 7 times table hard to memorize?

But the real odd duck in the list is solve problems. Nowhere does the CARA measure problem solving. Nor, I thought, were we still stuck with the misconception that adults with weak literacy skills also had poor cognitive or reasoning skills. In fact, I thought we had pretty much agreed that most adults with weak literacy skills were excellent at solving problems - especially the problem of getting things done without revealing to the world an inability to read!

Still, the skills language prevailed. The National Literacy Secretariat (NLS) was reinvented as the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills (OLES). In the eastern half of the country at least, anyone not claiming to be instructing adults in Workplace Essential Skills - or Essential Skills, as they are sometimes called, as though what's good for General Motors is by definition good for everyone - lost access to federal dollars, and was reduced to whatever funding they could charm out of Rotary Clubs and city councils.

Meantime, a great deal of literacy work simply disappeared; either dried up altogether, or evaporated down into isolated pools of small scale, unresourced volunteer work.


Who should be doing "literacy" work (and what work needs doing)?
The second thing that stands out for me is that, despite the drying up of funded literacy work, there was a deluge of concern about literacy. The public conversation about Canada's literacy crisis reached a crescendo. We heard, over and over again, that nearly half the country was functionally illiterate. Here in New Brunswick, we heard it was more than half. A former ten-year premier, Frank McKenna, whose government won the 1995 UNESCO International Literacy Prize for instituting a province-wide adult literacy program, spent the second half of the 2000's giving TD Bank sponsored speeches on how New Brunswick had to get its literacy act together - without a single blush or backward glance.

We also saw an unseemly contest between large organizations wanting to position themselves as the go-to guys for literacy advice and funding in Canada. So, for example, ABC Canada Literacy Foundation changed its name to ABC Life Literacy Canada and "developed a new vision, mission and brand." What's this Life Literacy? They say:

It’s the literacy skills you need to live your life and the new skills you need to acquire throughout your life. Workplace, family and community are important areas in your life where developing your reading, writing and math skills can result in a more productive and more successful life experience.

(Seriously. They really did tell us what areas are to be important in our lives, and direct us to become more productive and successful. Thanks. Thanks for that. Nice brand. Looks good on you.)

ABC Canada also reminded us that National Family Literacy Day was a registered trademark. (Before the decade was out, they would throw a propitiatory arm around the whole month of September.) The CLC and the LLC - or maybe it's the CLL - each spent several happy years and millions of dollars republishing other people's studies, reports and op-ed pieces, all without actually improving the lot of literacy workers and learners on the ground. (I imagine they would dispute this, but this is my experience, and I'm a literacy worker, I know a bunch of literacy workers, and I know a whole lot of literacy learners.) Oh, and the Movement for Canadian Literacy amalgamated with one of them - I forget which, but I figure if it matters to you, then you probably already know.

Meantime, our provincial and federal governments designated more and more dollars for literacy - or what was now counting as literacy. In fact, in the first part of the decade, the federal government put up more money than it was able to spend. Or maybe they were just lying. You know, promising funds, but then disqualifying applicants who chose the wrong guy for their MP. You decide.


Is there still a (reading-writing) literacy field?
The third thing that stands out for me is the emergence and then disappearance of a different kind of trans-Canada conversation. I'm thinking here of the Literacies Journal - a world class journal of research and reflection that invited and nurtured a conversation between adult literacy workers. There was also the RiP or Research in Practice initiative that came out of the west - at least, it seemed considerably west of here - and prodded field workers to write down (or draw or quilt or sculpt) their reflections and share them with each other. There were probably others - Jan Greer tried hard to make something like this happen in New Brunswick - that started or didn't start and then ended or stayed too local to show up in national venues.

I don't know how successful these efforts were on their own terms. This last thing is hard for me. I might be getting it wrong. I felt befriended by Tracey and Maria and Nancy and Peter and others - you know who you are. It's easy for me to assume that what helped me was equally helpful for others. Maybe other literacy workers aren't ending the decade with the same sense of missing friends and missing handrails. In any case, I'm still thinking about the structural and economic barriers that limited their reach. What I feel sure about is that, unlike the ABC, CCL, LLC, WTF banner wavers, there were people who were serious about meeting literacy workers where they were at, and then helping them speak for themselves.


So what's the balance then?
I don't know. Literacy has certainly found a higher profile - even if I struggle to recognize it at times. Literacy spending may be falling, but I'm sure it is still well above where it was in 2000. Certainly that's true of New Brunswick. There are also, here in NB, many more professionals paid to address literacy and literacy-related issues.

But as the scope of the word "literacy" has grown and spread, an odd emptiness has appeared in the heart of it.

In 2000, they wrote, "Experience suggests how to design and deliver quality adult literacy programs...." Then, one day in 2010, a young mom told me she couldn't read very well, and she wanted someone to help her in the daytime. She wanted someone to read aloud with her, so that she could learn to read stories to her child. And I was left to help her get on a list of people waiting to be connected to a volunteer.

Why? Because, in 2010, in New Brunswick, no one gets paid to offer that kind of adult literacy support - to do what we used to call "literacy work."

Isn't that strange?

Happy New Years. :/

New Years Widget by Widgia

Nothing a Sunday can't set straight

Sunday morning. Breakfast in bed. Idly tweaking webpages.

I grabbed a page on About.me a while back (determined to make better use of it than I had of my promising but failed Clutter.me attempt last year). About.me is really just a landing page for a web directory, short bio and a high def photo. Well... mostly it's just pretty. When I google "about.me wendell dryden" the first page of returns shows my blog and linkedin page, but not my about.me page. Too, with less than half a million in venture capital raised (see the Techcrunch story here), it's unclear what future it has.

But... you know. It's a snowy Sunday morning. I don't have to do anything right now.

What better way to spend my time than thinking and tweaking, er, about me.

:)

TDSS Killer, LOLcats and the new Facebook profile

I just finished my 7th computer sort-out of the year. This time it was an interesting re-direct virus that the classic tools like Superantispyware and Malwarebytes wouldn't even detect. In general, the computer performed normally - well, normal for Windows Vista on an under-resourced laptop - but some sites were out of bounds (Majorgeeks, for example) and none of the onboard safeware programs would update or, for that matter, do their jobs. It took me about an hour of Googling the various error messages to track down the immediate cause and cure (Kaspersky Lab's removal tool). Then, I was another 3 hours or so updating and rebuilding the computer's safe guards.

I enjoy doing this kind of thing. I set the infected computer up beside my own laptop, put on some tunes, dig out a manual or two, and then get to researching and copying files with a flashdrive. I always learn something new, and I get a kick out of returning a newly cleaned and streamlined PC to its owner. (If I'm feeling especially cheerful, I load them up with David Bowie tunes and episodes of the second season of Red Dwarf.)


But I also wonder, each time this happens, how on earth distance education is supposed to work for people with weak problem solving skills or a poor knowledge of computers or just general reading challenges. The last two laptops I worked on belonged, respectively, to someone who would score as an IALS Level 1 learner and someone with two B.A.s and a Master's degree. What they had in common was a lack of background knowledge and experience - well, that and teenage kids who lacked a certain measure of online caution.

Maybe that's the question: Do online distance learning environments work for adults with teenagers in their house?


In other news, we did three - count 'em, three - Christmas parties last weekend. One more to go. Also, I've been learning how to tweak the new Facebook profile - which, by the way, may require you to reset some privacy settings. Just FYI.

Too, I've been spending some more time with video-making stuff. And, I've been watching the Wikileaks story unfold, reading a bit of history, and started the Lord of the Rings again.


Along with, you know, classes and tutoring and bookwagon and stuff.

Those Christmas charts and graphs

...no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.

A Christmas Carol

I picked up some Christmas cards for the class, thinking that they would provide for some functional literacy learning. Then, I remembered I don't have as many lower level learners in my classroom these days.

That kind of killed my plans for a Christmas-themed "whiteboard Wheel of Fortune" game, or a couple of rounds of "Unscramble the letters to name the Christmas carol."

How to support mid-level and GED-prep learners at Christmas?

A shared reading of A Christmas Carol would be fun. If we used the Saddleback Classics version we could take advantage of their workbook as well.


But... no. These guys are all too studious and business minded and - dare I say? - Scrooge like.

For reading, they mostly concentrate on my Good Reads - Quick Reads - Rapid Reads collection, or straight up history. (I should read something more serious, one opined, setting aside a Twilight book in favour of a history of the War of 1812.) Beyond that, they're focused on science workbooks, essay-writing, mathematics, and the close study of maps and charts. You'd think they were preparing for some sort of expedition.

Which, I suppose, they are.

Still.... The closer my learners to come to passing their GED, the less fun they are. Now I'm reduced to thinking up Yuletide essay starters or inference questions based on passages from The Grinch.

Thank goodness for the bookwagon - a program that always brings the party with it!

Creating a safe learning environment for adults

I was looking through some old training documents - most more than 10 years old now - that I was given when I first started this work. One of them, reproduced below, was based on conversations with adults with low literacy skills.

I know it describes a type of classroom and customer base somewhat different from the ones I work with today. Our funders and partners have different expectations now; including the expectation that we will give weight to their philosophies of education and welfare-to-work policies. There has also been a shift in our society as a whole toward idealizing traditional schooling methods and exaggerating the link between education and employment - as though the ranks of the unemployed weren't filled with people with high school, college and university degrees. (I notice that ABC Canada just picked up another 1.5 million to further push the facile message that it is a lack of conventional schooling, rather than our monetary, taxation or import/export policies, that has derailed our economy and widened the gap between rich and poor.)

In any case, I still like to look over these documents from time to time. I think it's worthwhile; not least to hear the voices of learners.

Physical features of a class that learners have said made them feel uncomfortable:

• Facilitator sitting behind a desk;
• Alphabet blocks or other "children's" decorations on the wall;
• Having to sit behind desks or at tables with backs facing to others;
• Lockers for possessions;
• The temperature (too hot or too cold);
• Having to take problems up the facilitator's desk;
• Textbooks and workbooks everywhere;
• A closed door that you have to open to go into the class;
• Too many people there;
• A piece of paper or a form to fill out at every (or my) seat the minute I walk in the classroom.

Things facilitators say and do that learners have said made them feel uncomfortable:

• Sit behind a desk and periodically walk around behind learners, looking over their shoulders;
• Dress a lot better than learners do every day;
• Talk down or being condescending;
• Never make mistakes, or make excuses when they do make one;
• Say "you must…" "you should…" "you have to…" all the time;
• Use closed body language when talking to learners;
• Socialize only with other facilitators during breaks and before class (especially in another room designated for this purpose);
• Talk about learners to anyone else, especially when they can hear;
• Not do the work too (expecting learners to write a journal when you don’t, expecting learners to read from a novel when you are doing something else, expecting learners to be lifelong learners when you are not being one);
• Point out learners' mistakes to them in a group or in front of the class, correct learners and then ask, "Do you understand it NOW?";
• Rarely ask learners what they want to do;
• Judge learners of personal life or lifestyle or habits;
• Ignore learners;
• Be away from the classroom for long periods of time;
• Force learners to participate in activities.

As a facilitator, ask yourself "Can an observer tell, by where I am sitting or how I am dressed, that I am the facilitator?" If your answer to this question is yes, then you run the risk of making some students uncomfortable. If the answer is no, then you are well on your way to creating a safe atmosphere for learners and a positive learning culture.

The bad news is I could add substantially to the number of ineffective practices simply by recalling my many, many clumsy mistakes with learners.

The good news is that I'm frequently mistaken for just another learner. Or the janitor. Or somebody who's, you know, gotten lost and is now loitering in the doorway in hopes of stealing a newspaper or something equally pathetic.

See?

Well on my way.

Community literacy and Christmas parties

We've done a dozen neighbourhood Christmas parties over the past decade, been guests at another dozen, and rode on one Christmas parade float. In that time, we've also spent many hours of conversation figuring out a "Christmas Party" strategy.

You might not think a clutch of university educated and/or manual labour type do-gooders like us would need to spend hours talking about neighbourhood Christmas parties. If so, you would be wrong.

Part of it has to do with budgets. We sometimes receive more invitations to help than we can afford. In our line, helping means either showing up and and being helping hands (an admittedly cheap option), running a craft table or being the floor entertainment (a slightly more expensive venture), providing a door-prize of a basket of six to eight books for a whole family (cost $120-$150), or providing a gift book for each child (at an average cost of $10 to $12 per). The last option is our favourite, but to meet all the invitations, we would need to find a couple of thousand extra dollars to spend. Which is... you know.


But that's all pretty straight-forward: we either have the money or we don't, and if we have only some money we try to make smart choices about how to divide it up.

Our lasting conversations were and are about what to do at the party. Providing books is fine, but it doesn't help us meet people. It doesn't lead to new or strengthened relationships. It doesn't provide the party planners with extra volunteers. And it doesn't create opportunities for us to support functional learning.

Early on, we tried to provide entertainment. But, despite having created a kick-ass, stick-puppet production of Stephanie's Ponytail and The Paperbag Princess, this was a poor idea. Why? Because we are poor entertainers.

(This is, by the way, a common misconception: that people effective at scaffolding children's literacy development are therefore effective at entertaining a roomful of children. But we aren't clowns or acrobats, jugglers or magicians, actors or singers or comedians. We're literacy workers. We have lots of skills and insights, but not the skills and insights needed to wow a roomful of children excitedly awaiting Santa.)

We tried puppet shows, sing-alongs, book readings, dramatic re-enactments and other things too dreadful to recall. Typically, the children were set in rows of hard chairs before us, scarce able to see and hear, beset by shushing adults, and awash in waves of boredom.

Eventually, we developed a different approach - one that drew upon our natural literacy-worker strengths.

For example, we know the kind of things that, spread out on a table, help children entertain themselves. We know that a functional craft table will have plain white and coloured construction paper. We know that crayons work better on most paper than markers, and pencil crayons work most poorly of all. We know that white glue takes a long time to dry, that glitter glue is popular but also a time bomb if children come dressed up to the party in their very best clothes, and that clear tape is a reasonable accommodation. We know that feathers and pipe-cleaners are fun, but they fall off frequently. We know that old Christmas cards are fun to cut up and copy, and easier to paste or tape down. (In fact, everything is fun to cut up and tape down when you're five years old.) We know that stickers are endlessly popular, that stencils can prove frustrating, and that paint is completely too complicated and messy for most settings. We know that you have to keep finger food off the table if you don't want someone eating the crayons, and that we may need to give-up a table if families need places to eat. We know that things go better if we leave child-minding to the caregivers, and instead limit our concern to refreshing the materials, modeling creative behaviours, and enjoying the artists around us. And we know that the joy is often in the creating and re-creating, and we needn't fuss too much about projects getting finished or displayed.


We also, of course, know how to share a book - it's how we spend our storytent summers. We know how to read and how to listen and how to help and how to not help too much. We know which books are popular read-alouds and which ones are better enjoyed individually. And we know how to create a safe, inviting, effective reading space.



Knowing all this, we've realized one effective way for us to help out at neighbourhood Christmas parties is to organize two tables, one for Christmas colouring (we separate the pages of half a dozen colouring books) and the other for card-and-decoration making (construction paper, crayons and markers, etc.). In between, we put down six or seven layers of thick blankets to create a cozy reading corner where we share reading much as we would in a storytent.


This trio of offerings allows children to come and go as they please, be as active or passive as they please, change activities often, and chatter happily to their friends without ever being shushed.

The only remaining thing for us to learn was how to present this idea early enough that the Christmas party planners could accommodate it into their larger scheme for the day.



The colouring-craft-reading-corner plan is our most intensive involvement. A less intensive one - and my favourite - is simply offering a Christmas storytent at some appropriate, public location.


On these occasions, we set a tent up indoors and string it with Christmas lights. Then, we read Christmas books with and to families as they wander in and out over the course of two or three hours.


Parents sometimes mistake this for the sort of "storytime" where the role of the children is to sit quietly as the books are read one by one. But we can usually overcome this with the simple tactic of reading two books simultaneously to different children. This seems to be enough to signal permission to other children and adults to also read aloud or to themselves.

As I say, this is my favourite community Christmas pastime, but I know it has drawbacks. Siblings are likely to tire of it at different rates and, if it is the only activity provided, there can be a bit of unpleasantness as the family negotiates the right time to leave. As well, there are a limited number of really good Christmas read-alouds - and an apparent endless supply of gooey, wordy, listless books.


Finally, there's the option of just showing up and asking, "How can I help?" Party planners can always use another set of skilled hands behind the scenes, and this at least gives us a chance to talk with and build relationship with the adults. Getting involved at the planning stages can also be helpful. We might offer to take minutes, and to help with tasks like sending out emails or creating flyers - and here I mean really help, not instruct or do-for, as the goal is to be useful even while nurturing independence and new capacity.

Where there's already a strong relationship, there may be opportunity to help a chairperson run a more successful meeting, or draft letters of solicitation or invitation. (Personally, I think this is pretty dull stuff, but my colleagues enjoy it, and I can only imagine how facilitators of Workplace Essential Skills would jump this kind of informal learning opportunity.)


In any case, you can see why, as community literacy workers, we talk about each year's Christmas party strategy. We start talking among ourselves in September - remembering the previous year, looking at the skills within our own volunteer base, and trying to figure out the financial prospects. We talk about prioritizing our time and resources, and how best to respond if we get requests we can't meet. We explore options for finding money for books (soliciting book donations is an option, but a poor one given the likelihood of receiving didactic, age-inappropriate, or just generally unpopular books). We talk about a lot of things, thinking about the families and our resources, the venue and how we've been asked to help.


I don't know if anything in the Foundations in Family Literacy training or, say, somebody's Literacy Studies program speaks to this. Probably not, as it all happens outside the classroom, in public or neighbourhood spaces. Authentic Community Literacy work is probably too informal and unorganized to fit into the academy's notion of prescriptive education - one more example of the difference between literacy work and schooling.

But there should be a course on how to join a Christmas party. Comm Lit 204: Integrating Literacy Support Within Neighbourhood Events and Celebrations. Or, better, Comm Lit 205: Providing Non-judgemental Support of Informal Learning While a Guest at Community Events. Or, maybe just, Comm Lit 206: Strategies to Avoid Singing Silent Night in Front of Forty Bored Children and Their Parents.

I'm thinking you wouldn't even need to make 206 a requirement.

Bookwagon Morning

An early morning stroll around the newest (shorter) Bookwagon route, via Google Street View and Windows Movie Maker.

The constant lurching makes the video nearly unwatchable, it's about two minutes too long, and I mixed the voices of children and adults too low into the music - a 1927 78" recording of a Chicago jazz quartet.

Still, it was an interesting experiment.

By the way, the inspiration came from a Techcrunch post, "The Best Of Google Demo Slam" and this entirely cool one minute video:

Bookwagons after dark II

We've picked up two new families since we started evenings.

We lost more than that, though I think only three or four were lost because of the time change. Bookwagon just gets more difficult during the winter. There is less street-borrowing. There are fewer chance encounters.

Though, I must say, we were completely encounterable last evening.