SUMMARY | April 29, 2016
In the Spring of 2016, the Festival of Literacies was revived with a group of students and alumni of OISE. The one-day event took place on Friday, April 29, 2016. Almost 50 participants came to the Peace Lounge at OISE. They included practitioners from the Greater Toronto Area as well as those who came from as far as Sudbury. Program staff as well as volunteers were present at the event sharing their stories and experiences working in the field. Students from OISE and from the rest of the University were also in attendance. Thanks to the funding support from the LHAE DSA at OISE (Leadership, Higher and Adult Education Departmental Student Association), we were able to offer the event to all participants free-of-charge including breakfast, lunch and refreshments.
At the event in April, the discussions centred around two questions:
1. Learning:
At the event in April, the discussions centred around two questions:
- What is important for learners?
- What is important for practitioners?
1. Learning:
- In response to ‘what is important to learners’ some asked if it should be learners answering this question more than practitioners.
- Learners responses, input and questions about what is important to them regarding literacy learning. Look for this voice.
- Telling you are in the right place: comfort, valued
- Respect – looking at person as holistic
- Diversity and mental health, self-care
- Join, make a community of learning, honour relationships in the classroom and learner’s community relationships and networks
- Celebrate achievements and progress invite family and friends (resonated among the group)
- Program enrollment over longer time and can step in and step out
- Prioritize learning driven language over oppressive deficiency language
- Flexible learning curriculum that builds trust, allows for mistakes, uses restorative justice and adult learning principles, and supports independence
- Learning through problem solving and self-advocacy
- Practitioners and learners have knowledge about learning
- Value the immeasurable through qualitative reporting on what
- Narrative as indicator of progress has equal weight as quantitative measures
- See “I’ve Opened Up” resource
- Good work happening in spite of demanding and reporting requirements
- Keep teaching and accountability balanced to allow for the creative process and practices of teaching and learning
- Professional peer-driven professional development: who else is facilitating a creative writing group? Let’s get together to share ideas/resources.
- Support voice of practitioners
- Connect with other professionals who navigate anti-oppressive perspectives – Ontario non-profit network a resources for practitioners
- Precarious working and learning conditions
- Imposing outcomes measurement accountability system – takes up a huge amount of time to make this work between learner and program and required reports
- Imposing requirements of personal information from learners - What is informed consent?
- Contrasting views and language – neoliberal results based policies friction with learner-driven holistic adult literacy teaching and learning models of practice
- Loss of funding, less research and development projects, less PD, less presences of learner and practitioner voice
- Some practitioners leave field – loss of professional knowledge and expertise
- Find ways to make the OALCF work for your program – try collaborating with funder
- Power of language: need language exchange to see different frames for doing literacy work and how they shape language and what we see
- What data, evidence and knowledge is prioritized for reporting