On May 28, 2017, the Festival of Literacies organized a supper meeting to initiate a dialogue between practitioners and researchers who are interested in adult literacy. Nine participants came to Scadding Court Community Centre at Bathurst and Dundas to talk about adult literacy while having a pizza dinner. Thanks to the funding support from the Centre for Learning, Social Economy and Work (CLSEW) at the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, we were able to offer the event to all participants free-of-charge.
The following are some key points that were raised and discussed and also some research ideas to bring forward to the next Festival of Literacies event in the fall:
1. Increasing the visibility of literacy
2. Research for policy change and advocacy
3. Thoughts on the Ontario LBS evaluation report
The following are some key points that were raised and discussed and also some research ideas to bring forward to the next Festival of Literacies event in the fall:
1. Increasing the visibility of literacy
- Literacy remains somewhat invisible to those working in community and social services. This is true even when literacy is one of the programs within the same organization.
- Similarly, violence and its impact are also invisible.
- Literacy is sometimes not even acknowledged or named by learners.
- Learners coming to literacy programs have the notion or expectation that literacy would transform their lives.
- Literacy programs are sometimes the starting place for learners to look for something new in their lives. For example, a woman may come to a literacy program while she is in the process of moving out of a shelter, feeling better about herself and getting a job.
- Statistics may be a way to tell a story, even if we might need to talk in terms of return on investment for adult literacy programs (like the LBS Evaluation Report). We need to be able to make our case for support and connect literacy to the broader social issues.
2. Research for policy change and advocacy
- On the policy level, the idea of literacy being a social justice issue has gone out of fashion.
- There may be a need for looking at diversification of funding options. Core funding from the Province (through Employment Ontario) has eroded over the years.
- Literacy has a history of being moved from department to department and from ministry to ministry. Perhaps there could be another “home” for literacy funding.
- Literacy policies need to have a human side and to have a quality of life. Literacy is more than about employment. We should be able to show the human effects of attending literacy programs. We should capture some sense of community empowerment. The sense of belonging in society and the reduction of feeling marginalized should have value and should be taken into account.
- Literacy has been coopted into different meanings over the years, especially when it is tagged with terms like financial and digital, etc.
- Policies should recognize the cycles of literacy learners who may come back to the programs over time, not because they fail at learning or the programs fail the learners. It is demonstration of the value of the programs to learners, for example, for providing a safe place to learn.
- We talked about how research could help find a way to enhance the legitimacy and the sense of value of literacy programs to make it harder to defund the programs in the future.
3. Thoughts on the Ontario LBS evaluation report
- The report was released into public domain in April 2017 (including the full report and the executive summary). It contains many interesting findings and leads to many questions. Some of these have been highlighted by Christine Pinsent-Johnson in her blog.
- One of the next steps, according to the letters attached to the release of the report, is “to engage with key stakeholders to help us prioritize the next phase of activity” (Assistant Deputy Minister’s Letter to the EO Network, dated April 12, 2017). We talked about how the field could use help to prepare for the “engagement” to come.