Being Disruptive

I just got this message from a literacy colleague and thought I would share it with you.

"The Not Business as Usual documentary has launched."

[Not Business As Usual is a provocative look at capitalism as envisioned by Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, the most influential economist of the late 20th century. The film explores why he only measured success by one metric: Greed. And how that narrow view has resulted in environmental destruction, human rights abuses and ironically enough, unsustainable business practices. This feature length documentary tracks the changing landscape of business with the rising tide of conscious capitalism and features the inspiring stories of several subversive entrepreneurs from Vancouver who are redefining what it means to be successful.]

"You can access it here [or embedded below].  It is 60 minutes long.  Food for our souls!

Terms that stick with me after a first viewing are:

• conscious capitalism
• unreasonable entrepreneurs (which I think we should re-frame as unreasonable educators)
• be disruptive
• you can live by your values and meet success

I would like to propose that we watch this documentary together and perhaps extract from it strategies that could work for us in terms of the social change that we want to effect.

We may want to consider hosting a literacy wide screening of this documentary to generate wider discussion and perhaps tap into the disempowerment feelings that educators are experiencing as a result of literacy delivery being subsumed by unbridled capitalistic pressures and expectations."

An Icy Alexandria

One of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's most famous quotes is "You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it."

There is some debate as to whether he actually said it but Noah Richler cited the quote in his book What We Talk About When We Talk About War and an excerpt from that book, including the quote, was published in the National Post.

Whether he said it or not, or whether he meant all the meanings that have been ascribed to the quote, the idea that Stephen Harper would say and think such a thing resonates with many Canadians.

This week it is resonating, once again, with people who do research.

In the wake of the announcement that seven Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries will closed this year, the  CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)'s Fifth Estate published a list of the federal programs and research facilities have been shut down or had their funding reduced by the federal government.

It is a long list. People are comparing this to the burning of the Library of Alexandria but a more Canadian metaphor might be the one Tannis Atkinson used in 2009 to describe the prospects for research that could support literacy practice and programs in her last editorial at Literacies: Nothing but ice, ice, ice as far as we can imagine.
 
What about the Canadian literacy library and research list? What would it look like?

Well, it might start with the National Literacy Secretariat - NLS (2007) and include, among others,

• Phase 2 of the Framework for Adult Literacy Research in Canada project to develop an infrastructure for research in practice that would bring together all the organizations, databases and networks currently supporting research initiatives and create a cohesive, sustainable pan-Canadian research network (2007);
• the AlphaPlus library which housed a pan-Canadian collection of adult education resources many of which are not available digitally (2007);
• the Festival of Literacies which was a pan-Canadian research in practice knowledge centre based at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (2008); and
• the Literacies research journal (2009) where much of the research conducted with NLS funding was reported and discussed;
• the database of Canadian literacy research, The Directory of Canadian Adult Literacy Research (2009); and
  
• RiPAL-BC (Research in Practice in Adult Literacy), a grass roots network of individuals and organizations committed to research in practice in adult literacy in British Columbia (2009).

The former National Adult Literacy Database (now Copian), another essential part of the pan-Canadian research in practice infrastructure, saw it's federal funding cut 25% in 2012 and another 15% in 2013 (PDF).

The federal government still participates in research about literacy statistics through Statistics Canada and occasionally the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills invites "eligible organizations" to

"submit proposals to indicate their interest in being part of a Pan-Canadian Network (PCN) focused on improving the labour market outcomes of Canadians through strengthened LES."

which represents quite a shift from the NLS' focus on these 4 types of research

• Understanding the literacy skills of the Canadian population and assessing the implications of these findings (including statistical and demographic research).
• Investigating new ways to assist various groups of Canadians in developing literacy skills (policy research).
• Assessing the nature and effectiveness of efforts to address literacy needs (program-related research).
• Understanding better how people develop literacy skills (pedagogical research).

and on

Research support provided by the NLS should help to develop Canada's capacity for literacy research. This means funding for research projects, for infrastructure, and for the training of future researchers.

Enhancing Literacy Research in Canada
A Framework for the Research Support Activities
of the National Literacy Secretariat, (PDF)
Human Resources Development Canada,
February 1998

The closing of libraries and the defunding of research diminishes us all. Not only do we lose our capacity to recognize ourselves but we lose our ability to wave across the room at international colleagues. 

Occasionally literacy researchers were funded by the NLS to attend international conferences to share research questions and findings and to learn about what was being asked and explored elsewhere. Now if we were to show up, we would show up with a much narrower offering. 

Canada's strength was not only that is supported 4 areas of research that captured a wide range of interests and needs but that it supported both academic and practice-based researchers as well as collaborations between the two groups.

Given the real possibility of dialogue between literacy workers and New Literacy researchers, literacy workers will be able to use the New Literacy research to clarify and further develop models for literacy work. New Literacy researchers will, in turn, benefit from accounts of literacy learning by literacy workers and from ideas by literacy workers about how the New Literacy Studies might apply to their work.

The New Literacy Studies:
a point of contact between literacy research and literacy work
by Guy Ewing, Literacies #1, spring 2003 

A new kind of research is emerging which is close to the ground and speaks directly to practitioners. It is worth reading, critiquing and applying to our practice. As well as reading, we need to write about our work. We can better support our learners and ourselves if we use our own literacy abilities to shape this work that we love.

Practitioners Making Time to Read and Write
by Sheila Stewart, Literacies #1, spring 2003

The pages of Literacies reflect the efforts, from 2003 to 2009, of the research-in-practice community to expand the range of practitioners who contributed to research and to discussions about research and the last issue reflects, well, the end of all that.

What was lost was not simply the NLS but the capacity of the federal government to play a catalyst role in creating a more literate society through developing and nurturing partnerships.

From community development
and partnerships to accountability:
the case of the National Literacy Secretariat (PDF)
by Brigid Hayes, Literacies #10, spring 2009

Right now the climate is not particularly conducive to genuine education. We are no longer allowed to ask literacy for what, literacy for whom. We are no longer allowed to say that literacy is a right rather than a charitable enterprise. Instead, in many parts of the country (those where basic literacy programs still exist), we are told we should be saying essential skills for all, so that the GDP will grow. So these are frozen wastelands, as far as genuine education is concerned. … As far as research that could support practice and programs? Nothing but ice, ice, ice as far as we can imagine.

What is to be done? (PDF)

by Tannis Atkinson, Literacies #10, spring 2009

Okay Literacy people, what will spring 2014 bring?

So why do I hold the image of spring in my mind? When I think of ice, I remember that it breaks by cracking. The huge dissonance between what is happening in programs and the ridiculous rhetoric that seeks to define literacy are creating cracks. Cracks can only lead to change. So let us consider that dissonance as rich in potential to foment change. Let us keep naming what doesn’t make sense. Let us keep clear about what we know to be true and real, and what is just nonsense. And let’s keep speaking out.

What is to be done? (PDF)

by Tannis Atkinson, Literacies #10, spring 2009

Towards a Tipping Point

Here is an old video Tracy Westell made of her discussion with Nancy Jackson about the slow movement and how some of those principles relate to educational approaches. We originally published the video over here on the original Literacy Enquirers site.



They talk about how to convince government that a slow approach is effective.

Nancy says that popular consciousness changes before policy regimes and we will have to wait for policy makers to catch up to what people in the field are thinking. She says that we will have to live with the current situation until policy makers understand that the testing and measurement regimes currently in place are not working and start to look critically at the approaches they are prescribing.

Tracy posits that we need a critical mass of opinion in order for policy makers to recognize what educators know.

In this recent article at Harvard Magazine, one such educator describes her approach and provides one more step towards the tipping point.

During the past few years, I have begun to feel that I need to take a more active role in shaping the temporal experiences of the students in my courses; that in the process of designing a syllabus I need not only to select readings, choose topics, and organize the sequence of material, but also to engineer, in a conscientious and explicit way, the pace and tempo of the learning experiences. When will students work quickly? When slowly? When will they be expected to offer spontaneous responses, and when will they be expected to spend time in deeper contemplation?

...

Now, the people in this room who are experienced in educational-feedback theory are probably horrified. Indeed, in the terms of educational science, this agonizingly slow response pace would be identified, I believe, as “non-formative” feedback. And yet I would like to suggest that slowness is not necessarily “non-formative”—in fact, in the case of this painting, it is thoroughly formative. Let me be clear that I am not arguing that we should wait 11 months to return papers. I’m talking in a more general way about the need to understand that delays are not just inert obstacles preventing productivity. Delays can themselves be productive.

...

I want to conclude with some thoughts about teaching patience as a strategy. The deliberate engagement of delay should itself be a primary skill that we teach to students. It’s a very old idea that patience leads to skill, of course—but it seems urgent now that we go further than this and think about patience itself as the skill to be learned. Granted—patience might be a pretty hard sell as an educational deliverable. It sounds nostalgic and gratuitously traditional. But I would argue that as the shape of time has changed around it, the meaning of patience today has reversed itself from its original connotations. The virtue of patience was originally associated with forbearance or sufferance. It was about conforming oneself to the need to wait for things. But now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state. Where patience once indicated a lack of control, now it is a form of control over the tempo of contemporary life that otherwise controls us. Patience no longer connotes disempowerment—perhaps now patience is power.

If “patience” sounds too old-fashioned, let’s call it “time management” or “temporal intelligence” or “massive temporal distortion engineering.” Either way, an awareness of time and patience as a productive medium of learning is something that I feel is urgent to model for—and expect of—my students. 

The Power of Patience
Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention

by Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard Magazine, November-December 2013

Shocked

As you may know, we have been following the controversy over the Temporary Foreign Worker program. Here is the latest update from PressProgress:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has delivered a scathing critique of the controversial Temporary Foreign Worker program, saying the government has been "assisting these companies to work around the marketplace in a way that disadvantaged Canadian workers only for the sake of the bottom line profit."

In an audio recording leaked Wednesday to a Vancouver newspaper of a recent roundtable discussion with local ethnic media, Harper's blunt analysis of the troubled program raises the question: will the Conservative government follow through to crack down on employers that abuse the TFW program — after facilitating its rapid expansion since 2006.

Most recently, new regulations governing the TFW program dropped a provision from an earlier draft that explicitly banned employers from accessing the TFW program if they were convicted of human trafficking, or of assaulting or uttering threats to an employee.
Meanwhile, Employment Minister Jason Kenney remains a defender of the program to tackle what he says is a skills shortage in Canada.

Listen to Harper for yourself. Is Harper blaming the bureaucracy and the previous government for the whole debacle?

Read some extracts over at PressProgress.

My favourite one is

There must be plans for companies to transition to a permanent workforce. What I say is if you really need temporary workers permanently, then that means we need permanent workers who become Canadian. And they have a right to stay here, and they have a right to bargain with their employer, and they have a right to be treated fairly, and they have a right not to be sent back to where they came from the first time they don't like something.

Not bad for the leader of a notoriously anti-union government.