Something for all of us

As promised, here is the Reading List from Maria Moriarty.

"Education either functions as an instrument to...bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." ~Paulo Freire

Some of these are linked and some are available at the library or for purchase. 

Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire (1970; 2007)
(Pedagogy of the Oppressed – what it is and why it’s still relevant
www.practicingfreedom.org/pedagogy-of-the-oppressed-what-is-it-and-why-its-still-relevant/
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Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community
Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 2012 2nd Linguistics Classics ed. London: Routledge
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Powerful Literacies
Jim Crowther, Mary Hamilton, Lyn Tett NIACE, 2000
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More Powerful Literacies
Tett, L. (ed.), Hamilton, M. (ed.) & Crowther, J. (ed.) 2012 Leicester: NIACE
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Challenging Representations: Constructing the Adult Literacy Learner Over 30 Years of Policy and Practice in the United Kingdom
Mary Hamilton and Kathy Pitt
(Reading Research Quarterly Volume 46, Issue 4, pages 350–373, October/November/ December 2011)
eprints.lancs.ac.uk/54011/1/Hamilton_and_Pitt_RRQ_2011.pdf ___________________________________________________________

Situated Literacies: Theorising Reading and Writing in Context (2005)
by David Barton (Editor), Mary Hamilton (Editor), Roz Ivanic (Editor)
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The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa (1996)
Edited by Mastin Prinsloo and Mignonne Breier
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The New Literacy Studies: a point of contact between literacy research and literacy work
Guy Ewing
literacies.ca/literacies/1-2003/analysis/2/1.htm

 





Tensions Between Policy, Practice and Theory: International Perspectives on Adult Literacy
CASAE 2010 Conference Proceedings
casae-aceea.ca/~casae/sites/casae/archives/cnf2010/OnlineProceedings-2010/Individual-Papers/Gardner%20Hamilton%20Pinsent-Johnson.pdf
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Publications by Mary Hamilton
www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/mary-hamilton(97ff2128-fed7-4c53-858f-1e7066ab82e2)/publications.html
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Publications by David Barton
www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about-us/people/david-barton
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Publications by Tannis Atkinson
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tannis_Atkinson/publications
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The Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning (Portland State University)
Stephen Reder
www.lsal.pdx.edu/reports.html
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Adult learning and Literacy in Canada (2001)
Linda Shohet
www.ncsall.net/index.html@id=558.html
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here is an older reading list from Maria - www.greedymouse.ca/enquirer/summerread05.htm

and here is a little list I (Tracey) started up a while ago - www.greedymouse.ca/papers.html 

#bringbackcopian - They did!

Copian is back!

It came back in a somewhat reduced state, but it is back.

And thank goodness for that. I finally heard back about my query to Jason Kenney's office on Friday but the letter was a quite disheartening I did not share it with you.

Dear Ms. Mollins:

On behalf of the Honourable Jason Kenney, Minister of Employment and Social Development and Minister for Multiculturalism, I am responding to your email of July 27, 2014, concerning funding for Copian and access to a doctoral thesis.

Until recently, a portion of the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills’ (OLES) annual budget was allocated for core funding that supported several literacy organizations. In order to enhance transparency, maximize the impact of available funding and level the playing field for stakeholders, OLES has shifted from core funding to project-based funding.

Please be assured that Employment and Social Development Canada remains committed to helping Canadians develop the literacy and essential skills they need to succeed at work and to contribute to a strong and competitive Canadian economy and prosperous society. OLES continues to accept proposals that support this objective. In 2014-2015, Employment and Social Development Canada has allocated approximately $27 million to support projects that lead to Canadians improving their literacy and essential skills to get and keep a job and be successful in the workplace.

In addition, please note that the paper you are seeking, Illiteracy and Poverty in Canada: Towards a Critical Perspective, is available from the University of Toronto Library.

Thank you for writing.

I'll just leave this here for now. I think all the readers of this blog will understand immediately how it demonstrates that the Minister is not interested in working with the not for profit sector on adult literacy education or creating a pan-Canadian literacy strategy that provides "all Canadians with the support and empowerment that so many of us take for granted" without me parsing every line. 

Jobs, jobs, jobs!

And readers of Brigid Hayes' blog will know that the Harper government has allowed allocated literacy funds to lapse year after year.
 
But for all of us who do not have access to the University of Toronto library, Illiteracy and Poverty in Canada: Towards a Critical Perspective is again available here.

Joy, joy, joy!

Copian still needs our help. Instead of buying a University of Toronto reader card, I donated a bit of dosh to Copian. The literacy community is not a good place to find extra funds these days - or ever :) - but if you have any rich friends, send them over here.

And just to cheer us up, I'll also leave this here. It starts on chapter 4, page 2 of Illiteracy and Poverty in Canada: Towards a Critical Perspective:

A Critical Perspective
As we have seen, both the liberal and conservative perspectives see deficiencies and shortcomings of the poor as a primary cause of poverty and unemployment. According to this "deficiency model", labour markets and the economy in Canada distribute success and failure more or less 'fairly' based on effort, abilities and qualifications. Therefore, the difficulties experienced by individuals in achieving adequate employment and income can in large measure be attributed to their personal shortcomings, which in the view of liberals mainly consist of lack of basic education, life skills and job skills ("human capital"), and in the view of orthodox conservatives consist of more fundamental deficiencies which cannot be easily or efficiently corrected, if at all.

In contrast, the critical perspective rejects the personal deficiency model. Its adherents share the view that the Canadian economy and its labour market are far from fair, and that in fact they constitute the primary source of poverty and unemployment. In effect, a new explanatory variable--i.e. the capitalist economic structure--is introduced into the discussion of illiteracy and poverty. For example, Canadian adult literacy specialist Anthony R. Berezowecki argues:

Much attention is given to the characteristics and deficiencies of the disadvantaged themselves .... Little or no consideration, on the other hand, seems to be given to what effect the operation of the existing Canadian socio-economic system has on the disadvantaged.... far greater attention must be paid to the hypothesis that the existence of such a large number of economically disadvantaged people in a rich country like Canada is the direct or indirect result of the present socio-economic system

Paul Belanger of the Institute Canadien d'Education des Adultes in Montreal suggests that the Canadian economy is based on what he terms a "structure of inequality". On one hand, there are adults with opportunities to pursue their academic and occupational goals. On the other hand there are those adults who inhabit a "socio-economic desert". For example, Berezowecki cites statistics which show that the national income share of the latter group actually shrank between 1965 and 1971. The top 20% of income earners increased their share of the total income 'pie' in Canada from 45.% to 48.5%, while the bottom 20% of income earners lost part of their already meagre share, dropping from 3.7% to 2.9%.

Reflection
Belanger recognizes that there is indeed a high correlation between illiteracy and poverty, but he questions the interpretation put forward by the liberal perspective, i.e. that it is a causal association:

A high proportion of illiterates was... revealed in many ... reports on poverty and social inequality.... It was felt that, if there was unemployment, it was because the workers lacked the necessary skills. Hard-core poverty was attributed ... to poor social integration and the absence of channels of communication with society as a whole. The answer was clear: massive literacy and occupational programs.... But are education and training the answer?

He argues that illiteracy does not cause inequality; rather, it reflects it, and to some degree helps to reinforce it. He says, "cultural handicaps reflect, rather than produce, structures of inequality," and "...illiteracy is not a causal factor, but rather, a symptom of a more deep-seated problem: that of maintaining the structures of inequality.

 Plus ça change...

Language Wars

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."  

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." 

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

quoted from here.

If you live in Canada you probably have heard about the semantic spat brewing between Oxfam Canada and The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).

The Canada Revenue Agency has told a well-known charity that it can no longer try to prevent poverty around the world if it wants to keep its charitable status for tax purposes. It can only alleviate poverty — because preventing poverty might benefit people who are not already poor. ...

Agency officials informed Oxfam that "preventing poverty" was not an acceptable goal.
"Relieving poverty is charitable, but preventing it is not," the group was warned.
"Preventing poverty could mean providing for a class of beneficiaries that are not poor."

'Preventing poverty' not a valid goal for tax purposes,
CRA tells Oxfam Canada
from CBC News

Curious? You bet. So curious that all over the internet people have been deriding the notion preventing something is not a charitable activity.

Some people have been proposing that the CRA mastery over language is actually a sign of the agency's deference to its political masters.

Some have asked about the CRA definition of poverty.

"What about diseases?" others point out. Preventing malaria benefits people who are rich as well as people who are poor. It may benefit people who have less access to good medical care more than those who do but it does have benefits for everyone regardless of income level.

All charitable enterprises have ripple effects.

When I went to work in a community-based literacy program that uses volunteer tutors, I was surprised at how much more time I spent with tutors than I did with learners. All tutors get 15-hours of training before they start to tutor and then one-to-one support from program staff as they hone their tutoring skills.

I was also surprised at how many letters of reference I was asked to write for tutors. Often they used these letters to get into school - especially teacher's college - or to get better work. No literacy learner ever asked for a letter of reference for school or employment purposes. The fact that literacy volunteers can use their experience on resumes and applications while literacy learners often feel they must hide their participation in a program made me question who the real beneficiaries of community-based literacy are.

People in the not-for-profit sector often point to the ripple effects to encourage funding from public and private sources.

In our field, people can be heard to say, "When people learn to read and write better, they are more productive at work which benefits employers; make fewer mistakes and cost employers and governments less in health claims; access social services, unemployment benefits and health care systems less and cost governments and tax payers less." They do this because they think that arguing for how literacy education benefits people living in poverty and people who are marginalized in the labour market alone will fall on deaf ears. People in our field have been encouraged to highlight a return on investment when approaching potential funders. Of course this has led to a situation where funders demand to see evidence of that return over how the work is benefiting the people accessing the educational resources - but that is another story.

UPDATE: I think this blog post should end here. A careful reader on Twitter pointed out that I may be confusing registered charities with non-profit organizations and sent me a link to the CRA page that explains the difference. 

All three think tanks discussed below CAN provide tax receipts for donations and that is why I wrote about them as registered charities. The page linked above tells us that registered charities can have different designations: "a charitable organization, a public foundation, or a private foundation." 

It also explains that 

Examples under the four categories of charity generally include:

• relief of poverty (food banks, soup kitchens, low-cost housing units)
• advancement of education (colleges, universities, research institutes)
• advancement of religion (places of worship, missionary organizations)
• purposes beneficial to the community (animal shelters, libraries, volunteer fire departments) 

It seems that in comparing the think tanks and Oxfam, I have been comparing oranges and apples - or at least oranges and tangerines. Oxfam may fall into the relief of poverty category and the think tanks into the advancement of education category and members of each group probably have to meet different criteria to maintain charitable status under CRA rules. Or some other aspect of the law that I do not understand.

Thanks to @RyanDeschamps - the careful reader who took the time to help me learn more about this. If anyone knows more, please add a comment below or send me a tweet.

What about other organizations with charitable status? How do they benefit people currently living in poverty as defined by CRA? Let us look at a some oft cited think tanks.

What about the C.D. Howe Institute? This is the organization that prepared the report on the Temporary Foreign Workers program we talked about yesterday? Their mission statement reads:

The C. D. Howe Institute is an independent not-for-profit research institute whose mission is to raise living standards by fostering economically sound public policies. 

Curious. No mention of how this impacts the living standards of people currently living in poverty only.

They go on to say:

It is Canada’s trusted source of essential policy intelligence, distinguished by research that is nonpartisan, evidence-based and subject to definitive expert review. It is considered by many to be Canada’s most influential think tank.

Okay then.

What have they done? Here is what they say on the Policy Impact page:

Institute policy intelligence has laid the intellectual ground for such fundamental achievements as:

• The development of continental free trade;
• Ending the unsustainable deficits of the 1970s and 1980s;
• The development of rigorous inflation targets and tactically effective monetary policy;
• The reform of the Canadian and Quebec pension plans;
• Lower and more competitive tax rates; and
• The development of a key new saving vehicle, the Tax Free Saving Account.

I'll leave it to you to evaluate who might be the beneficiaries of these fundamental achievements.

What about The Fraser Institute?

The Fraser Institute measures and studies the impact of markets and government interventions on the welfare of individuals. ... We are involved in research on a wide range of topics, such as the quality of education, health care, and the overall tax burden of Canadians.

On their donation page they state:

Thank you for helping The Fraser Institute in the pursuit of free choice, competitive markets and less government regulation.

Again, I'll leave it to you to evaluate who might be the beneficiaries of these pursuits but I would posit that it is not only people currently living in poverty.

What about equal time for the lefties:

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is an independent, non-partisan research institute concerned with issues of social, economic and environmental justice. Founded in 1980, the CCPA is one of Canada’s leading progressive voices in public policy debates.

And even curiouser...

The Broadbent Institute is an independent, non-partisan organization championing progressive change through the promotion of democracy, equality, and sustainability and the training of a new generation of leaders. We are proud of Canada’s tradition as a diverse, fair, just, and inclusive society. 

But due to their political work, they are not a registered charity - no tax rebate here.

I think we can all can forgive Canadians if they are confused and stunned by the CRA definition of poverty, prevention and charity.

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Papers that matter:

ICYMI, you may find the 1977 paper by Sidney Pratt, Naldi Nomez and Patricio Urzua, Literacy: Charitable Enterprise or Political Right still quite relevant.

This paper was available at Copian.

Write to Jason Kenney to ask for it :)

I have posted it here in the meantime.