Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts

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/
___________________________________________________________

Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community
Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. 2012 2nd Linguistics Classics ed. London: Routledge
___________________________________________________________

Powerful Literacies
Jim Crowther, Mary Hamilton, Lyn Tett NIACE, 2000
___________________________________________________________
 
More Powerful Literacies
Tett, L. (ed.), Hamilton, M. (ed.) & Crowther, J. (ed.) 2012 Leicester: NIACE
___________________________________________________________

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)
___________________________________________________________

The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa (1996)
Edited by Mastin Prinsloo and Mignonne Breier
___________________________________________________________

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
___________________________________________________________

Publications by Mary Hamilton
www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/mary-hamilton(97ff2128-fed7-4c53-858f-1e7066ab82e2)/publications.html
___________________________________________________________

Publications by David Barton
www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about-us/people/david-barton
___________________________________________________________

Publications by Tannis Atkinson
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tannis_Atkinson/publications
__________________________________________________________

The Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning (Portland State University)
Stephen Reder
www.lsal.pdx.edu/reports.html
___________________________________________________________

Adult learning and Literacy in Canada (2001)
Linda Shohet
www.ncsall.net/index.html@id=558.html
___________________________________________________________
 
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 
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The Half Full Glass

It looks as though there is something optimistic in the air these days.

I had lunch with some literacy friends and in the midst of talking about the number of literacy program closures and lapsed funds we suddenly started to see opportunities again. We started to talk about how the election might bring us new federal allies and that we need to dust off the work we were doing to build a pan-Canadian network for literacy workers and learners and for literacy research in practice (see below).

The Canadian Union for Public Employees (CUPE) launched their new book Transformations: Literacy and the Labour Movement and the website Learning in Solidarity (learninginsolidarity.ca) this week. The book looks at the past, present and future of how the labour movement and the literacy movement work together. I, sadly, could not attend the launch but I have heard that the conversation quickly turned to the future and how labour can speak to power (policymakers) about the importance of literacy work in building equity in all facets of life, not just as a tool to ensure labour market participation.

Some people have written a Declaration that "calls on parties to take a stand on seven proposals and to reveal their plans for putting adult education back on track in Canada." I don't know if they were thinking about the Declaration of Persepolis but I like to think that they were because that was written at another optimistic time.

And Suzanne Smythe, one of the Declaration signatories, has written a policy note for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives about what happened when the federal government dismantled any semblance of a pan-Canadian literacy network and shifted funding into private hands through the Canada Jobs Grant.


It is looking good out there. Our people are getting their mojo back. The ice is cracking. We are hoping for an early spring. We are getting ready to seize the moment.

Here are some of those earlier works on pan-Canadian networks:

Building a Pan-Canadian Strategy on Literacy and Essential Skills: Recommendations for the Federal Government (2002)

A Framework to Encourage and Support Practitioner Involvement in Adult Literacy Research in Practice in Canada (1999)

Developing a Framework for Research in Practice in Adult Literacy (2005)

Focused on Practice: A Framework for Adult Literacy Research in Canada (2006)
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Conviviality in the Face of Zombies




from here


The Toronto Star has published an article about Canada's imaginary skills gap in May and it just came to my attention today - finger on the pulse as usual :)

The article is by Sachin Maharaj who is a graduate student at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education).
If we really had a large skills gap, wages in STEM fields would be very high and unemployment would be very low relative to non-STEM fields. But there is almost no evidence of this. In fact, the median salary of science and technology grads is actually lower than those in non-STEM fields, and the unemployment rate in STEM and non-STEM fields is virtually identical. The report therefore concludes that contrary to popular opinion, “Canada appears to have a well-functioning labour market, where individuals are choosing fields of study and occupations based on factors such as market signals and personal preferences.”

That so many people continue to believe in existence of a skills gap, despite the facts, is why Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has dubbed it a “Zombie Idea,” an idea that should be killed by evidence, but refuses to die. Krugman pins the blame on the fact that influential people and the media have kept repeating the skills gap narrative for years now, to the point where it has just become accepted wisdom. He thinks part of the reason for this is to divert attention away from widening income equality and so that workers can be blamed for their own struggles. But while I doubt that is a major motivation among government and business leaders here in Canada, that does not make the skills gap story any more real. So perhaps it is time to put this myth to rest and focus our efforts on more pressing issues.

We talked about this Zombie idea in our post about the Temporary Foreign Worker program and you can find links to more articles about the skills gap myth there.

The trope of blaming workers for their own struggles - especially when it comes to people who are viewed as needing to upgrade their literacy skills - is not new of course.
... the influential Jump Start report of 1989 stated, "There is no way in which the United States can remain competitive in a global economy, maintain its standard of living, and shoulder the burden of the retirement of the baby boom generation unless we mount a forceful national effort to help adults upgrade their basic skills in the very near future (p.iii)."

by Tom Sticht

The IALS discourse also acts as an important disciplinary mechanism of neoliberalism. Its framing of literacy is used to convince people who live in the Global North that economic competition is inevitable, that each of us is responsible for our nation’s GDP, and that some people in our midst—usually racialized people who are not fluent in an official language—are a drain on our individual and national prosperity. It is used to convince ‘good citizens’ to fear unproductive people who are hampering the economy, and to blame themselves rather than the structures of capitalism if they become ‘unproductive’ or unemployed. Finally, literacy as it has been constructed in IALS has been used as justification for undermining the social safety net: one of the most recent reports based on IALS data (Coulombe et al, 2005) concludes that investments in ‘human capital accumulation’ are more beneficial to national economies than policies that support social infrastructure.


As Tannis says:
In Canada, government departments which support adult literacy insist that programs focus on a narrow range of literacy outcomes tied to a framework of Essential Skills that articulates key competencies identified by the OECD through PISA and IALS. Increasing numbers of practitioners experience a profound disconnect between the real needs of learners in their classes and the demands placed on them by state funders. In addition, they now feel pressured to spend more time on paperwork than on working with the adults who the programs exist to teach.

Practitioners often respond to this predicament with dismay, puzzlement and frustration. They bemoan the fact that policies and funding seem driven by accountability rather than attempts to meet the needs of people who are marginalized because they lack basic education. Practitioners feel that the government policies are irrational, and most do not believe it is possible to effect change. While some may be aware that these pressures result from the past decade of neoliberal economic policies, the field as a whole has been unable to respond effectively to the poisoned environment in which they now work. 
I met up with some literacy workers at a work event the other day and we were talking about how we might have to start again - unfunded in a basement library as they did in Parkdale, Toronto many years ago.

Later that week, I went to a poetry reading where one of the founders of that program was reading and another was attending. We talked about the program briefly and Arthur Bull started talking about the Learning Circles Project and how what we learned there informs his work now. The other founder, Michelle Kuhlmann, was a researcher on the Powerful Listening Project and her work there and in a community based literacy program keeps our field connected to the needs of learners.

We cannot return to the old days and we cannot shake the zombie ideas. So what can we do? How can we keep community development and asset-building approaches alive in our work? Here are some ideas from those founders:

We called our time together deep listening. We needed this experience and we were very open about how we entered this time with each other, looking for what would emerge each time, and cherishing the time together. This is a very personal reaction to a research project, but I was also aware how it related to the field we work in everyday. There was this lingering feeling about how unusual our research situation was compared to the experience of keeping up with our daily life in literacy. When feelings of discomfort and difference arise in our work we are on the spot and have to choose the best response for the moment but can be left with disturbing feeling and questions that are not resolved even for years. These feelings and experiences surfaced and lived in our storytelling. I don’t mean that we “used” the stories as much as we experienced them together.
by Michelle Kuhlmann, Powerful Listening

there is a hard-to-define element that seems to be a prerequisite for any successful learning circle. This is best described by the word conviviality; that is, the enjoyment people take in each other’s company. Again and again, when asked why they come to a group, people expressed the idea that they like spending time with the other people in the group. All of the above elements - safe place, peer learning, self-determination, group thinking - contribute to this atmosphere of enjoyment. It is also something that has a life of its own, that the group itself can create and nurture. Of course this is not something that can be made into a rule, or produced on demand. Nevertheless, it should never be far from our minds as we think about learning circles.

How are these elements of the group dynamic created?  There are undoubtedly many factors, but the overriding one seems to be the role of the facilitator. Clearly this is different from the traditional role of the teacher or instructor. It involves a number of different facets. ...

Another feature of facilitation that we noticed in a number of the cases is that the facilitator was thoughtful about being, and acting like, an equal with the participants in the group. The leadership role of the facilitator seemed to be to all about leading the group to where they take over.

At the same time, we observed that the facilitator’s role in fact shifts within the group, and sometimes even during a single session. The facilitator is almost always the person who has the responsibility for the overall life of the group. As such, he or she is always paying attention to what is happening in the group, and adjusting his or her role accordingly. This role might shift from time-keeper, to storyteller, to peacemaker to teacher, to traditional facilitator. This attention and adaptability seems to be at the heart of what makes a good facilitator in a learning circle.



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Balancing Acts


We know that our conditions of life are deteriorating. ... Interesting jobs are sliced up, through digital Taylorism, into portions of meaningless drudgery. The natural world, whose wonders enhance our lives, and upon which our survival depends, is being rubbed out with horrible speed. Those to whom we look for guardianship, in government and among the economic elite, do not arrest this decline, they accelerate it.

The political system that delivers these outcomes is sustained by aspiration: the faith that if we try hard enough we could join the elite, even as living standards decline and social immobility becomes set almost in stone. But to what are we aspiring? A life that is better than our own, or worse?

For some reason this article made me think of all I have been reading about the precariat lately.
Guy Standing is a scholar at Soas, who was once a high-up at the UN's International Labour Organisation. In his vocabulary, to be at the sharp end of modern capitalism is to be a member of the precariat: a split-off from the shrinking working class, and one which is growing in size, though not yet in influence.
His 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class set out its story: the term was originally used in 1980s France to denote temporary and seasonal workers, but now, with labour insecurity a feature of most western economies, it is the perfect word for a great mass of people, "flanked by an army of unemployed and a detached group of socially ill misfits", who enjoy almost none of the benefits won by organised labour during the 20th century. In Standing's view, they increasingly resemble denizens rather than citizens: people with restricted rights, largely living towards the bottom of a "tiered membership" model of society, in which a plutocratic elite takes the single biggest share, while other classes – the salariat, free-ranging "proficians", and what remains of the old working class – divide up most of what remains.
A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens – review
by John Harris, The Guardian, April 9, 2010

This is not a new phenomenon of course
What these harsh economic conditions have produced in Canada, as they have in other capitalist nations like the U.S., is a split in the working class between a relatively better-paid, more secure stratum (but one that is not immune to the effects of recession, as the present period is demonstrating), and a large "surplus population" of unemployed and underemployed workers, forced either to fill low-wage Jobs or to remain idle, waiting to be called up during a period of exceptional economic expansion. ... While in the Marxist sense all productive workers face exploitation, members of the surplus population face an extra measure of it in that they receive a significantly smaller portion of the product of their labor than other workers-- often below the amount required for normal standards of subsistence. They are what has been termed "superexploited".

but we are all surplus labour now.

Here is Andrew Cash on the issue of the precariat in my neighbourhood:


In 2013 Cash put forward a private member's bill C-542, the Urban Workers Strategy Act, designed to grant urban workers greater access to social support mechanisms and basic labour standards. (Read the Rabble article by Ella Bedar - an intern! - about the Bill here.)

According to Cash, you are an urban worker if your source of income is vulnerable or precarious because you work without benefits, workplace pensions or job security in the following circumstances:
(a) as an employee on a short-term contractual basis, whether continuously or intermittently;
(b) as a self-employed individual;
(c) as an employee on a part-time basis; or
(d) as an intern.
The McMaster University study, It’s More than Poverty, was prepared by the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) research group, a joint university-community initiative.

The United Way follow up to the 2013 study, The Precarity Penalty, can be found here and an overview can be found here.
Lewchuk's study shows that nearly 44 per cent of working adults face some level of precarity, a fact that Statistics Canada labour force data doesn't always show. While roughly half of this group work in temporary or contract employment, the other half work jobs that might on the surface appear stable, but in reality contain many of the characteristics of precarious labour, such as irregular and inconsistent scheduling and a lack of any benefits beyond basic wages.
by Ella Bedar, Rabble, May 22, 2015
The longer-term trend points to more insecure employment, said Prof. Lewchuk. “Each time there’s a recovery, the level of security is a little bit lower than the previous boom. I think this is because the competitive pressures are greater – firms are looking to cut costs … technology has changed, and there’s an infrastructure where they can go to temp agencies, and get not just unskilled workers, but they can get CEOs now.”
by Tavia Grant, The Globe and Mail, May 21, 2015

This is not a Canadian phenomenon. In May of this year the International Labour Organization published The World Employment and Social Outlook: The changing nature of jobs.


What was once viewed as a passing crisis now seems to be the new normal, producing deep psychological unease within the workforce and growing inequality between those with stable incomes and those without.

Global financial officials are worried to the point they've again started using the term "hysteresis," borrowed from physics, to warn that long-established unemployment is becoming "structural" and therefore harder to correct, as the jobless lose skills and companies grow addicted to cheaper, temporary labour.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, often called the developed world's think tank, describes this ugly phenomenon as the rise of the precariat — a play on the working-class proletariat and meaning those trapped in precarious lives with neither material nor psychological welfare.

by Brian Stewart, CBC News, June 01, 2015

So what does this have to do with literacy work, literacy workers and adult education policy?

Many literacy workers and adult educators have been members of the precariat for as long as we can remember. A small group of us actually approached a public sector union in the late 1990s to see about how we could work together for "greater access to social support mechanisms and basic labour standards" but the union was not ready work with us. Maybe they will get ready now.

As we have mentioned a few times on this blog, on this contested ground that is adult education, the battle for a system that is accountable to learners has been lost. The primary "customers" for adult education and training are employers. Governments at all levels and in all jurisdictions try to design training that meets the needs of employers and programs are assessed by their ability to meet labour market outcomes instead of educational ones. However, the labour market outcomes expressed by these bureaucrats and policy makers - a permanent, stable, well-paying job - are not possible for most workers and are at odds with the needs of employers "addicted to cheaper, temporary labour."

And this is where we fit in.
As anyone who’s watched a TED talk, read a David Brooks column, or attended an Aspen Ideas Festival can tell you, there’s hardly a single issue currently vexing Americans that the 1 percent doesn’t think can be solved with more “education.” Urban poverty? Education! Stagnant wages? Education! Police brutality? Education! ... If you can think of a problem that might be at least mitigated by redistribution, you can bet that there’s some sage of the plutocracy out there insisting that we focus on education instead.

So how are we going to fulfill our mandate?
In response, the Westminster [British government] consensus insists that [the precariat] should be subject to regimes that are not just cruel, but dysfunctional. In other words, it doesn't actually matter if so-called welfare-to-work programmes actually help people, or just screw them up: the point is that they visibly punish them in pursuit of a political dividend. In that sense, the precariat is not only at the cutting edge of the economy, but at the receiving end of a postmodern politics that values the manipulation of appearances much more highly than reality. 
A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens – review
by John Harris, The Guardian, April 9, 2010

Are we going to continue to design "boutique" programs that profess to prepare workers to be "nimble" and "flexible" enough to meet the mercurial needs of capricious employers? Or will we be adherents of the critical perspective
while liberals see literacy education as a technical process of compensating for cognitive skill deficiencies among the poor (to permit them to better adjust to the needs of the economy), adherents of the critical perspective view such efforts both as ineffective - because they do not deal with the root cause of poverty - and as oppressive - because they better accommodate the poor to the structures which exploit them. For their part, they would make adult basic and literacy education a vehicle for the awakening of critical social consciousness among members of subordinate social classes and a means of support for collective efforts to radically transform the class system.

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Colouring inside the lines

After slashing funding to literacy organizations and chastising the field for not being prepared for the cuts and for way it has frittered away taxpayer dollars on "countless" research papers, the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills (OLES) has put out a Call for Concepts for Innovative Training models. As Brigid Hayes points out, it is the first call in two years.

In her most recent post Brigid documents how difficult it is to assess proposals for innovation when the field has very little information about what projects have been funded and the outcomes of those projects. OLES has not done a very good job of posting details and outcomes of the projects they fund.

In any case, as the first of the "innovative" training models involves replicating proven programs in a new place or for new people and the second is about integrating Literacy and Essential Skills (LES) into existing programs, it is only the third option that would allow for any innovation at all and as that model is tied to labour market outcomes rather than educational ones, it is a fairly boxed-in innovation.
Concept Papers must fall under one of the following Innovative Training Models:
  • Expansion of a proven LES model: this would include models that have been successfully applied within Canada or outside of Canada that could be replicated in a different region or with a different target audience and/or increased in scale;
  • Integration of LES into other programs: application of LES into an existing employment and/or training program; or
  • New LES model: development and testing of new approaches with the potential to improve labour market outcomes for Canadians.
Always with the labour market outcomes. Long gone is the idea that literacy is about culture, self-directed learning and community development.

I don't have much more to say. The main point of this post is to tell you to follow Brigid on this issue just in case you missed her blog.

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It was a hoax...


Parents need to stop raising their children on the principles that they must beat everyone in their class, that their school needs to rise up the league tables, or for their country to defeat every other nation on Earth in global education rankings.
We need to stop pushing our kids, by The Guardian

I read this earlier today and immediately thought about those of us in adult education and our battles against the reduction of student achievements to the human capital profit margin. Here are some excerpts from A Layperson's Guide to PIAAC by Brigid Hayes that explain how this process works in Canada.
We live in an age of accountability, performance measurement, the adage that whatever can be measured matters. PIAAC and its predecessor surveys define what matters for literacy practice in this country. ...

In this country, we seem to have an extraordinary emphasis on the five levels to the exclusion of alternative ways of measuring progress demonstrating progress. Literacy discourse relies heavily on questions of literacy levels, how many hours will it take to move somebody from one level to another. ...

Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a shift to have benchmarks that speak almost exclusively of literacy as a work-related practice. Now I would agree that work is where many of us spend most of our time and that workplace practices can contribute to or inhibit the development of literacy practice. But the political discourse in this country has placed literacy as only a workplace and economic issue. Literacy’s role in social cohesion and societal stability is ignored. Other venues for literacy practice and growth, venues such as the community and the family, appear undervalued. ...
We’ve set up a dichotomy between literacy as a social good and literacy as an economic good. Here in Canada, with the jurisdictions split between federal and provincial responsibilities, we have the federal government leading the charge on the economic value of literacy with the provinces focusing on literacy as a form of adult or second chance education. Provinces have been dividing responsibility for literacy from responsibility for workplace training, the latter which is now, more often than not, focused on essential skills.

At the national level, government is focused on results, not necessarily educators or practice. It seems more important to show movement from one level to another. For example, we have funders asking that curriculum focus on one essential skill at a time.

IALS was easy to understand – it mimics grade levels. Levels resemble the grade system that certainly policymakers understand. When I was in government I had a director general say to me, and I quote, “IALS is the ultimate report card,”– he was planning to use it as a means to determine whether we had been successful. ...

PIAAC puts the attention on the individual. Yet the environment in which we are being asked to use the skills is just as important as the skills we have. I could have all the skills in the world only to find that the work environment or personal environment do not demand that I use them. In that case, I am not going to value those skills. By the same token, it’s imperative that we not create barriers of unclear writing and unnecessarily complex text. It’s not just about the individual.

PIAAC and its focus on the individual give short shrift to the challenges faced by adults who are trying to improve their skills. This is not some sort of mechanical process. We need quality programs that are accessible with sufficient funding, teacher training,and resources. Learners need support such as income replacement, childcare, transportation. We need adult friendly programming and institutions. The culture here in Canada values youth education and formal education. This is why adult education sits at the margins. This is why informal education is not valued.

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Language Wars Update: Bias and Neutrality

In the Language Wars post, I wondered why think tanks had not yet been subjected to the Canada Revenue Agency audits that many see as targeted harassment of organizations that do work in contradiction to various Conservative doctrines that usually contain some version of "you're with me or you're with the pedophiles/anti-semites/communists..."

It seemed that I might have been mixing up categories of organizations that are eligible for charitable status and that think tanks are in a category that do not have to help the poor in order to retain their status.

Last week the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives was singled out for a CRA audit because
"A review of the Organization's website, as well as the previous audit findings, suggests that the Organization may be carrying out prohibited partisan political activities, and that much of its research/educational materials may be biased/one-sided."
Hmmm.

That led to questions about whether right-wing think tanks are also undergoing audits and having their activities questioned.
Among right-leaning or pro-business think-tanks in Canada, two — the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa — have confirmed to The Canadian Press they are not currently under audit for political activities. Two others — the Fraser Institute in Vancouver and the Montreal Economic Institute — have declined to comment on the matter.
On Friday, the Fraser Institute president, Niels Veldhuis, claimed that the work of his think tank is not biased but data based.

Hee hee.
 
Press Progress published an article today that deftly disputes the claim that the Fraser Institute is unbiased.

Neo-liberalism has taken a strong hold over policy debates in Canada and other G20 countries - we cannot talk about anything from education to health care to the environment to transportation to foreign policy with out including discussions of the positive impacts of privatization, free trade, open markets, deregulation, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy. Neo-liberalism has become our political lingua franca. Perhaps the Fraser Institute people do not see the bias in their work because of this.

I wonder what Brazilian adult educator Paulo Friere would say to Niels Veldhuis. Perhaps he would say this:
“The educator has the duty of not being neutral.”
 From We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (1990)
Or perhaps:
“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and powerless means to side with the powerful, not to remain neutral."
Or he might speak to us instead:
Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system - to the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new "Culture of Silence".”

Hang in there CCPA - we need your kind of bias as we foster a Culture of Noise!

 


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Bringing Copian to Question Period

My colleague and Parkdale - High Park riding mate wrote to our Member of Parliament, Peggy Nash about the cuts to literacy funding and the resulting closure of Copian (#bringbackcopian). We have permission to publish her words here and I wanted to share them with you.
Dear _____,
Thank you so much for reaching out to my staff about the recent funding cut for COPIAN. I know that this database was a tremendous resource for many in the literacy community. The government’s changes in this area have not gone unnoticed. I have worked with Parkdale Project Read and others around changes to the Labour Market Agreements in the wake of the Canada Jobs Grant’s rocky implementation. I have also written Minister Kenney on this to voice my opposition to any loss of federal funding for literacy programs.
This issue of literacy funding has been brought up by the NDP in Question Period, as recently as May 30 (http://openparliament.ca/debates/2014/5/30/sadia-groguhe-1/). I will continue to raise this issue, including the loss of COPIAN,  both directly to the government and through our Official Opposition Critic for ESDC.
Again, thank you for contacting us about this.
Kind regards,
Peggy Nash
Member of Parliament - Députée | Parkdale - High Park
______________________________________________________

peggy.nash@parl.gc.ca

We at the Literacy Enquirer thank Peggy Nash for her work on the LMAs and the Job Grant Program and we thank the NDP for helping us to shine a light on what these cuts mean to our community, our field and people engaged in lifelong learning. Click on the link on the letter to see the NDP question and the response from the Employment and Skills Development Canada Parliamentary Secretary, Scott Armstrong or read the screen grab below. You can see that Scott Armstong is right on talking points here and is reading from the same script as Alexandra Fortier.


#bringbackcopian
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Debating Literacy Funding



WE LEARN is a place where we can hear learner ideas about policy and practice.

WE LEARN Board Secretary Shellie Walters has written an interesting piece on government funding for adult education and literacy programs. She writes about the US context but Canadadians will relate to much of what she says especially in light of the recent toppling of our mainstays.

Here is Shellie's Board bio:
“I am a student that started with my local program in 1999 reading at a fourth grade level and then got involved with WE LEARN and then started working on Women’s Perspectives. I am now on the board and my role is the secretary. I have come a long way and I am currently in my second year of college. ”
And here is a little of what she has to say:
Looking back at the question of why the government is giving money to Adult literacy programs both to college and community based programs. On the pro side, currently the tax payers are only providing enough money for 3% on the individuals that require the assistance to get help. 43% of individuals with a lack of skills are living poverty. If the adults in a household have necessary skills the children of that household are more likely to have the skills too. When I started looking at the con side, even I thought that I would find more evidence to support that side. What I found, the more that I researched these arguments that I have heard, was that they are based on rhetoric and fallacies.  
Read more here.
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Bring Back Copian





Carol Goar wrote about the latest round of federal funding cuts and the closing of Copian.
For Ottawa, it’s all about productivity, competitiveness and enhanced efficiency. For the people who run shoestring literacy organizations, it is about sharing knowledge and spreading hope.
You can read her column here. She quotes one of us and some of the people who posted on the Copian page.

Read her column and leave a comment.

Here are some other things you can do:
M. Elisabeth Barot,
Education Programme Officer,
The Canadian Commission for UNESCO
(http://unesco.ca/en/home-accueil/contact)

Or, as Tracy Defoe suggested on the Copian message board, when you are looking for a resource that you used to be able to find on Copian, contact the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills (OLES).

Mailing address
Office of Literacy and Essential Skills
Employment and Social Development Canada
140 Promenade du Portage, Phase IV
Mailstop 515
Gatineau QC
K1A 0J9

or use this online contact form:

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Counting Research



Without an announcement or any consultation, it appears that the federal government has decided to quietly collapse Canada’s national literacy and essential skills network. This is happening at the same time as community literacy programs across Canada experience a seismic shift and uncertainty of sustained operations, while millions of dollars in federal funding is being effectively diverted from federal-provincial Labour Market Agreements and redirected to the unproven Canada Job Grant program.
“Our government is committed to ensuring that federal funding for literacy is no longer spent on administration and countless research papers, but instead is invested in projects that result in Canadians receiving the literacy skills they need to obtain jobs,” said Alexandra Fortier, a spokeswoman for Employment and Social Development Minister Jason Kenney, in an email.
For years, federal funding “was going to the same organizations to cover the costs of administration and countless research papers, instead of being used to fund projects that actually result in Canadians improving their literacy skills,” said an email from Alexandra Fortier, Kenney’s press secretary.

“These organizations were advised three years ago to give them ample time to prepare (for) the federal government changing the structure of funding through the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills to make it more effective. Canadian taxpayers will no longer fund administration of organizations, but will instead fund useful literacy projects.”


Hmmm. I wonder what Ms. Fortier means by useful?

Here is something that did get funded:
Establishing the Business Case for Workplace Essential Skills Training: UPSKILL - A Pan-Canadian Demonstration Project
Research conducted over the last decade shows significant gaps in literacy & essential skills among the Canadian workforce. In addition to having negative impacts on firms’ productivity, research suggests that workers suffer consequences of low literacy in the form of lower wages, reduced job stability & even higher health risks from workplace injury. While anecdotal evidence suggests that LES training may be helpful in eliminating these skills gaps, a strong business case for its use in the workplace has yet to be established.

In light of this, the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills aims to fill this gap by evaluating workplace LES training with the most rigorous evaluation methods & helping determine its ROI. Thus, in partnership with the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC), the Pan-Canadian research and demonstration project, UPSKILL was launched in 2010. UPSKILL utilized a random assignment design to provide the most reliable measures of the impacts of LES training in the workplace.

One of the partners for this project, OTEC (Ontario Tourism Education Corporation) describes their mission as:
Improve your business’ ability to attract, retain and develop high performers – let OTEC’s experts help to identify skill gaps, set goals and develop a customized training or standards program to achieve them. 
I guess it is no surprise that what this current government finds useful are projects that serve to meet the needs and goals of businesses and employers rather than those of learners and practitioners.

One tiny silver lining in this funding cut is that perhaps literacy organizations will no longer have to twist themselves into such odd shapes in order to secure funding from a government that views learning as valid only when it is tied to productivity gains defined by employers. On the other hand, many of these organizations may cease to exist at all.

from the Copian website on June, 9, 2014


These will be grim days for literacy learners and practitioners but we are used to grim days.

Ms. Fortier  speaks of the funding of "countless research projects." In some days that were not so grim, the federal government did fund research projects, many of them conducted by practitioners who seized the opportunity to develop, explore, test and validate promising practices. These projects were not countless. They were counted, documented and counted upon by literacy workers across Canada and internationally.

In Canada, adult literacy is a field with no formal accreditation system for practitioners. In the days of research in practice, we did better than that. We came to the field from a diversity of educational backgrounds and used all our knowledge and skills to propel our field forward. We used research in practice as our system of professional development. It worked to strengthen the work of individuals and entire communities of practice.

Granted, we were not much interested in making the business case for literacy learning or determining the impact of literacy learning on firms’ productivity. Our projects focused on how to work with literacy learners to meet their goals -- goals such as participating in their communities and communities of practice differently and gaining access to the information and resources essential to a fulfilling and joyful life.

We proposed and conducted these projects because we love our work and we believe in justice - and because justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public. We knew that this was a kind of crazy wisdom and our ROI was assessed by what learners told us about the joy of learning and about the power of learning:



Unfortunately, because of the cuts Copian has closed the database and the documentation of all this learning and wisdom is no longer available to us. Another library bites the dust.

This work belongs to us. By us I mean all Canadians because it was publicly funded and all literacy practitioners and learners because that is who who did and needs the work. Much of this work does not exist anywhere outside this database.

Please Government of Canada, and Mr. Kenney in particular, return our work to us. This is our university and you just closed it down. Is that really what you meant to do?
 
You can still learn about some of these projects at Literacies but, of course many of the links to the actual project reports will no longer work.

To see what others are saying about the funding cuts, see the Beyond 'Literacy as Numbers' in Canada blog and the comments on the Copian page.

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