Time for serious reflection on adult literacy
Providers of adult basic education (ABE) in Ireland need to step back and reflect on adult literacy.
The Department of Education and Science has invested a significant amount of money (€30m last year) in adult literacy provision since the publication of the OECD's International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) in 1997.
That survey focused attention on the 'adult literacy problem' in Ireland. It found that 25pc of the population scored at the lowest level in the scale. Only Poland had a higher figure.
Although the numbers of people attending classes in ABE services increased from 5,000 per year in 1997 to 40,678 per year at the end of 2006, it is not clear if the total figure of 113,000 clients targeted in the White Paper on Adult Education 2000 had been reached by the end of the National Development Plan 2000-2006.
Now, more importantly, providers need to evaluate the impact of the many different initiatives rolled out over the last 11 years, such as workplace literacy and family learning programmes and the Intensive Tuition in Adult Basic Education projects.
Rather than the quantitative study carried out by the OECD with scaremonger percentage results that encourage equations of "illiteracy" with diseases that need to be "eradicated" and lead to politicians calling for spending overdrive (which is not always the solution, as we have seen in the Health Executive), providers should now undertake qualitative analyses of the kind carried out by Mary Hamilton and David Barton in Lancaster (Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community) or by St Munchin's Family Resource Centre in Limerick (Reading the Future), which look at the uses of reading and writing in everyday life and people's experience and response to literacy provision.
In this way, not only can we gauge the impact of adult literacy provision in the last 11 years, but we can also connect people's practices "with what they want to learn and how best they are able to learn it".
RaPAL (Research and Practice in Adult Literacy), an independent and international network of learners, teachers, managers and academic researchers involved in the area of literacy, language and numeracy, will be holding its annual conference outside the UK for the first time. It will be hosted by the City of Galway VEC at NUIG on June 20/21, preceded by a pre-event on the evening of June 19 featuring a talk by Sheila Rosenberg provocatively entitled, "Why don't they speak English? Why can't they speak English? Why won't they speak English and Whose English is it anyway?"
The theme of the Galway conference is inclusion and engagement in research and practice in adult literacy, numeracy, family learning and ESOL. There'll be more than 30 workshops presented by learners, practitioners and researchers from Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, South Africa and Lithuania.
On Friday, June 20, delegates will be welcomed by Breandán O'Callarán, CEO of the City of Galway VEC, and the keynote speech will be delivered by Senator Fidelma Healy Eames, Fine Gael Seanad spokesperson for Education and Science.
On the final day there will be a discussion on the professionalisation of the tutor. The conference will conclude with a plenary session by Professor Roz Ivanic, who will take a retrospective look at developments in adult literacy research and practice over the last 20 years.
- Kieran Harrington
