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Teaching adults to read By
Ulli Diemer But the reality
is that in Ontario alone there are over one million adults who are
“functionally illiterate” — adults whose lack of
reading skills create serious problems for them, people who have
trouble reading a newspaper. Many of them
are older, people who perhaps missed out on schooling because of
the Depression. Many come from the poorer, especially rural, parts
of Canada. Some are immigrants who can speak and understand English
but can’t read and write. And many are simply products of our
educational system who pass out of the system each year, after 10
or more years of schooling, still illiterate. In Ward 7 alone,
the. 1976 census found 12,225 functionally illiterate adults. East
End Literacy, a local group that works with adults to help them
become literate, estimates that half of the students taking part
in its program begin at such a basic level that they cannot read
a street sign. The problems
they face are daunting and never-ending. Job applications, their
childrens’ report cards, directions on bottles of medication,
ballots in the voting booth are all indecipherable. It becomes impossible
to obtain a driver’s license, to buy a birthday card, to read
one’s child a bedtime story, to buy grocery products such as
“No Frills” items that don’t feature a picture of
the contents on the package. The ways of
coping are often ingenious, ranging from “I’m sorry, I
forgot my glasses” ploys to phenomenal feats of memory whereby
everything from prices to shapes of containers to colours of subway
stations are memorized. Sometimes illiteracy is successfully hidden
from employers, friends, and the world at large. But much more
frequently the result is poverty, unemployment, and the inability
to participate in or enjoy many of society’s most basic activities.
And there is often a feeling of shame and failure, a debilitating
loss of self-respect, a lack of belief in one’s own abilities
and potential. One is acutely aware of being dependent on the help
of others in coping with a print-oriented society, and therefore
of continually having to admit that one can’t read or write. It is with these
realities in mind that East End Literacy approaches the problem
of helping adults to learn to read. A cornerstone of East End Literacy’s
philosophy is the belief that becoming literate is an important
way for people to gain more control and power over their lives. Coupled with
this is a stress on encouraging students to believe that they are
capable, that they can learn, that they can win more control over
their own lives. This also often involves understanding that it
may well have been schools and other institutions which failed them,
rather than it being they who are failures. Workers at East
End Literacy say that they often encounter students who were effectively
victimized in some way: working class students who were glibly labelled
as having a reading disability by a system that geared its curriculum
and approach to middle-class culture; students with reading problems
who received no individual attention and were allowed to slip further
and further behind and were then shunted into dead-end programs
where no real attempt at teaching was made. East End Literacy’s
approach to teaching (done by 60 volunteer tutors each working with
one student) emphasizes using the lives of the students as the centre
of the curriculum. This can mean that a student who wants to get
a driver’s license will use the reading skills required for
the driver’s examination as the focus, while a student who
wants to be able to write letters home to her family in Jamaica
will learn by talking about what she wants to say in a letter, having
the tutor write it down, and then using that as a “text.” In addition
to one-on-one tutoring, East End Literacy also encourages students
to get involved in group learning. One group meets to put out a
quarterly magazine called The Writer’s Voice, which
consists of writings by students. Students choose the topics for
a particular issue — for example, being unemployed, or housing
— discuss it, and write about it. The process strengthens reading
and writing skills through focusing on something the students have
decided is important, and also helps to build a feeling of being
able to be creative. At the same time, students develop a sense
that the experiences they have gone through, and what they have
to say about them, are important. When that happens,
a sense of increased power and responsibility go hand in hand. One
student, who knew she had gotten far less than a fair shake in school,
expressed impatience mainly with herself, not with the system that
had held her back. Her reason: “I’m the one that has to
do something about it.” Published
in Seven News,
April 4, 1984 See also:
Marguerite
has come a long way. Ulli Diemer |
