The IALSS: Whose story will it tell?
According to the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), 48% per cent of Canadians do not read or write well enough to meet the demands of the changing workplace.
When the IALS report came out, newspaper headlines declared the "literacy deficit" to be a national emergency — without an immediate remedy Canada would be unable to compete in the global economy. We were told that it is our duty as good citizens to upgrade our skills to meet the demands of the 21st century — if we do not, we ourselves will be responsible for our own ruin.
The second IALS survey, called the International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey (IALSS), is underway. The international report is due this spring and the Canadian report is due in September 2005.
Who or what is being assessed?
Individuals? Systems?
Literacy programs? Teachers?Education policy makers?
What will the headlines be this time? Who will be praised and who will be blamed? How will the literacy field respond? How, in this era of standardized testing, will we assert our knowledge and experience as practitioners, as learners, as workers and as citizens?
Read more about the IALS and
IALSS at www.literacyjournal.ca.
Click on the web forum tab and then on
the fall 04: IALS link. 
TM
The Adult Education Review: another home, another official story?
Will
there be a new home
for literacy or
will it remain
under-housed in MTCU?
asks
Tracy Westell
At the recent Ontario Literacy Coalition conference, Kathleen Wynne, the MPP heading the adult education review, said that she supported the idea of a "home" (read secretariat??) for adult education in the provincial government. Of course, this would require the Legislature's approval before it could be implemented. It would have to be like a group home, housing all of us disparate adult ed folks in one house. This doesn't bode well -- we know that group homes often elicit the NIMBY (not in my back yard) response and are stopped before they begin. Adult literacy has always suffered from NIMBY, having never settled anywhere for long (I count four ministries) and always changing itself to fit its new surroundings. Would the form of government body housing literacy change the function of literacy policy?
Certainly having the adult literacy portfolio in a "work preparation" branch has influenced the government's motivations for funding adult literacy: Jobs are the ultimate goal. There are other pressures on adult literacy policy, not the least of which is the Auditor General's report of a few years ago which has the literacy bureaucrats madly counting beans on Wellesley Street.
A secretariat sounds like it might be able to set its own agenda although it would still be subject to the accountability craze of the Ontario government (a craze that has swept through all governments who can afford it). The up side of having a secretariat is that every time the literacy portfolio has moved house, we have seen new doors crack open and new possibilities take shape. A secretariat would mean we could build a house to fit literacy instead of literacy shape-shifting to fit its new home; you know, Extreme House Makeover - not Trading Spaces.
What does this adult ed review have to do with the Bob Rae review of post-secondary education in Ontario? Apparently not a lot. Wynne's office says there's no formal relationship between the two reviews. I guess post-secondary means 'after completing secondary school' and not 'after not completing secondary school.' And adult education means 'education for those who need a second chance, remediation, upgrading, etc.' and not 'education for adults who want to learn.'
If you go to the post-secondary ed review web site (interestingly called raereview.on.ca: why wasn't the adult ed review web site called wynnereview.on.ca?), Rae asks us "What's your vision of a learning province?" Certainly my vision would include access to learning for all adults in Ontario, regardless of their purposes for wanting to learn. And you wouldn't have to be able to read to take a course in Canadian history or Jacques Derrida (see page 4) and you wouldn't need to write to discuss your ideas and have your voice heard. According to Wynne's office, the adult ed review will be released late this fall...
The Enquirer will have the
story.
