On November 15, the PEI Literacy Alliance staff went to Wellington to visit Colette Aucoin at the Société éducative ile-du-Prince-Edouard.

What is your role here?

I am the program coordinator for the Society, and I also do facilitation for the college level students. For literacy and academic upgrading, I play a coordinating role because we have facilitators that work directly with the students.

The college offers distance education, so the approach to teaching is a little different. As a facilitator for the Collège de l'Acadie I also do some technical things like taking care of the computer network. For the Société éducative I take care of administrative tasks as well.

The Society is a non-profit organization with four staff. Aubrey Cormier, the Executive Director, Bernice Arsenault the Administrative Coordinator and Christine Maddix, the Secretary-Receptionist are the other members of the team. We share different roles.

The Centre seems like a busy, complicated place. What is it like from the student's point of view?

We try to be a one-stop shopping centre for students. If someone comes for academic upgrading, he will usually meet with me. We try to match the services we offer with the student's needs. We also have a human resources development counsellor who works with the student to help develop a learning and career plan.

If the student wants to write the General Education Diploma (GED) we can help him prepare for the exams. Our students have access to writing the exam in French.

If a student chooses to have an academic grade 12 we can help with that. If the student wants to retrain and find a career in a field the college offers, he or she can enrol in a college program. An adult learner can apply for admission to the College with his GED or a prior learning assessment.

The Collège de l'Acadie is a distance education Community College that has five learning centres in Nova Scotia and this one in PEI. All the centres work on the same curriculum and they all have the same video conferencing systems.

Are all the courses offered in French?

All the college programs are in French, although we offer English as a subject. With GEDs, some adults have had English schooling and choose to write the exams in English.

We have an issue with the French GEDs. The exams are set in the United States and then translated. The translation is very bad. We have lost some students because they struggle with the translation.

In PEI, language is a literacy issue. According to the 1991 Census over 49 % of the francophone population had less than a grade 9 education. So half of our French people have reading issues, which presents a double challenge, not only low literacy but also being in a minority. It is difficult to convince people that they should study in their own language however there are many job opportunities out there for bilingual people.