Paul Martin's current budget highlighted literacy as a priority with emphasis on several areas. One was family literacy. With this commitment, Canada joins a growing trend in the US, the UK and Australia.

It is too early to make definitive claims. Preliminary research indicates that the outcomes of family and workplace literacy are clearer and more sustainable than those in more traditional programs. This article provides a brief history of family literacy, some international examples of the diverse programs which fall into the category, and a critical framework for assessing it.

Family literacy means different things to different people. There are at least two dominant models and diverse programs built on those models. Common to both is the belief that family literacy is an investment in adults in need and an attempt to prevent their children from having future literacy problems.

Deficit-driven models implicitly identify family literacy with a set of correct values and set out to reform wayward families through literacy and "right" reading. Strength-driven models, often community-based programs, acknowledge and build on the culture and experience of participants.

Family literacy
Denny Taylor was one of the first researchers to assert that there was something called "family literacy." In the early 1980s, she spent three years of doctoral research trying to find out how parents help children learn to read. She discovered that parents did not set out to teach their children; literacy was simply part of the environment - embedded in the telling of stories, shopping, access to books. Most of her work has been with inner-city families, and she has written several books on the subject.

In the late 1980s, family literacy became an identifiable strand in the US. Organizations such as the Kenan Family Trust funded national awareness and seeded projects mainly addressed to poor families, often focused on mothers. With a strong push from Barbara Bush, initiatives spread. By the beginning of the 1990s, a National Center for Family Literacy was in place and formal programs were being implemented across the nation. Taylor is critical of most American family literacy programs on the Kenan model which she claims portrays a monolithic image of poor families as illiterate and "at risk." She believes this image hampers literacy workers. She favours a strength-driven model based on what people already know and do.

Not discounting Taylor's concerns, there are some excellent programs and outcomes supported by the National Center for Family Literacy and there are some reprehensible ones from poorly-conceived community-based efforts. Indicators of excellence are starting to emerge and do not belong uniquely to a specific model.

Canadian initiatives
In Canada, we began to examine family literacy more closely in 1993 leading up to a national conference in Ottawa in November, 1994. Lee Weinstein wrote the focus paper for that conference. He said: "What family literacy has done and can do is give literacy teachers and administrators the opportunity to move their work to where learners live, and to look outside the classroom at the ways in which society tells people they are powerless. Family literacy can open the door to building curriculum around learners' self-identified issues in real contexts by its explicit inclusion of family and other significant people with whom learners interact on a daily basis."

A report written in 1994 on community literacy as an approach to family and intergenerational literacy tracked a demonstration project in Surrey, B.C. which tried to involve a large number of community-based organizations in an initiative to integrate literacy into their programming. The report acknowledges the problems in the project and suggests ways to avoid repeating them. Despite problems, it is an excellent example of strength-driven family literacy, including its complexity.

At this point, several provinces have special interest groups on family literacy working through their coalitions or their education departments (e.g. Nova Scotia). The Movement for Canadian Literacy has provided strong encouragement for the continuing push around this issue. Laubach Canada has projects across the country. Now the government has endorsed the idea, and we wait to see the direction they will take in their funding.

British models
The UK developed strong interest in the deficit-driven American model around 1994, but a year later had undertaken a distinctly British national awareness campaign on the BBC directed by the Basic Skills Agency. They produced a kit on reading and other literacy activities for families that could be ordered after the televised announcements. Response was so overwhelming that the agency had to reprint the kit. They were trying to keep a record of the orders for possible follow-up. Simultaneously, pilot projects were being created and evaluated in a wide range of contexts. Currently, there are also parent support organizations to help families understand and use new technologies for literacy and learning.

New directions
In the US, there have also been some innovative developments integrating family literacy and technology in ESL and ABE provision. Virginia Tardaewether teaches in a family literacy program in Salem, Oregon. With colleague, Lucy Tribble MacDonald, affectionately known in electronic circles as "litLucy", Virginia has integrated computer use into many aspects of the program from the parent's time learning alone to the parent-child time together (PACT).

Based on early indications, the emphasis on family literacy holds promise, but we have to do more critical analysis and evaluation before we can understand its full potential or its pitfalls. Evaluation is one area where Canada has traditionally been weak. We fund projects, often calling them pilots, when similar ones have been around for years. We have a difficult time providing a credible body of empirical data on any aspect of literacy provision, including family.

Where studies have been done, mainly in the US, there are indications that retention is higher in family literacy, that the goal of supporting their children's learning is a powerful motivator for adults and that embedding literacy in activities connected to daily life leads to greater sustainability. Only time will confirm these hypotheses.

Stay tuned for developments.