While keeping this broad perspective in mind, we chose to refine the focus of our research interests to exploring Level 1 and 2 learners' perspectives on progress for those who primarily had "independence" as a learning goal. It should be noted that in Ontario literacy services are provided to adults who are working towards one of three goal pathways: employment, further education / skills training or independence. Our shift in focus to learners having independence as their main learning goal was made with the intention of further contributing to an understanding of what constitutes "independence" in the context of adult literacy.
The project also aimed to help academics further develop their understanding about how adults learn, what constitutes "progress" and the effectiveness of practitioner-academic research collaborations. We also hoped that this work would help to inform government policy makers in developing their accountability frameworks for delivering adult basic education. Most importantly, we thought this work would help learners to begin to understand their own ways of learning, to recognize the progress they make in all aspects of their lives once they entered a literacy program and to articulate their learning needs and dreams. We believed this project would not only answer our questions about progress, but also be relevant to the concerns and questions of other literacy programs in Canada.
We secured funding in September 2004, and started the project in December 2004.
We used a qualitative exploratory approach, facilitating 18 focus groups comprised of a total of 56 adult learners to explore their perspectives on progress. The learners were drawn from the five participating literacy organizations. We used a semi-structured interview approach to elicit answers to our basic question: how do learners perceive progress?
The foundation for our approach came from Battell's (2001) research, Naming the Magic: Non-Academic Outcomes in Basic Literacy. This project described and field-tested six techniques for documenting non-academic outcomes of learners as a result of their participation in literacy instruction. One technique involved questioning learners with the intent to encourage them to develop a "growing awareness of the various changes in their lives". (Ibid., p 47) Our project made use of some of the suggested questions and prompts from that technique. Below are the questions we used in the focus groups.