June 2003

Community Literacy of Ontario

National Foundational Training in Family Literacy: Proudly Announcing Ontario’s First Graduating Class!

The Centre for Family Literacy in Alberta, in collaboration with a pan-Canadian advisory group, developed national Foundational Training in Family Literacy. The goals of this training are to provide a common base of knowledge to family literacy practitioners across Canada and to give professional credibility to the field. This nationally -recognized training is now being offered all across this country by various provincial organizations.

Community Literacy of Ontario offered national Foundational Training in Family Literacy online to 21 participants working in diverse community literacy agencies from across Ontario. CLO is extremely pleased to announce that Ontario’s first class will graduate in June 2003. Participants will be presented with official certificates from Maureen Sanders, Executive Director of the Centre for Family Literacy, during the final online course module to be held on June 19, 2003.

CLO’s intensive online training took place once per month from January to June 2003. Each module was four hours in length. Our dedicated participants further augmented this rigorous online training with self-study of the course manual, homework assignments, supplementary readings, and an online discussion group on AlphaCom. The evaluation results were overwhelmingly positive and clearly demonstrated that our participants found the content, the facilitation and the online learning experience to be extremely valuable.

CLO’s online training was based upon the 10-chapter, 370-page Foundational Training in Family Literacy course manual. This manual was developed by the Centre for Family Literacy and each chapter was written by a variety of experts from universities and family literacy organizations from across Canada. CLO also included various Ontario family literacy case studies from: Dryden Literacy Association; Literacy Council of Niagara West; the Timmins Learning Centre; ALSO (Ottawa); Kingston Literacy; the Wellington County Learning Centre; Road to Reading Festival; Frontier College; Hamilton and District Literacy Council; and the Kingston Family Literacy Centre. In addition, we shared current research from the Making Connections report developed by the Ontario Literacy Coalition and Kingston Literacy. We thank you all for sharing!

Foundational Training in Family Literacy covered the following topics:

	MODULE 1: January 2003 – “Understanding Family Literacy” and “The Practice of Family Literacy in an Unjust World”
	MODULE 2: February 2003 – “The Dynamics of Working with Parents” and “Working with Parents in a Family Literacy Setting”
	MODULE 3: March 2003 – “Understanding Children and Their Development”
	MODULE 4: April 2003 – “Understanding Emergent Literacy”
	MODULE 5: May 2003 – “Working with Communities” and “Best Practices”
	MODULE 6: June 2003 – “Administering a Family Literacy Project” and “Evaluating a Family Literacy Project”