Adult Literacy

“They want to learn because they know that it’s benefitting their children.”

/ The Old Crank

No time these days to maintain this site on anything close to a regular schedule, but I thought I’d break my long silence to log this quote reported in the Celina Record, (in Texas), about the influence of adult education in children’s educational success, a favorite topic of this blog:

[Jill Roza, the district’s director of adult education services] was the assistant principal at Celina Intermediate School. She said that she had frequently encountered parents “who didn’t feel comfortable coming into the school system if they didn’t speak English,” which made it difficult to “get them the information they needed for their children to be successful” in school. “Many did not have a firm foundation in their own language,” she recalled, “and so I wanted to do something that would create that harmony between the community and the school and would make them feel much more comfortable coming into a school setting.”

Roza added: “Watching them come into class with their supplies, they are so excited and they want to learn because they know that it’s benefitting their children. Many of them will say,’I want to help my child with their work.’”

International Literacy Day 2015

/ The Old Crank

Today is International Literacy Day, an annual observance for focusing attention on the importance of literacy around the world. There are events in schools and communities around the globe today to mark the occasion.

The theme of International Literacy Day 2015 is “Literacy and Sustainable Societies.” UNESCO notes that “[l]iteracy skills are the prerequisite for the learning of a broader set of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values required for creating sustainable societies,” while at the same time, “progress in areas of sustainable development, such as health and agriculture, serves as an enabling factor in the promotion of literacy and literate environments.”

International Literacy Day celebrations are generally more prominent outside of the Unites States, although many U.S. adult literacy programs mark the day with events or announcements. This UNESCO page has links to some of the more prominent ILD 2014 events.

For those of you who are fans of infographics, here is the official UNESCO ILD 2015 infographic (click on it to see the entire thing):

Shared Decision-making Increases Need for Greater Health Literacy

/ The Old Crank

Another study on the relationship between health literacy and health outcomes:

“Limited health literacy is a significant problem in our patients, and why this is so important is because we have moved so far from paternalistic medicine to an approach that is all about shared decision making,” Tormey said, which increases the health literacy burden on the patient. “Most patients, if you look at studies, will say they have limited literacy, that they want to be involved, that they want to be engaged, but they have more barriers to doing so, and they interpret communication differently than patients with adequate health literacy. So we really need to be able to develop tools that can engage these patients and make them feel supported as they embark on these kind of decisions.”

“A Lot of Them Live the Way They Live Because No One Has Yet Shown Them a Better Way”

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

This article by Bella English in the Boston Globe about Ismail Abdurrashid, lead instructor for the College Connections program at College Bound Dorchester, Mass., is good reminder of who and what really matters in our field. I’m guessing Abdurrashid has never read a single WIOA regulation…