Ken Latour, Instructor, Hay River CLC, Aurora College
While working as the adult educator in the Fort Resolution Community Learning Centre, Ken Latour worked to develop local tutors and literacy workers. The guiding philosophy was to involve as many people as possible in order to build community support for the literacy program and to ensure that it would not collapse with the removal of any one participant. To support the project, an overall literacy program coordinator, two tutors, and three family literacy program facilitators were hired. All were part-time, with the exception of the coordinator who was nearly full-time. This strategy worked well as it allowed the program to see who was effective in what capacity, and widened the community network in that every additional person hired had an existing network of support and contacts within the community.
The training software STAPLE (Supplemental Training for Adult Practitioners of Literacy Education) was used to train the community tutors and instructors. This software package was easy to use and was extremely thorough. It was important not to underestimate the amount of training that people needed to be effective tutors. It was important to make time in the schedule at the beginning of the program to ensure that tutors were not confused or floundering. It may be a completely new field of work for some and they will need guidance. Under-supporting a tutor will harm both the tutor and the learner. The best learning comes through doing. It was important to provide support to the tutors when they were having hard times and accept that this was a natural part of their learning experience.