QUALITY STORYTENTS

A resource for family, early childhood and community literacy workers

We spent several years and many hours refining this program. The development of the program coincided with the development of several other family literacy pilot programs and projects in Saint John, many of which involved Wendell and I as staff or volunteers. Modeling ourselves on Western Canada’s experience, we facilitated several short-term organizational partnerships, and organized a family literacy advisory committee. I continued to learn more about family and early childhood literacy, eventually becoming a certified Mother Goose Teacher and a Foundational Family Literacy Trainer. Wendell received Mother Goose training, as well, and also pursued training in adult learning.

During this time, one of our guiding concerns was how to get our programs to those families most isolated by poverty, low literacy skills, poor health and so on. This came, in part, from our awareness of the rural nature of much of New Brunswick (we had been offering family literacy promotion and workshops throughout southwestern New Brunswick, from Woodstock to St. Stephen to St. Martins). It also came from the realization that our centre-based projects seemed to exclude some families, whether through indirect costs, geography, culture or harder to define institutional barriers.

Then, at last, with the Summer 2003 Storytent program, a partnership between ourselves, a tenant's association and a public library, we felt like we had a satisfactory model of a truly inclusive, learner-centered, community based family literacy program. We are pleased to share that model through this document. We hope that there will be some practical suggestions interested people will be able to immediately use, as well as helpful information about the how and why of the Storytent.