“Canada was the envy of the industrialized world for its creation and innovation around workplace literacy inthe 1990s.”
EDUCATION EXPERT
Partnership is becoming an ever more present idea as the best way to go about solving social, cultural and economic issues of the day. This partnership dialogue now encompasses adult literacy. However, there is a tendency to use the term loosely or to define it to whatever suits our needs at the moment.
The purpose of this interpretative case study was to document a government initiative through the Human Resources and Social Development Canada’s (HRSDC) National Literacy Secretariat called the Business and Labour Partnership program that has been in existence since 1988. The overall intention was to understand the process of partnership development and the strategies that were used to engage business, labour, literacy practitioners, and provincial and territorial governments in adult work-related literacy at a time when no such program model existed.
The case study focused on a particular program that had a longevity that allowed for important representations of the partnership phenomenon. The primary method for collecting data was through semi-structured interview schedules. Questions were drawn from a literature review that focused on partnership development and program planning. Considerable attention was given to the selection of interviewees from stakeholder groups of business, labour, and government from different regions across Canada. Along with interviewees, other sources of information were used such as archival records, documents that were both print and electronic, and field notes.
Twenty-six, face-to-face interviews were conducted between May and July 2006 and 60 documents were collected. Several techniques were used in the data analysis path. One of these techniques, categorical aggregation, produced a collection of instances and relevant meanings based on a coding scheme designed from the interview schedules. Eight major themes emerged from the various data sources.
Three periods of time that covered the current life span of the program were used as units of analysis. The first period is referred to as the foundation building of the program and included the years 1988 to 1995. The second period is called development and demonstration and covers the years from 1996 to 2000. The third time frame is called the period of program change and spans the years from 2001 to 2006. In the spring of 2006, the National Literacy Secretariat became the National Office of Literacy and Learning, and the funding program was renamed the Adult Learning, Literacy and Essential Skills Program. For purpose of this project, however, the program name National Literacy Secretariat (NLS) is used throughout the document.