One of the ways that Movement for Canadian Literacy (MCL) fulfills its mandate is by providing a forum where people from provincial/territorial and national organizations can work together to identify, discuss and address issues of common focus. This project, Mapping the Field of Family Literacy reflects MCL’s goal of building consensus, capacity and commitment on the topic of family literacy.
The original vision for this paper was to create a Family Literacy Action Plan. To help shape that vision, a working group, which included well-known family literacy experts from across the country, was struck. After several conversations and interviews with the working group contributing their knowledge and expertise towards the development of this work, an internal decision was made to realign the scope of this project. It was determined that a family literacy snapshot was required to inform the development of a family literacy action plan. With the change in scope of this report, the working group was informally disbanded. We would like to thank our working group members: Cheryl Brown, Lesley Brown, Debbie Griffith, Gabrielle Lopez and Suzanne Smythe and we look forward to working with them in the future as we move into the action planning phase of this work.
This paper provides snapshots of family literacy “activity” in each province and territory with the intent of providing a view of family literacy through a wide angle lens. In other words, to look widely, not deeply, at family literacy. Each snapshot was created from a series of interviews with provincial and territorial literacy coalition staff, key informants working in the field of family literacy, staff from some provincial and territorial governments and/or website and document reviews. The interviews identified two over-arching themes: How family literacy is funded and who provides family literacy programming.
Over the next year MCL will continue its work on family literacy from a national perspective.
Lindsay Kennedy
Project Manager
Movement for Canadian Literacy
April 2008