The first formal meeting of the Alberta Literacy Coordinators Group was a landmark event. It was the fall of 1986; literacy was moving up on the political agenda and for the first time there were strong indications that financial support would be forthcoming from the federal and provincial governments. There were about 25 people at the meeting in Edmonton, some from well-established literacy programs, most from programs that were less than a year old and others from programs that were just getting started.
The group worked hard together for 2 days, deciding on a mission statement and making plans and setting priorities for the future. Some of the closest friends I have today, I met at that meeting. With our own enthusiasm, those of us who were "new kids on the block" respectfully and eagerly joined forces with the other literacy workers. We left that meeting knowing that we were part of something important, not realizing we had yet to discover what being literacy workers would mean to us as individuals.
Four years have passed. The following conversations took place in the fall of 1990 with women who entered the literacy field close to the time of this historic meeting.
"The way I explain the idea of 'literacy' to my kids is, 'If you don't finish Grade 12, it's like having one pair of pants and one shirt. The nice thing is, in the morning you get up and you don't have to worry about what you're going to wear. But the bad thing is, you will never wear anything else except that shirt and that pair of pants.' I tell them that it's a good thing to have lots of choices."
As she often does, JAN THIESSEN had found a refreshing and insightful new way to approach an idea. We were sitting in the Alberta Vocational College staff lounge in Edmonton talking about old times. When I met Jan at the ALCG meeting, she had just been hired to pilot the Community Reading Project for AVC Lesser Slave Lake.
"I remember my going away tea at the hospital where I had been working," Jan said smiling. "I told everyone that I was going to go and be a literacy coordinator in Slave Lake. I didn't exactly know what that meant yet but I assumed that because the job was real enough to have been advertised in the newspaper, they would all know what I was talking about, but nobody did! I felt like some sort of pioneer breaking new ground."
Jan loved her literacy work from the very beginning. She talked about pioneer spirit, risk-taking and the resourcefulness and creativity needed to be a pioneer in a new field of study. For Jan, "the appeal of working in unknown territory is that you can do just about anything; you can define it just about any way you want. There are lots of opportunities to go in all kinds of directions."
Breaking new ground is not unfamiliar to Jan. She and her husband and three young children are homesteading on a beautiful piece of land just west of Athabasca. I wondered if her chosen way of life played any pare in her "roll up your sleeves and dig in" approach to literacy. She laughed and said, "Even though I have a teaching degree, I'm sure that part of the reason I was hired for the job was because I live off the beaten track and don't have running water. Somehow the hiring committee thought my homesteading experience would help me relate better with the students!"