There are only a handful of literacy programs in Alberta that are 10 years old. And only a handful of literacy workers who have been working in the field for as long. We depend now on those people to recall and recount what "the early days" were like.
Joanne Synder is one of the province's literacy pioneers. Her description of the formative years of the literacy program in Red Deer (Chapter 9) really intrigued me. The growth of this Program is a colourful (and typical) story of the evolution and development of literacy programming in Alberta.
I promised Joanne that SYLVIA BROWN would be high on my list of people to talk to when I went to Red Deer as she was one of the first volunteer tutors and a "cornerstone" of the literacy project.
Sylvia is a tiny woman in her late 50's who remembers the early days of working in literacy with warmth and affection. "Oh, we had quite a time," she reminisced. "Joanne was full of ideas when the program was getting off the ground. We were in the basement of the library. It was a tiny little room. Joanne had a table for her desk and there was a table for a volunteer and a student to sit and work together. There was a bathroom just off to the side. Heaven help you if you had to go to the toilet because that was our storage area; we had all the books and boxes stacked in there. It was a major event using the toilet because you had to climb over all the books first. At least you were never short of reading material!"
"Outside the little room was the basement staircase. We managed to squeeze a table in the tiny space under the stairs for another student and tutor. And that's all the room we had."
"The 5 years I worked with the program was really quite a wonderful time. The humorous little incidents made the atmosphere more relaxed which was beneficial to both the students and the tutors. Joanne organized the program so that it was like a drop-in centre, too. We would have people come in and look around. It was comfortable; it wasn't threatening. The laughter and enthusiasm were infectious and reflected on all the people working there. Laughing together is really important; it really helped get us through some of the more difficult days."
"I remember one girl who came in to be assessed. She read beautifully. I told her I felt we couldn't do anything more for her because she read so well. But the girl said, 'Yes but I don't understand a word of what I've just read!' I was shocked. She didn't have any comprehension skills. I understood that students may not be able to read or write or add numbers but it never occurred to me that someone wouldn't be able to understand what they could read. That was a real eye-opener for me."
"And another eye-opener was that students weren't always able to work on a lesson when they came to be tutored. Sometimes you had to give them awhile because something traumatic had just happened to them and they needed time to talk about it. There was no way they could concentrate on a lesson until they got it out of their system first. And sometimes 'getting it out of their system' would take up the whole lesson time."