Staff Training

This handbook and its companion, Taking Down the Wall of Words: Community Agencies and Literacy, can provide your staff with basic information about illiteracy and how it might affect their work. The resource list at the end of this book may also be helpful if you would like to have some more in-depth knowledge of the issue. But to make literacy awareness and sensitivity part of your agency's everyday work, you may need specialized information that relates directly to the services you provide.

Literacy organizations — networks, training programs and other local, national and provincial organizations — are rich information resources. A visit to your agency by a literacy expert can be an excellent opportunity for you to:

• assess your policies, programs and processes for their “literacy quotient”;
• learn about literacy and literacy training programs;
• discover how your organization can identify people with poor literacy skills, and
• share your specialized knowledge of the people who use your services with a member of the literacy community.

Raising Awareness

If a literacy professional can spend some time with your organization, you may want to do a “walk around” to explain how the agency works and to describe the services it provides and the people who typically use them. He or she may be able to offer some advice on how you can make your practices more accessible to people with low literacy skills.

With the information from your agency tour, the literacy worker can speak with your staff and volunteers about the practical realities of their work. They can be guided to identify people who may be avoiding literacy tasks and who may benefit from literacy upgrading programs. Organizations that have provided literacy awareness training to their staff and volunteers have found afterwards that the workers refer increasing numbers of clients who don't read and write well to literacy programs. The next section of this book provides guidelines on the referral process.

During the literacy information session, staff and volunteers can also discuss the benefits of removing literacy barriers, using plain language in all their communication and making literacy an ongoing concern. Such a session can be an information- sharing opportunity. The expertise you have about the people who use your services can be useful to a literacy worker. If some of the people you serve every day could benefit from literacy upgrading programs, your information may help the literacy expert develop strategies to encourage them to enrol in a program.

Your staff and volunteers can learn about the different kinds of literacy programs available in your community: One-on-one training, small group sessions and classroom courses, teaching methods that relate directly to the learner's lifestyle, experiences and needs, computer-based courses and courses in English or French as a second language.

An innovative approach that has been used successfully to sensitize people to the realities of life with low literacy skills is to ask them to decipher a new language. In workshops, people are invited to try and read words and phrases written in a language they don't know. The challenge of having to deal with familiar and new situations without the help of the written word helps participants appreciate the many contexts in which literacy demands raise barriers to understanding. It also helps them understand the strategies necessary to deal with everyday events without reading and writing skills.

Train the Trainers

You may wish to have one or several staff members trained as resident specialists in literacy and plain language writing. These specialists would then be able to assist other employees in developing literacy sensitive work methods. They may also be the people who discuss literacy-upgrading programs with clients who might benefit from them.

Your in-house literacy specialist could have more extensive training to identify people with low literacy skills, to know the types of literacy programs available and the nature of the illiteracy problem in your community, and to learn the methods of plain language writing. While it may be difficult for one person to become an “expert” in so many different areas, it is realistic for someone to become knowledgable enough so that he or she can identify sources of help. This person might find out who in the community can rewrite some of your materials in plain language, for example. The individual need not be able to do all the literacy work for your agency.

Ask a local literacy program if your future specialist could enrol in a training program for volunteer literacy teachers. The information about literacy and the training process that can be gained from such a brief session can be invaluable. The individual might also spend some time with literacy experts, learners and plain language writing specialists.

Once the resident specialist has received sufficient training, he or she can become your agency's resource person on written materials, literacy-sensitive practices and the referral of people who want to improve their reading and writing skills to literacy upgrading programs.

Orientation

New employees who receive orientation sessions dealing with the needs of your client group and your agency's programs and practices will also need a session on literacy awareness. Such a session can be offered by your in-house expert or by a literacy professional. As your staff and volunteers become accustomed to working in ways that lower literacy barriers, they will be able to reinforce this literacy awareness on a day-to-day basis.

That's My Job

Part of the process of raising the awareness of staff and volunteers and changing your work methods to improve accessibility can be to have everyone review their job description to look for literacy-related activities. Almost any job in a community agency can involve tasks that relate to clients' literacy needs. Anyone who deals with the public or with documents given to clients and consumers may need to improve their literacy quotient.

Receptionist

As the first person people meet, the receptionist represents an agency to the people who use its services. The receptionist's job description might call upon the individual to deal courteously with all clients and consumers, to explain programs and procedures in plain language, to assist people with forms and to be sensitive to people's special needs, including literacy assistance.

Counsellors

Literacy awareness is probably only an extension of counsellors' established approach of dealing with clients and consumers in a holistic way. Job descriptions might include the need to inform clients about literacy programs when and if the counsellor deems it appropriate, to refer clients to such programs and to follow-up in order to determine whether the program meets the person's needs.

Executive Director

The Executive Director is the critical link between the Board of Directors and the work done by agency staff and volunteers. A commitment to literacy by the organization's top manager is essential to achieve continuing success with initiatives started by a literacy audit. As the person responsible for carrying out the organization's mission, the Executive Director can incorporate literacy concerns into every aspect of its work. And he or she can ensure that the organization establishes and maintains contacts with literacy organizations and other community agencies with common goals. The section of this handbook dealing with “Shared Concerns, Common Goals,” gives some suggestions on how these exchanges can be fostered.

The Legacy

By investing in training to help employees deal with literacy concerns, an organization can ensure that literacy is not forgotten once the literacy audit is completed and some forms and brochures have been revised. The imagination and dedication of staff and volunteers will help the agency to respond to its clients' ever-changing needs and its own changing requirements. Your agency's workers, as always, will be its most important resource.