Introduction
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
Adult literacy work, and the understanding of literacy issues, have
been developing in Canada for over a quarter century. International
Literacy Year, 1990, promoted that development and gave it a new visibility.
As we begin to move through the 1990s, it is timely to take stock of
adult literacy work in Canada. This report attempts to do just that
— to give an account of the state of literacy work and to identify
key issues for the future. It is written for literacy advocates, researchers
and policy-makers.
New people are continually entering the literacy field, and regional
differences in literacy work are great. All this strengthens the movement
and enriches it with novel perspectives. But it also makes it difficult
to preserve the sense of moving forwards from a commonly understood
situation and history. One major purpose of this report is to provide
a common store of background knowledge for literacy advocates, researchers,
and policy-makers, who have entered the field at different times, or
in different parts of Canada. This report is of course selective; others
who have been involved in or studied adult literacy would provide different
accounts. But an attempt is made here to be judicious, neither writing
on behalf of a single tendency nor pretending that differences and disagreements
do not exist.
The report is divided into two chapters. The first chapter provides
an overview of the state of literacy work in Canada. This chapter has
three sections. The first is concerned with the nature and scope of
restricted literacy, and what the statistics on literacy can tell us.
A second section deals with aspects of the history of literacy work
and the literacy issue since the 1960s; it draws attention to the social
and economic forces underlying literacy policy. The third section outlines
the the literacy activities and policies of federal, provincial and
territorial governments. Thus history is dealt with first in a broad
overview; then in terms of the particulars of governments and departments.
The second chapter identifies some prominent issues in literacy for
the 1990s. These include the nature and degree of political will for
the development of literacy in Canada; efforts to develop a range of
learner-centred and community-specific literacy programming, and their
relationships to moves towards co-ordination and accountability in programming
activity; the uncertain future relations of community, institutional
and workplace programs; and the capacity of the literacy policy process
to absorb the lessons being learned in practice.
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