Community and "standards"

Government reports and policy documents often use the language of learner-centredness and community. It is now commonly observed that programming, curriculum and teaching methods should be diverse, that programs rooted in learners' daily environments can most easily adapt to their needs, and that community involvement in literacy programming builds a feeling of "ownership."

Highlighting this language in government reports can lead to a rosy view of the diversity of programs and their integration into communities. But there are many questions concerning the relations between rhetoric and reality, policy and programming, in regard to learner-centredness and community-specific programming. The achievement of community specificity in literacy programming, should not be exaggerated. Community specificity is one principle; it suggests some measure of program autonomy. Program accountability is another principle; it is sometimes at odds with community specificity and program autonomy. Their relations remain to be worked out.

At the same time that learner-centred practices in literacy work have been developed, and a variety of programming forms have been elaborated, there have arisen pressures for "accountability," for "standards" or definitions of "quality," for definitions of "good practice" or "exemplary practice," and for "consistency" or "articulation" between programs. For example, in 1988 the Council of Ministers of Education announced actions that provinces and territories would take regarding literacy: these included increasing publicity, programming, and practitioner training; and "the establishment, as much as possible, of coherent programs and consistent standards in order to facilitate the recognition of literacy achievement to the greatest extent possible by educational institutions, employers, and the public."¹⁵⁹ The Movement for Canadian Literacy in 1991 declared that the "essential next step in the development of effective literacy level education in Canada must be the definition of standards for the provision of that education."¹⁶⁰ The 1991-2 policy and evaluation process in Ontario, described in initial documents as aiming at "a comprehensive and unifying approach to the development of policy and evaluation," is designed to yield a steady march, through the preliminary steps of policy and guidelines for quality, to guidelines for evaluation.¹⁶¹