celebrating literacy

The party put on by the St. Christopher House Adult Literacy Program was the BEST! It was a fantastic gathering of literacy practitioners, literacy learners and musicians. Thanks Judi and Fran for a great day of catching up with old friends and making new ones. We have always been wildly impressed with how you consistently enagage a diverse group of learners and tutors in meaningful learning experiences. Despite all the constraints and barriers, you work hard, and with great success, to find the opportunities and openings. And now you treat us all to this most excellent day. Wow.

There were so many highlights but an important part of the event for many of us was the presentation about the history of SCHALP by Nancy Friday and Jean Unda. They referred to two documents that were so important to the founding of SCHALP and are deeply meaningful to many literacy workers. Both documents discuss how education can be used either to reproduce existing structures and promote compliance or uncover systemic inequity and foster critical thinking and action.

Literacy: Charitable Enterprise or Political Right created by Sidney Pratt, Naldi Nomez and Patricio Urzua in October, 1977 draws on the 1975 Declaration of Persepolis and describes how the principles of the declaration can be put into practice in community-based literacy programs in downtown Toronto.

Here is an excerpt about curriculum development:

The human being is seen as a subject, acting upon the objective reality, responding in multiple ways to challenges, creating and transforming reality in relationship with other human beings. Society is seen as historic, cultural and dynamic. Historic, because it is relative to time and space so that it is also human being. Dynamic, since humans are acting upon society as subjects, society is always changing. Education perceived as a historical dialogue where situations are posed as problems and analyzed.