Return-Path: <nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id h5B8tgC11331; Wed, 11 Jun 2003 04:55:42 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 04:55:42 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <28231CE1.3D8F4EEE.0004C68E@aol.com> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: HthKar@aol.com To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-ASSESSMENT:286] Re: construction and basic skills X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 X-Mailer: Atlas Mailer 2.0 Status: O Content-Length: 3105 Lines: 12 Joy First you have to find out the company culture. It may be a new style workplace with flattened management structures and a continuous improvement approach to training, in which case construction workers will need a whole load of literacy skills in order that every text (using the word loosely) in the workplace can be written jointly by all workers (you can refer to Gramsci/Freire on this which gives your work an extra zip for one reason or another) or it may be old style. You might need to do an organisational needs analysis. Then you can do a training needs analysis/task analysis. This involves walking round with a clip board. These used to have to say things like reading, spelling, punctuation etc on , but now I think you will have to check off bullet points from the curriculum if you want your local LSC to fund it. Then you have to have a steering committee meeting to agree your product with a team. You can get unions involved in this. It is I think less classic behaviourist occupational development procedure. See Rogers and somebody for the ESOL version. You can read all about doing this is a booklet published by NIACE called Breaking DOwn Barriers, a certificate in workplace basic skills training Of course, if the employees are working towards one of the national vocational qualifications, basic skills will be built into the text books written for their courses. Some of these are quite good: the level of the text is carefully controlled. They include a lot of good materials for use in oral work. I recommend in particular Brett P 1991 Constuction Competences for NVQ (CORE)A Building Craft FOundation. This has nice sections on for example, scale drawings, and it even has some word searches using vocabulary that has been used in each chapter. I have problems with the methodology suggested in Breaking Down Barriers in that it seems to assume there is some kind of a match between the job description of an individual and his or her level. You should be assessing individuals, not their jobs, indeed for a scheme to meet even the old BSA standards this was compulsory. If you don't do this, then you run into the classic problem of many NVQ on the job courses thatthey were felt to be certifying skills people already had, rather than teaching them anything new. Of course, you might find people who seem not to be up to their jobs, which puts them at risk, and I suppose that if you were up front with the unions and employees about this it might limit your marketing potential unless it was a very new style company in which union power is very much lessened. I recently put together a portfolio of work at Level 2 key skills for a person taking a level 1 construction industry qualification, and it was only I think lack of time that prevented us working towards a level 3. Someof the work was definitey level 3. I think that there are things in New Zealand called training packages;they really have pared literacy and numeracy training down to the very least that can possibly be taught, if that is what you are aiming for. Karen Heath
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