Return-Path: <nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id g5D22ZX02445; Wed, 12 Jun 2002 22:02:35 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 22:02:35 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <3D07FBDA.147E4B63@goldfieldaccess.net> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: Archie Willard <millard@goldfieldaccess.net> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-HEALTH:3717] Followup to Illinois New Readers for New Life State Conference X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-NSCPCD (Win98; U) Status: O Content-Length: 3515 Lines: 66 Last week-end I was in Peoria, Illinois, to attend the Illinois New Readers for New Life State Conference. This was a special time in adult literacy for me to see all the adult learners and how excited they were being a part of making the health literacy video for the AMA. In order to bring awareness to other doctors about some patients’ poor literacy skills, Dr. Terry Davis brought a team to make a video about the problems that adult learners face when they go into a medical clinic and also to do research on this subject. There were camera people, production people and people from the AMA to assist. Michael Wolf, PhD of Northwestern University was there interviewing adult learners on a health literacy project that he is working on. The New Readers of Illinois teamed up with this research team to help make health literacy better. At this conference, we were all students and all teachers at the same time. We talked about health literacy from both sides and learned from each other. To my knowledge, never before has anyone partnered with adult learners in this way. There were many ideas and some were very good ones that can be used to make health literacy better. Friday night Common Cause had an open house. They showed us their facilities that they are so proud of, and well they should be. The building they use is an old church that was sold to them for one dollar. They are very excited about what they are doing there. They have a reading center, a computer room, a day-care center and church services are still held in this building. They do fund-raising and many things are donated to them. Many people volunteer their time to make the center run better. They are a grass-roots organization. We were all touched by the people who ran the center and the love that was in the room that night. What happens at this center is what America is all about. Saturday morning people were coming together at Bradley University. They were getting reacquainted with old friends and making new friends before the conference got underway. About 80 adult learners plus some professionals were at this conference. There was a general session on health literacy. Dr. Terry Davis gave a good overview of health literacy in our country and led a discussion. Mark Williams, MD and Ruth Parker, MD each spoke and answered questions. They all stressed that they were here to learn from the adult learners Some of my thoughts about the day: If we are going to move forward with adult literacy it will take the education field, the medical people and the adult learners all working together. One of the things I learned was that health literacy is a bigger problem in our country than we realize and that only 5 million dollars has been spent to learn more about it. Yet it has cost our country billions of dollars. When talking about people having social problems because of poor literacy, Congress and society in general do not seem very interested, but if you say that we have health problems because of poor literacy skills they tend to listen. We all came away with a better understanding of each other and a lot was learned. This day should be just a beginning in health literacy. I hope other professions will partner with adult learners and I hope they will let the adult learners be the teachers. For me it was a great day and it was good to be a part of what happened there. Archie Willard Adult Learner -- Archie Willard millard@goldfieldaccess.net URL - http://www.readiowa.org/archiew.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jan 17 2003 - 14:41:33 EST