Hi All,

Having followed the conversation yesterday, I thought I would jump in here today to talk about my experiences in the U.S. and also South Asia.  I found the exchange on transferring learning to family and community members quite interesting.  

During my time with World Education our work in Nepal with adolescent girls in nonformal education classes provided an opportunity to for these girls to share information with both family and community members.  The Girls Access to Education (GATE) Program integrated health education and literacy learning.  The class provided girls a safe place to discuss topics not often talked at in the home.  One such topic was trafficking. A series of booklets was produced and along with sharing important information about the issue of trafficking girls from small villages to larger Nepali cities or to cities in India, the booklets encouraged girls to share this information with people in their families and with their friends not enrolled in the literacy classes.  The transfer of information and communicating about trafficking and the consequences was as important as the girls learning to read.

Other literacy programs in Nepal integrated livelihoods development and IPM (integrated pest management).  Since most people in Nepal are farmers, the technology transferred through integrating IPM into literacy materials for neo-literates was innovative.  Another innovation was transferring this information to women farmers, so that they could bring the technology back home and share it with other family members.  

For the livelihoods development work, groups of women actually studied the feasibility of different business opportunities.  Did the village really need another tailor?  Was there a market for the sale of soap in nearby Kathmandu?   How could they improve their farming so that would have vegetables to sell in the market?  Watching women work together in a group and assess what was most profitable and whether to take on ventures as individuals or as partners was a wonderful experience for me.  

Having been based in Boston for the past few years and working for a nonprofit, Boston Partners in Education, that is not directly involved with adult basic education, my interest is in how students within the Boston Public Schools are supported by their families and friends to academically achieve, mature as confident young adults and graduate from high school.  Of the 57,000 students that attend Boston Public Schools, 18% of the are English Language Learners or have "limited English proficiency."  In Boston last year, 78% of students in 3rd grade passed the annual reading exam they take, and 72% passed the English Language Arts exam in 4th grade, so there is are about 25% of students in elementary grades that don't have the reading and writing skills they need to succeed in school.  

Family involvement in their children's education is crucial.  In Boston, there are family literacy programs that encourage families to read to their kids for at least twenty minutes a day, four or more times per week.  These programs are run in partnership with schools, and parents have conferences with their child's teachers two times a year to discuss the reading activities they do with their children.  I think that there is an opportunity for parents and children to teach one another in programs like this.  

Boston also has something called a School Readiness Initiative that is meant to help parents ready their children, aged 0-5, for school.  The initiative is fairly new, but I know there is an adult education component to it, since of the ~ 32,000 households in the city with children in this age group, half of the parents (16,000) have no more than a high school diploma, 7,500 have not completed high school, and 8,400 of these households are headed by parents with limited or no English proficiency.

I would be interested in hearing more about family literacy programs going on in the U.S. and other countries, and what you see as the benefits and challenges of these programs.  

Thanks,
Pamela Civins






>>> "Juliet Merrifield" <j.merrifield at zen.co.uk> 9/10/2007 11:33 AM >>>

I think we know remarkably little about how learning is shared or
transferred from one context to another or one person to another.  Some
learning projects deliberately seek a wider impact than just the
individual participant.  I'm thinking of a World Education project in
Mali working with Parent Associations -- Barbara, this might have been
one of your projects?  As I remember it (and I've only read about it in
the UNESCO report I mentioned earlier) the aim was to build the Parent
Associations as community organisations, with individual literacy and
numeracy skills as one of the means of this.  There were all sorts of
spin offs.

Family literacy programmes also deliberately aim for impacts beyond the
individual participants, though children are usually the main focus
rather than other family members.  Your example of the financial
literacy materials is a good one, David, suggesting what I am aware of
anecdotally, that take home materials that are well produced with useful
information do get passed on a lot.  This is certainly true of ICT
learning materials, that I know get passed around other family members.

In my own centre we have done in the past (and expect to in the future)
literacy and numeracy work alongside and embedded with community
development training courses, recruiting local leaders in small
neighbourhood and other organisations.  The community development
training is planned to help them be more effective as community leaders,
and the literacy and numeracy work simply supports the skills needed for
some of that (minutes, reports to funders, book-keeping etc).

Juliet

Juliet Merrifield

-----Original Message-----
From: specialtopics-bounces at nifl.gov 
[mailto:specialtopics-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of David J. Rosen
Sent: 10 September 2007 15:40
To: specialtopics at nifl.gov 
Subject: [SpecialTopics 576] Learning transferred to family and
communitymembers

Juliet and Barbara,

I wonder if you could address how what participants learn in programs  
is transferred to family and community
members.  Several years ago in the U.S., for example, some adult ESOL  
programs added financial literacy and home-buying awareness  
components. Students often said that they wanted extra sets of  
learning materials to give to other family members who wanted to open  
a checking account or buy a home.  I wonder if there are examples of  
this "transference" or possibly "shared" learning in any of the  
programs you have worked with, and if you can suggest strategies for  
encouraging it.

David J. Rosen
Special Topics Discussion Moderator
djrosen at comcast.net 



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