The ALNARC (Adult Literacy and Numeracy Australian Research Consortium) National Forum held in mid February in Melbourne provided an opportunity to review current research being coordinated through ALNARC and to reflect on the value of a national research network which can reach from academe and bureaucracy to classroom and across many different settings and jurisdictions.

ALNARC has two main purposes: to carry out policy research into adult literacy and numeracy, in VET and in the community, and to help build a culture of research across the field of practice. In her presentation to the Forum, Catherine Gyngell, representing DETYA, talked about the historical development of ALNARC and role of ALNARC as a national research network. As a national network ALNARC is well positioned to explore policies and trends which have commonalities across different settings but where implementation can take very different paths depending on local circumstances. ALNARC is able to undertake coordinated research projects across the different jurisdictions and to pull together the findings in ways that inform policy development at the state and national levels.

The ALNARC research projects presented and discussed at the two day forum reflected the potential of such a network and enabled its work to date to be measured against the expectations of the field. Over 150 people, including industry training people, RTO (registered training organisation) teachers, adult literacy practitioners, government representatives and researchers, came together to discuss the outcomes of ALNARC research around literacy in national training packages and literacy provision for marginalised groups in the community.

The move to ‘embed’ literacy within industry standards has raised a complex bundle of issues involving different stake-holders, different providers and contested understandings about what literacy is and why we need it. Research undertaken through ALNARC has explored the meanings of literacy in training packages through six state projects based in different industries and different kinds of delivery sites. Reports of the six studies, presented in draft form at the forum, will provide the basis of a synthesis report tying together the various findings and producing a detailed national picture of the place and problematics of literacy in training packages and ideas for more effective integration of literacy within vocational training.

ANTA representative Rob Bluett spoke about the importance of ALNARC’s work in producing a national perspective on adult literacy in VET. He said that the teaching of generic skills in the course of teaching technical skills represented a huge challenge to RTOs. The other big challenge he discussed was assessment, and the need to find fair and effective ways of assessing competence; training packages he said will "stand or fall" on whether units of competence can be effectively and consistently assessed in relation to each other.

Bob Paton, representing MERSITAB (the Manufacturing, Engineering and Related Services Industry) reminded the audience that many industry standards were set as the result of industrial relations issues, rather than on the basis of training requirements. He spoke of problems in the area of assessment that are being experienced in many industries: for example, the imposition of written assessment tasks in order to assess work skills. He said that there was an issue of fairness in ‘pen and paper’ tests that may discriminate on the basis of literacy skills, not work skills. On the other hand, we cannot be sure that oral testing is always valid and reliable. However, "there must be a balance in there somewhere". He concluded by asking what ALNARC could do to contribute to the quality of assessment in training packages.

In the afternoon, Damon Anderson, Research Fellow at CEET (the Centre for the Economics of Education and Training) at Monash University, gave a provocative talk comparing the understandings of literacy that were implicitly constructed in the discourse of training packages, with more ‘traditional’ understandings about social and critical literacies. He asked, what would Freire have said about training packages? A lively debate ensued in which one participant replied that Freire would have embraced training packages on the grounds that they provide a framework which can be applied in many different ways, rather than prescribe a fixed content.

A panel of three literacy practitioners from different RTOs each spoke about their experiences in working to ensure that literacy was included centrally in training programs structured by training packages. Rhonda Raisbeck from Holmesglen Institute of TAFE talked about her involvement in a program of training workplace trainers and assessors in the forest products industry. Rhonda said that working in industry as a literacy teacher is fraught with difficulty because there are so many stake-holders, "it is like working out a Venn diagram". The RTO has an agenda while being reliant on the funding body, the ITAB has an agenda; the union has an agenda, and the enterprise has an agenda. They (the RTO) come somewhere in the middle and have to try to ensure that all the stake-holders get something out of it.

Linda Wyse, from Linda Wyse and Associates, reminded the gathering that at this early stage of implementation, it is easier to raise issues than to find answers. What holds good for one set of learners at one site, may not hold good for others, at another site. The training packages themselves vary greatly in the way that they address language, literacy and numeracy (LL&N). Language, literacy and numeracy in training packages need to be addressed in two key areas: we need to understand LL&N skills as underpinning or enabling the technical skills in the units of competence and we then need to look at LL&N skills as communication skills when they are overtly identified as such as parts of particular jobs.

Peter Waterhouse from Workplace Learning Initiatives talked about multiple literacies, local literacies, and the different ‘truths’ in relation to literacy. He argued that training packages can be read as creating the space for innovative educators to explore and colonise. "There is plenty of scope for dialogue on design and there is also scope for exploring languages and literacies but they may not be the languages and literacies we are most used to. We may need to restrain (and re-train) our urge to teach, and to cultivate our capacity to listen and to learn from the multiple voices and tales of the workplace."

Finally, Jean Searle, director of the Queensland Centre of ALNARC, presented ALNARC’s plans for carrying out more specifically focused research in the area of literacy and training packages for 2000. Projects presently on the drawing board include:

• a review of the different administrative guidelines and the different forms of resource allocation across states, and how these impact on the implementation of training packages, and influence literacy and numeracy outcomes,
• an examination of the role of WELL (Workplace English Language and Literacy) programs in supporting provision for literacy in training packages
• an investigation of the various strategies that RTOs use to provide/accommodate literacy and numeracy support in delivering training,
• an investigation of the extent to which literacy and/or numeracy problems impact on the successful demonstration of competence in the making assessments, and how literacy and numeracy issues are dealt with at the point of assessment, and,
• an exploration of the assumptions about ‘literacy’ on which the current arrangements are based, and how well these assumptions articulate with practices on the ground.

After discussing the proposals in small groups, many ideas were put forward from the floor as to possible lines of investigation and questions that could and should be explored in relation to literacy and training packages.

The first day of the Forum saw a great deal of debate and sharing between and amongst practitioners and other stake-holders. It seems that ALNARC had lived up to its promise of doing and disseminating research which made connections between the worlds of industry, government, research and adult literacy practice. Hopefully, the Forum enabled participants to postion themselves more strategically and constructively within the Venn diagram that Rhonda Raisbeck spoke of, or to design our own diagrams which might help us navigate the political and practical complexities of ‘literacy in training packages’.

The second day of the Forum focused on small scale practitioner research in relation to literacy programs for special needs groups. The findings and discussion will be reviewed in the next issue of the ALM. The text of the main presentations and ALNARC research reports are being made available on the ALNARC website: http://www.staff.vu.edu.au/alnarc.

Jill Sanguinetti