The Role of SACAL in
changing times
During 1999 and 2000 ALNARC worked with the South Australian Council of Adult Literacy on
a project that investigated the changing conditions of teacher's work in the literacy and
numeracy field. Out of this work SACAL was commissioned to undertake a project to examine
issues of leadership in adult literacy. Ms. Baljit Bhela completed the work for SACAL and
developed a discussion paper of her findings. The discussion paper acted as a conversation
starter for the 2000 SACAL Annual General Meeting held in October 2000 and the summary of
the paper is presented here. When a published version of the paper is available we will
provide details on this website.
Click here to read a
summary of Baljit Bhela's discussion paper.
ALNARC (SA) Collaborations with the Spencer
Foundation
During 2000 three projects have been supported by funding
from the Spencer Foundation. Outlines are attached here and reports on the projects will
be available in mid-2001.
- Women experiencing domestic
violence: an investigation into their needs for literacy services.
Jane Gunn, Protea Training, Adelaide South Australia
- Unpacking feminist approaches
to language and literacy education.
Jo Martin, Women’s Education, Adelaide Institute of TAFE, South Australia
- The Performance Factor:
Conjuring Spirits
Liz Campbell, Women’s Education Program, Adelaide
Institute of TAFE
- Creating Numeracy
Assessment Materials to Match NRS Indicators of Competence
Chris Lake, Rosemary Wood, Chris Campbell, and Paul Mulroney, Private training providers,
South Australia
Women
experiencing domestic violence: an investigation into their needs for literacy services.
Jane Gunn, Protea Training, Adelaide South Australia
The broad interest of this study relates to how the educational and training needs,
with particular attention to the literacy needs of women who have experienced violence at
home are perceived and met by service providers at the first point of contact. Community
health and counselling services in the western suburbs of Adelaide were the agencies
involved in this study.
The question was framed
- How do services providers recognise the educational needs of women moving on from
domestic violence
Unpacking
feminist approaches to language and literacy education.
A Report into the pedagogical practices of the Women’s
Education Program offered in Technical and Further Education Institutes in South Australia
Jo Martin, Women’s Education, Adelaide Institute of TAFE, South Australia
This report documents the explorations of a group of feminist educators. The group was
interested in questions relating to feminist pedagogy and to some extent the relationship
between these questions and their development of ‘literacy pedagogies’. Some
lecturers who were new to the program were asking for written information on how to teach
in a feminist way. Others wanted to explore more explicitly their feminist leanings.
Initial questions guiding the project included:
- How do lecturers teach in Women’s Education in South Australia?
- What does it mean when we say we teach from a feminist perspective?
- What pedagogical practices do we employ?
- How do Women’s Education lecturers think about their feminist practices?
Two further areas of investigation emerged in planning the research project. The first
was a focus on ‘literacy’ practices within Women’s Education
teaching/learning. The group explored how a feminist practice was related to the
objectives of Women’s Education and the ‘fit’ with literacy learning? A
second level of inquiry was to investigate the (literacy related) learning experiences for
students.
THE PERFORMANCE FACTOR: CONJURING SPIRITS.
Liz Campbell, Women’s Education Program,
Adelaide Institute of TAFE
Liz Campbell describes a journey she took with a group of women in a creative writing
class. Liz invited the women to join her in writing monologues for performance and, in her
own words, she wondered "How important was the performance factor in this creative
writing process?"
The project describes the outcomes of a writing class that used public performance as a
central element associated with the women’s journey of learning.
Click here to go to the project site.
CREATING NUMERACY ASSESSMENT MATERIALS TO MATCH NRS
INDICATORS OF COMPETENCE
Chris Lake, Rosemary Wood, Chris Campbell, and Paul Mulroney, Private training
providers, South Australia
From July to December 2000 a group of South Australian literacy practitioners worked
together to devise a set of numeracy assessment materials, to be used in pre-training
assessments for a government funded literacy and numeracy program. The project provides
two outcomes
- a set of assessment exemplars
- a report on the process of the work, its context, the problems encountered and the
outcomes.
The work was not undertaken as a formal research project but was a response to the
practical demands made of literacy educators in LANT programs. Although it has actually
evolved as "practitioner-research" the educators agreed to keep the reporting
process within the frame of an anecdotal record of experience, rather than rewriting the
work as an academic record of the development of assessment exemplars.
