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On the invitation of Dr Edem Adubra, Head of the Secretariat, International Task Force on Teachers for EFA at Unesco, Tessa Welch attended this meeting, and presented on the African Storybook Project as part of the session on innovative teaching and learning of youth and adult literacy embedded in efforts for sustainable development.
Some of the thinking on literacy and lifelong learning
The meeting was held against the backdrop of the formal adoption of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) scheduled for the UN Summit September 25th-27th, 2015 in New York.
A notable inclusion in the SDGs is ‘to reduce inequality within and among countries’ (Goal 10), and it is in terms of Goal 10 that we need to read Goal 4, which directly affects education:
Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
The relationship between literacy and lifelong learning does not need to be spelled out: literacy is the foundation of education and lifelong learning. Hence it comes as no surprise that the first declaration in the Communique to emerge from the Global Meeting on Literacy and Sustainable Societies was
Ensuring equitable access to quality literacy learning opportunities as a crucial foundation of lifelong learning.
However, the Global Meeting did not, in my view, satisfactorily resolve the link between literacy and sustainable development. At one level, the link is obvious, but people struggled to move beyond this obvious link. For example, one of the speakers simply declared that there cannot be development when 60% of a population are not literate (as is the case in Benin). He did not explain the relationship between development and literacy.
David Atchoarena, Unesco Director of Division for Policies and Lifelong Learning Systems, made the most sense on this topic. He said literacy should be seen as a ‘transversal effort’ across the other sustainable development goals. Without literacy, there is no lifelong learning. Without lifelong learning, people cannot deal with the complexity of modern life. His Division covers, among other areas, ICT in Education and hosts a dedicated programme on mobile learning.
Others argued that learning should not only be ‘lifelong’, but also ‘life wide’ (referring to the bridge between formal and non-formal), and that literacy should be understood as a continuum. This means that functional literacy cannot be defined in absolute terms, because the purpose of literacy varies at different points on the lifelong learning continuum.
Dan Wagner, UNESCO Chair in Learning and Literacy, and Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania also made a useful comment:
We need to learn more about how supply and demand for literacy will change in the face of globalisation and environmental challenges where multi-sectoral.
Some initiatives/concepts relevant to Saide’s work
The notion of ‘Learning Cities’ was a concept given expression in a presentation by the Mayor of Balanga City in the Philippines, Mr Garcia. He said that there were four factors influencing success in literacy for lifelong learning for citizens:
- Infrastructure
- Teachers
- A learning environment
- Networks (peer support).
He expands further:
Nurturing a culture and the love of learning is not something that happens overnight. This has to be practiced until it becomes a habit and accepted as an inherent part of the larger culture. Parents have a big role to play in promoting this culture of learning in the household. They need to be reminded that they are, in fact, the primary teachers of their children. Leaders of the city, in government and in the private sectors, also need to be models of lifelong learning, meaning they themselves have to continuously learn. For this reason, creating that learning environment in a city can be challenging as it takes careful planning, the integration of well thought-out policies and resources to build the needed infrastructure (i.e., library, audio-visual rooms, parks and open spaces, etc.).
He talked also about the way to integrate values education into literacy efforts – trying to influence people away from smoking and drinking, and encouraging an understanding of exercise as a contributor to health.
Both Veronica McKay (Kha Ri Gude Literacy Campaign in South Africa) and Perez Gonzalez (National Institute for Adult Education in Mexico) spoke about massive literacy campaigns. Both in Mexico and in South Africa the campaigns reach very large numbers of learners by a cascade model using volunteers, with a strong emphasis on assessment, validation and certification. However, the Mexican Education Model for Life and Work has a wider target audience. It is for people over 15 years of age who have missed out on basic literacy, primary or secondary education, or would like to improve their personal, family, work, social or civic performance.
Aija Tuna from Latvia has spearheaded a massive project for transforming schools into multi-functional learning centres. Building Sustainable Communities: How Schools can Help. This is very interesting for us in South Africa where the notion of teachers’ centres/learning centres/ multi-purpose community centres has been around for a very long time, with not a great deal of success. Perhaps we should study what Latvia is doing.
Another interesting project to follow is that headed by Prof Christine Garbe (University of Cologne). In less than two years, she has built ELINET (the European Literacy Network) consisting of 78 partner organisations from 28 European countries (only Poland, Latvia, Slovakia, and Luxembourg are not part of the Network). The goals are to work together to create literate environments, improve the teaching of literacy, and to do this in an inclusive way, contributing to equity.
Progress and ‘way forward’
There was a feeling within the meeting that the cause of adult education and adult literacy has taken a back seat in the last fifteen years. Alan Tuckett (known as the ‘man who invented the adult learner’) gave this feeling the clearest expression when he said that there had been very little progress in Education for All Goal 4:
Achieve a 50% improvement in adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, and equitable access to basic and continuing education for all adults.
Improvements that there have been in literacy rates have largely been as a result of illiterate people dying, rather than more people being made literate. The international statistics on literacy are sobering. As a consequence of slow and uneven progress, 757 million adults, two-thirds of whom are women, lack literacy skills. Other marginalized groups such as ethnic and linguistic minorities, people with disabilities, people in rural areas and out-of-school children are also dramatically over-represented. At least 250 million children of primary school age are likely to enter adulthood without the functional literacy skills needed to participate fully in society.
A proposal to address this was made by Prof Arne Carlsen of the Unesco Institute for Lifelong Learning in Hamburg. He proposed the formation of a Global Alliance on Literacy which will attempt to ensure that in the Education 2030 literacy is seen as central and a key driver for achieving the SDGs. This proposal has been incorporated into the Communique.
The Saide mission statement taken together with the first of our open learning principles, is clearly aligned to both SDG 4 and the Communique from the Global Meeting.
Our mission statement reads as follows:
- Increasing equitable and meaningful access to knowledge, skills and learning through the adoption of open learning principles and distance education.
The first open learning principle is:
- Learners are provided with opportunities and capacity for lifelong learning.
Saide’s recent focus on literacy (particularly through the African Storybook Project) as the key component of building ‘capacity for lifelong learning’, as well as one of our key slogans ‘access with success’ (most recently a focus in the Siyaphumelela Project) are two of the ways in which we are working towards sustainable development in the Sub-Saharan Africa context.
We could also argue that Saide is, through the African Storybook initiative, creating a demand for literacy in the mother tongue. Our work with a range of partners across Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in terms of cost sharing and collective impact, is clearly aligned with this international agreement.
Finally, the African Storybook Project is an innovative approach to the teaching of literacy, but we have to be careful that we continue to implement in ways that are directed at reducing educational inequality both within and across countries.
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