Literacy Basics - Community Literacy of Ontario

Where is Everybody?

Introduction

From our personal experiences as literacy practitioners, from our knowledge of our local communities and from the results of provincial and national surveys, we know there is a need for literacy programs. Literacy agencies spend considerable time and effort recruiting learners using a variety of promotional tools. However, despite the need and our efforts to respond to that need, learner recruitment is often a challenge for many literacy agencies.

For example, Community Literacy of Ontario (www.nald.ca/clo.htm) delivered live, online training workshops to 50 Ontario literacy practitioners in May 2006. During those workshops, practitioners answered the following question: how important is learner recruitment in your agency? Here are their responses:

• What we do now seems to work well. There are always new learners. (18%)
• We used to be able to attract new learners quite easily, but lately there are fewer and fewer. (33%)
• It's becoming a serious issue. Our numbers of new learners are down. We need to do something about it. (31%)
• It has been a problem for quite some time. We have tried a number of strategies but nothing seems to work. (12%)
• Code Red! We are in desperate need of more learners in our program. (6%)

Where are they are all? Why aren’t adults with low literacy skills banging down our doors? What can the current research tell us? Could we be better at recruiting students and designing our programs around their needs? What are the barriers to attending programs, and what can we do about it? What typically motivates learners to upgrade their skills? What effective recruitment strategies are other literacy agencies using? Are there useful tools and resources that can help literacy organizations with recruitment? In this online training module Community Literacy of Ontario explores these key questions.

NEXT PAGE

Designed and hosted by in collaboration with CLO