Functional Illiteracy. Day two at Biblioteka Botkyrka

Our second day of attendance at Literacy for All conference at Bibliotek Botkyrka lived up to the impressive standard set by the previous day.

We had three speakers in the morning:

Qarin. Franker fro the Depatment of Swedish, at the University of Gothenburg I Sweden, Birgitta Notlof from the Livstycket Knowledge and Design Centre, in Tenasta, Stockholm and Laura Mendez form LL-Forlaget publishing house.

Today I will write about the first two speakers. 

Qarin Frankar spoke to us about multimodal communication and the new approaches we must take regarding literacy in order to adapt to this new way of thinking.

 She is referring to new technologies which we encounter daily - smart phones, tablets and cloud computing etc. In order to function well in society today it is necessary to learn a new type of language almost, with new symbols and terminology. Many every-day transactions have migrated to the internet now and unless we are able navigate this new online world we become isolated. 

In order to help people to adapt and cope with this new world we must take a new approach to teaching. We can no longer have the 'autonomous' way of teaching, with a passive student and active teacher. We must look at literacy and learning as a social practice. Something that happens inside and outside the classroom. Students must learn as a group to cope and manage situations together.

She also spoke of starting points when teaching literacy. Instead of starting with what a student doesn't know, it is better to start with what they do know. For example, start with reading the bus ticket which the student used to arrive to the classroom. Or look at the milk carton they buy in the supermarket.

 Many people, who would be classed as illiterate by conventional standards, learn to cope by recognising symbols, images, or differentiating colours and function well usng these methods. It would be inaccurate to say that these people are illiterate.  They may be perfectly capable to read In their own language, just unable to understand the language of the country they now live in. So they learn and adapt using other means. 

These people often get forgotten in society, however. Qarin gave as an example election slips and posters from a recent election in Sweden. Students, who could not read Swedish, we're asked to look at the posters and try to reconstruct the narrative from the image. None of them guessed that they were for an election. She also showed us the voting slips which gave no clues to which candidate belonged to which political party. In fact all the voting slips looked identical. In comparison, the voting slip from the 1994 election in South Africa had symbols which represented the candidates as well as pictures of the candidates themselves. This happend because it was acknowledged that a large majority of the voters would have literacy difficulties.

Our second speaker was Birgitta Notlof from the Livstycket Design Center in Stockholm. 

She gave us an animated presentation about her work with immigrant women. She describes it as Functional Pedagogy, where pupils use all their senses to learn. They make, create and design through drawing and embroidery, all the while they are learning through conversation and experience. 

They use methods to learn such as looking in a mirror while sounding out the words, tracing their fingers over textured letters and composing rhymes about each sound or letter they learn. 

These methods go back to Qarin's theory of learning being a social practice,the students feel and experience the learning. 

At the same time they relive, and share their own life-stories. Many were forced to flee their own countries due to war or persecution. These women would have been denied education in their own countries and are deeply affected by the loss they have experienced in their lives. 

The design centre has a range of quality fabrics and household items designed by the women, each with a story to go with it.  It was a very inspiring presentation about empowerment and knowledge. 

Livsycket translates as bodice,  a recurring motif in the
designs. This bodice supports the body and gives women
strength, in the same way literacy and collaobration has
given these women strength. 

In the afternoon we again, attended a workshop. This time we used the Johari Window model to discuss what needs were provided or not provided by our respective libraries. It generated a lot of discussion about our limitations and desires when it comes to providing library services. I would highly recommend this method for problem solving for specific topics if you are working in a team.