Blog Every Day in June Day 24 : Functional Illiteracy Workshop -Sweden

Today's guest contributor is Lara Lopez Boronat, a Spanish information professional. 
Earlier this month she attended a workshop in Sweden looking at the role libraries play in improving literacy. Thanks for sharing your experience with us Lara!  -Maria Savvidis

After completing my studies in Spain, I worked in Spain and Berlin. My current role is as a Library Assistant in the Information and Reference Library in Richmond (London) and requires a lot of IT training for people from the Borough and beyond. We mostly provide courses about Internet searching, iPads and Tablets, database queries and eBooks.

Twenty library and information professionals (including myself) were selected from around Europe to attend the Functional Illiteracy Workshop in Botkyrka (Stockholm, Sweden), promoted by the European Union Grundtvig Programme. I was interested in attending the workshop to enhance my knowledge and skills in information literacy and to find out what other European professionals are also doing in this area.

Over five days we discussed the role of libraries in society and in the provision of literacy skills, as well as focusing on the creation of an European network to share best practices and cooperation in between us.

Botkyrka, where the workshop was held, is the county in Sweden with a large percentage of immigrants. Libraries are essential in the process of teaching Swedish to refugees and immigrants. Although the Swedish government provides free courses for the Swedish language, libraries support this leaning with further activities and materials such as easy reading books, meeting groups and afternoon tea talks.

It surprised me the importance that Swedish professionals give to the learning in their own language. During the lectures, different people emphasized the essential right for immigrants of studying in their mother tongue, as well as also learning the Swedish language. The library where the workshop was held had a huge collection of books in more than 50 languages, and some library professionals speak more than two languages.

Lectures during the workshop were based mostly around immigration and its issues, as well as theory about the definition and variables of literacy. After a few discussions we all agreed that literacy is not only to learn how to write and read, but to be able to make functional activities in our daily life. We learnt how teachers use colours, images and visiting places with their pupils to make them proactive learners. 

We had great examples of literacy programmes, such as Livstycket. Here female immigrants are the main focus of the activities which include sewing, embroidery and textile printing; this is also combined with theoretical education in Swedish, social studies and IT. The key point of these activities is to work on their confidence by giving them practical skills that they can use in a variety of situations. 

Easy-reading newspapers are also trending in Sweden. They focus on people that are learning Swedish and people with learning disabilities and adapt the daily news to their comprehension level. For example, politicians’ campaigns are full of rhetoric and difficult to understand the meaning of every message. In these newspapers they make the messages understandable and direct. There is also a webpage where you can comment about the news and ask questions to politicians. 

In the afternoons, the group got together to speak about the lectures that we had in the morning and to create a European network of literacy professionals, our main aim. We talked about how to cooperate within our institutions to create a network of information professionals for literacy programmes. We also shared experiences and best practices to take ideas and to adapt them to our workplaces.

For me, the best idea I found in these talks was the “Dog reading” activity. In Ljubljana (Slovenia) children read books aloud to a real dog. In this way, they practice their reading skills and they improve their communication skills while at the same time they have fun.

Now that the workshop is over, we have to work in the network development. We have called it “Literacy for all -European Library Network”. At the moment we are working to compile everything from the workshop week and to make it public. This is the blog where we will be writing: http://functionalilliteracy.org/ and soon there will be more tools to share information with you.

To sum up this exciting week, libraries must be the soul of the community, not only providing traditional services but supporting the development and skills of migrants and people with learning difficulties. Literacy is the key to this improvement, people are not illiterate because they are poor, people are poor because they are illiterate.

Backward Design: Rethinking and Planning Library Instruction

Sarah Graham wrote a fantastic post on June 7th (“Why brainstorming doesn't work”) about introducing debate instead of typical free-association exercises to engage students and encourage creativity. In her discussion, she briefly mentions the obstacles of deeper instruction given limited time and only “one shot” in which to teach. But what if you had the opportunity for more frequent contact? In this regard, my colleagues and I have been somewhat fortunate.

My big project this past year has been leading the redesign of two online credit-bearing information literacy courses. While they have been very popular, they’ve undergone only minor changes since they were developed at The Ohio State University over a decade ago. However, technology and research into student information behavior has made large strides, and it was time for a major revision. In this post, I’d like to the share a little about the backward design process we used to revise the course.

Curriculum developers and instructional designers may be familiar with this three-stage approach to course planning that runs counter to longstanding methods. Instead of starting with content and figuring out how to assess students on the content, it starts with assessment goals and then determining if the content meets those goals. Or as Wiggins and McTighe (2005) depict the general process:

1.       Identify desired results

2.       Determine acceptable evidence

3.       Plan learning experiences and instruction

The first step of identifying desired results is more than just coming up with a student-centered outcome to be accomplished in the fourth week of the course; it’s trying to figure out what your “big rocks” are, or what your students will say or remember about your course long after it has concluded.

Eventually, you develop granular objectives based on those broader goals. Once you do that, then you can figure what constitutes evidence (tasks or activities) that your students produce to meet those objectives. Finally, you decide what content is necessary in light of your goals and tasks as well as how to organize everything.

These ideas (along with cognitive research about learning and retention) have challenged our thinking and resulted in drastic changes to the existing courses. For instance, evaluating sources is part of library instruction, but how do we do we do it? Within the course, we administer a 10-question reading comprehension quiz on an online reading and a couple questions on the final test. What happens when we take the backward design approach instead?

Identify desired results

Our team believes that one of the broader goals of the course is something like the following: Students will bring a critical eye to information sources they encounter.  We want students to not only recognize bias or analyze for authority, but instill a habit of mind so they are constantly thinking about whether sources meets their need (or are trustworthy enough to be repeated at a party). We still have the practical sub-goal of teaching an evaluative framework, but we don’t want to forget our larger goal in the design of the rest of the course.

Determine acceptable evidence

So what tells us that they understand and are able to use this framework for evaluating information sources? If we’re being honest, a quiz is probably not the most effective means—at least not as the sole assessment. For many, learning artifacts commonly come in the form of term papers or presentations.  For one of our two courses, a major component of the new final project is the annotation of cited sources in a Wikipedia. It provides an authentic (real life) experience while providing formal evidence for student understanding.

Plan learning experiences and instruction

This is where everything comes together and we’re able to ask (among many questions): What do students need to know to complete the Wikipedia annotations and what’s the most effective way for them to learn it? Now that you’ve established goals and evidence, you can figure out what activities will be appropriate and how everything is organized. Maybe it is an interactive tutorial, or to steal from the aforementioned blogger, a debate-type activity could contribute to active learning and long-term understanding of the content.

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While I’ve largely spoken about the role of backward design in course development, it’s certainly transferable to one-shot instruction, online tutorials, and other such tasks. What’s important to remember is that it isn’t a prescriptive process—it’s just a way of thinking that I believe opens up a largely unexplored avenue of creativity in all parts of the library. Those of you familiar with other ISD process models may find this useful as it speaks a little more directly to educational contexts. However, I’ve also grossly oversimplified what turns out to be something very messy, and I encourage you to read “Understanding by Design” by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe if you’re interested in learning more.

Brian D. Leaf (leaf.7@osu.edu), Instructional Design Librarian Resident, The Ohio State University