City Wide Literacies Forum (3)
On Saturday 30 October, the third city wide literacies forum met at McDonald Road Library. About thirty people attended the day, a good mix of tutors, volunteers and development workers and we all appreciated the opportunity to meet and share experiences. One of the aims of the forum is to share good practice, and with this aim in mind, we invited Nina Dutton and Jane Ward from NIACE (The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education) to present their research findings on Catching Confidence in learners and Fiona McDonald from Learning Connections to discuss Reflective Practice.
Catching Confidence
Nina and Jane carried out their research in an attempt to acknowledge the response of many learners, that being involved in learning makes them feel more confident. They emphasised that they weren’t interested in measuring confidence as a competence, but rather to capture confidence and recognise it as a meaningful outcome for many learners. To this end, they developed a questionnaire to use with learning groups and they asked a range of groups to use this tool at two different stages in the course of a learning programme, to see if any changes in confidence were noticed.
Groups were free to change the questions to suit their particular situations, and to reduce the number of questions if they wanted. Jane and Nina then followed this up with some focus group work asking the learners how they found the process.
The results of the research were, not only a tool which confirmed that learners did gain confidence participating in learning, but that they also benefited from the discussion process involved in taking part and valued the opportunity to discuss their confidence. At the forum, we were given the chance to try out the tool for ourselves and to discuss how we felt about it. We agreed that it was a useful process to go through, and to recognise how our confidence can change according to situation or how we feel.
Reflective Practice
After lunch Fiona McDonald took us through some of the theories on reflective practice. This was a very active process involving small group discussions, on why reflective practice is beneficial, what barriers we face in finding the time to reflect and how we might go about it. Of course, events such as the city wide forum offer a great opportunity for reflective practice but the room was full of other ideas from informal get togethers with colleagues, regular team meetings and Internet chat rooms to post useful suggestions or experiences. Fiona also encouraged us to try some reflective writing with a partner, with each of us taking a turn at writing and then commenting on what the other had written.
Further information
If you would like to read more about the research from NIACE or to try out the Capturing Confidence tool, go to www.niace.org.uk/funds/ACLF/Catching-Confidence-Summary.pdf
If you are interested in reading more about reflective practice, Fiona suggests the following texts:
Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Stephen Brookfield.
Reflection in Learning and Professional Development, Jennifer Moon (1999).
A video of the event is available to borrow from the CLAN office and a Catching Confidence pack for tutors will be available from January 2005. Contact Gillian on 0131 270 6070. Email: gillian@clanedinburgh.org
City Wide Literacies Forum (1 and 2)
At the first Edinburgh City Wide Literacies Forum we had agreed the purpose: to exchange ideas and information on good practice; to network; to share approaches and resources and to facilitate lobbying and responding to policies and strategies.
The second Forum took place on 23 June in the Nelson Room at McDonald Road Library. The menu for the day was strawberries and cream, followed by small group discussion on publicity and marketing strategies.
Feedback about what's worked locally and city-wide included:
· involving existing learners in presentations to potential learners
· peer advertising through other courses and groups
· displaying the words "free" and "crèche"
· being visible and going to public places where learners are · Beans.
There was also a chance to look at the Learning Connections progress in developing the Key National Standard Qualification in Adult Literacies Tutoring and to hear an input about the new CLAN Resource Base. Nineteen literacies practitioners attended from the voluntary sector and Community Education and some of the comments were: "very interesting, good networking, good to share ideas and learn new things...website sounds exciting ... resource base here will be very useful".
If you would like more detailed notes about the publicity and marketing discussions, or if you have suggestions for the next Forum meeting, please contact Gillian at CLAN. Tel: 0131 270 6070. Email: gillian@clanedinburgh.org
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