1. Providing Literacy Specialist Services to Targeted Audiences – Project Final Report
Project Goal: To broaden the range of literacy specialist services that are available in
Alberta.
Objective #1: To research the adaptation of literacy specialist services to two targeted
audiences: one, social workers and two, speech language pathologists.
Objective #2: To adapt literacy specialist services for the two different audiences based
on the research phase.
Objective#3: To develop a family literacy awareness and sensitivity workshop.
Project Outcomes, Measures of Success, Challenges and Recommendations
We are pleased to be able to report on the successful completion of our project.
We feel that we have broadened the range of literacy specialist services that are available
in Alberta. We have created three different workshops tailored to meet the needs of the
community. Research was conducted with literacy experts, professionals, and community
workers to determine how literacy specialist services should be adapted to meet the needs
of specific target groups and how the workshop delivery should be designed to be
appropriate for a certain audience.
Outcomes include:
1. Designing of Literacy Awareness/Literacy and Parenting Skills (LAPS) workshop
specifically for Social workers.
2. Development of Plain Language workshop for Speech Language Pathologists and
Audiologists.
3. Creation of a Family Literacy Awareness and Sensitivity workshop for
community workers
4. Outline of materials (videos, research, books) that should be included in the
Learning Links kit re Literacy Awareness.
5. Drafting of informational material/flyer on the workshops we offer.
6. Raising of general public awareness as to the literacy challenges in Canada.
Although our timelines were very tight on this project we are very pleased with what we
were able to achieve in such a tight timeframe. Work on the project will continue through
other funding so we will have better sense of what we have achieved six months from
now. We know we have raised awareness as we have had at least four new requests for
information about the workshops we can provide. We have been booked to do a Plain
Language Workshop to an adult learning consortium in Medicine Hat. We had one
participant at our Edmonton workshop with social workers request contact information so
that she could set up a workshop with her co-workers, feeling that they were not doing
enough to help or identify their clients as low-literate. In addition, Wal-mart has
expressed an interest in literacy specialist services for the managers so that they may

2. work more comfortably with their low literate employees. Finally a community group in
Bowness has requested a Family Literacy Awareness workshop for the professional
development.
Highlights for us include the “light bulb” moments we have observed in our workshop
participants who have begun to recognize that they may not have disinterested clients but
may have low-literate clients. It is encouraging to know that several of them have
indicated that they will change their practice based on their work with us. An unintended
outcome was our work with Learning Links to help them put together a Literacy
Awareness kit that will travel around the province to assist communities to raise public
awareness.
Another highlight is testing our materials with larger groups then we have worked with in
the past and seeing that the workshop delivery with slight modifications can be very
successful in large groups as well as small groups. Although we would add a cautionary
note to this observation, be sure to work closely with organizers of workshops up until
the last minute. Unfortunately at our presentation in Kananaskis organizers had indicated
a week before the conference that we would have thirty participants. At the last minute,
they let us know they had sixty people. The organizers had not arranged the workshop
room in the proper configuration as we had requested and we had to try to adjust our
presentation on the fly. Thus we were not as successful with this presentation to a large
group as we could have been given adequate preparation time and proper room
arrangements. Next time we will check numbers the day before and double-check and
confirm room arrangements the day of the workshop.
We are also pleased to report the successful testing of our Family Literacy Awareness
Workshop. Although it was a small group that participated we had an opportunity to test
our workshop design and implementation and the feedback from the group was very
positive. They indicated that they would not advise us to change a thing.!!!
Finally, we estimate that we have reached over 100 people through our work on this
project.
We thank Literacy Alberta for this opportunity and think that this important work should
continue.
Respectfully submitted,
Elaine Cairns and Jayne Clarke