Adult Literacy in TEDx?

Please excuse this cross posting, but I thought that different groups may have different perspectives/voices to share. I have been selected to give a 12 minute TEDx talk on adult literacy. Some of you may have heard of TED-a series of talks under the assumption-"ideas worth spreading". TEDx is a local version of TED (see http://www.ted.com/tedx). These talks are meant to educate/provoke/incite/entertain/provide a call to action. They are given to a live audience and also taped for the Internet. The audience includes just about all kinds of people, with all kinds of backgrounds. As I begin to prepare my talk, I am wondering what you think:

a. Should be the tone of the presentation?

b. Highlighted in the presentation?

c. Avoided in the presentation?

d. Included as specific facts?

e. Included as illustrative examples?

Most people who will be listening will not know much, if anything about adult literacy, and therefore I view this as an opporutnity to get the word out about our field's needs. Any ideas would be very welcome.

 

Thanks!

Daphne Greenberg

Georgia State University

Comments

First of all, congratulations on being selected to conduct a TED talk.  This is a terrific platform and opportunity, Daphne. Here are a couple of my initial thoughts. One of the critical pictures to present is who the adult learner is and is not--eliminate the stereotypes.  Paint the economic and social picture that occurs when adults are not literate.  Proliteracy has a few graphical representations of the impact.  http://www.proliteracy.org/the-crisis/adult-literacy-facts Tell the story, though, people remember the stories over the data. I will be following this discussion to read what others think and let us know when you are scheduled to give your talk!  

Thank you, Daphne, for all your good work!

Michelle

I agree with Michelle. The story you tell will anchor your message in the audience's brains. They need something to connect with. I attended a TEDx event in Greensboro, NC a few months ago. One of the most striking speeches was given by Reverend Fraccaro. He weaved the story of immigrants in our city by starting with his experience and then branching out to the relationships they had formed.

If you can somehow use the experience of one adult learner and weave it into your speech, you will give life to your words and connect with your audience.

Let us know how it goes or where we can find the talk once it is uploaded. Congratulations on being chosen to speak at this event.

 

Yacine.

The most compelling reason I work in adult education is because I feel my students are as connected to me and everyone else as my neighbors, friends  and family.  If I ignore their need (and desire!) to become productive, active members of my community, I negatively affect my community's ability to thrive.  This is often a too-large, largely ignored, and pushed-aside group of adults, many coming from repeated cycles of poverty.  If my work can positively boost their ability (and desire!) to make positive changes, it doesn't only affect them, it also affects their children and their grandchildren.   So many programs exist to reach out to under-privileged children.  The parents and grandparents of these children will likely have a greater influence than these programs because they are who the children go home to each night.  Helping adults, educationally, to build their lives, or turn their lives around, builds community on a broader, stronger base.  Our adult programs are vital.

 

I'm eager to see/hear your talk and see the topic introduced in a Ted forum.

As a designer at the Center for Health Literacy, I find that even when organizations make the effort to write at the appropriate level for poor readers, the design for readability aspect is oftentimes overlooked. How the layout is formatted is just as important as the writing. If the page is poorly formatted, crowded, and aesthetically not pleasing, even a post-graduate level reader will not have an easy time with it. Perhaps this is not relevant for your talk, but it's worth mentioning. 

The Center produced a series of webinars last year on writing and designing for health literacy. You can find them here:

http://www.maximus.com/our-company/multimedia-insights/webinars

Good luck with the Tedx talk...I enjoyed the one we had here in Providence recently. Lots of interesting talks and new people to connect with!

Hello Daphne, Eva, and others,

Since you will be speaking to a general audience, Daphne, perhaps it would be useful to mention both sides of the literacy coin: learning to read well, and writing clearly, plainly and completely. Eva's point about design for readability applies to text and also to web page reading formats -- and unfortunately many web pages are not well designed, that is, not clear and not written simply and plainly for those who are not already familiar with the topic or information. Adult literacy researcher, Tom Sticht, in one of his enlightening workshops in Massachusetts said that if it were up to him he wouldn't let people graduate from college who couldn't show that they could write at the fifth grade level. Wasn't it Mark Twain who once apologized to a friend for writing a long (five page) letter, explaining that he didn't have time to write a short one? Writing simply, plainly and clearly is a set of skills and a discipline; however, it helps all readers, especially those who have difficulty reading. If even only ten people in your audience took plain writing to heart that would make it worthwhile to mention this side of the literacy coin.

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

I totally agree that you need to explain our adult literacy population and the diversity of their needs. Proliteracy is a great source of facts, charts, and the link between adult reading difficulties and poverty. Another important topic would be connecting adult literacy with family/children's literacy. A call to action would be recognizing the immense value of investing in both! 

Thanks to everyone for your helpful comments. The actual presentation is on November 7th. I do not know how quickly it gets posted on the Internet.

Daphne

Your presentation at the TEDx on November 7 will be an important contribution to help adult learners.  Some points to emphasize, in my view, are (1) expressing that 90 million adults do not read at a sufficient level to obtain jobs of the 21st Century, (2) corporations, government agencies, foundations, and other groups are just starting to recognize this, (3) the learning and education sciences have some potential solutions to help adult learners, and (4) a few promising approaches to help adult learners.  Also mention the Center for the Study of Adult Literacy. 

Daphne: By November 7, 2013 the PIAAC first reports will be out. See the note below which makes the point that it is important to not hype the “deficit” model of adult literacy and claim that 90 million adults do not read at a sufficient level to obtain jobs of the 21st Century. There are no data to support this claim, and as I have noted elsewhere, no one believes it anyway, including adults themselves. Instead I think the PIAAC results should be used to address the range of and different competencies and abilities of the adult population and the opportunities that adults have in the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) to acquire additional competencies for economic mobility, health care, and children’s educational achievement. The following note adds some more to this line of thought.<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

Tom Sticht

16/20/13 Better Equity and Fewer Unsupported Inferences Coming in the PIAAC

Tom Sticht International Consultant in Adult Education

Definition: eq•ui•ty: The quality of being fair and impartial: “equity of treatment.”

In October of 2013, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will release some of the findings from the Program of International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This will include results of the assessment of adult literacy skills using methodologies like those used in the earlier International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills (ALL) survey. For adult literacy education advocates there are two things about the PIAAC methodology that will be different and will affect how the results of the survey are interpreted in advocacy programs.

For one thing, in the earlier surveys a standard of having an 80 percent probability of getting items correct was used to assign a person to a literacy level, while in the new PIAAC a standard of a 67 percent probability of getting an item correct will be used to designate an adult’s literacy level. The .67 standard was recommended in a 2005 report from the National Academies of Science, National Research Council (NAS/NRC) and serves to reduce the errors of saying someone cannot perform a certain literacy task when in fact they can. Hence the results are more equitable for advocacy purposes.

The Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS), widely used in the United States to assess adult literacy skills, uses a .50 percent probability level for establishing proficiency. This is the traditional psychometric probability level for creating scales because it produces equal probabilities of saying someone cannot do something when they can, as opposed to saying someone can do something when they cannot. While the PIAAC .67 response probability does not reach this level of equity in error making, it is better than the previously used .80 standard for scaling proficiency.

In the 2005 ALL report it was stated that, "Depending on the country, between one-third and over two-thirds of adult populations do not attain skill Level 3, the level considered by experts as a suitable minimum level for coping with the increasing demands of the emerging knowledge society and information economy. " Now this position has been reversed in reports from the 2013 summer institute of the Centre for Literacy in Montreal which was called Learning from IALS, Preparing for PIAAC. There it was reported that “there will be no official statements from OECD or governments about a specific level, e.g. level 3, required to function in everyday life because the data do not support such normative claims.” This is consistent with the earlier 2005 NAS/NRC report which indicated that the practice of identifying the level of skills adults need in order to function adequately in society, as in the ALL report, is based on “unsupported inferences.”

Because of the foregoing, literacy advocates must use caution in making claims that some 30, 60, or 90 million adults lack the literacy skills needed to function adequately in society. This has been the primary use of the results of past adult literacy surveys. For instance, the report of a National Commission on Adult Literacy in 2008 stated that the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) “ found that some 93 million lack literacy at a level needed to enroll in the postsecondary education or job training that current and future jobs require.” Somewhat surprisingly, even a 2011 report by cognitive scientists from the NAS/NRC, who should have known better, especially since an earlier 2005 NAS/NRC report cautioned about making “unsupported inferences” from adult literacy surveys, went ahead and stated that the 2003 NAAL “ estimates that more than 90 million U.S adults lack adequate literacy.”

We can anticipate that the PIAAC will present a distribution of percentages of adults in each of five levels and there will be some very low scoring adults and some very highly scoring adults, and a large percentage in the middle range of literacy scores. For adult literacy education advocates, a learner-centered approach can be taken which points out that the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) of the United States offers opportunities for adults across a wide range of literacy abilities to increase their knowledge and skills for meeting their personal goals.