This video, part of a series prepared by the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), focuses on a Montreal literacy group that uses theatre both to help people with low literacy skills express themselves and to raise awareness of the barriers and prejudices they face.
This book is based on interviews with adult learners and contains the interviews/essays and a finished play.
The idea for the project was to explore, through interviews, some of the less obvious reasons why people end up with poor literacy skills and to prepare a theatrical presentation based on these real–life stories.
In 2003, in collaboration with Blue Metropolis, The Montreal International Literary Festival, The Centre for Literacy presented the fifth annual Grassroots: Community Writing and Arts event.
This document offers an introduction to readers’ theatre, a form of drama that features participants reading from their scripts. A readers’ theatre production is usually easy to put on because it doesn’t require props or costumes and participants aren’t required to memorize their lines.
This interview was conducted by Janet Patterson, the BC Director for CCLOW in 1987. At the time of the interview, Lillian Nakamura Maguire was the Yukon Director for CCLOW, as well as the coordinator of personal skills development programs at Yukon College in Whitehorse. She was a distance education, self-directed learner in the Master of Adult Education program at St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia.
Academic achievement hasn't come easily to native Canadians. In the small Inuit community of Pond Inlet where the author was an adult educator at the time this article was written, many of her students were casualties of the education system.