Local materials: To produce or adapt?
by Linda Shohet, The Centre for Literacy of Quebec, & Lianne Calvert Shefler, RECLAIM

Is there a need to continue producing more English-language adult literacy materials in this country?

We want to make the case that new materials are needed if a particular subject has not been treated or if the quality of existing materials is generally poor. Otherwise, there is now a large bank of high-quality adult literacy materials in print and online, as well as the means of sharing them across distances; teachers can learn to find, assess and adapt many of them for local needs. The main reason for developing new materials would be that a search found no existing material(s) that could be used or adapted for a particular purpose.

Before we offer some guidelines about how to search and adapt, we want to look at some of the arguments that are made to support the production of local materials, and show how the context has changed over time.

Twenty years ago there was a serious lack of usable relevant Canadian materials that respected adults as learners in the adult basic education sector. Texts were frequently borrowed from the elementary school level, sometimes in the mistaken belief that adults who could not read well were childlike. More often they were simply the only materials available. Some teachers constantly scrambled to create their own materials, but there was little that was widely known. Some programs, such as East End Literacy in Toronto and RECLAIM in Montreal, began to encourage students to write and publish their own stories which then became texts for others; many of these small books resonated with students in tone and content.

When the National Literacy Secretariat was formed in 1988, part of their mandate was to support production of Canadian materials. They can claim great success. In fifteen years, hundreds (perhaps more, since no one can give an exact figure) of materials have been published, some of them of worldclass quality. Some, however, are quite poor in quality, and many more are reproductions, or cut-andpaste versions, of similar resources created elsewhere, that commit inadvertent copyright violations. How many guides to nutrition or job-searching have been written in the past ten years in Canada, not to mention in the US, UK, and Australia? At program level, how many family literacy manuals have been created?

We focus here on classroom materials. We have to distinguish between personal narratives and materials that are based on objective purposes — creating a program, training volunteers, or teaching students to do certain tasks, such as fill in a form, read a map, etc. We discuss mainly the second category.

The two most common arguments for supporting local production are that professional development occurs when practitioners create local materials, and that local materials are more engaging for students and volunteers.

Let’s examine each of these reasons. There is no doubt that practitioners learn from creating their own materials. However, we argue that they would learn just as much,if not more, from finding, assessing and adapting similar materials. To adapt materials, they must find where materials currently exist. They must learn how to use the resource centres across the country, and how to search through NALD and other on-line databases. Then they must learn how to assess particular materials against set criteria, and how to adapt them to their own contexts, while respecting copyright. This is professional development at its best.

The question of local context is more contentious. In most task-oriented resources, the core material is often fairly generic. For example, if one examines twenty guides to jobsearching skills written since 1995, there is a large amount of overlap. There may be differences if a group or organization has a distinctive underlying philosophy, which may be one reasonable argument for them to create their own material. However, this is the exception rather than the rule, and looking at previous publications can still help a group articulate how they are different.

In adapting, one changes place names, measurements, units of currency, local policy references and contact numbers, and inserts local examples.

Lianne Shefler has used examples from American and British texts to show how they can be analyzed and offers some guidelines and checklists for adaptation to different levels Ultimately, quality should be a determining factor in choosing materials to adapt. While this presentation concentrates on classroom materials, similar criteria could be developed for judging the quality of program materials. This could become a valuable national project.

Policy-wise, the NLS has recently been requiring more justification for production of materials. We think that the same case can be made inter-nationally. Adaptation has to be seen as a form of professional development as effective as production, and as a way of sharing the best of what has been produced in ABE.

Linda Shohet is Executive Director of The Centre for Literacy of Quebec, and Lianne Calvert Shefler is Executive Director of RECLAIM, a not-for-profit volunteer literacy organization in Montreal.

Be sure to check out Adapting adult literacy materials across student levels and geographic boundaries (77k), a PowerPoint presentation by Lianne Calvert Shefler, RECLAIM, Montreal
This slideshow gives some general guidelines for adapting materials, with examples of adaptations from American and British resources.

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