Ok… it’s a bit rough and first draft but here’s the start of the content for Module 1 of the NZDipALN. This content will become an online module. Let me know if you want to start working on this now. Any and all feedback welcome.

Module 1: Personal Approach to Strengthening Adult LN

Summary

In the assessment task for this module you need to describe your personal approach to embedding or contextualising literacy and numeracy in your teaching or training (26611 1.1) You’ll need to:

discuss the assumptions that underlie your approach,
contrast how you approach teaching numeracy to literacy,
explain how your approach is informed by research and theory, and
evaluate your approach against some best practice principles.

Key Questions

What is a personal approach to strengthening adult literacy and numeracy?

It’s a personal narrative that describes:

The way you think about teaching adult literacy and numeracy.
How you teach.
Why you teach that way.

Why should I develop an explicit statement of my personal approach to teaching literacy and numeracy?

It’s a good question… It’s a bit like the question of why should we make literacy and numeracy explicit in our teaching. And like this question there are different answers. Here are some that we think are important:

It makes you think more deeply about what you do and how you do it.
It might lead to a positive change in your teaching practice.
It helps to give you a clarity of purpose behind what you do in your work, a critical sense of mission or vision, which is useful when things get tough.
It helps you answer the following question: Is what I’m doing having any effect on my learners?
It helps you stay focused on your teaching goals.

How do I write this?

That’s what we’re here to help you with. Writing a personal statement like this, something that drills down into the philosophy of why you do what you do is challenging for most people.

Most of us go through life without really examining what we think about things. And it’s hard to look at our assumptions about life and put them into words.

However, we’re going to narrow things down. We’ll ask you to pick some key aspects of the framework we use for embedding literacy and numeracy. Then we’ll ask you to look at these aspects of your teaching approach in relation to a few key assumptions that underpin your training.

For our purposes, your statement needs to be at least 500 words. You can write more, but don’t go too crazy. The purpose here is to be concise, and write using language and concepts that a general audience can understand. In other words, we’re not after rocket science. We don’t need an extended description for our purposes.

Don’t use up all your good ideas here either. Once you’ve written your personal statement you will need to look at your personal approach in the light of different perspectives including from recent research.

What are the different parts of this module?

This module and the attached assessment task breaks down into three parts. Here they are:

Develop a concise statement of your personal approach to strengthening adult literacy and numeracy.
Explain how relevant theory and research underpins your personal approach to teaching adult literacy and numeracy
Evaluate your personal approach against current constructs in adult literacy and numeracy practice in Aotearoa New Zealand

A framework for embedding literacy and numeracy

You should remember from your NCALNE (Voc) training that we used a framework for describing the baseline knowledge and skills for embedding literacy and numeracy.

With this Diploma we’re working with the same framework. But we’re going to go a bit deeper. And before we can do that we need to simplify the system slightly. Here it is in a nutshell:

Understand issues and context
Assess needs
Design skills development
Deliver outcomes
Assess gains
Evaluate effectiveness

We’ll spend some time reviewing this so that you’re clear what happens at each stage. This is essentially the same approach we use in the NCALNE Lite modules and in ALEC’s live delivery of the NCALNE (Voc) that many of you are familiar with.

Assumptions that underpin our teaching

From there, we’ve selected some of the main assumptions that tend to underpin teaching and training. These assumptions are general and underpin how most of us teach and train.

Think of them like threads woven through your approach.

You’ll need to pick at least two from the list below to discuss in relation to your approach.

Lifelong learning
Stress or anxiety caused by learning
The educator as facilitator
Learner centredness
The learner as co-collaborator in learning
The need for learning to be active
Learner readiness

Examples and samples

Through this process we’ll provide you with examples of what we’re talking about as well as samples of statements written by tutors who have been through this process. Some of them might even be your colleagues…

Part 1: Describe your personal approach of teaching adult literacy and numeracy

So what’s the first part?

In part 1 of the assessment for this module you need to write at least 500 words describing your personal approach to embedding or contextualising literacy and numeracy in your teaching or training (26611 1.1). And as relevant you need to discuss the assumptions that underlie your approach.

Revisiting the framework for embedding literacy and numeracy

Listen to Graeme Smith from ALEC discussing the framework we use for embedding literacy and numeracy in Aotearoa New Zealand.

[Need to record video of me or someone giving an overview of the framework]

Assumptions that underpin our teaching and training

Now let’s take each of the assumptions in our list and make sure we’re clear on what we mean by each. Your job will be to think about what you think and do in relation to how you teach.