Reading Together, Succeeding Together: The Importance of Family Literacy

Presented by:  Dr. Vianne Timmons
President and Vice Chancellor
University of Regina
May 6, 2010

Good evening everyone, and thank you so much for coming.  I am truly honoured to be here tonight, because it is a pleasure to speak with a group of people for whom I have great admiration and with whom I share a strong connection – people who love books and care about literacy.  Tonight, I want to share my passion for literacy with you, and I hope that in doing so I can provide you with some insight into an area that is connected with books and reading but is not always on our radar screen.  That area is family literacy.

I know that in Saskatchewan there is a lot of leadership around family literacy, and many of you are leaders in this field.  I hope that what I say this evening resonates with you.

I would like to begin with a short personal discussion about my experience with literacy of a different sort – literacy in social media such as Facebook!  When I became President of the University of Regina, I decided that it would be a good idea to connect with young people and understand the phenomenon of social networking. So right away, I went to the experts – my children!

I asked my son Samuel, who was 17 at the time, if he would help me get on Facebook and he reluctantly agreed. We sat down and he helped me set up a Facebook account.  He was able to find me three friends – including himself.  I was so excited!  Every day, I logged into my account so I could check in on his “wall” and learn the Facebook lingo.  I must also confess that I thought it was a great way to spy on my son so I could get at least some idea of what was going on in his life.  I’m sure I’m not the only parent to have thought this!

At any rate, I was pretty much a silent Facebook partner for several weeks – and I should have left it that way!  However, one day I saw a posting on Samuel’s wall indicating that he was dating someone named Sherry.  He’d never told me about her, and I was so excited!  At the supper table that night, I decided to engage in some dinnertime conversation as we all do.  So in front of his sister, I said to Samuel, “So, tell me about Sherry.”  He was mortified.  He looked me in the eye and said, “Mom, clearly you do not understand Facebook etiquette.  What you read on Facebook you do not discuss at the supper table.  You are no longer my friend.”  He then dumped me as a Facebook friend.  I believe the term is “un-friended” me.  He has since given me limited friend access, but the fact remains – I am for all intents and purposes not literate in the ways of Facebook.  This is probably the same for many families, though it may not be in technology – but instead in the very basics such as reading and writing.

In the grand scheme of things, there are larger literacy challenges out there – challenges faced by many families every day.  There are all kinds of different modes of learning and literacy, but what I would like to talk about this evening is something that comprises the fundamentals of literacy for many people – books, reading and writing.

As a little girl, I grew up in a small, remote mining community called Labrador City.  My parents had six children in eight years, and we did not own a television.  Every Wednesday night during the long winters, my parents wrapped us up in our winter clothes and together we walked to the library to get our books out for the week.  I have such vivid and pleasant memories of this.  I would get my books and then disappear, escaping into new worlds I had never experienced and would never forget.  For me, books are places to explore other worlds, meet other people, and see other places.  As a child, I was fascinated by fairy tales, for example, which allowed me to live out dreams and fantasies while still remaining grounded in reality.  From an early age, then, books were an important part of my life.

It has remained that way for me and all of my siblings.  We all get together every year, and when we do, you will invariably find each of us curled up separately with a book.  This behaviour drives our children crazy.  If they want to have a soccer game, my siblings and I won’t leave our books to join the game until each of us has finished the chapter we’ve started.  For my siblings and I, reading opens up the world like no television or movie theatre has, in part because we didn’t have a television or movie theatre while growing up.  Reading allows us to explore different worlds, different ideas, and different modes of learning.  For that reason, books and libraries are still an important part of our lives – and how we make our livings.

When I became a teacher, I recognized the fact that families should become a very important partner in education – something I believe to this day.  Over the years, teachers have used families as agents rather than as partners, and I don’t believe this has been the right approach.  I believe we must engage parents as co-educators, and this principle has guided my teaching practice and my research throughout my career.

As librarians, all of you are in the role of educators, and I’m sure most of you have regular contact with children and their parents.  Parents very much want good service, and want their children to learn from you in order to improve their reading and writing skills.  But children have a wide variety of needs.  Parents are seeking information exchange opportunities, which in many cases means exchanging information with you.

Most of you have gone to parent-teacher interviews – either as students or as parents.  These sessions can be perplexing.  Parents – especially parents of high school students – stand in line in the gym and eventually get five minutes with the teacher.  During that five-minute span, you quickly hear how your child is doing, and then you move along to the next line.

This is not the exchange of information families are seeking from educators.  Families want an opportunity to connect and exchange in many other ways.  They want to see how they can help their children with homework, and they want to have continuous connection with teachers. Therefore, many libraries have often seen themselves in the role of educators working with families.  As such, the role they play – the role YOU play – in children’s lives is very important.

Over the course of my research, families have shared with me many issues related to literacy. Sometimes they say that libraries are scary places for many of them.  Given my positive experience with libraries as a child – and given that librarianship is your occupation – this might be hard to understand.  But feeling confident about going to the library can be an issue for many families, and anything we can do to develop that confidence and build the connection between families and libraries is a good thing.

There are some myths about families and their connections with schools, mainly surrounding meaningful family involvement.  The key term here is “meaningful.”  Parents do things such as fundraise for schools and go on field trips, but that is not the kind of family involvement we can see as having a direct impact on children’s learning. There’s a myth , for example, that single parents are less involved with their children’s education.  However, there has been good research done on the amount of time single parents spend with their children on homework, sports and other activities – and this research indicates that the amount of time single parents spend on these activities is often the same as in dual-parent families.

In my research, family literacy is a way to connect.  In my opinion, family literacy should be at the heart of what naturally occurs in a family’s life – from a child writing out a grocery list, to a family reading that grocery list together, to parents putting notes in their children’s lunch boxes.  We should integrate literacy into as many aspects of family life as possible.  Unfortunately, for some families this is not the case, but for others it is a way of life.

The families I want to talk to you about are those families who breathe, think and live literacy on a daily basis.  There are many researchers such as Doug Willms, from the University of New Brunswick, who have done a tremendous amount of work on educational achievement and have found that enabling families has a very positive effect on children’s achievement.

When I hear people talk about improving literacy and school achievement, I don’t often hear about enabling families as one of the solutions.  I hear about improving schools, I hear about the importance of eliminating poverty, and I hear about the investing in early years – but I do not often hear about the importance in investing in families.

Willms has also said that there are many studies that show that family influences on school achievement outweigh the effect of school and community programs.  So, you can make a difference in children’s literacy by engaging and working with families.

Most relationships built between schools and home have been built on a deficit relationship.  Sometimes you get a phone call about your child missing classes.  I know that I get those calls regularly, not because my daughter skips classes, but because she is involved in choir, band and different activities, and she sometimes fails to let the teachers know that she has to attend a practice.  Therefore, I have to listen to an automatic phone call from the school telling me that my daughter has missed third period or fifth period, and that she should let them know next time.  This is often the kind of interaction parents get from schools.  For many parents, the call isn’t a computer-generated one, but is instead a personal phone saying that their child is having difficulty or problems.  In these cases, complaints about the child’s behaviour form the strongest connection between families and school.  That to me is a deficit relationship.

But this deficit is not just one-sided.  Some family members avoid fostering school relationships because they have had negative experiences with schools. I have worked with parents who say that just to walk into the school – and even to smell the place – brings back such negative memories for them that they do not want to go in.  Some say, “Libraries are not the place for me.  When I walk into a library I feel like an imposter and I know that I do not belong.”   I am not talking about one or two families; I am talking about a society.  Approximately 40% of our parents do not have pleasant memories about schools and libraries. We have to think about the impact that this could have on children and their own perceptions of their learning environment.

There are lots of other challenges that parents face with respect to schools – lack of rules and boundaries, for example, and the jargon and inaccessible language educators can use.  These can pose challenges for parents seeking to understand and make a connection with teachers.

We also know that socio-economic status has an impact on achievement.  For some families, reaching out and making contact, connecting with the school, or walking into that local library is very challenging and very hard to do because of their socio-economic background. It is not in their realm of experience.

When I was working on literacy with families, many parents said that when they get letters from school, they do not always know what the letters say.  Some parts they can’t read, and others they can’t understand.  When I first heard this, I asked the parent to give me a copy of one of the school newsletters.   Here is an excerpt from that newsletter:

“Student achievement demonstrates service to the community that is positive and verifiable, demonstrates capacity for leadership and ability to motivate others and demonstrates interest in innovation.  Parents must assume much of the responsibility to ensure that students make this commitment.  Parental involvement improves student achievement, promotes a positive attitude toward school and motivates students to succeed.”

This sort of statement is challenging for many parents to understand.  I’m not sure it’s entirely clear to me!

Often parents are treated like children. One of my vivid memories of grade two parent teacher- interviews was that we were asked to sit on those little children’s chairs.  The school wanted to make us feel what it was like to be in grade two.  Instead, it made many parents feel silly and uncomfortable.  I know this was not teacher’s intent, but it was the result.

Family literacy is a very important area to think about, not just because of all the research that takes place in the field, but because for many of these families, there are multi-generational literacy challenges which we need to turn around. Family literacy is about getting parents involved, comfortable and confident when working with their children.  This will help improve their own literacy skills, and also help develop family cohesiveness.  And I’m happy to say, libraries are often the place that provides family literacy programs that make a difference.

I would like to share with you some of the work my research team and I have done on family literacy.  We began working in Prince Edward Island on a program focused on families with multi-generational literacy challenges. For many families, this is a source of shame and embarrassment, and for that reason it was hard to recruit families for the project.  By advertising in rural community newspapers and church bulletin boards, however, we found ten families who agreed to work with us to develop a family literacy program.

We did not have a package ready for them.  Instead, we spent a year with the ten families to find out how literacy affected their lives. We wanted to hear their stories and to understand them. We did reading assessments on the children; we found that the boys had more literacy difficulties than the girls, and that for the most part the fathers had the literacy problems rather than the mothers.

The graph below depicts the differences between males and females in terms of literacy problems:

We had all the assessments done in the first year, and the families worked with us to identify what the family literacy program would look like for them. What did they want to see in it?  What would make a difference for them?  In addition, how was literacy affecting their lives?  In short, we wanted to take a proactive approach for these families, develop a program WITH the families and not FOR the families.

What did we learn in that year working with these families?  The parents told us that they struggled helping their children with homework, and that some of the areas that challenged them most around literacy were:

• Reduced mobility.  They lived in rural communities, so getting to the library to get books was challenging;
• Lack of knowledge of available services.  Some of them did not even know that they had access to specific community services;
• Finances.  Some of them did not have money to buy books, so around Christmas we bought books for the children; and
• Lack of affordable child care.  Many could not afford child care that might give time to increase educational or opportunities for themselves.

You may find some of the quotes from these parents to be interesting:

• “Like, I find with the principal at our school, was my teacher in high school and I’m like…this little kid again.  This is ridiculous!  I’m an adult.” (Needs Assessment 2000)

• “The guidance counselor at school…she’s a lovely lady…her children are perfect…who is she to tell me how to raise my children, or whether my problems are actually problems…we’re very different people.” (Needs Assessment 2000)

For these families, there was a lack of connection to the school and to the teachers. They would look at you today in this room and think that you have perfect lives – that you all must have perfect children because you are all librarians and educators.  So for many of these parents – and the parents you encounter in your work – the gap between you and them is enormous.

And at the same time, we interviewed the teachers of the children and saw a real disconnect between them and the parents.  Teachers can assume that parents are not doing enough. “You can ask the parents to do things but they don’t help at home.  They expect the school to do everything” was a common thing we heard.

Parents say they want to work on the homework but they do not have the skills, and at the same time, teachers say that the children are not doing their homework.  Parents say, “When I walk in the school we see the principal of the school who used to be my teacher when I was a child, and I feel like a child all over again.”  Teachers can be influenced by family histories and previous family experiences. This is a quote from one teacher:  “His Dad had reading difficulties as well.  I’ve been here long enough that I taught his Dad, too.”

You see, parents and teachers are telling the same stories, but from different perspectives. We can dissolve barriers by including families in the process.  Children have higher achievement in school when parents are involved, so parents should be:

• Included in the decision making regarding their children;
• Educated on the proper strategies to help their children to attain higher achievement in school; and
• Enabled and empowered to work on behalf of their children.

It is very important to involve families in the decision making to make sure that they are not just agents. Instead of sending homework with the children, maybe we should teach homework skills to parents to help them work with their children. That is how libraries can help.  Libraries are a safe haven for many families when they find you and connect with you.  Libraries can be a place where parents feel safe to teach and learn with their children.  In some cases, parents cannot easily access the schools because of their shame. You are very fortunate as librarians.  You have an important role to play with these families – not the least of which is helping parents learn to advocate on behalf of their children.

So, during our family literacy research, what did the families say that they wanted?  They wanted a program that was not too long – maybe one night a week for two and a half hours. They wanted us to teach them AND teach their children. We did what we called a “direct adult, direct child, parent-child together time” program. We had a facilitator with the parents and one for the children, and then we brought them together and we did guided instruction with the families once a week, for two hours at a time.

The parents had told us the areas in which they wanted help, and these were some of the main ones:

• How can I help my children with fluency, so they don’t stumble so much with their reading?
• How can I help them figure out the words they stumble over while reading?
• When you give us something to read, can you make sure that we can read it?

We made resource packs on ten topics, using clear language in each one.  We also found ten articles on each topic, and wrote the authors to ask if we could re-work and edit their articles to put them in clear language for the parents – not plain language, but clear language.  When there was a word that we thought the parents might not understand, for example, we defined it.  We explained it, but we did not remove it; we helped them understand it.

We tested the children.  We did pre- and post-reading tests, looking at basic reading, comprehension, and listening. Every week after the program, we did evaluations and interviews with the families. We had two groups with ten families the first time we ran the program. The second time we ran the program, we advertised and we got 20 more families.  We gave ten families the program before Christmas, doing pre- and post- reading assessments, and then we gave the other ten families the program after Christmas. The following data shows the results for the families who received the program in green and the families who received the program later in orange:

Look at the area of reading and comprehension in ten weeks.  The children who undertook the program had nine months’ worth of achievement in reading and comprehension, and the children who did not get the program had a four- month achievement.  Four months is a reasonable flevel of achievement from September to Christmas in a ten-week program, so they had average achievement.

Look at the results for the children who did receive the program.  What amazes me is the listening comprehension.  Look at the difference, which I will talk about a bit later.  We ran this program for over a hundred families over four years, and almost got the same results every time. We might get six months’ worth of achievement in listening comprehension and eight months’ worth in reading in some cases, but overall it was very similar each time we ran it.

What is important is what the families learned – that reading, literacy and writing is about touching, holding and being together.  I remember the specific instance of one mother when we first started the program.  We asked if the children could read something aloud to their parents, and she put her child across the table from her and she got the child to read. When we were teaching them, we said they should cuddle up together, and the mother asked, “Is this how reading should be?”  I said yes, and she replied, “No one ever did that with me.  I learned to read in school and in school you sat there and read and teachers listened to you.  No one told me or taught me to curl up with my child to read.”  You would think that a parent should know that, but if that is not the kind of experience they had, there is every possibility that they will not read that way with their children.  So many of these families had to learn different skills – not necessarily about reading or writing, but about touching and connecting and being together with their children.

Months later, we did a follow up evaluation, and some of the parents’ comments were:

• “It was worth every minute we put into it.”

• “I liked that we learned together as a family.”

• “We are still doing things that we learned in the program.”

• “I am glad now that there is a program being made available for people that need help with their kids.”

I was so surprised when they told me, “We are so glad that we are not the only ones.  We always thought we were the only ones who did not know how to help with the homework.”  When the families were together, they would say things like, “ I do not know how to do that new math, do you?”  They got the chance to share and know that they were not alone in the challenges they faced.

We also got funding to look at Aboriginal family literacy.  We did not want to impose a program developed with rural families on those Aboriginal families, so we decided to undertake a similar process and design a program in conjunction with the new families.  We put a call out and we got ten families from the Mi’kmaq Nation to work with us. We spent a year with them to find out how literacy challenged them in their lives. They told us something different from the previous families.  They wanted a similar program in length and time, but one that was culturally and contextually appropriate.  They wanted their culture embedded throughout a thematically based program.  They wanted to talk about storytelling but they also wanted the program to emphasize respect for elders. They wanted it to be much more holistic, with the learned skills embedded right in the program.

They did want comprehension and decoding skills, but they wanted these skills embedded in themes.  They wanted a program that was a whole story for them, with the Mi’kmaq culture celebrated and honoured. We did just that, spending time with them to learn of their literacy challenges and determining how we could address them in a culturally appropriate manner.

We got all kinds of feedback.  One comment was, “My husband can’t read so he can’t help our children.”  Another one was, “I do not want my kids to be stuck. I look at my friends now and I see some of them who cannot even read and that scares me.”  Another parent said, “I am proud to be Mi’kmaq and I want my child to be proud to be Mi’kmaq.”

They wanted the program to be in English and not in their language, so we developed a theme-based program with the families. In each one of the themes we had a skill that we taught.  For example, in the “Native Pride and Culture” module we worked on guided reading.  IN the “Respect for Elders” module we embedded the skill of decoding and phonetics.  In the theme around animals, we embedded the skill of comprehension. We did a whole module on nature to enhance the skill on fluency.

Below you can see the results for the 20 families who participated.  The orange represents the families who did not get the program until after Christmas, and the yellow represents the families who received it before Christmas.  The most staggering result is the 19 months’ worth of listening comprehension for the children who got the program before Christmas versus two months for those who got it after Christmas.

We wanted to understand the cause and significance of these results.  Why did listening comprehension have such dramatic growth, for example?   We think that we did not just teach literacy skills such as reading and writing.  We had been unintentionally teaching them how to speak differently to their children.  Instead of asking, “Did you have a good time at school today?” parents learned to say to their children, “Tell me the most interesting thing that happened to you at school today.”

The importance of changing the way we speak to our children has a huge impact on the way they learn. If listening comprehension improves, you will understand directions better, you will know how to interact with others, and you will have better and more rewarding conversations. It is a very important skill to work on and improve.

After the Aboriginal family literacy program was finished, the parents said:

• “I had to go to parent-teacher interviews yesterday, and they’ve been seeing the difference.”

• “I think that it was just perfect.  I liked it.”

• “I know it’s helping [my daughter], and I’m really happy.”

• “Every night we do homework, and if it’s time for reading, it’s not a chore or anything anymore.”

• “[I liked] when the parents get in there together and we talk.”

That last quotation is interesting to me.  I mentioned earlier that the parents they liked getting together and talking.  That connection between families and the ability to share their experiences with each other is incredibly important.

In my opinion, family literacy is a shared responsibility that includes parents, children, and educators.

For educators, how can we improve connections with families?  We need to talk to educators about family communication. We need them to understand that for many families, higher education is a luxury they have not had.  If as an educator you they have an education, some families may not believe that you can understand their experience.

Also, as educators we have to encourage acts of participation, so that families do not just come to their children’s programs, but get involved in the programs with their children.  We also have to have a no-fault policy, no blame assigned to the family.  There is no parent in the world that does not want his or her child to do well. As an educator, you have to harness parents’ love for their children and work with it whenever you can.

Educators have to look into interactive activities that connect parents and children.  Interactive homework once a week is one possibility, to get parents to engage with their children in fabulous, rich literacy activities.

When parents talk about going to parents’ night at the beginning of the school year, one of the main challenges they talk about is homework.  So educators have to work constructively with this.  Have some workshops for parents on how to help your child with homework.  Perhaps once in a while, don’t let the child do the homework at home, but instead, bring parents and children together at school in the evening to work with each other.  Parents need to understand that connecting with their child is important, and you can translate that communication into success at school.

We have recently begun a new research project looking at developing a family literacy program with new immigrants to Canada.  This is a really challenging project.  We have done the needs assessment, and it is very clear to me that the newcomer families want something different from the rural and Aboriginal families I have worked with in the past.

When talking about literacy, the new immigrants often said things like, “We do not have even the simple things.  We need to know how to make a grocery list, and we need to know how to find those groceries in a grocery store.  We need to know how to work with the doctor, and how to understand and promote our children’s health.  We need to know how to get our children involved in sports.”  Therefore, the family literacy program we will develop with them will be very different from past ones.

Before I conclude, I want to talk about your role as librarians.  I want to say that as educators, you had a tremendous impact on me and my life. When I walked to the library on those winter nights in Labrador City, I always walked with anticipation and the librarians who waited for me had already selected books they knew I would love.  They introduced me to worlds I had never imagined existed, and places, people and stories I have never forgotten.  Librarians helped give me a rich educational experience, and I credit that experience for helping me throughout my life and career.   I know that without that introduction to books, stories, adventure, heartache, mystery and fantasy, as the daughter of a miner from Labrador I could never have grown up to one day be the President of your University.  Those librarians took the time and interest needed to have a positive impact on my literacy and my life – and I hope you do the same for the children who walk through the doors of YOUR library.

Thank you.