National Library News January 1999 Vol. 31, no. 1

From Author to Reader: Trends in Literacy and Reading in Canada and Internationally

by Gwynneth Evans,
Director General,
National and International Programs

Having been asked to speak on some trends and perspectives on literacy and reading, I would like to add that the human elements that bring together the author, publisher, bookseller and distributor, librarian, reader and community are of particular interest to me.

Let me start with a very recent experience. In late September, author Sharon Butala read at the National Library. About 80 of us were crowded into one of our meeting rooms, with a bookseller, and a small display by the United Services of Canada, the sponsor of her trip to Ethiopia to study ecological diversification. Her most recent novel, The Garden of Eden, follows the seasons and moves between southwest Saskatchewan and Ethiopia. In the days since then, I have read Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning.

Ms. Butala has built up a strong reference collection at her farm, where she lives nine months of the year. (She and her husband move to their ranch when the cattle are ranging.) She has many dictionaries and atlases and books on religion, myth, philosophy, psychology, and Amerindian history and culture. And in one of these sources, she found a Sufi saying: "when the pupil is ready, the teacher will come." And she added, "my teacher was to be books." And yet a clear message of her work is — my teacher is also nature. Indeed, the subtitle of The Perfection of the Morning is An Apprenticeship in Nature.

That night, we all remarked how quietly and intimately present the author was among us, taking us into her story, describing the Canadian and African settings, introducing us to her characters and to the Saskatchewan she has come to know and love so well. Here we were — listening to Sharon read and then asking her about her experience of life and literature. Literary, literate — littérature, littéraire, lettré — all come from the Latin root — littera, letter. We experienced the importance of both the oral and written traditions.

For the fifth year in a row, Canada has been number one in the United Nations human development report. The indicators have been chosen to assess social and economic development. But there were two disturbing percentages even in this glowing report and, combined with a third, we must take heed. According to this report, 16 percent of Canadian adults are illiterate and 12 percent are below the poverty line. Moreover, our ranking for the recognition of women in the workplace, public office and leadership positions has fallen.

Why do I choose to identify those factors together? In Western society as well as other societies — Asian, African, South American — we know that poverty and illiteracy are often intricately bound. And if poverty is especially prevalent among women and children, we know that it is difficult to reach them, even when massive campaigns of basic education are undertaken by the government. We also know that family literacy and development are increased in communities where women read, learn and apply their knowledge for family planning, health, diet, small business, and the environment. Reports and studies of community development related to the dominance of sustaining a literate environment have been found in the media and major journals, but these stories are often buried in favour of the horror stories of war, famine, crime and corruption that crowd our screens and headlines.

We know much more about adult literacy than we ever have before. International comparative studies (Literacy, Economy and Society, Reading the Future: A Portrait of Literacy in Canada, and Literacy Skills for the Knowledge Society) have given us data on societies quite different from our own — in Poland and Sweden, for example, as well as those more like our own in Great Britain and the United States. These studies test three different types of literacy: prose literacy, documentary literacy and quantitative literacy. They test the ability of an individual to understand text within its context (prose); the ability to identify information and understand and apply instructions (documentary) and numerical literacy. There are five levels — from the most basic to the most sophisticated skills — of comprehension and application of the information gained through absorbing the meaning of the passages. Interestingly enough, the European results (with the exception of Poland) generally demonstrate that the greatest portion of those tested are clustered in levels 2 and 3 — quite adequate for many forms of life and work. In North America, we proportionately have more adults in levels 1 and 5 — the two extremes of basic and sophisticated. And in this increasingly information-based economy, those at the first level find it hard to get and keep jobs. Moreover, our own figures have not changed over time — we have as many adults in that low level as there were at the beginning of the 1990s.

A number of countries have mounted campaigns to encourage. They understand the need from both an economic and a social perspective. We in Canada sometimes find such campaigns difficult to launch at a national level because education is a provincial matter. We do have the National Literacy Secretariat within the Department of Human Resources Development. Many of its agreements are worked out at the provincial, community and organizational levels. And much has been accomplished.

The value of lifelong learning is now associated with the promotion of reading, and countries like Wales, for example, also attach the survival of Welsh to these initiatives. The Welsh Book Council, publishers, booksellers, librarians and authors join forces in a common cause. UNESCO promotes the importance of a book policy, as well as information and educational policies, in order to identify the infrastructure necessary for a viable publishing industry in developing countries.

I am a volunteer with CODE (Canadian Organization for Development through Education). We have worked in Africa and the Caribbean for many years to integrate three related programs: the provision of foreign books chosen by the partners in our countries of emphasis and pertinent to our target audiences (school children and adults with less than six years of schooling); the support of publishing in local languages, using indigenous authors, illustrators, and publishing houses; and the development of libraries and library staff. There is increased recognition of the interdependence of these activities in providing support for a sustained literate environment, which, in turn, contributes to community development.

Where do libraries fit in? A UNESCO manifesto on the public library identifies the public library as a promoter and supporter of reading and literacy. The public library is also a source of information, materials and services for all groups within the community. In recent years, we have worked on a school library manifesto to be presented to the UNESCO member states because we believe that the school library has a fundamental role to play in the teaching of reading, analytical and literacy skills. Many libraries play a variety of roles for different age groups. It is known, for example, that young children learn quickly. They can be taught several languages before they go to school. We also now know that children who are not read and spoken to begin to lose that dexterity and capacity to learn; their brain cells begin to atrophy if they are not stimulated. So libraries have programs for pre-schoolers and their caregivers, collections of appropriate reading and listening materials, facilities for tutoring and reading clubs, and some act as the focal point for bringing together all the players — authors, publishers, teachers, readers. When one accepts the necessity of practice in reading, analyzing and applying information, the importance of the library as a centre for lifelong learning (for both individual and group learning) follows. I am not saying that the centre is only physical; with the technologies it can also be virtual. However, the planning, organization and services of the library must be developed in consultation with the citizens of the community. The human element is vital to the planning and evaluation of the services. Most libraries have not seen themselves as publishers except for the kinds of materials that promote and explain their services or promote specialized collections. However, with the Internet, libraries are providing access to information in an enhanced way — information not only held by the Library but also available in different forms and from many sources, including full text and multimedia. They may also be training sites and public points of access for their whole community.

In considering the various models that libraries can emulate in providing support for individual and group reading, I would like to tell you about an experience I had in northern Peru almost two years ago. Knowing of a dynamic rural library service in the area around Cajamarca, where Pisarro took the last Inca emperor in 1534, a colleague and I spent a month with several of its leaders. The network is a voluntary service in peasant farmers’ homes. A corner of the public room in the house is devoted to the library, and members of the community may come before their day in the fields starts or after it ends. In the evening, children and adults read together around the light of a coal lamp and discuss the content and application of the materials they read together aloud — either in Spanish or, occasionally, in Quechua. What is remarkable about their materials is a 20-volume encyclopedia, written and illustrated by the peasants themselves, under the guidance of a leader formally trained in the anthropology and culture of the high Andes.

Espousing a philosophy of Les traditions pour demain, based on the importance of understanding the community’s history, origins, customs and beliefs, this leader has promoted confidence among the people in writing and reading their stories. Living close to nature and to the sources of their story, they have worked to piece together all the connections between their material, social and spiritual lives so that they can take hold of the present and build the future.

This network of rural libraries is built on volunteer and democratic principles, supported by a small headquarters staff who offer training and communication and provide books for the libraries in family homes. The network has been built up over 25 years and the publishing program started about 10 years ago.

My colleague and I spent a week with the leaders at a planning session and a couple of days in the home and hamlet of one of the librarians. I was impressed by the joy, the pride and the fellowship of these people. They are talented musicians and orators. They tell their stories with conviction and they see their library work as vital to community survival and development.

We spent some time in Cajamarca to assess the essential elements of literacy in practical terms, set against all the reading we had done in international studies. We also wanted to know whether the Cajamarcan experience is transportable to other situations, especially to Africa.

Literacy is a concept, a process, a set of skills, and a mode of behaviour. In our part of the world, we think of it in personal or individual terms; in the Andes, it is a community activity, based on stated principles and needs. My sense is that we all can learn lessons from our Peruvian colleagues, by recognizing that the oral and the written are different but complementary expressions of communication and by trying to understand that reading is not only a solitary exercise but a communal activity, both in developing societies and in our own. Societies learn and develop as we acknowledge the importance of literacy to our social, economic and spiritual lives.

When we discussed the Peruvian experience with African experts, they pointed out the predominance of local languages and different customs, religions and belief systems on that continent. There is greater diversity in Africa and a greater range of circumstance — much of it even poorer economically — than in the Andes. However, we have also learned that we must provide culturally sensitive materials that correspond to the needs of women and children, as well as to those of men. The collaboration of authors, illustrators, publishers, librarians and funding organizations in finding the balance between the choice of useful foreign collections and the stimulation of new local materials is an issue which deserves our attention.

Returning to my Canadian story about the work of Sharon Butala, I would suggest that she too calls us to know and understand our pasts and our contexts so we can build our futures. She comments that when the students are ready, the teachers come. And I believe that she realizes that we are all both students and teachers. We can learn from one another, especially if we are susceptible to being creative and open to possibility. We can work together at the local, provincial, regional, national and international levels to increase the promotion and enjoyment of reading for many purposes and to stimulate the practice of literacy among individuals and groups.