COMMUNITY-SERVICE PROVIDERS AS LITERACY FACILITATORS - A PILOT PROJECT

A pilot project was conducted with 20 community service providers that included health, social, and other professional workers from an inner -city area in one of Canada's capital cities. The goals of the project were (a) to explore a range of community service providers' perspecti ves on literacy; (b) to determine if six hours of training in family l iteracy development strategies modified community service providers' u nderstanding of literacy learning; and (c) to examine how community se rvice providers, as a result of the training, incorporated literacy ev ents for the families they serve in their professional practice. Parti cipants were involved in two three-hour workshops directed to literacy acquisition in general and family literacy practices in particular Da ta were collected through pre- and post-survey questionnaires, individ ual interviews, and information collected during the workshops. Result s indicate that participants demonstrated a shift in attitudes from sk ills achievement to sociocultural perspectives on literacy acquisition . The community service providers also attended to and included litera cy events more frequently in their own professional practices after wo rkshop participation.