Appendix 13

A Literacy Campaign in South Africa[1]

 Introduction 

This brief document outlines a proposed concept for implementing a literacy campaign in South Africa. It represents a practical attempt to respond to the Minister of Education’s Call to Action to ‘break the back of illiteracy’ within five years. We begin by outlining a concept for the campaign itself. We then augment this with a brief statement of operational principles for the campaign and a discussion of the critical role of the Literacy Agency planned for launch by the Ministry of Education early in 2000.

The Concept in Brief

In essence, we propose a national literacy campaign, led by the Ministry of Education and supported by the public broadcaster. This campaign will take the form of a nation-wide programme of activities for developing literacy and promoting reading. The programme of activities will involve volunteer learners and include volunteer literacy educators (as well as educators already employed to provide literacy training) recruited through key ‘mobilizing networks’ such as religious organizations, trade unions, business organizations, local government and parastatals, and the network of public and private adult learning centres. 

The programme of activities will be drive by the Literacy Agency – a body leading and coordinating a multi-agency national campaign – which will provide packages of learning resources designed to provide direct support for learners and facilitators. They will also be supported by the public broadcaster through weekly television and radio broadcasts, designed for shared viewing or listening over a period of several weeks.  

This programme of activities will be supplemented by the provision of post-literacy support strategies such as mass distribution of books by the Literacy Agency, use of same language sub-titling in music videos and other programme formats, and support of a national campaign to stimulate reading. 

The campaign will respond to a variety of needs, motivations, and different contexts of learning of adults and young people and will offer a variety of options – ranging from shorter to longer packages for learning and from highly structured learning activities to more informal activities to support youth and adults to achieve their learning goals relating to literacy and numeracy.

 Contents 

Operational Principles

The following operational principles have been identified for the literacy campaign. Others will be added to this list as planning proceeds:

•     The success of the campaign depends on a sustained and visible political will, which will ensure that the nation remains mobilized behind the project. In addition to the Minister of Education, this must include high level buy-in from political leaders and important agencies like churches, funders, and other government departments.

•     The campaign will have to be driven by mother tongue literacy instruction.

•     The campaign will be designed to support a wide range of communities and audiences with a wide range of interests, and to appeal to different motivations for becoming literate. In this regard, it will be critical to disaggregate the target audience (illiterate youths and adults) to understand these different interests and cater for these most effectively. It will offer core support (a starter pack of teacher materials, a starter pack of learning resources), which local initiatives could adapt to their audiences' needs.

•     The campaign will have to be designed to support a wide range of people and interests,.

•     The Literacy Agency will offer central coordination and leadership but it will facilitate local initiatives by using ‘people’s networks’ like churches, trades unions, and others. In this sense, it will ensure a coordinated multi-agency implementation. It will be critical to strike a balance between eliminating unnecessary ‘middlemen’, who could delay the distribution of resources, recruitment of learners, and other crucial activities and devolving responsibilities so that volunteers and agencies that join feel that they own the campaign.

•     Although the different elements of the campaign can be easily repeated, clear time frames need to be set for the project.

•     Given the above, the campaign will have to be implemented with an eye on contributing to systemic development in various ways. The role of the Directorate of Adult Education and Training – which has this as its primary focus – will be key in this regard. The project needs to design an open learning network, bringing new energies and institutions to a national campaign with the view to consolidating systematic development in adult education. It is important that the campaign is as uncomplicated as possible – allowing anyone to join – but designed so that those interested in moving on to the qualifications regime are able to do so too.

•     All educational resources produced for use in the campaign should be produced with a view to contributing to resourcing adult basic education and training more broadly. For example all broadcasts, on both radio and television, should be packaged on audio and or videocassette together with all printed materials to form mixed media packs for distribution to appropriate networks of adult learning.

•     The campaign may start with populist themes, using cultural magnets like sport, music and storytelling to ensure maximum uptake, but could then build a cycle of common national themes over the five-year period to hold a common thread through the entire country.

•     The campaign will be run in a manner that ensures that new enthusiasm and energy is brought to adult education. The spirit of the campaign will be inclusive, positive, and people-centred, but driven with a sense of purpose and vision.

•      A key goal of the campaign will be to popularize learning.

•     The campaign will focus specifically on breaking down stereotypes about learning and illiteracy. Primary research on the nature of these stereotypes and their social implications will have to inform the project design and be structured into marketing campaigns.

•     The campaign must be developed in cooperation with various national strategies to develop adult education.

•    The campaign must contribute systematically to gathering more accurate statistics on adult education.

•     The campaign will have to be designed and implemented as a single, integrated strategy, not as a series of discrete elements.

•     The campaign will integrate appropriate research, monitoring, and evaluation functions into its planning and implementation.

The Concept in Detail

The concept presented below is a preliminary description of a literacy campaign. Details of implementation, as well as possible modification of the concept during discussion with key agencies, will be added as a full project design is developed (see project plan below). The different elements presented below can be run several times over, depending on the requirements of the campaign and the Literacy Agency. Thus, this should not be considered as a proposal for a once-off set of events. The intention is to design a campaign simple enough to cater for large numbers of learners and flexible enough to accommodate the diversity of the target learning population (which includes out-of-school youths, older people, women, the unemployed, people living in rural areas, the disabled, parents, prisoners, and a range of other kinds of learners).

Mobilizing the Nation

Effectively, the literacy campaign will begin with a Public Call to Action by the newly-formed Literacy Agency, located in the Minister of Education’s Office. It will have several functions, including:

•         Recruiting volunteer educators;

•         Raising general awareness;

•         Motivating learners to participate in the campaign;

•         Mobilizing society to support learners; and

•         Soliciting other forms of support.

 

This call to action will be made through key ‘mobilizing networks’, including religious networks (particularly Church Networks), the public and private network of adult learning centres, trade unions, the Mining Sector, and the Department of Correctional Services. A key aim of this first phase will be to recruit volunteers who are prepared to act as educators for the campaign.

This process of recruitment will be managed by the mobilizing networks themselves, working in partnership with the Literacy Agency. It will be actively supported by SABC Educational Broadcasting,[2] through radio and television advocacy campaigns. This will involve use of continuity presenters and short inserts, publicizing the Call to Action and providing contact details for people interested in volunteering their services. It will be supplemented by other features covering the campaign in more detail, possibly either as part of established programmes or as stand-alone documentaries. 

Simultaneously, the SABC will begin broader marketing strategies to popularize the concept of literacy training. These will be run in conjunction with partner mobilizing networks. This advocacy process will also be run by the Literacy Agency, and will include dissemination of brochures, press releases and articles, and other above- and below-the-line marketing strategies. The purpose will be to raise public awareness about illiteracy, seeking to remove stigmas attached to illiteracy, to encourage illiterate people to participate in the literacy campaign, and to persuade other people to make contributions to the campaign itself. These contributions could potentially include financial or other in-kind contributions or may involve removing possible barriers to the success of the intervention. For example, employees could contribute by ensuring that flexible work arrangements allow potential volunteers or learners to participate in the campaign, other people could contribute by minding the children of learners and/or volunteers during learning sessions. In a sentence, the aim of the campaign will be to encourage everybody to ‘do their bit’ to break the back of illiteracy. It will ask of everyone ‘What are you doing about illiteracy?’ A critical component of the marketing campaign will be to understand the wide-ranging motivations that may lead people to participate in the campaign itself and to use these to draw in learners. Various ‘cultural magnets’ will be deployed in this regard, including broad themes such as sport and music, as well as specific sales pitches, such as learning how burial society money is used, helping a child with school work, or reading the history of the Zionist Church. 

From a broadcasting perspective, this campaign will incorporate similar strategies to those employed to recruit volunteer educators. In addition, there will be an effort to integrate characters into popular mainstream television programmes where this is possible and useful, using these characters and their daily experiences in an attempt to break down stereotypes surrounding illiterate people. Sport and music programmes will also be used as key programming platforms for the marketing campaign. In summary, then, the SABC will devise a programme mix using existing programmes, as well as designing new ones, to meet the needs of this advocacy drive.

Training the Educators: Initial and Ongoing

The second phase of the campaign will comprise training volunteer educators. Again, the mobilizing networks will be critical, as these will provide the link between volunteer educators and the central campaign office at the Literacy Agency. The intention will be to provide intensive training delivered in the way so successfully used by the Independent Electoral Commission.[3] The training process will be driven by the Literacy Agency, working with a range of adult educator training programme providers. Here, broadcasting has a central role to play. We envisage that volunteers, either or their own or in groups, will receive starter training packs, which outline a simple teaching and learning methodology for teaching literacy and provide the necessary resources to teach small groups of learners.[4] Starter packs will be distributed via the appropriate mobilizing networks, possibly with large-scale logistical assistance from appropriate agencies such as the army or private sector distributors. 

Volunteer educators will receive direct support from the mobilizing networks with which they are associated. In addition, however, broadcasting will have a key role to play in supporting volunteers. We anticipate that a weekly programme series that provides direct support to the volunteers will be broadcast on television (and repeated at least once on a different time slot). This series, which will run for a number of weeks, will provide simple and clear directions on how to run a literacy session effectively, showcasing best practice and demonstrating clearly how to engage groups of learners and take account of their different interests. These will then be supplemented with weekly talk show programmes on every radio station (thus ensuring a full spread of languages), during which volunteer teachers are able to call the station and ask experts questions about literacy training and any problems they are experiencing with the materials themselves. These will extend beyond the training sessions to provide ongoing support to volunteer educators. In addition, it may be possible to use newspapers to circulate additional resources, almost in the form of a weekly tutorial letter for volunteer educators. 

This phase of the campaign will be run in conjunction with identified adult educator training programmes. Working with such providers, it will still, however, be necessary to design and implement a different programme from those currently offered by adult educator training agencies.

Providing Literacy Training

The mass mobilizing campaign and volunteer educator training will need to be carefully timed to ensure that, as public interest reaches a peak, it can be acted upon effectively through the provision of literacy training. Thus, once the training period is completed, it will be important to ensure that learners are recruited for informal sessions around the country. Again, this will take place through liaison between the Literacy Agency and its partner mobilizing networks. Management information systems will need to be set up at the Literacy Agency to keep track of volunteer educators and their learners. The people involved in each of the networks will then populate these. This management process will be critical to the success of the campaign, but will pose significant implementation challenges, each of which will require carefully planned solutions. 

We anticipate that the literacy training itself will follow a similar pattern to the training of volunteer educators. Weekly television programmes will be broadcast (and repeated as often as possible) for viewing by groups of learners at communal venues where television sets are accessible. We also envisage weekly programmes being broadcast on all SABC radio stations, again designed for communal listening. Television and radio programmes will have to be designed to complement one another, but also to stand alone as resources, particularly so that learners without access to television can still follow the course. 

The basic methodology cutting across the printed, radio, and television resources will have to be carefully designed to be applicable in a wide range of contexts and appealing to a wide range of learner interests. Again, the starter packs provided to volunteer teachers could be supplemented with newspaper circulars targeting learners themselves and designed to reinforce skills they are picking up during group sessions. By the end of the literacy training period, learners should have received basic literacy training, which we expect to focus specifically on teaching the basics of reading and writing.

Post-Literacy Support

Provision of post-literacy support will be critical to the long-term success of the campaign. The following are strategies that can be employed to support newly literate learners:

•     Use of same-language subtitling in music videos (and possibly other programme formats) to reinforce skills learned in literacy sessions);

•     Mass distribution of easy readers by the Literacy Agency (including print runs potentially running into the millions to reduce unit costs of books), supported by on-air reading of books by respected individuals; and

•     Support of ERA-led campaign to stimulate reading in South Africa (details of which are due to be finalized at a conference to be held at the end of February, 2000).

Others will be developed as the campaign unfolds. In addition, strategies to accommodate newly literate learners in other educational programmes will have to be developed as the campaign unfolds and the expectations and interests of these new learners are raised. The Directorate for Adult Education and Training within the Department of Education will be critical to achieving this. 

 Contents 

[1]This concept paper has been developed in conjunction with the SABC, the Department of Education, and the fledgling Literacy Agency.

[2] SABC Educational Broadcasting refers to both radio and television broadcasting. It is envisaged that radio and television will work closely together on this campaign, as part of broader SABC efforts to set up bi-media units. This is also in line with recent proposals developed for the Department of Education on pathways for educational broadcasting.

[3] In brief, the Independent Electoral Commission used broadcasting to train many thousands of electoral volunteers before the 1999 election. Weekly programmes were broadcast on SABC television for all volunteers to watch, and these were then supplemented with radio talk shows – broadcast on all radio stations to ensure a full spread of languages – during which volunteers could telephone experts with specific queries. These programmes were so popular they very often ran over their scheduled time. This was then augmented with various print support strategies. By all accounts, this training intervention worked very well, contributing significantly to the success of the country’s last election.

[4] The literacy teaching method chosen will have to be carefully selected from the myriad available after consultation with a panel of South African literacy experts. The method would have to be conceptually and procedurally simple and capable of being used by untrained volunteers using a simple training manual and a learner primer (or equivalent). It is probable that the method chosen would blend a whole word and sentence approach (rather than phonics) as a starting approach and would try to embrace some of the empowering elements derived from Freirian and neo-Frierian approaches. The design of the training manual and learner primer would require extremely careful thought and the highest degree of expertise. Ideally the primer would be a generic one  with any reading content focussing on a key theme of interest to all (health care might be an obvious choice though there can be a danger in having reading material that is too didactic and edifying). Reading material could make use of some of the excellent easy readers for adults already developed in South Africa as well as new material.  With regard to numeracy, very basic numeracy should be built into the primer.  An additional numeracy primer should also be developed.  Instruction on writing is less controversial and there will be little difficulty in designing some materials for learners.