Prioritizing learners means prioritizing digital equity

At AlphaPlus, we’re here to support adult literacy educators in your daily work. But we’re also committed to bringing the adult literacy sector’s voice into necessary spaces, taking your issues — and potential — into national conversations.

An adult education perspective on digital inclusion

Recently, our team member Christine collaborated with Matthias Sturm, adult education researcher and evaluator (and my former AlphaPlus co-worker), to publish a paper for the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP). Christine, our policy and research specialist in education and technology, has been working with Matthias to find ways to advance the conversation about digital inclusion.

The IRPP is a national organization that informs debates on policy issues facing Canadians and their governments, with strong connections to federal and provincial policymakers. Christine and Matthias noticed their publication featuring adult basic skills and pitched a topic examining digital access, equity and literacy. The result is the paper Adult Education: The Missing Piece to Bridging the Digital Divide (a French version will be available in December).

Bridging the digital divide requires skills development

This new paper sheds light on issues you know well but that haven’t been addressed at the policy-making and funding decision levels. For example, those of us working in adult literacy education know that bridging the digital divide is about more than access to devices or the internet. A lack of digital skills prevents people from taking full advantage of essential services and deprives them of potentially life-changing education and employment. Overcoming inequities requires equitable opportunities to benefit from technology — which requires the development of specific skills.

The adult literacy sector is already doing this work — but we need support

Adult literacy educators often work with the very adults on the other side of the digital divide. As a field, we are well-positioned to help bridge that divide within our upgrading, vocational, language and literacy programs. However, as Christine and Matthias highlight in the paper, we face barriers:

Complex system: The system in which we work is complex and siloed, with a mixture of federal and provincial funding sources and providers, including community non-profits, school boards/districts and colleges.

Unstable funding models: We lack sustainable core funding and instead rely on short-term, project-based funding. Organizations delivering adult literacy education programs rely on part-time staff working on contracts.

A lack of formalized, supported professional development: The sector offers limited professional development and does not mandate professional qualifications.

Recommendations

In the paper, Christine and Matthias recommend two measures directed at Employment and Social Development Canada to help adult education programs add digital learning to their offerings:

1. Provide sustained core funding to provincial and territorial adult education programs. This funding is needed to stabilize operations, facilitate long-term planning, reduce administrative redundancies, and ensure predictable support for equipment acquisition, IT infrastructure and software licensing. It would also enable the creation of a national platform to share learning materials and best practices among educators.
2. Connect community-level adult education with broader digital literacy efforts. We need a cross-sectoral network to co-ordinate digital skills programs and increase access for underserved communities. Building on existing partnerships and establishing new collaborations would help integrate informal and formal learning, ensuring equitable access to digital resources across diverse Canadian communities.

New priorities for AlphaPlus

This paper’s publication coincides with AlphaPlus unveiling our refreshed strategic outlook. Following the pandemic-era rapid adoption of technology within literacy programs and two years of funding that allowed us to experiment with how we support you, our new direction better reflects the state of your work.

We’re broadening our role from promoting the use of technology to sustaining the momentum that has already been created, and we’ve identified five priorities for the future (plus a new mission and vision). For the next several years, AlphaPlus will:

1. Focus on teachers who strive to place learners and their experiences at the centre of the learning process.
2. Support building literacy and learners’ digital confidence to participate in society.
3. Provide teachers with actionable content that integrates well-researched sector shifts.
4. Facilitate teacher collaboration and leadership networks across language and cultural communities.
5. Understand the adult literacy sector across Canada and pursue collaborations.

You’ll notice an alignment between our new priorities and our recommendations to the federal government. We recognized that our approach must go beyond “what has always been done” and short-term challenges. We can’t afford to operate in silos and within an Ontario-only context. To keep up with the relentless pace of technological change, we need a comprehensive, co-ordinated and sustainable approach — for AlphaPlus and our whole sector.

Learn more about our refreshed strategic direction

Download the IRPP paper on their website