“Working in Adult Literacy” will shut down sometime in the next few months. So now is the time to download any posts or resources that you use in your work and want to keep. Thank you for reading and connecting.

Gone But Not Forgotten

Some of the posts and resources, the ones still fresh enough to offer some insights into adult literacy work, will be available on the Community Learning Network Portal. Over the past few years, I have been working with Corrie Rhyasen Erdman from the Community Learning Network and Berniece Gowan from Calgary Learns, along with members of their organizations. I’m closing my chapter, but they will take my material on, in sync with the work they are doing.

The blog will be here at this address until they reveal its new incarnation on their website. Beginning in the fall of 2026, you will find some of your favourites still available on the CALP Portal. Adult Learning Programs and Community Support Across Alberta | CALP. 

What’s Next for Me?

I’m 80 years old. What’s left is living until I die, that indeterminate length of time everyone has left. Finishing up my work in adult literacy has left me room for a new passion, maybe a new way of reaching people, out loud and in person, the way I started. I’ve taken up stand-up comedy, and I’m having fun. Although it seems like a sharp right turn, there is a through line. I have found another place to reach people who I would not ordinarily meet; a place to be provocative; a place to tell the world how things look to me. If you want a sneak peak, here’s a link: Kate Nonesuch – YouTube 

The Story of “Working in Adult Literacy”

My goal was “to write down everything I know about teaching before I retire.” I began in June 2012, shortly after I stopped doing classroom teaching. I was acutely aware that any trace of my professional work would fade away as soon as I left the classroom. So many things I had worked hard on–anything new I had learned about teaching adult literacy, any innovations I had made to practice, any of my insights or research that contradicted or expanded conventional wisdom, my strategies for working successfully with adult literacy students—all would be gone. I didn’t want that time and energy to go to waste; I thought my ideas about practice were worth keeping, so I began this blog and website.

I wanted to tell my truth about teaching adult literacy. I didn’t want to gloss over the raw spots and the miseries of working conditions or students’ lives. I was determined to reveal the rationale behind the way I worked with students, especially when it seemed contradictory. I resolved to expose my petty internal dialogues even when they showed that I was simply a human being, not SuperTeacher. In short, I wanted to talk about the day-to-day dynamics and interconnections of adult literacy work.

Finally, I wanted to collect some things I had written which had gone out of print or never been published. 

Around the time I was writing my first posts in this blog, I was honoured to work with Literacy Nova Scotia, developing an on-line program for training literacy practitioners. It was a wonderful opportunity to put my ideas about practice into a form that others could use, and to see how adult literacy practice was both the same and different in another part of the country. Many blog posts came out of my work on this project. 

How Did It Go?

As I wrote the posts, I came to realize the importance of some of the things I had done by chance or instinct, on a hunch or in a pinch. I took the time to articulate some of the principles that guided me: respect, resistance, and reality (Respect, Resistance, and Reality | Working in Adult Literacy). I got to see my work whole, something I had not been able to do in the heat of the classroom.

By writing the stories of interactions with students, I could reveal how they taught me and how much I learned from them; I was happy to give them some well-deserved credit. I showed up in class with as much of myself as I could; they showed up with whatever they could bring or had to bring. Together we experienced delight, despair, or boredom in every moment. 

As I published the posts, many adult literacy practitioners responded with their own experiences or asked a question that prompted another post. Sometimes they led me to their own writing, or to the work of other practitioners. Teachers in the K-12 system, teachers of English as an additional language, people from other countries, or other provinces in Canada, workers in health fields, and people working in women’s issues made thought-provoking comparisons with their own work. All those things enriched my reflections on the practice of those of us—whether tutors, classroom instructors, or volunteers—who work with learners on the front line, often far away from the concerns of administrators, policy makers, and funders.

What about That Long Break?

After a few years, I stopped posting regularly because I had said nearly all of what I had to say, yet I could not quite give the blog up. There were still two big things that needed to see the light of day before I was finished, but I was stuck. I didn’t know how to say them. 

First, there was the times tables. For thirty years I had been working on a method for teaching the times tables with no memory work. I saw that my students’ lack of fluency in basic facts inhibited their success in the math we were doing. Their feelings about the times tables made them resist my method. Why not put my method into shape for elementary schools? I thought a comic book would make it fun for kids, so during COVID I settled into learning PIXTON software for making a comic book, and eventually published Times Tables Make Sense. (Math Dog – Times Tables Make Sense) Commercially, it was a colossal failure, but nonetheless I am glad I finished it. I valued the immersion into the great number of technical and artistic skills I had to learn, and the satisfaction of digging in deeply and focusing fully. 

The other big piece waiting to be written was the NeverFail Writing Method. I developed this method over several years, a method that uses specific positive feedback to move students from reluctant “can’t write/won’t write” participants to more confident and correct writers able to articulate some of the elements of good writing. I had developed it in the classroom, step by step over many years. I had given many workshops in the method, but I could not figure out a way to write it down that would be clear enough for practitioners to implement, but at the same time show the simple but steely principles behind what seems to be a very straightforward set of activities to do with students. Then, in 2023, I began working on a project for the Community Learning Network. I worked with four amazing women in the literacy field in Alberta, Berniece Gowan, Corrie Rhyasen Erdman, Rebecca Still, and Emily Robinson Leclair to produce an online course called The NeverFail Writing Method. The Never-Fail Writing Method Their ideas about how to use videos, graphics, and a spiral organization made it possible for me finally to get it out of my head and into the world.

Those two pieces out of the way, it is time to shut down my website.

Thanks

This work of many years would not have been possible without the contributions of so many people who supported me and challenged me: 

• More than 1,000 adult learners, over many years, helped me find my way. Sometimes they worked with me and sometimes they resisted me; always they made their own decisions for their own reasons. In doing so, they taught me how to teach and brought joy to my working life. 
• Evelyn Battell and Jenny Horsman, who have been the first readers of most of my work over the past 50 years. They pushed me to tell the story behind the story of the way I worked with students, especially when I had taken that back story for granted and not bothered to tell it.
• Jane Hunter, Berniece Gowan, and Corrie Rhyasen Erdman, movers and shakers in the literacy field in Canada.
• The many readers of this blog whose engagement with the posts kept me writing more.
• Colleagues at Vancouver Island University and in the literacy field in BC who sharpened my thinking as I went along.
• Friends who listened (and still listen) to my stories about teaching life.