About this guide

Seeing the reading and writing adult learners are already doing

This is the guide I wish I had when I entered the field the better part of thirty-five years ago — a framework for adult literacy teaching that starts from the richness of what people already do with reading and writing, and builds from there.

The guide grew out of that time: twenty years working in programs, a PhD and involvement in various research projects, some university teaching and course development, then several years working alongside thoughtful colleagues and passionate educators across Ontario through AlphaPlus. Across all of it, one conviction held — that adult literacy teaching is at its best when it starts from what learners bring, not from what a curriculum says they lack, and that most educators already sense this, even when the systems around them leave little room to act on it. 

This guide argues for practice-based teaching in a system built around accountability. It doesn't reject accountability — it gives educators what they need to name their practice-based work, plan it deliberately and defend it as the real teaching it is. 

— Christine Pinsent-Johnson

Using and adapting this material

This guide is meant to be used, not just read, and used differently in different places. Ontario's system is not Manitoba's, a community program is not a college, and what serves your learners may look little like what serves someone else's. So you are welcome to take this material and make it yours: reword it, restructure it, translate it, cut what doesn't apply and add what your context needs. Adapting the framework to a different program or a different jurisdiction isn't a departure from how it's meant to be used. It is how it's meant to be used.

The guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-NC-SA). In plain terms, that means:

• Attribution — credit Literacy in Practice (litinpractice.ca) as the source, so others can trace it back and adapt it in turn.

• NonCommercial — use and share it freely, but not to make money. It stays a shared resource, not a product.

• ShareAlike — if you adapt it, release your version under the same licence, so the changes you make stay as open as what you started from.

That's the whole intent: keep the material moving, keep it free and let each program shape it to the learners in front of them.

Use of an AI assistant

The thinking here is mine. The ideas, arguments, structure, categories and purpose are my own, and so is what matters most: an understanding of the conditions educators work in, and of their tireless commitment to adult learners. AI assistants can't unite the research on literacy as social practice with the everyday reality of educators' work. That takes experience and judgment it simply doesn't have.

That understanding, together with an outline and framework I'd developed over several years, shaped a series of detailed prompts and uploads that set the tone and direction for the project. The main thing the AI assistant (Anthropic's Claude) worked from, in other words, was my own creation.

From there, AI worked as my editorial assistant. I used it to make my ideas and arguments clearer and more accessible to educators, to generate some instructional strategies within the framework I'd established, and to help me make some design and technical choices.