Agir pour la prise en compte de l’illettrisme – Taking action to address illiteracy
Lire et Ecrire estimates on the basis of international surveys that 10% of the adult population in Fédération Wallonie–Bruxelles is illiterate, i.e. does not master the fundamental languages (oral, reading, writing, arithmetic) and basic knowledge from primary school, neither in French nor in another language.
Lire et Ecrire is regularly and increasingly approached by private and public organisations interested in acting on these findings at their level, either for their users and/or their workers. We are developing similar skills internally: literacy training, including for workers, raising awareness of the persistence of illiteracy and taking people into account, ongoing training for frontline workers, development of territorial platforms, etc., but also more specific projects such as La Traversée. However, we have not developed specific professional skills to support these organisations and are struggling to find the right methodological and organisational framework. We would like to be able to respond regularly and appropriately to their calls for tender and/or requests for collaboration that could have a significant impact on people.
As a lifelong learning movement, we actively support the possibilities of civic engagement of illiterate people who wish to do so and are attentive to creating opportunities for learners to position themselves as competent actors in the fight against illiteracy, its causes and/or its consequences. Aware of the difficulty for literate people to understand the specific difficulties of non-literate people and convinced that being a beginner reader is not the same as being a beginner thinker, we seek to base our work on the expertise of our teams as well as on that of the people who experience these situations.
In this project and around the problem described above, we wish to create a space for reflection and design associating researchers (statutory and/or students) and operators in the field to define an intervention device of the type accompanying a company or organisation in taking account of illiteracy in their development.
Several dimensions seem to us to need to be dealt with, requiring a cross-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach, in a non-exhaustive manner: the analysis of the demand and how to mark out our response in relation to it, the methodological and ethical framework for intervention, the internal competences of Lire et Ecrire and the external competences to be mobilised, the organisational, institutional and partnership framework to be implemented in order to carry out this mission - including the statutory, administrative and legal questions.
In our opinion, this is an innovative approach, more specifically on at least 2 aspects: the development of a service offer in and from a non-market association framework and the mobilisation of the expertise of people experiencing illiteracy in the process.
Project partners
Applicant: Lire et Écrire Communauté française
Institution: Les régionales de Lire et Ecrire (particularly the one in Brussels)
Academic partners: Brussels Research Open Lab
Want to learn more or get involved?
If you are a member of one of the CIVIS member universities or a stakeholder in any of the CIVIS territories and would like to find out more about the project, reach us by email or by contacting your CIVIS university.
Project contact: sylvie.pinchart@lire-et-ecrire.be
OpenLab contact at ULB: fanny.sbaraglia@ulb.be
