RAPAL LITERACY CONFERENCE 2014
by Steph Taylor, College Leader, Offender Learning Steph was a rapporteur at the RaPAL Conference. A very warm welcome awaited visitors at the RaPAL Literacy Conference in Birmingham. Sallie Condy, Chairperson of RAPAL, gave a most enthusiastic welcome and update on the activities of the group.
Professor Linda Lang, Dean of Education of Health and Wellbeing from the University of Wolverhampton gave a keynote presentation on experiences in professional learning and the lifelong learning barriers and bridges to higher education. Linda spoke about how access to higher education has improved as previously only the extreme elite got into university. Now there are many bridges being built to higher education and better access to courses through partnerships between universities and schools with taster days and visits.
Professor Linda Lang talked at length about the new University Technical Colleges or UTCs for 14-18 year old students. Some are opening in September 2014. The universities are working with industry from the start. Health Futures is the new University Technical College opening in September 2015 with 23 partners across Wolverhampton for 14-19 year olds, adopting a careers-focus across its regional catchment area.
L wasEaP
also mentioned which is “Learning Education and Progression”, a course for first steps to higher education for which the response has been good.
The choice of workshops was excellent and it was difficult to choose as I wanted to go to them all. I chose “Mental Health Literacies” with Jonathan Berry, Director of the Community Health and Learning Foundation. With an excellent power point presentation, Jonathan gave facts and figures about health issues that affect different communities. It was a fascinating delivery of health facts and how preventable some deaths could be if literacy skills were improved. We also joined in with some gentle activities which brought laughter and amusement to the presentation. It really made me think about how we can link more health-related classroom activities in our literacy and social life skills setting in offender learning, my work area.
Lunch was a good time to network and I sat with a very friendly group and chatted about literacy, the morning talks and teaching in general.
Feeling refreshed, we returned to the main lecture theatre and Claire Collins gave an enthusiastic talk about digital literacies with a presentation of how we can use technology to enhance our teaching. Claire's passion was apparent, which is always great to experience. As I get older I think it gets more difficult to keep up with all the technology, so well done Claire for motivating us into talking about the new technology. Claire also had been working with a colleague in America and we linked up to hear about a project which was also very interesting. There was not enough time to hear all about the project as we needed to walk to the next workshop.
The last workshop was with Tara Furlong talking about her research work on literacy in letter writing. The case study shown was of work from two different solicitors and the difference in the text and writing. Tara's presentation was most professional and it was evident that Tara is very talented in the use of computer technology.
As Claire Collins mentioned earlier in the day, 'It is great to meet up with like-minded individuals that want to share good practice in literacy and education.’
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