[NLA] Re: Followup to Illinois New Readers for New Life State Conference

Thu Jun 13 20:40:12 EDT 2002

Ever so briefly here, Archie --

Congratulations to you and to the doctors, too!  The Illinois event in which
you participated was superb!  Your post carried such a great message for ALL
of us on this listserv to hear.  The doctors in the AMA certainly
responded - there's no *question* about that!

We "helpers" need to ask ourselves on a constant basis:  What is important
in the daily lives of our learners?  If we can identify their issues and
then seek ways to help them meet the needs that surface, related to coping
when one has lower level reading, writing and spelling skills, we can all
change lives.  And you DID that, Archie!  You opened some new doors of
awareness and understanding between the doctors and the learners.  We are
*each* teachers at some time -- and you learners certainly *were* during
this event.

What a great post!  What a wonderful experience it had to have been!  Health
Literacy is a critical need from what you said and what has been said by
learners in my program.  Your involvement is inspiring me to drive forward
and DO something about it here as well.  Thanks for the motivator!  Thanks
for the inspiration!!

Nancy Hansen
Sioux Falls, SD
----- Original Message -----
From: "lewis kalmbach" <lewis at kadvertising.com>
To: "Archie Willard" <millard at goldfieldaccess.net>; "_NLA LISTSERV"
<nla at lists.literacytent.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 10:41 AM
Subject: [NLA] Re: Followup to Illinois New Readers for New Life State
Conference

Archie....you are an amazing human being. It was an honor to meet you and
spend a few days learning with you. Thank you for that opportunity.
Lewis Kalmbach

> From: Archie Willard <millard at goldfieldaccess.net>
> Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 20:53:55 -0500
> To: _NLA LISTSERV <nla at lists.literacytent.org>
> Subject: Followup to Illinois New Readers for New Life State Conference
>
> Last week-end I was in Peoria, Illinois, to attend the Illinois New
> Readers for New Life State Conference. This was a special time in adult
> literacy for me to see all the adult learners and how excited they were
> being a part of making the health literacy video for the AMA.
>
> In order to bring awareness to other doctors about some patients' poor
> literacy skills, Dr. Terry Davis brought a team to make a video about
> the problems that adult learners face when they go into a medical clinic
> and also to do research on this subject. There were camera people,
> production people and people from the AMA to assist. Michael Wolf, PhD
> of Northwestern University was there interviewing adult learners on a
> health literacy project that he is working on. The New Readers of
> Illinois teamed up with this research team to help make health literacy
> better. At this conference, we were all students and all teachers at the
> same time.  We talked about health literacy from both sides and learned
> from each other. To my knowledge, never before has anyone partnered with
> adult learners in this way. There were many ideas and some were very
> good ones that can be used to make health literacy better.
>
> Friday night Common Cause had an open house. They showed us their
> facilities that they are so proud of, and well they should be.  The
> building they use is an old church that was sold to them for one dollar.
> They are very excited about what they are doing there. They have a
> reading center, a computer room, a day-care center and church services
> are still held in this building. They do fund-raising and many things
> are donated to them. Many people volunteer their time to make the center
> run better.  They are a grass-roots organization. We were all touched by
> the people who ran the center and the love that was in the room that
> night. What happens at this center is what America is all about.
>
> Saturday morning people were coming together at Bradley University. They
> were getting reacquainted with old friends and making new friends before
> the conference got underway. About 80 adult learners plus some
> professionals were at this conference. There was a general session on
> health literacy. Dr. Terry Davis gave a good overview of health literacy
> in our country and led a discussion. Mark Williams, MD and Ruth Parker,
> MD each spoke and answered questions. They all stressed that they were
> here to learn from the adult learners
>
> Some of my thoughts about the day: If we are going to move forward with
> adult literacy it will take the education field, the medical people and
> the adult learners all working together. One of the things I learned was
> that health literacy is a bigger problem in our country than we realize
> and that only 5 million dollars has been spent to learn more about it.
> Yet it has cost our country billions of dollars. When talking about
> people having social problems because of poor literacy, Congress and
> society in general do not seem very interested, but if you say that we
> have health problems because of poor literacy skills they tend to
> listen.
>
> We all came away with a better understanding of each other and a lot was
> learned.  This day should be just a beginning in health literacy. I hope
> other professions will partner with adult learners and I hope they will
> let the adult learners be the teachers. For me it was a great day and it
> was good to be a part of what happened there.
>
> Archie Willard
> Adult Learner
>
> --
> Archie Willard
> millard at goldfieldaccess.net
> URL - http://www.readiowa.org/archiew.html
>
>
>
>

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