Multi-level Literacy Workshop in Rural Area (Germany)

Mellendorf is a village about 20 kilometres north of Hannover. The Mellendorf Literacy Workshop was created in order to give local residents with low levels of literacy the opportunity to improve their skills by attending a learning environment organised in the form of an open workshop: no enrolment, no obligation to attend regularly, and individual activities for each attendee corresponding to her or his individual needs. This of course requires a better teacher/learner ratio than in ordinary courses. In this case we were able to implement this with the help of the Erasmus+ funding of this project which gave us special leeway. 

HISTORY

One reason for organising a literacy training outside of town, in one of the villages of the predominantly agricultural surroundings of Hannover was that people there have far less access to education as the local education facilities do not have the capacity to provide such courses. Moreover, in the village of Mellendorf we saw a chance to cooperate with the local community centre and its Form Angels (Formularlotsen) service. That’s a service run by local volunteers, usually elderly local, who are available to help others with filling in complicated forms as needed for various administrative purposes, for example for applying for social benefits. Our idea was that some of their clients would potentially be members of our target group: local residents with lacking proficiency in literacy (so called functional illiterates). We thought that the Form Angels of Mellendorf would be able to identify such individuals, and to relate them to the new learning offer that was going to be set up once a week in the same building of the community centre, an old vocational school.  

In order to enable the Form Angels to help us, we invited them for one Saturday afternoon, together with other potential multipliers, to a seminar where one of our adult literacy experts introduced them to the idea that there are about 7 million adult persons in Germany who cannot sufficiently read and write; what techniques such persons use in order to hide their disability from others (which the often do), how such persons can be identified; and how they can be encouraged to attend the workshop we were going to organise for them.  

However, this entire idea to approach local illiterates became a failure. There were several reasons: first, the Form Angels had – what we initially did not know – just started with this service, and so they did not have already established lines of trust with their mentees. Second, the number of mentees of the Form Angels was relatively low. And third, the Form Angels believed that in the group of their existing mentees there were actually no functional illiterates.   

In parallel, we had undertaken other things to inform the local public about the new offer. This included newspaper articles, word of mouth, and a lot of help by the network of local civic organisations gathered in the community centre. So we anyway started the workshop, once a week, on Thursday afternoon. The first three or four sessions went without a single participant showing up. We used the time to prepare material for potential participants, and to make plans for additional PR activities, including going from door to door in the village and presenting the project in direct contact with citizens there, hoping that some would know neighbours or relatives that could need our service. We also considered cooperating with one of the local businesses, a large warehouse, where supposedly many low-qualified people are employed.  

All these additional measures to contact participants however eventually turned out unnecessary, as during the fourth afternoon a young lady showed up who had had somewhere heard that there was something like a class for learning reading and writing in the community centre. This lady was a refugee from Afghanistan who was predominantly interested in improving her German and in contacting people. We worked with her this afternoon. When she came back the next week, she brought with her two friends; the third weeks the group was already five people, mixed women and men.  

Thus the open learning workshop started basically through word of mouth and the articles in the local newspaper. Participant numbers grew constantly, so that soon we had to hire an additional teacher in order to cope with the number of people and their heterogeneous needs and competences. In order to provide a good quality learning environment, one teacher can, in our experience, care for about three learners at once. Of course, with this history of finding participants, the character of the workshop changed: Rather than local (German) rural (functional) illiterates, the group now consisted of refugees from various countries of the Middle East including Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. They weren’t total newcomers to Germany at all, more typically they had already spent three years in the country, and they usually had also passed one or several of the ordinary “German language and society for immigrants” courses, but usually not with sufficient success.

INNOVATION

The innovative element in this approach is that we tried to offer a learning opportunity that is as far from “traditional” lessons as possible. We believe that this would suit especially the needs of functional illiterates who typically have had unpleasant experiences at school, and thus would be put off by a typical school setting.  

Another element of innovation is to offer a learning opportunity that brings together different groups of learners – both indigenous population with literacy issues, and immigrants who generally have language issues, and sometimes also have low-level basic education. The idea was to provide a learning environment where both groups could profit from each other.

TARGET GROUP

Participants that factually attended the workshop are immigrants (refugees and others) who want to improve their German language skills. Their language skills were between levels A1 and B2, which illustrates how diverse the group was. Some participants had attended school regularly and over many years (on is a former officer of the Syrian army), others have attended school only for a few years, and their first step should be to acquire all the techniques of learning (learn learning).  

Participants came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. They were aged 30 to 50 years.  

Learning goals for them are improving the ability to read and write (in German, or at all), and to develop a better command of German in general. We also put some emphasis on Alltagskompetenz – the competencies necessary to cope with everyday tasks in a modern society, as adequate participation in society is one of the core purposes of basic education (not only in the  MobileBE project). The same thing is true for media competency.  An emphasis in terms of time spent during the workshops was active reading, especially for those participants who had not sufficient experience with learning as a self-directed activity.  

CONTACTING & MOTIVATING PARTICIPANTS

After the initial plan of contacting potential participants through the Form Angels (see introduction above) did not work so well, we started thinking about alternative methods of finding participants. Things we considered were having a market stall on a place busy with passers-by in the village centre and talking to people like during an election campaign; knocking at people’s doors and presenting the project that way (like Jehova's Witnesses), and contacting one of the larger companies in the village we knew was employing many low-skilled people in order to organise with them an in-house literacy training. However, nothing of these was necessary, as eventually it turned out that the various other measures we had taken, eventually came to fruition. We, and the Mellendorf community centre, had published articles in the local newspaper. (In Hannover we would not have had that opportunity, but the small local newspaper in the rural municipality was happy to accept articles submitted to them about planned activities in region). Also, the various initiatives and associations using the community centre’s venues had their part in making the project known to more and more people, especially such in multiplier positions. During preparation for the project, we also had one or two meetings with volunteers and teamers of various local initiatives to present them the plan and get them involved.  

In terms of motivating participants we did not have to take specific measures. The participants who eventually appeared - chiefly refugees from the Middle East, accommodated in Mellendorf and neighbouring villages – were intrinsically motivated to learn. Their main interest was to improve their command of German. For doing so, they could attend courses in Hannover, 20 kilometres away, and easily reachable by public rail transport, but still, having a learning offer at the very place where they are living was much more attractive to them. Possibly also because it offered opportunity to get into contact with other locals, as opposed to the anonymity of the metropole.  

Prepared to overcome obstacles, we had also an additional tool at hands: for people living too far away (in neighbouring villages), without a vehicle, and where public transport was not frequent enough, the Mellendorf community centre offered their van to the project. The offer was, however, never used, as all participants somehow managed to come to the venue by themselves.  

Some participants attend the course in order to prepare themselves for the German language exam B1 level (which is an prerequisite for various benefits and employment chances), in which they had failed previously. One participant needed to improve his command of German in order to get a driving licence. Others said that the main driver for them to attend the workshop was to become able to help their children with homework for school.   

THE LEARNING & TEACHING

In this workshop, each participant has the opportunity to work on his reading, writing or speaking skills, depending on her/his needs and desires. Teachers prepare a Learn Counter (a large table at one side of the room) where a plethora of learning materials (language levels A1 to B2) are displayed, and learners can pick something from there.  

In practice most of our participants laid focus on improving their speaking skills in German. To meet that need, the group developed a tradition, by the end of each Thursday’s session, to do half an hour of reading together, or alternatively to discuss about some topic of common interest. These parts of the workshop had then more of a classroom character.