The Irish Challenge

January. 2004

Our dauntless director recently gave a one-day workshop on adult literacy in the west of Ireland. The aim was to show how the practices of imaginative education could help adults improve their literacy skills. After presenting some of the cognitive tools and showing how the planning frameworks (see the Teaching and Curriculum navigator to the left) could be used, the literacy teachers were invited to work in small groups using one of the frameworks to plan a lesson on a topic of their choosing. Towards the end of the day, one of the teachers said that she had a problem getting her students to learn the differences in spelling between “there”, “their”, and “they’re.” Daunted, jet-lagged, and brain-dead, our director said he would work on it and post one way to do it on our website. So here it is. We will be adding further examples of using the frameworks in the Teaching section. If you have used one or other of the frameworks, please send us descriptions of your lessons and units so that we can add them to our slowly growing set.