Numbers and Narratives:
Adding up Stories of Success in Adult Literacy

Bow Valley College and Calgary Learns
Calgary, AB

Evolution of our research problem

Shortly after the Connecting the Dots Symposium in May 2008, our project team revised the research question from:

Where in our accountability system are we successful and why, and how can we improve the system to make it more useful for all stakeholders?”

To:

What characteristics of the relationship between Calgary Learns and two Bow Valley College adult literacy/basic education providers support mutual accountability and how can these characteristics be strengthened or nurtured?

The question was revised to specify that we will be looking for characteristics in the relationship that reflect mutual accountability.

A tool to assess accountability

The assessment tool is for funders and funded organizations to gauge their working relationship with each other including capacity for best/promising accountability practices. The outline of the most recent draft includes:

  • Organizational practices
  • Application process
  • Project reporting: funder’s non-monetary support to service provider
  • Service providers' contributions to the field
  • Funder and service provider inter-personal relationships

Focusing on mutual accountability

An accountability system based in the concept of mutuality has several characteristics:

  • It is negotiated between the stakeholders in a process that engages all the players in clarifying expectations, designing indicators of success, negotiating information flows, and building capacity.
  • Each responsibility is matched with an equal, enabling right: the right to a program that meets one’s learning needs with the responsibility to take learning seriously, for example.
  • Every player knows clearly and agrees to what is expected of them.
  • Every player has the capacity to be held and to hold others accountable.
  • Efficient and effective information flows enable all players to hold others accountable.
    Merrifield, J. (2001) "Performance Accountability: For What? To Whom? And How?” in How are We Doing? An Inquiry Guide for Adult Education Programs. Bingham, B & Ebert, O. NSCALL Teaching Training Materials. pp. 1.19-1.26.

    • Fall 2008 Activities

    Objective
    Explore and identify elements that contribute to mutual accountability (MA) and create an assessment tool on mutual accountability.

    Accomplishments

    • Regular team meetings (planning, tool development, research and review of literature, and review of preliminary findings).
    • Identified 36 useful references for tool development and MA definition.
    • Initiated tool development – focused on content, then format, approximately 90 % complete as of January 2009.
    • Meetings between team's practitioner-researcher and project manager to review accountability documents, discuss linkages between accountability expectations and in-class learner assessment, and the involvement of program staff in accountability activities.

    Objective
    Strengthen relationships and communication between delivery programs, Calgary Learns and the provincial funder, Alberta Advanced Education and Technology (AAET).

    Accomplishment
    BVC and Calgary Learns have engaged in conversations about accountability which we did not do before. This project has contributed to a sense of openness and cooperation between BVC and Calgary Learns.

    Team Members' Learning

    Each of the members of our team was asked to reflect on their own learning from participating in this action research project.

    Practitioner-researcher

    I have witnessed the benefit of increased communication between the funder and the funded at the level of practitioner and funding officer. It would be nice if the tool we are developing could someday incorporate questions that instructors and learners could use to assess their communication and relationships in the classroom... A major challenge for me has been having too little time as a team to discuss our approaches to accountability. I have learned a great deal about the topic, yet it still is the tip of an iceberg; the parameters of the meanings of accountability are broad...

    Funder, Calgary Learns

    I am accustomed to working directly with the program coordinators of the organizations we fund and I am comfortable discussing mutual accountability within those relationships. Recently I realized that the tool we are developing could also be used between Calgary Learns and our funder – the provincial government. This gives me the opportunity to try out the draft tool from the perspective of a ‘funded organization’ as well as from the ‘funder’ perspective.

    My big challenges in this project are: understanding how to separate the effects of agreeable personalities from the effects of sound principles and practices of mutual accountability...

    Research friend

    I have learned about the many steps to literacy for adult learners and have heard anecdotal stories that are consistent with the academic research ..It appears to me that much of the accountability “disconnect” between service providers and funders stems from (i) a lack of awareness on the part of some funders about the long and incremental process toward literacy for adult learners; (ii) a lack of awareness among some service providers of the need to demonstrate to both funders and, the learners themselves that participation in programs is moving them, however slowly, toward literacy; and (iii) a need for both service providers and learners to identify and agree on indicators of improvement at the very early stages of literacy development.

    Project manager

    I have learned how challenging it is to nail down intangible aspects of accountability. How to capture the specific characteristics of the personalities of funder agency staff and provider agency staff, and deciding how these personal ways of communicating and relating can be generalized in the tool we are developing. I have appreciated learning more about the funder’s job; how they ‘connect the dots’ between the individual organizations they fund, the local community's adult learning needs, and the provincial government’s (their funder) priorities for adult learning.
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