The Center for Literacy

Connecting the Dots: Practicing Shared Accountability

Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador
St. John's, Newfoundland

Project Goal

The view from Literacy NL's office

Partners, Literacy NL and NL Department of Education, Adult Learning and Literacy Division, will develop guidelines for discussing and reaching agreement on identified accountability needs and practices. The goal is to improve communication to allow for continuous dialogue and innovation in addressing accountability needs in the literacy field.

The objectives of our project include:

1. Identify and work towards a common understanding of the purpose and impact of accountability in the adult literacy field.
2. Support meaningful dialogue and stakeholder consultation around literacy initiatives, including the Division’s current work on a new strategic plan for adult literacy.
3. Identify and pilot a framework for funder/provider communication and use this framework to improve communication and understanding about a mutually-identified accountability practice during spring 2009.

Progress

Through the course of six meetings from October through early December 2008 our team has participated in a dialogue from which the theme of communication has emerged as a fundamental issue of accountability.

Participants were first asked to identify what they were accountable for, and to whom. Over the course of meetings 2 to 4, it became clear that it is essential to understand the limits that enables and informs communication between partners in order to begin practicing shared accountability.

Meetings 5 and 6 focused on the issues and values that will be important in undertaking an action in Phase 2 of the project.

The time line below tracks the course of our discussions from our first meeting through our last, and:

1. indicates the research questions posed in each meeting,
2. highlights the responses we discussed, and
3. provides examples of participants' contributions in the form of quotations.

Meeting 1

Our first meeting was largely introductory but also identified several characteristics of and concerns about accountability. These ideas, summarized below, became the starting point of our Phase 1 discussions:

• Accountability is multiple or 'layered'.
• Accountabilities to several stakeholders; these shift according to point of view.
• Accountabilities may compete or conflict with one another.
• Accountability is limited by many forces, including life and work needs, and capacity for program delivery.
• Accountability is itself a limiting force: we are afraid to accept more responsibilities for fear of being held accountable.
• Accountability can be improved.
• 'Opaque' accountabilities within an organization can be 'demystified'.
• Competing accountabilities can work in step more effectively.

From these characteristics, we created a list of issues to be explored over the course of the Fall meetings:

• Who (or what) is my organization accountable to? For what, and to what end?
• How do multiple accountabilities coexist? Are they in competition? How?
• What limits my ability to be accountable?
• How does the need for accountability limit my work?
• Does the responsibility to be accountable prevent me from achieving things?
• Are my accountabilities opaque to other stakeholders? Can they be demystified?

Meeting 2

In this meeting, we asked: “To whom am I accountable, and for what?”

Responses demonstrated that accountabilities are at once multiple and layered, but not always transparent. We also explored how accountability has both personal and professional dimensions.

Participants' Voices

“I am accountable to funders for fulfilling requirements, in terms of responding and reporting; and to stakeholders – the learners and practitioners.”

“I'm accountable to myself – I have belief in myself, a commitment to my staff, and belief in what we are doing. . . . I live accountability. I am accountable to the individual adult learner but I am also accountable to a system – this is a challenge to communicate with stakeholders. I am accountable to a staff, superiors and minister – in terms of budget, support to staff. There are layers of accountabilities, above, below and horizontally.”

Meeting 3

During this meeting we looked at questions such as: “How are stakeholder needs voiced? How do you get information? What validates your perspective on what stakeholders require you to be accountable for?”

• Discussion revealed that every topic in literacy is spoken to by several voices, perspectives and even “cultures”.
• Acknowledging this seems to be both a part of and challenge to accountability, insofar as accountability turns on the issue of trust.
• The issue of trust has roots in the history of communication between community and government, and the way that this history affects current communication.

Participants' Voices

“Trust is a big issue between the organization and the division. [The coalition and government] have openly talked about how to get beyond that and be able to talk it through and feel the level of comfort needed to say we are true partners.”

“There are two separate cultures at work, and when my voice is heard at the government table, I want to know where the open process is. I focus very deeply on the process, because I feel that it allows for reciprocal communication to happen, and we're not quite there. Then again, if I could put [the funder's] hat on, I understand that it's a different world on that side of the table.”

Meeting 4

Our fourth meeting's primary focus continued to center on the issue of how to incorporate stakeholder input.

• Themes of trust continued to surface.
• Building on prior discussions, it also became clear two kinds of knowledge inform communication: knowledge of one another as persons with titles and responsibilities, and first-person, experiential knowledge of one another as individuals.
• There is always an imbalance of power in the conversation between community and government.

Participants' Voices

“That idea of 'us and them' – I think we're breaking it down. I think it's just a ghost of the past that rises up, and there is a natural tendency to be anti-government.”

“It has to be said that the government is still the power person in the room for a lot of community organizations: government would be creating a contract, and government would be setting a standard, especially when we're talking about accountability.”

“You have accountabilities that constrict you, and when I talk about government, I don't talk about you, I really do talk about the constriction."

Meeting 5

We posed the following questions: “Have you anything further to add to previous comments on issues dealing with stakeholder input? Is the role of stakeholder input one of the factors difficult to identify in reaching satisfactory accountability?”

• Communication is influenced by the history of community and government interaction; in particular, it is influenced by how participants understand that history.
• Mutual acknowledgment of good work is essential to improved communication.
• Participants began to articulate a vision of the partnership that they desired to build as an outcome of this project.

Participants' Voices

“Lots of times I walk into a room and the wall is already constructed; there is a level of expectation that I'm going to disappoint people before I open my mouth, or that I'm going to give government speak and not be authentic in dialogue..."

“From [the Coalition's] perspective, we put significant effort into our submission to the Strategic Adult Literacy Plan, so we do feel there needs to be some acknowledgment of the fact that [we are] being heard.”

“But how do we ensure that cynicism and history is acknowledged and that we can still move forward?”

“It's about bringing people together. If you want community to move with government, you have to bring everyone into the room and acknowledge everyone.”

Meeting 6

The final meeting of 2008 was planned as a visioning exercise based on a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, in which participants were asked to identify a set of potential 'causes' that could bring about (or help avoid) a failure in communication. The causes that were identified included:

• The different natures of the two groups involved
• Availability of resources to consult
• Evidence for making judgments
• Timing
• Perception of value