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Photo by Dawn Dzubay |
From the Great Smoky Mountains in the east to the Mississippi River in the west, Tennessee is one long, narrow state of contrasts. Cities such as Nashville and Knoxville may be thriving, but many rural counties remain plagued by high levels of illiteracy and unemployment.
To help narrow the prosperity gap, the Tennessee Literacy Coalition (TLC) has harnessed one of the state's best-known natural resources-its volunteer spirit-to launch Tennessee Reads. A series of tutor-training workshops across the state has drawn community volunteers, Federal Work-Study students, and parents in welfare-to-work programs.
The need to improve literacy rates is the one thing that Blount County, in the east end of the state, and Dyer and McNairy Counties, in the west, have in common. The percentage of adults with less than a high school education in these counties ranges from 32 percent to 45 percent, and national comparisons of second-grade reading scores in 1997 placed the counties below the 55th percentile.
Even before the America Reads Challenge, however, TLC was working to improve these numbers. "We already had in place a statewide literacy program to use AmeriCorps and VISTA volunteers to recruit tutors and develop tutoring sites," says Meg Nugent, Executive Director of TLC. "But America Reads gave our National Service learning project a jump start that we wouldn't have had otherwise. It has allowed us to expand our tutor-training capacity across the state."
Tennessee Reads has dovetailed its parent-training workshops with one of the state's new welfare reform efforts. Families First mandates that welfare recipients who do not have a high school diploma or general equivalency diploma (GED) must spend 20 hours a week in adult education classes. "We know from working with adult education programs that many low-income children are at risk of not learning to read well because their parents are poor readers," says Nugent. "They don't know how to help their children with their homework and don't encourage reading at home. With our parent workshops, we are helping to break this cycle of illiteracy."
Debra Conner, a trainer for Opportunity for Adult Reading in Cleveland, Tennessee, has developed a three-hour workshop using Laubach materials to teach parents about phonics, reading levels, and listening skills. Tutor trainers take these workshops directly into the Families First classrooms at adult education sites. With demonstrations, group discussions, and hands-on activities, parents are trained how to help their children with word families, sight words, language experience, and duet reading. In one activity, they create an alphabet book using pictures from magazines. In another, parents break into pairs and practice tutoring one another (one plays the role of tutor, the other plays the "child"). Workshop participants also hear about how learning disabilities can affect a child's reading progress, and where to go for additional information. Despite their own lack of education, parents show an impressive eagerness to learn, says Conner. "These parents really want to help their children, but many simply don't know what to do. We believe that the workshops increase parents' self-esteem as significantly as they increase their basic skills to help their children succeed. Parents are willing if they have the tools." Several parents have even asked about the possibility of volunteering to tutor another child or an adult.
"Even if education had all the money it needed, it could never begin to pay for the time and qualities that a committed volunteer brings to a tutoring session with a child," says Nugent. "Supporting volunteers through training and ongoing technical assistance is critical to strengthening our programs-America Reads and others-as well as ending the cycle of illiteracy.
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