Ontario Literacy Coalition's Weblog

Frontier College began through the work of Reverend Alfred Fitzpatrick. He was born in Millsville, Nova Scotia. Two of his brothers had gone to work in the Redwood lumber camps in California. His brother Lee had died there and they had not heard from Isaac since he left. Young Alfred became a minister and decided to serve the workers in the Redwood forest lumber camps. He wanted to search for one lost brother and find the gravesite of the other.

The legend says that Alfred met his brother Isaac when he offered him a ride in his horse-drawn wagon. During the ride Isaac learned Alfred was his little brother. Isaac thought Alfred was some 4,000 miles away. He was surprised and very happy. Alfred then heard about the hard life men had in the lumber camps. Many died through accidents on the job. Alfred decided to spend his life helping those who worked in the camps.

Many workers in the camps were from other countries. Alfred was driven by a spiritual desire to help them. He believed everyone had the right to knowledge and that knowledge for life began with adult literacy.

Alfred went to a lumber camp near Nairn Centre in Northern Ontario in 1899. He started his first Reading Camp in October 1900. Young university graduates followed and started 24 reading rooms. They met in log buildings or tents throughout that northern region. These graduates were supported by church donations, as well as private, commercial, and some governmental finances but they were then—as they are now–volunteer workers.

These “labourer-teachers” worked alongside the miners, railway workers, or those working in the lumber mills. In the evening, tired and hurting from hard work, they set up their blackboards and taught basic literacy skills to their fellow workers. They often used a reading tent or pulled open the door of an empty boxcar. Pain, tiredness, lots of mosquitoes and very few books were all part of literacy for both teachers and learners.

Little has changed since 1899. Labourer-teachers still work for the same wages as their co-workers. They still teach literacy in the evenings. They will teach whenever and wherever there is space and time for learning.

The Canadian government liked what Alfred was doing. With thousands of immigrants entering Canada in the 20^th century, the government started giving Frontier College funds for citizenship education classes. By 1920, the number of labourer-teachers had grown to 46 men and 3 women. Alfred wrote the Handbook for New Canadians in 1919. This handbook was given to each volunteer to teach from.

By 1920, some 100,000 workmen had been taught by over 500 labourer-teachers.

One of Alfred’s struggles was with the college and university education system. Alfred had been given degree-granting authority for Frontier College. This was given by the federal government in 1919. However, this charter was never fulfilled. Many of the universities, colleges, and provincial departments of education across Canada would not accept the idea of a “national college.” Alfred Fitzpatrick died along with his dream of a degree-granting institution in 1925.

Edwin Bradwin became the second president of Frontier College. He worked hard to be sure that Frontier College kept placing labourer-teachers throughout Canada as volunteers in non-credit teaching. Today, labourer-teachers work alongside migrant workers on farms and in market gardens.

Frontier College is now also

• reaching the physically and mentally challenged in literacy
• building learning partnerships with Canada’s First Nations Peoples
• teaching literacy in prisons
• promoting reading with young people.

Some have questioned if Frontier College reached out to everyone in its earliest days. They did not work with many First Nations and women in the earliest years. Some have said that teaching citizenship did not respect immigrants’ backgrounds. This is not said about today’s Frontier College.

Today Frontier College is working with learners, hearing their voice, and, at times, helping to fight for them in the face of injustice.

Religious, social and economic purposes have often formed the basis of literacy content and funding. Learner voice in literacy is a recent chapter in the long history of our field.

If we can learn one thing from our history, it is to begin to ask: “Literacy for what purpose, as decided by whom, and for whose benefit?” Today, we could ask, “What is the purpose of my program now?” “What was its purpose when it first began?” “What model would be best if we are to be truly authentic, effective, literacy educators into the 21^st century?” What can we learn from our own history for today and tomorrow?

The Moonlight Schools of Kentucky and Cora Wilson Stewart

Cora Stewart was a person of vision and one of the most determined, most capable people in early American literacy history. One evening in 1911 she opened the doors of the Little Brushy schoolhouse in Rowan County Kentucky.

Rowan County was the poorest county in Kentucky at the time. Her idea was when the moon was shining, adults were to come down from the hills and up from the “Kentucky hollers” to learn to read and write in the local school houses.

Stewart had hoped that perhaps 150 adults would come. Instead, 1,200 enrolled in the first year; 1,600 the second; and, by 1913, no fewer than 25 counties had started Moonlight Schools for adult learners.

Within four years, Alabama had established “Adult Schools”; South Carolina had started “Lay-By Schools”; the Community Schools appeared in North Carolina; and “Schools for Grown-Ups” were created in Georgia. All of these were based on the Kentucky model.

By 1914, Oklahoma had not only established night schools for literacy, but offered credit in its Normal Schools for adult education teachers. Washington State created adult night schools on the Kentucky model in 1915, as did Minnesota and New Mexico.

According to historian Wanda Cook, this was the official beginning of adult literacy education in America.

Today Cora Wilson Stewart’s hand can be seen in every aspect of literacy programs across the U.S.A. yet, few know her name.

At age 15, Stewart began teaching in the Morehead Public School. She had been repeatedly told by the community that “elderly folks were too self-conscious and embarrassed to go to night school”, but when a mother asked her for help to write to a daughter who had recently moved to Chicago; when a middle-aged man “with tears in his eyes,” begged to be helped to learn to read so he could feel “whole,” and an aspiring local musician asked her to teach him to write, she turned to adult literacy education.

Stewart included Native Indians and African American adults in the literacy movement, a step way ahead of its time. In the years of the First World War, Stewart was asked to be advisor to the U.S. army on literacy. She not only created a learning program for them, she wrote The Soldier’s First Book so countless soldiers in the trenches could write home for the first time and read the letters they received.

Stewart also fought to have what today would be ESL programs for new immigrants. She was indeed a driving force in the literacy movement.

The Modern Day Legend of Native Literacy at Nogojiwanong
(Peterborough, where the rushing waters meet)

Once not so very long ago, a Circle of learned Anishnabe Kwe were offered tobacco by a young man seeking their wisdom. There was something weighing on his heart regarding many of his people and he longed to find a solution.

The heaviness on his heart was for the people who were missing something. Those who needed something very important in their lives. They hadn’t finished school and their children weren’t going to either.

The Circle sent the young man to talk to many people about this and to write down what they said. They knew the ways of Queen’s Park, where the money grows on the trees.

The young man surveyed as many of the people as he could find. They said they longed to come to a place where Aboriginal people wanted to learn and would teach one another. The Circle decided the gathering place should be called the Learning Program because of what the people had said they wanted to happen there. The man at Queen’s Park said yes to this idea and sent the Circle a little bit of money for the gathering place.

Many snows came and went. After each snow, the time of renewal, something new took place. At first the people came to be teachers but there were no students. Then the students came looking for the teachers and there weren’t enough of them. Next the right number of students and teachers arrived at the same time. Each year after that was different too. What stayed the same was that the students didn’t think they had what they needed so they came seeking. It turned out they had much wisdom so they shared what they could to help the others. So many people came, more space was needed for them to discuss things and to learn from one another.

The Circle became the Council for the Learning Program. Some of the founding mothers had to move on and sent others in their places. The help that everyone gave each other lifted the heaviness off the hearts of many of the people.

The little bit of money sent by the man at Queen’s Park did not change. It seems the money trees at Queen’s Park were suffering from a blight that continues to this day. That did not stop the people who could always find ideas to keep the gathering place going.

So, to this day, the Native Learning Program at Nogojiwanong carries on as a place for Aboriginal people and their families and friends to gather, to learn and to teach. It is known by Anishnabe as far away as James Bay.

Early in the American civil war, gun ships from the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron of the Union Army sailed boldly into Port Royal Sound, South Carolina. Troops on board were primed and ready to engage the confederate army. Instead, they found some 10,000 freed slaves standing in rags, many near starvation, and all unable to read or write.

Why were so many illiterate? In 1740, South Carolina had become the first state to pass a law making it illegal to teach slaves to write. In 1834, it also became illegal to teach slaves to read. While some “house slaves” and lead field workers were highly literate and numerate, for the vast majority, breaking such state laws had very serious consequences. If caught learning to read or write, punishments could include having one’s (writing) fingers chopped off, whippings, beatings, being branded with hot irons, or even being hanged (Quigley, 1987).

General Thomas Sherman was in command of the Northern squadron. Sherman took the decision to “recommend that Washington dispatch superintendents and instructors” (Stubblefield & Keane, 1994, pp. 130-131) to help.

New school buildings rose up. Hundreds came forward. Deprived of reading and writing for so long, they had “an instinctive sense of literacy’s value” (Rachal, 1986, p. 16) and were drawn to the “forbidden fruit” (Swint, 1967, p. 72) of knowledge through reading and writing.

Racism surged back during Reconstruction with a violent, relentless, backlash. Yet, even in the face of punishment and death, Black men and women came forward in the thousands after the Civil War.

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History has multiple interpretations. If we knew more about our roots, we would be better equipped us to avoid the pitfalls of the past and learn from the best of our rich history.

Imagine if the “class of 2008” were to leave a history of your program as a legacy to build upon.
Imagine future learners and teachers adding more student’s or teachers’ stories; locating early artifacts, textbooks and reading/writing materials; or perhaps building up photo album on the beginnings of the program.
Imagine how program histories could be shared electronically and in print; how we could learn from mentors past for today’s policies and classroom practice.
Imagine how surprised some in our communities would be to learn that, in some regions and communities at least, adult literacy courses pre-date local public schools.

But how to get started? Here are some suggestions…and they are only suggestions. There is no one “right way” to learn about our past.
The starting point could simply be asking this question: “Who were the founders of our program?” From this might come: “Who were some of our first teachers, administrators and learners?” Then: “Could we contact them?”
The next step could be to see if one or two of these early learners and/or teachers or coordinators could come to the program and talk about how, where, when and why your program began.

There is no one way or best way to learn about the history of your program. This is but one suggestion.

Learners, teachers, tutors, and administrators alike are beginning to tell their stories–most for the first time. Submissions have been received from those involved in labour literacy, Aboriginal literacy, Research-in-Practice and a variety of diverse programs. Some of these submissions are being posted on this OLC blog and it is just wonderful to see the response.

June 2008: I applied to be a Frontier College Labourer-Teacher because I wanted to be in the midst of something unusual, something challenging and something important. Now, half way through my experience “on the farm”, I can safely say that all of those desires have been more than satisfied.

My first week on the job was dominated by incessant inquiries: am I doing this right? I don’t know what the bud is supposed to look like; and of course, the hugely popular, what should I do if I maybe killed it? We don’t work slowly either and keeping pace with these men (many of whom have been doing farm labour for their whole adult lives) has been tougher than any half-marathon that I have run. The amount of dexterity and mental toughness involved is incredible.

I am taking great joy in my teaching here and the excitement that a student feels. Don’t get me wrong, there is next to no glory to be had as a Labourer-Teacher. The job is not defined by any great educational triumph or monumental social transformation occurring before your eyes. Many long afternoons in the field and those short evenings that you dare steal away for yourself are dominated by gnawing questions: Can I really call myself a teacher when some days make me feel like I understand so little?’ Maybe even more than that though, more than just teaching, I‘ve become firmer in my conviction that people have a limitless well of creativity and genius that can be tapped. Witnessing an expression of awe spread across the face of a man who had never touched a computer before as he manipulates satellite images of his hometown was enough of a demonstration of human potential to make me believe that we can all be so much more.

Mark Dance, is a Frontier College Labourer-Teacher and a student at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

For over 100 years Frontier College, a national, volunteer based literacy organization, has recruited university students for a unique program: labourer-teachers share the lives and the work of the labourers they teach, volunteering their services after hours for classes, recreation and support.