Lynette Winter
View comments from Lynette Winter, Senior Online Editor for the National Centre of Literacy & Numeracy for Adults, taken at the Symposium in Hamilton, July 2011.
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Key content
The value of collaboration in building embedded literacy and numeracy teaching cultures
Transcript
I think for vocational tutors that we work with, they are tradespeople, and they come to do teaching because they're passionate about it and passionate about helping other people, but they may not have had any training about being a teacher. And they also, from a literacy and numeracy point of view, they have enough numeracy and enough literacy to do their job really well, but it may not be enough literacy... a depth of knowledge I guess to be able to identify what their learners don't know. And I'm talking about numeracy particularly – we know how to get an answer, we actually don't know how we got the answer or why that answer works, and sometimes you have to know those sorts of things to be able to transfer the skills and.. And so it's a matter of making them aware of how much they actually do know, giving them some side knowledge about why what they're doing works – how it fits in with our number system; and then helping them to figure out ways to find out where the gaps for their learners are, and they can try to fill them.
I think this cross-pollination between organisations and even across institutes, between vocations will be a very powerful thing. There’s no point in everybody reinventing the same wheel.