Return-Path: <nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id h9EFv0V18417; Tue, 14 Oct 2003 11:57:00 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 11:57:00 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <3F8C1B6B.858CB34@goldfieldaccess.net> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: Archie Willard <millard@goldfieldaccess.net> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-health@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-HEALTH:4200] The Iowa New Readers Plain English/Health Literacy Conference X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-NSCPCD (Win98; U) Status: O Content-Length: 6700 Lines: 118 The Iowa New Readers Plain English Health Literacy Conference The October 2003 Iowa New Readers Literacy Conference was about health literacy and Plain English. This was the fourteenth consecutive Iowa adult literacy conference, the first being held in September of 1990. At the first conferences we worked on how adult learners could get involved in life, to help them to speak out and to be able to speak up. At some of the next few conferences we worked on leadership and we have many adult learners who have become good speakers and good leaders. Most of our Iowa adult learners are doing well. They are small business owners, farmers, some have degrees and others are working on degrees, most have jobs and some work three part time jobs, but they are making it. A lot of adult learners cannot attend these conferences because of jobs that require them to work on those Saturdays. At a literacy celebration last week at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, some of our adult learners were speakers and did an excellent job of speaking out for adult literacy. At the first conference it was hard to get the adult learners to say anything. We have come a long way since then. In 2001 we asked the Iowa Secretary of State to come to our conference and to bring the ballots that our state uses in the elections in Iowa. We looked at them as a group and wrote a report about the ones we understood and the ones that were confusing to us and gave the report to the Iowa Secretary of State. We hope we have helped make voting better in Iowa. In 2002 adult learners from 5 different states attended our conference and the conference became a regional conference that year. The 2003 adult learner conference is over and I feel the adult learners came away from this conference with a lot of valuable health information. We were pleased to have our friends from South Dakota take part in our conference again this year. Audrey Riffenburgh, a specialist in plain language and health literacy from Albuquerque, NM, was our guest speaker. In the morning she spoke about the Plain English movement in the world and how important it is that we speak and write in Plain English so we all can understand each other. Then we broke for lunch. At lunch time the New Readers of Iowa presented an award to Chester Culver, Iowa Secretary of State, for the work that he has done with us to make voting easier in Iowa, as well as when we requested him to write the state plan in Plain English (required of the state in order to receive federal dollars from the Help America Vote ACT to improve voting in our country), he did just that. In the afternoon Audrey talked about health literacy. She talked about what you need to do to get ready for your doctor visit, things you need to know when you get into the doctor's office, being prepared to ask questions, and things you can do to help yourself. We were also encouraged to help others. These are things for which people who can read well also need to prepare themselves. Mary Ann Abrams, MD, MPH, a Health Management Consultant in Des Moines, came to the conference and listened to the adult learners express their concerns and problems about their office visits. Then she spoke with us about the office visit and answered some of our questions about getting good health care. Being able to talk to Dr. Abrams in person was very good for the adult learners. It helped to take away the shame and fear for some who think they are not good enough to ask questions of a professional person. We have come a long way as a group of adult learners. At these 14 different conferences we have learned from each other many different skills to live life by. Many of these skills that we have learned are taken for granted by most people. Most of us learned how to laugh at ourselves and to laugh together. We have now come to enjoy life and the fear of living life is going away. We have stopped blaming ourselves for not learning how to read. We understand it was the system that did not reach out far enough to teach all the people in our country how to read. By now many of us as adults have reached the level of reading that we will stay at. Probably that's as good as we are going to get. We are not going to make the research charts look any better. The gains that we make bring about a big difference in our lives, but they are small in the eyes of the people who keep statistics. The most important thing we have learned is the joy of living life. We get involved in society and we give back to others. How can you measure something like someone's joy or happiness? How do we measure giving back to others and the lack of fear in our lives? The people who have developed tests for adult learners need to look back at their tests and to go deeper before they come to a conclusion about where adult learners are at. They need to add new measurements about life in their testing. Try and tell the people who have come to these conferences that they are not better off, that the tax payers’ money is not well spent on adult literacy. Going back to testing there are those in the medical field who feel literacy testing should be done to receive medical attention. From your view point it looks like a good idea, but you need to look through the eye of the person who has literacy problems. As a dyslexic and an adult learner with reading problems, I speak for many other adult learners. We hate having to take another written literacy test. People with other kinds of handicaps are not continually asked to expose their weaknesses to whatever degree they are handicapped. There is no physical pain in taking a written test, but when we have to go back and take a written test there is a lot of frustration inside each of us. We grew up feeling humiliated because we had poor literacy skills and now we are adults. More written tests are seen as another step backward for us and it turns us away. A lot of ground was covered and a lot of information was presented to be absorbed in one day. Health Literacy is a subject that needs to be gone over, again and again. Somehow the medical professionals need to become more aware that there will be people coming to see them with poor literacy skills and for them to speak and write in Plain English, and the adult learners need to be better prepared to speak to their doctors when they go for medical help. We all need to find some common ground. Archie Willard Adult Learner -- Archie Willard millard@goldfieldaccess.net URL - http://www.readiowa.org/archiew.html - - - - - - - - - If there were no adult learners there would be no need for adult literary organizations or adult literacy programs.
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