BALID: events

Events

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Notice of BALID AGM

The BALID AGM will be held at 5.00 pm on Wednesday Dec. 14

Location:

The Riverside, Hamilton House, 5 St George’s Wharf, London, SW8 2LE. (www.riversidelondon.com).

At the AGM members will need to elect officers and committee members for the next triennium as required in our constitution. These are:

Chair - currently Katy Newell Jones
Vice-chair - Vacant
Secretary - currently Juliet McCaffery
Treasurer - currently Ian Cheffy

The Executive Committee is composed of 4 individual members and 4 organisational members all of whom need to be elected or re-elected.

All nominations, duly proposed and seconded should be sent to Juliet McCaffery (juliet.mccaffery@gmail.com) as secretary by November 21st 2011.

Literacy discussion

The AGM will be followed at 6.00 - 8.00 by the next of our literacy discussions. The topic is

Transferable Literacies; to what extent do literacy practices taught as social practices result in transferable literacy skills?

The discussion which will also be held in a corner of 'The Riverside'. Everyone, practioners and academics and those just interested in literacy issues, is welcome and there is no charge for participating. The Riverside also serves food and some of us will be eating.

Common Goals, Shared Purpose:

Strengthening Reading, Family Learning and the UPE Targets

24 & 25 January 2011

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Following the Family Learning conference held in Sierra Leone in 2009, BALID again collaborated with the British Council to host a further conference on Family Learning, in partnership on this occasion with PRAESA (Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa).

Some 80 participants shared their experience of family learning, drawing on their own experiences in South Africa, Cameroon and Brazil. Highlights of the conference were the stimulating interaction between the participants and the workshops in which family learning practitioners shared their insights and gained new skills.

Download the full report here.

Education For All: Strengthening UPE through Family Learning

12 & 13 February 2010

The conference followed on from an initial one day conference on Family Learning, organised by BALID in London in 2007. Key speakers at that conference presented their perspectives on Family Learning in the UK, Family Learning in Uganda and Family Learning from the point of view of funders.

The conference in Sierra Leone was the result of collaboration between BALID and several partners

the British Council, Sierra Leone
the African Family Learning Action Group
the Adult Education Department at the Ministry of Education, Sierra Leone
Freetown Teachers College
local NGO partners in Sierra Leone.

It brought together over 70 practitioners in family learning, from Sierra Leone and other countries and provided an exciting forum for showcasing how family learning approaches in Africa are enabling parents and other family members to develop their own skills and support the vital learning which takes place in schools.

Download the full report here.

BALID Spring Seminar 23 April 2009

University of London, April 2009

Literacy, Marginalisation and Inequality: Dialogue towards programmes for equality

Helping ‘marginalised’ people to access the literacy practices and skills they need to improve their social and economic conditions has long been an aim of international organisations, including BALID. Following the production of working papers on these issues for DFID (www.dfid.gov.uk), BALID’s Spring Seminar addressed the location of such literacy work in the wider debates about marginalisation and inequality.

The seminar anticipated two forthcoming activities in this field – the new Global Monitoring Report on ‘Marginalisation’ being produced by UNESCO Paris (www.unesco.org) and the conference on ‘Literacy Inequalities’ at the University of East Anglia (http://www.uea.ac.uk/ssf/literacy-conference-09). Participants in both projects attended the seminar, which was held at the University of London.

Key speakers

Bryan Maddox:
Bryan is a social anthropologist working on literacy, language and education in South Asian contexts. He has undertaken fieldwork in Nepal and Bangladesh, and has strong interests in inter-disciplinary work in education linking anthropology and economics. His current research interests are the links between literacy, human capabilities and wellbeing. Bryan is co-director of the Masters in Education and Development at the School of Development Studies and is an organiser of the UEA conference.

PowerPoint presentation - Bryan Maddox here

Juliet McCaffery:
Juliet has a long history of working in the field of literacy as a practitioner both in the UK, and as a consultant to overseas programmes in the Middle East and Africa and also the Republic of Ireland. Her book Developing Adult Literacy co-authored with Juliet Millican and Juliet Merrifield has recently been published by OXFAM. She has also had articles published on literacy and conflict resolution and a variety of teaching materials. She is currently researching the marginalisation of Gypsies and Travellers in the UK.

Juliet’s paper is in progress and will be shared on the BALID site as soon as it is available.

Participant feedback was very positive; people felt that there was an unmet need for seminars and forums to keep up to date with work in this field, sharing experience amongst practitioners, policy makers and researchers and hearing from leading exponents. Those attending should, we hope, be well placed to engage in the forthcoming debates about improving access to literacy and be better able to contribute both to practice and to policy. BALID seminars are held approximately every six months; check our website regularly for forthcoming events.

Past Seminars: - Literacy practice from South Sudan and Cameroon

Saturday 15 November 2008

Details (pdf) available here