STELLA - Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia © 2002 AATE, ALEA, DE&T(Vic), and EdDeptWA 1 Learning for all: reflections on a parent volunteer reading program Years 7 – 12 Sharon McDonough This narrative is a personal reflection based upon my experiences as Special Education Coordinator in a Catholic secondary school, where I was responsible for overseeing a reading program which used parent volunteers as tutors for students with literacy difficulties. "Excuse me Miss McDonough, can I have the work we're going to do today? I want to take it to PART." My eyes widened in surprise as Sam came up to me at the beginning of class and made this request. He was in Year 7 and transition reports from his primary school had indicated that he was a student who experienced learning difficulties combined with a lack of motivation (not surprisingly!). Yet here he was, standing before me at the beginning of second term and asking for work to take to his PART lesson. At the beginning of the year I would never have imagined that this student would feel enthusiasm towards learning tasks and it was at this point that I became convinced of the benefits of the parent volunteer program. Midway through 1999 I took over the role of Special Education Coordinator in a rural Catholic secondary school. Prior to taking over the position my experience of the PART program had been limited to students disappearing from my English class once a week to have their weekly lesson. The program, Parents as Reading Tutors program (PART) was the responsibility of the Special Education Department with the organization of timetables, liaison with parents and preparation of material for tutors looked after by a member of the Special Ed staff. The program had been running successfully at the college for the past five or six years. The PART program lists its specific aims as being: • to increase the confidence, self-esteem and literacy skills of underachievers in reading, • to empower a group of voluntary helpers to provide direct instruction and increased support for those students, and • to increase parent participation in schools. (PART Parent Manual , 1994) In the school the program ran with each student attending one lesson of PART per week. Ideally PART would occur at least twice a week in the secondary school setting, but the reality of running such a program in this environment with its diverse curriculum meant that getting students to attend once a week often proved to be challenging enough. To my frustration, a program designed to foster both self-confidence and literacy skill levels in students was relegated to being carried out on the edges of the educational program. Furthermore, the subjects students were to be removed from for tutoring were limited to English, SOSE and RE. Why? I'd questioned when I took over. The reply was based around the fact that traditionally that was how things had been and that removing students from other subject areas left them open to missing too much valuable information. As an English teacher I was affronted by the thought that this kind of logic implied I wasn't teaching anything valuable on a regular basis, and that we were still adhering to the notion that subjects such as maths and science were more important. This kind of attitude requires a paradigm shift that is yet to occur in many schools; a shift to a philosophy that recognizes literacy as the responsibility of all departments, not just English, and one that recognizes that in all subjects - science, maths, home economics, biology, etc - students require literacy skills in