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Even Start: Building on Families' Existing Strengths

The best family literacy programs share certain curricular components, but are tailored to meet the needs of the diverse families they serve. This digest describes how Even Start has led to the development of many different family literacy programs.

Much information is available about family literacy program components effective in teaching literacy skills. Less attention has been paid to the value of building on families' existing skills, diverse cultures and languages, and life experiences, although doing so has been shown to increase program efficacy. This article, therefore, focuses on strategies for reaching families that reflect the strengths they already have.

General program principles

The Federal Even Start Family Literacy Program, authorized in 1988, is the catalyst for much of the family literacy activity nationally.

Program participants are ethnically diverse, frequently urban and limited in English proficiency, and, increasingly, teenage parents and the very poor. In 1996-97 Even Start supported 637 projects serving 34,400 parents and their children (Tao, Gamse, & Tarr, 1998).

Funded programs must adhere to Even Start's core organizational, curricular, and evaluation requirements and goals. They must provide parents with instruction in a variety of literacy skills and assist them in promoting their children's educational development; they also must provide the children with an early childhood education. Many programs, in addition, specifically help adults get a GED and develop marketable job skills, and most work with community agencies to provide a full range of social services.

Despite Even Start's mandates, program models vary widely. Some are designed for replication nationally, use a fully refined and evaluated curriculum, and receive additional major support from private foundations.

Customization for diverse families

The degree to which programs reflect and involve the families they serve varies, although multi-site programs tend to be more generic in organization and curriculum.

Another difference among programs is the extent of their acceptance of a "deficit" model for disadvantaged parents, which considers poverty and literacy deficiencies a personal, rather than a social, problem.

This philosophy results in a curriculum that directs parents in the program's understanding of the correct way to learn and raise children, instead of appreciating and using parents' innate and experienced-based knowledge as a building block for additional skills development (Taylor, 1993).

An approach to literacy development that conforms to Even Start's education principles, but also validates the participants' capabilities, increases a program's potential for success.

When staffed by individuals who respect diversity and different kinds of knowledge, a program can address issues of race, class, and gender, and can help parents overcome feelings of powerlessness that may diminish their belief that personal literacy development will improve their family's lives (Gadsden, 1996; Strickland, 1996).

Curriculum

Certain curriculum components have been shown to increase family literacy program effectiveness with diverse learners. Curriculum can facilitate learning by helping participants, through interactions with the staff and each other, do the following (Butkus & Willoughby, 1995; Gadsden, 1996; Griswold, & Ullman, 1997; Shanahan et al., 1995):

• Understand and develop a range of child- and literacy-development perspectives; get mutual support and help; develop respect for cultural differences; and build self-help, communication, and interpersonal skills.
• Use their own knowledge and beliefs as a foundation for additional learning.
• Identify and meet personal goals, and become an advocate for themselves and their children.
• Build communities and networks for support and political and social action.

By encouraging talking, reading (of multicultural materials), and writing, programs can create opportunities for behavior that develop traditional literacy skills, while showing participants that their native way of communicating with their children (such as oral story-telling) is also a valid type of literacy activity (Heath, 1982).

Conclusion

Developing the skills of parents to enable them to be more personally successful and fulfilled, and to more effectively promote their children's learning at home and achievement in school, is the goal of all family literacy programs.

Programs which consciously draw on the existing abilities of families in program design and curriculum, and which use social and cultural issues as a context for learning, have an additional goal: they want to build the participants' self-esteem through an appreciation of their own knowledge and instincts, help them understand that they are not to blame for their circumstances, and "empower [them] to direct their own learning and use it for their own purposes" (Auerbach, 1995, cited in Griswold & Ullman, 1997, p. 25)

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