Joanne Goodall
THE AQUINIAN
New Brunswickers are familiar with illiteracy statistics and commercials depicting a province where 50 per cent of people cannot read or write. Four St. Thomas Social Work students and their social action placement partners, the Literacy Coalition of New Brunswick [LCNB], want to erase this stereotype.
Marie Paule Doucette, Meaghan Andrews, Chantal Dawson, and Janice Taylor, along with the LCNB, created an art contest to help bring awareness to the public. The contest is open to anyone aged 16 and over.
Participants can submit artwork depicting LCNB’s nine essential skills of literacy which are: reading text, document use, numeracy, writing, oral communication, working with others, continuous learning, thinking skills, and computer use.
“When we went to the literacy coalition, they explained to us that literacy is more than what people actually think,” Dawson said. “When people think about literacy, they think of reading and writing. …The poster contest, that we launched, is to raise awareness of what literacy is.”
The art contest will help people learn about the nine essential skills of literacy, but also, to make them aware that they themselves can continue to learn and progress their skills as well.
Posters about the art contest can be found across STU campus, but Doucette believes the issue of illiteracy must go beyond the campus property lines.
“Literacy is important to anyone, no matter if you are in university or not,” Doucette said. “When students pick up the wire about the contest, we hope that they go online, look up the nine essential skills and realize that there is not one person that is good in all them.”
Participants will design symbols to depict the nine skills and the artists’ work will then be judged on how clearly they can be depicted if anyone was to see the finishing project.
The art contest deadline is November 17th and for rules and regulations please check out the LCNB website. All the art work received will be at an open house at the LCNB building in downtown Fredericton. The winner with received $500 plus their design will be the LCNB’s new promotional poster for the organization’s website, Facebook page, and by other affiliated organizations across Canada.
