Areas Essential for Adult Literacy
Personal Experience
For my entire life, I have felt inadequate in terms of my essential literacy abilities. Though I went to University. What I struggled with primarily is communication literacy and digital literacy. I am able to speak, I am able to type, but I was never able to convey a message effectively to others or find the information I want on the internet. This caused a lot of internal and external struggles. As a result of these deficiencies, I took it upon myself to become literate.
Essential literacy skills required as an adult are:
- Financial,
- Digital,
- Sexual,
- Emotional,
- Communication,
- Health
Definition of each Literacy Area
- Financial literacy is the ability to manage your personal budget, make educated investments, and control your debt (i.e. credit cards).
- Digital Literacy is the ability to find the information you want by using the internet, evaluate the truthiness of the information, and write information into a digital text document.
- Sexual literacy is having knowledge on how to have safe sex, the ability to build an intimate connection with a partner, the ability to sustain a healthy intimate bond with a partner, and the ability to make yourself and your partner orgasm.
- Emotional literacy is the ability to express your feels verbally to yourself and to others. For example, if a conservation topic frustrates you, be able to identify that the topic frustrates you and express to the other person that it frustrates you.
- Communication literacy is the ability to develop rapport with another person and a group of people. Such as, by being able to effectively listen, tell jokes, tell stories, and ask questions.
- Health literacy is having the ability to take care of your mild health needs, have an awareness when a health issue requires medical attention, and take basic steps to prevent diseases (i.e. physical activity, a healthy diet, and obtaining an appropriate amount of sleep).
Why are they important?
All of these literacy skills are important for different reasons. Each aspect is necessary to overcome many challenges life will throw at you. Being illiterate in one of these areas will result in harm all the way throughout life until you learn them. Becoming literate in all these areas is therefore essential to reduce future struggles.
Actions to Take, to gain Essential Literacy Skills
What you can do today to gain literacy in the 6 essential areas would be:
Finance
- Take McGill’s free personal finance course (5 hours)
- https://learn.mcgillpersonalfinance.com/account/login?ReturnUrl=%2fhome%2fLearningPath%2f88493
Digital
- Read my series on Digital Literacy that I have posted on my LinkedIn profile, to gain knowledge on digital literacy and how to find information on the internet.
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-landry/
Sexual
- Unavailable
Emotional
- Identify as a colour your emotions and the emotions that you can detect from others. Check out the colour wheel resource below.
- To start expressing your emotions, try: “ I feel ____ (emotion), when you ____ (action).”
Practice expressing yourself using the OFNR components. For example,
- Feeling: “I feel irritated…
- Observation: “…when I see you’ve returned my car with an empty gas tank.”
- Request: Would you fill it up by tonight?
- Needs/values: I want to trust that I can get to work tomorrow.”
Communication
- Write and express your ideas onto a digital paper using Medium.com
- Read books on humour, active listening, and body language detection.
For example:
- The Comic Toolbox by John Vorhaus
- Conversationally Speaking by Alan Garner
- Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease
Health
- Start exercising, eating fruits and vegetables, and sleep 8 hours per day.
- Create a diary of your mental and physical pains. If an issue persists for a long period of time or increases in a severe way. Consult with a medical professional using a summary generated from your diary of when the issue occurred, what is the issue, and what triggers do you hypothesize may have caused the issue.
Resources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_literacy
- https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/children_and_empathy_teaching_emotional_literacy
- https://www.edutopia.org/blog/five-social-emotional-learning-lessons-for-adults-elena-aguilar
- https://www.groktheworld.com/what-nonviolent-communication-nvc-also-known-compassionate-communication-language-life#:~:text=NVC%20advocates%20radical%20self%2Dresponsibility,with%20more%20clarity%20and%20compassion.
Color Wheel
- https://do2learn.com/organizationtools/EmotionsColorWheel/images/chart1.jpg
- https://inspirationfeed.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/710px-Plutchik-wheel.jpg
