No abstract

Health and health care in Canada is a story of high ideals, complex policy agreements, moments of raging public controversy, and the creation of a national health system that is the envy of many other nations. Despite its many health care achievements, evidence is mounting that good health is far from being universally accessible to all Canadians. As we discuss in this chapter, following a three-year pan-Canadian study on health and learning, it became painfully clear to us that in far too many cases, one' s ability and capacity to learn about health can have immediate-even life-and-deathconsequences. We concluded that good health is not strictly a medical problem and not simply a governmental funding issue. Our conclusion was that good health is, above all, a matter of successful learning. Our study made it clear that adult education can play a key role in enabling people to maintain and improve their health. Yet we found that learning and health is a remarkably underresearched, underrecognized area within the ambit of adult education. Since the area of learning and health not only defies boundaries but is far larger and more complex than any policy, system, or program, we hope that these findings will encourage adult educators in Canada and beyond to become more involved in the critical issue of health and learning. 49 5

As we move into the next millennium, there is a pressing need to enhance skills such as reading, writing, math, and oral communication to deal with changing workplace needs. Changing technology, increased employee decision making, quality initiatives, and new government regulations have made workplace education a priority. A well-conceived training and development strategy attends to the basic skills needs of workers to ensure the successful attainment of short-term and long-term company goals. In the workplace, opportunities for basic skills development can provide the foundation for other learning.Basic skills programs, like other workplace programs, tend to have a greater impact in workplaces that value employee input, encourage decision making, and promote ongoing learning. This type of workplace may provide an opportunity to plan and develop collaborative, holistic, integrated basic skills initiatives that will benefit both the individual and the organization.The focus in this chapter is on collaborative workplace education, with the recognition that not all workplace environments are conducive to this kind of approach. In places that are not open to collaboration, other effective strategies for basic skills education can be used. For example, there are many successful union-based and union-led programs that provide basic skills education for their members with minimal or no company involvement.Collaborative initiatives involve workers in program planning and decision making at every stage of development and work hard to marry individual and organizational needs. They respect and value the knowledge and experience that people individually and collectively bring, and are designed to assist people in developing new skills and self-confidence. These initiatives recognize that NEW DIRECTIONS FOR ADULT AND CONTINUING EDUCATION. no. 68. Wintcr 1995 0 Jossey-Bass Publishen 63 64 WORKPLACE LEARNING

Purpose -Many Canadians presume their universal health care system provides equitable opportunity and access to health, yet this is not necessarily the case, especially for marginalized populations. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize how marginalized, yet resilient, communities are able to build capacity and contribute to their own learning about health. Design/methodology/approach -Environmental scan, state of the field review and community consultations on a national scale. Findings -For adults living in rural and remote areas that fall below health norms, health knowledge and care is often not enough to build capacity and support resilient communities. More learning needs to be done by all members of community and government. Practical implications -Consultations with selected members of marginalized populations and their service providers reveal a cross-community, cross-sector and cross-government focus on addressing the social determinants of health is needed to increase individual capacity. Originality/value -Consultations with community members and their service providers reveal rich information about the state of health and learning in selected areas across Canada. Using literature on health and learning as a framework, this paper discusses challenges and promising practices in terms of participants' abilities to sustain their own and their communities' health and learning.

Since the mid-1980s, my work as a practitioner and researcher has focused on education in the workplace, including literacy development. By "literacy development," I refer to programs that focus on basic skills such as document use, writing, math, communications, and computers, usually but not always for those workers without a high school diploma or much postsecondary education. As a practitioner, I have worked with employers, unions, and other partners to plan and set up "workplace literacy programs" as well as mentoring and providing professional development for other workplace educators. As a researcher, I spent six months on the factory floor to conduct an ethnographic study of how workers and management use literacy (or not) in a textile factory.As a novice workplace practitioner, my understanding that the workplace is a contested terrain was immediate, although how to work with its complexities was not. Over time, my understanding of how to work with the complexities of this contested terrain became much deeper, but it is still a work in progress. Even though principles to guide practice are crucial, there are no hard-and-fast rules for resolving ethical issues-dilemmas that are not easily resolvable because they present opposing values and outcomes that may do harm to certain groups of people if not properly considered. 33 3