The main target group of the Project for Literacy of Adult People with new Technologies “Elcádiz” is the adult population serving time at the Alicante II - Villena penitentiary that has been considered as illiterate according to certain criteria. The main goal of the project is to provide the target group with the basic skills related to writing, reading, use of new technologies, general knowledge and numeracy, all of them considered necessary for an effective exercise of citizenship.
Within the target group it is noteworthy the significant percentage of immigrant students coming from northern African countries and, especially, the women, who constitute a highly vulnerable group.
A parallel goal is to make working materials available for adult education teachers, which are innovative, diverse and at the same time adjusted to the safety and availability constraints of ICT in penitentiaries or other adult training centres.
Thus, with the goal of incorporating the writing-reading process, the project presents the students with a battery of web sites sequenced according to growing difficulty, covering the introduction of the first letters (vowels, L, P…) and the use of the keyboard until they are able to build simple texts, always appropriate to the world of adults. As users, they read and write their first letters with such an indispensable tool in today’s society. The project consists also nine printed volumes for the progressive incorporation of the writing-reading skills, three more centred in basic general knowledge adapted to their academic level, and five sequenced volumes concerning numeracy.
Several years of close work with our students have been necessary for the development of the project, gathering their contributions, needs and expectations, and taking always into account the very important background that they, as the adults they are, can bring into the undertaking.
Similarly, it has also been taken into account that the students find themselves in a stage of their lives with little time available for education, compared to the number of years of compulsory schooling contemplated in our educational system for the first periods of education. For this reason, the contents gathered are essentially functional, which encourages students not to drop out of the system. All this work is gathered in classroom-based work proposal, hoping that it will be useful both for the target group and for their teachers. It is available for free use for Spanish-speaking adult educators.
The project ElCádiz was awarded with the third prize in the Resolution of 16 November 2015 of the State Secretariat for Education, Vocational Training and Universities, for the Miguel Hernández Award 2015. It also received the honourable mention Julián Sanz del Río, which makes it join the Spanish candidacies for the UNESCO international literacy awards, called on a yearly basis for the Literacy International Day.