Learning to read as an adult
According to the Agence nationale de lutte contre l'illettrisme, nearly 7% of the adult population in France have difficulty reading and writing. This represents around 2.5 million people. Illiteracy has a significant impact on these people's daily lives.
The Coraplis association sets up literacy programs adapted to enable these individuals to develop their skills and regain their autonomy. But the challenge is to let people know that these offers are available!
How do you inform people suffering from illiteracy about the services to which they are entitled? The Ink Link has taken up this challenge.
Interviews with people suffering from illiteracy first enabled us to target the media they could look at. Anything printed is scary… So we had to use video and animation.
Another aim of the interviews was to gather life stories. An important point is to destigmatize people who often feel like failures.
There are many reasons why people may not be able to read. Seeing other people's stories makes them realize that they're not alone, and that solutions do exist.
After collecting a sufficient number of testimonials, we created six different scenarios, representative of the situations encountered. During workshops, people taking part in literacy workshops were able to react to these scenarios, suggest modifications to make them more accurate and realistic, and select their favorite stories.
Together with the beneficiaries, we then chose the art of Émilie Saitas, who works with colored pencils in a soft, semi-realistic style. The aim was to catch the eye and make people want to look.
Jacques was born shortly after the WWII and never had the chance to go to school. But because he's so handy and resourceful, he's always managed to find work and hide his illiteracy. Now that he's retired, he'd like to learn to read…
Sophie looks after her children alone. She's dyslexic, but when she was younger, she didn't have any help.
Her desire to help her children motivates her to take lessons.
Karine had a complicated childhood, placed in different foster cares… She was never able to learn to read…
Today, she helps the elderly and thinks she could take the time to learn to read…