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Case Study: Sarah

Sarah is a care worker in her 50s. She has an adult son with dyslexia living at home. Last year, following advice from her carer agency she took a ‘Communications for Care Workers’ course. This year, despite discouragement from her son, she has enrolled for a sign language Course in addition to the ‘Improve your English using IT’ course. She had not used a computer before starting this course. She takes same time to understand new tasks and requires some support to work through each part of the workbook However, she is feeling extremely happy with, and motivated by, her own progress and her new skills. She intends to use her new IT skills to help her progress on to the next level care course. She also aims to go on to a higher level IT course.

This course is enabling Sarah to work at her own pace, see tangible results of her own progress each lesson and to build her confidence immensely. By developing language and IT skills simultaneously, Sarah is now confidently planning her own progression routes, linked to her career development, in a very positive way. A discrete IT course could easily have made Sarah feel anxious and a lot of the content, including tasks such as spreadsheets and mail merge, would not be appropriate to her individual learning goals and personal aims.

Case study taken from DEBS (Developing Embedded Basic Skills) Newsletter, issue 1, December 2002, NIACE