What do mushrooms, worm farms, T-shirts and billycarts all have in common? For most people not a great deal really! But for adult literacy students in a community house east of Melbourne, these four ideas have been the basis of enterprise and project learning during the last four years where language, literacy and numeracy skills have been an integral part of developing a micro business or producing a product. All the projects have provided firstly an alternative approach where social activity and learning outcomes are interwoven and secondly a context for learning in which the students are in the driver’s seat. In other words the adult literacy students are responsible for the bulk of the planning, organising and production of the final product. This process involves large doses of problem solving and risk taking for both students and tutors but despite the problems and the risks there is always a grand sense of achievement and completion. For me, the beauty of the enterprise is that the focus is on the task of creating or producing the product and so the literacy and numeracy are just a natural part of that process.

Each one of these projects has involved all the course components of literacy courses taught under the umbrella of such frameworks as the National Reporting System (NRS). The projects have included oral communication (discussions, debates, instructions, surveys, meetings, listening to speakers, questioning); reading (background information about the product, letters, instructions, notes, articles); writing (information for customers, posters, survey forms, personal responses to the project, instructions) numeracy (costs, profit, loss, weights, measurements, Street Directories and directions, quantities, time, fractions, decimals, estimation, maths language); learning strategies and/or General Curriculum Option( personal and group planning, organising, goal setting, recording.) But these components have occurred in the context of the ‘needs’ of the project (ie a poster to advertise, or how to run a meeting) at a time when that activity was necessary. This project format has also offered the opportunity for many adult literacy students, who are only too aware of their low literacy skills, to gain confidence in a work-like environment and often to recognise their capabilities as they have the opportunity to utilise the myriad of life skills and knowledge that they have accumulated. In a nutshell, the literacy / numeracy / oracy aspects are just a means to achieve real world goals; not an end in themselves.

The first of these Morrison House projects was born during a discussion about the exorbitant cost of worms - the fish bait variety - in a class of predominantly male literacy students, most of whom were avid fishermen. From there the worm farm project was hatched. In subsequent years there have been two other opportunities to incorporate learning and production. One group ran a micro T-shirt business producing Morrison House T-shirts in three sizes and with a choice of 4 colours for the design. Another group contracted to build eight billycarts for the School Holiday Program at Morrison House. Both of these projects provided the basis for a sizeable chunk of a literacy program. Of course it was not all smooth sailing and there were hurdles to overcome, but the outcomes in terms of literacy, learning, confidence and the validation of lifetimes of knowledge and skills far outweighed the problems experienced.

And so, in 1999 the opportunity to run a mushroom farm arose. Our full time students who are with us for about 20 hours a week were all involved with the initial planning. (See photo) Both the low skills group (NRS 1,2,3) and higher skills group (or NRS 4,5) contributed by working in small groups to suggest how the business could be set up, to identify possible problems, markets etc. An excursion was then arranged to Chiquita Mushrooms where the students were shown over the establishment and given tips about growing mushrooms successfully. We were to have made our own compost but the timing meant that our students would be leaving for the Christmas holidays before our mushrooms were popping up. Happily, Chiquita Mushrooms came to our rescue and supplied us with compost and spore in order that our ‘business’ would be in operation and students would have the opportunity to grow and market the mushies. The following information details the ‘NRSing’ of the mushroom project.