Unfortunately, in the education system and among educational researchers, there's quite a divide between the educational research and the practice, what happens in schools. Unfortunately, in schools, that has contributed to a lot of things happening that aren't necessarily working—I guess we're on a theme here—but it's what we know and what we do, so that's what the practice continues to be. There are examples of this all over the place, as there are with literacy. Through my own research, I've seen it. The practice and what we're seeing in the research literature aren't lining up.
I hate to simplify it, but that is one major area, and it's something that my organization has been working on with the provincial government to talk about. How we can we merge what's going on? We do have several faculties of education. We do have several people who are looking specifically at the area of literacy and early reading development.
How can we merge those two areas to make the research that's happening effective in the classroom and to look at doing some demonstrations, such as what we're proposing here with Learning Together? That means taking it back before school and looking at pre-K. What are the activities that our pre-K educators could be doing with children to prepare them for school? It's very well established in the research literature what the things are that children need to know and what classroom teachers can do. How can we bridge those two areas?