Social Literacies

Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education

Brian V. Street

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317894407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Social Literacies develops new and critical approaches to the understanding of literacy in an international perspective. It represents part of the current trend towards a broader consideration of literacy as social practices, and as its title suggests, it focuses on the social nature of reading and writing and the multiple character of literacy practices.

Section 1:

Literacy, Politics and Social Change

Introduction

The first Section attempts to link specific insights regarding literacy practices to broader cultural and political debates, thereby addressing the interest of the Real Language series in ‘the relationship between language and social change’. In the transmission of literacy to so-called ‘developing’ societies, many of the assumptions of the culture and literacy bearers have been premised upon what I term an ‘autonomous’ model of literacy and against which I have proposed an ‘ideological’ model. This section attempts to bring out the implications of this framework of thought for particular campaigns and suggests ways in which the relationship between literacy and culture can be re-thought within the literacy programmes of the 1990s.

Chapter 1: Putting Literacies on the Political Agenda

This chapter arose out of dissatisfaction with the representations of literacy evident in Agency and media accounts during International Literacy Year (1990). The rhetoric intended to draw public attention to literacy and to encourage both financial and organizational resources into the field, reproduced many of the stereotypes of the autonomous model: in particular, that ‘illiterates’ were lacking in cognitive skills, living in ‘darkness’ and ‘backward’ and that the acquisition of literacy would (in itself, ‘autonomously’) lead to major ‘impacts’ in terms of social and cognitive skills and ‘Development’. While such claims may achieve the short-term aim of shocking the public and governments into some response, in the long term it is likely to be damaging to the field, both in the ways in which it demeans those adults who do have literacy difficulties and also because it raises false expectations of what they and their society can expect once they do improve literacy skills.

Statements by developers regarding the need for literacy, the importance of literacy for development and the terrible consequences of ‘illiteracy’, all assume that we know what ‘literacy’ is and that when people acquire it they will somehow ‘get better’. I argue that behind these assumptions is usually a very western-oriented and narrow image of what ‘literacy’ is, a model based upon the particular uses and associations of literacy in recent European and North American history. I suggest that these narrow assumptions about literacy might provide an explanation for the failure of so many literacy campaigns in recent years. They have involved the construction of a ‘stigma’ of illiteracy where many people had operated in the oral domain without feeling that it was a problem. Where this has happened, the concept of ‘illiteracy’ has itself become one of the major problems in people's ability to see themselves as communicators. The rhetoric of public campaigns reinforces rather than challenges these images. International Literacy Year should have been used to open up these debates and to establish clear frameworks and concepts on which programmes can be based, not to reiterate worn cliches and patronizing stories about ‘illiteracy’. The new thinking about literacy outlined in this book might, I suggest, provide a more fruitful framework for future action and campaigns. This involves recognizing the multiplicity of literacy practices rather than assuming a single Literacy has to be transferred in every Literacy Campaign. It also assumes that questions regarding which literacy is appropriate for a given context and campaign is itself a political question, not simply a matter of neutral choice by technical ‘experts’. In this sense, ‘Putting Literacies on the Political Agenda’ is the first task of Development Agencies and of Educationalists. It is to this challenge that the energy and stimulus of International Literacy work should be addressed.

Chapter 2: Literacy and Social Change: The Significance of Social Context in the Development of Literacy Programmes

This chapter argues that the transfer of literacy from a dominant group to those who previously had little experience of reading and writing, involves more than simply the passing on of some technical, surface skills. Rather, for those receiving the new literacy, the impact of the culture and of the politico-economic structures of those bringing it is likely to be more significant than the impact of the technical skills associated with reading and writing. The shifts in meaning associated with such transfers are located at deep, epistemo-logical levels, raising quesions about what is truth, what is knowledge and what are appropriate sources of authority. Clanchy (1979), for instance, reports how the apparently simple act of dating a business letter in medieval England had profound significance of a religious and doctrinal kind: for a secular person to locate themselves in a time frame that was essentially non-secular was seen as sacrilege, a profanity, not merely a technical matter of learning conventions for different genres of writing. I explore this material in some detail as it is sufficiently distanced from immediate pressures and significance to serve as an exemplar for much contemporary practice in development campaigns for literacy. The changes being wrought by a present-day literacy programme may likewise strike deep at the roots of cultural belief, a fact that may go unnoticed within a framework that assumes that reading and writing are simply technical skills. The medieval example, rooted in the changes brought by the conquering Normans to Anglo-Saxon England, also brings out the extent to which power relations, often of a colonial kind, underlie many literacy programmes. There too, as in many modern cases, the indigenous population had literacy practices of its own that were undervalued and marginalized by the standard being introduced. People are not ‘tabula rasa’, waiting for the novel imprint of literacy, as many campaigns seem to assume. The uses of oral conventions for memorizing, asserting authority and claiming rights are able to achieve the objectives that colonists and educators have claimed could only be accomplished by the written word: indeed, in the case of medieval England, the local population were acutely aware of how susceptible to forgery and deception was the written word, especially in the hands of conquerors eager to assert claims to land they had newly acquired. Claims for the neutral and objective character of writing were seen for the political self-interest they clearly were.

Similar processes can be observed in many modern contexts where literacy is brought by outsiders. Claims for the consequence of literacy are frequently couched in the neutral language of ‘objective’ science while disguising the political and economic interests of those imparting it. I explore these power relations, as they are implicated in literacy campaigns in a number of developing countries and make a working distinction between ‘colonial’ literacy — brought by outsiders as part of a conquest — and ‘dominant’ literacy — brought by members of the same society but frequently belonging to different classes, ethnic groups or localities. Describing case studies from Malagasy, Iran and India, I argue for a more culturally sensitive analysis of literacy transfer and a greater attention to the power relations embedded in literacy practices. With regard to current debates about the nature of literacy campaigns, I argue against the ‘mass’ campaign favoured in many Agency circles and in favour of rooting campaign work in local cultures and local definitions of ‘need’. Recent developments in the ethnography of literacy suggest a far richer picture and a more complex framework for planning than previous campaign organizers have envisaged.

1 Putting Literacies on the Political Agenda

1990 was International Literacy Year. According to the Task Force set up to co-ordinate activities around the world, the main objective was to create public awareness and ‘develop an atmosphere of positive attitudes towards the problem of illiteracy as a cultural problem and the need to tackle and combat it’. Worthy sentiments, but do they reveal serious flaws in the way that literacy is treated in public discussion? Do problems in the construction of literacy and ‘illiteracy’ themselves lie at the root of many of the ‘problems’ ILY was supposed to address? In their coverage of literacy issues, whether in the Third World or in the UK, both politicians and the press have a few simple stories to tell that deflect attention from the complexity and real political difficulties these issues raise. Attention is frequently restricted to scare stories on the numbers of ‘illiterates’ both in the Third World and within ‘advanced’ societies; patronizing assumptions about what it means to have difficulties with reading and writing in contemporary society; and the raising of false hopes about what the acquisition of literacy means for job prospects, social mobility and personal achievement.

Campaigners as well as agencies and governments still make great play of figures that show, say, 25 per cent of the UK to be ‘illiterate’, or 25 million people in the USA; a reflex in assessing the degree of ‘development’ in Third World countries remains their literacy ‘rate’; and United Nations' statements highlight the increasing absolute numbers of ‘illiterates’ in the world, while calling meaninglessly for the ‘eradication of illiteracy by the year 2000’. The figures are, of course, counters in a political game over resources: if campaigners can inflate the figures then the public will be shocked and funds will be forthcoming from embarrassed governments, or Aid Agencies can be persuaded to resource a literacy campaign.

The reality is more complex, is harder to face politically, and requires qualitative rather than quantitative analysis. Recent studies have shown, for instance, that when it comes to job acquisition the level of literacy is less important than issues of class, gender and ethnicity: lack of literacy is more likely to be a symptom of poverty and deprivation than a cause (Graff, 1979). Researchers (cf. Levine, 1986) also point out that the literacy tests which firms develop for prospective employees may have nothing to do with the literacy skills required on the job: their function is to screen out certain social groups and types, not to determine whether the level of literacy skill matches that of the tasks required. Some employers, for instance, have the somewhat mythical belief that employees who have learnt literacy are less likely to be antagonistic to new technology, computers, etc., and use literacy tests as a screen for these supposed attitudinal qualities. While some individuals find that attendance on literacy programmes does lead to jobs they would not have got otherwise, the number of jobs in a country does not necessarily increase with literacy rates, so in many cases other people are simply being pushed out — those with literacy difficulties may be leap-frogging each other for scarce jobs. Governments have a tendency to blame the victims at a time of high unemployment and ‘illiteracy’ is one convenient way of shifting debate away from the lack of jobs and onto people's own supposed lack of fitness for work. But many tasks require minimal literacy or a different kind of literacy skill than is taught at school, and employers can sometimes teach these on the job fairly easily: lack of literacy skills is not so frequently a real barrier to employment as the public accounts suggests.

Lack of literacy skills may also be less of a handicap in daily life than is often represented. The media likes to tell heroic stories of the ‘management’ of illiteracy, how ‘illiterates’ get around the city or bypass written exercises like form-filling or reading labels.

The situation, however, need not be represented as though people are suffering from some disease or handicap. Fingeret (1983), for instance, has shown how communities develop networks of exchange and interdependence in which literacy is just one skill among many being bartered: a mechanic without literacy skills may exchange his skills in car maintenance for a neighbour's ability to fill in a form; a businessman may speak a letter into a tape for a friend to write up, much as medieval monarchs used scribes. In this situation the acquisition of literacy skills is not a first order priority at the individual level, so long as it is available at the community level. Many immigrant groups have found themselves in similar situations, with ‘gatekeepers’ learning specific literacy skills relevant to their particular situation and often mediating with agencies of the host community. Among the Hmong of Philadelphia, for instance, sensitive literacy teachers have abandoned traditional, exam-oriented literacy teaching in favour of helping particular women develop sufficient commercial literacy to enable them to market their weaving and create an independent economic base (Weinstein-Shr, 1993; Weinstein-Shr and Quintero, 1994).

Such examples have led researchers and practitioners to talk of ‘literacies’ rather than of a single, monolithic ‘Literacy’. It is not only meaningless intellectually to talk of ‘the illiterate’, it is also socially and cultural damaging. In many cases it has been found that people who have come forward to literacy programmes because they think of themselves as ‘illiterate’ have considerable literacy skill but may be needing help in a specific area. This could be treated as no different from any potential students applying to educational institutions, whether adult education or university postgraduate work. When applying to a literacy programme, adults who have defined themselves as ‘illiterate’ are often asked to read some written material so that their level and needs can be assessed: in one study in the USA they were asked to read texts produced by adult literacy students on the programme rather than ‘top-down’ published material and many found, to their own surprise, that they could read them fairly easily. Some, indeed, continued to read whole student magazines and publications, ignoring the ‘test’ aspect of the situation. Familiarity with content and context affected what were thought of as context-free, neutral skills in literacy decoding. While doing research among adult literacy students at a literacy centre in the UK, students told me of their concern that they could not learn literacy properly because they ‘could not speak properly’: that is, their dialect or pronunciation differed from Standard English. The stigma of ‘illiteracy’ is a greater burden than the actual literacy problems evident in such cases.

In many developing countries this stigma is still in the process of being constructed. People who have been accustomed to managing their daily lives, intellectual and emotional as well as practical and economic, through oral means have not required the elaborate definitions and distinctions associated with literacy and illiteracy in the West. In fact there are very few cultures today in which there is not some knowledge of literacy: children, for instance, learn to interpret logos on commercial goods and advertizements, or to ‘read’ television with its often sophisticated mix of script, pictures and oral language. Islamic societies have long been used to forms of reading and writing associated with religious texts and with scholarly and commercial activities, while in other contexts people have developed their own ‘indigenous’ writing system, used perhaps for specific purposes such as letter writing, sermons, or love notes. Literacy campaigns, however, have generally ignored these local literacies and assumed that the recipients are ‘illiterate’, beginning from scratch. Even Paulo Freire (1985) the most influential radical literacy campaigner, has tended to believe that people without western-type literacy are un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Real Language Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1: Literacy, Politics and Social Change
• Section 2: The Ethnography of Literacy
• Section 3: Litefacy in Education
• Section 4: Towards a Critical Framework
• Index