Local Literacies

Reading and Writing in One Community

David Barton, Mary Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136448331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Local Literacies is a unique detailed study of the role of reading and writing in people's everyday lives. By concentrating on a selection of people in a particular community in Lancaster, England, the authors analyse how they use literacy in their day-to-day lives. It follows four people in detail examining how they use local media, their participation in public life, the role of literacy in family activities and in leisure pursuits. Links are made between everyday learning and education. The study is based on an ethnographic approach to studying everyday activities and is framed in the theory of literacy as a social practice.

This Routledge Linguistics Classic includes a new foreword by Deborah Brandt and a new framing chapter, in which David Barton and Mary Hamilton look at the connections between local and global activities, interfaces with institutional literacies, and the growing significance of digital literacies in everyday life.

A seminal text, Local Literacies provides an explicit usable methodology for both teachers and researchers, and clear theorising around a set of six propositions. Clearly written and engaging, this is a deeply absorbing study and is essential reading for all those involved in literacy and literacy education.

Part I

1

Understanding Literacy as Social Practice

Introduction

Literacy is primarily something people do; it is an activity, located in the space between thought and text. Literacy does not just reside in people’s heads as a set of skills to be learned, and it does not just reside on paper, captured as texts to be analysed. Like all human activity, literacy is essentially social, and it is located in the interaction between people. This book is a study of what people do with literacy: of the social activities, of the thoughts and meanings behind the activities, and of the texts utilised in such activities. It is about how a particular group of people use reading and writing in their day-to-day lives. Of necessity, the book is particular; it sets out from individual people’s lives and particular literacy events at a certain point in history. At the same time, it is also about the general nature of literacy and about the state of literacy in the world at the end of the twentieth century. This book explores contemporary uses and meanings of literacy in everyday life and the ways in which these are changing. It is based upon an ethnographic study which documents in detail literacy practices at one point in time and space: the time is the final decade of the twentieth century, the place is Lancaster, a town in the north-west of England. We look backwards at the history and cultural traditions on which these practices rest, as well as examining the constant change affecting people’s contemporary practices.

The book draws upon and extends new views of literacy. It develops the field of literacy studies which has come into being in the past few years. Several studies have examined the literacy practices of individuals and groups, including people’s uses and meanings of literacy and the value it holds for them; these studies have contributed to a theory of literacy as social practice and collective resource. We will refer to some of these studies later in this chapter but will keep more detailed discussion of much of the work until the third section of the book when integrating and extending ideas about the nature of literacy.

As described in the preface, we wish to contribute to this field in three distinct ways. Firstly we offer a description and an investigation of literacy in one local community. Secondly, the book represents a contribution to the theoretical understanding of literacy, and more generally to the understanding of social practices and how people make sense of their lives through their everyday practices. In doing this we find that we provide an account which is often at odds with other public images of literacy such as media images, and we draw attention to vernacular literacies which are often hidden literacies. This leads to our final aim, which is to contribute critically to public discussions on literacy, education and the quality of local life.

This book is based upon an empirical study. Whether or not it is made explicit, all empirical studies start from many theoretical assumptions. All research has a theory underlying it. In approaching our study of literacy, we brought a clear set of propositions about literacy – a theoretical framework. This oriented us towards particular ways of working and particular approaches to data collection and analysis. The theory has been further refined and amplified as we have carried out the study, analysing and reflecting on the data. We wish to make this theory explicit. The main part of this first chapter is concerned with describing our theory of literacy. We also introduce other concepts we have made use of and explain some of the motivation for this research.

This theory of literacy we put forward implies a certain approach to research, demanding particular research methods and data. It is an ecological approach, where literacy is integral to its context; this is what Barton (1994) refers to as ‘an ecology of written language’ and Lemke (1995) has called an ‘ecosocial’ approach to human communities. The theory also provides a rationale for the structuring of the book: because literacy is situated socially, we need to devote the next two chapters to describing the context of the study. This means historical context as much as contemporary context. Chapter 2 provides some of the literacy history of the city and its institutions, with glimpses of literacy in Lancaster at the turn of the eighteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth century. Chapter 3 is concerned with locating the study, as a contemporary study based in Lancaster, England in the 1990s. Lancaster is a distinct city with its own idiosyncrasies, and the 1990s are a particular point in history, not least in terms of the changing nature of literacy.

In terms of methodology, we carried out interviews, we observed activities and we collected documents. We refer to the study as an ethnography; it is an ethnography of a set of cultural practices, those concerned with literacy. It is an ethnography in that the study consists of detailed examination of a real situation, working, as Clifford Geertz puts it, ‘by the light of local knowledge’ (1983: 167). A variety of methods are used and people’s own perceptions are highlighted. This is a critical ethnography in the important sense that we are trying to reveal and question the traditional assumptions which frame literacy, to expose the ways in which it is ideologically constructed and embedded in power relationships (see Kincheloe and McLaren 1994). In so doing, the study contributes to a more critical debate and understanding of literacy practices, both in and out of education.

Our study is also a critical ethnography in that we are committed to uncovering and documenting everyday literacies which are often unrecognised in dominant discourses about literacy. In this way, our research has affinities with feminist methodologies and other research with marginalised groups (Harding 1987). Our research has, in Kincheloe and McLaren’s terms (1994), a transformative, emancipatory aim. However, it is not directly action-oriented. Implications for education and cultural action can be drawn out of this study, but we have deliberately not set out from educational concerns or agendas for change. Other aspects of our research programme focus more direcdy on these action outcomes, as in Ivanic and Hamilton (1990); Barton and Hamilton (1996). Our approach has been strongly shaped by the insistent voices of practitioners and adult students in community-based adult education who reject definitions of literacy in terms of skills, functions and levels which do not fit their experiences, nor their visions of the power of literacy in everyday life (see Mace 1992a).

This is an ethnography of a limited set of cultural practices, those concerned with literacy. Therefore, in traditional terms it may be more accurate to say that we utilise ethnographic methods or that we take an ethnographic approach, rather than to say that this is a full ethnography of the whole of people’s lives (see Green and Bloome 1996). In Chapter 4 we describe the research methods and their rationale, raising issues about qualitative research methodology and the relations between researcher and researched.

These first four chapters provide information which creates the setting for the empirical study, covering theory, historical background, contemporary context and methodology. The second section of the book consists of four chapters each of which provides a detailed picture of the literacy life of an individual person. Harry Graham, the subject of Chapter 5, is a retired firefighter with strong views on education and who is trying to write his memoirs of the Second World War. Shirley Bowker, in Chapter 6, is concerned about her children’s schooling and cares passionately about social issues. In Chapter 7, June Marsh, a part-time market worker, keeps detailed household accounts in order to survive financially and utilises a wide range of media. In Chapter 8, Cliff Holt is worried about his health but he enjoys betting and gets pleasure from writing.

The third section of the book consists of six chapters which explore particular themes about literacy and draw upon data from the full range of people we talked to and the observations we made. In these chapters we examine how literacy is a communal resource utilised by families, by community groups, and by individuals. Chapters 9 and 10 are concerned primarily with the range of reading and writing which goes on in the home, exploring first of all its diversity and then looking at patterns related to gender, numeracy practices and practices in a multilingual household. Chapter 11 addresses the relationship between everyday practices and learning, covering the informal learning of new literacies, as well as relationships between home learning and more formal learning of educational institutions. The next chapter, Chapter 12, examines the role of literacy in the many local organisations which people belong to, and how literate activity is one of the roots of local democratic participation.

Chapter 13 describes how people use reading and writing to make sense of the world and to become experts in particular domains. Chapter 14 brings together some of the threads of the earlier chapters and in it we identify a range of vernacular literacies, or local literacies, in people’s everyday lives, exploring their definition and contemporary significance. An afterword, Chapter 15, reflects on how the findings from this local study can be related to literacy practices in other times and places. The Appendices contain further information and notes on some educational implications of the book. Throughout there are boxed Asides, mainly covering a variety of extra material which the reader may want to pause at or return to selectively at a later stage. This material includes detailed quotes from interviews and fieldwork observations, discussions of methodological points, and statistics which provide some national context for the findings of this local study.

A Social Theory of Literacy: Practices and Events

We present below the theory we employed as a set of six propositions about the nature of literacy. We explain each one, making clear how it shapes our study. The starting-point of this approach is the assertion that literacy is a social practice, and the propositions are an elaboration of this. The discussion is a development on from that in Barton (1994: 34–52), where contemporary approaches to literacy are discussed within the framework of the metaphor of ecology. The notion of literacy practices offers a powerful way of conceptualising the link between the activities of reading and writing and the social structures in which they are embedded and which they help shape. When we talk about practices, then, this is not just the superficial choice of a word but the possibilities that this perspective offers for new theoretical understandings about literacy.

Our interest is in social practices in which literacy has a role; hence, the basic unit of a social theory of literacy is that of literacy practices. Literacy practices are the general cultural ways of utilising written language which people draw upon in their lives. In the simplest sense literacy practices are what people do with literacy. However practices are not observable units of behaviour since they also involve values, attitudes, feelings and social relationships (see Street 1993: 12). This includes people’s awareness of literacy, constructions of literacy and discourses of literacy, how people talk about and make sense of literacy. These are processes internal to the individual; at the same time, practices are the social processes which connect people with one another, and they include shared cognitions represented in ideologies and social identities. Practices are shaped by social rules which regulate the use and distribution of texts, prescribing who may produce and have access to them. They straddle the distinction between individual and social worlds, and literacy practices are more usefully understood as existing in the relations between people, within groups and communities, rather than as a set of properties residing in individuals.

Aside 1.1 Literacy as Social Practice

• Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these can be inferred from events which are mediated by written texts.
• There are different literacies associated with different domains of life.
• Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationships, and some literacies become more dominant, visible and influential than others.
• Literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices.
• Literacy is historically situated.
• Literacy practices change, and new ones are frequently acquired through processes of informal learning and sense making.

To avoid confusion, it is worth emphasising that this usage is different from situations where the word ‘practice’ is used to mean learning to do something by repetition. It is also different from the way the term is used in recent international surveys of literacy, to refer to ‘common or typical activities or tasks’ (OECD/Statistics Canada 1996). The notion of practices as we have defined it above – cultural ways of utilising literacy – is a more abstract one that cannot wholly be contained in observable activities and tasks.

Turning to another basic concept, literacy events are activities where literacy has a role. Usually there is a written text, or texts, central to the activity and there may be talk around the text. Events are observable episodes which arise from practices and are shaped by them. The notion of events stresses the situated nature of literacy, that it always exists in a social context. It is parallel to ideas developed in sociolinguistics and also, as Jay Lemke has pointed out, to Bahktin’s assertion that the starting-point for the analysis of spoken language should be ‘the social event of verbal interaction’, rather than the formal linguistic properties of texts in isolation (Lemke 1995).

Many literacy events in life are regular, repeated activities, and these can often be a useful starting-point for research into literacy. Some events are linked into routine sequences and these may be part of the formal procedures and expectations of social institutions like work-places, schools and welfare agencies. Some events are structured by the more informal expectations and pressures of the home or peer group. Texts are a crucial part of literacy events, and the study of literacy is partly a study of texts and how they are produced and used. These three components, practices, events and texts, provide the first proposition of a social theory of literacy, that: literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these can be inferred from events which are mediated by written texts. Our study is concerned with identifying the events and texts of everyday life and describing people’s associated practices. Our prime interest here is to analyse events in order to learn about practices. As with the definition of practices, we take a straightforward view of events at this point, as being activities which involve written texts, but we return to this term for further discussion. An example of an everyday literacy event, cooking a pie, is to be found in Aside 1.2.

Aside 1.2 Cooking Literacy

When baking a lemon pie in her kitchen, Rita follows a recipe. She uses it to check the amounts of the ingredients. She estimates the approximate amounts, using teacups and spoons chosen specially for this purpose. The recipe is handwritten on a piece of notepaper;’It was written out from a book by a friend more than ten years ago. The first time she read the recipe carefully at each stage, but now she only looks at it once or twice. The piece of paper is marked and greasy by having been near the cooking surface on many occasions. It is kept in an envelope with other handwritten recipes and ones cut out of magazines and newspapers. The envelope and some cookery books are on a shelf in the kitchen. The books range in age and condition and include popular ones by Robert Carrier. Sometimes she sits and reads them for pleasure.

Rita does not always go through the same set of activities in making the pie. Sometimes she makes double the amount described in the recipe if more people will be eating it. Sometimes she cooks the pie with her daughter, Hayley, helping her where necessary. Sometimes she enjoys cooking it; at other times it is more of a chore, when time is limited or she has other things she would rather do. Rita has passed the recipe on to several friends who have enjoyed the pie.

Rita does not always follow recipes exactly, but will add herbs and spices to taste; sometimes she makes up recipes; at one point she describes making a vegetable and pasta dish similar to one she had had as a take-away meal. She exchanges recipes with other people, although she does not lend her books.

Our work complements other studies, primarily in Linguistics, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of asides
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: localliteracies in a global world
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index of Informants
• Index