Adult Literacy as Social Practice

More Than Skills

Uta Papen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134260225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

With a radically new perspective on reading, writing and mathematics for adults, this refreshing and challenging book shows how teachers and curriculum developers have much to gain from understanding the role of literacy in learners' lives, bringing in their families, social networks and jobs. Looking at the practicalities of how teachers and students can work with social practice in mind, Adult Literacy as Social Practice is particularly focused on:

* how a social theory of literacy and numeracy compares with other theoretical perspectives
* how to analyze reading and writing in everyday life using the concepts of social literacy as analytical tools, and what this tells us about learners' teaching needs
* what is actually happening in adult basic education and how literacy is really being taught
* professional development.

With major policy initiatives coming into force, this is the essential guide for teachers and curriculum developers through this area, offering one-stop coverage of the key concepts without the need for finding materials from far-scattered sources.

Part I
A new theoretical approach

Chapter 1
Literacy – what is it?

Definitions, discourses and metaphors

What this chapter is about

In this chapter, I examine different theoretical perspectives on reading and writing and how they relate to different understandings of literacy and numeracy education. I begin by briefly examining public perceptions and media images of literacy.I then discuss different definitions of literacy that can be found in the research literature and in policy documents. My aim here is to show that these are not neutral definitions and ‘literacy’ is not simply a technical term, but that different concepts of reading and writing are grounded in specific discourses about literacy, about learning and about the learner. In order to explain what is meant by ‘discourses about literacy’, I then briefly introduce the view of language that I take in this book.

The readings that accompany this chapter provide more background to the concepts that are discussed in the main text. The discussion activities at the end of the chapter invite readers to critically examine their own assumptions about literacy and numeracy as well as on those that inform different literacy, numeracy and language programmes.

Literacy, numeracy and ESOL: the current debate

Much has been written and much is being said about what literacy is and what it means to be literate. Whether we browse recent newspapers, read the government’s last election manifesto or listen to public debates on the radio, the term literacy is likely to appear. Without doubt, literacy is high on the agenda of public concerns.A quick glance at the discussion suffices to reveal the tenor of the current debate.There is much talk about changing educational demands, because of new technologies, changing workplaces and Britain’s position within the global economy. There are worries that lack of literacy – or ‘illiteracy’ – hinders employability, leads to social exclusion and poor health, and is correlated with crime and anti-social behaviour.

We hear about falling standards and the appallingly low reading and writing abilities that many children are believed to have at the end of their school careers. With regard to adults, recent media scares claim that low literacy standards are a major problem for the UK, with more than 20 per cent of the population believed to have ‘very poor literacy skills’. These figures come from recent international studies (OECD 1995, OECD/CERI 1997, OECD 2000) by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a powerful international body whose voice adds weight to the views of those who worry about the negative impact that Britain’s poorly skilled workforce is assumed to have on the country’s economic performance.

The debate easily extends to numeracy and ESOL. According to the above survey, a significant percentage of adults in England have serious difficulties with numeracy. This, together with the low levels of literacy the OECD survey reports, is believed to hamper the country’s economic development and society’s overall well-being. In the ongoing debate about refugees and asylum-seekers, the question of whether immigrants should be obliged to learn English is raised. Overall, this is a highly politicised debate about the future of our society and about who will be allowed to be part of it.

What emerges strongly from these debates is the high emotional and ideological value attached to literacy and the central role it plays in relation to many of our society’s major concerns. Starting with the question ‘What is literacy?’, in the remainder of this chapter I provide an overview of different concepts of literacy and what these have to say about the literacy learner and about literacy teaching. I suggest that literacy is not a transparent concept, but a highly contested term and that we can think about it not so much in terms of definitions and common understandings, but more in terms of a ‘literacy debate’ (Wray, quoted in Street 1999). Rather than searching for what look like neutral definitions, we need to think about metaphors for literacy and the discourses about literacy that frame our ideas about reading and writing.

Following the Moser Report, a major review of the adult basic education (ABE) sector in England (DfEE 1999), in 2001 the British Government launched Skills for Life, a new national strategy for adult literacy, numeracy and ESOL. This development is highly relevant to those who work as practitioners in the adult basic education sector. The Skills for Life strategy is based on a set of assumptions about what literacy, numeracy and ESOL are and how best to teach them. Beginning in this chapter, I am going to examine how the assumptions about literacy that underlie particular programmes – such as Skills for Life – frame the process of teaching and learning, whether they automatically exclude other approaches and to what extent practitioners who implement the policy draw on other concepts and approaches. In doing so, I will show that different concepts had varying degrees of influence on past and present policies. In this first chapter, I invite readers to critically examine some of the concepts of literacy used by policy-makers, practitioners and researchers, and to discuss these in the light of their own experience, in the context of policies in England and elsewhere. I will begin to do this in this first chapter, but this will be an ongoing theme throughout the book.

Definitions of literacy

Among those definitions of literacy that have been around for quite a while, three concepts have been particularly influential: the functional, critical and liberal concepts of literacy.

Functional literacy

‘Functional literacy’ has been defined as follows:

A person is literate when he [sic] has acquired the essential knowledge and skills which enable him to engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning in his group and community, and whose attainments in reading, writing and arithmetic make it possible for him to continue to use these skills towards his own and the community’s development.

(Gray 1956: 24)

In the above definition, literacy is described as a skill, which is required for a broad range of activities associated with the individual’s participation in society. The word ‘functional’ here refers not only to the society’s demands on its individual members, but encompasses reading and writing that serves individual needs and purposes. In subsequent re-formulations, however, the concept became increasingly tied to economic considerations: that is, literacy became identified with the skills needed in the context of employment and economic development. At the same time, the individualistic perspective was gradually lost and, overall, the concept appeared to become more prescriptive.

Reflecting these changes, Baynham (1995: 8) notes that functional literacy is ‘a powerful construct in defining literacy in terms of its social purposes, the demands made on individuals within a given society, to function within that society, to participate and to achieve their own goals’. Rassool (1999), who summarises the rise of the concept and the various changes the definition has undergone equally draws attention to the close association in most variants of functional literacy with work-related tasks, with jobs and employability, and with the demands of the economy. She suggests that the concept of functional literacy matches skills with quantifiable educational outcomes (which can be measured through adequate testing procedures) and with ‘economic needs’ (Rassool 1999: 6).

Central to the concept is the assumed correlation between individual skills and the overall performance of the society and the nation in terms of modernisation and economic productivity (see OECD/CERI 1997). Within this framework, functional literacy is linked to the concept of human resource development and the debate about ‘basic’ skills that occupies a central place in current employment policies. Literacy is seen to have high economic value and it serves as an indicator for economic and societal development.

A further term that is commonly used in discussions about literacy is the concept of ‘basic literacy’. Rassool (1999: 7) defines basic literacy as ‘the acquisition of technical skills involving the decoding of written texts and the writing of simple statements within the context of everyday life’. While this clearly overlaps with functional literacy, basic literacy appears to place greater importance overall on the individual and their needs, whereas functional literacy, as already argued, moves the debate away from the individual towards externally-set needs for reading and writing – that is, literacy becomes linked to work-related skills and emphasises society’s demands on the individual. Both concepts, however, conceive of literacy as a set of neutral, technical skills, which have little if anything to do with culture and society. In this view, literacy in itself is valued for its assumed benefits. These are believed to be to enable learning and access to information, and thereby to support knowledge acquisition, to develop thinking and to improve the individual’s chances of finding employment and income.

A functional view of literacy can be found in current definitions of adult basic education in the UK. The Moser Report for example (DfEE 1999) refers to it as ‘. . . the ability to read, write and speak in English, and to use mathematics at a level necessary to function at work and in society in general’ (DfEE 1999: 2). However, as we will see later in this book, the functional model is not the only perspective informing ABE policy and practice in the UK.

The functional model emphasises the individual and their literacy deficits as the underlying problem. Solutions, accordingly, are to be sought by providing literacy (and numeracy) education that tackles precisely these deficits and helps people to acquire the skills they need in order to function appropriately in the workplace and in society at large (Bhola 1994, OECD 2000). In terms of educational practice, the functional model sees literacy as a fixed set of discrete skills, which are believed to be universal and transferable to all kinds of situations that require the use of written language (Barton 1994). What these skills are is of course a matter of debate, and I will come back to the question of skills repeatedly in this book.

Critical literacy

The concept of ‘critical literacy’ is associated with the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose ideas have influenced literacy debates and literacy policies all over the world. Critical literacy refers to the potential of literacy as not only ‘reading the word’, but also ‘reading the world’ (Freire and Macedo 1987). Freire’s ideas about literacy gained prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when, at the international level, faith in the functional model of literacy was beginning to fade due to the poor results many literacy programmes had produced. At this time, adult literacy work was mainly focused on the so-called developing countries, whereas industrialised nations such as the USA and the UK only slowly began to recognise adult literacy (or, as we should say, adult illiteracy) as a potential problem. I will come back to this in Chapter 5, where I describe the history of adult literacy policy in England.

Critical literacy, as Freire developed it, moves away from the ‘utilitarian-vocational meanings’ (Rassool 1999: 8) of the functional model, towards a pedagogy that aims to allow participants to understand their world in terms of justice and injustice, power and oppression, and so ultimately, to transform it. In this framework, literacy is conceptualised as a variable of power and it is linked to a transformative project. In other words, for Freire, literacy was political and the question of how to teach adults to read and write became part of a political project, and was no longer seen as a neutral technique as in the functional view. This opened up a whole new way of thinking about literacy programmes, what their aims are, what methods they use, what content they teach, what benefits they may bring to learners, and so on. In Freire’s view, literacy involves learners’ critical reflection on their social environment and the position they take within it. Freire (1972: 31–2) argued that ‘what is important is that the person learning words be concomitantly engaged in a critical analysis of the social framework in which men exist’. Contrary to the functional model, critical literacy’s primary purpose is not to help the individual to move up higher on the existing social ladder, but a radical critique of the dominant culture and the existing power relationships between social groups (see Shor 1993).

Freire’s ideas have influenced adult educators all over the world, including in Britain (see for example Lister 1994). Hamilton (1996, see Reading 1 on pp. 17–18) refers to this critical ideology as ‘literacy for emancipation’ whose roots in the UK she traces back to the traditions of working-class and community education. While critical literacy need not necessarily be as radical as Freire may have thought of it, it is often linked to democratic citizenship and the role that education plays in supporting people’s participation in society. This includes having the ability to not only decode the literal meanings of texts, but to read behind the lines, and to engage in a critical discussion of the positions a text supports. I will come back to this later in this book, when I will look more closely at current adult basic education policy in England and other countries of the UK.

The liberal tradition of literacy

The third concept of literacy that influences the practice and policy of literacy education in Britain is connected with the tradition of liberal adult education. In this view, literacy education is seen as a welfare activity by the middle classes for disadvantaged sectors of society (see Reading 1, pp. 17–18). The liberal tradition of adult literacy and basic education is informed by a humanist view of education that emphasises personal development and individual goals. It believes in the right to education of all citizens. Accordingly, adult basic education programmes that are informed by a liberal perspective go beyond work-related and ‘functional’ skills in a narrow sense, and include the more leisure-orientated uses of reading and writing, including creative writing and access to literature. Liberal adult basic education does not limit its provision to the working population, but regards literacy for older people or for those who are not part of the workforce as an equally valid activity.

Metaphors and discourses

Functional, liberal and critical concepts of literacy are not straightforward definitions, and we may not want to use the word definition at all. Rather they present us with competing ideologies of literacy, all of which use specific metaphors for literacy and are grounded in particular discourses about reading and writing. Crucially, they differ in terms of what they think the goals for literacy, numeracy and ESOL are (for the individual and for society as a whole.) But what are metaphors for literacy and what do we mean when we talk about discourses about literacy? Barton (1994) explains how metaphors are used to describe what literacy is. A well-known example is the medical metaphor that associates lack of literacy with a disease, or a virus, which needs to be ‘eradicated’. Note that many of these metaphors, although speaking about literacy, in reality refer to illiteracy. We have all heard about the ‘literacy crisis’, which in fact is referring to illiteracy! Metaphors for literacy do not stand on their own. They are part of a particular view on literacy that has implications for how we think about learners, how we think about what they ought to learn and how this could be achieved. Metaphors for literacy are part of broader clusters of meaning; they are part of discourses.

What is a discourse?

Discourses can be described as themes, attitudes and values – expressed through written and oral statements, images and behaviour – which at a given time and place, within a certain institutional or non-institutional context are deemed meaningful (adapted from Gee 1999: 37). Crucially, discourses not only claim to be meaningful, but they also make a claim to truth.

The notion of discourse, however, is not straightforward, and there are different understandings of what it means. In linguistics, the term discourse is often used to talk about extended stretches of text (in the broad sense, referring to both oral and written language). Discourse, in this sense, refers to the forms of language associated with specific registers and genres. Examples would ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: A new theoretical approach
• Part II Implications for policy and practice
• References