CHAPTER TWO: Theories and ethnographies of literacy 2.1 Introduction
2.6 Ethnographic studies of community literacies
2.6.3 Literacy and everyday community life
dimensions of instruction under investigation. These two dimensions of instruction were firstly, adult learners’ use of real life and authentic materials in literacy learning and secondly, the extent of collaboration between learners and teachers during adult literacy education classes. The data on changes in the literacy learners’ out-of-school literacy practices were analyzed from adult literacy learners’ comments on a 173 question questionnaire about their home literacy practices that can be attributed to their literacy learning (Purcell-Gates et al, 2000).
The following conclusions were made from this study. Adult learners in classes that use real life (authentic) literacy activities and texts read and write much more and use a greater variety of texts in their everyday life. The extent to which literacy instructors and learners collaborate in the learning process has no influence on the everyday literacy practices of the learners. Those students who come to learning centres with lower levels of literacy skills and stay much longer experience more change in their literacy practices than those who come with higher levels of literacy and stay for a shorter time.
Surprisingly, learners attributed their change in literacy to factors other than use of authentic real life material during literacy instruction.
From the findings of their study, the researchers recommend that teachers should use more real life materials and encourage learners to stay longer in class since this has a positive effect on their out of school literacy practices. Researchers are encouraged to investigate further the impact of different aspects of classroom instruction on the literacy practices of literacy learners (Purcell-Gates et al, 2000).
Fingeret used unstructured in-depth interviews and participant observation with 43 adults in an urban setting. She stayed in the communities she was studying “in order to
understand how they viewed their social relationships and the role literacy played in their social world” (1983, p. 134). The population sample for this study consisted of both urban white and black North Americans who were not able to read and write at the time the data was being collected. The choice of the respondents to participate in the study was based on their availability and willingness to participate in the study, and their relevance as participants of the study. However, efforts were made to include a wide range of people with different educational backgrounds
In addition to contributing the concept of literacy networks, Fingeret’s (1983) study shows that in communities where literacy mediates many aspects of everyday life, non- literate adults in that community will develop different strategies to cope with the literacy demands in their life. These strategies include reducing the number of times they have to depend on other people to deal with the literacy demands in their life by developing what Fingeret calls ‘formulaic literacy’, a strategy that takes advantage of the format of a particular document like a regular telephone bill. Through learning the format, they fill in the information required by copying from other older documents without seeking help, and developing close working relationships with professional people who became their readers for technical documents like legal documents.
In Iran, Street (1984), a social anthropologist, conducted a study that contributed to the theoretical development of the social practices theory of literacy. This study was on literacy in two rural communities in Iran: Cheshmeh and other mountain fruit-growing villages, and the plains grain-growing villages. The concentration of his study was in Cheshmeh. From this study, Street identified three different forms of literacies in use.
These were:
• 'religious literacy' with its base in the Makhtab Koranic School,
• 'commercial literacy' used in the fruit trade between the rural fruit farmers in Cheshmeh and the townspeople, and
• 'schooled literacy' of school children from urban schools in town
These three literacies had different uses in the community’s everyday life. The religious literacy in Arabic scripts was firmly based in the practice of Islam and used by the community in their religious life. This involved reading the Koran, praying, and for those who became Mullahs, teaching the faith. Learning the Makhtab literacy provided social
status and leadership opportunities in both religious and commercial life in Cheshmeh for those who were literate in it. In an extended argument, Street noted that, although the Makhtab literacy was based in Islamic religious literacy, it was not uniform across the Islamic faith. He noted that there were some varieties of literacies within Islam as much as there was a lot of variation in the practice of the Islamic faith. The different variety of the Islamic faith provided the ideological framework within which reading and writing could be learnt and used. According to Street, the Cheshmeh variety of Islam was flexible enough to allow for the learning and use of literacy outside of the practice of religious life. For that reason, the Cheshmeh religious students were able to adapt their literacy skills to commerce leading to the development of a new commercial literacy. Street says this transferability was a social and not a technical (skill) phenomenon as the autonomous model of literacy would like to claim. My reading of Street (1984) makes this seem to be an evasive argument that is not firmly supported by his presentation in most of Chapters 5 and 6 of his 1984 book.
Commercial literacy was used in fruit trade by ‘tajers’ (fruit traders). They used it for keeping various types of business records like credit records, payment records, quantity of fruit supplied by each individual farmer, business contracts with the peasant fruit farmers, labelling their crates, lists of suppliers and signing cheques. Commercial literacy was a development from the Makhtab religious literacy. All the ‘tajers’ were former learners of the Makhtab schools and they were the ones who were responsible for adapting the Makhtab literacy to commercial use.
School literacy was only used by the younger generation who were attending government states schools in town. These students did not have the social authority commanded by the older people who attended the Makhtab religious schools. Therefore, even though their literacy knowledge could be well suited to the fruit business, it was not widely
acknowledge by the local community. The use of literacy in a community therefore requires some acceptable social authority in a community. The Makhtab literacy, unlike school literacy, had a firm foundation in the spiritual practices of the local community members and this made it readily acceptable for use in the context of everyday trade and the practice of religious life (Prinsloo, 2005; Street, 1984).
From his findings, Street (1984) concluded that literacy differs from one context to the other, and proceeded to develop the concepts of multiple literacies and literacy practices to explain this new approach in literacy thinking. It was from this study that Street came up with the autonomous and ideological models of literacy. This theoretical classification
generated a lot of debate and research around the concept of literacy as a skill and social practice thus leading to the articulation of the social practices theory of literacy. Over the last two decades, this view of literacy has been developed and refined and it is still undergoing further refinement (Street, 2000b).
There are many interesting lessons that can be drawn from Street’s (1984) study. One interesting lesson that is not highlighted in later discussions or references to Street’s work in Iran relates to commercial literacy, which was a development from the Makhtab religious literacy. Street noted that most of the ‘tajers' were former Makhtab students who adapted the literacy skills they acquired from the Makhtab classes for use in the new literacy domain of trade and commerce:
…the ‘tajers’, who were the crucial group in enabling villages like Cheshmeh to cash in on the new economic circumstances, were able to achieve their successes partly on account of a basic knowledge of, and acquaintance with, forms of literacy acquired in the
‘makhtab’ (1984, p. 159).
This finding shows that literacy skills and knowledge gained from one context can be adapted for use in completely different contexts. This was possible because of the favourable social and economic conditions that existed in Cheshmeh and the other mountain villages to motivate them to adapt their religious literacy knowledge to take advantage of the favourable economic situation that existed for them. However, this does not negate the fact that the teaching of literacy must be based on content that is
immediately relevant to the learners’ everyday lives. In Iran, because religion was immediately relevant to the learners’ lives, they were able to transfer the literacy skills and knowledge to another area that provided them with sufficient demand for the use of reading and writing to organise their commercial life.
The second interesting lesson not highlighted in Street’s (1984) later work is in explaining the economic differences between the fruit-growing mountain villages including
Cheshmeh and the plains grain-growing villages. Street says:
A significant factor in enabling villages with the infrastructural advantages I have noted to actually cash in on the economic possibilities provided by the 1970s boom was the fact that a number of them had previously developed specific literacy practices and skills. This basis in ‘makhtab’ literacy as I have described it …facilitated the development of a new
‘commercial’ literacy practice and associated skills (1984, p. 159).
Street is arguing here that literacy inter alia facilitated economic growth for the mountain people, because it enabled them to take advantage of the economic boom of the 1970s compared with the plains people whose literacy was for religious purposes only.
Interestingly, Street’s (1984) position that literacy had a significant role in the
development of the mountain people supports the position of Goody and Watt (1968) whom he opposes, and contradicts the position of the NLS that literacy has no role in social and economic development (Prinsloo, 2005; Prinsloo & Breier, 1996a).
After these three seminal studies, there have been a plethora of similar studies in different parts of the world following the literacy research tradition set up by these key studies. In this tradition, literacy research focuses not on the individual but the community and their ordinary day-to-day lives. Its not possible to review all these studies in this work, therefore, I have selected a few that I consider most relevant to this study which is also based on the same research tradition. Several of these studies have been documented in books edited by Street (1993, 2001)
Barton and Hamilton (1998) conducted a similar study of local literacies in Lancaster.
They analysed everyday reading and writing practices in the lives of people living in Lancaster. Their study was of “a mainly white working class community.” The study covered communication between people in different contexts of everyday life at home, school, work place and the public domains. The study reveals that even within one context like the home, there are a wide range of literacy practices that apply to different purposes, experiences, roles, and values. For example, reading a recipe or cookbook in the kitchen is different from reading newspapers in the sitting room. These are different literacy practices in the home domain. The study also reveals that different contexts in peoples lives overlap in a number of ways, e.g. workplace literacy practices being part of the home literacy practices and vice versa (Barton & Hamilton, 1998).
This study also provides details of the ethnographic approach used in the study of literacy as social practice. This approach brings together a diversity of research methods such as in-depth biographical interviews, observations, and historical studies of literacy. In their work, too, Barton and Hamilton provide a research approach that locates the study of literacy in both time and place (see Hodge, 2003). The time element of this study consisted of tracing the historical development of literacy in Lancaster to the time the study was carried out and contrasting the two (time and place) elements. The place aspect of the study was in locating the study in a particular location named ‘Springtide’ whose literacy practices they describe in detail in their work (Barton & Hamilton, 1998).
In South Africa, a group of studies funded by the Joint Education Trust (JET) was carried out following the social practices approach to literacy. The outcome of this ethnographic study of literacy-in-use in different contexts and communities in South Africa was a volume of work on the social uses of literacy edited by Prinsloo and Breier (1996b). The
primary concern of this study was to inform adult literacy education policies in South Africa. The study was motivated by concerns about the difficulties that were being experienced by literacy agencies in recruiting and retaining adult literacy learners in South Africa. The big question for the study was to find out why, if illiteracy is
responsible for personal and social problems being experienced in South Africa, people are neither turning up for literacy classes nor completing in large numbers. The
researchers speculated that there was a difference in the expectation from literacy between the policy makers and the social life of ordinary South Africans. In this
mismatch, the policy makers see illiteracy as a major problem and assume a large demand for literacy education, and go on to encourage the launching of adult literacy education programmes for a large section of the population to fit this assumed demand. On the other hand, people are not responding with corresponding zeal to these adult literacy
programmes, and they seem not to see literacy as one of their major priorities. The study therefore investigated the assumptions on which adult literacy policies are based and how these assumptions reflect the actual practices in the lives of ordinary South Africans (Prinsloo & Breier, 1996a).
They employed the ethnographic methods of research that are commonly used in the study of literacy as a social practice. This method involves the use of “concentrated observation over a period of time” (Prinsloo & Breier, 1996a, p. 24). The chosen focus for this investigation was the local literacy practices in different social contexts of South African life. The areas covered included literacy in schools, factories, the taxi industry and farms in South Africa's black and coloured settlements and townships.
One of the outstanding findings of this study is that a lot of informal learning goes on in people’s everyday social interactions at work and in ordinary everyday life. This informal learning includes informal acquisition of literacy skills in everyday life activities and livelihood activities. They also discovered that people often work as a team in activities involving literacy. This collective involvement provides literacy mediation and learning through social networks of support in real life situations. The consequence of this finding was that there are actually more people who are literate in their own context of life than those reflected in national statistics and policy documents for adult literacy education in South Africa. The research recommended that adult education should move away from the conception of literacy and learning in terms of schooling to apprenticeship learning in real life situations (Prinsloo & Breier, 1996a). The South African study is particularly important because it highlights the disparity between adult literacy education policy and literacy learners’ expectations and experiences of literacy.
In Papua New Guinea, Kulick and Stroud (1993) studied how the local people in Gapun village use literacy in their own ways. Individuals in a newly literate society, far from being transformed by literacy, instead actively and creatively apply literacy skills to suit their own purposes and needs. Literacy was introduced by the missionaries in Gapun. The missionaries believed that literacy would have a positive effect on the people in Gapun, in terms of the preservation of their language. Instead, the people of Gapun had their own perception of literacy that was being shaped by their culture or ways of life.
In Gapun, there are two dominant languages: Taiap and Tok Pisin. Taiap is an isolated Austronesian language spoken only in Gapun, and it is not yet written. Tok Pisin is an English-based Creole that is most widely spoken in Papua New Guinea. Since the 1950s, few members of Gapun have been nominally literate in Tok Pisin. With the introduction of the government-run grammar school in the neighbouring village in 1967, which was attended by most children from Gapun, English, the language of instruction used in this school, became the third language in Gapun. The children of Gapun were thus acquiring literacy in a language that was not used in daily life within their community. After learning literacy under very difficult condition of unfamiliar English language instruction,
“the children are able, without any formal instruction, to transfer those skills to Tok Pisin, thus becoming functionally literate in that language” (Kulick & Stroud, 1993, p. 32).
There are two transfers made in this case, first the transfer from English to Tok Pisin, and second the transfer from school literacy to everyday life. This finding raises questions about the relevance of insisting on a context and language consistent literacy
teaching/learning model advocated by protagonists of the social practices model. If it was possible in Gapun, can it not be possible elsewhere?
On another note, Kulick and Stroud (1993) make for very interesting reading because, although they acknowledged that schoolchildren were able to transfer their literacy skills to Tok Pisin, they observed with some care that:
Outside of school, however, literacy skills are almost never used. Most boys and virtually all girls who became literate in school make almost no use of their reading and writing abilities outside the classroom, and after they leave school at age fourteen to fifteen, many of these young people may never read and will almost certainly never write again. There are only a few opportunities in the course of normal life to read and write. the only type of literature that regularly enters the village, for example is the Sydney Morning Herald, but which is purchased in loose sheets by the villagers and is used to roll cigarettes; it is never read” (p. 32).
In spite of the above observation, Kulick and Stroud (1993) were able to note that Gapunner do own “some printed matter which is occasionally looked at, and a few villagers do sometimes write” (1993, p. 32). They also noted that Gapunner do not read to
gain information about things that do not concern them. The objective of reading is to accomplish some immediate life task, “like confirming the words to a hymn, preparing to recite a prayer, reading a note one has been given, deciding to discover a heretofore concealed truth in a religious text” (1993, p. 33). Unless their understanding of reading, writing and information was different, I think, seeking to discover a concealed truth in a text is a search for information.
Likewise, writing also has a very specific purpose in Gapun. For example, they do not keep diaries for purposes of planning their daily chores, nor do they write letters to long distance relatives and friends for maintaining contact. The writing that is done in Gapun consists of mostly short notes that they write for very specific reasons like requesting a favour to use one’s dog for hunting. Other uses of writing include recording bereavements that take place in the village, and lists of names of some important people (Kulick &
Stroud, 1993).
Most literacy events in Gapun relate to the practice of the Christian faith, in which they read religious literature. This is because literacy was introduced within the context of the Christian religion. The obvious text available for this Christian literacy practice was the bible, the prayer book, the hymnbook, religious calendars, and liturgical instructions – always written in Tok Pisin. In a small survey conducted in Gapun, most (97 per cent) of all the printed matter in Gapun was religious materials. Surprisingly, in spite of this predominance of religious texts, Kulick and Stroud noted that:
With the exception of the hymn booklet, which the villagers take with them to the mass and sometimes look in while singing, most of this literature is almost never read. Only printed matter containing pictures or lines drawings is ever really looked at. Nobody ever actually reads the Bible, for example, but schoolchildren or an adult and several
schoolchildren sometimes page through it together and comment to each other about the abstract line drawings of figures they find there. This paging through printed materials and commenting to one another about the pictures there is how the villagers often ‘read’
such materials (Kulick & Stroud, 1993, p. 36)
While it is true that, Gapun villagers did “take hold” of literacy and incorporated it into their communicative repertoire, they also associated literacy with European cultures such as the village prayer leader being “neatly dressed in a button shirt” and the “European- style window” of the believer’s house (Kulick & Stroud, 1993, p. 39). This is also supported by the strong link between literacy and Catholicism as reported by Kulick and Stroud (1993). All these go to show that literacy, in the conception of the Gapun villagers, is associated with modernity based on European cultural influences. This is a fact not emphasised by Kulick and Stroud who focus on the agency of the villagers in shaping literacy in their community.