CHAPTER TWO: Theories and ethnographies of literacy 2.1 Introduction
2.5 The ideological model/the social practices theory of literacy
2.5.3 The social practices theory of literacy
According to the social practices theory of literacy, literacy is a social activity affected by human relationship:
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 (Barton & Hamilton, 1998, p. 3).
Literacy is a “social practice embedded in specific contexts, discourses and positions”
(Street, 1996, p. 1), and it derives its values, attitudes and meanings from the social institutions in which they are embedded. As mentioned in section 2.2 above, different social institutions and relationships support different literacy practices, which they shape and are in turn shaped by the literacy within them. "What counts as literacy varies depending on the people using it and the social political context within which reading and writing take place" (Papen, 2001, p. 41). Each society has its own literacies or literacy practices constructed around its own culture and each literacy domain produces its own literacy practices that are tailored for the communicative practices that take place within that domain or social and economic formation (Mpoyiya & Prinsloo, 1996). For example, institutions like schools, hospitals, churches, and taxi operators have their own distinct ways of using reading and writing that are developed and suited for their kind of activities (see Prinsloo & Breier, 1996b; Mpoyiya & Prinsloo, 1996). Street (1993) further explains that according to the social practices theory of literacy, making meaning through literacy
is constructed through social processes or relationships for very specific purposes and specific purposes promote specific literacy practices and ideology associated with it.
Unlike UNESCO’s perspective, the social practices theory of literacy is concerned with what people do with literacy and not what literacy can do for people, and how literacy is used in different contexts of social and economic life, and not how literacy leads to social and economic transformation of poor, preliterate communities.
Although literacy practices differ from one context to the other, this does not mean that every context or society has its own form of static literacies, because these contexts change over time and so do the literacy practices within them. Therefore, literacies in all contexts are under a continuous process of reconstruction and negotiation. It is not a static concept, but an ideologically dynamic concept and these changes cause members to continue learning new literacy practices to cope with the changes in their contexts of literacy. Kell (1996), for example, provides a good example of how change in discourse affected a woman who was acting as a literacy mediator during the South African liberation struggle years. The woman, Tsotso, functioned well as a literacy mediator, during the years of struggle against apartheid. She had developed and perfected her ‘print management skills’ (Klassen, 1991) which she used to serve her community within the discourse of the anti-apartheid struggle. The changes that came with the end of the apartheid era brought in a new discourse of development and reconstruction that her print management skills (literacy practices) were not sufficient to deal with. She was redefined as an illiterate and had to join a night school to learn reading and writing to enable her to participate in the development and modernisation programmes of the new democracy.
Prinsloo (2005) introduces the concept of ‘variable literacies’ to capture this aspect of variability in literacy practice over time and place.
According to the social practices theory of literacy, literacy is implicated in power relations within society, in terms of ideological influences that make some literacies more powerful than others (see Barton, 1994; Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Baynham, 1995;
Crowther et al., 2001; Parry, 2000a; Street, 2005). Gee (1990, p. 27) argues that “any view of literacy is inherently political (in the sense of involving relations of order and power among people).” In most cases, the literacy practices of those in mainstream society tend to be dominant over and above the literacy practices of some minority groups.
Furthermore, according to the social practices theory of literacy, it is not enough to learn how to read and write without the knowledge required for using the skill in culturally and
ideologically specified contexts (Scribner & Cole, 1981). This knowledge is the discourse practice of a group in a particular context. Learning or fluent control over this discourse is important for using literacy in the contexts that are defined by that particular discourse. A discourse is a socially accepted way of using language, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or social network (Gee, 1990). It is a shared realm of making meaning in a defined social group or institution.
Literacy, as a secondary discourse involving the use of print (see Gee, 1990, pp. 137- 193), may draw patterns of making meaning from the group’s primary discourse. It is, therefore, subject to the rules that regulate making meaning in the group. The group’s primary discourse is its original communicative repertoires that are used in ways specific to the functioning of the group. These repertoires are fashioned by the group’s survival and communicative environments. The group’s communicative repertoires also fashion how language and literacy are used to create and communicate meanings in a way that promotes and serves the interest of the group. The group’s mode of survival in this case determines how the group uses literacy in their everyday lives to sustain their existence.
Therefore, teaching literacy as if it is a neutral technology has the danger of introducing a different discourse that may not find meaning in the real life of the learners (see Gee, 1990). However, a careful reading of the literature reveals that it is possible to learn how to read and write in different contexts with completely different discourses and still be able to transfer the literacy knowledge and skills for use in other contexts (see Kulick &
Stroud, 1993; Street, 1984).
As a theory that arose in opposition to the dominant autonomous model of literacy discussed above, the social practices theory of literacy rejects all the major claims of that model, especially the idea that literacy leads to social and economic development and modernisation. It also rejects the view that literacy is a neutral technology and argues that literacy is ideological.
Basically, the social practices theory of literacy takes a “socio-cultural approach to examining literacy as it is acquired and used by members of various cultures in relation to structures of power and authority” (Kim, 2003, p. 1) in their communities. The basic tenets of the social practices theory of literacy are summarised by Barton and Hamilton (1998, p. 7) as follows:
• literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these can be inferred from events mediated by written texts;
• there are different literacies which are associated with different domains of life;
• literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationships, and some literacies are more dominant, visible and influential than others;
• literacy is 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
Barton (1994, pp 34-35) provides a similar summary of these basic tenets of literacy as social practice. In the summary, Barton emphasises the specificity of literacy in social contexts and relationships, with a past, an attitude and values all of which inform people’s behaviour in producing texts in different social and economic contexts. He also mentions that, “Literacy is a symbolic system used for representing the world to ourselves. It is part of our thinking. It is part of the technology of thought.” Although this part of the earlier summary was left out of their 1998 summary outlined above, it is like an endorsement of the cognitive ‘consequence’ theory of literacy (see Ong, 1982) against which the theory came up as a challenge.
The social practices theory of literacy, with its new perspective on literacy, refocused the study of literacy from:
• concern about the technology of literacy to literacy in social relationships;
• literacy instruction to literacy use in context;
• concern for individual literacy skills to literacy practices in context (Prinsloo &
Breier, 1996b);
• search for universality to investigating available choices in specific societies;
• the study of how literacy instruction affects people to how people are affecting literacy and how this should relate to instruction (Hamilton, 1998; Street, 1993a) In sum, the social practices theory of literacy focuses attention on, and values the technology, more than the uses, of literacy.
In taking the focus outlined above, a study of literacy involves a study of the social relations that influence literacy. This change in focus presents a new dimension in the study of literacy that popularised the use of ethnographic methods and case studies that can handle the study of social relations in different contexts of literacy (Baynham, 1995).