Telling tales of literacy: a case study
June Smith and Richard Edwards
University of Stirling, Scotland, UK
Paper presented at SCUTREA 34th Annual Conference, University of Sheffield,
UK. 6-8 July 2004
Introduction
Further Education (FE) stands at the interface of education, training and employment
and is central to policies of lifelong learning in the UK. It is one of the primary
providers of education and training for adults. The growth and breadth of studies
available for students within FE has resulted in increased and diversified literacy
demands upon learners. This is the result of increased diversification of text types
and also the media through which these can be read and written. Yet the focus of
much attention regarding literacy has been on the development of basic skills in
further education, even when these are framed as core skills for higher level
qualifications. The core skills approach assumes that literacy acquisition can be
described as a set of competencies to be achieved through practicing skills, which
are deemed appropriate at a particular level. This is a skills deficit model of literacy
that Street (1984) identifies as an autonomous model, that is, literacy skills are
techniques that can be acquired independent of specific contexts.
This approach has been challenged by the New Literacy Studies (NLS) which locates
literacy events (different forms of reading, writing and representation) in the context of
those social practices within which they are developed and expressed (Barton et al.,
2000). Moreover, society has attributed different values to different practices and to
those who use them. These differing values have effects on the personal, social and
economic prospects of learners. The NLS position, which has been highly influential
in adult education research, argues that the term ‘literacy’ has been adopted by policy
makers and reading experts as a replacement for the terms ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ but
without the concomitant transfer of the underpinning principles of social practice. NLS
has spawned a wide range of research which recognises the importance of making
visible the individual’s ‘vernacular literacy practices’ contextualised in the everyday
domains of work, home, neighbourhood and community (Barton and Hamilton, 1998).
There has also been interest in examining the ways in which these vernacular
practices might act as resources for learning in more formal curriculum settings. Such
border practices are sometimes referred to as syncretic literacies (Gregory et al.,
2004) However, little research influenced by this approach has been undertaken
within a FE context. Thus while NLS has been telling in influencing research and
some practice, there is a question as to whether its stories are influencing practice
more generally, in particular in the provision of learning opportunities for adults in FE.
This paper reports on the findings of a small-scale research project within one
Scottish FE College conducted by one of us (JS), which has been used as a pilot for
a TLRP Phase III research project, Literacies for Learning in Further Education
(www.lflfe.stir.ac.uk), which began in January 2004. Using an ethnographic approach,
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the pilot research was designed to explore:
1. What literacy practices did students engage in across a variety of domains?
2. How aware were academic staff of the variety of practices students engaged in?
3. Which literacy practices were supported and which were marginalised within
present curricular arrangements?
4. What were staff’s understandings of literacy?
Research was conducted in two curriculum areas, Social Health and Child Care
(SHSC) (largely female) and Information Technology and Communication (ITC)
(largely male). We do not intend to outline the methodology here or report the
outcomes of the project as a whole. Instead we focus on the student stories, in
particular those of three particular students: Coco, Chapman (both information
technology students) and Louise (a social care student). These are selected to
illuminate particular issues rather than to be representative of the outcomes as a
whole.
Literacy practices among FE students
The initial intention of the pilot project was to explore students’ literacy practices
within the domains of work, home, community and the college. However, as not all
the volunteers had experience of employment, this was dropped as a domain for
investigation. Volunteers were interviewed in friendship groups of three. Before the
first conversation with each of the groups, we looked at pictures that illustrated a
variety of literacy practices from home, a local factory and a shopping mall. Despite
this stimulus, when asked about their reading and writing at home, the volunteers’
replies included: ‘nothing much’ or ‘just the daily paper’ or ‘an occasional magazine’.
However, when probed it became clear that the volunteers used literacy in a wide
range of activities. Yet none of them appreciated the variety or complexity of literacy
practices in which they engaged, nor described themselves as either readers or
writers. In their ethnographic study of a local community in Lancaster, Barton and
Hamilton (1998) found that this was a common perception. They argue that people
come to adopt unconsciously the view that readers read ‘books’, not newspapers and
that reading and writing are connected to academic or bureaucratic organisations.
They argue that this view demeans people’s everyday practices.
From the interview data two issues emerged strongly: the relationship between
literacy and identity and a mismatch between home and college literacy practices.
These are inter-related. Coco, Chapman and Lousie all chose avoidance as a general
strategy for dealing with their literacy tasks. As a result of Chapman avoiding dealing
with bureaucracy, he had accrued debt for non-payment of council tax. Choosing to
avoid writing had consequences at college for both Coco and Chapman. Both of them
failed their college course and were not able to return the following academic year. In
contrast, Louise did pass her access course and moved onto a nursing course. Other
than avoiding writing, Coco, Chapman and Louise shared other experiences: they all
felt they had literacy problems; all had negative experiences of school education; all
had been advised to attend support classes. However, only Louise accepted learning
support. This was significant and we will use it in part to explore the relationship
between literacy and identity.
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When Coco and Chapman were asked why they did not attend learning support both
became defensive. Coco said: ‘Why should I change how I write, a’m Scottish and I
want to write the way ah talk’. A significant aspect of Coco’s statement was his
reluctance to change his language use. He was clear that changing how he wrote
was an attack on his Scottish identity. Chapman had similar views. On one occasion
when presented with a transcript of one of the conversations, he said: ‘I like the way
you’ve used ma words and no changed them to sound posh. This sounds like me’.
Using the concept of Discourse, Gee (1996) explained that when an individual’s
primary Discourse conflicts with a secondary Discourse; it can cause problems of
identity. Both Coco and Chapman had broad dialects and accents and they had great
difficulty adjusting to the college’s expectations of their written language. Both saw
the teachers, particularly the communication lecturer who marked them for oral work,
as being ‘snobby’. This was not the case with Louise, which points to issues of
gender and identity in the development of literacy practices. More broadly, Ivanic
(1997) in her study of students found that those particularly from backgrounds not
traditionally associated with higher education, had difficulties in maintaining their
identities in the light of the new literacy practices expected of them by academic
institutions. She argued that when a NLS view of literacy is adopted rather than an
autonomous one, issues of identity play a central role in pedagogy.
Learning support was seen by Coco and Chapman as a challenge to their identity.
They felt they would have to undergo change, which was unacceptable to them. In a
sense, they felt they were being required to replace the identity associated with one
set of practices with another. However, other positions would have been possible. For
instance, adopting a social critical approach to literacy would enable these two
volunteers to value their language use and accept learning support as an extension of
their current practices rather than a replacement for them. Street (1995) argues that
dominant groups place a higher value on their own way of using language over other
uses and it is this value which brings about concepts of deficit.
To avoid this, Barton and Hamilton (1998) advocate that staff should develop
programmes that enable students to become an authority in their own right, actively
selecting an appropriate language for themselves, rather than simply adopting one
imposed on them by the dominant group. However, Gee (1996) argues that this
approach ignores the pressures of social structures. He advocates that students need
to develop not just an awareness of a range of Discourses but also a ‘powerful’
Discourse to challenge the status quo. We therefore see that in addition to the stories
of literacies told by students, i.e. sense-making practices, there are also stories to be
told about them, attempting to describe and explain for different audiences.
The second issue to focus on, which may have contributed to the difference between
Louise’s achievement and that of Coco’s and Chapman’s, was the mismatch between
their home literacy practices and those expected by the college. Street (1995) has
argued that many learners enter education unfamiliar with the institution’s literacy
practices. To examine this in more detail, we will describe the contrast between the
students’ descriptions of their learning environment with their descriptions of their
home-based literacy practices.
Both student groups interviewed in the Social Health and Child Care enjoyed their
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college experience. Their enthusiasm was evident from the first conversation with
them. They particularly liked the classes where they were encouraged to talk about
their assignments and assessments before attempting them. Classroom practice
formally encouraged this approach by regularly undertaking group work. Informally
the volunteers continued this practice in the refectory and corridors. Vera said: ‘It’s
amazing but I am more likely to remember if we talk about it (the class topic) at
lunchtime, rather than what the teacher said in the class’. When looking at their home
literacy practices the volunteers were more likely to engage in them as part of a group
activity or for a group purpose. For instance, Louise enjoyed her Bible readings and
hymns as a collective experience on a Sunday. She read moral tales to her Sunday
school class who later coloured-in pictures of the stories. When she reminisced about
her school days the only pleasurable experience she remembered was reading The
Merchant of Venice, when each member of the class was involved in reading the
parts aloud. Even her collection of recipes was started when she wanted to cook with
her own children. Louise’s experience and pleasure of reading came when it was a
cooperative and collaborative experience, not as an individual act.
In their ethnographic study of Spittalfield, London, Gregory and Williams (2000)
studied mono-lingual mothers’ descriptions of home-based literacy practices. They
found that the women described their home-based practices as fun and collaborative
and their school-based literacies as painful and individualistic. They argued that
women’s everyday experiences of literacy are usually collaborative and it is only
within the education system that people are expected to undertake literacy tasks on
an individual basis. These tasks are divorced from a real purpose, often being an end
in themselves. While there was some evidence of this in relation to some literacy
practices among the SHCC students, there were also indications that they
collaborated as both part of the engagement with lecturing staff but also outwith
classroom environments.
In contrast to SHCC, the student interviewed in ITC described being regularly bored
at college. They openly blamed working through the computer learning packages on
their own as the main reason for this boredom. They welcomed the few opportunities
they had to work in different classroom environments. They found working alone
much of the time a strain. Indeed their learning was package-driven and required not
only high levels of motivation, but particular academic reading practices with which
they were not familiar. Their learning environment did not include a combination of
enactive, iconic, verbal and environmental learning (DEETYA 1997), which it is
suggested draws more readily upon a range of existing literacy practices and
encourages motivation in learning through information technology.
For the male students, particularly the younger group, working alone was a new and
painful experience. When examining their descriptions of their home-based practices,
as with the female students in SHCC, many of them were collaborative. Graeme and
David reported asking either friends or mothers to help them complete college,
bursary or job application forms. At home, both ITC cohorts spent little time on
sustained reading of unbroken text. Furthermore, they spent little leisure time alone
preferring the company of their friends. Many of the computer games they played
were either networked or part of an on-going play. During class time in college, the
younger cohort did everything they could to extend their ‘together’ time, taking longer
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breaks, getting up from their seats, shouting across machines or using the computer
to talk to each other. These attempts to be together were seen as acts of indiscipline
or a poor attitude to college work by lecturing staff.
For the younger ITC cohort the mismatch between their home literacy practices and
those at college may have been too challenging, not so much in the event itself but in
the lack of collaboration in the practices within the college. Consequently they overtly
resisted the class practices expected of them which led to confrontations with their
teachers. ITC staff acknowledged the difficulties in the learning packages which
included: vocabulary difficulties and problems assimilating unbroken chunks of text
with no associated tasks written for a school rather than an adult audience. However,
although lecturers recognised the problems with the learning packages, they felt that
because some of the students coped, those who did not were lacking in motivation or
ability. To help those students with difficulties the learning assistant spent time
‘translating’ text. In contrast, for both female groups in SHCC the transition from
home to college was less painful because they were expected to undertake literacy
tasks in ways that were similar to those they adopted at home. Although they still
faced difficulties with actual literacy tasks, they felt comfortable with the approach to
learning.
However, while the SHCC volunteers said that they benefited from their collaborative
experiences, when it came to production of college-based written texts there was an
incongruity. Although the female mature cohort said they preferred learning through
talk together, they carried out their college-based written tasks alone and at home.
They each had organised a space for this. For Vera it was in her bedroom and for
Louise and Amanda it was a table in the living area. This tension may reflect the
differences they perceived between the goal of home and college literacies. College
work is measured by individual success, whereas home literacy practices are part of
everyday lives that carry no individual performance pressure. This may also reflect
the value both students and society put on the two practices. Hynds (1997) argues
that there has been a strong push of individualism within schools because a higher
value is placed by society on individual achievement. These volunteers seem to have
absorbed this value and produce even the non-assessed college written texts
individually.
The different teaching approaches adopted by ITC and SHCC reflect different
epistemological assumptions about the vocational areas. For both areas these
assumptions also influenced the literacy practices required by the students.
Computing subjects were discussed and taught by staff as a fixed body of knowledge
which had to be transmitted to students (novices) by their teachers (experts). It was
the role of the expert to impart their distinct body of knowledge with its ‘right’ answers
in measured chunks to the novices. The goal for the student was to learn the
knowledge within the learning packages. On the other hand, the approach adopted by
the SHCC staff suggests that the epistemological base they were using was
predicated on knowledge as a construction of ideas which are open to negotiation,
interpretation and debate. The students’ goals are to come to an understanding of
ideas and values and how these can influence behaviour. Discussion therefore
played a significant role in the learning process. None of the staff explicitly reported
these views as they had not reflected on their disciplines in this way. This then is the
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story about them but it would be interesting to see what effect, if any, alternative
narratives around literacy and learning would have on their approach to teaching.
This begins to move us forward into the extended project.
Further stories ...
The above project found that, despite NLS research, concepts and ideas from
research have not impacted on practitioners within this particular college. Also
students had absorbed the deficit model of literacy and talked about their own reading
and writing in terms of inadequacy, despite engaging in a rich variety of literacy
practices in the home, which could be used as a resource for the new literacy
practices expected of them within the college. There are thus many stories and
different genres of story – research, practitioner, policy, student - told about literacy,
some of which are more telling than others
The research story told here provides a backdrop for the Literacies for Learning in
Further Education project, which will be mapping the literacy practices of students
and literacy demands of college study in four curriculum areas in four colleges, two in
Scotland and two in England. We will be doing this in conjunction with colleagues at
the University of Lancaster and in partnership with college-based researchers. We
shall also be exploring those syncretic, border or hybrid literacies that do not exist
tidily on either side of the boundary between the vernacular and formal. Unlike the
above project however, we shall then engage with staff and students to develop
pedagogic approaches that mobilise vernacular literacy practices in relation to the
more formal demands of the curriculum. The impact of these approaches will be
researched to establish whether and/or how they have affected learning and
attainment.
The above project has provided us with many insights, both substantive and
methodological, to take forward in the new research. In other words, we can tell
ourselves some stories about our own project based on the pilot. From the above, we
can see that these may involve interventions to support more collaborative learning
and/or staff development to consider the implicit learning and literacy assumptions
underpinning the teaching of different curriculum areas. Engaging with issues of
literacy and identity will also be an area of interest, particularly for us those
associated with nationhood, given the recent devolution of Scottish government. And
inevitably in taking the new project forward we will be examining questions of value
and power in and around particular literacy practices. Methodologically, the stories we
take forward are of the importance of ethnographic approaches taken seriously rather
than the somewhat gestural use of ethnography in many studies. We are also taking
forward the notion of multimodal methodology in adopting diverse approaches to the
collection of diverse data, including the visual/iconic as well as the verbal and
observational.
The main LfLFE project is in its early stages, but the stories we tell in and around it
are already informed by established work and socio-rhetorical networks (Edwards et
al., 2004). In other words, our story comes from somewhere and is not news from
nowhere. As it develops we expect to have more stories to tell, not least around the
entanglement of NLS and FE. With this degree of shorthand, we may txt the next
text…!
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Note
This paper is in part based upon work initially funded by the Institute of Education,
University of Stirling and SFEU and now funded by the ESRC’s Teaching and
Learning Research Programme (Ref: RES-139-25 0117).
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