Subject: Telling tales of literacy: a case study
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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, 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, 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.

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 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 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 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…!

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).

References

Barton D and Hamilton M (1998) Local literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community, London, Routledge.

Barton D, Hamilton M and Ivanic R (eds) (2000) Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context, London: Routledge.

Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (1997) Digital Rhetorics: Literacies and Technologies in Education – Current Practices and Future Directions, Volume 1- Overview of the Project, Canberra, DEETYA.

Edwards R, Nicoll K, Solomon N and Usher R (2004) Rhetoric and Educational Discourse: Persuasive Texts?, London, Routledge.

Gee J P (1996) Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, London, Routledge.

Gregory E and Williams A (2000) City Literacies Learning to Read Across Generations and Cultures, London: Routledge.

Gregory E, Long S and Volk D (2004) Many Pathways to Literacy: Young children learning with siblings, grandparents, peers and communities, London, RoutledgeFalmer.

Hynds S (1997) On the Brink – Negotiating Literature and Life with Adolescents, New York, Teachers College Press.

Ivanic R (1997) Writing and Identity: the Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing, Amsterdam, John Benjamins BV.

Street B (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Street B (1995) Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy Development, Ethnography and Education, London, Longman Publications.

This document was added to the Education-line database on 23 June 2004