The Salty Chip Blog

A social space to learn more about the Canadian Multiliteracies Collaborative

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Researching Literacy for Social Change: Opening up Deliberative Spaces for Action

On May 28th 2010 the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada held its Annual Preconference at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. The theme was Language and Literacy Research for Social Action: Critical conversations and ‘exquisite attention’. Our plenary address, bearing the title above was given by Dr. Mary Hamilton of the University of Lancaster, UK.

The talk was very well attended, and the feedback both positive and personal, with several comments that her work really resonated with scholars in Canada. Mary has graciously given us permission to videotape her talk and provide access to it online so that it can be shared with a wider audience. The talk lasted for approximately one hour, and so has been compressed and saved into a wmv format. You can access it via this link:
Mary Hamilton: Researching Literacy for Social Change

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Notes on Institutional Ethnography and New Literacy Studies

In May, 2010, the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada hosted a Symposium entitled, “Mapping Local Literacy Work to Global Policy Discourses”. The symposium brought together leaders in the fields of new literacies and critical sociology including Mary Hamilton of Lancaster University, UK, Richard Darville of Carleton University, Dorothy Smith of the University of Victoria and of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), and Victoria Purcell-Gates, of the University of British Columbia.

From diverse perspectives these researchers share a common interest in mapping the dynamic relationship between local literacy work and its “ruling relations” (Smith, 2005), with a view to forging literacy and social policy that takes up, rather than erases, “intractable problems of inequality, social exclusion and social injustice” (Hamilton & Hillier, 2007, p. 592). The goals of the symposium were to share insights across diverse fields of research and practice, to foster the development of powerful tools of literacy policy analysis, and to explore opportunities for social action, especially in settings outside formal schooling.

Symposium organizers, Roz Stooke of the University of Western Ontario, and Suzanne Smythe, of Simon Fraser University, hope that this will be the beginning of many conversations about the ways in which a social practices perspective on literacy might engage with IE’s analytic strategy.

Richard Darville was unable to attend, and below are the notes of his presentation shared that day by Suzanne Smythe. We thank Richard for his willingness to share them with the broader community.

Notes on institutional ethnography and new literacy studies*
Richard Darville

It is a rare pleasure to be able to discuss literacy as social practices and institutional ethnography, in the same place. These notes sketch how they have come together in my own life and work, and rough out the tasks that seem important now.
Long ago, much of my focus as a PhD student was on the social organization of knowledge, now part of institutional ethnography. While thesis-writing, because I needed a roosting place with income, I began a stint teaching part-time in an adult literacy program. Part-time became full-time. A stint became 8 years. Teaching became organizational work. Over time, and with great colleagues, I caught the wisdom of literacy work, to always keep the teaching of reading and writing grounded in people’s lives, developing what makes sense there, and looking at the world from there. In that sense, teaching is organic, and has a “liberatory” aim.
I didn’t go looking for ways to use IE in literacy teaching. They hit me on the head. I came to see that some kinds of literacy teaching – and these may be essential – go on with texts that are experience-telling. That is, the sequence of the unfolding text moves through the moments of what people live through; experiential stories and recipes are prototypical. Of course texts like these work within social relations, but those relations are usually familiar, and don’t require any figuring out.
But for very many other texts, their fittedness into social relations does require some figuring out. Those texts are institutional – carrying the objectified knowledges of government agencies, labour markets, media, and so on. Learning to read them often takes attention that goes beyond the surface of the texts to what standpoints they take, what they’re assuming but not saying, what they include and leave out. There is an array of concerns that literacy workers may talk about in casual terms, as “what they’re looking for,” “where it comes from,” “who it’s meant for,” or “what you’re getting into.”
One important question for literacy work is what pedagogies and pedagogical genres are helpful for people who are not bad at using experience-telling texts, but stumble around in institutional texts. IE’s attention to texts and reading helps to identify that question, and can help to answer it.
But pedagogical questions, of course, keep bumping into the ways that literacy work and literacy practices are hooked into governance. They are hooked into what I have come to see as an adult literacy regime – the ensemble of governmental, administrative, academic and media processes that aim both to promote literacy and to regulate its development. I’ve been driven to study the regime as a reader of media and policy depictions of literacy that often seem just bizarre, as an advocate sucked into making arguments that sell, and distressed at accountability procedures that seem almost designed to squeeze out the continual invention that is crucial in good literacy work.
The overarching regime discourse is pushed through the OECD but echoed across European and Anglo-Saxon nations. It deploys a version of human capital theory, conceiving every form of human knowledge and ability in terms of its economic usefulness, as a “stock of skills.” For adult literacy the key carrier of this discourse has been the population literacy testing known as IALS, the International Adult Literacy Survey (and its variants). IALS assesses not traditionally conceived literacy skills, but “information-processing” – performing predefined tasks that require locating and combining bits of information, and doing operations with that information. IALS famously asserts that “level 3” is required for our knowledge economy, and says that 48% of Canadians 16 and over don’t have it. This claim is routinely corrupted to say that these people struggle with everyday tasks. But what IALS actually claims is that, below level 3, people don’t have a “predictable capacity” to perform an array of information-using tasks of moderate complexity, almost certainly including tasks that are not everyday tasks for them. It’s what musicians call “sight-reading.” This construct of literacy is profoundly embedded in human capital accounting. IALS’ adaptable level 3 readers are the counterpart of management discourses’ flexible, retrainable workers. They are ready immediately to conduct tasks that someone else has determined – but not (as literacy workers might say) to “read the world” from which those tasks come.
Literacy rates are a “policy object.” They are purely textual phenomena, existing only through policy discourse and technologies. Policy orients to literacy rates as they correlate with other objects of policy interest – individual income and health, unemployment or social assistance rates, even GDP. These associations become rationales for “investments” of public resources.
The literacy as human capital discourse is now nearly ubiquitous in media discussions, policy proposals and research, and even advocacy organizations’ efforts to promote “the issue.” This discourse’s (transnational) prevalence is part of what leads to descriptions of the OECD as the éminence grise of education policy. But the OECD also exerts force through “governance by data..” With IALS – of course like PISA and other “indicators” – league tables are made, comparing nations and provinces. These become the measure of successful policies and effective programs – those that get the numbers better, and the relative rankings higher. The data on literacy as a resource for competitiveness instigate competition, and effectively displace other reckonings of how literacy is a social good.
This has not been taken up in Canada – as it has in the UK – in a major strategy for increasing literacy, serious work at drawing people into programs, or expansions of diverse forms of research. It has though led to a firming of the regime’s regulatory grip, through an intensifying development of program accountability and curricular devices, aligned with models of public management which insist on “performance outcomes measurement.” While not actually requiring IALS-like testing, accountability and curricular devices still make individuated, decontextualized, hierarchically ranked skills what counts as literacy. So literacy programs come to be administratively accountable for producing something isomorphic with the policy object called “literacy.” They are required to describe what they do – and what learners gain – in terms devised for their governance.
Of course there are ruptures between what gets counted and the diverse, messy actualities of literacy work. Of course the wisdom of literacy work grounded in people’s lives is undercut by the institutional ordering, in many ways.
Any analysis of the literacy regime like the one sketched here is animated by the hope that it could find ways to reshape policy processes to make them better aligned with local realities. I can only do something lesser, can only say:
(a) IE studies of the regime can help clear the hegemonic dust from people’s eyes. They can make it easier to see what local invention is up against – how it happens that policy is so split from practice, and how accountability data don’t tell what’s actually going on in literacy work, and certainly don’t tell how to do it.
(b) Literacy workers and learners will go on locally inventing literacy work, in ways more generous than governance presumes. This is simply impelled by actual circumstances. Local invention can be and sometimes is carried forwards and coordinated by a discourse produced on different bases, by accounts of literacy work produced by and for those doing it, and in dialogue with diverse local experience. Social practice analyses of literacy should be mainstay resources for these accounts.
(c) Researchers and literacy workers know that the gains actually most important in literacy work are people using authentic texts both in programs and in their lives outside, and getting more familiar with how texts work and more confident about engaging with them and with text-related forms of talk and action. These actually important gains should be publicly juxtaposed to quantified skills gains, and might even horn in on their space. Indeed researchers and practitioners are pushing for a broadening the accountability through terms like non-academic outcomes, confidence, social capital, or increased text-use.
(d) And there is still the utopian imagination of a project of adult literacy governed differently, perhaps by a “right to literacy” – recognized in Canada or transnationally: a right to literacy on its own, and as a prerequisite to other rights to security and to democratic capacity; a right to develop literacy in ways that are locally sensible, shaped by people themselves; a right to develop literacy in ways that take up, rather than erase, “intractable problems of inequality, social exclusion and social injustice.” That different ruling discourse also needs a push.

* Prepared for the Symposium: Mapping Local Literacy Work to Global Policy Discourses, at the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada meetings, Concordia University, May 2010.

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