This chapter deals with the topic of New Literacy Studies. As such, it forms the second ingredient of our background perspective to classroom language ethnography. The research area of New Literacy Studies emerged in the 1980s. The chapter begins by addressing its inception, issues of definition, and the context for early studies. A number of works and studies are cited throughout. The chapter then deals with the key concepts of New Literacy Studies and their rationale. A range of theoretical concerns and critiques are also included, as well as further case examples to illustrate a range of methodological issues. Finally, the chapter addresses the implications that New Literacy Studies may have for policy and practice. The intention is to give an explicit account of the provenance and state-of-the-art of this approach to literacy.
What has come to be termed the ‘New Literacy Studies’ (hereafter NLS) (Gee, 1991; Street, 1996) represents a new tradition in considering the nature of literacy; one which focuses not so much on acquisition of skills, as in dominant approaches, but rather on what it means to think of literacy as a social practice (Street, 1984). This approach entails the recognition of ‘multiple literacies’, varying according to time and space but also contested in relations of power. NLS, then, takes nothing for granted with respect to literacy and the social practices with which it becomes associated, problematising what counts as literacy at any time and place and asking ‘whose literacies’ are dominant and whose marginalised or resistant. A key issue in approaching NLS is to clarify what the term ‘new’ refers to. For many researchers and practitioners, especially those in the field of education, it is often assumed that what is ‘new’ is the ‘literacy’ that is being described. So-called ‘new’ technologies are increasingly being brought into schools, for instance, and with them ‘new’ online forms of reading and writing – sometimes described as ‘second life’. The uses of reading and writing associated with novel access to visual images may well justify the epithet ‘new’. However, the debate is still unresolved as to how far the features of such activities are really different from more ‘traditional’ uses of reading and writing. We will consider these issues further below, as we engage with discussion of multimodality and its association with literacy. But, in the ‘New Literacy Studies’, the term ‘new’ refers not so much to these forms but rather to the studies themselves; that is, it is the ways in which literacy is conceptualised and researched that is ‘new’ in the ‘New Literacy Studies’. In this chapter we consider just what exactly is ‘New’ in NLS and lay the ground for then linking our theoretical take on literacy to the theoretical perspectives offered by social theory and the implications of such for our understandings of language and education, literacy, and classroom ethnography.
One of the key ways in which literacy studies of the kind we are considering can be described as ‘new’ is in their methodological perspective. Whereas dominant approaches to literacy in education tend to conceptualise literacy as a set of skills and study it through cognitive based theories of learning and activity, New Literacy Studies adopts an ethnographic approach to the study of reading and writing in varied social contexts, both in and out of education systems. In addressing the issues associated with understanding literacy ethnographically, literacy researchers have developed a conceptual apparatus that both coins some new terms and gives new meanings to some old ones. My own work, for example, begins with the notion of multiple literacies, makes a distinction between ‘autonomous’ and ‘ideological’ models of literacy (Street, 1985), and develops a distinction between literacy ‘events’ and literacy ‘practices’ (Street, 1988); concepts we will explore further below and that will carry through to discussions in later chapters with further links and explorations in connection to Bourdieu's theory of practice.
The standard view of literacy in many fields, from schooling to development programmes, works with the assumption that it is, in itself, independent and will consequently have effects on other social and cognitive practices. Introducing literacy to poor, ‘illiterate’ people, villagers, urban youth, etc., will, therefore, have the effect of enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, making them better citizens, regardless of the social and economic conditions that accounted for their ‘illiteracy’ in the first place. This as the autonomous model of literacy, and I have argued (Street, 1984) that one of its consequences is that it disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it; so that it can then be presented as though such are neutral and universal and that literacy will have benign effects. Research in NLS, as we will see, challenges this view and suggests that, in practice, literacy varies from one context to another and from one culture to another, as do the effects of the different literacies in different conditions. The autonomous approach is simply one approach amongst many, but it presents itself as though it is ‘natural’ and, indeed, many who adopt it often tend not even to indicate the grounds for their treatment of literacy, assuming these are known and obvious. When made explicit, this unselfconscious use of the autonomous model can be seen as the imposition of the views of one sub-group on another; whether within a country, where the version of one class or cultural group are imposed onto others, or more generally, between countries, where ‘western’ conceptions of literacy imposed on to other cultures.
The alternative, ideological, model of literacy offers a more culturally-sensitive view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another. This model starts from different premises from the autonomous model: it posits instead that literacy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill; and that it is always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. It is about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity and being. It is also always embedded in social practices, such as those of a particular job market or a particular educational context, and the effects on learning of that particular literacy will be dependent on those contexts. Literacy, in this sense, is always contested, both in its meanings and its practices. Hence, although it might seem sufficient to many to refer to such variations as ‘cultural’ models of literacy, I want to suggest that this is not enough and that what we need is indeed better described as an ‘ideological’ model of literacy: particular versions of literacy are always ‘ideological’, in the sense that they are always rooted in a particular world-view and a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and to marginalise others (Gee 1990; Besnier and Street, 1994). The argument about social literacies (Street, 1995) then suggests that engaging with literacy is always a social act imbued with power relations from the outset. As such, the ways in which teachers or facilitators and their students interact is already a social practice that affects the nature of the literacy being learnt and the ideas about literacy held by participants, especially the new learners and their position in relations of power. It is not valid to suggest that ‘literacy’ can be ‘given’ neutrally as a set of ‘skills’ ‘available to all’, and its ‘social’ effects only experienced afterwards.
These ideas were first laid out in a book called Literacy in Theory and Practice (Street, 1984) in which I challenged the outstanding examples of the ‘autonomous’ model at that time, many of them rooted in cognitive theories of learning and development and often focused on how children learn to read, and how educationalists should address acquisition. In this book, I drew upon my own field work in Iran, focusing on the everyday uses and meanings of literacy ‘outside’ of school, as well as ‘inside’, to propose a more social practice view of literacy and show what happened when this view came into contact with the dominant theoretical and policy perspectives of the time. An issue here was the shift from a more cognitive view of literacy – as skills embedded in mental procedures – towards a more social constructivist view – as practices embedded in different social environments and cultures. Before giving more detail of this work, I am going to briefly recall the history of debates about literacy as reading, cognition and early learning, and to look at how a social practice view of literacy has been developed in recent years.
Many of the earlier theories of literacy and of learning that the ideological model has taken to task rest on deeper assumptions about cognition and in particular regarding the ‘cognitive consequences’ of learning/acquiring literacy. It is these that I questioned in the 1984 book. A dominant position, for instance, was to apply the idea of a ‘great divide’ – originally used to distinguish ‘primitive/modern’ or ‘underdeveloped/developed’ – to ‘literates’ and ‘non-literates’, a distinction that implicitly or explicitly still underpins much work in and justifications for international literacy programmes. I showed how anthropologists, such as Goody (1977) and psychologists such as Olson (1977, 1994) linked the more precise cognitive argument to broader historical and cultural patterns, regarding the significance of the acquisition of literacy for a society's functioning. These claims often remain part of popular assumptions about literacy and have fed policy debates and media representations of the significance of the ‘technology’ of literacy.
Whilst rejecting an extreme technological determinist position, Goody (1977) for instance did appear to associate the development of writing with key cognitive advances in human society – the distinction of myth from history; the development of logic and syllogistic forms of reasoning; the ability of writing to help overcome a tendency of oral cultures towards cultural homeostasis; the development of certain mathematical procedures, such as multiplication and division; and – perhaps the key claim for educational purposes – that ‘literacy and the accompanying process of classroom education brings a shift towards greater “abstractedness”’. Whilst he is careful to avoid claiming an absolute dichotomy between orality and literacy, it is partly on the grounds that his ideas do lend credence to technological determinism that he was challenged, through the experimental data provided by Scribner and Cole (Scribner and Cole 1978; Cole and Scribner 1981) and the ethnographic data and arguments by myself (Street, 1984), Heath (1983) and others (see Finnegan, 1988; Maddox, 2001). Goody himself has criticised many of these counter arguments as ‘relativist’, a term that might be applied to much contemporary thinking about literacy (and social differences in general) as we shall see below.
During the 1970s the social psychologists Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole conducted a major research project amongst the Vai peoples of Liberia in order to test out the claims of Goody and others about the cognitive consequences of literacy in a ‘real life’ setting, and I drew extensively on their work in the 1984 book. Their accounts of the outcomes of this research (Scribner and Cole, 1978; Cole and Scribner 1981) represented a major landmark in our understanding of the issues regarding literacy and cognition that we are considering here. They quote Farrell, as a classic example of such claims (1977: 451): ‘the cognitive restructuring caused by reading and writing develop the higher reasoning processes involved in extended abstract thinking’ and they argue, ‘Our research speaks to several serious limitations in developing this proposition as a ground for educational and social policy decisions’. They address the limitations of these claims in both empirical and theoretical terms. For instance, many of the claims derive from abstract hypotheses not based in evidence, or the evidence used is of a very specific form of written text, such as use of western scientific ‘essay text’ literacy as a model for accounts of literacy in general (cf. Olson, 1977; Street, 1984). Many of the assumptions about literacy in general, then, are ‘tied up with school-based writing’. This, they believe, leads to serious limitations in the accounts of literacy: ‘The assumption that logicality is in the text and the text is in school can lead to a serious underestimation of the cognitive skills involved in non-school, non-essay writing’. The writing crisis, to which many of the reports and commissions in recent years refer (cf. Adams, etc.), ‘presents itself as purely a pedagogical problem’ and arises in the first place from these limited assumptions and data.
Scribner and Cole, instead, tested out these claims through intensive psychological and anthropological research of actual practice, taking as a case study the Vai peoples of Liberia, who have three scripts – Vai (an invented phonetic script); Arabic; and Roman – each used for different purposes.
We examined activities engaged in by those knowing each of the indigenous scripts to determine some of the component skills involved. On the basis of these analyses, we designed tasks with different content but with hypothetically similar skills to determine if prior practice in learning and use of the script enhanced performance.
(Scribner and Cole 1978: 13)
The tests were divided into three areas: communication skills; memory; and language analysis. On the basis of the results, they argue that all we can claim is that ‘specific practices promote specific skills’: the grand claims of the literacy thesis are untenable:
there is no evidence that writing promotes “general mental abilities”. We did not find “superior memory in general” among Qur'anic students nor better language integration skills “in general” among Vai literates. … There is nothing in our findings that would lead us to speak of cognitive consequences of literacy with the notion in mind that such consequences affect intellectual performance in all tasks to which the human mind is put.
(Scribner and Cole 1978: 16)
This outcome suggests that the metaphor of a ‘great divide’ may not be appropriate ‘for specifying differences among literates and non-literates under contemporary conditions. The monolithic model of what writing is and what it leads to … appears in the light of comparative data to fail to give full justice to the multiplicity of values, uses and consequences which characterise writing as social practice’.
Scribner and Cole, then, were amongst the first to attempt to re-theorise what counts as literacy and to look outside school for empirical data on which to base sound generalisations (cf. Hull and Schultz, 2002 on literacy in and out of school). One of the main proponents of the ‘strong’ thesis regarding the consequences of literacy has been David Olson (1977), who has been, and is, one of the sources for claims about the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy (cf. Street, 1984) and was indeed cited by Scribner and Cole in their account. But, in a later book (1994) he tries, like them, to modify the inferences that can be drawn from his own earlier pronouncements and to set out what is myth and what is reality in our understanding of literacy. He draws an analogy with Christian theologians trying to put the faith on a firmer basis by getting rid of unsustainable myths that only weakened the case. As he describes the unsustainable myths of literacy, he seems to be challenging those put forward in his own earlier accounts (1977) and by Goody, Farrell and others. In arriving at ‘the new understanding of literacy’ he describes six ‘beliefs’ and the ‘doubts’ that have been expressed about them as a helpful framework for reviewing the literature on literacy (Olson, 1994):
1 Writing is the transcription of speech.
2 The superiority of writing to speech.
3 The technological superiority of the alphabetic writing system.
4 Literacy as the organ of social progress.
5 Literacy as an instrument of cultural and scientific development.
6 Literacy as an instrument of cognitive development.
He then outlines the ‘doubts’ that modern scholarship has thrown on all of these assumptions. For instance, with respect to (4) literacy and social development, he cites counter arguments from such anthropologists as Lévi-Strauss (1961) who argued that literacy not only is not the royal route to liberation, but is as often a means of enslavement:
It seems to favour rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind. … The use of writing for disinterested ends, and with a view to satisfactions of the mind in the fields either of science or the arts, is a secondary result of its invention – and may even be no more than a way of reinforcing, justifying, or dissimulating its primary function.
(Lévi-Strauss (1961: 291–2) cited in Olson, 1977)
With respect to (5) cultural development, Olson cites the work of cultural historians and anthropologists (cf. Finnegan, 1999) who ‘have made us aware of the sophistication of “oral” cultures’, and from whose work it appears: ‘No direct causal links have been established between literacy and cultural development’.
Like Scribner and Cole, Olson's conclusion challenges the dominant claims for literacy for adults as well as for children:
the use of literacy skills as a metric against which personal and social competence can be assessed is vastly oversimplified. Functional literacy, the form of competence required for one's daily life, far from being a universalizable commodity turns out on analysis to depend critically on the particular activities of the individual for whom literacy is to be functional. What is functional for an automated-factory worker may not be for a parent who wants to read to a child. The focus on literacy skills seriously underestimates the significance of both the implicit understandings that children bring to school and the importance of oral discourse in bringing those understandings into consciousness in turning them into objects of knowledge. The vast amounts of time some children spend on remedial reading exercises may be more appropriately spent acquiring scientific and philosophical information’.
(Olson, 1977: 12)
He concludes: ‘For the first time, many scholars are thinking the unthinkable: is it possible that literacy is over-rated?’
As we shall see below, for many researchers the rejection of the ‘literacy thesis’ does not necessarily mean that we should abandon or reduce work in literacy programmes: but it does force us to be clearer as to what justifications we use for such work and how we should conduct it. The next section shows how new theoretical perspectives, themselves growing from the debates outlined above, can provide a way of pursuing work in the field of learning and teaching literacy without the ‘myths’, over statements and doubtful bases for action of the earlier positions.
The issue of how children learn to read has been highly contested in recent years and has tended to lay the ground for approaches to literacy more generally. In many circles, still, the term ‘literacy’ is interpreted to refer to ‘reading’ and more particularly to the learning of reading by young children. Adams (1993), for instance, herself a key figure in US National Commissions on Literacy, begins an overview of the literature on ‘literacy’ with the claim:
The most fundamental and important issues in the field of reading education are those of how children learn to read and write and how best to help them.
The piece from which this comes was included in a book entitled Teaching Literacy Balancing Perspectives and offers an introduction to some of the key terms in the field of reading; for example, ‘phonics’, ‘whole language’, phonemic awareness’, etc. It also makes claims about what ‘scientific’ research now tells us about learning to read. There is now a requirement in some countries for ‘scientific-based’ approaches that can provide sound evidence of which methods and approach is superior and that can claim to ‘soundly refute’ some hypotheses in favour of others (Slavin, 2002). Adams’ response to these requirements, based on a year reviewing the literature on the ‘reading wars’ and looking for alternatives, was that there has been a coming together of different disciplinary strands, that different perspectives are beginning to agree on what counts: the whole language view of learners engaging in a ‘guessing game’ (Goodman (1967) or that the spellings of words are minimally relevant to reading (Smith, 1971) have been rejected in favour of attention to ‘phonics’. The key to improvement in literacy, especially amongst the ‘economically disadvantaged’, is ‘phonic instruction … word recognition, spelling, and vocabulary’.
If one were only to read such accounts, then the picture would seem clear enough and the task of increasing literacy – not only within the US as in this case, and in the UK as in recent years but across the world, for adults as well as children (cf. Street, Baker, and Rogers 2006) – would be simply a matter of putting these principles into practice. However, once we take into account the theoretical debates outlined above and we read recent authors writing about the learning of literacy, then the apparent security and certainty of the dominant policy and educational positions comes into question. Goodman, for instance, who is largely seen as the leading international figure in ‘whole language’ approaches, refers like Adams, to ‘what we have learnt’ and to ‘scientific knowledge’ – but in this case that requires a different ‘knowledge’, namely ‘of language development, of learning theories, and of teaching and curriculum’ (Goodman, 1996), not just of ‘spelling-sound relations’. For him learning literacy is a more ‘natural’ process than described in the phonics approach and he likens it to the way in which humans learn language: ‘Written language is learnt a little later in the life of individuals and societies, but it is no less natural than oral language in the personal and social development of human beings’ (Goodman, 1996).
Whether language and, by analogy, literacy are ‘taught’ or ‘learnt naturally’ represent extreme poles of what, for most educators is a ‘continuum’. As Goodman states, ‘while I separate learning reading and writing from teaching reading and writing, I can't do so absolutely’. What is evident from these accounts, then, is that underpinning approaches to literacy are theories of learning. What the ideological model of literacy addresses is that such learning does not take place only in the formal context of schools, but is also a key aspect of everyday life – as Rogers argues, we need to distinguish ‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’. Rogers refers to ‘taskconscious learning’ and ‘learning-conscious learning’ and for him, these forms of learning are to be distinguished by their methods of evaluation (task-conscious by the task fulfilment, learning-conscious by measurements of learning). Whilst this may at times appear to differentiate adults strongly from children, Rogers and others argue that both children and adults do both – that in fact they form a continuum rather than two categories. Whilst adults do much less of formal learning than children, the difference, he suggests, really lies in the teaching of adults (i.e. the formal learning) and in the power relationships, the identities built up through experience, and the experiences adults bring to their formal learning, issues we will address more closely later in the book where we look at example of the application of new theories of literacy and of learning to development programmes around the world. Much of learning theory in the discipline of psychology, then, is rooted in the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy and has failed to address these features. Aspects of the more traditional literacy learning of children (including ‘assembly-line preparation’ and ‘test learning’) have consequently been used for adults, as is evident in many adult literacy programmes: adults are encouraged to join younger age groups, to take tests, to decontextualise learning and ignore their own previous knowledge, etc. The cognitive theories of great divide were combined with learning theories to generate formal approaches to the teaching of literacy, to children and to adults. In the second and third Parts of this book we address a number of contexts where these older theories of literacy and of learning have been challenged and the concepts embedded in New Literacy Studies and extended through the ideas of the social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu.
It follows from the distinction between models of literacy that researchers in NLS employing an ‘ideological’ model of literacy would find it problematic simply to use the singular term ‘literacy’ as their unit or object of study. Literacy comes already loaded with ideological and policy pre-suppositions that make it hard to simply ground ethnographic studies of the variety of literacies across contexts in a single underpinning concept – Literacy (with a capital ‘L’ and a single ‘y’). Researchers in the field have addressed this methodological complexity in describing and comparing the object of study by developing alternative terms. This acknowledgement itself connects with issues of the construction of the research object and the need for a reflexive approach addressed later on in this book. We must begin with the recognition that there are ‘multiple literacies’; not a single uniform phenomenon we can term ‘literacy’, and then simply compare across contexts. Indeed, the tendency often has been to see one context, the researcher's or educator's own, as setting the standard, and other literacies as being somehow ‘less’, inferior. Educational practice, from this perspective, has tended to assume that the educator is filling an empty space in the learner's knowledge, and must therefore bring ‘light’ into ‘darkness’ as it were – a phrase common in international statements about literacy. In a recent account of work in international settings concerned with adult literacy, a group of practitioners and researchers, adopting a ‘New Literacy Studies’ approach, contextualised their work in relation to these traditional views:
Traditionally, however … the world is divided into two, the literate and the illiterate; and by definition, it is thought that illiterates know nothing about and have no experience of literacy. In this case, the adult learners (so it is assumed) do not bring any existing experience and knowledge with them. It is taken for granted that ‘starting where they are’ means starting without any perception of what literacy and numeracy mean, without any existing skills or practices.
(Gebre et al., 2009)
In contrast to this position, as we will see in our account of the LETTER Programme in Chapter 5, new approaches to literacy – both research and pedagogy – recognise that this view:
does not tally with life. We know that all adults (including so-called ‘illiterates’) can and do count, that they can and do measure and calculate (for example, in the market, in cooking or in farming) – in other words, they engage in numeracy activities. We know that they can and do negotiate literacy tasks such as money, bills, letters, election notices etc. And in any case, so-called ‘illiterates’ have experience, often deep experience, of being excluded from literacy activities – they see texts and many think, ‘That is not for me’.
So adults do bring to adult literacy learning programmes experience and knowledge, perceptions and some practices relating to both literacy and numeracy. So, if the facilitator is to ‘start where they are’, is to build on their existing knowledge and experience, how can we and the facilitators find out what they know and do?
(Gebre et al., 2009)
We will later describe some literacy and numeracy programmes that have attempted to answer these questions and to develop new ways of engaging with adult learners. These approaches build upon the conceptual frame being outlined here, starting with the recognition of ‘multiple literacies’, but then also recognising that it is not very appropriate or helpful to simply rank these different ‘literacies’ in ways that emphasise the deficit of some learners at the expense of the supposedly ‘fuller’ knowledge of others. Rather, we begin by attempting to understand the different uses and meanings of literacy in different contexts and to compare in a more ethnographic sense rather than a dominant or judgemental sense. In adopting such a framework, I argue, we need some further ‘new’ concepts to help us see what is going on and to understand and appreciate the engagement with reading and writing of people from other groups than ourselves, whether these include learners in educational programmes, villagers in ‘development’ contexts, urban poor in western societies or, as in my own work context, PhD students struggling with the discourse and genre features of ‘academic literacies’ (see Street, 2009). We address these issues later as we look at the implications of New Literacy Studies for work in education.
As noted, in attempting to develop a conceptual framework for handling these complex issues, I have both drawn upon the notion of ‘multiple literacies’ and also developed a working distinction between ‘literacy events’ and ‘literacy practices’ (Street, 1988) that I suggest is helpful both for research and in teaching situations. The term literacy events is derived from the sociolinguistic idea of speech events. It was first used in relation to literacy by A.B. Anderson et al. (1980) who defined it as an occasion during which a person ‘attempted to comprehend graphic signs’ (1980: 59–65). Shirley Brice Heath, further characterised a ‘literacy event’ as ‘any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants’ interactions and their interpretative processes’ (Heath, 1982b: 93). I employ the phrase ‘literacy practices’ (Street, 1984: 1) as a means of focusing upon, ‘social practices and conceptions of reading and writing’; although later elaborating the term to take account both of ‘events’ in Heath's sense and of the social models of literacy that participants bring to bear upon those events and that give meaning to them (see Street, 1988; 2000). David Barton, in an Introduction to his edited volume on Writing in the Community (Barton and Ivanic, 1991: 1) attempted to clarify these debates about literacy events and literacy practices and, in a later collaborative study of everyday literacies in Lancaster, England, Barton and Hamilton begin their account with further refinements of the two phrases (1998: 6). Baynham (1995) entitled his book Literacy Practices: Investigating Literacy in Social Contexts. Similarly Prinsloo and Breier's volume on The Social Uses of Literacy (1996), which is a series of case studies of literacy in South Africa, used the concept of ‘events’ but then extended it to ‘practices’, describing the everyday uses and meanings of literacy amongst, for instance, urban taxi drivers, struggle activists in settlements, rural workers using diagrams to build carts and those involved in providing election materials for mainly non-literate voters. The concept of literacy practices in these and other contexts attempts to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy events but also to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind.
More recently, I have further elaborated the distinction with respect to work on literacies and multilingualism in an edited volume on Multilingual Literacies by Martin-Jones and Jones (2000). As part of that broadening, for instance, I noted that we bring to a literacy event concepts, social models regarding what the nature of the event is and that make it work and give it meaning. Participants not only ‘do’ reading and writing, they also have ideas about what they are doing – whether this means, as we noted briefly above, not counting their own activities as ‘literacy’ at all or, on the other hand, considering their own ‘literacy’ to be the norm against which other practices should be judged – as in many contemporary policy documents and in the kind of pedagogy identified in national government strategies, such as No Child Left Behind in the US and the National Literacy Strategy in the UK. Literacy practices, therefore, refer to both the activities of reading and/or writing in which people are involved in specific contexts and also to the ideas that such people have of literacy, involving the particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts.
A key issue, at both a methodological and an empirical level, is how we can characterise the shift from observing literacy events to conceptualising literacy practices. How can we get beyond the temptation to describe what we think is going on as we watch people engage with reading and writing, and to put thoughts into their head about what they are doing, without actually asking them. Or, further, since their own views might also be tainted by their exposure to ‘our’ views, by engaging in longer term ethnographic-style enquiry into ‘what's going on’. What does an ‘ethnographic’ perspective bring to the understanding of multiple literacies and of literacy events and practices? I will briefly describe my own ‘field’ experience in Iran as an example of the link between adopting an ethnographic perspective and the study of literacy.
When I went to Iran in the 1970s to undertake anthropological field research, I did not go to study ‘literacy’, but I found myself living in a mountain village where a great deal of literacy activity was going on. Maybe part of my interest derived from having done my first degree in English literature. I had moved into anthropology, because of dissatisfaction with looking only at ‘texts’. I wanted to locate them with respect to ‘practices’. I attempted to bring English literature together with anthropology through a PhD on European Representations of Non-European Society in Popular Fiction. I looked at popular stories of adventure in exotic places: the Tarzan stories, Rider Haggard, and John Buchan as popular authors and Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad as more established authors. I arrived in Iran at my field site already excited by the ways that writing and anthropology could be brought together. Perhaps it was this sense that led me to focus closely on the literacy practices of the villages I lived amongst and even more on the ‘representations’ of these practices by different parties.
I was drawn then to the conceptual and rhetorical issues involved in representing the variety and complexity of literacy activity at a time when my encounter with people outside of the village suggested the dominant representation was of ‘illiterate’ backward villagers. Looking more closely at village life in light of these characterisations, I saw not only a lot of literacy going on but several quite different ‘practices’ associated with literacy – those in a traditional ‘Quranic school’, those taking place in the new State schools, and the inscribed means that traders used in their buying and selling of fruit to urban markets. Versions of literacy by outside agencies (e.g., State education, UNESCO, and national literacy campaigns) did not capture these complex variations in literacy happening in one small locale where the people were generally characterised as ‘illiterate’. These external ‘representations’ seemed as much out of line with the ethnographic reality as earlier representations of non-European society had been. Just as theories of race, evolution and hierarchy used by 19th century writers, academics and policy makers have proved inadequate to making sense of human diversity, so the academic writing and policy pronouncements concerning literacy did not usefully describe or explain what was going on in this Iranian village and – as I discovered later – in many other parts of the world on which literacy policy and theory have been brought to bear.
(from On Ethnography, Heath and Street, 2008)
What happened in this case is repeated in certain ways for every ethnographer: a host of questions emerge from initial curiosity about patterns of symbolic structures and their uses; the prior questions arise perhaps from other domains and the ethnographer is struck by contrasts between ‘common sense’ views of what was going on and what they are learning from longer, more intense engagement with local practices. But, in later discussions in the present volume on the links between Bourdieu's theory on the one hand and classroom engagement with literacy on the other, we are aware that not everyone is likely to engage in such long term fieldwork as they struggle with the meanings of literacy we outline here. David Bloome and Judith Greene have provided a helpful way of characterising the features of an ethnographic approach that everyone can draw upon, particularly in the present case as we consider literacy events and practices in different cultural contexts. They make a distinction between conducting ethnography, adopting an ethnographic perspective, and adopting ethnographic tools. Conducting ethnography then refers to framing and conceptualising through an in-depth long-term study of a social group. Anthropologists, in particular, have ‘owned’ this approach. Adopting an Ethnographic Perspective, on the other hand, refers to applying an ethnographic approach to a specific situation. This approach is less comprehensive than a full ethnography and more appropriately describes what the participants were attempting to engage in through the workshop process which we describe in Chapter 5. Adopting Ethnographic Tools finally refers to using the tools of observation and participant observation to comprehend a certain situation, but without the general theory of culture and society that is involved in either of the other two approaches. The first such approach is characterised by the pure anthropologist who travels to an area and stays there for a number of years and then writes a major study on a community. However, there is a middle ground between highly specialised skills and the ethnography that we all learn as members of society. This can be characterised by disciplined and reflective ethnographic inquiry in which an ethnographic perspective is systematically applied to specific situations and processes. It is this perspective that is to be found in New Literacy Studies as participants, whether anthropologists, educators, practitioners in international literacy programmes or policy makers, attempt to describe and understand the literacy events and practices of those around them.
Some further concepts have proved helpful, as the methodological debates about use of ethnographic perspectives have been extended. For instance, the accounts offered by New Literacy Studies have led some to question the apparent lack of broader generalisation and over focus on the ‘local’. Reports based on NLS have often found themselves subject to criticism from other social scientists, or more positivist-oriented policy makers, for not making clear the nature of their ‘sample’ and the ‘typicality’ of their subjects. One way of describing this conflict of approaches, is to draw upon Mitchell's helpful distinction between ‘enumerative induction’, and ‘analytic induction’ (Mitchell, 1984), where the former depends upon generalisation from a sample to a larger population and the latter aims to elicit theoretical insights rather than empirical extrapolations:
An anthropologist using a case study to support an argument shows how general principles deriving from some theoretical orientation manifest themselves in some given set of particular circumstances. A good case study, therefore, enables the analyst to establish theoretically valid connections between events and phenomena which previously were ineluctable.
(Mitchell, 1984: 240)
As my own fieldwork in Iran evolved, I made connections between local uses of literacy there and other social practices, such as identity, power, and commerce (see Street, 1984, especially Chapters 5 and 6). This work emerged as a ‘telling case’, of literacy as social practice, rather than an attempt to generalise about the whole of Iran or about literacy in general. If we are able to identify the kind of variety in literacy events and practices I noted in some Iranian villages, then we might be able to carry those questions and insights to other places. As a result, we might ask: are there different literacies in place here? Might there be some literacy practices associated with commerce, some with religion and some with education, as in this case, or might we find other ‘types’ such as the ‘local literacies’ identified by Barton and Hamilton in their study of the Lancaster environment in England? From this point of view, ethnographers of literacy will look for the ordinary or routine in each site and thereby identify for analytical exposition ‘telling’ instances of behaviour that elucidate, contradict, or expand relationships presented in earlier theories or field studies.
A further critique of the ethnographic approach in general, and of its use in NLS in particular, has been that the researchers have tended to be ‘westerners’ and that, in effect, they were still imposing an outsider view on their subjects. This is an issue that anthropologists in particular have been very concerned with in recent years, and their attempts to take it into account and to develop further conceptual tools have also proved useful for NLS work. The basic principle here is again that of reflexivity: even while doing observing and describing ‘others’, the researcher must remain conscious of her/himself. Through reflexivity, we can be aware of the reason for undertaking the research in the first place, of the experience, beliefs and values which we bring to the task – in the case of NLS identifying and understanding the literacy and numeracy practices which the subjects do within their own community, practices of which the researched may be completely unconscious. The researcher must go back and forth – enter the situation and then retreat to consider before re-entering again. Ethnography should be considered as cyclical, with forward and backward movement. It is not a question of the researcher abandoning his/her own belief systems and values but, as Todorov suggests, (1988), a matter of ‘proximity and distance’, a continuous process of movement backwards and forwards that one probably never gets out of once acquired. Anthropologists sometimes privilege their ability to act as a ‘fish out of water’, taking a distant view of local practices (a theme and indeed a metaphor that we will see developed further in the programme described in Chapter 5). Yet, they also give highest credit to colleagues who have immersed themselves in local practices and can think like the ‘natives’. Todorov suggests that the issue is not just seeing the either/or but in recognising the full axis. Fieldworkers distance themselves from their home culture as they come into proximity with an unfamiliar social group. They then become more immersed before distancing themselves from their field site as they return home, drawing near again to their own culture. Many return to their field site, thus repeating the cycle of proximity and distance which becomes a reflex for all such engagement with difference and similarity. The ‘ethnographic imagination’ (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992) is founded on this cycle and can be applied in micro situations of engagement and comparison, as well as larger ones, including those where researchers enter and leave sites of learning over a period of time. The terms emic and etic taken from the field of linguistic studies are often used in the field of anthropology to describe this proximity/distance relationship. As noted in Chapter 2, emic is used to describe the insider's point of view, while etic is used for the outsider's point of view. The ethnographer does not simply try to capture the local but rather attempts to understand their way of understanding using an emic/etic approach, not as either/or but exploring how the local and the outsider views are related. The emic sheds light on the local perspective, and the etic account may see it from outside, but the emic/etic axis or relationship will relate the two together.
Those who have adopted an NLS perspective, then, have helped to develop a series of concepts that move us well beyond the traditional approach to literacy as skill or ‘illiteracy’ as deficit. Some of these terms have been adapted from anthropology, such as emic and etic, proximity and distance, telling case and reflexivity, whilst the notion of an ‘ethnographic perspective’ has built upon anthropological accounts but broadened out to others not trained in that discipline. How these concepts are used for understanding literacy in different contexts is a question that is still being explored and one that we will come back to later in this volume as we seek to link approaches from NLS with those of Bourdieu and of classroom ethnography. At the same time, some of the ‘new’ concepts in the NLS field are more particular to literacy itself – terms such as ‘multiple literacies’, literacy as social practice, ideological and autonomous models and ‘literacy events’ and ‘literacy practices’, have all been developed in the last twenty years, as those in the field have engaged with the deep and complex issues associated with understanding the uses and meanings of literacy in different times and places.
A wealth of ‘ethnographies of literacy’ has emerged deploying and developing these and other key concepts in a variety of international contexts, including the UK (Barton and Hamilton, 1998); the USA (Collins, 1995; Heath, 1983); South Africa (Prinsloo and Breier, 1996); Iran (Street, 1984); India (Mukherjee and Vasanta, 2003); Mexico (Kalman, 1999); South America (Aikman, 1999); and multiple ‘development’ contexts (Street, 2001). The strength and significance of the approach, and the considerable literature it has generated, is attested by a recent spate of critical accounts that have addressed some of the problems raised by such ethnographies in general theoretical terms and, more specifically, for practice in educational contexts. The next section summarises some of these theoretical concerns and critiques and then turns to their applications to policy and practice.
In terms of theory, Brandt and Clinton (2002) have commented on ‘the limits of the local’ apparent in many NLS studies. They argue that NLS ought to be more prepared to take account of the relatively ‘autonomous’ features of literacy without succumbing to the autonomous model with its well documented flaws: this would involve, for instance, recognising the extent to which literacy does often come to ‘local’ situations from outside and brings with it both skills and meanings that are larger than the emic perspective favoured by NLS can always detect. Whilst acknowledging the value of the social practice approach, they:
wonder if the new paradigm sometimes veers too far in a reactive direction, exaggerating the power of local contexts to set or reveal the forms and meanings that literacy takes. Literacy practices are not typically invented by their practitioners. Nor are they independently chosen or sustained by them. Literacy in use more often than not serves multiple interests, incorporating individual agents and their locales into larger enterprises that play out away from the immediate scene.
(Brandt and Clinton, 2002: 1)
They also point out the important and powerful role of consolidating technologies that can destabilise the functions, uses, values and meanings of literacy anywhere. These technologies generally come from outside the local context: there is more going on locally than just local practices. Whilst researchers have learnt much from the recent turn to ‘local literacies’, they fear that ‘something [might] be lost when we ascribe to local contexts (those) responses to pressures that originate in distant decisions, especially when seemingly local appropriations of literacy may in fact be culminations of literate designs originating elsewhere?’
I would agree with most of Brandt and Clinton's analysis here of the relationship between the ‘local’ and the ‘distant’. Indeed, it is the focus on this relationship, rather than on one or other of the sites, that characterises the best of NLS. Brandt and Clinton's account here provides a helpful way of describing the local/global debate in which literacy practices play a central role. I would, however, want to agree with their caveat about the possibility of over-emphasising ‘the local’ whilst disagreeing with their labelling of the ‘distant’ as more ‘autonomous’. The ‘distant’ literacies to which Brandt refers are also always ideological, and to term them autonomous might be to concede too much to their neutralist claims (see Street, 2003).
Brandt and Clinton's concern with the overemphasis on the local in some NLS accounts; their recognition that for many people the literacies they engage with come from elsewhere and are not self invented; and that there is more going on in a local literacy than ‘just local practice’, are all important caveats to deter NLS from over-emphasising or romanticising the local, as it has been accused of doing (cf. response by Street to McCabe, 1995 in Prinsloo and Breier, 1996). This important debate can, however, be continued without resorting to a claim that ‘distant’ literacies are ‘autonomous’ – as Brandt and Clinton imply in their attempt, to address certain ‘autonomous’ aspects of literacy without appealing to the ‘autonomous model’ of literacy. Distant literacies are actually no more autonomous than those of local literacies, or indeed than any literacy practices: their distant-ness, their relative power over local literacies, and their ‘non-invented’ character as far as local users are concerned, do not make them ‘autonomous’, only ‘distant’, or ‘new’ or hegemonic. To study such processes both a framework and conceptual tools are required in order to characterise the relation between ‘local’ and ‘distant’. The question raised in the early NLS work concerning how we can characterise the shift from observing literacy events to conceptualising literacy practices does indeed provide both a methodological and an empirical way of dealing with this relation, and thereby taking account of Brandt and Clinton's concerns.
NLS practitioners might also take issue with the apparent suggestion that distant literacies come to local contexts with their force and meaning intact. As Kulick and Stroud indicated a decade ago in their study of new literacy practices brought by missionaries to New Guinea, local peoples more often ‘take hold’ of new practices and adapt them to local circumstances (1993). The result of local-global encounters around literacy is always a new hybrid rather than a single, essentialised version of either. It is these hybrid literacy practices that NLS focuses upon rather than either romanticising the local or conceding the dominant privileging of the supposed ‘global’. As we shall see when we discuss practical applications of NLS across educational contexts, it is the recognition of this hybridity that lies at the heart of an NLS approach to literacy acquisition regarding the relationship between local literacy practices and those of the school.
Collins and Blot (2002) are similarly concerned that, whilst NLS has generated a powerful series of ethnographies of literacy, there is a danger of simply piling up more descriptions of local literacies without addressing the underlying general questions of both theory and practice. In exploring why the dominant stereotypes of literacy are so flawed – such as the notions of a great divide between oral and literate, and the now challenged assumptions of the autonomous model – they invoke NLS but then want to take account of its limitations and to extend beyond them:
Such understanding also has a more general intellectual value for it forces us to explore why historical and ethnographic cases are necessary but insufficient for rethinking inherited viewpoints … although ethnographic scholarship has demonstrated the pluralities of literacies, their contextboundness, it still has also to account for general tendencies that hold across diverse case studies.
(pp. 7–8)
They argue for ‘a way out of the universalist/particularist impasse’, which had troubled Brandt (as we saw above), ‘by attending closely to issues of text, power and identity’. These issues are at the heart of current developments in NLS, from Bartlett and Holland's concern with identities in practice (see below), to Street's attention to literacy and power in the ideological model, and Maybin's (2000) refinement of Bakhtin's ‘intertextuality’ with respect to literacy practices. Writing in Situated Literacies, Maybin (2000) also links NLS to wider strands of social-critical work, offering a way of linking Foucauldian notions of ‘Discourse’, Bakhtinian notions of ‘intertextuality’, and work in ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ with the recognition from NLS of ‘the articulation of different discourses [as] centrally and dynamically interwoven in people's everyday literacy activities’. Gee (2000), in the same Situated Literacies volume, also located the ‘situated’ approach to literacies in relation to broader movements towards a ‘social turn’ which he saw as a challenge to behaviourism and individualism – a challenge which NLS has also pursued. Janks (2000), located in South Africa, likewise links Literacy Studies to broader social theory, invoking concepts of ‘Domination, Access, Diversity and Design’ as a means of synthesising the various strands of critical literacy education. Freebody, writing from Australia but, like Janks, taking a broad theoretical and international view, likewise writes of the relationship between NLS and ‘critical literacy’, an approach to the acquisition and use of reading and writing in educational contexts that takes account of relations of power and domination (Freebody, 2006)
Bartlett and Holland also link NLS to broader social theory. They propose an expanded conception of the space of literacy practices, drawing upon innovations in the cultural school of psychology, socio-cultural history and social practice theory. In locating literacy theory within these broader debates in social theory, they build on the concern of Bourdieu to focus on the relationship between social structures (history brought to the present in institutions) and ‘habitus’ (history brought to the present in person), and suggest ways in which NLS can adapt this approach, an issue that is of course central to the present volume and with which we will deal in some detail in later chapters. Applying a concept of ‘figured worlds’ – ‘a socially produced and culturally constructed realm of interpretation’ – to literacy practices, they suggest that such might include ‘functional illiterates’, ‘good readers’ and ‘illiterates’, any of which might be ‘invoked, animated, contested and enacted through artefacts, activities and identities in practice’ (p. 6). In the world of school-based literacy in particular, scholars have noted the tendency to invoke and deploy such figurings and identities to characterise children and their attainment. Holland and Bartlett enable us to see such characterisations as themselves part of what we should be taking into account when we try to understand literacy practices in context: we should be wary of taking these literacy practices at face value, a scepticism that will prove useful as we move towards applying social literacy theory to education in general and schooling in particular.
In her research on London families, Pahl (2002a, 2002b) has built upon Holland and Bartlett's use of habitus in relation to figured worlds in order to help her describe the multimodal practices of young children at home. She develops this approach further in this volume. Drawing also upon Kress for multimodality and Street for literacy practices, she describes the ways in which young children take from and adapt family narratives as they do drawings, create three-dimensional objects and write graffiti on walls. The work of ‘figuring’ these family worlds is done through a combination of oral, visual and written artefacts through which, over time,` key themes – such as a family's connection with the railways in India or with a farm in Wales – become ‘sedimented’ and persistent. Through these narratives, embedded in material and linguistic form, the identity of family members is constructed and adapted over time. There is here again a pedagogic message about how schools might recognise and build upon such home practices, but there is also an important theoretical contribution to NLS: namely that Pahl shows how any account of literacy practices needs to be contextualised within other communicative modes. Like Bartlett and Holland, and Collins, she develops a sophisticated analysis of how such practices relate to concepts of textuality, figured worlds, identity and power.
Another update and extension of NLS is to be found in Hornberger's edited volume (2002) in which the authors attempt to apply her conception of the ‘continua of biliteracy’ to actual uses of reading and writing in different multilingual settings: ‘biliteracy’ is defined as ‘any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in or around writing’, and is described in terms of four nested sets of intersecting continua characterising the contexts, media, content, and development of biliteracy. A number of the authors, as in the Martin-Jones and Jones (2000) book, draw out the links of NLS to such multilingual settings.
The next stage of work in this area is to move beyond these theoretical critiques and to develop positive proposals for interventions in teaching, curriculum, measurement criteria, and teacher education in both the formal and informal sectors, based upon these principles. It will be at this stage that the theoretical perspectives brought together in NLS will face their sternest test: that of their practical applications to mainstream education.
Hull and Schultz (2002) have been amongst the first researchers directly to apply insights from NLS to educational practice and policy. They build upon the foundational descriptions of out-of-school literacy events and practices developed within NLS, to return the gaze back to the relations between in and out of school, so that NLS is not seen simply as ‘anti school’ or as interested only in small scale or ‘local’ literacies of resistance. They want to use the understandings of especially children's emerging experiences with literacy in their own cultural milieus to address broader educational questions about learning of literacy and of switching between the literacy practices required in different contexts. They:
are troubled by a tendency … to build and reify a great divide between in school and out of school [and that] sometimes this dichotomy relegates all good things to out-of-school contexts and everything repressive to school. Sometimes it dismisses the engagement of children with non-school learning as merely frivolous or remedial or incidental.
(Hull and Schultz, 2002: 3)
In contrast to this approach, and drawing strongly on work in NLS, they argue for overlap or complementarity or perhaps a respectful division of labour. They cite Dewey's argument ‘that there is much we can learn about successful pedagogies and curricula by foregrounding the relationship between formal education and ordinary life’, that,
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside of the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school.
(Dewey, 1899/1998: 76–8)
However, how are we to know about the experiences of the child outside school? Many teachers express anxiety that the children in their classes come from a wide variety of backgrounds and it is impossible to know them all. Hull and Schultz respond by invoking the work of researchers ‘who have made important contributions to understanding literacy learning through ethnographic or fieldbased studies in homes, community organisations and after-school programs’. Their edited volume offers accounts of such research in a variety of settings. They are aware of the criticism of such approaches that it might over-emphasise the ‘local’ or even ‘romanticise out-of-school contexts’, and aim instead to ‘acknowledge the complexities, tensions and opportunities’ that are found there. Nor is their aim to provide an exhaustive account of such contexts – teachers are right to argue that this cannot all be covered. Instead, they aim to provide us all, but especially those responsible for the education of children, with an understanding of the principles underlying such variation and with help in listening to and appreciating what it is that children bring from home and community experience. Indeed, the book combines both articles about such experience with comments by teachers and teacher educators on their significance for learning. Here, NLS meets educational practice in ways that begin to fulfil the potential of the approach but through dialogue rather than simply an imposition of researchers’ agendas on educators.
In Australia, the work of Peter Freebody and of Allan Luke, provide powerful examples of the application of new theoretical perspectives on literacy, including NLS, to education, especially work on curriculum and assessment in Queensland (cf. Luke, and Carrington 2002; Luke and Freebody 2002). In another edited volume on NLS, a number of authors from a variety of international contexts similarly take on this challenge and attempt to follow through such practical applications of the NLS approach (see Street 2005). As with Hull and Schultz's work, the authors are conscious of the links between theoretical debate and the work of teachers in school addressing literacy issues. The collection of case studies ranges from formal education, including elementary, secondary and higher education, and informal sectors such as community associations, international development programmes and workplace literacies. Across these educational contexts, the authors are concerned, not just to apply the general principles of NLS but to offer practical critiques of its application that force us to refine its original conceptualisation. The volume is intended to be not a static ‘application’ of theory to practice but a dynamic dialogue between the two. In attempting to work through the implications of these approaches for different sectors of education, the authors find limitations and problems in some NLS approaches – such as the ‘limits of the local’ in educational as well as theoretical terms – that require them to go back to the underpinning conceptual apparatus. Theory, as well as practice, is subject to the critical perspective adopted there, so that both researchers and practitioners have either to adapt or reject parts of NLS as it is applied to such new tasks.
Such a challenge is raised by current research by Baker, Street and Tomlin applying literacy theory to the understanding of numeracy practices in and out of school (Baker et al., 2003; Baynham and Baker, 2002). Numeracy, even more than literacy, has been seen as a ‘universal’, ‘context’ free’ set of skills that can be imparted across the board, irrespective of children's background experiences and prior cultural knowledge. Recent approaches to ‘situated learning’, when allied to those from situated literacy suggest that such a ‘banking’ model of education, as Paulo Freire termed it, is inappropriate, especially in the multilingual, multicultural situations that characterise contemporary hybrid cultural contexts. The question that Street and Baker address is how far such a culturally-sensitive approach can be applied to numeracy education: can we talk of multiple numeracies and of numeracy events and practices as we do of literacy? Can we build upon cultural knowledge of number, measurement, approximation, etc., in the way that Hull and Schultz and those in the Literacies across the Curriculum volume believe we can do for cultural knowledge of literacies, scripts, languages? The questions being raised by NLS, when applied to new fields such as this, will again lead to critiques, not only of current educational practice but also of the theoretical framework itself. As with the critiques by Brandt, Collins, etc., NLS will be forced to adapt and change – the validity and value of its original insights and their applications to practice will be tested according to whether they can meet this challenge.
In an international context, the application of NLS to both schooling and adult literacy has also raised new questions and faced new problems contingent on the nature of the particular context: the aim of such ‘applications’ has not been to impose a pregiven template on to local work in the field but to enter a dialogue (cf. Street's 2001 edited volume of essays on literacy and development in a dozen different countries for detailed examples). The LETTER Project described in Chapter 5 builds on this work and links theoretical debate with applications in development education contexts. A central theme here is that, as with other ‘applications’ of NLS (cf. Rogers, 1994; Street, 2001), the local context generates it own new and unique problems that force us to rethink and adapt the initial conceptualisation. In this case, as in many development contexts, the problem arises as to whether there a conflict between theory and policy, and between the local and the needs of scale faced by administrators? The more that ethnographers explain the ‘complexity’ of literacy practices, the more policy makers find it impossible to design programmes that can take account of all that complexity. The more ethnographers demonstrate that literacy does not necessarily have the practical effects that the rhetoric has suggested – improved health, cognition, empowerment – the harder it becomes for policy makers to persuade funders to support literacy programmes. The more ethnographers focus on specific local contexts, the harder it seems to be to ‘upscale’ their projects to take account of the large numbers of people seen to be in need. The LETTER Project described in Chapter 5 is an attempt to bridge this apparent divide between policy and research in general, and in particular between large-scale needs and micro ethnographic approaches.
Despite the willingness of the UK Department for International Development to fund such imaginative approaches to literacy work overseas as the LETTER Project (e.g. through the DELPHE Scheme), in the UK itself, as in the USA, the qualitative and ethnographic-style work that characterises NLS and underpins such an approach is currently out of fashion in higher policy circles. A number of commissions and panels have reviewed research on literacy in the light of a more outcomes based, ‘scientific’ approach effectively adopting an autonomous model of literacy to determine policy and educational practice; e.g. The National Academy of Science report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow et al., 1998); the National Reading Panel set up by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NRP, 2000); and the US Department of Education's newly formed Institute of Education Sciences plan to evaluate research as part of its web-based What Works Clearinghouse project. Academic researchers, including those active in the field of literacy, are playing a leading role in these developments. For instance, in the USA Robert Slavin, the founder of Success for All, argued in a recent paper in Educational Research that: ‘the use of randomised experiments that transformed medicine, agriculture and technology in the twentieth century is now beginning to affect educational policy’. He concludes from a survey of such research that ‘a focus on rigorous experiments evaluating replicable programs and practices is essential to build confidence in educational research among policymakers and educators’ (Slavin, 2002). In particular, this approach suggests ways in which what is known from experimental studies of literacy acquisition can be built into programs and policies for early schooling.
In both the UK and the US qualitative researchers in the literacy field in general, and those working in NLS in particular, have addressed the wider epistemological assumptions underpinning the ‘scientific’ move and the specific issues regarding acquisition of reading that are often the focus of such approaches (cf. Harrison, 2002). Joanne Larson's wittily titled volume Literacy as Snake Oil (2001) has a number of sharp criticisms of the way the Reading Panels have been set up, run and then invoked for policy purposes in the USA. The popularity of such a volume has led to a new edition in which there are also articles on the UK, including one by some of the present authors (Street et al., 2007). These and other authors demonstrate some of the problems with the ‘scientific’ approach – its inability to engage with the nuances of cultural meanings, the variation in uses of literacy across contexts and the problems already highlighted with the autonomous model of literacy – and attempt to construct more meaningful solutions (cf. Gee, 2001; Coles, 2001). The present volume extends this work by considering ways in which the nuanced approach to ‘practice’ evident in the work of Bourdieu can be applied in the literacy context, refining the notion of ‘literacy practices’ and locating literacy in its social context where relations of habitus and field create a different dynamic – one not captured by dominant policy perspectives.
The effects of critical engagements with social theory, educational applications and policy are that NLS is now going through a productive period of intense debate that first establishes and consolidates many of its earlier insights and empirical work and, second, builds a more robust and perhaps less insular area of study. A major contribution arising from the work cited here has been the attempt to appeal beyond the specific interests of ethnographers interested in the ‘local’ in order to engage both with educationalists interested in literacy acquisition and use across educational contexts, both formal and informal, and with policy makers more generally. That practical engagement, however, must still be rooted in a sound theoretical and conceptual understanding if the teaching and studying of literacy are to avoid simply being tokens for other interests. We need to analyse and contest what counts as ‘literacy’ (and numeracy): what literacy events and practices mean to users in different cultural and social contexts – the original inspiration for NLS – but also investigate the ‘limits of the local’; and how literacy relates to more general issues of social theory regarding textuality, figured worlds, identity and power. It is in this context that the present volume further draws upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu in order to develop analyses and interpretations that will enable us to further refine our understandings of literacy; whilst, at the same time, focusing on literacy as a case study, for such analyses can perhaps also help us extend and refine the application of the conceptual apparatus offered by Bourdieu. The next chapter addresses these issues with an account of Bourdieu's theory of practice and consequent method.