microsoft word lns 16.2-17.1pp 95-96 edney bookreview 16-oct.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 n o 1 2 0 0 9 95 building professional pride in literacy a review by denyse edney building professional pride in literacy: a dialogical guide to professional development for practitioners of adult literacy and basic education by allan quigley krieger publishing company, 2006, p.o. box 9542, melbourne, florida isbn: 1-57524-262-1, 244 pages. www.krieger-publishing.com what should professionalism mean in the literacy field? quigley cites the results of a survey of literacy practitioners. according to one participant, ‘to act “professionally” in literacy and adult education is to self-educate in professional development.’ another replied that literacy practitioners act professionally when they view ‘students as most valued clients and attempt to engage their individual needs and goals within a high-quality program of basic skills instruction.’ the theme of caring was one of the strongest points made. quigley quoted from another survey participant: ‘to act professionally in adult literacy one is service-oriented, friendly and accountable. a professional is ethical (with) strong values, especially those pertaining to literacy and the population one serves’. quigley concludes that professionalism in adult literacy and basic education ‘appears to be the combination of knowledge and skills, as required in any profession, but it also needs to involve caring, empathy, compassion, ethical conduct, and dedication to the learners’ needs’. as an adult literacy educator working on the front lines (aboriginal health literacy in central australia), i particularly appreciate and applaud quigley’s summation. this guide is intended to help practitioners develop as professionals. discussion questions, professional development activities, and follow-up readings appear at the end of each chapter; each chapter is written to help enhance skills, knowledge and values. quigley’s guide involves the use of learning circles and a learning journal as ways of reflecting on what is happening. a learning journal will capture your thoughts, your reflections, your opinions, your doubts and your successes. quigley gives an interesting account of the history of literacy education (in the uk, us and canada) before giving a rundown on some pros and cons of different adult learning philosophies: liberal, progressive, vocational, humanist and radical. i agree with quigley that problem-solving, although time-consuming, is worth considering, ‘since ownership of learning, the challenge of problem-solving, and finding collaborative ways to achieve relevance are all very powerful methods in adult education’. quigley also r e v i e w s 96 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s reviews some of the basic principles of teaching adults and some of the methods that have proven effective within each of the philosophical approaches. to act professionally is to bring three essential qualities to adult literacy. what should go into professional conduct in teaching and administering adult literacy? education and training to build knowledge of the subjects and practice and education or training to build the skills necessary for the job were the first two required elements. but the third element was stressed repeatedly. in adult literacy, a professional needs to be a caring, compassionate, dedicated educator. one is held to a high standard on values in our field. i recommend this book as a practical way to undertake professional development in the field of adult literacy education. it will, indeed, help build professional pride in literacy. microsoft word lns 16.2/17.1 backpages.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l u m e 1 7 n u m b e r 2 2 0 0 9 42 notes on contributors leslie limage unesco education sector programme specialist (retired). literacy and basic education policy and practice specialist. currently: international and comparative education consultant. former visiting professor of comparative education, ucla and arizona state university, secondary school and adult education and literacy tutor, united kingdom. graduate degrees from university of paris and university of london institute of education in comparative education, economics of education and sociology of education. numerous publications, studies, reports and public-speaking in literacy, education policy reform, education in post-conflict and reconstruction, diversity and education. contact: leslie.limage@wanadoo.fr j. lo bianco j. lo bianco is professor of language and literacy education at the university of melbourne. he was the author of the 1987 national policy on languages, which addressed adult literacy, english and languages other than english across education and training sectors. he directed the national languages and literacy institute of australia between 1990 and 2002. at the university he specialises in research and teaching in sociolinguistics as well as policy on literacy and language questions. current projects include children’s early writing, mass english teaching in china and language policy in se asia, especially sri lanka, malaysia, china and thailand. he is president of the australian academy of the humanities. microsoft word lns 16.2-17.1pp89-90 bunt 16-oct.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 n o 1 2 0 0 9 89 reviews developing adult literacy a review by joanna bunt developing adult literacy: approaches to planning, implementing, and delivering literacy initiatives by juliet mccaffery, juliet merriefield and juliet millican oxfam gb 2007, oxfam house, john smith drive, oxford ox4 2jy 2007 isbn-10: 0855985968, 289 pages. available at: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/downloads/adultlit_wholebook.pdf the authors of this book have set out to create a compilation of the theories behind different models of adult literacy to assist planners internationally in their development of new adult literacy programs. the book offers no ‘quick-fix’ solution or adult literacy program template, but is rich with examples and ideas emerging directly from literacy teachers ‘at the chalk face’ from diverse areas of the globe. case studies demonstrate how ideas have been put into practice, with a focus on the learning experience being a collaborative process between a facilitator/teacher or between learners and their peers in the classroom. there is also a focus on learning in outdoor learning environments. the book considers concepts of literacy in its different guises: as skills, tasks, social practice and critical reflection. the authors analyse the practical side too — approaches to the curriculum, resources, training and assessment. chapter 4 considers what we mean by literacy. literacy has expanded to have meanings far beyond just reading and writing. i enjoyed reading about the pros and cons of the competency-based or functional approaches to adult literacy programs. the chapter provides an organised framework for tutors to teach with a competency-based approach; however, the book recognises that the approach can lead to students being able to perform certain tasks in isolation yet remaining unable to translate these competencies across diverse life tasks (p.61). in the discussion on literacy as critical reflection (p.91), there is an interesting section on the difficulties faced by some women in attending literacy classes. attendance can be seen as a challenge to spousal power. this is an issue not often obvious in contemporary australian literacy classes, but interesting to keep in mind — the unseen or unexpected restrictions experienced by some students. r e v i e w s 90 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s a very realistic and pragmatic chapter (chapter 11) is devoted to monitoring and evaluating literacy programs. the authors here stress that evaluation should take into account the purpose of the program, capacity of staff and resources available. a very detailed and useful exposition of the evaluation process follows with many examples — and an ultimate conclusion that evaluations ‘enable organisations to build on their strengths and address their weaknesses’ (p.149). there is a very comprehensive chapter (chapter 12) on how people learn to read and write, which i feel is of great interest not only to planners and teachers, but also to the volunteer tutors in any literacy class. lastly, the section on resources and materials gave me several helpful new ideas for my own literacy class. in all, the book has been well-written by authors highly experienced in the literacy field. i feel that the book is primarily aimed at planners, rather than literacy teachers facilitating programs at the local level; however, it is very easy to read and crammed with useful practical examples, such as the ninestage framework (p.78) for drawing up a learning program based on the literacy and numeracy that participants require to be able to operate more effectively in their community. this book is an engaging assessment of adult literacy in a global context, with detailed statistics concerning literacy worldwide, and its effects on poverty and economic development. also covered are international policies for universal literacy and trends in both policy management and teaching in a local context, such as the popular and effective trend in the past decade towards learning literacy and numeracy skills through information and communication technologies. i would highly recommend this book to those working in the literacy field who are interested in thinking ‘outside the local box’. microsoft word lns18.2_notes on contributors_final.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 2 2010 89 n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s s t e p h e n b l a c k stephen black is a researcher in the centre for research in learning and change at the university of technology, sydney, australia. he is currently working on a national project with keiko yasukawa on integrated literacy and numeracy in vocational education and training. he worked in tafe nsw for more than 20 years as a head teacher of basic education, and he has been an active researcher in the adult literacy field since the 1980s. his email is stephen.black@uts.edu.au. b o b b o u g h t o n bob boughton is an associate professor in the school of education at the university of new england in armidale, nsw, australia, where he teaches adult education and development. he visits timor-leste regularly, and has recently returned from a three-week study tour in cuba, where he was able to interview the staff at the pedagogical institute for latin america and the caribbean (iplac) in havana who developed the yo, sí puedo literacy campaign model. his email is bob.boughton@une.edu.au. c a r o l a z u m a h d e n n i s carol azumah dennis recently a doctor of education degree at the institute of education, university of london. after working for some years as a teacher and manager of adult basic skills, she left further education and started working in higher education. she is currently employed as a programme director for post compulsory teacher education at the university of hull. her research to date has focused on policy and practice surrounding quality in teaching and managing adult literacy. her email is carol.dennis@hull.ac.uk. g r e g o r y m a r t i n gregory martin is a senior lecturer in education at the university of technology, sydney, australia. gregory has negotiated a number of roles including educator, activist and researcher in both school and community based contexts. he is on the editorial boards of the journal for critical education policy studies, education policy futures and the international journal for critical pedagogy. his email is gregory.martin@uts.edu.au. k e i k o y a s u k a w a keiko yasukawa is a lecturer in adult education at the university of technology, sydney, australia. she teaches and researches in adult numeracy and literacy. as an active member of the australian council for adult literacy and the nsw adult literacy and numeracy council, she has been involved in advocacy for a national literacy and numeracy policy renewal. her email is keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au. microsoft word just notes on contributors.docx n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s d a v i d b a r t o n david barton is professor of language and literacy in the department of linguistics and director of the literacy research centre at lancaster university in the uk. he has published extensively in the language and literacy field. his current interests include: literacy in contemporary society, literacy and social justice, and reading and writing on web 2.0. his email address is: d.barton@lancaster.ac.uk j o a n n a b u n t joanna bunt works at the maisie kaufmann learning centre, a non-profit community-based, registered training organisation in maryborough, queensland. her email address is: jjjbunt@gmail.com s o n d r a c u b a n sondra cuban is a lecturer in educational research at lancaster university in the uk and a researcher with the lancaster university research centre. her work focuses on migration, gender, education, and learning and literacies in communities and workplaces. her email address is: s.cuban@lancaster.ac.uk d e n y s e e d n e y denyse edney is a literacy educator with central australian remote health development services, a registered training organisation working with aboriginal health workers in alice springs and on remote communities throughout central australia. she is also a doctoral student researching aboriginal health in central australia. her email address is: denyse.edney@carhds.nt.edu.au m a r y h a m i l t o n mary hamilton is professor of adult learning and literacy in the department of educational research at lancaster university in the uk. she is also associate director of the lancaster literacy research centre. she has published extensively in the language and literacy areas, focusing on informal adult learning, literacy policy and change. her email address is: m.hamilton@lancaster.ac.uk a n n k e l l y ann kelly is a lecturer in the faculty of education, griffith university, brisbane. her current research interests are in the integration of language, literacy and numeracy with vocational training, work and vocational training practices and higher education in tafe institutes. her email address is: ann.kelly@griffith.edu.au u t a p a p e n uta papen is a lecturer in literacy studies at the department of linguistics and english language at lancaster university in the uk. she studies reading and writing as social and cultural practices. her email address is: u.papen@lancasdter.ac.uk s t e p h e n r e d e r stephen reder is professor and chair of the department of applied linguistics at portland state university in the united states. his research and teaching interests are in the area of adult literacy development, second language acquisition, and the role of technologies in informal learning. his email address is: reders@pdx.edu microsoft word lns 16.2-17.1pp91-94 kelly bookreview 16-oct.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 n o 1 2 0 0 9 91 reviews reading the world of work a review by ann kelly reading the world of work: a learner-centred approach to workplace literacy and esl by melina gallo kreiger publishing co. 2004, malabar, fl., isbn 1-57524 217-6 (hbk), 160 pages as the title of this book suggests, gallo advocates a learner-centred approach in framing workplace literacy programs. she claims that such an approach can change conventional notions of workplace literacy, improve communication practices throughout enterprises and help adult learners realise they have acquired much useful information in their lives that can be built on in their workplace learning. in addition, through further learning using learner-centred methods, they will be able to ‘transform’ rather than ‘adapt to’ conditions in their workplace. the book is divided into seven chapters. the first two chapters focus on understandings of literacy generally and, specifically, workplace literacies. here gallo critiques narrow forms of workplace literacy provision and hyperbolic statements about what workplace literacy programs promise. to ground her position she draws on previous relevant literature by boyle (1999), gee, hull and lankshear (1996), gowen (1992) and hull (1997). she contrasts such approaches with one that is learner-centred. this is described as ‘innovative’, ‘based on employees’ strengths, concerns and interests’, and resulting in their being able to ‘navigate the power dynamics and culture of the workplace’ (p.2). while i suspect many literacy researchers and practitioners would agree with such an ideological approach, gallo herself falls into the trap of hyperbole by making claims for the effectiveness of a learner-centred approach—a claim that seems to be largely based on the work of paolo freire and her own experiences. the following chapters outline a number of features gallo identifies as needing to be incorporated into the planning and implementation of a workplace program. for the most part, these seem to be sensible and, from my knowledge of such programs, would reflect good practices in this provision. for example, in the planning phase, gallo recommends that the views of all stakeholders be heard but, again, she goes further than perhaps might be feasible, by suggesting that the views of potential learners be given r e v i e w s 92 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s priority. she further suggests that goals be realistic and achievable as well as being able to be assessed and recorded; workplace documentation be used; teachers spend a little time in trying to understand the more general literacy context of the workplace as well as the specific literacies needed by the learners, including oral communication needs; and agreement with respect to critical issues such as whether attendance will be voluntary, paid and in work time, be established. one important point she makes is to recognise that the values of the learners’ co-workers must be recognised and respected and that improving individual’s literacies may have a serious impact on their interactions with these co-workers. the methods gallo recommends that literacy teachers use to develop competencies include use of discussions, representing the main themes of these in a range of forms, including visual imagery, and then textualising these themes in a written form. in drawing these ideas together, gallo proposes that ‘workplace improvement projects’ be used as the foundation for curricula. these are based on principles of situating literacy activities within authentic life situations and using problems identified by the learners as topics of particular interest. again, she asserts that this approach is successful, using her own experiences as evidence to support such claims. in her final chapter, as well as re-asserting her claims for a learner-centred approach, she proposes a number of different assessment strategies and reporting forms to show not only learner development but also to promote workplace programs. this could be an important publication for workplace literacy teachers who are starting out delivering programs in this area as, in general, it is based on sound recommendations. for others with experience in such teaching, though, there may not be much that is new. i also have reservations about a couple of aspects of the book. in addition to the very strong assertions based on scant evidence regarding the effectiveness of this particular approach, i also question whether workplace literacy programs should be focusing, to a substantive extent, on literacy activities engaged in by learners outside of work. this is especially problematic if programs are funded by employers. gallo devotes a whole chapter to advocating that this should be an integral part of workplace literacy programs. thirdly, i do not believe the first part of the title of this book reflects the content. gallo does not really address the issue of ‘reading the world of work’, except in a very limited way. finally, the dichotomies that gallo sets up in her thesis are a concern. while understandings of good practice relating to workplace literacy programs have been published quite extensively, including the principle that learner needs and interests should be integral to such programs, the work of farrell (2000), jackson (2003), kelly (2003), kleifgen (2005), scheeres (2007) and others, has shown us that workplaces are not sites that can be understood in a simplistic way. indeed, while workplace literacy programs have been operating here in australia and elsewhere for more than twenty years, there r e v i e w s k e l l y 93 has very little research into the actual literate practices of workplaces and the effectiveness of different literacy training approaches. as a result, i would have appreciated a little more tentativeness on gallo’s part in promoting her learner-centred approach as an option in developing workplace literacy programs. r e f e r e n c e s boyle, m (1999) immigrant workers and the shadow education system, educational policy, vol 13 (2 may), pp 251-279. farrell, l (2000) ways of doing, ways of being: language, education and ‘working’ identities, language and education, vol 14, no 1, pp 18-36. gee, j, hull, g and lankshear, c (1997) the new work order: behind the language of the new capitalism, westview press, boulder, co. gowen, s (1992) the politics of workplace literacy: a case study, teachers college press, new york. hull, g (1997) hearing other voices: a critical assessment of popular views on literacy and work. in hull, g, ed, changing work, changing workers: critical perspectives on language, literacy and skills, state university of new york, albany, pp. 3-42. jackson, n (2003) writing people up at work: investigations of workplace literacy. literacy and numeracy studies, vol. 10, nos 1 & 2, pp 5-22. kleifgen, j (2005) iso 9002 as literacy practice: coping with quality-control documents in a high-tech company, reading research quarterly, vol 40, no 4, pp 450-468. kelly, a (2003) the work of clerical trainees in local government council offices: an ethnomethodological study of competence and competency standards, in kelly, a, changing work, changing workers: critical perspectives on language, literacy and skills, university of queensland, unpublished doctoral dissertation. scheeres, h (2007) talk and texts at work: beyond language and literacy skills. literacy and numeracy studies, vol 15, no 2, pp 5-18. r e v i e w s 94 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word lns18.1_3review_300710.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 8 n o 1 2 0 1 0 67 review unlatching the gate – helping adult students learn mathematics a review by armin hollenstein review: safford-ramus, katherine (2008): unlatching the gate – helping adult students learn mathematics. xlibris corporation, 186 pages. isbn 978-1-4363-5121-8 (hardcover) and 978-1-4363--5120-1 (softcover) katherine safford-ramus is an associate professor of mathematics at saint peter’s college, a jesuit college in new jersey, usa. she has been teaching introductory mathematics courses at the tertiary level for 24 years at a community college. this book is based on her doctoral thesis. in chapter 1, unlatching the gate deliberates a rich specra of conditions for, and peculiarities of, mathematics learning by adults in a formal environment. influential theories and empirical findings in the fields of educational psychology, adult education and mathematics education are surveyed with a focus on adult learners and – of course –teachers and institutions. the text does not discuss empirical research undertaken by the author; it examines her broad personal teaching experience in the light of the above-mentioned body of knowledge and proposes directions for the development of adult mathematics education. in this sense, unlatching the gate is a theoretical book reflecting on practical issues. the target audience would be adult educators and students of post secondary mathematics education. the field of adult mathematics is depicted as highly heterogeneous in terms of students, teachers, goals and settings. safford-ramus discusses different contexts of learning and their conditions, including adult basic education, adult secondary education, undergraduate studies and graduate school, and also formal learning in prisons, during military service, in parent education, in the workplace and in welfare-to-work programs. heterogeneity marks also the personal aspects: differences among students in a group, between student bodies and among teachers are – in the author's view – as important as the shared common ground of adult mathematics learning and their teaching. starting out with socrates and his methodology of discussing mathematical issues with adult learners, in chapter 2, safford-ramus then fast forwards to modern theories of human learning. she avoids the often practised 'bashing of behaviourism'. she models math anxiety as a trait originating in classical conditioning à la pavlov unintentionally administered r e v i e w 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s by early math teachers. she cites thorndike who advocates for adult learning of mathematics to take place in authentic situations – and not by drilling isolated mathematical schemes. she clearly sees some of the fundamental restrictions of behaviouristic theory and their technological application in programmed instruction. she presents gestalt theory as a counter movement to behaviourism, arguing that 'the whole is more then the sum of its parts' and that looking at patterns and structures of entities is a genuine mathematical activity. in several short sections, the text describes social learning theory (bandura), and information-processing theory (gagné). entering the field of constructivism she discusses the “classic duo”: social constructivism introduced by lev vygotsky and individual constructivism or genetic epistemology by jean piaget. in a section on cognitive development, piaget’s concept of phase shifting (décalages) is addressed: horizontal décalage an individual showing different developmental stages, depending on the content in question; and vertical décalage different people in an age group staying in different developmental phases in regard to a common content. both concepts are empirically backed up and is shown to be highly significant for adult education. in a further section she discusses contemporary but theoretically more isolated issues like learning styles, multiples intelligences and brain research. last but not least, emotional factors are seen as decisive for learning mathematics, i.e. negative emotions as important and hard to overcome barriers. in chapter 3, adult learning is contrasted with the learning of children and adolescents. and it’s again thorndike laying some foundations for situated cognition and life long learning. adult learning is furthermore characterized by humanistic theories, assuming a “natural tendency for people to learn [...], if nourishing environments are provided” (cross, 1981:28, cited 62); going from maslow’s concept of “self actualization” to erikson’s and levinson’s models of individual development. key adult education theorists such as knowles, mezirow and brookfield and their contributions are explained in this section. important to safford-ramus's work are “patterns of knowing” as proposed by magolda (1992, cited 90) like absolute, transitional, independent and contextual knowledge; and the categorization of learners done by the ncsall adult development research group (helsing et al., 2001 cited 91, 92), that distinguishes instrumental from socialising and self-authoring learners. in accordance to the students perspective, the teachers perspective on teaching/learning can come in different flavours: the own teaching can be perceived as transmission of a stable body of knowledge, and/or as apprenticeship and enculturation in the field of mathematics, as developing existing knowledge, as nurturing the learners self concept and self efficacy r e v i e w h o l l e n s t e i n 69 and/or finally as part of a collective social reform. these findings are transformed in some insights into climatic aspects of a course and it’s developments. in chapter 4, headed “mathematics education theory” saffordramus takes an american-canadian perspective of institutionalized mathematics learning to describe standards. (for the author of this review, standing in a european tradition, this is the only somehow alienating aspect of this very fine book. the open spirit breathing through this book seams to pause here and give the word over to an accountant, who claims to add up the essentials.) standards for intellectual development, standards for content, standards for pedagogy and peaking at “standards 2000” with its content and process standards for school mathematics. much more interest is generated in the second part of this chapter which is devoted to pertinent topics like (a) the primacy of understanding over bare mathematical skills, (b) problems and problem solving with the ideal of real world problems in the background, critical thinking as essential part of doing mathematics in context and (c) in a cooperative manner. these standpoints reflect the need for problem based curricula, the quest of assessing this kind of knowledge, the role, information and communication technology can play and – of course – math anxiety. after the broad discussions on foundations of mathematical learning and teaching, the book changes tone and direction in chapter 5 to discussing the author's own rich teaching experiences in relation to programs and classroom delivery. last but not least chapter 6 sketches “the road ahead” by raising questions like: what do we know and what can we do? technology? what mathematics do adults need to know? special needs? how do we change the adult mathematics classroom? unlatching the gate is a good text for mathematics teachers in adult education, for students of education and for researchers looking for “sound” research questions. the range of topics covered is very broad with the effect that coverage of some aspects do appear rather sketchy and rough (e.g. the fundamental constructivist positions of piaget or vygotsky and their developments into present time) but without being inadequate. the conclusions drawn from theories and research based findings for a praxis of adult mathematics learning in formal learning contexts are interesting and foster further discussion. some questions remain, at least for the reviewer, undiscussed: how do we get adults engaged in mathematics? in a context of professional development, how is a balance to be achieved between understanding the mathematics and knowing how to do the job? what is the impact of standards and standardized assessments on adult mathematics education in the face of the great diversity (in learner groups, contexts, needs) such as is illustrated by this book? microsoft word 0712lns18.1prelims_6aug.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 1 2010 1 editorial keiko yasukawa this issue of literacy and numeracy studies offers a selection of articles that illustrates the diversity of sites in which researchers of adult literacy and numeracy are working. they focus on teacher education, workplace literacy practices, working with young people, and an autobiographical account of ‘road safety literacy’, and they demonstrate through their different methodological approaches and foci the richness of the literacy and numeracy research arena. the first article by david wallace explores a new adult literacies teaching qualification in scotland that is grounded in the social practices approach to literacy. in many western societies the neo-liberal discourse on education can be seen to limit the possibilities of learning and the ways teachers can work with students, but not in scotland. thus, as wallace describes, a program for teachers that foregrounds learners' experiences and knowledge creates tensions between what the trainee tutors expect from the course and what they encounter. however, the author argues, using the concept of 'liminality', that 'it is these contested or uncertain spaces the stage of liminality' when transformative learning takes place. the article is an account of an ambitious, principled and ultimately hopeful approach to the education of adult literacy tutors at a time when interest in the creation of knowledge and meaning of teaching practice through critical inquiry is increasingly being displaced by externally manufactured, standardised curriculum. in the second article, ann kelly provides a study of tacit literacy practices in the workplace that are deployed through oral communication. she argues that these tacit literacies play a critical role in enabling the workers to perform their tasks, yet they remain unrecognised in the relevant industry training packages that ostensibly articulate the competencies needed in the workplaces. her argument is not for these particular tacit literacies to be 'added' into the training packages; rather it is that work practices cannot be pre-packaged, and literacy practices in particular, emerge in particular contexts and in localised circumstances. teachers and workplace supervisors therefore need to be more closely observant and document the work practices of their workers in order to be able to develop a more authentic description of the practices in which their trainees and workers are engaged. in australia, this article provides some important and challenging insights that need to be taken notice of by industry leaders who are rediscovering adult literacy and numeracy as a key workplace issue (australian industry group 2010), and are piloting programs to improve workers' literacy and numeracy levels. e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s andrew chodkiewicz, jacquie widin and keiko yasukawa provide the third article in this paper in which they present a case study of the teaching practices of experienced adult educators who work with young people who have disengaged from the formal school system. their study of the teachers' practices, through which the teachers effectively and skilfully engage the young people, leads them initially to challenge the claims made about the social practices approach to literacy and numeracy pedagogy. what they observe is not obviously what might be recognised as a social practices approach. however, through closer and more critical reflection, they themselves arrive at a new interpretation of what could be called a social practices approach. such an approach may actively avoid drawing directly on the learners' lived experiences or using materials that are authentic to the learners in their everyday world, and yet still create the possibilities for the learners' new and desired learner identities to emerge. the last article by jinghe han, michael singh and dacheng zhao stretches our understanding of what literacy is by providing an autobiographical study of a chinese woman learning 'road safety literacy' in an english speaking country. the article shows that like learning to read printed text, learning about road safety might be characterised from a functional perspective as a purely instrumental process of learning signs and rules, and acquiring psychomotor skills to manoeuvre their vehicle. however, their examination of the lived experiences of the learner driver shows that a wide range of personal and socio-cultural factors can interfere with and texture the way the learner makes meaning of road safety; for example, the learner in this study had brought with her a view that road rules were not something that had strict legal standing because of they way they were regarded in the country where she grew up. this issue concludes with a book review by armin hollenstein of the publication unlatching the gate: helping adult students learn mathematics by katherine safford-ramus (2008), based on her doctoral study. references australian industry group, 2010, national workforce literacy project: report on employers (sic) views on workplace literacy and numeracy skills, australian industry group, north sydney. safford-ramus, katherine, 2008, unlatching the gate: helping adult students learn mathematics, xlibris, usa. microsoft word 0705lns151backpage.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 1 2 0 0 6 97 reviews academic culture: a student’s guide a review by maria simms academic culture: a student’s guide to studying at university by jean brick national centre for english language teaching and research (nceltr) 2 0 0 6 , s y d n e y , i s b n 9 7 8 7 4 1 3 8 1 3 5 ( p b k ) i s b n 1 7 4 1 3 8 1 3 5 5 ( p b k ) 2 6 3 p a g e s jean brick’s book is an excellent guide to academic culture and skills for students and academics alike. although she describes the book as being about academic culture it is much more than that. i found it to be a comprehensive, useful and very readable guide to english for a variety of academic purposes. academic culture sits between the in-depth analysis of university culture and the nature of disciplines described by tony becher and paul trowler in academic tribes and territories and the more skills-based texts such as stella cottrell’s the study skills handbook. brick has combined analyses of academic culture with how the culture of different disciplines forms a basis for the knowledge and skills they expect of students. the book gives a very informed account of the aspects of culture that are common to universities in ‘australia, canada, ireland, new zealand, the uk and the usa’ (3) and what constitutes a discipline. the opening chapters explain academic culture as the ‘attitudes, values and ways of behaving that are shared by people who work or study in universities’ (2) and give a very useful account of the way disciplines work in an academic setting. brick describes the features common to all disciplines (knowledge through debate and argument, academic position, substantiated evidence) then discusses their divergence from each other as due to the questions they ask, the methods they use to ‘investigate’ (3) and the style of texts they expect students to write. while this explanation of academic culture gives students insight to the r e v i e w s 98 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s scholarly world they must negotiate, it also provides a rationale for the disparate research and writing methodologies in an academic institution. as an academic study skills lecturer, one of the pleasures for me in reading the book was the layout of the chapters, which are designed to make complex information about university culture, thinking and practice, accessible and applicable. each chapter opens with the topic heading, learning objectives and a word list. these are followed by discussion of the topic using texts as examples, a summary of the chapter’s main points, then exercises that enable students (and teachers) to put the information into practice. there is always room for new ideas on the more commonly explored topics of academic reading, writing, preparation for lectures and participation in tutorials, particularly for the specifics brick uses to show how these things can be done. this information is often news to students and it would be hard to find an academic skills lecturer who is not on the look out for different approaches to familiar topics. i was also very interested to see how brick tackled the more ephemeral topics which include academic thinking, the place of the student’s voice in assignments and inductive and deductive reasoning. voice is an important element that many students do not understand. it can be difficult to explain but brick does it very well. the chapter, ‘voices in academic texts’, describes what is meant by voice and how to distinguish the writer’s voice from other sources used in the text. the first two chapters on this subject lead logically into brick’s explanation of plagiarism. using examples, brick’s chapter on academic integrity gives students (and academics) very clear guidelines as to what constitutes plagiarism and how much referencing needs to be done particularly in the tricky area of paraphrasing which is so often misunderstood and can lead to unintentional plagiarism. i think the chapter on the differences between written and spoken text offers an invaluable aid to oral presentation. the student who races through their tutorial paper, head down from start to panting finish, often misses the subtlety of transferring ideas from a purely written form to writing for spoken presentation. while reading any paper in its entirety would not usually be desirable in a tutorial, writing a paper that is to be presented orally lets the student know there is a stylistic difference in work that is written to be spoken and this includes how to attribute sources of information in spoken material. if i have a quibble with brick’s journey through the highways and byways of academic thought, culture and practice, it is with her discussion of inductive and deductive reasoning. brick argues that most ‘lecturers in english-speaking universities expect students to use a deductive approach’ while inductive reasoning is used more often by our ‘foreign counterparts’ (38). while this may be true, there is a belief that in western universities the r e v i e w s l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 99 inductive process of moving from the specific to the general to arrive at a probable conclusion is more widespread in the humanities and that deductive reasoning, with its logical progression from correct premise to proven conclusion, is the preferred methodology of the sciences (although i believe the two modes are more mixed and matched than this would suggest). i think it would have been useful for brick to extend her discussion of this topic to how various disciplines in english speaking universities can apply the two kinds of reasoning. however, the chapter provides a lively discussion of what constitutes inductive and deductive reasoning that will not go astray for anyone interested in academic culture and practice. overall this is a terrific source of information about academic culture and the skills students need to succeed at university. it’s one to include in every university library. r e f e r e n c e s becher, t and trowler, r (2001) academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines (2nd ed), society of research into higher education and open university press, philadelphia. cottrell, s (2003) the study skills handbook (2nd ed), macmillan basingstoke, palgrave. l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 1 2 0 0 6 100 microsoft word lns 17.3 inner pages23.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 7 n o 3 2 0 0 9 1 keiko yasukawa, stephen black, alison lee, hermine scheeres, jean searle, rosie wickert and (editors) contents volume 17 no 3 2009 editorial alisa belzer & ralf st. clair articles ‘i am not a “good” teacher, in terms of the college; i don’t do all their paperwork’: reasons for teacher resistance to the new accountability demands of the english skills for life strategy karin tusting 6 accountability requirements and professional development in the us adult basic and literacy education system cristine smith 27 literacy, learners and laws: a turkish case study of surviving regulation özlem ünlühisarcikli 42 extending accountability: from compliance to learning ajit gopalakrishnan 57 notes on contributors 73 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s editorial for several years our work has addressed the impact on practice of national policies related to standardisation and accountability in the us, england, and scotland (belzer 2003, 2007; belzer & st. clair 2003, 2007; st. clair & belzer 2007). our purpose has not been to evaluate the implementation of these initiatives or their effectiveness in terms of improving learner outcomes, but rather to explore two interrelated assumptions. the first is that significant changes in adult basic education policy have an impact on the field that is both broader and narrower than their initial designs might suggest. the second is that implementation of policy is shaped not just by top down statute and regulation, but by an interactive dynamic among practitioners and learners, program managers and directors, and local and national authorities that control many of the funds supporting adult basic education. analyses of standardisation and accountability policies from these perspectives have helped shed light on the ways in which they can provide useful structures for advancing the aims of adult basic education, while at the same time limiting the field’s responsiveness to learners, narrowing what can be accomplished, and pushing practitioners to change practices simply to appear compliant. yet they also shape, often implicitly, definitions of literacy and assumptions about teaching and learning, resulting in a far broader reach than the procedural changes they initiate. when we developed the call for papers for this special issue, we knew we had only scratched the surface by looking at three national systems and that the passage of time changes the understanding of policy. it seemed clear that a range of perspectives drawn from writers who are positioned differently in the field could deepen our understanding of the ways policy and practice shape each other and influence the work of practitioners and the provision of services for learners. the papers we have selected for this issue tell a broader story that amplifies and extends our earlier work. tusting investigates how standardisation and accountability embedded in the english skills for life system can contradict practitioners’ images of good teaching, leaving them feeling sometimes inadequate, sometimes resistant, and sometimes responsible for absorbing the brunt of policies they see as putting undue demands on learners. while tusting studies the impact of policy on practitioners’ images of themselves as teachers soon after the policy was put in place, the articles by smith and gopalakrishnan discuss accountability implementation in the us alisa belzer & ralf st. clair e d i t o r i a l l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 3 approximately 10 years after it was initiated. both do so from a systems perspective that looks at how policies play out over time in aspects of the field that were not necessarily the proximal “sites” of the policy at the outset. specifically, smith raises questions about how initiating a standardised national accountability system “has affected professional development systems, activities, and opportunities”, wondering whether the need to train teachers to comply with the national reporting system (nrs), an accountability system put in place in the late 1990s, has affected opportunities to develop professionally in areas related to teaching and learning. she assumes that these two objectives could be in competition for limited professional development time and money. gopalakrishnan’s paper documents the ways in which the accountability system, though initially implemented in purely procedural ways, has come to have a substantive impact on program management, curriculum and instruction. although some have questioned the validity of outcomes data from the nrs, he does find that changes within the accountability system yielded strong indications of improvement on the measures used in his state. he looks in particular at how the accountability system influences practice at the program and classroom levels once its newness has worn off. he found many programs stopped scrambling to comply with new demands and started actually making use of the information generated. ünlühisarcıklı gives a fresh perspective by introducing us to the turkish adult basic education system, in which she describes accountability as being “mainly concerned with compliance with laws and regulations, rather than the ‘quality’ of provision as such”. her paper demonstrates the ways in which broad centralised assessment policy can be interpreted with great variation when it is not aligned with accountability, professional development, or assessment strategies. this leaves much to the instructor’s discretion suggesting the opportunity for significant responsiveness, but also substantial variation in outcomes. these papers make clear that system level changes in accountability procedures and expectations go well beyond their original intent, scope, or focus, to have an impact on teaching, learning and program management, and more broadly on the nature of service provision, the setting of priorities for whose purposes for learning get met, and the climate for instruction. although change seems almost inevitable, the nature of that change seems less predictable; it is shaped by variations in interpretation, capacity and understanding, and level and quality of compliance. while tusting and ünlühisarcıklı illustrate aptly the combination of likely but unpredictable change wrought by broad centralised policies regarding accountability and standardisation, smith and gopalakrishnan push us to think about the conditions that can maximise the potential of positive impact of well intentioned policy (although good 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s intentions cannot be taken as a given). these four papers continue to strengthen the view that systems need coherence and alignment with regard to professional development, meaningful data management, and consistent messaging about the purposes and uses to which accountability measures will be put to improve practice rather than punish programs and practitioners. without these, changes are likely to be carried out on the surface, based on a fear of surveillance and negative consequences for failure to comply. as a result the changes may not help learners at all, but cost practitioners dearly in terms of time, energy, and emotional turmoil. changes can be costly (literally and figuratively) without reaping much actual benefit. all four papers affirm that only when accountability requirements are viewed as providing information that can inform and improve practice in meaningful ways will they yield meaningfully improved practice. they demonstrate that professional development, leadership, and timely and specific access to data that is directly informative (along with the know-how to use it) are of critical importance. these three elements are interlocking and interdependent, functioning like three legs of a stool. without any one, the stool will wobble. however, at least as important as the stability provided by the three legs, is the “floor” upon which they rest, pointing to the critical importance of an accountability system that can help a range of stakeholders make useful decisions about service provision and practice. timely data that is not informative is not meaningful. the effort to document and report on learning gains is busy work if assessment does not measure growth that is relevant not just to funders but to a range of stakeholders, most importantly learners. finally, information generated by accountability data and supported by professional development should yield knowledge that has the potential both to inform and improve practice in meaningful ways. these conditions will create a strong base upon which to rest the stool. although we believe it to be a meaningful step, there is a need for more opportunities like the one represented by this issue of literacy and numeracy studies for different countries and different systems to learn from each other about what happens, under what circumstances and how, when it comes to accountability, systems of standardisation can have an increasingly positive outcome. references belzer, a (2003) living with it: federal policy implementation in adult basic education. the cases of the workforce investment act and welfare reform. ncsall reports #24, national center for the study of adult learning and literacy, cambridge, ma. belzer, a (2007). implementing the workforce investment act from inbetween: state agency responses to federal accountability policy e d i t o r i a l l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 5 in adult basic education, educational policy, vol 21, no 4, pp 555588. belzer, a & st. clair, r (2003) opportunities and limits: an update on adult literacy education,eric clearinghouse on adult, career, and vocational education, columbus, ohio. belzer, a & st. clair, r ( 2007 ) the world touches the classroom: using “anthropolicy” to understand political, economic and social effects on adult literacy education, in guzzetti, bj, ed, literacy for the 21st century: adult literacy, praeger, westport, ct, pp. 17-35. st. clair, r & belzer, a (2007 ) the challenges of consistency: national systems for assessment and accountability in adult literacy education, in campbell, p, ed, measures of success: assessment and accountability in adult basic education, grassroots press, edmonton, alberta, pp 159-206. 1lns161prelims keiko yasukawa, stephen black, alison lee, hermine scheeres, jean searle and rosie wickert (editors) contents volume 16 number 1 2008 editorial keiko yasukawa 1 articles creativity in everyday literacy practices: the contribution of an ethnographic approach karin tusting and uta papen 5 portfolio building: the relationship with literacies in students’ everyday lives angela brzeski 25 mapping the adult numeracy curriculum: cultural capital and conscientization helen oughton 39 a new literacies approach to academic numeracy practices in higher education robert prince and arlene archer 63 revisiting reading: exploring an intensive reading pedagogy in adult literacy helen de silva joyce, susan hood and david rose 77 notes on contributors 95 subscription information 97 editorial policy and notes for contributors 98 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 16 no 1 2008 1 editorial keiko yasukawa the value of pluralist views of literacy and numeracy afforded by new literacy studies (nls) for researching and understanding literacy and numeracy is now well-established with the wealth of published studies, including articles in previous issues of literacy and numeracy studies. nls offers an alternative lens through which we can observe literacy and numeracy practices in places and in ways not possible through the more ‘official’ and dominant lens of regulatory authorities. in this issue, too, four of the authors are writing with an nls approach and they present studies that alert us to aspects of literacy and numeracy practices that extend possibilities for further conceptual development in nls. the first article by karin tusting and uta papen shifts our attention from the different ways in which people read and negotiate texts to the creativity that is exercised in the making of texts. they argue that creativity has been a neglected area of study in nls, perhaps because of the traditional association of creativity with notions of the gifted and talented, and elite notions of aesthetics and artfulness. the authors use a typology of forms of creativity suggested by banaji and burn (2007) that distinguishes between the creativity associated with: the ‘creative genius’ that is attributed to a special talent and giftedness; ‘democratic creativity’ that recognises the kinds of artfulness that are expressed by the creative geniuses, but recognises and affirms their manifestation in popular culture and its artefacts; and ‘ubiquitous and popular creativity’ that is evident in everyday, common occurrences of creating new meaning-making situations. using ethnographic methods, the authors present close observations of the production processes of a parish bulletin in a catholic parish in england, and advertising texts in namibia. the importance of highlighting the creative dimensions in the way nls pursue the study of literacy practices is borne out of the observation that karin tusting and uta papen make that while literacy practices are socially and culturally contingent, they are not socially determined. the participants in the literacy practices bring new influences in the forms of purpose, interests, values and sense of aesthetics to also ‘shape’ the product and its meaning. expressing the part that the participants play in literacy practices as ‘creativity’ resonates with the debate that has been taking place in the social studies of technology about what it means to talk about technology as being ‘social’. one of the key projects for the field of science and technology studies (sts), has been to theorise the relationship e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s between science and technology and the social world. starting from an earlier thesis of technological determinism (that technology is an autonomous force that controls social development), the field has contemplated the idea of social determinism (that social interests determine the direction of technological development), and are now increasingly contemplating a messier, more blurred relationship between the technological and the social that involves a mutual shaping of technology and society (see for example, bijker and law 1992, mackenzie and wajcman 1999, latour 2005). if we were to think of texts as technological artefacts, then the attention that tusting and papen have drawn to the study of creativity in literacy practices could well find some resonance with some of the conceptual work being undertaken in sts. the second article by angela brzeski is also about the production of text, in this case portfolio building in a vocational education course in a further education college in the uk. the author contemplates the challenges brought about when individuals have to make sense of the different literacy practices expected of them in different social situations. there have been several studies examining the challenges for children’s school learning when their home literacy and numeracy practices are divergent from the literacy and numeracy practices that are valued in school (see for example, hannon 1995, cairney 2000). brzeski examines the same question for adult learners who are learning to build a portfolio as part of their vocational education course, and asks how teachers can build on the learners’ home literacy practices in their efforts to learn the literacies demanded of them in the further education course. using the metaphors of resonance and dissonance, the author looks at the aspects of the literacies such as genre, audience, purpose and media, experienced in the home and in the college to see whether there is resonance or dissonance across each of these ‘wavelengths’. where she has found dissonance, she suggests teaching and learning strategies for helping to create resonance, but also signals that in some cases the curricula for the vocational courses need to be re-designed to avoid learners being ranked on a ‘literacy ladder’ that achieves nothing more than labelling some learners as having literacy deficits. although the pluralist views of literacy and numeracy, and the resistance to privileging any single form of literacy or numeracy, are features of the social practices approach to literacy and numeracy studies, helen oughton’s article about her adult numeracy learners in community education centres in the uk reminds us that we cannot ignore the values the learners place on some forms of numeracies over others. the author uses mindmapping as a research tool to examine what the learners who were studying a curriculum based on an autonomous model of mathematics wanted to see in their numeracy curriculum. the kind of numeracy that dominated the mindmaps from learners in three out of four groups of e d i t o r i a l l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 3 learners was one based on learning autonomous skills, similar to what was in the curriculum, while the curriculum sought by several of the students in the fourth group reflected an understanding of numeracy as a socially situated critical tool. acknowledging that this is a preliminary study, and using bernstein’s theory that curriculum shapes learners’ motivation, the author explains why the learners in three of the groups expressed a desire to acquire autonomous mathematics. however, she postulates that the level of ‘conscientisation’ that the learners in the fourth group had developed through working in areas that engaged them in social justice and policy issues may have moderated their acceptance of the autonomous numeracy curriculum. the pluralism of the nls enables recognition of academic numeracy practices as one of many legitimate numeracy practices. the fourth article by robert prince and arlene archer theorises academic numeracy as social practice and illustrates how nls and the concept of multi-modality can be helpful in theorising the kinds of meaning-making practices that are involved in academic numeracy. the article marries the work in nls involving literacy practices with the work that has been evolving in developing a theorisation of mathematics as a critical social tool, drawing on literature from critical mathematics education (see for example, skovsmose 1994, gutstein 2006) and ethnomathematics (see for example, d’ambrosio 1985, knijnik 1997). the example that the authors provide to examine the ways in which students make meaning out of ‘bmi charts’ reveals some similarities with critical literacy practices, for example the questioning of the authority of the text. however, it also illustrates how academic numeracy requires more than being able to ask the critical questions; it requires the ‘reader’ to also engage with the questions in mathematical ways, and this reinforces the view that while literacy and numeracy are inseparable in many instances, numeracy practices are more than special examples of literacy practices. the final contribution in this issue is by helen de silva joyce, susan hood and david rose. these authors describe a pedagogy of ‘intensive reading’. the pedagogy they describe is an explicit and deliberate methodology for teaching reading. the authors argue that this fills a gap in adult literacy teaching where there are well-developed approaches for supporting students writing, but there has been much less attention given to supporting students’ reading. their article outlines in detail the systematic implementation of the intensive reading pedagogy in several adult literacy classrooms, including their collaboration with the teachers who are now implementing the pedagogy. the article provides a helpful and comprehensive set of reflections on the impact and implications of more broadly adopting this pedagogy that takes into account the complex environment in which teachers are currently working, for example, a e d i t o r i a l 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s casualised adult language and literacy teaching workforce, highly uneven levels of resourcing of different providers, and the disparate language backgrounds of the students. although the authors do not set out in this article to illustrate or extend our conceptual understanding of nls as do the other articles in this issue, their analysis of the contexts and practices within which their pedagogy can work reminds us that not only the literacy practices of the learners, but their teachers’ pedagogical practices too are shaped by, and themselves shape the broader social, cultural and political contexts in which the teaching practices are located. references banaji, s and burn, a (2007) creativity through a rhetorical lens: implications for schooling, literacy and media education, literacy, vol 41, no 2, pp 62-70. bijker, eb and law, j eds, (1992) shaping technology/shaping society: studies in sociotechnical change, the mit press, cambridge, ma. cairney, trevor (2000) beyond the classroom walls: the rediscovery of the family and community as partners in education, educational review, vol 52, no 2, pp 163-174. d’ambrosio, ubiratan (1985) ethnomathematics and its place in the history of mathematics, for the learning of mathematics, vol 5, no 1, pp 41-48. gutstein, eric (2006) reading and writing the world with mathematics: towards a pedagogy of social justice, routledge, new york. hannon, peter, (1994) literacy, home and school: research and practice in teaching literacy with parents, routledge-falmer, london. knijnik, gelsa (1997) an ethnomathematical approach in mathematical education: a matter of political power, in powell, arthur b and frankenstein, marilyn, eds, ethnomathematics: challenging eurocentrism in mathematics education, suny, new york, pp 403-410. latour, bruno (2005) reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-networktheory, oxford univeristy press, ny. mackenzie, donald and wajcman, judy, eds, (1999) the social shaping of technology, 2nd edition, open university press, buckingham. skovsmose, ole (1994) towards a philosophy of critical mathematics education, kluwer, dordrecht. microsoft word lns 17.2 inner pages final.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 7 n o 2 2 0 0 9 1 keiko yasukawa, stephen black, alison lee, hermine scheeres, jean searle, rosie wickert and (editors) contents volume 17 number 2 2009 editorial rosie wickert 1 articles multilateral cooperation for literacy promotion under stress: governance and management issues leslie j. limage 4 unesco, literacy and leslie limage joseph lo bianco 35 notes on contributors 42 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s editorial readers of literacy and numeracy studies will be familiar with the editorial policy which aims ‘to promote scholarship and critical analysis of policy and practices concerning the many complex ways that adult literacy and numeracy are implicated in adult life’. normally this is achieved through the publication of papers which have been blind reviewed in the usual way. however, literacy and numeracy studies is not just a refereed journal (one of the very few dedicated to adult literacy and numeracy), its eighteen volumes also chronicle the development of this important area of work over the last twenty years of its presence in australia and elsewhere. this documentary capacity of the journal takes priority on occasion over the adherence to its strict referencing practices. this special issue of the journal is an example of the editors’ concern to enable this documentary role to occur. the writer of the main paper published here is dr. leslie limage, well known to many readers as the key driver of unesco’s stance on literacy and basic education. her widely known identification with this program means that independent blind refereeing of her paper is impossible – as she has indeed discovered elsewhere. a snapshot of leslie limage’s career provides an important context for her concerns. her doctorate in 1975 on adult literacy policies and programs probably made her the first person in the world to have earned a doctorate focused on this topic. prior to joining unesco in 1983 she worked on language and literacy policy for oecd-ceri (centre for educational research and innovation). from 1983 to 2006 she held positions at various levels of unesco’s education sector in paris as a program specialist in all aspects of basic education from early childhood to adult literacy, including, importantly, coordinator for the 1990 un international literacy year. as she says in her paper in this edition, she has been involved at a policy and program level, worldwide, in children’s and adult literacy at all levels throughout her adult life. limage’s account is an important addition to the relatively small number of what i have referred to as ‘stories of actors involved in policy struggles’ (wickert 2001) or what various contributors to yeatman’s 1998 volume activism and the policy process term ‘insider policy activism’. this is generally interpreted to mean activism ‘inside’ government policy machinery. the role of unesco in public policy processes is an interesting rosie wickert e d i t o r i a l l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 3 question that beckons further debate. for now, i am assuming that the insider role in the bureaucracy of the united nations is not unlike that of state agencies. paul dugdale, a contributor to yeatman’s collection, is interested in the ‘ethics of policy activism inside government’ and of what yeatman interprets as the ‘the peculiar ethical discipline and passion of insider activism’ (p.14). dugdale notes that there are ‘constraints on the activities of employees of government agencies which have implications for what aspects of policy activism they can pursue’ (p.111). ignoring these constraints can lead to exclusion in various ways. notwithstanding, again as pointed out by dugdale, insider policy activists have two important ‘technologies’ or ‘power tools’ inaccessible to outsider activists: ‘the discernment of opportunities or ‘issues’ in contemporary debates, and the practical mapping of a path through the policy process ... knowing how to frame policy statements so they actually make a positive difference’ (p.115). limage’s account provides a case study of both the ethical dimensions and constraints, as well as the pragmatic practical possibilities of insider activism. dugdale conceptualises this as: the turning of ‘lofty remits’ to ‘practical action’, as lo bianco observes in his commentary piece later in this volume. although we see ample evidence in limage’s account of her use of the ‘technologies’ available to insider activists, it is the ethical dimension that dominates her concerns. some may argue that limage’s conflicts are driven by an ethical commitment to her profession (education) and clearly this is an important motivator for her. however, what comes across so strongly is her sense of deep disappointment at what she perceives to be the loss of the organisation’s commitment to the traditional ethics and professionalism of bureaucratic responsibility and accountability. inevitably, as with any personal account of historical events, particularly those subject to the micro-politics of large organisations, there will be other, contesting, narratives of what happened during the period in unesco covered in limage’s paper. her analysis does not necessarily reflect the views of the editors; rather, it reflects our concern to ensure that her account is available for interested readers and further analysis. if there is to be debate about these events, then the editors welcome contribution to such debate – which we will publish in the refractions section of our regular editions. we developed the refractions section in recognition that adult literacy and numeracy are deeply enmeshed with politics, and this section offers the opportunity for contributors who may not seek independent refereeing of their work, to publish more rhetorical and controversial pieces likely to interest our readers. knowing that controversy can undermine the capacity of the actors involved in controversy to be heard, we invited professor joseph lo bianco to write a piece to provide a commentary on leslie’s paper. many of our 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s readers will be aware, not only of professor lo bianco’s activism in getting adult literacy recognised as an important policy issue in australia, but also his work with unesco. he is, therefore, a well informed commentator whose observation that, ‘in a complex multilateral and linguistic agency like unesco, politicisation runs deep, the consequences are profound and the work of committed individuals ultimately crucial’ (p35), is particularly pertinent to limage’s story. references dugdale, paul (1998) the art of insider activism, in yeatman, anna, ed (1998) activism and the policy process, allen and unwin, sydney. pp.104121. wickert, rosie (2001) politics, activism and the process of policy production: adult literacy in australia, in lo bianco, joseph and wickert, rosie, eds, australian policy activism for language and literacy, language australia publications, melbourne. pp.75-91. yeatman, anna, ed (1998) activism and the policy process, allen and unwin, sydney. microsoft word notes oncontributors/backpages.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 8 n o 1 2 0 1 0 70 n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s 
 andrew
chodkiewicz
 andrew chodkiewicz is a senior researcher in the languages program, faculty of arts and social sciences at the university of technology, sydney with an interest in community based research related to literacy practices, community languages, cultural diversity and human rights education. his email address is: andrew.chodkiewicz@uts.edu.au 
jinghe
han

 dr jinghe (jing-her) han is a senior lecturer of education in the centre for education research at the university of western sydney, australia. she is currently undertaking an arc discovery project, researching supervisory pedagogies to enhance international students’ studies in australia through engaging their intellectual heritage. her email address is:j.han@uws.edu.au. armin
hollenstein
 armin hollenstein is a lecturer in educational psychology at the institute for educational science (university of bern) and is co-leading two national projects concentrating on adult literacy. after some initial years as a teacher in primary and high school, he started teaching and researching in the fields of mathematics education and classroom management at colleges for teacher education. over the last two decades he has been addressing the needs of future and inservice teachers in kindergarden, primary, secondary and high school. his email address is: armin.hollenstein@edu.unibe.ch ann
kelly
 ann kelly is a lecturer in the school of education and professional studies at griffith university in australia. her research interests include literacy practices, educational assessment and the retention and training of mature aged workers. her email address is: ann.kelly@griffith.edu.au 
 michael
singh
 michael singh is professor of education in the centre for education research at the university of western sydney, australia . he is director of n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s 71 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the knowledge work democracy research program and leader of the rosete program. he is researching the place of international research candidates' knowledge in internationalising australian research education , along with queensland's education and training reforms in senior learning (years 10, 11 and 12). his email address is: m.j.singh@uws.edu.au david
wallace
 david wallace is senior lecturer in the department of educational and professional studies at the university of strathclyde in glasgow. since 2006 he has managed the scottish consortium responsible for designing and implementing the pilot teaching qualification in adult literacies. his email address is: david.wallace@strath.ac.uk jacquie
widin
 jacquie widin is a senior lecturer in theory and practice of tesol at the university of technology, sydney. her research includes language and literacy teacher education with a focus on teaching practice and critical analyses of the internationalisation of education. her email address is jacquie.widin@uts.edu.au keiko
yasukawa
 keiko yasukawa is a lecturer in adult education, and adult literacy and numeracy at the university of technology, sydney. her research includes adult education teacher development and adult teaching practices, and theories and practices of critical mathematics. her email address is keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au dacheng
zhao
 dr dacheng zhao (da-chung jow) is a research fellow in the centre for education research at the university of western sydney, australia , and coordinator of the research oriented school engaged teacher education program . his study of mathematics practices in australian and chinese schools was published in the international journal of science and mathematics education and mathematics education in different cultural traditions: a comparative study of east asia and the west. his email address is: d.zhao@uws.edu.au l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 8 n o 1 2 0 1 0 72 editorial policy and notes for contributors literacy and numeracy studies is an international refereed journal which aims to promote research, scholarship and critical analysis of policy and practice concerning the many and complex ways that adult literacy and numeracy are implicated in adult life. one of the aims of the journal is to extend narrow functional and externally imposed definitions of literacy and numeracy to multiple, open definitions that focus on what people do with their skills, and how they use different texts and modalities in differing contexts. the possibilities for adult literacy and numeracy learning occur in all environments and in many ways. this means that the editors are pleased to accept papers from a range of theoretical perspectives and research approaches, from researchers and practitioners emerging from differing epistemological positions. articles published in previous issues reflect the diverse sites and orientations where literacy and numeracy practitioners work both with people with english-speaking language backgrounds and those with language backgrounds other than english. research sites have included workplaces, prisons, communities, higher education, vocational and adult education, adult esl, indigenous populations and virtual environments. literacy and numeracy are thus understood here as socio-cultural phenomena, the successful acquisition of which moves beyond test and survey results or conventional education and training settings. relevant terms that may help potential contributors determine if this is the journal for them include adult basic education, adult and community education, workplace language, literacy and numeracy, academic language, literacy and numeracy, online literacies and critical literacy and numeracy. because adult literacy and numeracy are emerging as a relatively new focus for research and academic interest internationally, the editors actively encourage submissions from post-graduate research students in the kinds of areas indicated above. finally, in recognition that adult literacy and numeracy are controversial and are engaged with the politics of equity, participation and social justice, the editors offer the opportunity, through the refractions section of the journal, for contributors to publish more rhetorical and controversial pieces likely to interest our readers. refractions papers are not normally submitted to external review. responses to refractions pieces are also welcomed. literacy and numeracy studies is published twice a year. manuscripts should be between three and five thousand words and can be emailed to: hermine.scheeres@uts.edu.au or rwickert@scu.edu.au. they should be double spaced, with ample margins, and bear the title of the contribution. paper title, name(s) of author(s) and address for correspondence should be e d i t o r i a l p o l i c y a n d n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 73 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s placed on a separate page. an abstract of no more than one hundred and fifty words is required. each manuscript is blind reviewed by at least two reviewers. proofs will not normally be sent to authors unless there are substantial changes and/or figures and diagrams. they should be corrected and returned within seven days. major alterations to the text will not be accepted. general
guidelines
and
style
conventions
 please note the referencing conventions used by literacy and numeracy studies and the requirement for non-discriminatory language. note also that, while literacy and numeracy studies is published in australia, it has a diverse and international audience. please clarify any terms that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers outside the country of origin of the paper, and to those outside the disciplinary fields of adult literacy and numeracy. please observe the following conventions: • do not use ‘ibid.’ (and the like) when repeating references • multiple references within parentheses should be divided by a comma, not a semicolon, and there should be no use of ‘and’ within such multiple references • single quotation marks (‘ ... ’) should be used rather than double (“ ... ”) except for quotes within quotes and please use ‘smart quotes’ • only direct quotes (ie. data) should be in italics • books, reports or other major works named in the article should be in italics • numbers from one to ten should be written as words unless in brackets, dot points, figure/table headings or endnotes. references
in
the
text
 references in the text should give the author’s name and year of publication (with page numbers if necessary) in the following style: ‘coproduction can be defined as the “degree of overlap between two sets of participants – regular producers and consumers”. the resultant overlap represents a joint production of outcomes’ (brudney and england 1983, cited in wirth 1991:79). if the quote is more than thirty words it should be indented in the following style: discourse contributes first of all to the construction of what are variously referred to as ‘social identities’ and ‘subject positions’. secondly, discourse helps construct social relationships between e d i t o r i a l p o l i c y a n d n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 74 people. and thirdly, discourse contributes to the construction of systems of knowledge and belief. (fairclough 1992:64) footnotes
 footnotes should be avoided. if necessary (as in some forms of historical referencing), numbered end notes can be used to elaborate matters which may be difficult to present in the journal’s reference style. these should be kept to a minimum. tables,
figures,
diagrams
and
illustrations
 authors must supply camera-ready copy of complex tables, figures, diagrams, illustrations and photographs. reference
lists
 please use full names whenever possible. multiple references for one author should be in order of publication. second and subsequent authors should be referenced surname, followed by first name. page numbers must be included for all journal articles and book and report chapters. only references cited in the text should be listed and these should be in full at the end of the manuscript as follows: australian committee for training curriculum (actrac) (1993) the national framework of adult english language, literacy and numeracy competence, actrac productions ltd, frankston, victoria. freebody, peter, gee, james, luke, allan and street, brian (1997) literacy as critical social practice: an introduction, the falmer press, brighton. hammond, jennifer and wickert, rosie (1993) pedagogical relations between adult esl and adult literacy: directions for research, open letter, vol 3, no 2, pp 16-31. humphries, b (1997) from critical thought to emancipatory action: contradictory research goals? sociological research online, vol 2, no 1, retrieved 1 feb 2004 from http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/2/1/3.html. johnston, betty (1993/unpublished paper) report on unesco adult numeracy seminar, marly-le-roi, france, march. e d i t o r i a l p o l i c y a n d n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 75 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s kirkpatrick, andy (1993) chinese composition structure: ancient or modern? in conference proceedings of the ninth national languages conference, northern territory department of education, darwin, pp 189-205. lee, alison and wickert, rosie (1995) reading the discourses of adult basic education teaching, in foley, griff, ed, understanding adult education and training, allen and unwin, sydney, pp 134-146. willis, sue, ed, (1990) being numerate: what counts?, australian council for educational research, hawthorn, victoria. author’s
bio‐note
 this note should be brief (two or three sentences at most) and include (i) author’s institutional positions or affiliations and (ii) a full address for correspondence. a very brief note of author’s special interests may follow. acknowledgments
 any acknowledgments authors wish to make should be included in a separate headed section at the end of the manuscript. please do not incorporate these into the bio-note. lns161backpages l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 2 2 0 0 7 95 notes on contributors arlene archer arlene archer is the co-ordinator of the writing centre at the centre for higher education development, university of cape town, south africa. her email address is: aarcher@ched.uct.ac.za angela brzeski angela brzeski works at preston college in the united kingdom and lectures in lectures in business administration at preston college and is a college-based researcher and co-ordinator for the lflfe (literacies for learning in further education) project. her email address is: abrzeski@preston.ac.uk helen de silva joyce helen de silva joyce is the director of community and migrant education in the nsw department of education and training, australia. she has more than 25 years experience in language research and language education. she has published extensively including a wide range of theoretical and practical articles and resource materials. her major research areas are spoken language and intertextuality in social and work contexts. helen’s email address is: helen.desilvajoyce@det.nsw.edu.au susan hood sue hood works in the faculty of arts and social sciences at the university of technology, sydney. she is an applied linguist who specialises in language and literacy teacher education, especially in teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol), in academic literacy, and in discourse analysis more generally. her research interests also extend beyond language to other meaning-making systems including gesture and image. her email address is: sue.hood@uts.edu.au helen oughton helen oughton works at the derbyshire adult community education, talbot st, glossop, derbyshire. her email address is: h.m.oughton@derby.ac.uk uta papen n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s 96 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s uta papen is a lecture in literacy studies at lancaster university, uk. her research focuses on the role of literacy in relation to the cultures and institutions of everyday life. her email address is: u.papen@lancaster.ac.uk robert prince robert prince is the co-ordinator of the numeracy centre, centre for higher education development, university of cape town, south africa. his email address is: rprince@maths.uct.ac.za david rose david rose is an associate of the faculty of education and social work, and of the department of linguistics at the university of sydney. dr rose´s work has been particularly concerned with indigenous australian communities, languages and education programs, with whom he has worked for 25 years. karin tusting karin tusting is rcuk research fellow in 'changing literacies in work, education and everyday life' at the literacy research centre. her research interests are in the detailed study of social practices using qualitative methods, including ethnography and discourse analysis, with a focus on the role of language in learning in communities. her email address is: k.tusting@lancaster.ac.uk 97 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s subscription information subscription rates for literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults are: individuals within australia aus$44.00 pa, individuals outside australia aus $50.00 pa; institutions within australia aus $88.00 pa and institutions outside australia aus $100.00 pa (all rates quoted include gst where applicable). cheques should be made payable to ‘university of technology, sydney’. international payments should be made in australian dollars or by credit card. journals to overseas destinations will be sent by surface mail. air mail rates are available on request. payment or authorised purchase orders must accompany all orders. inspection copies are available on request. order form institutional rate (within australia) aus $88 ($80 + $8gst) institutional rate (outside australia) aus $100 individual rate (within australia) aus $44 ($40 + $4gst) individual rate (outside australia) aus $50 please send to: name (block capitals)____________________________________ address________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ post/zip code_____________ country _____________________ telephone_____________________fax______________________ e mail_____________________________________________________ payment is enclosed or please charge my mastercard visa bankcard card number _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ expiry date _ _ _ _ _ signature ____________________________ date _________________ please return this form to maree joulian, literacy and numeracy studies, faculty of arts and social sciences, university of technology, sydney, po box 123, broadway, nsw, 2007, australia. 98 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s editorial policy and notes for contributors literacy and numeracy studies is an international refereed journal which aims to promote research, scholarship and critical analysis of policy and practice concerning the many and complex ways that adult literacy and numeracy are implicated in adult life. one of the aims of the journal is to extend narrow functional and externally imposed definitions of literacy and numeracy to multiple, open definitions that focus on what people do with their skills, and how they use different texts and modalities in differing contexts. the possibilities for adult literacy and numeracy learning occur in all environments and in many ways. this means that the editors are pleased to accept papers from a range of theoretical perspectives and research approaches, from researchers and practitioners emerging from differing epistemological positions. articles published in previous issues reflect the diverse sites and orientations where literacy and numeracy practitioners work both with people with english-speaking language backgrounds and those with language backgrounds other than english. research sites have included workplaces, prisons, communities, higher education, vocational and adult education, adult esl, indigenous populations and virtual environments. literacy and numeracy are thus understood here as socio-cultural phenomena, the successful acquisition of which moves beyond test and survey results or conventional education and training settings. relevant terms that may help potential contributors determine if this is the journal for them include adult basic education, adult and community education, workplace language, literacy and numeracy, academic language, literacy and numeracy, online literacies and critical literacy and numeracy. because adult literacy and numeracy are emerging as a relatively new focus for research and academic interest internationally, the editors actively encourage submissions from post-graduate research students in the kinds of areas indicated above. finally, in recognition that adult literacy and numeracy are controversial and are engaged with the politics of equity, participation and social justice, the editors offer the opportunity, through the refractions section of the journal, for contributors to publish more rhetorical and controversial pieces likely to interest our readers. refractions papers are not normally submitted to external review. responses to refractions pieces are also welcomed. literacy and numeracy studies is published twice a year. manuscripts should be between three and five thousand words and can be emailed to: keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au, hermine.scheeres@uts.edu.au or n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 99 rwickert@scu.edu.au. they should be double spaced, with ample margins, and bear the title of the contribution. paper title, name(s) of author(s) and address for correspondence should be placed on a separate page. an abstract of no more than one hundred and fifty words is required. each manuscript is blind reviewed by at least two reviewers. proofs will not normally be sent to authors unless there are substantial changes and/or figures and diagrams. they should be corrected and returned within seven days. major alterations to the text will not be accepted. general guidelines and style conventions please note the referencing conventions used by literacy and numeracy studies and the requirement for non-discriminatory language. note also that, while literacy and numeracy studies is published in australia, it has a diverse and international audience. please clarify any terms that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers outside the country of origin of the paper, and to those outside the disciplinary fields of adult literacy and numeracy. please observe the following conventions: • do not use ‘ibid.’ (and the like) when repeating references • multiple references within parentheses should be divided by a comma, not a semicolon, and there should be no use of ‘and’ within such multiple references • single quotation marks (‘ ... ’) should be used rather than double (“ ... ”) except for quotes within quotes and please use ‘smart quotes’ • only direct quotes (ie. data) should be in italics • books, reports or other major works named in the article should be in italics • numbers from one to ten should be written as words unless in brackets, dot points, figure/table headings or endnotes. references in the text references in the text should give the author’s name and year of publication (with page numbers if necessary) in the following style: ‘coproduction can be defined as the “degree of overlap between two sets of participants – regular producers and consumers”. the resultant overlap represents a joint production of outcomes’ (brudney and england 1983, cited in wirth 1991:79). if the quote is more than thirty words it should be indented in the following style: discourse contributes first of all to the construction of what are variously referred to as ‘social identities’ and ‘subject positions’. secondly, discourse helps construct social relationships between n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 100 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s people. and thirdly, discourse contributes to the construction of systems of knowledge and belief. (fairclough 1992:64) footnotes footnotes should be avoided. if necessary (as in some forms of historical referencing), numbered end notes can be used to elaborate matters which may be difficult to present in the journal’s reference style. these should be kept to a minimum. tables, figures, diagrams and illustrations authors must supply camera-ready copy of complex tables, figures, diagrams, illustrations and photographs. reference lists please use full names whenever possible. multiple references for one author should be in order of publication. second and subsequent authors should be referenced surname, followed by first name. page numbers must be included for all journal articles and book and report chapters. only references cited in the text should be listed and these should be in full at the end of the manuscript as follows: australian committee for training curriculum (actrac) (1993) the national framework of adult english language, literacy and numeracy competence, actrac productions ltd, frankston, victoria. freebody, peter, gee, james, luke, allan and street, brian (1997) literacy as critical social practice: an introduction, the falmer press, brighton. hammond, jennifer and wickert, rosie (1993) pedagogical relations between adult esl and adult literacy: directions for research, open letter, vol 3, no 2, pp 16-31. humphries, b (1997) from critical thought to emancipatory action: contradictory research goals? sociological research online, vol 2, no 1, retrieved 1 feb 2004 from http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/2/1/3.html. johnston, betty (1993/unpublished paper) report on unesco adult numeracy seminar, marly-le-roi, france, march. kirkpatrick, andy (1993) chinese composition structure: ancient or modern? in conference proceedings of the ninth national languages conference, northern territory department of education, darwin, pp 189-205. lee, alison and wickert, rosie (1995) reading the discourses of adult basic education teaching, in foley, griff, ed, understanding adult education and training, allen and unwin, sydney, pp 134-146. willis, sue, ed, (1990) being numerate: what counts?, australian council for educational research, hawthorn, victoria. n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 101 author’s bio-note this note should be brief (two or three sentences at most) and include (i) author’s institutional positions or affiliations and (ii) a full address for correspondence. a very brief note of author’s special interests may follow. acknowledgments any acknowledgments authors wish to make should be included in a separate headed section at the end of the manuscript. please do not incorporate these into the bio-note. n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 102 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word lns 16.2-17.1 editorial 16-october.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 n o 1 2 0 0 9 1 editorial stephen black this is a special issue of literacy and numeracy studies which, because of its length and the number of articles featured (six), we have made into a combined volume 16(2)/17(1) 2009. we refer to the issue as showcasing a ‘social practice’ perspective on adult literacy and numeracy because each article fits within and builds upon a conceptual framework in which various literacies are viewed as social practices. commonly, this perspective is also described as the ‘new literacy studies’ or a ‘socio-cultural’ or ‘situated’ perspective. as researchers in this volume indicate (reder in particular), the social practice perspective has gained considerable recognition in the area of adult literacy and numeracy research, but to date it has had far less impact in the policy and program areas. to briefly illustrate this point, i begin this editorial with a short anecdote. what follows is a verbatim extract from a recent email exchange in which a vocational counsellor in tafe, the main public vocational education and training provider in australia, refers a student to the adult basic education (abe) section of a tafe college. the counsellor writes: i would like to refer s (name of student) to abe for assessment and placement in an appropriate literacy class. s has been enrolled in the fitness certificate 3 but is about to withdraw because of her extremely low literacy levels. i have done brief cognitive and literacy assessments and find that while she is within the average range for cognitive potential, she is below the 5th percentile and 1st percentile for her word recognition and spelling respectively. she reports extremely disrupted and unsatisfactory primary and secondary education in her country of birth in ireland. could you or your staff contact her …? this anecdote does not of course reflect a social practice perspective on literacy; rather, it is the very antithesis, and this is the point to be made. i use this anecdote to highlight why we need and promote an alternative social practice perspective. i would contend that this counsellor’s perspective on literacy represents dominant understandings, not only in this counsellor’s own professional field, but probably more generally, at least in the field of vocational education and training. that is, literacy is viewed as a singular e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s entity which can be measured accurately and presumably generalised across all the domains of one’s life, including at work, at home and in the community (i.e. it is ‘autonomous’ of social context). further, that there may be an underlying assumption of a relationship with intelligence levels (hence measures of ‘cognitive potential’), and that professional experts determine on the basis of their tests which individuals are deemed lacking in literacy skills and refer them to other experts for remedial assistance. one outcome of such a perspective is internalised feelings of personal failure and lack of worth that many individuals experience as the result of being labelled as having low levels of literacy. the student featured in the above anecdote, for example, later left a telephone message with abe staff cancelling an appointment and saying she thought they would be wasting their time trying to improve her literacy skills. the articles in this special issue of literacy and numeracy studies challenge this dominant perspective and offer instead an alternative perspective which can be seen to be a more productive, democratic and inclusive discourse on the roles of literacy and numeracy in the everyday lives of individuals within communities. these articles were drawn originally from a series of papers for a symposium at the american education research association conference in chicago, illinois in april 2007, and revised for publication in this journal. sondra cuban at lancaster university in the uk played a leading role in collating the following articles and liaising with the authors and we thank her for her efforts. the articles in this special issue cover a wide range of areas, some more directly related to adult literacy and numeracy pedagogy than others. this is part of the strength of a social practice perspective, the boundaries between formal and informal education and everyday life contexts are blurred. in place of dominant institutional constructions of literacy, the focus shifts instead to the meanings of literacy practices as viewed by people themselves in a range of different social contexts. cuban draws out these distinctions in her opening article in which she locates social practice research within a strong socio-political context. in a wide-ranging article, she demonstrates how social practice research stands in contrast to the prevailing ‘skills-based’ philosophies which underpin adult literacy and numeracy provision in the united kingdom and the united states, and which currently are seen as the ‘elixir’ for the knowledge-based economies of neo-liberal political systems. social practice research offers a wide angle lens through which to view (and critique) these globalising trends through in-depth analyses of the complexities of social life. following cuban, papen, in an article on health literacy, also presents a social practice view on literacy as a direct challenge to the traditional and dominant ways of viewing literacy. frequently, health literacy is viewed as an abstract set of skills that can be measured by performance tests in order e d i t o r i a l l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 3 to determine how health literate an individual may be. but such tests ignore the contextual nature of health literacy. papen explores how individuals navigate their own health care, including how they engage with textuallymediated health care processes. papen argues essentially that health literacy needs to be situated and focused on practices (and not just skills) and that it is frequently a shared resource, achieved collectively by groups of people, and especially families. reder presents a different approach from these authors in his efforts to incorporate practice-based pedagogy and measures in adult basic education programs. unusually for a social practice researcher, his research methods include quantitative research data. through statistical modelling based on data from a major longitudinal study of adult learning in the united states, he indicates that participation in basic skills programs impacts on literacy practice measures but not on literacy proficiency measures. and yet, proficiency measures, that is, measures of short term learning gains, dominate the accountability regimes of adult literacy policy and programs in the united states and internationally. further, his study indicates that engagement in literacy practices over time leads to increases in literacy proficiency, thus strengthening the case for practice-based pedagogy and measures in adult basic education programs. barton in his article on adult learners’ lives, and hamilton in her article exploring changing literacy practices through the ‘lens of ageing’, both selectively draw on findings from their previous qualitative studies to illuminate aspects of a social practice perspective. barton focuses on the relationships between adult learners’ lives and the language, literacy and numeracy learnings in which they are engaged. employing a range of methods, including observation and in-depth interviews, he explains the aim is to observe people engaging in literacy practices, ‘within the frame of their lives and sociocultural contexts, and to listen to what they say about these practices and the meanings the practices have in their lives’. his findings indicate the complex range of issues that need to be taken into account in literacy learning, including the skills and competencies people have that are often unrelated to the official curriculum, and background factors such as previous negative schooling experiences, histories of violence and trauma and the range of constraints, emotions and aspirations that affect people’s participation in learning. hamilton’s article documents the subjective experiences of older people, their changing networks and affiliations, and the way they are positioned by their literacy-mediated encounters. as a counter to the survey literature in which ageing is usually associated with declining cognitive functioning, a detailed ‘ethnographic eye’ presents a more complex picture. as people age their life events and their identities in different social domains change. retirement, for example, and caring for others, and being cared for e d i t o r i a l 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s lead to engagement with new literacy practices which are frequently mediated through the involvement of family members and other social networks of support. completing this special issue, cuban’s second article explores the lives of ‘undocumented’ immigrant women in the united states based on an ethnographic study of a small group of mexican women who work mainly as cleaners in private homes. these women are not easily or even legally accommodated within existing literacy or esol programs with their standardised curriculum and regulatory attendance regimes. instead, they receive assistance from community-based organisations (cbos) which operate according to a different logic, advocating for the rights of immigrants and organised flexibly to accommodate the women’s working lives. cuban uses the term ‘caring literacies’ to describe how the women both receive assistance and in turn, as active agents, provide assistance to others within their community networks in their efforts to improve their lives. these articles provide an important contribution to the growing body of literature on a social practice perspective on adult literacy and numeracy. they provide further evidence of the appropriateness of such a perspective in tackling major social justice issues in so many educational and noneducational contexts. the challenge is to extend these concepts from academic research domains into mainstream thinking in the educational policy and program areas. for example, returning to the anecdote at the beginning of this editorial, when educational or vocational counsellors dispense with their primary focus on standardised literacy and cognitive tests, and instead engage in genuine dialogue with students over how these students view their everyday world and the meanings they attach to the role of literacy practices within it, then we will know we are making some progress. microsoft word 2204-8918-1-pb (1) l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 15 no 2 2007 1 editorial alison lee this issue of literacy and numeracy studies takes up two major themes shaping the landscape of research and practice in adult literacy. the first of these is the more recent of the two: the intersections between literacy and professional and workplace practice. the second is perhaps a more sustained and enduring concern in the field with the relationship of literacy to context, place and culture. in this sense, this issue of the journal is an expression of the reach and diversity of concerns with literacy in ‘social participation, the utilisation of social resources and the quality of life’ (green, lo bianco and wyn, this volume) and carries forward critical debates for the field across the span of practice from the workplace, to the classroom to the community. linking these apparently disparate domains is a preoccupation with the imperative for literacy in relation to contemporary social life, and a call for appropriate forms of theorising of the meanings of literacy in different settings and circumstances. whether this finds expression in the increasing ‘textualisation’ of work; the increasing ‘individualisation’ and ‘responsibilisation’ of populations in relation to their own health; the ‘commodification’ of basic literacy work in remote aboriginal communities, or the move in literacy research towards trans-national studies of modes of collaborative pedagogy – all of these acknowledge the socio-political significance as well as the complexity and challenge of literacy. the first two articles are strongly oriented to the increasing reach of literacy into professional and workplace worlds and the contemporary lifeworld of social particpation. a key theme here is the intensification of the relationship between literacy and the conduct of contemporary social life – in work, in professional e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s practice, in health and the relationship of individuals to institutions and systems of governance. the first article, by scheeres, focuses in the increasing textualisation of the workplace. she documents the ways in which increasing demands for literate practices in relation to writing and reading, but also for talk – in meetings and teamwork etc – are serving to shape work in quite different ways. changing work requires and produces new kinds of workers, whose worker identities are more and more tied up with being literate in increasingly complex ways. the ‘scene of work’ has indeed, as rob mccormack said a decade and a half ago, become the ‘scene of discourse’ (mccormack 1991). the ‘scene of discourse’ is also the theme of the article by green, lo bianco and wyn on the intersections between literacy and health. titled ‘discourses in interaction’, the article argues the need for the importance of a properly theorised take on the intersection of these fields, focusing on the ‘sub-field’ of ‘health literacy’. the convergence of education and health at the site of health literacy construct and enact participation in health in ways that require theorisation from a cross-sectoral perspective, in order to make explicit what is often implicit between the two fields: on the one hand, through contemporary systems of governance, an increasing emphasis on individual responsibility for health and wellbeing and, on the other, a long tradition in adult literacy of socio-cultural models emphasising social participation and community. the third and fourth articles continue a theme of participation and community, albeit in contrasting ways. both invoke a focus on place and, in different ways, on cultural difference. melodie bat’s account of the struggle for literacy in a central australian aboriginal community tells of circumstances that may shock many readers. so often the story of access to literacy for aboriginal people is told as a story of disadvantage. here, in this beautifully narrated story, we see laid out a e d i t o r i a l l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 3 different kind of account, where what is taken for granted in urban settings – access to basic literacy materials – is dependent on profit margins at the local store. this extreme expression of the application of a market logic by governments to manage complex social responsibilities is deeply shocking to those of us who want to see literacy as a human right. this is an important corrective to otherwise taken-for-granted stories of literacy and an important counterpoint to the metro-centrism of much adult literacy research, even that purporting to be ‘critical’. finally, in the article by taylor, evans and abasi, we see the emergence of cross-national research on adult literacy, drawing our attention to the cultural and pedagogical similarities, as well as the striking differences, between what appear to be parallel systems. canada and the uk have certain cultural traditions in common but significant differences. the article presents an argument for, and a useful documentation of, collaborative approaches to adult literacy pedagogy. while it presents itself as socially oriented, it continues at times to work off cognitivist frames for learning, seeing learning as an individual achievement. in this sense, the article demonstrates a continuing need for theoretical work across the boundaries of national research communities and research paradigms. a major challenge for the research field is to build an international conversation and to engage in cross-nation research studies that build the capacity to better engage in the increasing complexity of the literacy/social participation relation. references mccormack, rob (1991) framing the field: adult literacies and the future, in christie, f, (ed) teaching critical social literacy, report of the project of national significance in the pre-service preparation for teachers of english literacy, e d i t o r i a l 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s canberra, department of employment, education and training, pp 224-256. microsoft word lns 17.3 backpages.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 73 notes on contributors alisa belzer alisa belzer is an associate professor in the department of learning and teaching at rutgers university, graduate school of education, 10 seminary place, new brunswick, nj, 08901, usa. her email address is alisa.belzer@gse.rutgers.edu <http://alisa.belzer@gse.rutgers.edu>. her research interests are in adult literacy education policy, professional development, and adult reading development. ajit gopalakrishnan ajit gopalakrishnan is an education consultant in the area of adult education and literacy at the connecticut state department of education, 25 industrial park road, middletown, connecticut 06457, u.s.a. his email address is ajit.gopalakrishnan@ct.gov. his research interests are in organizational development, assessment, accountability, learner retention, and technology. the inferences and suggestions presented in this paper are those of the author and may not necessarily reflect the views of the connecticut state department of education. cristine smith cristine smith is an assistant professor at the center for international education, school of education, university of massachusetts, 285 hills house south, 111 thatcher way, amherst, ma 01003, usa. her e-mail address is cristine@educ.umass.edu. her research interests include professional development for adult literacy teachers, girls’ and women’s education in developing countries, and transition to college for adult students. ralf st. clair ralf st.clair has been working in literacy education for some years now, trying to understand the way literacy education systems shape teaching and learning. he is based at the university of glasgow in the faculty of education. he can be found at rstclair@educ.gla.ac.uk. karin tusting karin tusting is rcuk academic fellow in changing literacies at the literacy research centre, lancaster university, lancaster la1 4yd. her email address is k.tusting@lancaster.ac.uk. her research interests are in l i t e r a c y , m e t a p h o r a n d w o r d s a t w o r k 74 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s workplace literacies, communities of practice and adult learning outside formal educational settings. özlem ünlühisarcıklı özlem ünlühisarcıklı is an assistant professor in the department of educational sciences at boğaziçi university, faculty of education, istanbul, 34342, turkey. her email address is unluhisa@boun.edu.tr. her research interests are adult vocational education, education in prisons, and adult literacy education. n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 75 subscription information literacy and numeracy studies is going to be moving to an open source access journal and will be available online at utsepress. utsepress journals are created, managed and published using open journal systems (ojs), a system developed by the public knowledge project. ojs assists with every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions through to online publication and indexing. you can subscribe to literacy and numeracy studies or other journals by going to: 1. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php 2. selecting ‘register’ from the menu at the top of the page 3. choose which journal you want to subscribe to 4. complete the registration form we encourage readers to sign up for the publishing notification service for this journal. use the register link at the top of the homepage for the journal (http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/). this registration will result in the reader receiving the table of contents by email for each new issue of the journal. this list also allows the journal to claim a certain level of support or readership. see the journal's privacy statement which assures readers that their name and email address will not be used for other purposes. issn 1441-0559 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s editorial policy and notes for contributors literacy and numeracy studies is an international refereed journal which aims to promote research, scholarship and critical analysis of policy and practice concerning the many and complex ways that adult literacy and numeracy are implicated in adult life. one of the aims of the journal is to extend narrow functional and externally imposed definitions of literacy and numeracy to multiple, open definitions that focus on what people do with their skills, and how they use different texts and modalities in differing contexts. the possibilities for adult literacy and numeracy learning occur in all environments and in many ways. this means that the editors are pleased to accept papers from a range of theoretical perspectives and research approaches, from researchers and practitioners emerging from differing epistemological positions. articles published in previous issues reflect the diverse sites and orientations where literacy and numeracy practitioners work both with people with english-speaking language backgrounds and those with language backgrounds other than english. research sites have included workplaces, prisons, communities, higher education, vocational and adult education, adult esl, indigenous populations and virtual environments. literacy and numeracy are thus understood here as socio-cultural phenomena, the successful acquisition of which moves beyond test and survey results or conventional education and training settings. relevant terms that may help potential contributors determine if this is the journal for them include adult basic education, adult and community education, workplace language, literacy and numeracy, academic language, literacy and numeracy, online literacies and critical literacy and numeracy. because adult literacy and numeracy are emerging as a relatively new focus for research and academic interest internationally, the editors actively encourage submissions from post-graduate research students in the kinds of areas indicated above. finally, in recognition that adult literacy and numeracy are controversial and are engaged with the politics of equity, participation and social justice, the editors offer the opportunity, through the refractions section of the journal, for contributors to publish more rhetorical and controversial pieces likely to interest our readers. refractions papers are not normally submitted to external review. responses to refractions pieces are also welcomed. literacy and numeracy studies is published twice a year. manuscripts should be between three and five thousand words and can be emailed to: keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au, hermine.scheeres@uts.edu.au or n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 77 rwickert@scu.edu.au. they should be double spaced, with ample margins, and bear the title of the contribution. paper title, name(s) of author(s) and address for correspondence should be placed on a separate page. an abstract of no more than one hundred and fifty words is required. each manuscript is blind reviewed by at least two reviewers. proofs will not normally be sent to authors unless there are substantial changes and/or figures and diagrams. they should be corrected and returned within seven days. major alterations to the text will not be accepted. general guidelines and style conventions please note the referencing conventions used by literacy and numeracy studies and the requirement for non-discriminatory language. note also that, while literacy and numeracy studies is published in australia, it has a diverse and international audience. please clarify any terms that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers outside the country of origin of the paper, and to those outside the disciplinary fields of adult literacy and numeracy. please observe the following conventions: • do not use ‘ibid.’ (and the like) when repeating references • multiple references within parentheses should be divided by a comma, not a semicolon, and there should be no use of ‘and’ within such multiple references • single quotation marks (‘ ... ’) should be used rather than double (“ ... ”) except for quotes within quotes and please use ‘smart quotes’ • only direct quotes (ie. data) should be in italics • books, reports or other major works named in the article should be in italics • numbers from one to ten should be written as words unless in brackets, dot points, figure/table headings or endnotes. references in the text references in the text should give the author’s name and year of publication (with page numbers if necessary) in the following style: ‘coproduction can be defined as the “degree of overlap between two sets of participants – regular producers and consumers”. the resultant overlap represents a joint production of outcomes’ (brudney and england 1983, cited in wirth 1991:79). if the quote is more than thirty words it should be indented in the following style: discourse contributes first of all to the construction of what are variously referred to as ‘social identities’ and ‘subject positions’. secondly, discourse helps construct social relationships between n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 78 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s people. and thirdly, discourse contributes to the construction of systems of knowledge and belief. (fairclough 1992:64) footnotes footnotes should be avoided. if necessary (as in some forms of historical referencing), numbered end notes can be used to elaborate matters which may be difficult to present in the journal’s reference style. these should be kept to a minimum. tables, figures, diagrams and illustrations authors must supply camera-ready copy of complex tables, figures, diagrams, illustrations and photographs. reference lists please use full names whenever possible. multiple references for one author should be in order of publication. second and subsequent authors should be referenced surname, followed by first name. page numbers must be included for all journal articles and book and report chapters. only references cited in the text should be listed and these should be in full at the end of the manuscript as follows: australian committee for training curriculum (actrac) (1993) the national framework of adult english language, literacy and numeracy competence, actrac productions ltd, frankston, victoria. freebody, peter, gee, james, luke, allan and street, brian (1997) literacy as critical social practice: an introduction, the falmer press, brighton. hammond, jennifer and wickert, rosie (1993) pedagogical relations between adult esl and adult literacy: directions for research, open letter, vol 3, no 2, pp 16-31. humphries, b (1997) from critical thought to emancipatory action: contradictory research goals? sociological research online, vol 2, no 1, retrieved 1 feb 2004 from http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/2/1/3.html. johnston, betty (1993/unpublished paper) report on unesco adult numeracy seminar, marly-le-roi, france, march. kirkpatrick, andy (1993) chinese composition structure: ancient or modern? in conference proceedings of the ninth national languages conference, northern territory department of education, darwin, pp 189-205. lee, alison and wickert, rosie (1995) reading the discourses of adult basic education teaching, in foley, griff, ed, understanding adult education and training, allen and unwin, sydney, pp 134-146. willis, sue, ed, (1990) being numerate: what counts?, australian council for educational research, hawthorn, victoria. n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 79 author’s bio-note this note should be brief (two or three sentences at most) and include (i) author’s institutional positions or affiliations and (ii) a full address for correspondence. a very brief note of author’s special interests may follow. acknowledgments any acknowledgments authors wish to make should be included in a separate headed section at the end of the manuscript. please do not incorporate these into the bio-note. lns 17.3 backpagesjan 4th lns 17.3 backpagesjan 4th.2.pdf microsoft word 0705lns151prelims alison lee, hermine scheeres, jean searle and rosie wickert (editors) contents volume 15 number 1 2006 editorial jean searle 1 articles researching literacy and numeracy costs and benefits: what is possible robyn hartley and jackie horne 5 mathematics for maths anxious tertiary students: integrating the cognitive and affective domains using interactive multimedia janet taylor and linda galligan 23 flexible mathematical understanding in an ironworking apprenticeship classroom lyndon martin, lionel lacroix and lynda fownes 45 intuitive mathematical knowledge as an essential aspect of contemporary adult learning: a case of women street vendors in the city of gaborone rebecca nthogo lekoko and kgomotso getrude garegae 61 horatio alger and the ged (general education development) diploma: narratives of success in adult literacy education jennifer a sandlin 79 reviews academic culture: a students’ guide to studying at university by jean brick reviewed by maria simms 97 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s notes on contributors 100 subscription information 103 editorial policy and notes for contributors 104 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 15 no 1 2006 1 editorial jean searle we are constantly being reminded by governments and the media that we now live in a globalised economy and in order to compete we need a highly educated workforce. in this context, literacy and numeracy skills are not only used as international benchmarks to record a nation’s competitiveness and wellbeing, but these skills are also deemed to be fundamental to employment. a lack of, or inadequate literacy and numeracy, means to be marginalised, that is, barred from access to new forms of knowledge and new modes of thinking. therefore, inadequate levels of literacy among a broad section of the populations potentially threaten the strength of economies and the social cohesion of nations. (organisation for economic and cultural development 1995:13) as demonstrated in the quotation from the organisation for economic and cultural development (oecd), the concepts of literacy and numeracy are not value-free – they have social, cultural, political, economic and educational implications. the papers which have been included in this issue of literacy and numeracy studies illustrate that what is regarded as being literate or numerate depends on the definition of literacy or numeracy that is adopted at a particular time in history and in a particular context. the authors variously argue that both literacy and numeracy may be viewed in relation to learning – as a cognitive or thinking skill, as a social practice, or critically in relation to ideological positions. generally, the views expressed by governments depict literacy and numeracy as sets of decontextualised skills, which once learnt, generally in schools, will transfer unproblematically to other contexts. individuals’ literacy and numeracy skills may then be assessed and if necessary remediated. as hartley and horne point out in their article which reviews recent literacy research, lack of literacy has been linked to poverty, poor health and criminal behaviour. on the other hand there is also an acceptance by society of the importance of literacy, which has led some researchers, as reviewed by hartley and horne, to focus on quantitative aspects such as measuring the ‘extent’ of the problem, or the social and economic costs and benefits of literacy and numeracy, rather than the social ‘uses’ of literacy. e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s following hartley and horne’s review of recent research, there are three articles which address issues concerning how individuals make meaning of mathematics. while coming from different countries and mathematical contexts, all the authors, to a greater or lesser extent, are concerned with the differences between school (formal, or academic) maths and out-of-school uses of mathematics. further, each article demonstrates the significant role that language plays in developing understanding of mathematical concepts. in the first of these articles, taylor and galligan are concerned that many students entering higher education have already developed mathematics anxiety, such that whether they are intending to study traditional mathematics based courses (eg engineering and science) or non-mathematical courses (business or nursing) they need to develop confidence in their mathematical skills. taylor and galligan argue that this is best achieved by providing socially organised activities around mathematics in which students are encouraged to engage and reflect on learning. this is operationalised through an interactive cd-rom in which actors take on the characters of commencing students who discuss mathematics in real life contexts then, as a group, reflect on different approaches to problem solving. students are encouraged to enter this safe place and have a go themselves using self-tests, explanations and explicit examples of problem solving. in the second article, martin, lacroix and fownes are concerned about whether and how transfer of mathematical learning takes place. their study documents discussions among a group of apprentice ironworkers who are working on a construction task. while taylor and galligan focus on developing understandings of formal mathematical concepts by putting them into real-life contexts, martin et al address how context informs and transforms mathematical understandings. at issue here is the difference between school mathematics – learning how to solve algorithms and decontextualised problems, and out-of-school mathematics, which in this case, is used as an aid to performance in the workplace. each context places different demands on the individual; there are differences in format, social support networks and required background information. each of these issues is explored in this article and, through the use of extracts from transcripts of the group discussions, it is possible to see how the practical workplace experiences of the apprentices are brought to bear on the problem. the authors argue that by bringing different ways of thinking mathematically to the task, the apprentices are able to work flexibly, embedding ‘formal’ mathematics into the context of the task, while their understandings are transformed by their workplace experiences. a totally different out-of-school context is provided by lekoko and garegae who are interested in the intuitive mathematical knowledge of women street vendors in botswana. these authors document the oral e d i t o r i a l l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 3 language surrounding the financial transactions of the street vendors, which together with money (notes and coins) and the actual items being sold, form a complex social semiotic system through which people make meaning. building on the work of lave (1988) and others, who view use of mathematics as socially situated practices, lekoko and garegae argue that there is no reason that informal or intuitive uses of mathematics are not as valid as formal mathematics. further, they are concerned that such highly contextualised and idiosyncratic uses of mathematics often remain unacknowledged, as, in this case, the women are deemed to be illiterate and innumerate. similarly, prinsloo and breier (1996) researching social literacies in south africa, argued that ‘local literacies’ are often overlooked in the rush to implement formal literacy programs. the importance of such research is that it goes beyond the economic imperative to produce knowledge workers, to investigate the links with lifelong learning and the possibilities of developing civic responsibility or social capital within communities. nevertheless, lekoko and garegae argue that oral and mental ‘intuitive’ mathematics, while important in the lives of the street vendors, is insufficient for the women to judge whether they are making a profit or if they wish to develop their businesses further. the final article in the issue takes a critical stance. many adult literacy practitioners would be well aware of how the media uses human interest stories, either to pursue particular agendas ‘how could barry leave school unable to read and write?’ or the virtues of literacy, ‘housewife tells how literacy changed her life’. in this article, sandlin challenges us to reconsider the status quo and examine how such texts are socially and ideologically constructed. sandlin is writing from an american perspective in which she explores the stories told about successful adult literacy students and likens them to the american ‘myth of success’ as epitomised by the horatio alger stories. while we recognise the manipulations of the media, what sandlin is asking is ‘why do teachers write [or retell] such stories about their students?’ are teachers who write or tell these stories acting out some form of moral crusade in ‘helping to shape beliefs and behaviour to meet the needs of society?’ sandlin analyses a range of stories and argues that they represent a particular genre of optimism, hope and the protestant work ethic. while such texts are sometimes used to provide evidence of successful teaching and learning, they may also promote false expectations or undermine the confidence of those who do not achieve. the alternative, sandlin suggests, is to engage in critical discussions in the classroom in which students are encouraged to create possible alternative outcomes or more realistic indicators of success. the articles presented in this issue move from a review of recent literacy research (hartley and horne) to an operational perspective on how to assist student learning (taylor and galligan), through a cultural view of e d i t o r i a l 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s mathematics as embedded in particular socio-cultural contexts (martin et al and lekoko and garegae) to a ‘critical literacy’ perspective (sandlin). in taking us on that journey, each of the authors emphasises the social nature of the uses of mathematics and literacy, as well as the importance of language and story telling in the learning process. references lave, j (1988) cognition in practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday practice, cambridge university press, cambridge. organisation for economic and cultural development and statistics canada (1996) international survey of adult literacy, organisation for economic and cultural development paris. prinsloo, m and breier, m, eds (1996) the social uses of literacy: theory and practice in contemporary south africa, sached books, cape town. call for papers special issue announcement the editors of lns are pleased to announce that dr alisa belzer of rutgers university in the u.s. and dr ralph st. clair of university of glasgow in scotland will edit a special issue of lns to be published in 2007. this issue will focus on how national accountability systems are influencing practice at the program and classroom levels. the guest editors are seeking submissions of papers that explore the choices and compromises and the costs and benefits of increased demands for standardized accountability and reporting procedures. they are also interested in papers that document how teachers and learners are developing and maintaining ‘responsive’ practices in this time when increasingly narrow accountability and curricular systems seem to be reducing the options open to educators and learners. they would like especially to urge practitioners to contribute, either as solo authors or in collaboration with researchers or policy people. papers should be submitted by july 1 2007 at the latest. if you would like to contact our guest editors directly, email dr belzer at belzera@rci.rutgers.edu and/or dr st. clair at rstclair@educ.gla.ac.uk. microsoft word 2209-8934-1-pb (1) reviews outside the classroom: researching literacy with adult learners by ellayne fowler and jane mace (editors) national institute for adult and continuing education (niace) 2005, 21 de montfort street, leicester, isbn: 1 86201 223 7, 142 pages. http://www.niace.org.uk outside the classroom: researching literacy with adult learners is another of those interesting publications from the national institute for adult and continuing education (niace) in the uk that take on the important task of linking the theory and practice of teaching and researching literacy with adult learners. ellayne fowler and jane mace view literacy as a social practice and set out to show how that theory can assist the practice and the training of teachers. they do this by linking aspects of theory to life through the use of various examples of how learners use literacy in their own lives. the book combines a theoretical discussion with presentation of a series of portraits of the real life experiences of learners. a total of nineteen portraits have been researched and written collaboratively with learners, who were selected from among groups of men and women taking literacy classes with the authors. the portraits explore the reading and writing lives of learners outside the classroom. fowler and mace have focussed on three key theoretical aspects of a social practice view of literacy for this book, namely literacy events, practices and values; social networks; and literacy environments. jane mace discusses literacy events and practices by referring to the work of david barton and roz ivanic, drawing out distinctions between the two, and draws on brian street to include a focus on values, attitudes and feelings. four portraits, together with a concluding commentary are useful examples of the way literacy events, practices and values are reflected through people’s lives. in analysing social networks ellayne fowler draws on the work of james and lesley milroy, jean lave and etienne wenger to show how analysing social networks and community of practice can offer valuable insights into the literacy practices of learners. by exploring the notion of literacy environments, fowler is also able to shed more light on the different domains of peoples lives and how they impact on learning. she draws on mary hamilton, anita wilson and heath’s seminal work in educationally disadvantaged communities. research is another important focus of the book. fowler and mace devote the second part of the book to research, in particular a discussion of the process of research and how research can be used to inform teaching practice. at a time when so much attention in research is on quantitative approaches, it is timely for mace and fowler to reflect on the research process, point to the value of the ‘spirit of ethnography’ in their approach and remind us of the importance of empowering and including learners in the research process in a way that has value to them as well as to researchers and readers. the book also addresses some of the ways research can be used to inform the practice of adult literacy teaching. they draw attention to the need for teachers to remember the main reasons why learners come into classes. as castleton suggested, it is often about how learners ‘can and want to use literacy to bring about changes in their lives’. as stephen kemmis (2005) points out, a central problem in understanding and changing professional practice is ‘to recognise and respect the diversity of key features of practice’ and his framework draws attention to individual features of practice, social features, cultural features and materialeconomic features. this book makes a useful contribution to that task and suggests that a challenge for future work in this area is to continue to acknowledge and include more explicitly, a detailed analysis of the social, cultural and material-economic features n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 75 impacting on learners and their learning environments. reference kemmis, s, (2005) knowing practice: searching for salience, pedagogy, culture and society, vol 13, no 3, pp 391-426 andrew chodkiewicz microsoft word lns 16.2-17.1pp 51-62 barton 16-oct.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 2 0 0 8 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 n o 1 2 0 0 9 51 researching adult learners’ lives to understand engagement and progression in learning david barton a b s t r a c t this paper examines the relationships between adult learners’ lives and the literacy, numeracy and language learning in which they are engaged. the paper brings together the results of a set of detailed studies of adult learners’ lives, summarising common findings from the studies and providing a set of implications for policy and provision. finally, the paper outlines a model of the aspects of people’s lives that are significant for effective language, literacy and numeracy learning. the four part model covers people’s histories, their current identities, their current life circumstances and imagined futures. r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s this paper brings together the results of research that has been carried out to develop understandings of the relationships between adult learners’ lives and the literacy, numeracy and language learning in which they are engaged. this is research that has been carried out at the lancaster university literacy research centre under the rubric of adult learners’ lives and which was funded by the english national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracyi. the national centre was part of the english government’s high profile skills for life strategy to improve provision and attainment in adult literacy, numeracy and english for speakers of other languages. the strategy began in 2001 and included core curricula with a set of levels, standardised tests, national targets and a framework for the professional development of teachers. starting from the perspectives of people attending language, literacy and numeracy provision, the research reported here focused on issues around motivation, participation, persistence and engagement of people on skills for life courses. the aim here is to examine the common findings of this research and to locate it in broader studies of adults’ engagement and progression, primarily other work in england. part of the research was carried out in colleges (ivanic et al 2006) but other research, the starting point for this paper, is based upon work in other community-based sites with groups of learners in what has been referred to as provision for the ‘hard to reach’ (barton et al 2006) and who can be seen as most marginalised. this included a drug support and aftercare centre, a young homeless project and a domestic violence project. working collaboratively with practitioners in each of the r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s 52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s sites, the research explored issues of participation and engagement with people who frequently have issues in their lives that impact upon learning. the current paper examines the significance of these findings in the light of a body of further work. this includes a later overview (barton et al 2007), further data collection and analysis of a range of studies to examine progression (hodge, barton and pearce, forthcoming), a specific study of homelessness (barton, satchwell and wilson, forthcoming) and practitioner guides that develop a social practice pedagogy based upon this research (appleby and barton 2008, appleby 2008, satchwell and barton forthcoming). overall, 282 people participated in the main research study, 134 were students and the remainder were teachers, managers and other support workers. the electronic database from the project consists of 403 data files, which include 198 recorded interviews. where we worked in depth with people in learning programs, this ranged from carrying out several interviews over a six-month period to keeping in touch with the person and their learning for more than two years. the later research returned to some of the same people so there is data from them covering up to four years, and additional people were added to the research. this is detailed qualitative research and it is important to stress, for the benefit of those not familiar with qualitative approaches, that this research is based upon large numbers of people and a variety of methods, outlined below, that provide rich data that can be triangulated. like reder, (this volume), we stress the importance of synthesising different approaches to these issues. part of the aim of this current paper is to demonstrate the common, repeated findings that come from a broad range of studies with different methodologies. the research is rooted in an approach that sees literacy, numeracy and language as social practices. this has been described extensively elsewhere (including barton 2007, other authors, this volume). the crucial point for the discussion here is that we see literacy, numeracy and language as activities that people carry out and which relate to and are shaped by all the other activities they engage in throughout their lives, rather than just as skills or cognitive attributes that people have or do not have. this has immediate implications for the way we approach research. we seek to observe people engaging in literacy, numeracy and language practices, within the frame of their lives and sociocultural contexts, and to listen to what they have to say about these practices and the meanings that the practices have in their lives. this broader view of language, literacy and numeracy has proved essential when trying to understand people’s participation, engagement and progression in diverse settings, and it leads to the development of a social practice pedagogy. in developing the methodology, we start from the fact that people are involved in many different activities in their lives and these change over time. different approaches to studying them can reveal different facets and r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s b a r t o n 53 relationships, deepening our understandings. we therefore combine methods of data collection, and have been developing responsive ways of gaining insights into the meanings people attach to their experiences. these methods include: observation, in-depth and repeated interviews, group work, photography and video. in most sites, such as a homeless shelter, one researcher was responsible for the site. there were around 20-25 visits to each site, at least 50 formally recorded interviews, and many more informal interviews and other activities. initially, the researcher negotiated access and began by getting to know the people and the site and the kinds of language, literacy and numeracy provision that took place there. this was followed by extensive observation that was recorded in field notes, along with informal and semi-structured interviews with a broad range of people. the research developed differently in each site and was negotiated with the participants. at a homeless shelter for young people, for instance, the researcher worked with a story teller to develop a photo project where young people took photos related to their lives and wrote and spoke about them. these were then used as the basis for a display, group discussions and individual interviews. each site involved a variety of methods and these are described in more detail in the references to specific studies given above. recorded interviews were transcribed and field notes were digitised, with due attention to issues of confidentially, and these documents formed the basis of the data for analysis. the rigour in this approach is in the richness of the data, in the level of detail and in the range of sources of data. throughout this research we sought to find ways of working collaboratively in data collection and interpretation, and to communicate with participants about the results of the research and how they can be disseminated. this is particularly important when working with groups that include people in positions of social inequality who have experienced marginalisation throughout their lives. the aim has been to represent people’s voices fairly and in consultation with them. it is the learners’ perspective on these issues that particularly adds to earlier findings in this area. examples of people in the study include sophie, a young woman attending a shelter for young homeless people. she had had an unsettled upbringing, was expelled from school and became homeless at age 15 and now dipped in and out of college. her everyday literacies included reading novels and writing haiku poetry. she was part of the research study for three years and at the end of the study had just had a baby girl and was about to go back to college. another example is jason, a man in his 30s who had stopped attending school at the age of 12, had become a labourer and was later unemployed after an accident and suffered from depression. he volunteered at a tenants’ association and participated in the study for three years. at the association he helped to set up and run the computer and internet, as well as keeping the accounts. he also enrolled in a college course but attended r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s 54 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s erratically. the people studied were participating in literacy, numeracy and english for speakers of other languages (esol) courses at different levels. they covered a wide range of ages and circumstances. detailed profiles are given in the fuller research reports, especially in hodge, barton and pearce (2008). k e y f i n d i n g s as a way of providing an overview of the research these are the key findings about adults’ lives. this is a list that was developed from the results of the research in community settings, and which is adapted here to take account of the further research: • many people brought highly-developed skills and competencies; these included literacies unrelated to the curriculum, such as song writing or poetry. uncovering people’s existing knowledge and skills and drawing on and building upon it is basic to a social practice pedagogy. teaching needs to take account of people’s skills, competencies, passions and talents. however, in a skills-based pedagogy and curriculum, people’s existing knowledge outside the confines of the curriculum may not be uncovered. similarly, people without qualifications are assumed not to have the appropriate knowledge and skills. • the majority of people we spoke to across the different provision had very negative previous experiences of education, and negative previous experiences with authority. this did not apply to all groups, but was common in the marginalised groups in our community-based studies. with students in esol courses, this varied and was more prevalent in particular groups according to ethnicity and migration history. • people carried histories of violence and trauma which affected their learning but which were not always open and visible. again, this was particularly true with people in community settings and some groups of esol students. experiences of living with ill health both in the past and present were common, as were experiences of bullying whilst at school. the issues of health and of bullying arose far more than had been expected at the beginning of the research. • people had different reasons for being involved with these settings: for some it was about safety and survival; for others transitions and moving on were central; whilst other people came with more specific learning goals. this variety was noted across a wide range of groups of people and forms of provision. in our later work on progression it was clear that some people were interested in course completion and moving on to further courses or as a route to work. other people had a broad range of their own motivations, unrelated to course or r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s b a r t o n 55 work progression, such as personal development or social participation. • people experienced a range of constraints on engaging in formal learning situations, including physical, mental, social and emotional constraints. social circumstances meant that many experienced turbulence and unpredictable change in their lives. people needed to feel when it was the ‘right time’ for them to engage in learning and change in their lives; this was something they had to identify for themselves. • feelings and emotions shaped people’s experiences of learning; for some this made engagement, particularly in more formal, structured learning very difficult; other people talked about formal learning provision as a safe haven from other overwhelming issues in their lives. again, we saw people’s quite different responses to learning provision. related to this many people in community provision talked in different ways about seeing themselves as having been positioned outside a world of ‘normality’, for example, very young people forced to live independently due to family breakdown and becoming drug dependent. feeling very different had put people off participating in learning in the past and attending college. • people had a range of aspirations common to most people, such as a safe, settled life, a good home, good family relationships, good work, good health. this point, about the entirely conventional aspirations of supposedly disaffected people, was also found in a study using a different methodology (calder and cope 2003). this study, based on interviews with 900 people from disadvantaged backgrounds, found people’s aspirations to be very similar to those of a control group: to have a family, an interesting job, and enough money to support their lifestyle; and to have a nice house, good friends and be in control of their own future. the issue for them was not that of not having the aspirations, but rather that of not knowing how to go about achieving them. • people had many roles, responsibilities and commitments; they had shifting priorities and circumstances that led to dipping in and out of learning. often immediate priorities had to take priority over formal learning. sometimes people prioritised the needs of family members rather than their own individual needs. goals were flexible and changed as circumstances changed, sometimes very unpredictably. there was often a gap between people’s short term and long term goals. this work develops and extends conclusions from existing research in this field. a key initiative for work in community settings in england was the adult and community learning fund (aclf) that ran from 1998 to 2004. r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s 56 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the findings from two studies of this program (mcmeeking et al 2002, sampson et al 2004) resonate with the findings of the work reported here. many of the learners in the program were dealing with similar life circumstances and events to those in our research. the reports point out that the so-called ‘hardest to reach’ learners may often have a range of problems, including health, housing, finance, family and crime-related issues, which are more immediate than their basic skills needs. this parallels our findings on the turbulence of life experiences and the need to respond to learners’ own purposes. it was also found to be necessary to address practical and financial barriers to learning, through providing for travel costs, materials and other necessary support, such as childcare. a crucial issue for provision is building and maintaining positive relationships with learners; this is a thread which runs through many of the findings of our research and is a key issue in our study of progression (hodge, barton and pearce 2008). the same is true of the reports of the community program. the social atmosphere of the program and the personal commitment of tutors were critical to learners staying on; and holding sessions in safe, familiar and welcoming places, was important. another element critical to learner participation was the quality and relevance of the learning program, with the attention to relevance recalling the need for flexibility and responsiveness to learners’ individual needs and circumstances found in our research. mcgivney’s (1999) study of informal learning in the community also highlights the importance of good relationships, intermediaries between people and educational providers, flexible and responsive systems, provision which responds to people’s existing interests and needs, and support mechanisms, with the most important factor being the key people involved in development work. as in our study, many of the learners in the aclf programs identified negative previous experiences of education and sampson et al (2004) found that an informal style of delivery, which allowed learners to work at their own pace, and which, critically, was unlike school, was important. many of the projects offered one-to-one support, enabling individualised provision appropriate to the particular learner involved. sampson et al also refer to an ‘encouraging’ proportion of learners moving into mainstream education; moving on to further basic skills classes was the most common form of progression which was reported. there were also important outcomes around personal development, such as learners’ self esteem, motivation, team working, time-keeping and individual problem solving. the reports recommend that innovative and effective ways of measuring such so-called ‘soft’ outcomes of programs be identified and disseminated, so that basic skills programs which have these impacts on these hardest to reach learners are not undervalued. r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s b a r t o n 57 mcneil and smith’s (2004) work assessing success factors of working with young people in informal learning also raises similar issues, including: the need for practitioners who understand the needs of working with these particular groups, and the associated difficulties in recruiting appropriate staff; the importance of working with people’s existing interests to promote engagement; the need for provision to be flexible, individualised and nonacademic; and the importance of non-judgemental relationships, and particularly of not being ‘like teachers’. similar issues arose in our case study of working with homeless people (barton, satchwell and wilson forthcoming). issues of transition are important, particularly with young people. cieslik and simpson (2004) have investigated the importance of poor basic skills as a factor in the relative success or failure of young people’s transitions into adulthood. their work draws attention to the importance of the social relationships and networks people are involved in, to the resources they can access from their own particular life circumstances, and to their life projects and horizons for action, all of which mediate the impact of their level of basic skills on their lives. their recommendations are similar to ours: that formal provision and learning opportunities overly focused on literacy and numeracy are unlikely to succeed without attention to the people attending, to their life projects and to how these are placed within complex circumstances. an overview based on extensive consultation and surveying existing research (bird and akerman 2005) suggests that successful literacy approaches need to draw upon a strategy which includes engaging individuals and building relationships, meeting learners’ needs and interests, and working in partnership. these are all issues that our research has identified as being crucial. our research reinforces and pulls together the findings from these other studies and, crucially, offers deeper understandings of the perspectives of learners. researching this issue from the point of view of learners rather than from that of provision offers a new perspective on certain issues. for instance, some studies talk of attracting and retaining learners as a major challenge. but we can see from some of the work described above that some of the learners whom provision felt had ‘dropped out’, might have been involved in a ‘dipping in and out’ process, as they worked out how and where learning fitted into their lives; this is a much more positive interpretation. i m p l i c a t i o n s f o r p o l i c y a n d p r o v i s i o n a crucial issue here is the extent to which we can make generic claims about people’s engagement in learning and the extent to which any claims and proposals need to be restricted to specific groups of people in particular locations. we believe that there are common principles and they are outlined above. research by others also supports these principles and provides validity r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s 58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s for them. at the same time, a particular situation, such as working with homeless people, young people or offenders, requires understanding of the specific situation and the adapting of general findings to the specific context. the different educational and social policy frameworks of different countries means that the issues and the responses to them will be slightly different. a study carried out in scotland, for instance, which has a distinct educational system from england, has found a similar range of issues related to progression but with different implications for provision reflecting the different policy environment (maclachlan et al 2008). the projects reported here have been embedded in a coherent strategy of communication and impact that aims to have a direct effect on practice. there is growing evidence that practitioners are most likely to draw upon research findings that resonate with their own experience and our own work supports this. throughout the project we have disseminated emergent findings from our work, first locally, and then regionally and nationally, in formal and informal ways. however, in a top-down, centralised system like skills for life, it is the learner’s perspectives that get most easily lost. there are some key issues for policy and provision thatcan be found in the individual reports. here i will draw attention to two issues. firstly, educational policy needs to link up more with broader social policy. for example, provision needs to recognise and respond to people’s practical constraints. this is a situation where specialised provision, such as for homeless people, can conflict with the needs of a formal educational system which demands regular attendance on fixed length courses. language, literacy and numeracy provision for young people and adults needs to be funded to work within the principal purposes of these settings. language, literacy and numeracy tutors/teachers need to receive support and training to equip them to work in specific community settings; they need time and space to be flexible and reflective practitioners. being able to work alongside specialist community workers can be important. a crucial issue, highlighted through our research, is that what is funded and what is not funded can have a significant impact on possibilities for engaging in learning, with such issues as travel and childcare. the sudden starting and terminating of courses for particular groups of people can be incomprehensible for the participants. funding affects learners in seemingly random ways; we found that often the most vulnerable learners end up with the most insecure provision. a study of community providers (hannon et al 2003) also identified similar issues. issues around the difficulty of obtaining funding for development work and core long-term funding were common. who funds the provision is also important with community organisations frustrated at the ways in which different government agencies make different and sometimes conflicting demands. skills for life in england started with the rhetoric of supporting two aspects of social policy: economic r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s b a r t o n 59 development and social inclusion. however, there was quickly a shift to a greater emphasis on the economic rationale. with limited funding this comes at the expense of the social issues and represents the greatest threat to community provision. a m o d e l f o r l e a r n i n g a n d p a r t i c i p a t i o n to bring this all together, from this work we have developed a model of people’s lives which is useful for understanding what people bring to these learning settings. the model enables us to focus on the aspects of people’s lives that are significant for effective language, literacy and numeracy learning. the model is rooted in the data on people’s lives analysed in these studies. it draws upon a range of theories and approaches and provides a ways of talking about the social shaping of learning whilst at the same time keeping people’s lives at the centre. (for more information on the theorising underlying this model, see barton et al 2007:17-24.) we describe people’s lives under four headings: their history, their current identities, their current life circumstances, and their imagined futures. we find it very useful to think of people’s lives in terms of these four aspects in order to find a way through complex data and to draw out significant themes. the figure illustrates these four aspects in a simple manner, the idea being that each person has a particular combination of practices and identities, with a history behind them, and an imagined future towards which they are heading, situated within a set of current life circumstances and events. figure 1. four aspects crucial for linking learning and lives. r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s we want to emphasise these four aspects of life: firstly, the importance of individual histories; secondly, how people have there own ‘ways of being’, the cluster of social, psychological and affective factors that make up their identities; thirdly, the significance of factors they may have little control over; and, fourthly, the importance of people’s plans and how they see future possibilities. of course, these four areas overlap and interact. people’s current practices are shaped by their life history, and people’s purposes and goals are influenced by their current circumstances. nevertheless, it is useful to be able to make the distinction here and we believe it helps us understand engagement and progression as crucial to learning. r e f e r e n c e s appleby, y and barton, d (2008) responding to people’s lives, national institute of adult continuing education, leicester. appleby, y (2008) bridges into learning for adults who find provision hard to reach, national institute of adult continuing education, leicester. barton, d (2007) literacy: an introduction to the ecology of written language, blackwell, oxford, second edition. barton, d, appleby, y, hodge, r, tusting, k and ivanic, r (2006) relating adults’ lives and learning: participation and engagement in different settings, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (nrdc), london. barton, d, satchwell, c and wilson, a (forthcoming) skills for life: provision for homeless people, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (nrdc), london. barton, d, ivanic, r, appleby, y, hodge, r and tusting, k (2007) literacy, lives and learning, routledge, london. bird, v and akerman, r (2005) every which way we can: a literacy and social inclusion position paper, national literacy trust, london. calder, a and cope, r (2003) breaking barriers? reaching the hardest to reach, the princes trust, london. cieslik, m and simpson, d (2006) skills for life? basic skills and marginal transitions from school to work, journal of youth studies, vol 9, no 2, pp 213-229. hannon, p, pahl, k, bird, v, taylor, c and birch, c (2003), communityfocused provision in adult literacy, numeracy and language: an exploratory study, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (nrdc), london. hodge, r, barton, d and pearce, l (2008) progression: moving on in life and learning, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (nrdc), london. r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s b a r t o n 61 ivanic, r, appleby, y, hodge, r, tusting, k and barton, d (2006) linking learning and everyday life: a social perspective on adult language, literacy and numeracy classes, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (nrdc), london. maclachlan, k, hall, s, tett, l, crowther, j and edwards, v (2008) motivating adult literacies learners to persist, progress and achieve: literacies learners at risk of non-completion of learning targets, learning connections, scottish government, directorate of lifelong learning, edinburgh. mcgivney, v (1999) informal learning in the community: a trigger for change and development, national institute of adult continuing education, leicester. mcmeeking, s, taylor, m, powell, r and sims, d (2002) 'i think i can do that now' an evaluation of round 5 of the adult and community learning fund, national foundation for educational research, slough, berkshire. mcneil, b and smith, l (2004) success factors in informal learning: young adults’ experiences of literacy, language and numeracy, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (nrdc), london. sampson, m, somani, b, zwart, r and siddiq, s (2004) adult and community learning fund, 1998 2004: final report basic skills agency strand, basic skills agency, london. satchwell, c and barton, d (forthcoming) learning and working with people who are homeless – a skills for life perspective, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (nrdc), london. i i particularly acknowledge the great contribution of the co-authors of the various reports, especially yvon appleby, rachel hodge, roz ivanic, candice satchwell, karin tusting and anita wilson. r e s e a r c h i n g a d u l t l e a r n e r s ’ l i v e s 62 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word lns18.2 prelims-final.docx stephen black, alison lee, hermine scheeres, jean searle, rosie wickert and keiko yasukawa (editors) contents volume 18 number 2 2010 guest editorial gregory martin 1 articles working the interstices: adult basic education teachers respond to the audit culture stephen black 6 is the professionalisation of adult basic skills practice possible, desirable or inevitable? carol dennis 26 time for national renewal: australian adult literacy and numeracy as ‘foundation skills’ stephen black and keiko yasukawa 43 back to the future?: timor-leste, cuba and the return of the mass literacy campaign bob boughton 58 refractions breaking out of the package: educating literacy and numeracy teachers with agency keiko yasukawa 75 notes on contributors 88 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 2 2010 1 guest editorial gregory martin against the backdrop of the most severe financial crisis since the great depression and years of irresponsible neoliberal policies, the debate over literacy continues to rage into the new millennium. this is partly because literacy and numeracy have long been seen as a ‘silver bullet’ solution for a myriad of economic problems (see dennis this issue). following from this, policy makers tend to use literacy and numeracy statistics to justify the development of policies and strategies that are focused on enhancing employability to meet their human capital agendas. yet, the current crisis only heightens how important educational strategies are that develop global citizens who have the critical literacy, numeracy and language resources for problem-posing and social justice purposes (luke and freebody 1999). given current ideological and material constraints, i suggest that activist educators who wish to intervene in debates about policy in order to create spaces for alternative futures will need to adopt gramsci’s (1992:172) call for a ‘pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’1. clearly, the stereotypical traditional view of literacy and numeracy as simply reading, writing or doing sums to get ‘the right answer’ diverts attention away from more troubling and complex issues in society to relatively easy problems to solve to do with the nature of the labour force. this deficit perspective, which focuses on individual faults, weaknesses or pathologies as the origin of the problem, fails to locate illiteracy or innumeracy within wider interrelations of culture, power and exploitation (gee 1991, lankshear with lawler 1987). indeed, recent newspaper stories exploit government statistics and deeply touching personal stories to turn the spotlight of attention on the significant percentage of adults who are deemed in the dominant neo-liberal discourse to be ‘functionally illiterate’ and how this threatens long-term economic competitiveness. all of this ignores several decades of empirical research – from various theoretical perspectives and target populations – that highlights the value of recognising ‘multiple literacies’ (gee 1990, street 1995) and viewing any form of literacy as ‘a social and cultural practice’ (comber and cormack 1997) that has the potential for empowerment and social change (luke and freebody 1997). importantly, it fails to acknowledge that the transmission belt of teaching basic and functional competencies does not provide sufficient resources for imagining and enacting alternative models and approaches to enduring interrelated economic, environmental and social challenges. for gramsci, ‘pessimism of the intelligence’ is the generative force of social change if it is not decoupled from an ‘optimism of the will.’ gramsci’s e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s ‘pessimism of the intelligence’ is based in a critical and realistic understanding of relations of hegemonic governance, power and domination and the prospects for challenging them. however, the second part of his famous phrase offers something more hopeful and encourages us not to fall prey to fatalism. unfortunately, the collapse of grand narratives that sustained collective political projects of emancipation and social justice has resulted in a loss of direction and political cynicism. in attempting to imagine and enact an alternative vision of the world, a critical literacy and numeracy does not narrowly privilege either the traditional postmodern domain of text or even the micropolitics of the body as a resisting site of desire or affect. this is not just an academic concern or critique of avantguard high theory or postmodern individualism. all too often, as black and yasukawa point out in the last article of this issue, rhetorical claims of new ‘paradigms’ are not informed by specific and concrete contextualisations. the danger here is that such self-authored calls for resistance or transgression only grow to be materialised in scholarly journals. rather, as a form of political interventionism, a political project of critical literacy and numeracy is one that is performed through collective and materialist frameworks with attention paid to the dialectical interplay between relations of signification and production (ebert 1996). the papers in this issue demonstrate that a re-engagement with collective politics is urgently required. the aim is to develop capacity for revitalised dialogue and interaction between teachers and their respective communities about issues applicable to the field of adult literacy and numeracy, including how best to counter the effects of corporate ‘accountability’ and the insidious diffusion of the ‘audit culture’ in education. such measures are not imposed to improve teacher practice or student learning but rather to change the culture of education to fit a neoliberal agenda. the relentless push of neoliberalism has diminished the capacity for critical literacies and numeracies to flourish under conditions that promote individualism and social contracts of self-care. as black and yasukawa point out, the common ground upon which to act has been hollowed out with the assault, over the past decade, on mechanisms that supported professional learning and research in adult literacy and numeracy. to compound this situation, the reification of accountability and audit regimes informed by neoliberal ideology has resulted in a hegemonic worldview that makes escaping or challenging these conditions extremely difficult. but as the contributors to this issue make clear, one should not fall prey to an overdetermined reading of the situation. activist-educators also hold the ‘dangerous memory’ of alternative knowledges and possibilities (giroux 1989: 99). e d i t o r i a l l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 3 on this note, the first article by black provides evidence that resistant identities, ‘working the interstices’, are indeed possible. drawing upon previous and continuing research in australia, black argues that the resistance of adult basic education (abe) teachers to a centrally imposed, performance driven audit culture in the vocational education and training (vet) sector is often based in a strategic decision on what rules and expectations to comply with. picking up on the idea that abe teachers are not empty vessels who slavishly follow policy, black states that the interpretations and responses ‘seemed to vary’, depending upon a range of factors. despite operating in an environment that emphasizes the deskilling and de-professionalisation of their work, black provides a compelling account of how abe teachers shape and re-shape their professional identity individually and collectively in their community of practice. the second article, by dennis, explores competing discourses and struggles around what she terms professionalism within a uk policy context – all this as the uk government wields it power by means of skills for life, a national literacy and numeracy strategy that provides a policy script for a preferred version of professionalism congruent with neoliberal ideals. neoliberal governance structures that privilege measures of performativity to enhance measurable outcomes via the emergence of audit cultures ‘demands a response’ but not one she argues that ‘has been pre-defined’. grounded in a small-scale research project with sixteen adult language literacy and numeracy (alln) teachers and managers in ten different organisations, her findings complicate the prescribing and imagining of a shared professionalization. for dennis, it is important to ask, ‘whose interests does it serve’? what is also often overlooked, she argues, is the way in which practitioners contest the meaning of policy through embodied and situated processes of performative fluidity, negotiation, and resistance. with this in mind, yasukawa argues in her refractions piece that qualities of resilience, robustness and imagination are required for the development of activist professionals who are able to publically engage in debates against neoliberal policies. as she points out, neo-liberalism has had significant effects in terms of industrial conditions, contestable funding and competency-based training in the australian adult literacy and numeracy context. when it comes to politics, yasukawa argues that teachers have the option of exercising professional agency through what sachs (2001:157) calls an ‘activist identity’. no doubt, this performative and generative act requires resilience to sustain it through periods of patient hard slog in order to build a broad solidarity. here, i suggest that that resilience is key to maintaining gramsci’s ‘optimism of the will.’ the fourth paper in this edition is a timely reminder that pedagogical struggles based in a critical conception of literacy still exist. although many academics on the postmodern left have abandoned or downplay/dismiss the e d i t o r i a l 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s liberatory or emancipatory potential of critical pedagogy/popular education, such ongoing praxis taps collective yearnings for alternative worlds based on justice. in particular, boughton provides empirically grounded insights into a mass literacy campaign in timor-leste, which drew both resources and inspiration from cuba. after the revolution, the cuban government embarked on an ambitious and successful national literacy campaign in 1961 and the model has since been exported to a number of countries including angola, venezuela, and nicaragua. however, as boughton states, literacy campaigns based in a revolutionary or decolonising agenda ‘fell into disrepute in the 1990s’. indeed, with the ideological tide running in favour of market forces, imagining and enacting collective politics is increasingly mocked and maligned, even in the enlightened space of the university (martin 2007). however, boughton’s research demonstrates that a critical literacy project does not have to rely upon lofty rhetoric or ideals. rather, it is the product of problem-posing dialogue and material struggle in specific cultural-historical and place-based contexts that must as freire (1993) argued be constantly ‘made and remade’ (p. 25). under neoliberalism, policies must be justified primarily in terms of their contribution to the economy. to date, such policies in the sphere of education have left a trail of social debris in their wake in terms of degradation, fragmentation, isolation and commodification. as a result, black and yasukawa argue ‘the field of adult literacy and numeracy in australia stands at a crossroads’. it is always tempting to try and predict the future or resort to wishing thinking, but there are no crystal balls, silver bullets or magic wands. rather than engage in speculation about the future direction of the field, black and yasukawa argue that the proposal of the australian federal government to develop a new national foundation skills strategy offers activist professionals with a policy platform and potential support mechanism for broader socio-economic change. they argue for funding that is not driven solely by the human capital agenda, but which gives attention to the generation of social capital through cross-sectoral partnerships and integrated delivery in vet courses, and to ongoing renewal through continued professional learning of practitioners and partnerships with universities. r e f e r e n c e s : comber, b and cormack, p (1997) looking beyond ‘skills’ and ‘processes’: literacy as social and cultural practices in classrooms, reading, vol 31, no 3, pp 22-29. e d i t o r i a l l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 5 ebert, t (1996) ludic feminism and after: postmodernism, desire, and labor in late capitalism, the university of michigan press, ann arbor, mi. freire, p (1993) pedagogy of the oppressed, continuum, new york, (original work published 1970). gee, j (1990) social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses, falmer press, london. gee, j (1991) what is literacy?, in michell, c and weiler, k, eds, rewriting literacy: culture and the discourse of the other, bergin & garvey, new york. giroux, h (1989) schooling for democracy: critical pedagogy in the modern age, routledge, london. gramsci, a (1992) prison notebooks volume 1, trans. j buttigieg and a callarri, ed joseph buttigieg, columbia university press, new york. lankshear, c with lawler, m (1987) literacy, schooling and revolution, falmer press, london. luke, a and freebody, p (1997) critical literacy and the question of normativity: an introduction, in muspratt, s, luke, a and freebody, p, eds, constructing critical literacies, cresskill, hampton press, nj, pp 1-18. luke, a and freebody, p (1999) a map of possible practices: further notes on the four resources model, practically primary, vol 4, no 2, pp 5-8. martin, g (2007) the poverty of critical pedagogy: toward a politics of engagement, in mclaren, p and kincheloe, j, eds, critical pedagogy: where are we now? peter lang publishing, new york, pp 337-353. sachs, j 2001, teacher professional identity: competing discourses, competing outcomes, journal of education policy, vol 16, no 2, pp 149-161. street, b (1995) social literacies: critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography, and education, longman, new york. 1 in joseph buttigieg’s edition of the prison notebooks, it is stated that gramsci attributed this phrase to romain rolland. microsoft word 0705lns151backpage.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 1 2 0 0 6 100 n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s l i n d a g a l l i g a n linda galligan is a lecturer in the learning and teaching support unit at the university of southern queensland in australia. linda’s email address is: galligan@usq.edu.au k g o m o t s o g e t r u d e g a r e g a e dr kgomotso getrude garegae is a lecturer in the department of mathematics and science education at the university of botswana. she holds a doctor of philosophy (phd) from the university of manitoba, canada. her publications and research interests include ethnomathematics and modernization of mathematics in the african context, information and technology, numeracy and literacy, gender, equity and equality, teachers’ and students’ beliefs about mathematics, its teaching and learning, as well as classroom dynamics with regard to hiv/aids and multiculturism. kgomotso’s e-mail address is: garegaek@mopipi.ub.bw l y n d a f o w n e s lynda fownes is the executive director of bc construction industry skills improvement council. her experience includes project design, data collection, test item writing and applying the results of research. lynda’s email address is: lfownes@skillplan.ca r o b y n h a r t l e y robyn hartley has for many years been a freelance researcher. her research interests span the tertiary and vocational education sectors and she has a long term interest in and commitment to adult and community education. j a c k i e h o r n e jackie horne has over ten years experience of conducting economic and social research and analysis. she was employed as an economist within the uk government economic service and as a researcher for the national institute of adult continuing education (niace). during a sabbatical to australia in 2004/05, jackie worked on a literature review on the social and economic benefits of improved adult literacy for the australian council for adult literacy (acal) and a systematic review for the new south wales department of education and training. since returning to the uk, jackie worked briefly for the scottish arts council and is now a researcher within the scottish executive education department. jackie’s email address is: jackiehuk@yahoo.co.uk r e v i e w s l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 101 l i o n e l l a c r o i x lionel lacroix is a lecturer in the faculty of education at brock university. his research interests include: mathematics practice and learning both in school and the workplace, instructional design, and activity theory. his email address is lionel.lacroix@brocku.ca r e b e c c a n t h o g o l e k o k o dr rebecca nthogo lekoko is a senior lecturer in the department of adult education, faculty of education, university of botswana. she holds a doctor of education (d. ed.) from pennsylvania state university, united state of america. dr lekoko’s research and publication interests have been in the areas of program planning, implementation and evaluation of adult and extension education programs. her recent journal articles and conference presentations have focused on specific areas of distance education such as policy frameworks, student support services and assessment strategies. her email address is: lekokorn@mopipi.ub.bw l y n d o n m a r t i n lyndon martin is a senior lecturer in the school of education and lifelong learning at the university of east anglia and an adjunct professor at the university of british columbia. his research interests are the nature of mathematical understanding, with a particular focus on workplace learning and collective understanding. lyndon's email address is: lyndon.martin@uea.ac.uk j e n n i f e r a s a n d l i n jennifer a sandlin is an assistant professor of adult education, in the department of educational administration and human resource development, ms 4226, texas a&m university, college station, tx, 77843-4226. her research interests include the politics of curriculum in adult education, welfare-to-work education, adult literacy education, and consumer education for adults. jennifer’s email address is: jsandlin@coe.tamu.edu m a r i a s i m m s dr maria simms is head of the learning assistance unit at southern cross university (which supports students in their academic research and writing) and manager of the enabling course, preparing for success at scu. she is a published author and has been a lecturer and tutor in creative writing at scu. her interests are academic and creative writing, textual and cultural theory and australian history and historicity with an emphasis on the place of women in history. her email address is: maria.simms@scu.edu.au r e v i e w s 102 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s j a n e t t a y l o r janet taylor is an associate professor in learning and teaching enhancement at the university of southern queensland in australia. her research interests include transition to and retention in higher education, mathematics education and bridging mathematics. her email is : taylorja@usq.edu.au l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 1 2 0 0 6 103 editorial policy and notes for contributors literacy and numeracy studies is an international refereed journal which aims to promote research, scholarship and critical analysis of policy and practice concerning the many and complex ways that adult literacy and numeracy are implicated in adult life. one of the aims of the journal is to extend narrow functional and externally imposed definitions of literacy and numeracy to multiple, open definitions that focus on what people do with their skills, and how they use different texts and modalities in differing contexts. the possibilities for adult literacy and numeracy learning occur in all environments and in many ways. this means that the editors are pleased to accept papers from a range of theoretical perspectives and research approaches, from researchers and practitioners emerging from differing epistemological positions. articles published in previous issues reflect the diverse sites and orientations where literacy and numeracy practitioners work both with people with english-speaking language backgrounds and those with language backgrounds other than english. research sites have included workplaces, prisons, communities, higher education, vocational and adult education, adult esl, indigenous populations and virtual environments. literacy and numeracy are thus understood here as socio-cultural phenomena, the successful acquisition of which moves beyond test and survey results or conventional education and training settings. relevant terms that may help potential contributors determine if this is the journal for them include adult basic education, adult and community education, workplace language, literacy and numeracy, academic language, literacy and numeracy, online literacies and critical literacy and numeracy. because adult literacy and numeracy are emerging as a relatively new focus for research and academic interest internationally, the editors actively encourage submissions from post-graduate research students in the kinds of areas indicated above. finally, in recognition that adult literacy and numeracy are controversial and are engaged with the politics of equity, participation and social justice, the editors offer the opportunity, through the refractions section of the journal, for contributors to publish more rhetorical and controversial pieces likely to interest our readers. refractions papers are not normally submitted to external review. responses to refractions pieces are also welcomed. literacy and numeracy studies is published twice a year. manuscripts should be between three and five thousand words and can be emailed to: hermine.scheeres@uts.edu.au or rwickert@scu.edu.au. they should be double spaced, with ample margins, and bear the title of the contribution. paper title, name(s) of author(s) and address for correspondence should be n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 104 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s placed on a separate page. an abstract of no more than one hundred and fifty words is required. each manuscript is blind reviewed by at least two reviewers. proofs will not normally be sent to authors unless there are substantial changes and/or figures and diagrams. they should be corrected and returned within seven days. major alterations to the text will not be accepted. general guidelines and style conventions please note the referencing conventions used by literacy and numeracy studies and the requirement for non-discriminatory language. note also that, while literacy and numeracy studies is published in australia, it has a diverse and international audience. please clarify any terms that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers outside the country of origin of the paper, and to those outside the disciplinary fields of adult literacy and numeracy. please observe the following conventions: • do not use ‘ibid.’ (and the like) when repeating references • multiple references within parentheses should be divided by a comma, not a semicolon, and there should be no use of ‘and’ within such 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identities’ and ‘subject positions’. secondly, discourse helps construct social relationships between people. and thirdly, discourse contributes to the construction of systems of knowledge and belief. (fairclough 1992:64) n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 105 footnotes footnotes should be avoided. if necessary (as in some forms of historical referencing), numbered end notes can be used to elaborate matters which may be difficult to present in the journal’s reference style. these should be kept to a minimum. tables, figures, diagrams and illustrations authors must supply camera-ready copy of complex tables, figures, diagrams, illustrations and photographs. reference lists please use full names whenever possible. multiple references for one author should be in order of publication. second and subsequent authors should be referenced surname, followed by first name. page numbers must be included for all journal articles and book and report chapters. only references cited in the text should be listed and these should be in full at the end of the manuscript as follows: australian committee for training curriculum (actrac) (1993) the national framework of adult english language, literacy and numeracy competence, actrac productions ltd, frankston, victoria. freebody, peter, gee, james, luke, allan and street, brian (1997) literacy as critical social practice: an introduction, the falmer press, brighton. hammond, jennifer and wickert, rosie (1993) pedagogical relations between adult esl and adult literacy: directions for research, open letter, vol 3, no 2, pp 16-31. humphries, b (1997) from critical thought to emancipatory action: contradictory research goals? sociological research online, vol 2, no 1, retrieved 1 feb 2004 from http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/2/1/3.html. johnston, betty (1993/unpublished paper) report on unesco adult numeracy seminar, marly-le-roi, france, march. kirkpatrick, andy (1993) chinese composition structure: ancient or modern? in conference proceedings of the ninth national languages conference, northern territory department of education, darwin, pp 189-205. lee, alison and wickert, rosie (1995) reading the discourses of adult basic education teaching, in foley, griff, ed, understanding adult education and training, allen and unwin, sydney, pp 134-146. willis, sue, ed, (1990) being numerate: what counts?, australian council for educational research, hawthorn, victoria. author’s bio-note n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 106 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s this note should be brief (two or three sentences at most) and include (i) author’s institutional positions or affiliations and (ii) a full address for correspondence. a very brief note of author’s special interests may follow. acknowledgments any acknowledgments authors wish to make should be included in a separate headed section at the end of the manuscript. please do not incorporate these into the bio-note. microsoft word lns 16.2-17.1pp 63-74 hamiltion 9-oct.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 2 0 0 8 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 2 0 0 9 n o 1 2 0 0 9 63 relinquishing the practices of a lifetime: observations on ageing, caring and literacies mary hamilton a b s t r a c t this paper draws on ethnographic and case study data from a variety of sources to explore the changing social practices of literacy across the lifespan. it explores the new literacy demands that people encounter with age when dealing with life events in a range of social domains. these include increased leisure; travel; changing family and peer relationships as a result of death and loss; issues of health and disability and accessing new technologies. it reveals how literacy is implicated in peoples' changing sense of time, place and history; how the older person’s identity as a literate actor may be interrupted by both institutional and informal processes of caring and their disengagement from spheres of activity that were previously central markers of their identity. ageing thus involves both expansion and retreat from familiar literacy practices. i n t r o d u c t i o n older adults are one significant group who have been defined as being ‘outside’ of contemporary literacy policy because they are not seen to be relevant to goals of economic productivity. this is despite the fact that populations of post-industrial societies are becoming progressively older and that adults’ literacy skills – when measured in cross-sectional surveys – appear to decline systematically with age (see, for example weinstein-shr 1995, oecd 2000). what consequences do literacy changes across the lifespan have for individuals and societies? what are the implications for policies and programs serving older adults? in what ways do the measured differences in literacy skills correspond with changes in the literacy practices of adults as they become older? this paper draws on ethnographic and case study data from a variety of sources to explore the changing social practices of literacy across the lifespan. it illustrates some of the new literacy demands that people encounter with age in the legal and financial domains, in dealing with life events linked with changing family and peer relationships; death and loss; increased leisure; travel; and new technologies. it reveals how literacy is implicated in people’s changing sense of time, place and history; how the older person’s identity as a literate actor may be interrupted by the processes of caring and their disengagement from spheres of activity that were r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e 64 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s previously central markers of their identity. it suggests that ageing thus involves both expansion and retreat from familiar literacy practices. some key issues in the field of literacy studies are thrown into new relief when examined through the lens of ageing. these include the role of literacy in relations of interdependency and mediation, especially the delicate balances of inter-generational support and control, negotiating the boundaries of public and private knowledge, and the importance of considering trust, fear and respect as factors in supporting literacy practices among older people that are acceptable to them. p i c t u r i n g l i t e r a c y a n d a g e i n g f r o m a b o v e a n d b e l o w explanations in the survey literature of declining literacy performance with age are typically couched in terms of cognitive change in functioning or changing educational opportunity over the last century. factors such as disuse of skills, or disinclination to learn in old age are cited (see weinstein-shr 1995). whilst these factors are undoubtedly part of the picture, my aim is to examine what additional insights into the relationship between literacy and seniority can be gained from applying a social practice perspective. the features of the social practice approach to literacy studies have already been rehearsed in general terms in the introduction to this volume by sondra cuban. for the purposes of this paper it is important to note that this approach aims to present literacy and ageing from the perspective of those experiencing it directly using a detailed, ethnographic method and focusing on the dynamics of individual subjects within a complex of contextual factors. such studies differ from traditional surveys of need in focusing not just on the deficits of those with few formal educational achievements. highly educated adults who have made their mark on life also experience change and have to re-negotiate the risks and positive benefits of literacy in older life. the ways in which they do so are just as important to explore if we are interested in understanding textually mediated social worlds. a social practice approach can usefully document three identity-related aspects of literacy: 1) older peoples’ subjective experiences of literacy, 2) the changing social networks and affiliations that are significant to older people, and 3) the ways in which older people are positioned by their literacymediated encounters with individuals and with social institutions. such data can offer rich accounts of subjectivities and the social meanings of literacy. this social practice approach forces us to take account of aspects of literacy experience other than the purely cognitive. a focus on ageing leads inevitably to consideration of embodied practices and the changing materialities of how a person, as a subject, engages with literacy. this is not just a result of the changing materialities of literacy technologies, a theme that is already well explored in the literature (see for example snyder 1997, kress 2003) but the changing materiality of the subjects themselves in sometimes r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e h a m i l t o n 65 rapid and extraordinary ways due to changes in memory, sensory changes in sight and hearing, joint stiffness, lack of mobility, strength and energy. there are positives, too, in embodied experience: a different sense of time and pace; the availability of more, slower, time; and a breadth of emotional experience and understanding built over the lifespan and invested in particular literacy practices and artefacts. these positive aspects are often drawn on as resources by other people involved in the networks and organizations in which older people participate. as janet isserlis puts it: elderly people have made spaces in the world, have interacted with people and events that many of us, who are younger, may be familiar with or not but have not experienced in the way that someone who was alive before the advent of television, the internet, fruit leather or space exploration might. older people know things that young people don't know and they know things differently (isserlis 2003). d a t a this paper draws on existing ethnographic and interview case study data from a variety of sources to identify a set of themes suggested by the social practice perspective. it is a speculative first exploration of this topic and the data has mostly been generated in studies that have aimed to document literacy practices more generally. few of these studies have focused specifically on ageing but they have picked up relevant material incidentally by looking at textually mediated lives in a range of settings and conditions. obviously, the details and literacy practices of older people will differ considerably under different social, cultural, economic, political and geographic conditions. the studies i quote from do not represent an even geographical spread and there is an emphasis on the uk and my own locality in the north west of england. however, my assumption is that the conceptual framework of literacy practices and the elements and processes identified through it can usefully be applied to the experience of older people in other contexts. the studies i have drawn on for this paper include local literacies (barton and hamilton, 1998, based in lancaster england), changing faces (hamilton and hillier 2006, based on a national english sample), and practitioner research projects (e.g. milioti 2000, isserlis, 2003 both from north america). some quotations are also drawn from a collaborative study of changing literacies and changing technologies across the lifespani currently being carried out with a group of senior learners at lancaster university, england (referred to in this paper as the ‘senior learners project’). this project and the present paper are preliminary steps toward more systematic study. r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s l i t e r a c y p r a c t i c e s e x p a n d w i t h a g e this section discusses the expansions of literacy that take place in old age as a result of the accumulated experience and mastery of a lifetime. these expansions result from the sense of time and place that many people arrive at or strive for in old age, a sense of history that is at once both individual and collective and which draws on reservoirs of cultural and linguistic knowledge. this can be seen clearly in the example of family history. documenting family trees and crafting stories related to family history that can be passed onto new generations is a common interest among older people. the status and identity that come from being the eldest in a family or community network is constantly refocused as friends and relatives die, people move into new roles and intergenerational dynamics change. there is never total closure or certainty, rather a degree of flexibility is always present, and literacy practices and interests shift accordingly. harry (see barton and hamilton 1998:81) was 66 years of age, a younger elder, when we met him as part of the local literacies project. he was already a grandfather, retired from the fire service and interested in writing his life history, especially his memoirs from the war. he was a man who had learned his literacies in his adult life through his work, his networks and interests, and he held a respected place in the local community. despite his lack of formal education, he was frequently asked for advice and to write references, he wrote letters to the local paper and used the library regularly. he was an officer in several local community groups. although we did not treat harry particularly as an ‘old man’ in our analysis there are several aspects of his literacy practices that seem, with hindsight, to be age related. he told stories of the limited educational opportunities that left him aware of the greater formal proficiencies of his own children and grandchildren. such stories are typical of his generational cohort (see antikainen et al 1996), field and malcolm 2005, but there is also something more general to notice about the ways that he was using his writing and reading to make sense of a life that he can already look back on and draw lessons from, for himself and for others. whilst his wife was still alive, harry, like many other people had already begun to document his family history, using written artefacts and a range of other media: collecting books, photos and family records; looking up names in church record books; and accompanying his wife on visits to cemeteries and libraries. the advent of the internet has made visible the extent of such ancestor hunting activities. in the uk, the extent of interest with genealogy first became clear in 2002 when the data from the 1901 census was posted online. the website was overwhelmed, crashing under the weight of 30 million hits a day as people looked up their ancestors (rudd 2008). this passion, utilised in reminiscence work in literacy programs and reflected in the popularity of r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e h a m i l t o n 67 local and family history adult education, may not be equally shared across social groups. i would suggest that it may be identified particularly with older adults and has special appeal to those who have been displaced from their familiar cultural context, not just by time, but through war, economic migration and so on. younger people may also engage in family history activities in the context of intergenerational exchange as found in one example drawn from the senior learners project. inspired by the 2006 football world cup, 84 year old roy’s grandson helped his grandfather research and assemble documents about his great grandfather who was a one of the first professional footballers and trainers in england. between them, they collected a mixture of family photographs, old programs, newspaper cuttings and internet information. l i t e r a c y i n d i f f e r e n t d o m a i n s o f o l d e r l i f e the example of family history is one domain where literacy expands with age and raises a set of interesting questions about sense-making and identity that can then be asked of younger and other social groups. the following section looks at several more key domains in which both expansions of, and withdrawal from literacy-related activities occur. it looks in turn at leisure, financial matters, use of the mass media and new technologies, and finally at the domain of caring which leads into a consideration of institutional responses to older people. l e i s u r e old age often brings substantial continuities with earlier interests, activities and expertise, though some domains, such as legal, financial and health, may become ever more salient and generative. for some people community-based networking and local political activities such as lobbying, organizing or serving on committees become more central as time is freed up from other commitments. other activities (such as those related to employment, participation in rock music festivals or extreme sports) may recede, although many people maintain spectator links with these via social networks and the mass media. in the senior learners project, the importance of music – recording and listening to it – was one of the first domains to emerge in discussions about new technologies. in the local literacies project, cliff holt and his step-sister, rose searched out a variety of local entertainment and leisure activities within the constraints of their very limited budgets. about six months before we interviewed them, they had developed a common interest in horse racing and betting and explained in detail their attempts to get to grips with the practices associated with placing bets. these included looking at newspapers, tote books, betting slips, the ‘tick-tack’ signaling system used on the race course and information on television and computer monitors (barton and hamilton 1998:140). r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s f i n a n c i a l m a t t e r s new literacy-related demands in legal and financial domains are faced by many older people when they deal with events such as death, loss and managing property and inheritance. older people act as sponsors and executors for others, as well as rearranging their own affairs with a view to dispersing rather than accumulating assets that is an earlier life preoccupation. in janet isserlis’s portrait of her aunt lil (2003), despite failing faculties and energy lil remained, almost to the moment of her death, concerned about, and connected to, ensuring that her papers were in order. she remembered, for example, a cheque that she needed to write for a relative, maintaining well organized records and procedures for carrying this out. she adapted these procedures to incorporate an increasing degree of collaboration with others, reducing the burden of literacy that she needed to carry herself. early in the afternoon of my birthday, she had my mother write the date, my name, the figure and words: lil then signed the cheque. i was struck by how dramatically lil's signature had changed; the letters were scribbly; her usual characteristic writing had visibly changed. i no longer remember how much, if any, writing she'd done during her last month in hospital. i don't think she did much, beyond, maybe, circling items on a daily menu…i do know (or think i know) that during her last few weeks, she'd lost interest in reading. i think she found it exhausting after having been an avid reader for as long as i'd known her (isserlis, 2003). m o b i l i t y a n d m e d i a old age may bring either expansion of, or withdrawal from, the domain of travel and mobility, depending on circumstances. expansion may occur due to increased time, eligibility for discounted services and sometimes available money after retirement. for many, however, health and reduced financial resources place new restrictions on mobility that have to be accommodated. one result of this for many older people, especially those confined to the home or institutional care is the importance of the mass media as an information source, for entertainment and social connection. a recent report (office of communications 2007) found that older people in the uk access familiar rather than newer media and that hours of television watching are highest in the oldest age groups and among those with disabilities. literacy may increase in importance as a mediator of social communication as face-to-face contact with others becomes more difficult to maintain. a common motivation for learning to use e-mail among participants in the senior learners project was to communicate with distant r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e h a m i l t o n 69 relatives, especially children for whom this was the obvious way to keep in touch. living a life inevitably brings with it encounters with new technologies and it is well worth considering how older people approach new technologies in distinctly different ways from, for example, children and young adults. the most obvious aspect of this is the overlaying of new competencies on old, whether it is the change in a system of measurement or a currency that renders people effectively bi-numerate or the displacement of an old technology such as the typewriter or the postcard, with a replacement for the same task. these changes bring both advantages and disadvantages for the user and render some of their existing skills obsolete. in some cases the encounter with a new technology is a sudden experience in old age, but in many other instances it is part of a lifelong adaptation to change and we should not underestimate the resources people can bring to this process, the meta-level knowledge it generates and the flexibility with which new practices can be incorporated into daily routines. in this sense, the skilled literacy user is constantly relinquishing their established knowledge and practices in the pursuit of everyday goal. pam recounts with humor learning to text from her daughter as, in part, having to learn to re-compose the wordy message she would normally write, to something shorter that can — is expected to be — sent in an instant: we went to h------on bank holiday monday and on the way back i got a text and i was trying to send one back and she said ‘mother are you writing a four page letter’? because it was taking me that long she said ‘give it to me, what do you want to say?’ (hamilton and hillier 2006:53) there are some interesting studies emerging of older people’s incorporation of health technologies into their domestic routines, for example the use of alarm pendants (see domenech and lopez 2007) or hearing aids. a key dimension here is the identities that people build for themselves in relation to health risks. these determine how intimacy with a protective device develops as the device continually questions a person’s existing view of their self-efficacy. a fit, but at risk, older person may not wish to identify with the information and images in a brochure showing someone like themselves in a dangerous position, for example after a fall. intimacy with a protective alarm may paradoxically make them feel more at risk, less in control, rather than safer with the result that they ‘lose’ or reject the device. where a device increases a sense of control and expertise, however, it may be actively incorporated into daily routines. an example of this from the senior learners project was self-monitoring of blood pressure using a device that can be bought from the pharmacy. this enabled more frequent testing and a double check on information given by the doctor. these examples highlight r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e 70 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s how use and understanding of information about health artefacts — including drugs — is much more complex than simply whether people can read the instructions given out by a health professional. c a r i n g the domain of caring, is one that is frequently highlighted in studies of older, adults. on the one hand, many older people become increasingly involved as carers themselves. partly as a result of the ageing process itself, partly because in withdrawing from the world of paid public work, older people have time to give attention to younger generations. if they are physically able and close by, they may be closely involved as babysitters and in childcare more generally as pam, the informant quoted earlier, describes as part of her reciprocal family relationships (see hamilton and hillier 2006:53). many grandparents are primary carers of children (see mission australia 2007, suarez 2007). on the other hand, as time goes on, many older people become increasingly dependent on others for their own personal care. i n s t i t u t i o n a l p o s i t i o n i n g o f o l d e r p e o p l e the examples given in the previous section have touched on issues of identity and literacy and this becomes more important as we think about how the increasingly textualised world interacts with the experience of old age, benefiting some, marginalizing others. by moving from the world of employment into retirement, old age and pensions, many people find themselves, for the first time for many years, in contact with the state bureaucracies delivering caring and welfare services directly on their own account. such agencies are, to use deb brandt’s term, major sponsors of literacy in old age and they intrude into the privacy of domestic life (brandt 2001). in data from the senior learners project, roy smiles as he tells how the social worker came with an independent living assessment form with many questions to fill in. he submits to this because he feels entitled to some aids that are available free through the local council. ‘she asked me if i had my own teeth and how often i clean them. i told her of course i had my own teeth, who else’s would i have? but what did she need to know that for?’ in fact, he has had dentures since the age of 23 but this piece of personal, intimate information is not given freely to someone he has never met before, sitting in his home with a clipboard. roy, like others of his generation, has also had to accommodate to changes in collecting his weekly pension from a system that required no writing (the post office cashier tore out the weekly voucher from a book, date stamping both the voucher and the remaining stub and handed over the cash) to one that uses a smart card that requires memorizing a pin and r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e h a m i l t o n 71 punching this into a machine quickly and accurately, in a public place, in order to obtain the money from his bank account. in her account of her grandmother’s move into a care home due to her deteriorating eyesight, deana milioti (2000) describes how this move interrupted both her grandmother’s social networks and her established literacy practices which had enabled her to communicate with friends and family of all ages, to cook food, and to get news and information. in a noisy environment, with busy staff, surrounded by more needy patients than herself, the routines of the care home exacerbated her problems rather than mitigated them. milioti (2000) observes the high reliance on oral communication with the patients whilst the organizational aspects of the care home, that co-ordinated the staff’s actions (for example around medication and meal times) were largely written and not shared with patients. care homes also tend to limit residents’ access to communication technologies such as phones and computers. t h e m e d i a t i n g f u n c t i o n s o f f a m i l y a n d c o m m u n i t y n e t w o r k s the institutional encounters with literacy described above often involve a three-way transaction between the older person, institutional staff and family carer. the role of the family carer may vary from that of onlooker to active intermediary and advocate. many of the procedures and paperwork designed by caring agencies have to take account of this – respecting the autonomy of the older person yet their need for support by trusted others is reflected in the form-filling procedures demanded by medical and other services. a common example is a scene in the hospital outpatient’s waiting room where the patient discusses and interprets with relatives the form that the doctor has asked them to fill-in and the implications of giving consent to a medical procedure. paperwork can become overwhelming or its significance is unrecognised. in one example, robert’s daughter discovers months of unpaid bills and correspondence in his study, left unopened. though he has been a distinguished doctor and is a highly literate person, the paperwork entailed by these letters is too exhausting or uninteresting to engage him anymore. however, the example of a collaboratively written cheque in janet isserlis’s case study of lil illustrates the crucial power of the signature to the exercise of adult autonomy (as mace 2002 argues). giving power of attorney even to a well-known friend or family member is a most significant one to a person’s sense of identity and control. the fear of fraud and deception can colour even apparently cordial family relations. relinquishing the right to sign is symbolic of an identity shift from being an authoritative and autonomous member of the family and community as provider and carer of others, a writer and decision-maker, to that of being cared for. r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e 72 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in the negotiation of these situations by elderly people and their friends, family and institutional care services, the necessary letting go of control reveals them to be complex, fraught with power relations. the site of old age thus highlights the emotional sensitivities of networks of interdependency, the importance of trust, fear, respect and the large amount of work that must be done to achieve a balance between s upport and control. the metaphor of social capital captures little of the texture of the subtle exchanges that constitute acceptable behaviors between consenting adults and these have been better explored in anthropological studies of reciprocity (hyde 2006). c o n c l u s i o n s a n d i m p l i c a t i o n s to date, studies of literacy and ageing have tended to be prompted by the changing demographic of age and concerns for social inclusion among a group who had fewer opportunities for schooling than the current generation. these older people may now experience increasing isolation from the networks of friends and family that have sustained them across their lifespan. whilst i share these interests and concerns, an ethnographic eye on the literacies of old age proves to be productive in its own right. it highlights domains, relationships, new questions and issues that we can take back into literacy studies more widely. in particular it focuses attention on the ways in which older people are repositioned by the institutional encounters that accompany changes of status and rites of passage such as retirement from paid work, becoming a grandparent, eligibility for services and pensions, or becoming formally defined as disabled. these encounters are often mediated by literacy. a fine-grained exploration of them underscores the complexity of exchanges within networks of support. trust, intimacy, respect for autonomy; reciprocity and economic exchange; negotiation of the boundaries of public and private space all these are significant dimensions of people’s experience. the ethnographic eye also emphasises the dimensions of embodiment and materiality involved in resisting or managing changes in both the ageing human agent themselves and the technologies involved in communicating across the lifespan. there are thus a number of lessons for policy that can be drawn from this paper. firstly, a lifespan approach to literacies is important. there is a great deal of life after retirement and after the age of 50. policy needs to differentiate more clearly among ‘younger’ and ‘older’ elderly. there is a need for cross-disciplinary policy responses and conversations, for example between education, health and social services. secondly, we need to pay attention to the potential of the mass media and communicative resources as well as formal educational opportunities to enhance literacy use, new learning and autonomy among older people. paradoxically, with decreased mobility older people have a higher reliance on the mass media and technological r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e h a m i l t o n 73 solutions to keep in touch with other people and the world at large. third, we need better understanding of the complex mediating roles of family, peers and institutions (often all implicated at the same time) in negotiating and supporting changes in literacy practices over time. intergenerational learning programs that span several generations, including grandparents as active participants, have great potential to promote age desegregation and understanding of these issues. r e f e r e n c e s antikainen, a, houtsonen, j, kauppila, j and huotelin, h (1996) living in a learning society: life histories, identities and education, falmer press, london. barton, d and hamilton, m (1998) local literacies: a study of reading and writing in one community, routledge, london and new york. domenech, m and lopez, d (2007) older people and artefacts: a problem of intimacy, paper presented to the centre for science studies and institute for health research seminar series, lancaster university, england. field, j and malcolm, i (2005) talking about my generation: learning, identity and agency the role of historical time and generational time over the life course, proceedings of the 3rd international conference at crll (centre for research in lifelong learning), university of stirling, 24-26 june 2005, vol 1, pp 168-174. hamilton, m and hillier, y (2006) the changing face of adult literacy, language and numeracy 1970-2000: a critical history, trentham books, stoke on trent, england. hyde, l (2006) the gift, canongate books, edinburgh, scotland. isserlis, j (2003) signing the cheque: case study of lil’s literacy practices, retrieved june 2008 from http://www.brown.edu/departments/swearer_center/literacy_resour ces/hamilton.isserlis.html kress, g (2003) literacy in the new media age, routledge, london. mace, j (2002) the give and take of writing: scribes, literacy and everyday life, niace, leicester. milioti, d (2000) nursing home literacies, a journal of ordinary literacies, english 348, university of boston, (an internal course-related document not formally published). mission australia (2007) grandparents raising their grandchildren, snapshot report, macquarie bank foundation, retrieved june 2008 from www.missionaustralia.com.au r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e 74 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s oecd (2000) literacy in the information age: final report of the international adult literacy survey, statistics canada and oecd. office of communications (2007) media literacy audit: report on media literacy amongst older people, ofcom, retrieved june 2008 from www.ofcom.org.uk rudd, m (2008) roll up for the magical ancestry tour, times online, june 22nd, 2008. snyder, i (1997) from page to screen, allen and unwin, st leonards, nsw, australia. suarez, d (2007) grandparents raising grandchildren and heritage language maintenance, presentation to the american educational research association, chicago illinois, april 2007. weinstein-shr, g (1995) literacy and older adults in the united states [ncal technical report tr94-17], national center on adult literacy, philadelphia, pa. i this project was initiated by invitation through the senior learners forum of the department of continuing education at lancaster university in december 2007. ten people responded and have participated in the core project, carrying out selfcase studies of changing literacy and technology use. we followed this activity by each conducting two interviews with contrasting members of our families and friends in order to broaden the range of response. the ages of people interviewed to date range from 58-91 years of age. microsoft word lns 17.2 lo bianco hs 30-11 final.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 7 n o 2 2 0 0 9 35 unesco, literacy and leslie limage joseph lo bianco i n t r o d u c t i o n rosie wickert points out that, in literacy policy: ‘the stories of actors involved in policy struggles have been overlooked’ (2001: 90). the paper by leslie limage redresses this gap for the crucially important area of international multilateral agencies, specifically the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco). her aim is to produce ‘a more clear-eyed look at how to advance the best of multilateral action in the field in which i have been involved at all levels throughout my adult life: children’s and adults’ literacy worldwide’ (limage, 2009: 7). readers of literacy and numeracy studies will be well versed in the profoundly political ways in which literacy and numeracy are conditioned, and how critical the ways to name and frame these fields of activity are for public action. sometimes these ‘profoundly political ways’ do not involve clashes of irreconcilable ideological positions, or divergent professional orientations, instead residing in the operational nature and choices of organisations, in micro-politics of struggle, interests, prestige, career-making, identity, power and control. for a complex multilateral and multilingual agency like unesco, politicisation runs deep, the consequences are profound, and the work of committed individuals ultimately crucial. n i n e t e e n e i g h t y f o u r during 1984 the united states, responsible for 24 per cent of the agency’s budget, announced its formal withdrawal from unesco, accusing it of being corrupt and anti-western. it did not rejoin until 2003. in 1983, former australian ambassador to unesco, owen harries (1983a), approvingly predicted the american departure in an article in the new york times on december 21. harries was previously a senior advisor to prime minister malcolm fraser and subsequently a fellow at the conservative us think tank, the heritage foundation, where he wrote a ‘backgrounder’ (1983b) lamenting the media policies promoted by amadou-mahtar m'bow unesco’s francophone senegalese director-general. m’bow was closely associated with the 1980 macbride report, the commission over the problems of communication (preston, herman and u n e s c o 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s schiller, 1989) and supported the building of the new world information and communication order recommended in macbride. in the ‘backgrounder’ and a hard-hitting executive memorandum (1983c), harries recommended that the state department announce united states withdrawal, believing this would force unesco to repair its operations, abandon its presumed anti-western stance, and tackle corruption and inefficiency. when the united states finally withdrew, secretary of state george shultz justified the action as follows: ‘trends in the policy, ideological emphasis, budget and management of unesco were detracting from the organization's effectiveness and leading it away from the original principles of its constitution (preston, herman and schiller 1989:10). the ‘original principles’ is a reference to the more ‘civilisation-centred’ ideals of the constitution contrasted with the more grounded real-world action in development promotion which had come onto unesco’s agenda through admission of poor countries. similar concerns to shultz’s were expressed by the united kingdom’s government and within a year of the united states departure the united kingdom also withdrew from unesco. n a t c o m i was appointed to the australian national commission for unesco in that same year, 1984. the national commission is responsible for facilitating australia’s participation in unesco’s fields of endeavour: education, science, culture and communications. it works mostly through the foreign affairs and trade department, although the bulk of the work relates to education and science. from the moment of joining the national commission, the devastating psychological and financial effect of the united kingdom and united states departures was evident. it placed considerable pressure on australia to show anglosphere solidarity, but the hawke and keating governments refused to follow suit, and the united kingdom’s readmission in 1997 eased pressure on the howard government. however, the ever-present possibility of withdrawal coloured many of the discussions and activities during my 12 years of involvement. e d u c a t i o n a n d l i t e r a c y during my period with natcom my work focused on regional activities, especially with the asia pacific program of education for all, melanesian and polynesian activities linked to international literacy year (ily) 1990, and follow up regional planning conferences, the regional s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n l o b i a n c o 37 advisory committee for education for asia and the pacific and participation in formulating australian policy positions on budgets, policies and activities of unesco. like many australian literacy and education personnel, i baulked at the unesco-speak of ‘eradicating illiteracy’ and classification of people as ‘illiterates’, and occasional and all-too-ready associations made between civility, culture and formal literacy. but it is crucial to keep in mind that unesco is not only multilateral, it is also, in a deep way, multilingual and multicultural. all understandings of phenomena require negotiation, and while we might reject stigmatising ways to name things, and express alarm at the chasm between high-sounding declarations and paltry resources, it was always clear to australian literacy educators that unesco was unique and uniquely valuable. even at its weakest, unesco commanded an authoritative high ground, derived from its universality and the elevated tone of its world mission in education, science and culture. the lofty remit was turned to practical action to support the right of girls to attend school, to bring basic education to destitute urban-dwelling adolescents and to devise creative nonformal provision of ‘street literacy’. these were possible because the high culture traditions and inheritance afforded the agency international traction in advancing an agenda of basic education and universal literacy as a shared global human right. by the late 1980s however, the full furore of the new world information and communication order, combined with unesco’s limited means (comparable to a large australian university), prevented it gaining traction among the quitters and held only tenuous appeal for the stayers. o e c d a critical change in unesco’s fortunes and reputation in relation to literacy arose during the early 1990s, when the organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd) transformed the public international understanding of literacy. in place of unesco’s formulation of literacy as a universal human right, literacy was construed as a proxy measure for the human capital stocks of national economies. this is the marker that prevails today and this development was critical to how industrialised countries came to see both literacy and unesco. the former was linked to economic competitiveness based on human capital theorisations of how national wealth is generated in the context of globalised trade and lowered protection. the unesco paradigm of declarations to ‘eradicate’ literacy in the interests of human rights was marginalised as neo-liberal notions of literacy took hold (lo bianco 1999). u n e s c o 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s today, statistical comparisons of relative literacy rates are a regular feature of contrast among developed countries as well as developing ones. many of the developed states which were reluctant to participate in ily in 1990, believing they had transcended literacy problems with universal compulsory education, are among the most enthusiastic participants. these comparisons have generated ever more complex procedures of measurement under the rubric of the international adult literacy survey (ials); a collaborative project of statistical agencies (statistics canada, the united states department of education’s national center for education statistics and the education testing service of princeton, new jersey), independent researchers and governments (lo bianco, 2004: australian council for adult literacy (acal) 2008). commencing with no single measure (wickert 1989), there has been a major evolution in the assessment of what is now called the adult literacy and lifeskills survey (alls), implemented between mid 2006 and january 2007 across australia. the results indicate that between 46 per cent and 70 per cent of australian adults recorded poor or very poor skills across one or more of the five skill domains: prose and document literacy, numeracy, problem-solving and health literacy. whereas the 1996 ials found that some 6.2 million lacked adequate literacy skills for the demands of everyday life and work, alls has documented an increase to some 7 million adults, due mostly to population increase (acal 2008). the involvement of the oecd has shifted the response of developed countries to their endemic literacy problems, once assumed to have been banished due to the inoculating effects of free, universal and compulsory education. u n e s c o ’ s u n i v e r s a l l i t e r a c y limage reports a sad account of loss of focus and energy within unesco following the united states withdrawal. the pursuit of universal literacy followed a two-track approach of making access to primary education universally available and linking this to complementary action in both formal provision and various non-formal activities for adults and other post-schooling populations. in the limage paper, we note a powerful iteration between the seemingly unconnected actions of individuals within unesco, and the conditioning forces outside it. it is not surprising that, as an insider with longstanding and meritorious service to this field, she places considerable emphasis of the critical need for a professional, international, civil service. for limage, this professional class of civil servants, neutral of the interests and agendas of the originating countries, the member states, who constitute s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n l o b i a n c o 39 the organisation and whose ideas and ideologies provide the intellectual climate within which the insiders must operate, is indispensible to providing continuity of effort, sustained attention, coordination of action, and rigorous attention to learning from implementation. this task of continuous improvement is unimaginable in the environment limage describes, subject to a too-direct connection with some of the most senior political figures in the world. recent years have witnessed a steady erosion of the focused attention and symbolic centrality literacy had commanded for some 60 years within unesco, though the world is still far from achieving the goal of ‘eradication’. the compelling account limage offers of unesco’s travails since 2003, the ‘return of the united states’ (the washington times 2007), makes sobering reading. this is much more than mere attention to the machinations of international organisational politics and the prestige of countries. how problems are named and construed, and how they are to be tackled, constitute the way those problems become adopted as projects for state or institutional policy, and how they are represented in public life. in her discussion of a similar problematic in the australian setting, wickert (2001) offers an equally compelling account of the multiple agents and agencies, within various agencies and departments of state. the account by limage is both passionate and dispassionate, engaged and ‘objective’; it is an insider’s account seen by someone whose new outsiderness was already being forged on the inside. it shows the immense value of memory in organisation and exposes the waste and duplication that emerges when memory is dissipated. australian literacy educators and researchers have long been conscious of the problematic relationships between knowledge and action, advocacy and engagement, persuasion and implementation (lo bianco 1996). advocacy on behalf of literacy translates into action on behalf of the opportunities and rights of particular and predictable groups of people. these groups can be understood in reference to their socio-economic status, their indigenous status and language backgrounds. these markers of social status, political presence, and economic characteristics and ethnic attributes, constitute a major part of the story of adult literacy within industrialised, so-called developed countries. the unesco literacy story related by limage, especially its more recent chapters, concludes with recommendations for ‘the way forward’. we can only hope these are pursued and implemented, as it is clear that international leadership, and particularly a resumption by unesco of its historic championing of the human rights inherent in the cause of universal literacy, with its attendant issues of justice for some of the most marginalised and oppressed peoples, remains crucial. this occurs even in light of statistically ever more sophisticated and reliable data sets about u n e s c o 40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s which social categories have what quantum of which kinds of literacy. another good reason to take heed of ‘the stories of actors involved in policy struggles’. r e f e r e n c e s australian council for adult literacy (acal) (2008) position paper on the 2006 adult literacy and lifeskills survey. retrieved 2 august 2009. http://www.acal.edu.au/publications/documents/allsacalppaper.pdf harries, o. (1983a) us quits unesco. new york times, late city final edition, p 27, section a. retrieved, 24 august 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/21/opinion/us-quit-unesco.html harries, o. (1983b) the u.s. and unesco at a crossroads. october 19, 1983 the heritage foundation backgrounder #298. retrieved, 24 august 2009 http://www.heritage.org/research/internationalorganizations/bg298.cfm harries, o. (1983c) the us and unesco: time for decision, december 5, 1983 the heritage foundation executive memorandum #40. retrieved, 24 august 2009 http://www.heritage.org/research/internationalorganizations/em40.cfm lo bianco, j. (1996) public policy and literacy research data: does knowing lead to doing?, aspects of literacy, assessed skill levels (4228: 0), australian bureau of statistics, canberra. pp.80-88. lo bianco, j. (1999) globalisation: frame word for education and training. human capital and human rights, language australia, melbourne. lo bianco, j. (2004) widening access and literacy, in m. osborne, j. gallacher, and n. crossan, eds, researching widening access: issues and approaches in an international context, routledge, london. pp 65-76. preston, w., herman, e.s., schiller, h.i, (1989) hope and folly: the united states and unesco, 1945-1895, institute for media analysis, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n l o b i a n c o 41 wickert, r. (1989) no single measure, summary report, department of employment, education and training, canberra. wickert, r. (2001) politics, activism and the process of policy production: adult literacy in australia, in j. lo bianco and r. wickert, eds, australian policy activism for language and literacy. language australia publications, melbourne. pp.75-91. the washington times, (2007) us envoy to unesco quits amid turmoil, tuesday, march 20, 2007. retrieved, 24 august 2009 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/mar/20/20070320-095607 5953r/?feat=article_related_stories microsoft word lns 17.3pp 27-41 smith 23dec.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 7 n o 3 2 0 0 9 27 accountability requirements and professional development in the us adult basic and literacy education system cristine smith a b s t r a c t even before the 2001 enactment of the no child left behind legislation, the education bill that holds schools in the us accountable for student achievement, ‘adult education [had] become part and parcel of the new federal trend to encourage the setting of national education goals and standards and holding programs accountable for demonstrating achievements’ (sticht 1998). now, almost ten years after enacting the workforce investment act (1998), the legislation that required states to report how adult students were making progress towards educational and work goals, the field is just beginning to take stock of whether accountability has helped or hurt our adult education system. in the us school system (kindergarten to 12th grade for children five to 18), several researchers have investigated the effect of stronger accountability requirements on professional development systems. berry et al. (2003), in a study of 250 teachers and principals in schools across six southeastern us states found that results were mixed: although high-stakes accountability systems help focus professional development efforts on the curricular needs of students, little evidence exists to support the claim that such systems help teachers change their practice to enhance student learning...a tendency exists…to narrow the focus of professional development activities to tested subjects or provide general support that is disconnected from curricular needs. (association for supervision and curriculum development 2004:3) i n t r o d u c t i o n the purpose of this article is to provide initial information, through the perceptions of practitioners in the adult basic and literacy education (able) field, about how the implementation of the national reporting system (nrs) (the accountability system in the us for able), has affected professional development systems, activities, and opportunities. one hypothesis would be that the effects are just as mixed in adult basic education programs as they have been in schools for children. a c c o u n t a b i l i t y r e q u i r e m e n t s 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s why is it important whether (and how) a national system of reporting and accountability has had an effect on the type of professional development that adult basic education teachers receive through their state professional development systems? in the able field, where the majority of teachers do not have much formal education specifically related to teaching adults (smith et al 2003), and few states require certification specifically related to adult education (smith 2006), professional development is the primary mechanism for preparing teachers with the knowledge and skills about instructional practices that will spur adult student achievement. if adult basic education teachers have much less access to professional development than their counterparts in the school system (smith & hofer 2003), and if the nrs has increased the proportion of professional development that practitioners are required to have related to implementing assessments and reporting, then it may mean that instructionally-focused professional development is ‘competing’ with accountability-focused professional development for teachers’ time. in other words, an important question for able is whether the accountability system has improved reporting at the expense of teachers receiving professional development about instruction. c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s o f p r o f e s s i o n a l d e v e l o p m e n t i n t h e u s a d u l t b a s i c a n d l i t e r a c y e d u c a t i o n s y s t e m the professional development system for adult basic education, literacy and language teachers in the us. like the service delivery system itself, is administered primarily through state-wide and private agencies rather than federal agencies. the system has evolved considerably over the past 20 years. in 1991, with the passing of the national literacy act, states received support to establish state literacy resource centers supported by the newly-instituted national institute for literacy. they were tasked with providing comprehensive professional development—both pre-service and in-service— for all adult basic education teachers in their states. states were to spend a minimum of 15% of their adult basic education funding on professional development and research activities, two-thirds of which was required to be spent on teacher training (belzer et al 2001). however, congress cut funding for the state literacy resource centers in 1995 (burt & keenan 1998). with the reauthorisation and reconfiguring of the national literacy act into the workforce investment act in 1998, states were allowed to spend a maximum of 12.5% on ‘leadership’ for a ‘wide variety of support and coordination efforts’ (belzer et al 2001), with no specific minimum for teacher training or professional development. thus, unless a state’s legislature also provided funding to augment the federal allocation, money for professional development decreased, particularly in states with limited adult basic education dollars (tolbert 2001). r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e s m i t h 29 the types of professional development offered to adult basic education and literacy teachers have continued to be predominantly in-service workshops and occasional conferences, rather than longer-term opportunities for development. the most recent national evaluation (rmc research corporation 1996), which surveyed all states’ use of federal monies for adult education professional development, found that single-session workshops accounted for 38% of all professional development activities, followed by institutes or courses (24%), and statewide or regional conferences (11%). although more states now offer some type of new teacher orientation, either online, face-to-face, or text-based (national adult education professional development consortium 2007), access to professional development— particularly in-service training—is additionally limited by adult literacy teachers’ part-time status, lack of paid professional development release time, and difficulties attending professional development activities: currently, the conditions of the abe occupation are such that those in the field will never be able to participate systematically in the very activities they see as necessary to doing their jobs well. educators claim the desire for professional development is present; readily accessible opportunities to fulfill that desire are most notably not. (wilson & corbett 2001:26) the circumstances in which adult basic and literacy education practitioners work, is an important background for understanding the effects of accountability on the professional development they are offered. a s h o r t h i s t o r y o f a c c o u n t a b i l i t y : t h e n a t i o n a l r e p o r t i n g s y s t e m adult basic education in the us is primarily funded by the federal government and by state legislatures, unlike the school system for children (which is primarily funded and managed by local school districts), and the higher education system (a combination of state-funded public institutions and privately funded colleges and universities). as the budget deficit grows, the federal government is increasingly interested in the return on investment for the almost $500 million allocated to able annually. over the years, demands for information about the return on this investment have varied. the national literacy act of 1991 asked states to voluntarily report on whether able programs had high-quality curricula, instruction and professional development; however, the workforce investment act of 1998 required a mandatory, quantitative reporting designed to inform congress about how many individual adult students meet specific societal and employment goals (american institutes for research 2005). a c c o u n t a b i l i t y r e q u i r e m e n t s 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the 1998 workforce investment act, title ii, the adult education and family literacy act, came down firmly on the side of outcomes and impacts that reflect, like the title, an emphasis on individual readiness as a worker and a parent, mandating that ‘adult education services are authorised in order to assist adults to become employed, be involved in their children’s education, and gain a secondary credential (ged or high school diploma)’ (bingman 2000). under this law, states were required to set performance targets for three core adult basic education outcomes, indicated by (1) improvements in literacy, language, mathematics and other basic skills; (2) placement, retention or career advancement in or completion of postsecondary education or employment; and (3) receipt of a secondary school diploma or equivalent (workforce investment act 1998). states have been required to show progress each year towards these performance targets, and there are funding sanctions for not doing so. in order to establish a common system for states to report to the federal government, the division of adult education and literacy of the u.s. department of education funded the development of the nrs, which ‘established measures for the core indicators required by the workforce investment act’ (bingman 2000:3). the nrs required each state to develop a system for providing data on all adult students who enter programs that receive federal funding. the state in turn requires individual able programs to follow each student with standardised tests to determine achievement and progress towards goals. program staff must at least attempt to test every student before instruction (pre-test) and then again after a certain number of hours of instruction (post-test). programs must record each student’s goal (whether related to improving skills, education level, or employment) as she or he enrols in the program, and report to the state against progress towards that goal each year. with stronger monitoring by the federal government of states’ progress towards adult education achievement and goals, and with stronger monitoring by the states of local programs’ performance, a shift towards a much more intensive, standardised system of documenting each adult student’s progress began in 1999. teachers and program staff were now required to provide quantitative information about each student's skills when they arrived at the program and periodically thereafter. in a six-state review of the impacts of federal policies (including the workforce investment act), on able programs and practitioners, belzer (2003) found that: programs also placed greater emphasis on testing and documentation, as well as on goal setting. rather than replacing classroom processes, these changes often added an extra burden to already over-taxed instructors (iv). belzer noted that in four out of the six states the state agency used the existing professional development system or other state-wide supports to help r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e s m i t h 31 programs respond to the nrs requirements, usually with limited funding. although belzer concluded that using the pre-existing professional development system helped programs through the change brought about by greater accountability demands, program administrators in belzer’s study reported ‘devoting more work time to documentation and less to educational leadership and professional development for their staff’ (39). if this is so, then it appears that the nrs must certainly have had an impact on the professional development offered to practitioners, at least during the time period when the nrs was being introduced. however, we still have little information about the longer-term affects of accountability requirements on professional development activities and systems. m e t h o d o l o g y due to the lack of research in this area, this study required an exploratory design to generate initial perceptions of those working in the field. these opinions and perceptions can then be translated into hypotheses for further research. the key research questions driving this study included: have the requirements for practitioners to participate in professional development related to accountability and assessment changed since the nrs accountability system was instituted, and if so, how? has the total proportion of professional development in programs or states related to accountability and assessment increased since nrs, and by how much? to what extent and in what ways has the nrs affected professional development and the type of training able teachers receive? data collection for this exploratory study began by identifying and contacting approximately 20 experts in the field of professional development in adult basic and literacy education. in order to find respondents who had worked in the field long enough to know what it was like before and after the nrs came into existence (approximately 1999-2001, depending on the state), only experts who had worked in the field since before 2000 were contacted. eventually, in-depth phone interviews with ten of these experts were conducted in the summer and autumn of 2007 using a semi-structured protocol. interviewees were asked about years of experience and depth of knowledge regarding adult basic and literacy education professional development, and the interviews continued with questions about changes in professional development related to accountability and assessment over time in their state or area and about their perceptions of the extent and type of effects the nrs has had on professional development. each interview lasted approximately 40-90 minutes, transcribed verbatim by the researcher. the ten experts interviewed included three state department of education project monitors (one each from a western, a southeastern and a northeastern us a c c o u n t a b i l i t y r e q u i r e m e n t s 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s state); a national expert in english for speakers of other languages (esol) instruction and professional development; a national expert in adult basic education and literacy; three directors of statewide professional development systems (one from a western state, and two from northeastern states); and two state-level providers of professional development (one each from a southeastern and a northeastern state).these professional development experts had worked in the field from eight to over 30 years. when asked on a scale of one to five how knowledgeable they felt they were about professional development in their state or nationally, all replied that they were very or extremely knowledgeable (nine out of the ten responded with a five). this study also employed a ten-question, on-line convenience survey of subscribers to the association of adult literacy professional developers listserv in december 2007-january 2008. the survey questions mirrored the interview questions, asking whether, to what extent, and how the nrs had affected professional development in the respondents’ program, state or area. sixty-nine practitioners responded to the survey. there was a wide range of experience among the respondents, with roughly one third of the sample each having less than five, between five and ten, and more than ten years professional development experience. of the 69, almost half normally worked at the program level, while 44% worked at the state level, 6% worked at the national level, and the rest worked at ‘other’ (unspecified) levels. the comments, always eloquent, from both survey respondents and interviewees indicate that it is difficult for many practitioners in the able field to separate the effects of the nrs system in general from its effects on professional development. in reporting findings, i have purposefully selected only those comments that relate specifically to professional development systems, activities and opportunities. f i n d i n g s c h a n g e s i n p r o f e s s i o n a l d e v e l o p m e n t r e q u i r e m e n t s the requirement for practitioners to participate in accountabilityrelated professional development appears to have risen considerably since the nrs began. thirty-nine percent of respondents indicated that teachers in their state were required to learn about student assessment or accountability requirements before the nrs took effect, compared to 74% reporting that teachers now are required to attend such trainings. in large part, this seems to be due to the increased expectation in many states that teachers take on the burden of administering tests to each adult student: new teachers are required to take training on how to give the tabe [test of adult basic education]. teachers are required to take the tabe themselves, know the skills that are needed r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e s m i t h 33 for students. training on how to administer it, analyze and make it useful for them instructionally, when it’s appropriate to readminister, and how to follow all the guidelines of the test administration manual. throughout the state, it’s mostly the teachers who administer the tests. (state department of education monitor) the primary staff (and sometimes the only staff) in able programs are the teachers, since many smaller programs do not have specific staff to conduct intake assessments. it appears that more teachers nowadays are required to attend professional development on test administration and accountability policies. in some states, this represents a net gain in the amount of professional development teachers can attend. yet respondents see this as a mixed benefit: the training and development of teachers are now taken into account as a real agent of change in the process of educating adults. by having a focus to move toward, program administrators have begun to understand how important the development and professional support to teachers really is. (survey respondent) a positive effect is when programs learn how to use the data to improve services or target classroom instruction, so long as it doesn’t become professional development around teaching to the test. however, in professional development, an important negative effect is that the pd dollars are increasingly being spent towards learning how to be good ‘bean-counters’...while data is ultimately a good thing, one could argue that the resources to support this training should not become a burden on the pd system and instead should be funded separately.(survey respondent) even though professional development around assessment is tedious and ‘yucky’, it has brought teachers together in a way that rarely happens. (survey respondent) c h a n g e s i n p r o f e s s i o n a l d e v e l o p m e n t o f f e r i n g s with increased requirements for practitioners to attend professional development (pd) focused on accountability and assessment, the proportion of such professional development also increased since the nrs. only 7.2 % of respondents reported that the proportion of accountability-focused professional development totalled more than a third of all pd offered in their a c c o u n t a b i l i t y r e q u i r e m e n t s 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s program, state or area. by contrast, 36% of respondents reported that accountability-focused pd equalled more than a third of all pd in the first few years after the nrs started (during ‘the transition’ to accountability). now, approximately seven years after nrs started, 50% of the survey respondents indicate that such professional development accounts for more than a third of the total professional development offered, and one-quarter of the respondents indicate that it represents more than half of the pd offered in their program. as one survey respondent explained, ‘other trainings have been tabled in order to train teachers in test administration’ which has led to an imbalance of pd offerings. the nrs has skewed professional development to a very limited range of topics and performances, which do not reflect the desired work and performance of learners in programs. (survey respondent) some recognise the importance of finding a balance in the focus of the professional development provided: we need to make sure that our training is focused on providing support and materials to our teachers and tutors and complying with nrs requirements . . .; we cannot privilege nrs requirements above providing excellent staff development in all aspects of our work. (survey respondent) t h e e f f e c t o f t h e n a t i o n a l r e p o r t i n g s y s t e m a c c o u n t a b i l i t y s y s t e m o n p r o f e s s i o n a l d e v e l o p m e n t the majority of respondents to the survey (78%) and all of the professional development experts interviewed indicated that the nrs had had either a moderate or strong effect on the pd system in their program, state or area. only 4% of the survey respondents reported that it had no effect on their pd system, but few believe that the nrs has mainly had a negative effect. instead, the majority of experts and 57% of the survey respondents believe that the nrs has had a ‘mixed’ (both positive and negative) effect on professional development. in addition almost a third of the survey respondents believed the nrs has had a largely positive effect on professional development in their program, state or area. however, what counts as positive or negative varies; the same focus—such as training on administering tests—was seen as positive by one respondent and negative by another. n e g a t i v e e f f e c t s : ‘negative’ effects on professional development included changes in the content/topic of professional development, with a greater focus on ‘teaching to the test’: more trainings are focused on using data, more for teachers on using software, less focused on instructional content. last year, r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e s m i t h 35 program coordinators were trained on data collection; now focus is on helping teachers understand the data system and what it means for students. this has taken away from professional development focused on instruction. (survey respondent) those providing pd in esol have heard from states. while they seem interested in learning about student needs, they are much more ‘up front’ about needing students to get higher scores on [standardised tests]. that is the end goal for some states. some teachers in some states are attending training on how to help their students get better scores on the tabe or casas. teachers perceive this is what pd is aimed at--getting higher scores on a test. (national esol expert) my biggest concern is that you’re squeezing out time for training on curriculum and instruction. we need to ‘stop measuring the pig and start feeding it’.. . but if you think about part-time teachers, there were real limits to how much time they could put in. so if they did [training on standardised test] and [the annual] conference, that was about all they had . . . there’s also training on how to work with students on setting goals, collecting information, and entering information on outcomes. that occupies a lot of energy… (director of state professional development system) nrs has caused the field to be more accountable across the board--improve quality, sense of improvement, and growth. it’s a better looking system. but i don’t think the structure to really capitalise on the opportunities is in place well enough. it’s still hit or miss . . . (national able expert) another negative effect of accountability on professional development was the perception of greater focus on showing gains and meeting goals: training around [student] goal setting is really critical, but i’m seeing that when learners come in to the program and are asked to set goals, staff has had training not in effectively setting goals, but training in how do you document the setting of goals for students so that they start in a low place, a small goal, and achieve that goal easily…learners will say, ‘i want to get my ged’, and there’s a shock. ‘oh no, we can’t say that, so let’s a c c o u n t a b i l i t y r e q u i r e m e n t s 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s break that down into the smallest of goals that can be achieved in the year, like ‘read to a child three times a week.’ not meaningful and not significant. training is geared to increasing performance on nrs on paper. however, having said that, the training i’ve sat in for instructors is outstanding, really excellent. (national able expert) capacity-building programs are not happening with the [federally-funded] system, but in programs not part of nrs . . . [they are looking at] career pathways, health literacy, financial literacy . . . the more creative things that i think encourage retention are the things that we’re not seeing so much in nrs, not responding to the needs of the learners. outside nrs, programs are still looking for innovation to serve those who haven’t been served. (national able expert) money that could have been spent on action research and practitioner inquiry is now used to support training on things like the casas and nrs, neither of which support teacher change in the actual classroom. it’s beginning to feel like a fool’s errand… (survey respondent) p o s i t i v e e f f e c t s : others do see the effects of the accountability requirements on professional development as positive, including a greater focus on reporting student gains and helping students reach broader goals: the major impact has been to make the administration, people who are operating these programs, focus more. because of the requirements the state gives us, if we meet our nrs goals, then we get incentives.(state department of education monitor) there is an increasing focus on english language learners getting into transitions to credit-bearing education or a vocational ladder. esol has to ‘count’ for something. this is not just a result of the nrs but the nrs contributes to it, because esol programs need to report against hard goals of getting a job, getting into post-secondary, etc. . . .this is supported by recent research, particularly the community college studies, showing a ‘tipping point’ for esl instruction: when english language students get instruction, a credential and college credit, this opens the doors to higher wages. . . . it’s not just about learning r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e s m i t h 37 english in order to survive, but learning english in order to contribute to the workforce and secure a living wage job, and teachers and programs need professional development to help them adapt. (national esol expert) at first, the required training was seen by many as unnecessary and too much. now, people have come to realise that understanding the accountability system has its benefits. programs have been able to target gaps in service, and some have used this information to plan professional development for instructors and other staff. (survey respondent) respondents also talked about the improved quality of professional development because it has to ‘count’ more: [there] has been a gradual moving towards pd with better presenters and follow-up…[there is] more understanding that you don’t just pick and choose the workshops you want to go to, based on a whim. now, pd has to count for more…[there is] an understanding of how professional development needs to feed into better student achievement, not just teachers being more well-rounded. (national esol expert) the quality of the training has increased because there’s additional competition between the states. reports saying, ‘look at these six states’, and then look at how our state is doing better. not appropriate competition, but it is showing legislators that adult education is improving dramatically and asking for more resources. (national able expert) a third positive effect was a stronger focus on professional development that is ‘focused’ and addresses ‘the basics’: [nrs] made us think more about the types of pd opportunities we offer. we have foundations in teaching math, foundations in family literacy, in teaching reading and writing, which all gear towards improving the quality of instruction that is given to students. part of that is in order to maintain funding, because we have to show that we are meeting and moving students along the nrs continuum. for professional development sake, it’s had a positive impact . . . in the past, we would let instructors choose a c c o u n t a b i l i t y r e q u i r e m e n t s 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s [pd activities] based on whatever they wanted to take...now, we are more guided. everything we try to offer will impact assessment, analysing that assessment, quality of instruction, tips and teaching strategies to meet these things. (state department of education monitor) what it’s done has helped all organisations, all states to increase at the local level the process for accountability . . . [that’s an] excellent thing, but doesn’t encourage going beyond the structure. dumbs it down at the same time that it’s building it up. nrs has brought everyone up to a certain level, but not a lot of creativity beyond that. (national able expert) finally, respondents indicated that the use of data as an instigator and source of information for solving problems has been a positive effect of accountability, and professional development oriented toward that goal: having something that is an instructional strategy that is student focused causes [practitioners] to question . . . they examine preconceived notions of what they’re doing, and then they have the data skills to find the answers to those questions. also, they [practitioners and administrators] network more; they tend to get answers from their peers, rather than turning it in as a professional development request. (state department of education monitor) c o n c l u s i o n the effect of accountability requirements on professional development appear to be as mixed in able programs as it is in schools for children. on the one hand, some practitioners perceive positive effects from the way that accountability has sharpened the focus of professional development and improved its quality. if so, this is a heartening but expensive and timeintensive process that may have positive long-term effects on the services that adult students receive. however, the negative potential is dismaying. according to the reports of respondents, in more than a few cases, professional development has narrowed to a focus on teaching to the test. even more distressing is the report that, in some states, able teachers are offered professional development in how to gear their instruction towards helping adult students perform better on the test of adult basic education (tabe). this is a standardised test measuring grade-level equivalent reading comprehension that programs primarily used to place adult students in the appropriate-level class but which (for lack of a better option) programs now use as a post-test to gauge literacy achievement. this surely defeats the r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e s m i t h 39 purpose of helping adult students to reach their goals, since no one could ever imagine that an adult student would choose to enrol in adult basic education with the specific goal of doing better on the tabe. what is also worrisome is the increase in the percentage of accountability-focused professional development activities. given the small amount of time able teachers received for professional development, and given the turnover of primarily part-time teachers in this field, one wonders how much instruction-related professional development new teachers receive, compared to the training they receive on how to administer assessments. further and longer-term research studies are needed to confirm and expand on the hypotheses emerging from this exploratory study. without funding for a random selection of interviewees and respondents, they should not be generalised to the field as a whole. however, this exploratory study raises some questions for future research. for example, what is the actual change in quantity of accountability-focused vs. instruction-focused professional development that practitioners actually receive, and is there a differential effect for part-time and full-time practitioners when there are increased requirements for accountability-focused professional development? is there a transition over time, after an accountability system becomes institutionalised, in the type of effect it has on professional development systems, such that initial negative effects give way to more positive ones that focus more on documented strategies to improve instruction, based on the data about student achievement? what are the characteristics of professional development systems in states where professional development is perceived to have improved since the inception of the nrs accountability system, and can those be duplicated in other states? however, the main implication of this exploratory study is that states must work harder to ensure a balance between good accountability and good professional development. this will probably require more funding from the federal and state governments to increase the overall amount of professional development, and it will require states and programs to pay more attention to the specific needs of both teachers and adult students, beyond scoring well on tests. a c c o u n t a b i l i t y r e q u i r e m e n t s 40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s r e f e r e n c e s american institutes for research (air) (2005) a brief history of the national reporting system. washington, dc american institute for research, powerpoint presentation, retrieved 14 dec 2007 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professional development in adult basic education, ncsall reports #25, national center for the study of adult learning and literacy, boston, ma. r e l i n q u i s h i n g t h e p r a c t i c e s o f a l i f e t i m e s m i t h 41 smith, c and hofer, j (2003) the characteristics and concerns of adult basic education teachers, ncsall reports no. 26, national center for the study of adult learning and literacy, boston, ma. smith, mc (2006) the preparation and stability of the abe teaching workforce: current conditions and future prospects.chapter 6 in j. comings, j, garner, b, & smith, c, eds, review of adult learning and literacy, vol. 6.lawrence erlbaum, inc, mahwah, new jersey. sticht, t (1998) beyond 2000:future directions for adult education, ovae, washington, dc. available at http://www.nald.ca/library/research/beyond/beyond.pdf tolbert, m (2001) professional development for adult education instructors: state policy update, national institute for literacy, washington dc. wilson, b, and corbett, d (2001) adult basic education and professional development: strangers for too long. focus on basics, vol 4, no d, pp 25–26. lns template l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 9 n o 1 2 0 1 1 66 notes on contributors sonja beeli-zimmermann sonja beeli-zimmermann has a degree in educational science from the university of berne, switzerland, where she is currently working as an assistant pursuing a phd. she collected the data referred to in this article for her master thesis ''si uno hace planes, dios dispone' – exploring planning skills of microentrepreneurs in nicaragua' and reanalysed them under the perspective of numeracy. her email address is: sonja.beeli@edu.unibe.ch louise dow louise dow’s interest in the social analysis of literacy began with community work in the 1980s, influenced by studies in social anthropology and communication. after two decades in the corporate panopticon, louise has recently spent time in remote areas of australia, completing a masters in education, and working as a literacy tutor, writer and editor. her email address is: ledow@iinet.net.au chris holland chris holland has worked in the uk, europe and new zealand to research and address learning issues for low paid workers that are often attributed to low functional language, literacy or numeracy (lln). her european work involves social inclusion projects for migrants in the workplace. in new zealand, chris is the director of work & education research and development services, which advises and conducts research and professional development mainly with government departments, industry training organisations and the council of trade unions. since 2007 chris has been exploring mentoring for apprentices. her email address is: chris@impactresearch.org.nz zoe nikolaidou zoe nikolaidou is a post-doctoral researcher at södertörn university, sweden. she completed her phd thesis in lancaster, uk, where she focused on the uses of literacy within vocational education. her current research focuses on second language literacy at the workplace, methodological issues of literacy research and discourse analysis. her email address is: zoe.nikolaidou@sh.se mailto:sonja.beeli@edu.unibe.ch mailto:ledow@iinet.net.au mailto:chris@impactresearch.org.nz mailto:zoe.nikolaidou@sh.se microsoft word lns 16.2 pp 19-34 papen 16-oct.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 n o 1 2 0 0 9 19 literacy, learning and health – a social practices view of health literacy uta papen a b s t r a c t in this paper, i use a social practices view of literacy to challenge dominant conceptions of health literacy. health literacy is frequently defined as an abstract skill that can be measured through individual performance tests. the concept of health literacy as a skill neglects the contextual nature of reading and writing in health care settings. it risks ignoring the many ways in which patients access and comprehend health information, make sense of their experience and the resources they draw on. the paper presents findings from a study of forty five literacy and esol (english for speakers of other languages) students’ health-related reading and writing practices in the northwest of england. i suggest that health literacy needs to be understood as a situated social practice and that it is a shared resource frequently achieved collectively by groups of people, for example families. i conclude with some reflections on the implications of my research for adult education practice. i n t r o d u c t i o n as part of the ‘new literacy studies’ (nls), the role of literacy in institutional contexts and social settings that require ordinary people to interact with officials and holders of professional knowledge has been widely studied (see for example barton and hamilton 1998, jones 2000, fawns and ivanic 2001, papen 2007). the primary aim of these studies is to investigate how people engage with the formal and bureaucratic texts that are part and parcel of institutional procedures, not to assess how well they score in literacy tests. nevertheless, many researchers adhering to a social practice view of literacy are interested in the implications of their studies for teaching and learning in formal and non-formal settings, including schools and community colleges. researchers have challenged dominant literacy policies (crowther, hamilton and tett 2001, papen 2005, luke 2005, jackson 2005, barton et al 2007). based on their insights into learners’ lives, they have suggested ways of linking adult basic education more closely to learners’ existing literacy practices and to those topics that are most relevant to their own experiences (hamilton 1999, barton et al 2007). health is one such topic. many adult learners suffer from health problems and they regularly interact with health care providers (papen and walters 2008, see also barton this volume). the l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h 20 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s present paper investigates the role of reading and writing in relation to people’s health and to the health care they receive. based on interviews with forty five adults, i discuss the significance of various literacy practices in relation to how people manage ill health, communicate with health care providers and interact with the institutional world of medical care. in the conclusions, i draw out the implications of my research for our understanding of patients’ health literacy and how it can best be supported. h e a l t h l i t e r a c y : t h e d o m i n a n t v i e w links between ill health and low levels of education are widely acknowledged (stationary office 1998, pamuk et al 1998, health canada, statistics canada and canadian institute for health information 1999, harris, sainsbury and nutbeam 1999). in recent years, health educators, medical researchers and adult educators have increased their efforts to explore this relationship in more detail and to understand the links between patients’ levels of literacy and their ability to assess and benefit from health services. researchers and politicians, from the fields of adult education and health, have become increasingly interested in patients’ ‘health literacy’ and how it can best be enhanced. health literacy can be understood as ‘the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions’ (seldon et al 2000). north american research is at the forefront of work on health literacy and british studies frequently draw on their american colleagues’ expertise (see for example von wagner et al 2007, ibrahim et al 2008). overall, the interest in health literacy is practiceoriented, aiming to develop new ways of helping patients to improve their health literacy (see for example the ‘skilled for health demonstration programme’, http://www.dfes.gov.uk/readwriteplus). most studies adopt a concept of health literacy similar to the one expressed in the above definition. the dominant view is that health literacy is an ability possessed by individuals (weiss et al 1995, baker et al 1999, nielsen-bohlman, panzer and kindig 2004, lurie and parker 2007). it consists of a set of competencies transferable to different contexts. because health literacy is treated as being context-independent, it is assumed to be measurable through abstract tests. accordingly, there is much research into patients’ levels of health literacy, this being seen as a prerequisite for developing new tools to teach health literacy. health literacy tests are individual performance tests. they measure patients' ability to understand specific texts (such as patient information leaflets) and their familiarity with medical terminology. the two most used tests are realm (rapid estimate of adult literacy in medicine) (murphy et al 1993) and tofhla (test of functional health literacy in adults) (baker et al 1999). both tests were developed by researchers in the us. they are regarded as useful instruments to assess patients' ability to cope with medical l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h p a p e n 21 terminology and to understand instructions from health providers. both tests have been used by researchers and health educators in britain (see for example beaver and luker 1997, gordon et al 2002, ibrahim et al 2008). in recent years, tofhla has been adapted for specific audiences, including spanish-speaking patients and those visiting dental surgeries (guerra and shea 2007, lee et al 2006, gong et al 2007). a new shortened version of tofhla, based on one text – the nutrition label of an ice cream container – also exists (weiss et al 2005). but what do these tests really measure? few researchers appear to have asked this question. clinicians and health educators accept them, either because they believe in them or because they are the only scores available. are there no alternatives to 'testing' people's health literacy? m e t h o d s the study, literacy, learning and health (llh), started from the assumption that there are other ways of exploring people's ways of reading and writing in relation to their health than to ask patients to take a health literacy test. it is one of the few studies that applies a social practice view of reading and writing to the area of health literacy (another example is freebody and freiberg 1999). the overall aim of this study that spanned a period of two years and eight months was to examine how literacy, learning and health are related to each other. crucially, the research set out to understand this link from the perspective of patients, i.e. users of the health care system, not providers. in line with the ethnographic tradition and similar to other studies in this volume, the aim was to capture ‘ordinary’ people’s point of view. the study, which was funded by the then department of education and skills, included forty five adults. at the time of interviewing them, all but two were students in literacy and esol (english for speakers of other languages) classes. informants were recruited from such classes in various places across the north-west of england including preston, halifax, lancaster and bolton. our aim was to identify and describe what written texts they come across in health care settings, how they engage with these, what difficulties they experience and what other sources of information they draw oni. we also asked students and teachers about their experiences with health as a topic in their classes (papen and walters 2008). the study was grounded in a view of health literacy as social practice. accordingly, we talked about health literacy 'practices' rather than health literacy 'skills'. setting aside the notion of skills, we were able to explore what people do with reading and writing rather than to 'assess' how good (or bad) they are at what they are doing. this is not to say, however, that we were not interested in people's abilities. but we did not define these as narrow skills. rather we conceptualised them as context-bound and changing l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s competencies, some of which, as i will show below, were not located in individuals but in groups and social networks. informed consent was obtained from all participants. our regular visits to the literacy and esol classes allowed the study participants to get to know us and to talk to us informally about our research. this was an important step in obtaining informed consent. the consent form itself and the signature we asked for, in some cases provoked discomfort; in particular some participants who were applying for asylum were wary of the official nature of this text and the requirement for a signature. we gave full anonymity to all participants and we removed all personal identifiers so that the respondents are not identifiable and cannot be identified through the details of the story. the preston, chorley & south ribble research ethics committee approved the study protocol. interviews were semi-structured and open-ended. unless the respondent objected (two cases), the interviews were taped and fully transcribed. twenty-nine informants were non-native speakers of english. the majority of them were interviewed using interpreters. we also collected many types of texts (including web sites printed out for patients, patient education leaflets, handwritten notes, diagrams drawn by a doctor, forms, etc.) and we discussed these texts with our informants. in our interviews, we started simply by asking people to recollect recent experiences of being ill and seeing a doctor. we then raised more specific questions about written texts they may have come across on these occasions. our aim was to gather detailed accounts of people's dealings with health care providers and of their experiences with texts such as forms, package inserts and websites. difficulties figured frequently in our informants' accounts. yet, we also learned of the many resources people had. pamela who had had several miscarriages learned to search the internet for insights into what had happened to her. when peter, who had several chronic diseases, found that his doctors frequently asked him to list all the (up to) eighteen different pills he was taking, he typed up a list of all his medication. pamela’s and peter's actions are central to the conception of health literacy that we developed through our research: a view of health literacy not only as deficit, but also as a resource. this echoes the view taken by hamilton in her study of older people's literacy practices (see this volume). six out of the forty five study participants became key informants. they were interviewed several times. we visited them in their homes or accompanied them on a visit to their doctor. the data set is complemented by field notes from these visits. the six key informants were chosen because they had interesting experiences of dealing with health providers and written texts to share and they were happy to share these with us. ideally, we would have liked to include a greater number of key informants, but within the time available this was not possible. interview transcripts and field notes were l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h p a p e n 23 analysed using a process of coding, supported by the software atlas-ti. codes (themes) were identified on the basis of the research questions and through a process of careful reading of all data. in the following sections, i summarise and comment on the main points of analysis emerging from the data. h e a l t h c a r e e n v i r o n m e n t s a r e ‘ t e x t u a l l y m e d i a t e d ’ s o c i a l w o r l d s to begin with, the study revealed that many health care processes are ‘textually mediated’ (smith 1999, barton 2001) thus requiring the patient to engage with various sorts of written texts. we found that changes in people’s health status are amongst those experiences in their lives that draw them into new literacy practices (see also hamilton this volume). according to the participants in the llh study, a variety of text types are used in doctorpatient interactions and in the provision of health care more generally. these include patient information leaflets and consent forms, prescriptions, charts and wall posters. these texts are part of how health professionals inform patients on the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of their disease. the following examples illustrate this further. anna, a polish woman, whose smear test had shown an abnormal result, had been given a leaflet ‘what your abnormal result means’. when she had to have a loop extinction treatment (to remove the affected cells), she received another leaflet explaining the procedure. maria, another informant, had seen a nurse about what she suspected to be a cold sore. at the end of the consultation, the nurse printed out for her a leaflet on the causes and treatment of cold sores. leaflets, such as these, are ‘interpretive resources’ (coupland and williams 2002:420): sources of meaning-making. however, the extent to which these resources are being taken up by patients varies and i will comment on this further below. patient education and information leaflets are designed to present medical information in terms accessible to the lay patient. judging from what our informants told us this was often the case. anna spoke very positively about the different leaflets she had received from her doctors. she also explained that the consultant had repeatedly invited her to raise any questions she had. she told me that when the doctor first explained the procedure to her, he drew an image of her uterus on a piece of paper to show her from where the affected cells would be taken. patient education leaflets often use a writing style mimicking oral conversations between a doctor and a patient. they address the reader in the second person and use a question/answer format to convey important information about a disease or a treatment. the question-answer format was commented upon positively by shanaz, another informant, who told us that when she looked for health information on the internet she was attracted by sites using this structure. l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s but patients do not only need to read and absorb written information. they also need to speak and listen, and dealing with written texts is often part of a speech event. as anna’s example has shown, text – in this case visual text is embedded in talk. text is also embedded in action and health texts derive their meaning in part from the functions they take within health care practices. this indicates the need for a contextualised approach to understanding health literacy. the following sections amplify this. h e a l t h l i t e r a c y i s e m b e d d e d i n s o c i a l r e l a t i o n s h i p s as a social context, health care is shaped by relations of authority. doctors and other health care providers are granted positions of power and they hold authoritative knowledge. patients are commonly expected to listen to the experts’ verdict on their condition and to comply with any advice given. literacy is part of the process of establishing and actualising these relations of power. the following example illustrates that health texts are frequently implicated in ‘relations of ruling’ (smith 1999). when debbie, a twenty eight year old mother of two boys, had had a scan, the conversation with the consultant – rather than focusing solely on the ovarian cysts he had detected – unexpectedly turned to contraception. debbie did not understand why the doctor talked to her about contraception and why he gave her a leaflet about the coil. at the time, she had no need for contraception. when the consultant told her that she ‘could end up pregnant’ and that ‘they couldn’t offer her sterilisation’, she ‘felt like a 10 year old that their mum and dad were saying be careful’. debbie took the leaflet. but she was not interested in its content. the leaflet became only useful to her much later, at the time of the research interview, when her personal situation had changed and she decided to have a coil fitted. when the doctor gave her the leaflet about the coil, he ignored debbie’s own views on her situation. debbie’s case reveals the importance of understanding health literacy within the social relations structuring health care provision. debbie’s rejection of the advice given by her consultant and her lack of interest in the leaflet may be falsely interpreted to result from her failing to understand what the consultant explained and what the coil was about. but debbie’s noncompliance had nothing to do with a lack of skills. it signaled her opposition to the identity (as a young woman needing contraception) the consultant tried to impose on her. l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h p a p e n 25 h e a l t h l i t e r a c y i s p a r t o f i n s t i t u t i o n a l p r o c e s s e s a n d p r a c t i c e s the above examples have already shown that health texts are part and parcel of how health care is dispensed. appointment letters, letters containing test results and new patient registration forms are an integral part of the institutional processes of health care provision. in one of the study locations, we discovered that general practitioners frequently print out leaflets for patients at the end of the consultation. marie’s doctor did this and she was not the only informant who mentioned this practice. it is reasonable to assume that debbie’s consultant’s insistence on discussing contraception was part of the health services’ general policy of providing information about contraception to women of child-bearing age. as the example shows, this was done although the information was not solicited. my next example further illustrates the importance of examining particular health texts in the context of the institutional practices and policies they are part of and which give meaning to them. forms stand for the institutions that issue them. forms, by the way they are written and through their functions in specific contexts, can deny people access to resources. they may require the applicant to take on an identity they are opposed to. after several years of living with lupus, a severe and chronic auto-immune disease, kate was unable to work and so ill that she applied for a disability allowance. when kate and her husband sat together to fill out the application form they struggled with the amount and detail of information about her disease they had to supply. they did not know much about lupus. in kate’s words, the form was ‘hopeless’ and ‘an absolute nightmare’. it contained many ‘gobbledygook’ questions, which she simply did not understand. kate resented that she had to provide a lot of information that was already contained in her patient file. being in a lot of pain day in day out, she could not understand that there was a need for her to ‘prove’ how ill she was. kate could not understand why her consultant’s verdict on her condition, contained in her patient file, could not simply be passed on to the department of social services. but the state’s discourse of welfare obliged kate to take on the position of applicant having to make a case. kate’s experience with the application form for a disability allowance also shows that bureaucratic texts can be written in a register applicants are not familiar with. kate told us that she had difficulties finding the appropriate words and that she did not know how to spell them. but this was only part of the problems she had with the form. the broader issue was her objection to the procedures she was subjected to, i.e. having to make a case for something that was blindingly obvious to her and not being able to rely on her doctor’s words when doing so. l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s t h e e m o t i o n a l s i d e o f h e a l t h l i t e r a c y health literacy is not only about dealing with information on a cognitive level. there is an emotional side to health literacy. several of our respondents spoke about the fear they felt when learning about a serious disease. this could stop them from engaging with health information. when katherine’s husband, who had just been diagnosed with advanced cancer, was given a leaflet to explain the chemotherapy he was to receive, he put the leaflet in a drawer and ignored it for a week. as katherine explained to us, they wanted information ‘in their own time’ and they felt that the consultants had a tendency to confront them with too much information in a way they found impossible to bear. not everybody i spoke to read the leaflets or brochures they had been given. some people did not want to know. when kate was first diagnosed with lupus, her gp gave her several leaflets. at first she read them. but she soon stopped because she was terrified by their content. she did not want to see herself in the descriptions she found. katherine also told us that it could be dangerous to know too much about an illness. dipta found that after she had detected a lump in her breast that her doctor considered to be harmless (and which later disappeared), she did not want to search for more information on the issue. she simply wanted to forget about this experience that had frightened her. c h a l l e n g i n g t h e d e f i c i t v i e w o f h e a l t h l i t e r a c y : p e o p l e ’ s s t r a t e g i e s f o r o v e r c o m i n g d i f f i c u l t i e s t h e y e x p e r i e n c e the people in the llh project dealt with the literacy practices of health care with varying degrees of confidence and competence and some of the study findings could be seen to support the deficit view of health literacy prevalent in current health policy. esol students for example mentioned difficulties explaining their symptoms and understanding the doctors’ words. the native speakers talked about struggles with specific genres (see kate above). but it is important to see that patients, including those commonly represented as having limited basic skills, are not without resources when it comes to dealing with the literacy and language demands of health care settings. in the following, i discuss the strategies the study participants employed to deal with health literacy demands. non-native speakers dealt with difficulties by preparing themselves for a visit to a doctor. before going to the surgery, elisabeth, a french speaker, wrote down some of the points she wanted to tell her doctor about. sonia (from poland) and jing (from macau) both used dictionaries to write down words to use when explaining their symptoms. sonia prepared a list of words and phrases in advance of her appointments to use as prompts when talking to her gp. jing used her dictionary to write down words for her doctor to l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h p a p e n 27 read. dictionaries also helped her and others when they tried to understand leaflets they had been given. pamela (a british woman) searched the internet to find out what was involved in a colonoscopy that her husband had to have. she made notes of what she read. jon (also a native speaker) used the internet and health books to get information about his daughter’s thyroid problems. he and others in the study actively sought out information to complement or clarify what their doctors had told them. one of the most common strategies the people in the llh project used was to draw on others who could help them with the literacy tasks involved in dealing with ill health. they drew on family members, friends and neighbors as literacy mediators. kate offers a good example of the importance of literacy mediation in relation to health literacy. kate relied to a large extent on her sister jenny to help her deal with lupus. when, after five years of having lupus and getting progressively worse, kate lost the trust in her consultant, she asked jenny for help. on behalf of her sister, jenny searched the internet for information about the disease, its prognosis and treatment. she wrote to two consultants and got kate referred to one of them. she also wrote to the local mp, when kate was refused a hip replacement. mediation, as in the above example, is ‘task-specific’ (cuban, this volume). however, it also stretches further to include general emotional support. kate relied heavily on her sister and the rest of her family for the kind of emotional help she needed in order to cope with her illness. when dipta, a young woman from india who had come to lancaster a year before i met her in the study, had to see a doctor for the first time, she asked her mother-in-law to accompany her, even if her english was no better than dipta’s. these examples show that literacy mediation in health care contexts involves what cuban (this volume) calls ‘caring literacies’. literacy mediation was mentioned by nearly all participants in the llh project. its key role in health care suggests that health literacy is often ‘distributed’. by this i mean that it is not simply a property or an attribute of an individual, but that it is shared knowledge and expertise. it resides in the patient’s social network. an individual’s health literacy could thus be seen as the sum of what she knows and is able to do herself and what she is able to achieve with the support from friends, family and other significant people in her environment. at a more general level, this view of health literacy as being collectively achieved also challenges individualised notions of responsibility and risk, which underline current health policies (green, lo bianco and wyn 2007). l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s c o n c l u s i o n s : w h a t d o e s t h e l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h p r o j e c t t e l l u s a b o u t w h a t h e a l t h l i t e r a c y i s ? what can we learn from the above examples about the nature of health literacy? and what conclusions can we draw regarding the role of health as a topic in adult education? first of all, the study shows that health literacy is always ‘situated’ (barton, hamilton and ivanic 2000). rather than conceptualising it as an abstract attribute or a generic ability of the mind, it is more helpful to think of health literacy as how people use reading and writing in specific health care contexts. crucially, the situated approach that i argue for in this paper also requires researchers to look at the other partner in healthy literacy: the doctors and nurses and how they communicate with patients (rudd 2008). the examples presented above demonstrate that specific health literacy practices, such as reading a leaflet, need to be examined not in isolation, but as part of a health care episode – the time period over which patients are dealing with a particular symptom or disease. adopting this perspective allowed me to take account of my informants’ earlier experiences with health professionals, their prior knowledge and understanding of their disease and any experiences they might have accumulated during the current period of illness. in anna’s case, i was able to do this through my repeated conversations with her. when anna read the leaflet she had received from her doctor after she returned home from her consultation, she looked at its content in the light of what the doctor had told her during their meeting (cf. pollock et al 2008). how she made sense of the information it contained also related to other texts she consulted, for example, polish and english websites on the topic. this was not the first time anna had had such a result and how she reacted to the leaflet was also a matter of her prior experience with abnormal smear tests. a further important finding from the llh project is that health literacy includes dealing with hierarchical social relationships, which can disempower the patient who is at the receiving end of health information and health care practice (murtagh and hepworth 2003). informants were aware of how little time doctors had for them and some struggled to raise the questions they wanted answers for. information given, including leaflets, is restricted in what it includes (often the dominant medical view on a specific disease and its treatment) and how it addresses the patient (as a passive recipient of knowledge) (dixon-woods 2001). current health policies in great britain are supportive of patients’ greater involvement in their care (department of health 2001, 2004). policies are driven by the model of the ‘informed patient’ who is actively involved in their health care and any decisions related to it (henwood et al 2003). whether patients take up these opportunities may in part be a matter of their ‘skills’. but the situation is much more l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h p a p e n 29 complex. my conversations with patients revealed that they may not necessarily conform to the informed patient ideal, but may remain ‘passive’. lupton (1997) suggests that this is also a form of agency showing that people’s reactions to illness are shaped by a variety of needs and emotions. this echoes my earlier argument about the affective side of health literacy. another reason for apparent passivity i found is that patients may see no need for information other than what their doctor tells them. they may want the doctor to be in charge and take responsibility for decisions (pollock et al 2008). yet other patients go off to gather knowledge but may find that this is not accepted by their doctors (dray and papen 2004). these scenarios reveal that it is important for researchers, educators and health care providers to shift their attention away from the patients’ assumed skills deficits to their meaning-making abilities and practices. this includes acknowledging that patients learn about health and disease in their own diverse and complex ways, following their own logic (armstrong and murphy 2008) and drawing on sources physicians might not see as legitimate (green, lo bianco and wyn 2007). this is important because we can only identify gaps in patients’ knowledge and experience (and ways to reduce these) once we know what they actually do and are able to achieve. i m p l i c a t i o n s f o r p o l i c y a n d p r a c t i c e the implications of the llh study for literacy and health policies in britain are manifold. first and foremost, as explained already, the study challenges narrow ideas of health literacy as a measurable and abstract concept. the study findings cast doubt on the validity of any pronouncements of patients' health literacy based on tests. tests such as realm neglect the contextual nature of reading and writing in health care contexts and the power issues involved in modern health care practice. they risk ignoring the competencies and experiences patients can draw on. they do not take account of the collaborative nature of many literacy activities. new ways of ‘assessing’ patients’ health literacy allowing for a more complete picture of what patients can and cannot do are required. with regard to the role of health in relation to learning and teaching, nls have repeatedly argued that literacy, numeracy and esol provision needs to be built on a thorough understanding of learners' existing literacy practices and their social contexts (see hamilton 1999, papen 2005, barton et al 2007). health, as the llh project has shown, is part of learners' everyday concerns and thus could be seen to be an ideal candidate for a social practices based curriculum. however, we have found in our study that in many literacy, numeracy and esol classes health is not a frequent topic (papen and walters 2005, papen and walters 2008). many esol beginners’ classes devote some time to helping learners understand the british health care system and teaching them the vocabulary needed to converse with a l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s doctor. but very few of our forty five informants expressed an interest in making health a more central topic of their class. the views of those who participated in the study indicate that health is not an easy topic to address in large, mixed (gender, age, ethnicity) classes, and that even those who frequently deal with ill health do not necessarily feel that their class is the right place to talk about disease. therefore, any attempt to give health a greater prominence in literacy, numeracy and esol classes needs to be thought through carefully. the above leads me to suggest that literacy, numeracy and esol classes may be better placed to support health literacy by offering units on more general and transferable abilities, such as searching skills (for those using the internet) and critical reading and critical language awareness (useful when reading patient information leaflets). much could also be done to ensure that literacy education takes sufficient account of the multimodal nature of contemporary texts, supporting students in their critical readings of visual language. visual images are prominent in health texts and they are a powerful means to convey meanings. health care is just one of many institutional settings people are affected by and in all such contexts, communication is often shaped by hierarchical social relations, creating a need for the ‘users’ to assert themselves in the face of bureaucracies and topdown policies. assertiveness training (i.e. how to talk confidently to a person of authority, see also cuban this volume) thus has the potential to benefit learners in many areas of their lives. such training would also need to discuss how written texts are used as part of talk, as seen in some of the examples discussed in this paper. the widespread use of social networks suggests that literacy, numeracy and esol classes could also explore the role of literacy mediators in learners’ lives, the aim being to support and develop this already well functioning strategy. r e f e r e n c e s armstrong, n and murphy, e (2008) weaving meaning? an exploration of the interplay between lay and professional understandings of cervical cancer risk, social science & medicine, no 67, pp 1074-1082. baker, d, williams, m, parker, r, gazmarian j and nurss, j (1999) development of a brief test to measure functional health literacy, patient education and counseling, vol 38, no 1, pp 33-42. barton, d (2001) directions for literacy research: analyzing language and social practices in a 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nutbeam, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 9, no 2, pp 57-66. gong, d, lee, j, rozier, g, pahel, b, richman, j and vann, w (2007) development and testing of the test of functional health literacy in dentistry (tofhlid), journal of public health dentistry, vol 67, no 2, pp 105-112. gordon, m, hampson, r, capell, h and madhok, r (2002) illiteracy in rheumatoid arthritis patients as determined by the rapid estimate of adult literacy in medicine (realm) score, rheumatology, vol 41, no 7, pp. 750-754. green, j, lo bianco j, and wyn, j (2007) discourses in interaction: the intersection of literacy and health research internationally, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 15, no 2, pp 19-37. l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s guerra, c and shea, j (2007) health literacy and perceived health status in latinos and african americans, ethnicity and disease, vol 17, no 2, pp 305-312. hamilton, m (1999) ethnography for classrooms: constructing a reflexive curriculum for literacy, pedagogy, culture & society, vol 7, no 3, pp 429-444. harris, e, sainsbury, p and nutbeam, d, eds (1999) perspectives on health inequity, australian centre for health promotion, sydney. health canada, statistics canada and canadian institute for health information (1999) towards a healthy future: second report on the health of canadians. health canada, ottawa. henwood, f, wyatt, s, hart, a and smith, j (2003) ignorance is bliss sometimes: constraints on the emergence of the “informed patient” in the changing landscapes of health information, sociology of health and illness, vol 25, no 6, pp 589-607. ibrahim, s, reid, f, shaw, a, rowlands, g, gomez, g, chesnokov, m & ussher, m (2008) validation of a health literacy screening tool (realm) in a uk population with coronary heart disease, journal of public health, advance access published july 31, 2008, pp 1-7. jackson, n (2005) adult literacy policy: mind the gap, in bascia, n, cumming, a, datnow, a, leithwood, k & livingstone, d, eds, international handbook of educational policy, springer, dordrecht, pp 763-778. jones, k (2000) texts, mediation and social relations in a bureaucratized world, in martin-jones, m and jones, k, eds, multilingual literacies, john benjamins, amsterdam, pp 209-229. lee, s, bender, d, ruiz, r and cho, y (2006) development of an easy-touse spanish health literacy test, health services research vol 41 no 4, pp 1392-1412. luke, a (2005). evidence-based state literacy policy: a critical alternative, in bascia, n, cumming, a, datnow, a, leithwood, k and livingstone, d, eds, international handbook of educational policy, springer, dordrecht, pp 661-675. lupton, d (1997) consumerism, reflexivity and the medical encounter, social science and medicine, vol 45, no 3, pp 373-381. lurie, n and parker, r (2007) editorial: moving health literacy from the individual to the community, american journal of health behaviour, vol 31 (suppl 1), s6-s7. murphy, p, davis, t, long, s, jackson, r and decker, b (1993) rapid estimate of adult literacy in medicine (realm]: a quick reading test for patients, journal of reading, vol 37, no 2, pp 124-130. murtagh, m and hepworth, j (2003) feminist thinking and menopause: autonomy and decision-making in primary medical care, social science and medicine, vol 56, pp 1643-1652. l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h p a p e n 33 nielson-bohlman, l, panzer, a and kindig, d (2004) health literacy: a prescription to end confusion, national academies press, institute of medicine of the national academies, washington. pamuk, e, makuc, d, heck, k, reuben, c. and lochner, k (1998) socioeconomic status and health chartbook, national center for health statistics, hyattsville, md. papen, u (2005) adult literacy as social practice: more than skills, routledge, london and new york. papen, u (2007) literacy and globalization: reading and writing in times of social and cultural change, routledge, london and new york. papen, u and walters s (2008) literacy, learning and health, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (department for innovation, universities and skills), london. available at http://www.nrdc.org.uk/ parker, r, baker, d, williams, m and nurss, j (1995) the test of functional health literacy in adults: a new instrument for measuring patients’ literacy skills, journal of general internal medicine, vol 10, pp 537-541. pollock, k, cox, k, howard, p, wilson, e and moghaddam, n (2008) service user experiences of information delivery after a diagnosis of cancer: a qualitative study, supportive care in cancer, vol 16, no 8, pp 963-973. rudd, r (2008) navigating complicated health systems, keynote address presented at the 6th international research conference moving in, on and up social inclusion, persistence and progression, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (nrdc), nottingham, uk. seldon, c, zorn, m, ratzan, s, and parker, r, eds (2000) health literacy. current bibliographies in medicine. no 2000-1, retrieved 27 june 2008 from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/archive//20061214/pubs/cbm/hliteracy.html smith, d (1999) writing the social: critique, theory and investigations, university of toronto press, toronto. stationery office (1998) acheson report: report of the independent inquiry into inequalities in health. stationery office, london. von wagner, c, knight, k, steptoe, a and wardle, j (2007) functional health literacy and health-promoting behaviour in a national sample of british adults, journal of epidemiology and community health, no 61, pp 086–1090. weiss, b, reed, r and klingman, e (1995) literacy skills and understanding health communication methods of low-income older persons, patient education and counseling, vol 25, no 2, pp 109–119. l i t e r a c y , l e a r n i n g a n d h e a l t h 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s weiss, b, mays, m, martz, w, castro, k, dewalt, d, pignone, m, mockbee, j and hale, f (2005) quick assessment of literacy in primary care: the newest vital sign, annals of family medicine, vol 3, no 6, pp 514-522. a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s this research was funded by the national research and development centre (nrdc) in adult literacy and numeracy. i would like to thank the nrdc for supporting this research. i would also like to thank dr sue walters, who worked as a researcher on the project and collected parts of the data i discuss. i much of the data for this study was collected by sue walters, who was the main researcher on the project. lns template l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 9 n o 1 2 0 1 1 1 editorial keiko yasukawa and stephen black the research articles in this issue examine literacy and numeracy practices in and for work. each paper asks different questions and utilises different lenses for examining the interaction of literacy and numeracy with work and learning, but together they illustrate the significance of generating rich descriptions of literacy and numeracy activities through ethnographic style approaches. in the first article, zoe nikolaidou investigates the literacy practices of a warehouse employee, derry, who is concurrently working and studying to gain a vocational qualification. the author uses activity theory to describe derry’s workplace as one activity system, and his endeavours to obtain a qualification as another activity system. she identifies derry’s portfolio as a ‘boundary object’ between the two activity systems, and this is where derry’s literacy learning takes place. the author shows that the creation of the portfolio becomes a process of recontextualising the texts that derry uses in the workplace into something that has new significance in his efforts to obtain the qualification. thus the literacy practices afforded by the boundary object play a key role in building connections between two otherwise parallel activity systems. chris holland’s paper focuses on three trades course apprentices in glass and joinery factories in new zealand. the author’s interest is the influence of employers’ and apprentices’ perceptions of the significance of apprentices coming from a ‘trades’ family on the kinds of learning experienced by the apprentices. the author found that employers expected that having a trades family background was advantageous for apprentices; they found it easier to work with ‘someone like us’ compared with someone who initially did not know how to fit into the culture of the trades. however, succeeding in an apprenticeship also involves successful learning off the job in a formal vocational course, and in this learning the author found that having a trades family background was not necessarily an advantage. some apprentices, however, enter an apprenticeship with neither the cultural capital of a trades background nor that needed in the formal learning environment. while not claiming to be conclusive, the author posits some possible approaches that could support apprentices who are navigating across the disconnect between workplace learning and formal learning. the third article takes us to female micro-credit clients in nicaragua. the author, sonja beeli-zimmermann, bases her observations and descriptions of the numeracy practices of self-employed women in the informal sector. the women participate in short workshops delivered by the ngo which provides micro-finance to assist them in developing a small e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s business. these workshops focus on the learning of specific financial skills including strategies for bookkeeping and saving. the author provides descriptions of the numeracy practices of the street vendors that show a wide repertoire of mathematical skills, not only related to numbers and calculations, but also the use of patterns and in some cases data and chance. some of the practices, the author finds, can be traced to what was taught in the workshops that the women participated in, but other skills taught in the workshops are forgotten or ignored. this is particularly the case where skills taught are not connected to the women’s prior and existing practices in their work contexts and also in their family and other community contexts. the three articles, studying literacy and numeracy practices in and for work in different contexts through different lenses, share the need to make connections between the formal learning and knowledge, and the informal learning and knowledge of the learners. nikolaidou’s study shows that the portfolio required by the formal course was a boundary object that mediated the learner’s workplace knowledge and the formal learning in the course. holland discusses mentoring as a possible approach to support apprentices’ efforts to integrate learning from the workplace with learning in the formal learning setting. beeli-zimmermann, while not making any specific suggestions, cautions against programs that are designed to improve numeracy and other skills without taking into account the rich informal knowledge already possessed by the learner groups. this issue has a final refractions article from louise dow. the author provides a critical reflection of the literacy aspects of educational change in australia’s far north queensland after experiencing teaching in a ‘sra direct instruction’ program in a cape york school. in her paper, the author examines the discomfort she felt with the direct instruction method through a close examination of the writings of a leading advocate of changes to indigenous education and welfare, noel pearson, in which he raises questions about critical literacy and the kind of world this form of education prepares children for. while the author’s experiences and reflections pertain to literacy teaching in school, and while direct instruction is a particular method of basic skills training, we suggest that the questions and concerns expressed by the author are not misplaced in relation to some of the ways in which adult literacy and numeracy teaching is approached. although the socio-cultural view of literacy and numeracy that is foregrounded in this journal has been developed in the research arena for more than two decades now, its penetration into policy discourses and classroom practice is arguably still limited. there are strong advocates for the direct instruction methods, both in the national media and in some formal education agencies, and dow’s article provides a powerful reminder of the potential limitations of this ‘back to basics’ discourse. microsoft word 2210-8938-1-pb (2) l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 2 2 0 0 7 75 reviews teachers voices 8: explicitly supporting reading and writing in the classroom edited by anne burns and helen de silva joyce national centre for english language teaching and research, macquarie university, sydney nsw 2005, 77pp, isbn 1 74138 103 7 this is the most recent book in a series that deals with teaching and learning in the classroom. the specific focus of this book is the explicit support of reading and writing in adult esl teaching, investigated through classroom projects within the framework of an action research approach. it consists of three sections: the first outlines the theoretical ideas underpinning the book, the second deals with the nature of action research, and the third and longest section presents the participating teachers’ own accounts of their research projects. it is accompanied by a dvd containing excerpts of their classroom teaching. the concept of scaffolding is central to this book. according to vygotsky’s theory, learning is a social process, rather than an individual one. students learn through working with their peers and other more skilled individuals, such as teachers, and by being challenged. scaffolding refers to the learning support given to students as part of the learning process. this support is structured by the teacher, and can be withdrawn later, when it is no longer needed. the theory of scaffolding is presented and discussed in the first section, while the practical application of scaffolding to their teaching is discussed in the third section, with the teachers’ accounts and reflections on their projects. one practical issue raised by a number of r e v i e w s 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s teachers was the problem of judging the level of difficulty of materials, so that they were challenging, but within the students’ capabilities. this volume, with the accompanying dvd showing examples of the classroom practice of the teachers featured in the text, could easily be adapted to the needs of a professional development session. there are pre-readings on the theory and research method, a number of teacher accounts to choose from, and an illustration of the teaching practice of each teacher on dvd. it would make for a stimulating session, and one with a practical classroom focus. for the same reasons, this would be a useful tool for teacher educators. the teachers featured on the dvd are all experienced teachers, and would provide good models for student teachers. the dvd offers the student teacher some useful examples of teaching techniques, such as classroom organization and the structuring of a lesson, and the book has some examples of teaching materials. each teaching sequence is divided into a series of steps, listed on screen at the beginning of each section, and this series of steps shows the basic structure of the teaching session through which the teacher gives the students a challenging lesson while providing learning support. for the practising teacher, the most useful and relevant sections of the book are likely to be the teachers’ descriptions of classroom activities and their reflections on their teaching practice, in particular the differing approaches to the perennial problem of finding appropriate teaching materials. a comparison of the different classrooms and teaching styles presented in the dvd will also be of great interest for all teachers. it is always interesting for a teacher to watch another teacher in action, and these teachers have been very generous in allowing us the opportunity to do so. the dvd offers a window into their classrooms, which is a rare and valuable resource, particularly when linked with the same teachers’ accounts of their objectives and r e v i e w s l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 77 reflections, as given in the book. this aspect of the book/dvd package is its most valuable feature, and should ensure that it is widely used in teacher training and professional development sessions. on a more general note, this volume reports on a project which involved teachers in the research process, and which linked classroom practice to theories of teaching and learning. the teachers’ accounts are the ‘teachers’ voices’ of the series title, voices which as anne burns points out, “have been absent too long from the research literature”. these voices deserve to be heard for the insights which they offer, not only into the practice of teaching, but into practice informed by theory. sarah ahern microsoft word lns 16.2-17.1pp75-88 cuban 16-oct.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 n o 1 2 0 0 9 75 participation on the margins of immigrant women’s lives and learnings sondra cuban a b s t r a c t this study focuses on the participation and learning of five women immigrants in the northwest us and the ways community-based organisations (cbos) operated in their work and community lives. the study points to the ways that the women became assertive at work, moved from the private into the public sphere, and developed caring literacies in their communities. i n t r o d u c t i o n a paucity of research exists on the roles of community-based education programs in the lives of women in ‘borderlands’ (anzaldua1990). as undocumented immigrants, they can access these learning sites, but are prohibited from using others due to recent anti-immigrant legislation. this study focuses on the accommodating ways cbos sponsor marginalised groups, rather than colleges which are bound to an ‘enrolment economy’ (rockhill 1982); or as one director of a cbo described, a ‘punch clock’. cbos and their community-based education programs are also more accommodating than typical english to speakers of other languages (esol) workplace programs, which tend to follow the employers’ agendas for upgrading literacy skills, overlooking the authentic needs of learners/workers (gallo 2004). learners are expected to enter both types of programs in order to fulfill targeted learning tasks and then leave when these are done, as if they were in a factory job. their participation is valued in terms of shift work especially when they perform according to ‘time on task’. their learning is inspected through an ‘edumometer’ (a standardised assessment that measures educational performance) which is one of many technologies of power that control learners (corbett 2008). the logic underpinning these practices supports the ‘science of economics’ that is endemic to neo-liberal pedagogy focused on individualism, efficiency and production (giroux 2008:65). in taking federal funding, programs implement policies that surreptitiously exclude learners, such as undocumented immigrants who cannot comply with these new standards. cbos, however, operate according to a different logic. five undocumented mexican domestic workers sporadically attended three cbo programs on the west coast of the us they persisted in their i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s literacy and language learning, even when they were not formally enrolled. furthermore, they were viewed as members of the community and learners in their programs, even when they had not shown up for a long time. this view contradicts conventional knowledge of participation as a regulated, uninterrupted pathway (porter, cuban and comings 2005). e s o l p a r t i c i p a t i o n a n d l e a r n i n g i n t h e u n i t e d s t a t e s with the burgeoning esol population in most advanced economies’ adult basic education systems, there has been increased interest in their participation and learning. although esol learners’ growing presence is acknowledged, they are largely ‘overlooked and understudied’ (mathewsaydinli 2008:201). program factors are critical. prospective students and participants now endure waiting lists, fees, and a back-to-basics vocationalist curriculum; for example, a study, lost in translation (colton 2006), found that the adult basic education system is nearly collapsing under the weight of demand in new york state and esol learners’ needs are unmet. esol learners are often represented as strong participators, able to overcome numerous hurdles to attend (comings, parrella and soricone 1999). some studies have examined these obstacles, particularly for immigrant and refugee women. they point to previous traumatic experiences like war, which make it difficult to learn, retain information, and concentrate (isserlis 2000). additionally, immigrant women often face discrimination in the workplace as well as violence at home (rockhill, 1990, norton 2000), which prevent them from attending programs. these studies point to how programs often do not compensate for these gendered/raced barriers, nor do they match the perceptions that these learners have of progress, which are different from the test score gains that are commonly emphasised by policymakers and program administrators (mathews-aydinli 2008). there has been little attention paid to the complex ways that esol women learners learn a new language and use literacy within their networks, including their strategies and resources for overcoming problems and advancing. much of this is due to the nature of participation research, which either makes these learners invisible or passive recipients of services in a restrictive system (isserlis 2008). rockhill (1982:3) shows that participation research is problematic because of its ‘superimposed definitions and its valueladen constructs’. studies typically disregard learners’ activities in other domains apart from formal education, and if they are not actively enrolled in a legitimate learning site, they are considered, ‘non-participants’. moreover, ‘non-participant’ translates to ‘non-learner’ (cuban 2006). although policy makers now recognise that students tend to stop out rather than drop out (belzer 1998, tolbert 2005), this concept is rarely incorporated into i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s c u b a n 77 programs that are primed to meet targets, and those who do not follow this logic, like cbos, are excluded. finally, immigrant women, as a valid category, is unavailable in national data sets, and without it, their active participation is unknown in programs or policies. curriculum is another problem in mainstream programs because often it does not match learners’ literacy and language interests and needs. commercial esol texts quite frequently do not confront real-life problems of women immigrants such as the ‘unhealthy living and working conditions, crowded clinics, high costs…which neither prepare students for what they might encounter nor legitimate these experiences when students do encounter them’ (buttaro and king 2001:55-56). furthermore, a complex sense of belonging and identity is absent in curricula that emphasise women immigrants adapting to societal norms. curriculum standards that focus on conventional topics and individual skill sets assume women immigrant learners (and potential learners) can tackle these problems alone. a g e n d e r e d s o c i a l p r a c t i c e f r a m e w o r k f o r a n a l y s i n g w o m e n i m m i g r a n t s ’ l i t e r a c i e s a n d l a n g u a g e p r a c t i c e s a gendered social practice approach highlights the barriers in formalised programs (like curriculum and program structures previously mentioned), while also paying attention to the literacy and learning strategies and resources women immigrants draw on outside these learning sites, for example, in cbos, workplaces and communities. using a gendered social practice perspective (norton 2000, robinson-pant 2004, moss 2007, cuban forthcoming), i show that the views of immigrant women learners and staff in cbos, on learning, persistence, and literacies, were outside the dominant lens of participation, outlined above. their own framings, and validation as learners, with their own interests, re-located them into an accepting environment, far from the displacement and estrangement they experienced in other institutions. the cbos offered the women, ‘just-in-time’ resources to negotiate new identities outside their difficult work conditions (louie 2001), building on their literacies and language assets and strategies in ways that were unavailable in formal programs. the immigrant women in this study struggled for self-determination with cbos, which were part of their social networks. the cbo staff acted as literacy and language sponsors (brandt 2001) who were attuned to the women’s issues and interests and created informal opportunities for them to advance. while these ‘third sector’ agencies are not immune from co-option by mainstream policies and programs whose sponsorship is through recruiting, regulating or withholding literacy (brandt 2001), cbos enable and support women immigrants to build networks outside enterprise models (mojab and gorman 2003). i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s 78 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s this sponsorship is especially important for undocumented latina learners, who may feel unsafe and insecure, due to their lack of protection, and have few agencies promoting their interests. cbos more than compensate for this population, however, and aim for self-organising. because of their central physical location in communities, partnerships with other organisations, and their specialisation in learners’ local/indigenous knowledge bases, and languages (through bilingual and participatory methods), they have a deep understanding of the diverse issues they face on a daily basis and can address their real-life problems and practices (rivera and huerta-macias 2008). the staff can also help learners learn new practices so they can develop solutions to their problems, and they nurture their leadership and expertise, similar to what bell hooks (in belenky, bond and weinstock 1991), calls ‘home places’. these places are nested within the community, are effective in creating loosely formed and culturally relevant networks, and in providing supports to particular women on an as needed basis. the ‘home place’ metaphor is significant because the workplaces of the women were in private homes that were anything but accommodating. the programs were like havens and public niches that marked them as different from the private spaces of the homes they cleaned and lived in, which were hazardous (due to employer and partner abuse). they also were places to network and develop innovative strategies for gaining more resources and changing practices. one example of a cbo that models these issues is casa latina.i in 2005, participants in its women’s leadership program, through discussions and analysis, led an opposition to an id act, because it would limit their abilities to obtain drivers’ licenses and be detrimental to their autonomy and ability to engage in domestic work. casa latina has a multi-issue women’s group focusing on domestic violence and other problems, as well as a domestic work group. these groups, led in spanish by learners, are designed specifically to give support and information. over the years, staff have acted as spokespersons to develop immigrant rights dialogues about organisational change to meet community needs (stern 1998). instead of employing top-down policy logic (‘time on task’) for recruiting learners who can demonstrate short-term gains, casa latina, operates according to (in drawing from anzaldua’s ideas) ‘borderland logic’ (cuban this volume). they recognise the women’s hardships as well as their literacy and language resources, and maximise their networking opportunities with supportive, culturally-based, and gender-sensitive services. one coordinator (fachinelli, personal conversation 2008) says of the women’s leadership program, it operates according to ‘the power of connection and networking, through the meetings, and providing space, providing i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s c u b a n 79 connection…. we would proceed with their needs, combine and give them space to be and work together’. t h e s t u d y : m e t h o d s a n d f o c u s five women immigrants were interviewed at different points between 2000-2005 in two cities in california and washington. i contacted the women through cbo program staff who were also interviewed. program observations were made for several days, every six months, over a three-year period in the california site. in washington, several observations were made in one of the programs during a two-year period, in order to supplement the data gained from graduate education student research in both sites. i also served as an advisory member, in a faculty capacity, to one of the organisations, which allowed me to gain access to it. in the other organisation, contacts through a popular education network were made. each of the women learners was interviewed with a loosely structured interview that lasted between one and two hours, and one woman was interviewed twice. the interviews were conducted in homes, cafes, and afterschool spaces — places the women selected that allowed them to feel safe to talk. the interviews were comprehensive so as to focus on their learning across many domains/contexts of their lives. questions were asked about their biographies, their work, their learning, their literacy practices, and their persistence in educational and learning activities and practices inside and outside of the programs to understand what they gained from their experiences. after each woman was interviewed, a transcript or a transcript summary was created from the tape recording, after which it was read and reread, then, through an iterative process of memoing, interpreting, and analysing, profiles were developed. these profiles were cross-compared with others to generate larger themes about the interactions between cbos and women immigrants, and their participation, literacy, and learning practices in the larger context of social and educational policies (denzin 1989, siedman 1998). the interpretative approach focuses on highlighting a narrative about the underlying meanings of a phenomenon within society. it is a layered process that allows for a concept, that would normally lie dormant beneath policy talk, to be highlighted and focused on intensely in a profile — in this case, the women’s informal learning, language, and literacy practices. the women had similar demographic traits, as mexican undocumented domestic workers, and their profiles revealed unique trajectories that did not fit formalised program profiles: • elly, in her early 40s, was a former nurse, who was married, with two young boys. because of childcare and transportation limitations, her i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s 80 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s tutoring took place in her small caravan, where she studied nursing texts with her tutor and on her own. after a third pregnancy, she stopped, but kept in touch with her program. • emelia, 28, was a mother of two young children who lived in a onebedroom apartment with her husband. she cleaned houses every day and then from 3 o’clock onwards, was with her children and her ‘best friend’ the tv, because she learnt english while watching it. she left the program temporarily, because she was too busy, and every so often borrowed books and videos for her children at the library. • estrella, 44, a former waitress in mexico, had a six year old, and was married to a diabetic husband. she attended a small group at her local school, in between her visits with him to the hospital. she wanted to develop her career in the us and sought out a community health program where she became a neighborhood health educator using bilingual education. • gloria, 48, and the mother of a teenager and a 30 year old, had been a nurse in mexico. she decided to clean after attending a care assistant program and learning that being a care assistant would pay her less money. she had much help for learning english literacy from her son and male friends. • mia, 35, had been a cleaner in mexico and continued with this work in the us, although she wanted to be a social worker/community worker. she was the mother of four teenagers, one of whom was suicidal. through seeking help for her daughter, she learned about community programs, which she attended. she originally attended a program to practise english conversation and eventually facilitated a group on domestic abuse, knowing about it from first-hand experience. the program staff consisted of women who were part of the learners’ communities and knew them well, collaborated with social organisations for support services, and advocated for immigrant rights. they also empathised with the women participants’ issues and were close to many of them. one staff member, for example, was a long-standing community advocate, networking with many agencies for immigrant services and saw immigrant students as the ‘invisibles’ who were not getting adequate help. her staff knew the students well and saw it as their main role to meet their needs, irrespective of whether or not they fell within the official remit of the program. they also called the students when they had not showed up and refused to see them as ‘drop outs’. the programs drew on a combination of learner-centered and labor education approaches that emphasised unconditional respect for and accommodation of the learners’ needs (whatever they were), especially their i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s c u b a n 81 work lives. this approach was vital for women who were in jobs that were considered to be dirty and degrading (discussed in the thematic section), not to mention, isolating. the goal was to foster their outside connections, through fusing with other community organisations, and through networking the women with one another, and with other agencies, in order to learn and build on their capacity to make change. the staff did not refer to learners as having literacy skill deficits, nor did they use conventional labels for them, also tutors were referred to as colearners. homework was not given because of the academic and child-like connotations and because the women had little time to do it. the staff offered flexible entry/exit options, comprehensive services, multi-modal instruction, incentives, bilingual communication and flexible arrangements, which fitted the women’s work and family rhythms. these traits differed from most state-mandated programs that had demanding agendas. t h e m e s a b o u t t h e w o m e n ’ s p a r t i c i p a t i o n , l e a r n i n g , a n d l i t e r a c y p r a c t i c e s while the women showed considerably diverse learning, participation, and literacy trajectories, there were notable patterns among them. a close look at the women’s work situations was important for understanding how the cbos addressed their learning support needs and informal strategies for literacy and language practices. this section presents those themes, which are not addressed in the literature. b e i n g a s s e r t i v e a t w o r k the women, all of whom were of color and were limited english speakers, endured numerous exploitative and racist encounters with their employers, mostly middle-class, native-born caucasian women, whose houses they cleaned. their need, therefore, was to develop expertise in asserting themselves, in ways that would be understood across race and class boundaries. not all of their employers, however, were forbidding, and, in a charitable manner, they gave them household items, found them additional jobs, invited them to family events or helped them to learn english. nevertheless, exploitation was rife. the homes were all large and it took the women hours to clean them. yet they were often rushed, were told they could not take breaks, make phone calls, or drink water, even when they were ill. these employers would use humiliating tactics to degrade the women, such as asking them to wash the floors on their hands and knees while watching them or watching the clock, refusing to pay, asking them to work overtime without pay, or, leave cheques under the welcome mat refusing to rewrite them when they were wet i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s 82 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s and illegible. mia told a story about a ‘boss’ who told her she ‘had a job because of the dog’ and would not put the dog on a leash even though mia told her employer she was scared of it. after mia facilitated a program group on abuse, in spanish, where she observed that the other women didn’t see their husbands’ hitting them as abuse, mia realised that she was being abused by her employer. one of mia’s problems was asserting herself orally with her employers, so she listened to english language radio and tv to help her practise interacting with them. she also had problems reading the notes that they left for her. but she got help from one of the cbo staff, as well as her daughter and a friend who was in women’s studies at the local university. on saturdays, they would sometimes go with mia to the houses and translate texts and conversations. the women’s learning of english in the cbos paid off in poignant ways. once mia developed confidence in using english conversationally, she would listen and give advice to the children of her employers, which made her realise she wanted to work with teens in the future. she would tell the parents about their children’s problems and attempt to mediate between them, building a stronger base of support for herself in their home. yet, it wasn’t without problems. she said, ‘kids will open to you and will tell you everything. i tell them [the parents] and they think i am crazy. they don’t appreciate this. they don’t like that [but] they stop it [their behaviours]’. while she was able to communicate with these teens, she had a difficult time communicating with her troubled daughter at home, and she sought out more opportunities to learn about the emotional needs of adolescents. the women’s informal learning at work was critical to their ability to communicate effectively. the program encouraged this in ways similar to those romero (1992) has documented, that is, the ways that domestic workers keep employers at bay by using assertive communication tactics. m o v i n g f r o m t h e p r i v a t e t o t h e p u b l i c the women came to the cbos when events in their lives were more stable, and they stopped when major events disrupted it, especially illnesses, childcare and pregnancies. they felt attached to the cbos because they knew they could come back any time, and were invited and welcomed. elly for example, in a follow-up interview, said that she was ‘taking a break for one month, because she had surgery, and [i] told my tutor i wasn’t feeling well, and would return’. elly studied nursing texts with her tutor who translated difficult concepts from english to spanish. elly felt he was a ‘brother’ to her. she also practised english with him on the library computer. she appreciated his accommodation of her emotional states, and she would let him know that she was not feeling well, and didn’t want to study: ‘but i say sorry leonard…maybe my brain today’s don’t work and he tell me its ok its ok take i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s c u b a n 83 care relax maybe another time.’ this flexibility was different from the local college where she recalled, ‘because some days i don't feel good, and i don't went to the school. the day doesn't return. the lesson doesn't repeat. this was very difficult for me’. she felt she didn’t want to keep cleaning houses because the chemicals caused rashes on her body but she felt that she had to do this to survive. still, reading nursing texts helped to keep her ‘big, big, big dream’ alive of being a nurse in the us and gave her the impetus to keep learning. similarly, gloria’s dream was to be a nurse in the us like she was in mexico, and she went to the community college to seek out information about it. but when she was held up by a series of pre-requisite courses in order to convert her credentials, she realised how long it would take and at a loss of wages. she then decided, through the support of various friends, and the program, to fully engage in her cleaning business, and establish relations with her various employers to network and build her social capital. one of her employers, invited her to her daughter’s wedding, which, while not unproblematic, led to new networks: when i came to the party, i feel good. but everyone is staring…i see i am the only hispanic people. i start talking with two bosses, and we are laughing and my boss, because we speak spanish, she sit with me a woman. later the person [her boss’s husband], take my hand and dance — it’s a jewish dance. i feel good. in spite of the women’s lack of legal rights and available services, the women’s programs served as stepping stones to develop a public personae and networks that emerged from the privacy of the homes where they worked. s p r e a d i n g c a r i n g l i t e r a c i e s i n t o c o m m u n i t i e s the women had helpers who mediated between their communities and the fast capital texts they encountered in their workplaces and in other institutions (lu 2007). these helpers are discussed in the literature in clinical terms, such as, ‘brokers’, ‘mediators’, ‘connectors’, or ‘readers’, with the taskspecific nature of the literacy assistance emphasised. the relational aspects, however, are overshadowed by the acts themselves. often, receivers of literacy help, in the literature, are shown as reciprocating through a nonliterate exchange, and they don’t learn from the transaction, nor pass on what they learn. in this sense, they are represented as passive subjects of literacy assistance, while the giver is the one who is empowered. the women in this study, however, constructed themselves as active agents of help, for when they received literacy and language assistance, they felt obliged to help another person with a similar problem, especially within the networks of the cbos. i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s 84 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in other words, the textual and language relationships that developed as a result of network members helping one another, and the cbos building on them, can be called, caring literacies because they went beyond the taskspecific activity (or a literacy event), and bonded a community, through an ethic of care (tronto 1993). they spread their help as part of broader literacy and language practices and benefits. this type of caring is more sustainable than the patronising maternal behaviours displayed by teachers in mainstream classrooms (luttrell 1996). caring literacies come from within the community and are critical to the emotional and cultural bonds and landscape that already exist. the help, which is hands-on, stems from a caring orientation and a desire to support another person, rather than solely from a lone literacy task that needs to be accomplished. caring literacies are passed on through informal learning and sharing, and they are socio-emotional resources that may be invisible to outsiders to that community. they aim towards collective and individual empowerment, which are not conducive to institutionalised environments, but which blossom in cbos through established networks. one example illustrates caring literacies. estrella’s attendance at her small group enabled her to grasp grammar skills in written and oral/aural english. she was assisted by her tutor, who taught in spanish and english, and the program which provided childcare, freed her up to learn. like the other women, she also used her local library to get videos and books for her children, in english and spanish, while using the tv as another media to learn, in addition to computer programs at home. estrella also decided to get more involved in her child’s school, and became a spanish tutor, after discussing it with one of the teachers who spoke spanish and thought estrella would be good at it. feeling more confident, she left her community more often, taking a computer course at a local centre, during which time she saw a sign advertising peer-health educator program for families. she applied along with her husband, and got a job teaching her neighbours about hiv. she felt that her neighbours weren’t as politicised as herself and needed to understand more than survival. estrella said, ‘my people need information for progress, and this very difficult. it’s good [to] clean house, but my aspiration is more… i like more -i work with the people. because they need much more -much help’. c o n c l u s i o n these themes demonstrate the agency, power, and strategies women immigrants exert for learning in spite of tremendous obstacles, and for a sense of collective power. their consciousness was raised as they interacted with other learners and staff about their work and home lives, and they realised they weren’t alone with their problems. while their programs made i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s c u b a n 85 small interventions in the women’s lives, it was difficult for them to overturn the larger forces. cathy kell (2008) has shown that often, women may start and stop many times under adverse conditions, to speak up and voice their opinions in communities. the women in this study relied on multi-lingual support networks, of which the programs were a part, to sustain their aspirational identities and to engage in their work and communities in more meaningful ways. their networking naturally enhanced their resources, which were unavailable in mainstream program structures and curricula. these strategies helped to reduce the level of exploitation they experienced at work, but did not eradicate it because larger policies were not in place to enforce them. gender-sensitive education (walters 1996, norton 2000) can assist immigrant women to re-embody themselves as self-possessed actors who achieve small ends each day by struggling to practise literacy and languages in their daily lives. furthermore, gender-sensitive policies can assist them to map their futures, through mobilising critical resources and supportive networks. r e f e r e n c e s anzaldua, g (1990) la conciencia de la mestiza: towards a new consciousness, in anzaldua, g, ed, making face, making soulhaciendo caras, aunt lute foundation books, san francisco, ca, pp 377-389. belenky, m, bond, l and weinstock, j (1991) a tradition that has no name, basic books, new york. belzer, a (1998) stopping out not dropping out, focus on basics, vol 2, issue a, retrieved on 7 july 2008 from http://www.ncsall.net/?id=417 brandt, d (2001) literacy in american lives, cambridge university press, cambridge. buttaro, l and king, k (2001) understanding adult esl learners, adult basic education vol 2, no 1, pp 40-60. colton, t (2006) lost in translation, center for an urban future, new york. comings, j, parrella, a and soricone, l (1999) persistence among adult basic education students, national center for the study of adult learning and literacy, cambridge. corbett, m (2008) the edumometer: the commodification of learning from galton to the pisa, journal of critical education policy, vol 6, no 1, retrieved 7 july 2008 from http://www.jceps.com/index.php?pageid=article&articleid=125 i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s 86 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s cuban, s (2006) a social practice view of literacy vs. a policy view, seminar in linguistics, june 22 2006, at universitat pompeu fabra, barcelona. retrieved on 12/10/09 at: http://www.upf.edu/dtf/recerca/grups/grael/lc/smnrs/sc/alr2.pdf cuban, s (forthcoming). destablilising gendered communication in workplace esol education, international review of education. denzin, n (1989) interpretative interactionism, sage, london. gallo, m (2004) reading the world of work, krieger, malabar fl. giroux, h (2008) against the terror of neoliberalism, paradigm publishers, boulder. isserlis, j (2002). trauma and the adult english language learner, eric digest. ed444397, retrieved 27 august, 2007 from http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-2/trauma.htm. isserlis, j (2008) adults in programs for the ‘academically unprepared’, new directions for adult and continuing education, vol 2008, issue 120, pp 19-26. kell, c (2008) presentation to the literacy research discussion group, october 20 2008, lancaster university, uk. louie, m (2001) sweatshop warriors: immigrant women workers take on the global factory, south end press, new york. lu, m (2007) afterword: reading literacy research against the grain of fast capitalism, in daniell, b and mortensen, p, eds, women and literacy, lawrence erlbaum, mahwah, new jersey, pp 297-318. luttrell, w (1996) taking care of literacy: one feminist critique, educational policy, vol. 10, no. 3, pp 342-365. mathews-aydinli, j (2008) overlooked and understudied? a survey of current trends on research in adult english language learners, adult education quarterly, vol 58, no 3, pp 198-213. mojab, s and gorman, r (2003) women and consciousness in the learning organization, adult education quarterly, vol 53, no 4, pp 228-242. moss, g (2007) literacy and gender, routledge, london. norton, b (2000) identity and language learning: gender, ethnicity and educational change, longman/pearson education, harlow, uk. porter, k, cuban, s and comings, j (2005) ‘one day i will make it’: a study of adult student persistence in library literacy programs, mdrc, new york. rivera, k and huerta-macias, a (2008) adult biliteracy: sociocultural and programmatic responses, lawrence erlbaum, mahwah, new jersey. robinson-pant, a, ed, (2004) women, literacy and development, routledge, london. rockhill, k (1982) researching participation in adult education: the potential of the qualitative perspective, adult education, vol 33, no 1, pp 3-19. i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s c u b a n 87 rockhill, k (1990) literacy as threat/desire: longing to be somebody, tesl-talk, vol 20, no 1, pp 89-110. romero, m (1992) maid in the usa, routledge, new york. seidman, i (1998) interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and social sciences, teacher’s college press, new york. stern, h (1998) dinosaurs and upstarts: organizational change at casa latina, focus on basics, retrieved on 7 july 2008 from http://www.ncsall.net/?id=394 tolbert, m (2005) factors influencing enrollment and persistence in adult education, office of vocational and adult education, washington dc. tronto, j (1993) beyond gender difference to a theory of care, in larrabee, m, an ethic of care: feminist and interdisciplinary perspectives, routledge, new york, pp 240-257. walters, s (1996) gender in popular education, zed, london. i casa latino centro de ayuda solidaria a los amigos / center for help in solidarity with friends. offers esol, workplace learning, and many other services related to workers’ rights, and seen nationally as a model of participatory education (see rivera and huerta-macias 2007). i m m i g r a n t w o m e n ’ s l i v e s a n d l e a r n i n g s 88 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word lns 17.3 ünlühisarcikli_23 .doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 7 n o 3 2 0 0 9 42 literacy, learners and laws: a turkish case study of surviving regulation özlem ünlühi̇sarcikli a b s t r a c t this article begins with a systemic overview of the historical background of literacy education in turkey from the beginning of the turkish republic in the 1920s to the present day. the middle part of the discussion focuses on the legal basis of adult literacy and basic education, the programs that are in use, and the accountability and assessment systems. finally, a qualitative study illustrates how these systems apply to the everyday practices of adult literacy education in turkey. i n t r o d u c t i o n adult literacy as an issue goes back to the first days of the turkish republic and the early experiences are of a unique kind worth reviewing in summary before passing to the contemporary situation in turkey. the republic of turkey was established over the ruins of the ottoman empire in 1923 and adult education, especially the provision of literacy education, was considered to be a panacea to the uneducated and war-weary masses. this was especially true of rural areas. it was also seen as an opportunity to build a sense of national identity around five central grand missions: modernisation, industrialisation, nation building, secularisation, and democratisation. mass educational provision was seen as a mechanism to break away from the past traditions of the ottoman empire by embracing and spreading these new policies. immediately after the foundation of the turkish republic, the enactment of the law on unification of education no. 430 in 1924 was a landmark, replacing the religiously dominated school system with the secular school system and ending the historical duality between secular and religious education in the country. this law brought all schools under the ministry of education in order to stimulate a national culture and assure national unity in all educational institutions, including adult education. in 1927, the first population census revealed that in the newly established republic only about 9% of the whole population (1.1 million out of a population of 13.6 million) knew how to read and write in the arabic alphabet that was then in use in turkey (oğuzkan 1955). this led to a language reform and the adoption of a new alphabet in 1928. the new l i t e r a c y , l e a r n e r s a n d l a w s ü n l ü h i s a r c i k l i 43 turkish alphabet was based on latin letters (with 29 letters: 8 vowels and 21 consonants) and replaced the arabic alphabet that had been in use for a thousand years. this language reform necessitated literacy education for the whole nation therefore, following the alphabet reform, nation schools were founded and a nationwide campaign for literacy was initiated (duman and williamson 1996). it was mandatory for everyone between the ages of 16 and 45 to attend these schools. the nation schools provided literacy courses and citizenship courses to over one-and-a-half million people in 1928 alone (şavlı 1974). nation schools came to an end in 1936 and their role was assumed mainly by the people’s houses until 1951 (celep 2003). there have been many further literacy campaigns and activities since the initial campaign in 1928. between 1959 and 1975 the turkish armed forces provided literacy education in private literacy schools (öz 2002). in 1962 a literacy campaign for women was undertaken, and between 1971-1974 activities to support functional literacy occurred. more recently a mass literacy campaign was conducted between 1981-1983 with about three million people participating (kirazoğu 2003), a new literacy campaign was launched on world literacy day in 1992, and a literacy campaign targeting female illiteracy was initiated in 1997. another literacy campaign, initiated in 2001 by the wife of the then president with the slogan ‘support to national education,’ aimed to reach two million people (bilir 2007) and started a trend for literacy as the favoured cause of female spouses of politicians (oddly reminiscent of the united states!). a campaign with the slogan ‘turkey is literate’ was launched in early 2008 by the wife of the president and finally, september 2008 was the launch date for the latest literacy campaign—initiated by the wife of the prime minister and bearing the slogan ‘mother daughter in school’. as in the english-speaking world, the pattern is one of constant rediscovery of a literacy ‘crisis’ (quigley 1997). o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 44 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s despite all the efforts, the overall illiteracy rate in turkey is still about 11.8% and literacy education will remain a major task in the coming years. moreover, there is a gender gap (the overall illiteracy rate for males is 4%, whereas it is 19.6% for females), and a regional gap (overall illiteracy rate is 8.7% in urban areas, and 17.3% in rural areas) (table 1). t o t a l t u r k e y u r b a n a r e a s r u r a l a r e a s t o t a l m a l e f e m a l e m a l e f e m a l e m a l e f e m a l e illiterate 6.139 1.026 5.113 454 2.402 571 2.712 literate 3.435 1.341 2.094 678 1.116 663 978 primary education 28.794 15.146 13.649 9.071 8.483 6.075 5.166 general secondary 5.584 3.233 2.351 2.431 1.857 802 494 vocational secondary 3.810 2.460 1.350 1.802 1.092 658 258 higher education 3.905 2.395 1.510 2.010 1.322 386 188 total 51.668 25.601 26.067 16.447 16.271 9.154 9.797 table 1. population by education level in 2006: 15 years old and over (numbers are in thousands). adapted from turkstat (2007). in the turkish context ‘illiterate’ means that a person does not know how to read and write in their mother tongue. ‘literate’ means a person knows how to read and write, but they may or may not possess credentials. however, considering a person as illiterate or literate depends on selfidentification, and the number of illiterate people may be even higher. some people declare themselves as ‘literate’ because they are ashamed to label themselves as ‘illiterate’. table 1 shows the population broken down both by literacy and by the credentials they hold. l e g a l b a s i s o f a d u l t l i t e r a c y a n d b a s i c e d u c a t i o n the early efforts in literacy education provided a structure and organisation to adult literacy education efforts and shaped the later legal framework and practices. accountability for adult literacy education in turkey is mainly concerned with compliance with laws and regulations, rather than the ‘quality’ of provision as such. the legal situation is not simple, but in the following section i lay out some of the key laws and regulations relating to adult literacy education. the turkish educational system is divided into formal and non-formal education by the basic law on national education no. 1739 of 1973, with articles 40, 41, and 42 covering non-formal education. non-formal education covers all kinds of educational provision, including adult literacy education, to l i t e r a c y , l e a r n e r s a n d l a w s ü n l ü h i s a r c i k l i 45 address the educational needs of every individual over the age of 14 regardless of educational background. the main responsible body in nonformal education is the ministry of national education (mone), general directorate of apprenticeship and non-formal education. the educational system is very centralised in turkey and the educational provision of all state, private, and voluntary bodies is run under the monitoring and inspection of mone. the specific responsibilities for adult literacy education provided under the auspices of mone are regulated by the 1983 literacy training for citizens who are out of the compulsory primary education age law no. 2841. accordingly, there is a department of literacy under mone, general directorate of apprenticeship and non-formal education responsible for program development and evaluation on adult literacy education. the department of literacy is a very small unit with only one expert and a couple of secretaries working to accomplish the immense requirements of literacy education (nohl and sayılan 2004). according to this law the responsibilities of the general directorate for adult literacy education are: • organising all kinds of educational activities; • providing cooperation and coordination with the state organisations and private and voluntary organisations; • monitoring and inspection of the educational programs and activities; • providing educational staff, material and technical support; • assisting the educational activities of other organisations by means of advising and taking necessary measures; • giving certificates and diplomas who complete the literacy courses with success; and • taking measures to motivate the state personnel and the like (article 4). the responsibilities of the private sector are also determined by this law. private sector institutions are obliged to take the measures to provide literacy education for their workers either by sending them to literacy courses provided by mone or establishing in-house literacy courses (article 6). the law is supported by two significant regulations. they are mone non-formal education institutions regulation and the regulation on courses to be offered free of charge by public institutions and organisations, municipalities, foundations, associations, and vocational chambers under control of mone (both published on 14 february 2006, official gazette 26080). these two regulations state the rules for administration, procedures, and guidance of literacy educational activities offered in turkey. these laws and regulations apply to all adult literacy education providers without exception. it is clear that the intention is to create a highly centralised and consistent adult education system throughout the nation. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s a d u l t l i t e r a c y a n d b a s i c e d u c a t i o n p r o g r a m s until 1980, adult literacy programs were concerned with teaching how to read and write, supporting basic skills and primary school completion programs. after 1980, these programs were re-invented as level i and level ii by mone. the programs were designed along behaviourist lines, and the teaching technique was based on memorising whole sentences first and learning sound-letter correspondences later. this remarkably strong commitment to a radical ‘whole language’ approach ended in 2005, when, as suggested in the support to basic education program (mone 2007a), new programs for level i and level ii were developed. their curricula were based on a constructivist approach, in line with the primary school curriculum, which was considered better suited to the needs of the target population (mone 2007b). most adult literacy education is directly provided by the mone in state-funded public education centres (pecs) established in 1955. pecs are the main providers of adult education courses among the institutions run by the mone general directorate of apprenticeship and non-formal education. in the 2006-2007 academic year alone, 204,747 participants attended adult literacy education in pecs (mone 2008a). pecs also cooperate with other state institutions in providing literacy education to the public, such as the turkish armed forces and ministry of justice, as well as ngos such as mother-child education foundation (mocef), rotary club, and association for supporting contemporary life. among these institutions only mocef and the rotary club have their own literacy education curricula equivalent to level i and approved by the mone. these are the functional adult literacy program, and simplified literacy education program respectively (nohl and sayılan 2004). the objectives of level i include teaching adult participants how to read and write, making them more proficient in written and spoken turkish, teaching them basic mathematics, and helping them to acquire basic knowledge, skills and behaviours to be used in their daily lives. the level i course is considered equivalent to the third grade of the eight-year turkish primary education, and is planned as 90 class hours, though the duration may be extended to 120 hours if needed. level i courses can be delivered in pecs or, with mone’s approval, in any other place chosen by one of the ngos. participation is free of charge and the teaching-learning materials are also provided for free by the local pec. it is possible to open a level i course with only two participants. those who successfully complete a level i literacy program get the right to continue to a level ii literacy program. no matter which agency provides the materials or the curriculum for programs equivalent to level i, it is the responsibility of the pecs to offer the certificates to the participants upon successful completion. however, l i t e r a c y , l e a r n e r s a n d l a w s ü n l ü h i s a r c i k l i 47 assessment of the participants for level i and equivalent programs is the responsibility of the course teacher, and there is no standardised test system to assess the learner outcomes. level ii courses are only offered at pecs by teachers who are appointed by the mone, and no other institution or organisation is allowed to organise this level of course. level ii aims to offer education that is equivalent to the fourth and fifth years of primary schooling and, again, the participants receive a certificate upon successful completion. with the level ii certificate it is possible to enrol in open primary education and to earn a primary school diploma after successful completion of three more years of schooling. the level ii program is 180 hours and organised around four different courses: turkish, basic social sciences, science and technology, and mathematics (mone 2007b). assessment of participants at level ii is the responsibility of an exam commission. the teacher in charge of the level ii program prepares the exam and the commission is responsible for administering the exam, keeping the records, and preparing the relevant documents and paper-work. like the level i program, there is no standardised test system to assess the learner outcomes, but in this case responsibility for assessment goes beyond the individual instructor. t h e p o l i c i e s i n p r a c t i c e as the previous sections have shown, adult literacy education in turkey is seen as an important activity, contributing to nation-building and the creation of economic and gender equity. legally, it is highly centralised, at least on the level of curriculum, but highly diverse in terms of assessment and, with instructors who receive little training, it is likely to be highly diverse in everyday practices as well. however, there is no research that explores how the laws and regulations interact with the everyday practices of adult literacy education practitioners. therefore, this article collects views and attitudes of teachers related to their adult literacy education practices, providing important insights into accountability and assessment of adult literacy education in turkey. to investigate whether there is a discrepancy between the practices of teachers and the laws and regulations in use, and if so, what they are, a qualitative method has been used in this study. the mone teachers and directors who are involved in adult literacy education in istanbul constitute the target of the study. they were, recruited through convenience sampling. currently, there are 39 administrative districts in istanbul, and in each district there is one pec. in order to contact practitioners in literacy education i phoned pecs and talked to the directors and the literacy instructors who were available at the time of the study, in summer, 2008. since it was summer time and most of the practitioners were on their summer vacations o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s and the others were busy it was difficult to get appointments from the practitioners. i had to call back most of them several times until i got scheduled appointments. i interviewed a total of ten practitioners (altogether three directors and seven teachers) from four different pecs and a primary school that offered literacy education to adults in cooperation with the local pec. except for one of the respondents, who has been teaching for six years as a primary school teacher but offering adult literacy courses only for two years, the other respondents had at least 15 years of experience in adult literacy education. of the seven teachers, three were teaching at level i and four were teaching at level ii. the interviews were semi-structured, and investigated the daily practices of literacy instructors and whether these practices differed from what the regulations necessitated. the duration of interviews varied from half an hour to two hours, and generally took place in the offices of teachers and directors. since they were busy with administrative duties and registration processes for the coming courses there were occasional disruptions. moreover, tape-recording was not possible, so that during interviews i took extensive notes to avoid loss of data. in fact, the interviewees were quite conscientious about the interview process and sometimes stressed very strongly that i should specifically note down what they were saying in their exact words. i coded the interviews and then grouped similar codes together and created categories. then i undertook a cross-case analysis of the interviews according to these broad categories, which reflected a common perspective on conforming (or not) to the processes dictated by the regulations. therefore, the data is laid out in the four thematic areas explored in the interviews: duration of the programs, attendance of the participants, assessment of the participants, and the teachers’ views of the curriculum. the quotes selected are either the ones that represent broadly similar views or the ones that reflect atypical views. in the reporting, names of the interviewees have been changed to protect particpants' identities. d u r a t i o n o f t h e p r o g r a m s all program evaluation studies revealed that the duration of level i and equivalent adult literacy programs has always been a problem throughout the years in turkey, with programs tending to be too short for maximum effectiveness (durgunoğlu, öney and kuşçul 2003, bülbül et al 1999). the practitioners interviewed in this study also mentioned the same problem, but they also indicated the ways they found to deal with this problem. for instance, mustafa, who offers a level i program, provides extra hours for the participants if needed: originally it was 90 hours, now we can extend it to 120 hours. but it is still not enough. okay, perhaps it is enough for some, but for most of the participants, especially for the elder ones, l i t e r a c y , l e a r n e r s a n d l a w s ü n l ü h i s a r c i k l i 49 it is not enough. some cannot even learn how to hold a pencil properly. i do some extra hours for those in need of them. but i am doing this without getting any credit. time is also a problem for level ii programs, and emre offered a different solution: level ii is equivalent to the fourth and fifth grade at primary school. can you imagine, you are trying to cover the curriculum of two-years in just 180 hours? it is not possible. what i do is this; i look at the profile of the course participants and decide which parts of the curriculum to cover and which parts to leave out. otherwise, you cannot do it. although there is a common agreement that the duration of courses is too short, mehmet who is a director recognised the difficulty of extending the courses: the ministry doesn’t want to make the programs longer. but at the same time, extending the courses doesn’t seem probable and practical to me. people are already having problems of attendance, if we make the courses longer i am afraid it would de-motivate them to participate from the very beginning. the duration of the programs is a real problem in terms of day to day teaching, but as mehmet indicated, simply extending them might not be effective. this presents a real dilemma for administrators and instructors. p r o g r a m a t t e n d a n c e the regulations require attendance on a regular basis, and a participant is allowed to miss only one-fifth of the classes. but all of the practitioners identified attendance as a problem. the teachers said they understand that the participants are adults, that they have other responsibilities, that the time schedule is not convenient for all and many other reasons. because of these reasons, they indicated that sometimes they find ways to accommodate their students. mehmet is one of these practitioners and he summarised the situation: it is difficult for adults to come to the classes all the time, sometimes they have other things to do and we need to be tolerant, otherwise the person would drop-out totally. so sometimes we do not report missed attendance in our reports. you have to do that. the regulations also restrict the time for registration to the courses, but sometimes people want to commence after the official registration time is over. what do i do? i simply accept the person and re-arrange the paperwork. you have to do that, you have to be flexible, if you want to serve these people better. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s again the teachers observe the participants and try to understand their situation before deciding the appropriate response. but some also reflected upon the difficulty of keeping a balance, because the participants should not be abusing the tolerance of the instructors and there should be fairness. veysel explained that there had been a very bright student at level ii who was a 5th grade school drop-out and need not come to the classes at all to pass the exam: i told him not to come to the classes, but this would create disturbance among the other participants so i told them that he is repeating the program from the previous year, since those who repeat the program do not need to attend the classes, they did not say anything. like this i lied to the other participants and i reported on papers as if he is coming on a regular basis. but nadir, another level ii teacher, indicated that the system could be easily abused since the teacher keeps the records and no one inspects those records: sometimes people want to bribe us in order not to attend the classes and get the certificate without accomplishing the requirements. i try to be fair and sometimes tolerate missed attendance, but the person has to be successful at the end of the program. but bribery is very disturbing and i suspect some accept. nadir also provided an example on the issue. those who have the level ii certificate are eligible to receive a driving license, but one is required to attend a driving course before receiving the license. as the teacher explained, there had been rumours that some of these courses get level ii certificates for their customers who do not have a school diploma by paying money. some motor-vehicle driving courses do not ask the applicants to get the training required, they just get the money and organise the papers and send the papers to the related office and the applicant goes there to fetch the license. in the story, i heard that as usual the traffic-police officer asked the person to write his name and sign up some paper to indicate that he has received the driving-license, and the person could not. so the officer got suspicious and finally found out that the person is illiterate although had the level ii certificate! aslan who is in charge of inspecting the motor-vehicle driving courses also emphasised his suspicions related with the issue: i cannot prove it, but i know as i know my name that some of the teachers are organising certificates to people who have not actually participated in the literacy program. ... the exam commission must also be in it; otherwise, it would not be l i t e r a c y , l e a r n e r s a n d l a w s ü n l ü h i s a r c i k l i 51 possible for a teacher to do that. if the commission is in it then everything would be organised officially and no one would know. attendance is a balance between what is appropriate for the individual learner and the regulations. this is an interesting situation, where the discretion of instructors can compensate for the multiple time demands faced by learners, but can also lead to abuse of the system by the less scrupulous. however, as emre, a level ii instructor, indicated it is expected that primary school diploma will be required with new regulations to attend the motor-vehicle driving courses. therefore, it will not be possible to abuse the system in the same way. a s s e s s m e n t o f t h e p a r t i c i p a n t s the mone non-formal education institutions regulation indicates that the course teacher has the authority to conduct written, oral, and applied exams for assessment of level i participants. if the teacher decides the participant is successful at the end of the course then the person gets the certificate from the local pec. an exam commission is responsible for the summative assessment at level ii, and the written exam is prepared by the program teacher, who takes part in the commission. teachers generally prepare questions according to the objectives provided in the curriculum of level i and level ii. although most of the teachers did not see problem in preparing their own questions a few indicated the difficulty of not having a standardised assessment system. mustafa is one of those who had difficulty in complying with the regulations. i try to do everything according to the regulations, but not everything is there. for example, for the exams i prepare my own exams but someone else prepare other questions. so there is no standardisation in this. i may ask difficult questions and someone else may ask easy questions. nadir reflected that the level of the questions may change according to the level of the class: there is the commission but the teacher prepares the questions and many times we prepare our questions to the level of our participants. if the level is high, then the questions would be more difficult; if the level is not so high then the questions would be a bit easier. there is no standard to it. this is how we need to do it. we want to give certificates if the person has made progress. what bora said in fact reflected how trivially assessment was considered by some practitioners: in fact i do this exam thing just because it is required, for me it is a formality. i know by heart who would succeed and who o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s would fail. i know my students; i know their levels from our practices in the classroom. i do not need an exam to learn their levels. if i need then i am not a good literacy teacher! therefore, teachers have quite different views of assessment procedures. some promote the need for a standardised test whereas others support the teacher autonomy in assessment. v i e w s o f t h e c u r r i c u l u m the interviews revealed that there are various methods used by the teachers. despite the curriculum change some use their own preferred method; some alter the existing curriculum to fit their purposes better. as the teachers noted, problems related to the curriculum and the teacher guidebooks are that the curriculum is loaded and difficult to cover in the course duration. guidebooks are provided for teachers, but are not very useful since the number of activities is limited, the instructions are short, and there are not enough examples. even more importantly, the content of the guidebooks is not parallel with that of the curriculum. overall, teachers tend to use whatever method they would like to use. bora is one of them: according to me, neither the previous curriculum (from sentences to sounds) nor the present one (from sounds to sentences) is suitable to teach literacy. i use my own method; it is a mixture of both and no one asked to this day about my own practice… i don’t use the workbooks and other materials prepared and send to us by the ministry… if i use those materials i cannot teach reading and writing to people. nazan, who is a primary school teacher and offering level i course in coordination with the local pec is the only instructor that indicated any positive views on the new curriculum, but not without some reservations: i like the new curriculum, it is better than the previous one. it is good but it is very loaded, time is not enough to cover all those in the curriculum. i can only teach the literacy part, not enough time for mathematics and life skills. you can only teach how to read-and-write, that’s all. the participants also indicated that some kind of inspection would be good, so that problems could be identified. however, the way inspection is done is also considered as important. currently, the pecs are inspected at the institutional level every two years, but this does not cover the individual programs and instruction. emre argued that inspection should be introduced back into the system: there used to be inspection in the previous years but since the new curriculum was put into practice in 2005 there is no inspection because everything is pre-prepared by the ministry, the course objectives, the activities to be carried during the l i t e r a c y , l e a r n e r s a n d l a w s ü n l ü h i s a r c i k l i 53 classes, everything. so they assume we use them, but everybody is doing something else and there is no control. even if there were control in old times we were still doing what we wanted to do, only on paper we used to prepare the course program and lesson plans according to the curriculum and the way the ministry wanted and inspections were done mainly by checking those plans rather than what is going on actually in class. i do what is good for my course participants and they are not in the curriculum always. the curriculum, the teacher’s guidebooks, and all other material are prepared by the mone department of literacy. bora criticised the administrators who are in charge of the department of literacy at the ministry: it is not possible to do this properly sitting at the office in ankara. they should first have some field experience, have some experience in teaching how to read and write to adults. then, they would talk. aslan reflected about the experts in the commission that prepared the level i and level ii curriculum: one or two people from the department of literacy at the ministry are experts and dedicated but not all. i have also met those people who prepared the workbooks, at one of the meetings organised by the ministry. to me, they are all academics who do not have experience in teaching illiterate adults. we, teachers should also have taken part in preparing those materials. nazan emphasised that usually teachers do not remember that a department of literacy existed in ankara. we do the things as we always do, many of us do not even know that there are some people at the ministry. as mentioned earlier, the mone department of literacy is a small unit that is responsible for program planning, curriculum development, providing materials, organising volunteers’ training, and any other adult literacy education related tasks and duties. during the development of new curriculum there were some difficulties. since there was no financial support it had been difficult to find volunteers to work in the committee to develop the curriculum. expertise in adult education and literacy was needed besides program development, and it had not been possible to find commission members who had such expertise (nohl and sayılan 2004). the practitioners consulted here appear to have some fairly significant concerns about the curriculum. the materials are not always consistent and the lack of inspection,in the positive sense, and professional support appears to be keenly felt. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 54 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s a related concern is the fact that teachers of adult literacy and basic education programs do not have any in-depth preparation in adult education. mone teachers who provide level i and level ii courses are usually teachers who have primary school teaching diplomas and are supposed to know how to teach reading-and-writing to adults from their practice with children. mone did not have a specific teacher training program in teaching adults for these teachers. in 2008 a teacher training framework program, named ‘adult literacy instructional techniques course’ was being prepared to introduce the mone teachers to the latest curriculum, instructional techniques, teaching material, assessment and evaluation. the inaugural course was planned to take place in june 2008 with 50 mone teachers participating (mone 2008b). however, this program did not happen, and has been postponed to an indeterminate date. therefore, it can be argued that the system has not yet established mechanisms for curricular accountability and professional development. c o n c l u s i o n turkey has a long tradition of adult literacy education, and current practices have their roots in earlier practices despite the periodic updates of legislation, regulation and approach. the law on unification of education enacted in 1924 requires all adult literacy programs to be under the control of the mone general directorate of apprenticeship and non-formal education. accountability to this agency is maintained by a complex and highly systemised system of laws and regulations, which provides a framework for all adult literacy education—whether it is directly provided by mone or an approved program provided elsewhere. the nominal degree of centralisation espoused in turkish adult literacy education is remarkable and certainly unusual. however, despite this centrality and laws and regulations the department of literacy under the mone general directorate of apprenticeship and non-formal education is a small unit that has to deal with the huge task of planning, co-ordination, and evaluation of literacy programs and campaigns. perhaps the responses of the practitioners to this system, which has been illustrated through the comments included here, are partly a consequence of the almost invisible existence of the strong central office in such a centralised system. responsibility is highly centralised, but practicalities make for very ‘light touch’ monitoring. in each of the areas of duration, attendance, assessment, and curriculum there is a tension between the pressure to meet the demands of centralisation and the desire to personalise teaching structures to reflect learner’s needs. this is not unusual in any system, but the particular form of these tensions in the turkish context is extremely interesting. the instructors are striving for means of providing the needs of their learners but there is no l i t e r a c y , l e a r n e r s a n d l a w s ü n l ü h i s a r c i k l i 55 substantial research study that determines the strengths and weaknesses of the existing system. suggestions of starting points for dealing with the tensions bearing on instructors include providing more professional support to the instructors; introducing some flexibility into the system to adapt the individual programs to the learning needs of participants; evaluating literacy training techniques currently in practice and determining the problems that are faced to develop new course materials and resource books; and restructuring the department of literacy as a larger unit equipped with more resources and professional staff. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 56 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s r e f e r e n c e s bilir, m (2007) non-formal education implementations in turkey: issues and latest challenges, international journal of lifelong education, 26 (6), 621-633. bülbül, s, kavak, y, gülbay, ö, gelbal, s, ekinç, e, gökçe, f, burgaz, b, badavan, y and üstünda, t (1999) a research on the evaluation of the first level literacy courses in turkey (final report), mone and turkey office of unicef, ankara. celep, c (2003) halk e�itimi, anı yayıncılık, ankara. duman, a and williamson, b (1996) organisation, constraints and opportunities: an analysis of adult education in turkey, international journal of lifelong education, 15 (4), 286-302. durguno � lu, a y, öney, b and kuşççul, h (2003) development and evaluation of an adult literacy program in turkey, international journal of educational development, 23, 17-36. kirazoğlu, c (2003) an evaluation of adult literacy campaigns in turkey, unpublished dissertation, boğaziçi university, istanbul mone (2007a) support to basic education program: strategic report (final draft), mone, ankara. mone (2007b) yetişkinler okuma yazma öğretimi ve temel eğitim programı (i. ve ii. kademe), mone general directorate of apprenticeship and non-formal education, ankara. mone (2008a) çıraklık ve yaygın e�itim genel müdürlüğü: türkiye geneli halk eğitim merkezleri sayısal verileri. available online: http://cygm.meb.gov.tr/birimler/istatistik/hem/hemistat.htm (accessed july 2008). mone (2008b) hizmetiçi etkinliği çerçeve programı, mone, hizmetiçi eğitim dairesi başkanlığı. , retrieved july 2008 from http://hedb.meb.gov.tr/faaliyet/liste/2008317p.htm. nohl, a m and sayılan, f (2004) teaching adult literacy in turkey: technical report to the support to basic education program, mone/eu, ankara. oğuzkan, t (1955) adult education in turkey, unesco, paris. öz, m (2002) türkiye cumhuriyeti’nde okuma-yazma seferberlikleri ve yönetimi, anadolu university, eski � ehir. quigley, b a (1997) rethinking literacy education: the critical need for practice-based change, jossey-bass, san francisco. şavlı, b (1954) adult education in the democratic state of turkey, unpublished dissertation, indiana university, bloomington. turkstat (2007) household labour force statistics: 2006, turkish statistical institute, ankara. microsoft word lns 16.2-17.1pp 5-18 cuban 16-oct.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 n o 1 2 0 0 9 5 outside practices: learning within the borderlands sondra cuban a borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. it is in a constant state of transition. the prohibited and the forbidden are its inhabitants (anzaldua 1990:378). a b s t r a c t social practice research can be seen to illuminate the practices of marginalised learners in ‘borderlands’, areas outside of formal educational frameworks. this paper examines the issues and challenges of social practice researchers as they explore borderlands logic set against a critique of the prevailing skills-based educational philosophies that dominate in the knowledge-based economies of the us and england. social practice research highlights meaning-making through a wide-angled view of the learning contexts of marginalised groups. this paper introduces the themes and sets the scene in a series of papers in this volume from leading social practice researchers. i n t r o d u c t i o n social practice research (barton and hamilton 1998, lankshear and knobel 2006, street and lefstein 2007, purcell-gates 2007) illuminates marginalised learners’ practices in ‘borderlands’ outside of mainstream frameworks. these ‘borderlands’ are the spaces of learning between formal programs funded by government policies and marginalised people’s transactions of educational, linguistic and cultural resources, in places such as community clinics and organisations, neighbourhood streets, bilingual households, and the back rows of classrooms. social practice researchers take snapshots of these scenes and offer panoramic and in-depth views of borderlands, revealing the literacy hybridisations of forbidden inhabitants. by detailing the trajectories of these ‘outsiders-within’ — older persons, high school dropouts, undocumented domestic workers, and multilingual patients — social practice researchers with privileges to cross-disciplinary and geographic borders, mediate between policy worlds and borderlands (pratt 2004). o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s t h e k e y i s s u e s a n d c h a l l e n g e s : u n d o i n g l i t e r a c y social practice researchers do literacies by highlighting people’s everyday practices and accenting their narratives (bartlett 2007). but they also undo literacies by analysing counternarratives, so as to strike at the foundations of policies. although discussing borders in insider/outsider terms may sound didactic, and reinforce the great divide theories that haunt the literacy field (reder and davila 2005), it is important for stressing unmistakable class, gender, and race disparities. a ‘border’, anzaldua cautions, ‘is a dividing line’ (1987:3). as groups push against borders through critical learning and active citizenship, the borders are redrawn. yet this redrawing is not without difficulties, as rivera and macias (2008:18) show of bi-literate communities who thrive in non-school environments, but whose practices are represented as ‘problems’ and ‘curses’ in educational policies, rather than as ‘resources’ and ‘blessings’. by emphasising the demarcations and the double-vision of marginalised groups moving between borders, ‘border pedagogy’ is manifested through ‘fragile identity… as it moves into borderlands crisscrossed within a variety of languages, experiences, and voices’ (giroux 1992:34, hayes and cuban 1997). undocumented women nurses from mexico cross physical borders and live in transitional homes (caravans) in ‘unincorporated’ areas, where they move to and from wealthy houses in cities for domestic work. they transport and perform multiliteracies and languages and, in so doing, change identities and relations in the borderlands (cuban this issue). although adult literacy systems in canada, australia, the us and england are marginalised (known, as ‘cinderellas’ or ‘stepchildren’ of education), they too have become constrictive. those who are deemed students are included, while others, like these women, are cast to the periphery, because they cannot meet entry requirements. they come to community programs and receive marginalised services yet develop innovative survival routes to gaining power. they use borderland logics, that is, practices and strategies that form outside of institutionalised systems of learning, through networks, which can be incorporated, if seen and understood. this paper sets the scene for how social practice theory assists in understanding borderland logics and practices against the backdrop of policies. first, i develop the key issues and challenges of the social practice theory within the discourses of marginalisation and globalisation through which the polarities of normative/exclusive education systems exist. then, i reframe the issues through the textual mediation of disparate worlds to show its complexities, after which implications for literacy practices and engagement among marginalised groups are made explicit. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s c u b a n 7 s e t t i n g t h e s c e n e f o r t h e ‘ b a c k t o b a s i c s ’ d r i f t i n e d u c a t i o n : t w o c a s e s t u d i e s that globalisation has created demands, leading to changed systems for adult literacy policies and provision, is clear. local cultures shape these forces too, hence ‘glocalisation’ occurs. the global forces are: 1) governmental and knowledge industry demands for evidence-based research and information; 2) re-regulation of public services (health, education, social services) through auditing regimes, and, 3) an infusion of business models into educational agencies emphasising productivity as a competitive advantage. policymakers rarely mention these forces and instead focus on globalisation as part of human capital, which, when harnessed, can uplift national economies into wealth and prosperity. for this, they make fast and loose connections between globalisation and skills. for example, wolf (2002:xi) cites the then secretary of state for education and employment in england who links these together when he says: the powerhouses of the new global economy are innovation, ideas, creativity, skills, and knowledge. these are now the tools for success and prosperity, as much as natural resources and physical labour power were in the past century. skills-based education is promoted as the elixir for the knowledgebased economy and for growth. learning is a tool for economic survival with generic skills that can be transferred from one environment to the next. the argument is handy for policymakers who discuss hard skills (like literacy) and blame a deficient workforce even as employers seek out workers with soft skills or dispositions (wolf 2002, jackson 2005). this skills discourse appeals to a broad segment of society because it symbolically joins education with economic growth and social justice, giving it the gloss of progressive politics (hursh 2006). for example, in a recent report leitch (2006) states: in the 21 st century, our natural resource is our people—and their potential is both untapped and vast. skills will unlock that potential. the prise of our country will be enormous—higher productivity, the creation of wealth and social justice. since these ‘skills’ are elusive, educational levels easily become proxies for employers, who use credentials as a screening and sorting devices for employment (wolf 2002). corporations and policymakers in countries such as england have been turning literacy skills into profit for the knowledgebased economy: ‘if we are to face the challenge of creating a high-tech, highadded value and high-wage economy,’ according to the labour party publicity some years ago, ‘we can only do so by skilling our people’ (wolf 2002:13). ‘education, education, education’ was the mantra, with little consideration for new entitlement systems. names and policy rationales became clear as more o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s countries formed national skills-based systems for adults and children, such as skills for life in england or equipped for future, in the us. it is not surprising policies sounded alike – no child left behind in the us and every child matters in england – as policymakers actively branded these ideas and adopted similar legislation. the sentiment of these policies is predicated on public services being earned. for example, england’s ministry of culture, education and science, said: ‘all people, young and old, are firstly and naturally responsible for themselves. you have to learn how to take care of yourself and therefore you must want to acquire the knowledge and skills to do that’ (in field 2006:131). literacy becomes a tool for individual social mobility with little concern about who and what is left behind, as a recent unesco based report (hill et al 2008) concluded about the us adult literacy system. the adoption of this self-seeking discourse, referred to as ‘personalisation’, has a historical base. both us and english adult literacy systems evolved from fragmented, volunteer sectors in the 1960s and 1970s into ones that are highly centralised and professionalised. this shift was reflected in the reagan (us president)/thatcher (uk prime minister) eras, with the weakening of social safety nets and their replacement with a contract culture (hamilton and merrifield 1999). adult basic education agencies, funded by the state, were turned into socially responsible corporations charged with being shock absorbers of these neo-liberal reforms and economic launching pads for the new service-based economy and privatised public services. henceforth, educational programs had to achieve employability or vocational outcomes if they were to survive conservative times. m i n d t h e g a p s i n t h e n e w e d u c a t i o n a l o r d e r : e v i d e n c e b r a n d e d r e s e a r c h a n d p r o g r a m s these consolidated systems reflect the new educational order, focused on individualistic learning for economic purposes over active citizenship and the common good (field 2006). the system needed to embody these values through new research regimes. since 2001, the evidence-based agenda in the us has promoted and exported throughout the world, a skills orientation, focusing on narrow, pragmatic issues (what works) which can be studied with a select few designs and methodologies: ‘all evidence is not created equal’ the revamped us department of education sciences exclaimed (whitehurst 2002). branding their choice of research methods as evidence-based, they endorsed randomised trials and quasi-experiments over qualitative approaches such as case studies, excluding ethnography altogether. since then, there have been repeated calls from the us administration under president george bush to re-organise adult literacy programs to align better with reporting systems, and use evidence-based research to increase the o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s c u b a n 9 performance of learners: ‘adults will have opportunities to improve their basic and literacy skills with high-quality research-based programs that will equip them to succeed in the next step of their education and employment’ (d’amico 2003:1). by setting the stage, the assumption was that other countries would adopt this agenda too. although england’s system has not created methodological restrictions to the same degree as the us, it has endorsed evidence-based research and the pressure mounts to implement it. there has been increasing concern about ‘the wide dissemination of flawed, untested educational initiatives that can be detrimental’ (boruch and mosteller 2002:1 in gorard and torgerson 2006) and there has been a call for a new social contract for research (hammersley 2006:3). the underlying message is that if these initiatives do not undergo rigorous testing, they can be wasteful or at worst, damaging. the assumption is that ‘hard science is the royal road to improvement’ (erickson and gutierrez 2002:22), and that scientific culture can cure educational ills in most advanced economic countries. allan luke (2005), in australia, refers to these evidence-based scenarios as part of globalised economies of education, consisting of regressive strategies, focusing on accountability, outcomes-based education and management. the discourses consist of new basics (futures-oriented curriculum reforms that can be measured through standardised testing), productive pedagogies (system-wide focus on pedagogy as the core work of teaching), and literate futures (a queensland state strategy for achievement and skill gains). these reforms ‘steer from a distance’ (luke 2005:665) with the emphasis on surveillance and centralised control. all of these efforts shift the focus to the individual and distract from real problems in the labour market and in society, including growing poverty, underemployment, and casualised working conditions that do not supply a living wage. the discourses also mask the ways formal provision has not moved in expected ways, including less money per student, causing participants and programs to evaporate (sticht 2007a, 2007b). jackson (2005) shows that these accountability systems are not as evidence-based as they are touted to be, especially if protocols are circumvented to comply with performance pressures. st. clair and belzer (2007) classify england and the us as market models. the us workforce investment act (wia), for example, has production at its core with the focus on individual choice, streamlining public services, and matching training with educational services, symbolising a shift from human potential to human capital. while the national reporting system acts as a monitor, little attention is paid to the lack of inputs and threatening conditions. in england, the skills for life policy is heavily prescriptive and performance-based with a national curriculum and set targets that are measured through systematic methods. both the us and english systems o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s become numbers games, with students ‘creamed’ to ensure progress and participation scores. yet, diverse learners and their complex needs, interests and practices are not incorporated and there has been a failure to capture myriad forms of learning, aspirations and successes. a w i d e a n g l e l e n s f o r s e e i n g t e x t u a l l y m e d i a t e d d i s p a r a t e w o r l d s social practice theory offers a lens to view globalising trends, not only in education, but in the social world, as it becomes textualised and disparate, creating opportunities for some while marginalising others. literacy is used as a means for managing social class divisions and controlling educational capital (e.g. lotteries, school vouchers and tracking systems), managing and controlling social and commercial phenomena such as large-scale migration (e.g. new citizenship tests tied to literacy), and managing and controlling widespread use of communication technologies (e.g. mobile phone texting). taken together, these forces fashion an ‘information age’ that connects profits to literacy, wherein writing becomes ‘hot property’ and a: ‘mass practice, [as it] thoroughly participates now in the trading of things and ideals’ (brandt 2007:567). literacies, however, are used for much more than social control, and social practice research incorporates local domains, where they are used by workers, families and community members for autonomy, outside of dominant structures. these local practices, while influenced by global forces, operate according to borderland, rather than policy logic, and encompass diverse social actors. in so doing, the social practice viewpoint creates a picture of the complexities of social life that cannot be captured through randomised control trials alone but which are essential to all policy and practice in education. often called the new literacy studies (nls), social practice research sees literacies as embedded within cultural, socio-historical, technological, economic, raced and gendered sets of relations in society and communities. it is concerned with what people do with texts, how they think about them, and use them through their relations. these processes are developed through communities of people who engage in similar practices. they are also sponsored through institutions, networks, and power relations through technologies, texts and artifacts that are fluid and permutate as they travel (brandt and clinton 2002). yet policies tend to immobilise, single out, and cement these practices making some more visible, normalised, and high-ranking, such as schoolbased literacies (the 3 r’s), while text messaging, gaming, or blogging are often learned informally within a community, outside of classrooms and are hidden. some policies make texts ‘toxic’ to use, as in social services, where ‘there is an official form to deal with every life situation’ (taylor 1996:14). one study (cuban 2008) found that the paperwork in england’s social care o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s c u b a n 11 system had exploded, to the point where it could be considered a fourth shift of work. these administrative texts pervade institutions, from hospitals to employment agencies to schools and colleges, in a phenomenon known as the ‘textually-mediated social world’ (brandt and clinton 2002, barton and hamilton 2005). social practice theory highlights these institutional texts as well as the strategies people use to live with and negotiate these ‘powerful literacies’ (crowther, hamilton, and tett 2001). social practice researchers show how people’s institutional literacy practices (like filling in a form in a local neighbourhood health clinic) link to national levels (government funding requirements to create standards and track use of the clinic) and to international mechanisms (tracking health care in the nation) to reveal transcontextual meanings. policies play an important role in these processes and it is important for research to analyse and challenge the ways in which different forms of provision respond (or fail to respond) to people’s textual practices. yet in as much as these texts are ‘done’, they can also be undone as they are living documents (created and maintained by people) (hunter 2008). thus, social practice research has evolved from an initial focus on school versus home-based literacies, to a local practice approach and later, to an examination of all social activities of which literacy is a part through many contemporary institutions, cultures, and networks, taking into account both local and global dimensions as two sides of the same coin (street and lefstein 2007). c r i t i q u e s o f t h e s o c i a l p r a c t i c e t h e o r y : a p e r t u r e s o r b l i n d s p o t s ? three critiques that circulate in the literature allege that social practice theory is neither critical nor cosmopolitan. the first charge is that the theory lacks salience for analysing social issues, and it merely describes what researchers see in front of them, ending in descriptive, blinkered and relativistic conclusions (brandt and clinton 2002). in part, this is a legitimate claim, because social practice researchers, in being open-minded to all social phenomena, have not wanted to criticise marginalised groups’ literacy practices. yet it is also true that social practice researchers do indeed evaluate practices by factoring spatial and temporal dimensions of literacies through ‘text-reader conversations’, which reveal character and actions of people, as they become institutionally accountable (smith 2005:101, 113). social practice researchers do this by connecting levels of social systems — including global states, nation-states, and regional districts, to individuals and communities through multi-sited methodologies, and then appraising them (buroway et al 2000). social practice researchers examine how actors are situated within and between institutions, which is especially important for bridging the tensions between theorists, teachers, and policymakers (crowther, hamilton, and tett 2001). social practice researchers recognise o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s that the points fit together in idiosyncratic ways due to literacy’s historical ‘tensions, continuities, and contradictions’ (graff and duffy 2008: 43). the second criticism is that by focusing on communities (of practice), there is neglect of who community members are, where they come from and their unequal opportunities to use literacies (gee 2005). this is a valid point especially when the labour of some members is exploited in maintaining community practices. this point needs to be clarified by social practice researchers who focus on how learning and literacies are linked to communities through particular socio-historical phenomena, networks, cultures and people. they acknowledge that people’s practices may transform social relations, but not without the possibility of becoming trapped and powerless too. stromquist (2001, 2007) shows that mediator relationships are not as reciprocal in theory as they are in practice, and that they are fraught with power relations, making them highly problematic. distributed literacies, for example, can become a rationale for policymakers to withhold provision to groups of women who have been found to help one another in the absence of institutional supports. holland and skinner (2008) show that social movements may profile the ‘educated’ and promote literacy practices that are unequal. the third critique is related to the first two claims. this critique is that social practice theory assumes a passive role for literacies; that is, it reflects people’s fixed social arrangements and social patterns and is not an active agent of social change (brandt and clinton 2002). this assertion also needs some explanation. in the social practice view, objects and humans exist in a network of transactions with their social resources moving locally and globally to solve problems, relate and learn. community-based educators for example, steeped in popular education, have wedded informal and formal learning to social change for decades (hamilton and hillier 2006). social practice theory can be a politically productive tool for critiquing policies and making change rather than a research device, or a reaction to hegemonic policies. social practice researchers unpack assumptions that literacy and formal education are powerful in and of themselves, and they support learning that is linked to social justice. m a r g i n a l g r o u p s a n d r e s o u r c e s although social practice studies often focus on groups of people (such as those mentioned above) who are shown as living on the margins and experiencing the effects of ‘globalisation and its discontents’, their situation has not necessarily arisen because of their literacy or language skills, even though these are what most policy makers see as the cause of their social problems. moreover, these groups are not marginalised when it comes to their actual participation in the new economy, as they are growing demographic groups and important labourers and consumers of services. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s c u b a n 13 cbos (community-based organizations) surface as unexpected innovators of education to support these groups, in spite of, or because they are underresourced. cbos’ economic and social marginalisation can even have inverse effects on learners’ community participation wherein resilient strategies are devised to distribute literacies. these critical resources are used ingeniously, though not without difficulty. l e a r n i n g , p a r t i c i p a t i n g , a n d p e r s i s t i n g learners may learn informally through self-study and computers; these are used in an embodied way for bonding, caring, self-understanding and collective action. these inconspicuous practices, learning processes and intrinsic outcomes cannot be captured in terms of short-term quantifiable gains, and are subsequently invisible to policymakers. nor do short-term programs yield short-term proficiency gains amongst learners, as reder (this volume) shows. although programs could tap proficiencies and practices by altering systems, this adaptation may suit funding structures rather than learners, especially if programs offer technology simply because it is cheaper than trained tutors. simply put, shallow interventions cannot reverse deeper inequalities. participation in formal programs is unequal (desjardins, rubenson and milana 2006). do technologies, by virtue of their stand-alone qualities, reduce inequalities for marginalised groups? how can they operate as a way in to formalised participation, (see reder this volume where programs influence learners’ practices), or, are they a way out as discussed previously? bringing computers to programs may involve, ‘bringing people to literacy and bringing literacy to people’ (reder 2007). but it depends on access, usage, resource levels and support features. with little data on informal learning, especially of the elderly who rarely participate in formalised environments (desjardins, rubenson and milana 2006), as well as undocumented immigrants who take a risk to enter them, the value of social practice theory is in spotlighting people’s hidden learning practices and communities. people move in and out of formal sites because of the myriad issues they contend with and because of program failure to compensate for structural disparities (e.g. transport, childcare) (merriam, cafferella and baumgartner 2007). all literacy and speech events are counted and made visible under social practice research rules, and hence a comprehensive view of learning emerges. these snapshots however, are not made merely for the sake of representation, but to bring in a social justice norm to adult basic education and broaden what it means to learn in multiple settings. spanish, for example, can be a pedagogical tool that is not a conventional esol learning mode in colleges, but it is in community-based sites (rivera and huerta-macias 2008). reder (this volume) shows that mixed methods and carefully developed o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s measures are needed to understand these complex issues and establish rigorous explanations about learning processes and practices. m e a n i n g m a k i n g , p o w e r , a n d l a n g u a g e social practice research highlights the meaning-making in learning through power and language. participants may report, in real terms, the value of their literacy practices for learning in certain situations, like being bullied in school (barton this volume). these understandings are gleaned through biographical and cultural analysis. descriptive information is amassed, then filtered through the interpretative lens of researchers who incorporate what participants say about their actions, and ally themselves with their stories. in one study (hamilton this volume), an elderly man was asked about his dentures by a social worker, who ‘was sitting in his home with a clipboard.’ the literacy paraphernalia (the clipboard) underscores the power the social worker claims in his home because she knows he needs free services and he understands that his compliance with her procedures is needed to get support. social practice researchers pinpoint these situations, describe the events in detail, and then analytically locate them amongst participants, the networks used to interact, and the powerful national and international forces and institutions of influence. the power relations, however, are not fixed and people’s identities, roles and relations do shift; for example, a cleaner may turn into a counsellor at work for teenagers but not in her own home with her daughter (cuban this volume). these scenarios depict major socio-cultural factors at play in individuals’ current situations, which link to past events and future aspirations. standard concepts and language change under a lens that depicts learning as embedded into people’s shifting routines and interests. causal explanations for practices are illuminated. c o n c l u s i o n : a t r a d i t i o n w i t h n o n a m e social practice research can be used to design learning sites that incorporate the interests of marginalised groups. they can be places to develop new practices and be a part of community-building activities and knowledge (kalman 2008). similarly, pedagogies need not just imitate people’s practices in their communities and workplaces but expand on their resources and repertoires for their greater individual and collective autonomy. while these ideas thrive amongst social practice researchers, educators and participants, they are considered revolutionary by policymakers who are wedded to skills-based systems. without more funding across learning sites, or advocacy for the mainly part-time teaching force in advanced countries’ cinderella systems, and finally, without greater policy interventions to ensure wider access, support structures, and opportunities, institutional change is stifled. marginalised groups will continue to be on the periphery, with little access to educational services, or inadequate ones at o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s c u b a n 15 best. yet, learning in communities will continue in the borderlands. social practice research unearths these learnings and makes visible and validates the ‘tradition that has no name’ (belenky, bond and weinstock 1996). r e f e r e n c e s anzaldua, g (1987) borderlands=la frontera, aunt lute books, san francisco. anzaldua, g (1990) la conciencia de la mestiza: towards a new consciousness, in anzaldua, g, ed, making face, making soulhaciendo caras, aunt lute foundation books, san francisco, pp 377-389. bartlett, l (2007) to seem and to feel: situated identities and literacy practices, teachers’ 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leithwood, k and livingstone, d, eds, international handbook of educational policy, vol 2, springer, netherlands, pp 763-778. kalman, j (2008) beyond definition: central concepts for understanding literacy, international review of education, vol 54, pp 523-538. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s c u b a n 17 lankshear, c and knobel, m (2006) new literacies: everyday practices and classroom learning, open university press, new york. leitch, s (2006) prosperity for all in the global economy: world class skills, hm treasury, london, retrieved 9 december 2008 from http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/furthereducation/uploads/documents/200612%20leitchreview1.pdf. luke, a (2005) evidence-based state literacy policy: a critical alternative, in bascia, n, cumming, a, datnow, a, leithwood, k and livingstone, d, eds, international handbook of educational policy, vol 2, springer, netherlands, pp 661-675. merriam, s, cafferella, r and baumgartner, l (2007) learning in adulthood, jossey-bass, san francisco. pratt, n (2004) working feminisms, temple university press, philadelphia. purcell-gates, v, ed (2007) cultural practices of literacy: case studies of language, literacy, social practice and power, taylor and francis, london. reder, s (2007) giving literacy away again: new concepts of promising practice, in belzer, a and beder, h, eds, toward defining and improving quality in adult basic education: issues and challenges, erlbaum, mahwah, new jersey, pp 255-276. reder, s and davila, e (2005) context and literacy practices, annual review of applied linguistics, vol 25, pp 170-187. rivera, k and huerta-macias, a (2008) adult biliteracy: sociocultural and programmatic responses, lawrence erlbaum, mahwah, new jersey. st. clair, r and belzer, a (2007) the challenges of consistency: national systems for assessment and accountability in adult literacy education, in campbell, p, ed, measures of success: assessment and accountability in adult basic education, grass roots press, alberta, pp 159-206. smith, d (2005) institutional ethnography, rowman and littlefield, new york. sticht, t (2007a) five year fall from the literacy summit, retrieved 7 march 2009 from http://www.nald.ca/library/research/sticht/aug07/page1.htm sticht, t (2007b) the seven enduring prep paap activities in adult literacy education, retrieved 2 january 2008 from http://lists.literacytent.org/pipermail/aaace-nla/2007/005231.html. street, b and lefstein, a (2007) literacy: an advanced resource book, routledge applied linguistics, london. stromquist, n (2001) literacy for women’s citizenship: what we know and what can be done, paper presented at the international conference on the role of adult education in sustainable development, organized by project literacy, johannesberg, 27-29 november 2001. stromquist, n (2007) discussant for division l education policy and politics, american educational research association, april 11, chicago, illinois. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s taylor, d (1996) toxic literacies: exposing the injustice of bureaucratic texts, heinemann, portsmouth, ma. whitehurst, g (2002) oeri powerpoint presentation, retrieved 7 july 2008 from http://www.ed.gov/offices/oeri/presentations/evidencebase.html wolf, a (2002) does education matter?: myths about education and economic growth, penguin, new york. microsoft word lns 18 1 han singh _2august2010.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 1 2010 52 road safety literacy for speakers of english as a foreign language: educating novice drivers for the public’s health safety jinghe han, michael singh, dacheng zhao a b s t r a c t the public health dimensions of road safety literacy for novice drivers who speak english as a foreign language, are a concern due to increasing transnational mobility. the research literature indicates interest in this language issue in terms of comparisons with native english speakers, gender, and international evaluations. however, studies of road safety as a literacy issue are limited. using an autobiographical approach this paper explores the textual, inter-textural and performative literacy of a chinese learner-driver in australia. evidence of the learner-driver’s life history, use of multiple languages, and cultural differences are shown to impact on her development of road safety literacy. i n t r o d u c t i o n road traffic, public health and education authorities across many countries are concerned about finding ways to improve public health through better road safety (escalera, moreno, salichs & armingo 1997, korica & maurer 2005, australian transport council 2006). research into drivers’ capabilities, characteristics and behaviours focuses on the relationship between users’ responses to road signs and what this means for public health and safety (al-yousifi 2000, al-madani & al-janahi 2002a, 2000b, british department of transport 2004). however, studies of the public health dimensions of what we call ‘road safety literacy’ in english speaking countries by learner-drivers who speak english as a foreign language (efl)or as a second language (esl) appear to be limited. this is so despite people’s increasing trans-national mobility. the practice of driving involves (a) learning to read certain forms of texts that are on the roadway (visual and audible), (b) understanding that a driver’s licence is an official qualification from which authorised institutions (police, courts) can withdraw credit, as well as, (c) coming to embody certain practices whereby the learner comes to look like a driver with certain capabilities, having a new social standing and sense of freedom, as much as having the potential for death or debilitation. in this sense, we see road safety literacy as having a role to play in the public health of individual drivers, the community of road users and those in society who deal with the costs of road trauma. this idea of ‘road safety literacy’ resonates with work of the english teachers’ association and the roads and traffic authority (2007) of new r o a d s a f e t y 53 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s south wales (australia), who have provided curriculum resources for exploring the issues of authority and drivers. conceived in this way, the idea of ‘road safety literacy’ offers a conceptual tool for situating the practice of educating learner-drivers in relevant social contexts. road safety literacy is usually developed in the country where we are born, and thus, undertaken in our native language. trans-national mobility sees increasing numbers of people from countries where english is a foreign language moving to countries such as australia where as learner-drivers they meet road conditions that may differ from those in their home country. given the public health issues at stake, there is a need to investigate the road safety literacy of efl and esl learner-drivers in this context. this paper contributes to the study of road safety as a site of adult literacy development. it reports the results of an exploratory study of the scaffolding of road safety literacy for an efl learner-driver in australia. but first we introduce the theoretical framework to explain further the concept of road safety literacy used in the research reported here. this provides the basis for the ensuing review of the literature, which provides insights into relevant road safety research. this is followed by a brief account of the research method used in this study, and the key findings. a t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l v i e w o f r o a d s a f e t y l i t e r a c y the research reported here is broadly situated in the approach of new literacy studies which has shown that literacy is not a single, unified set of skills or competences, but rather that there are many different literacies associated with a range of different social practices (street 1998). what then of the everyday literacy practices involved in learning to drive a motor vehicle, a fairly ubiquitous practice in australia, and increasingly in china? driving is an expression of popular culture, a means of communication, and the negotiation of a technology requiring particular reading skills. the safe use of motor vehicles can enhance civic, economic, and personal participation. it has to respond to changes in automobile technologies and requires multifaceted interventions, which benefit from being considered from multiple perspectives. road signs, digital or otherwise, are part of the everyday texts that impose literacy demands on the diversity of road users. this includes those who speak english as their only language as well as those for whom it is one of two or more languages in their communicative repertoire. in examining the efl driver's learning of road safety literacy, the multiliteracies pedgagogical framework developed by cope and kalantizis (2000) was useful. firstly, the learning was studied as an example of situated practice (cope and kalantzis 2000) by working with the learner’s real-life experiences of learning to drive. to add to the situation at hand, the learnerdriver used her prior knowledge from home, school, communities and r o a d s a f e t y h a n , s i n g h , z h a o 54 culture to contribute to her learning. secondly, overt instruction (cope and kalantzis 2000) was involved through the instructor giving direct instructions during the lessons. thirdly, cope and kalantzis’ (2000) idea of critical framing was used in examining how the learner discerned the context and purpose of driving, which in turn added to the learner’s perception of her identity as a driver and social context. fourth, cope and kalantzis’ (2000) notion of transformed practice could describe how the learner-driver brought her 'embodied understandings' into this context and site of popular culture (pahl & roswell 2005: 91). to understand road safety as a form of literacy, blau’s (2003) three dimensional (3-d) view of literacy was chosen. for blau, textual literacy firstly refers to the ‘procedural knowledge that allows a reader to move from summarising or retelling the plot of a story, to constructing a plausible interpretation, to reflecting critically on a text’ (blau 2003:19). for example, a learner-driver can demonstrate this textual or operational dimension of literacy by decoding and pronouncing words such as ‘no right turn’. second, inter-textual literacy refers to the ‘conceptual and informational knowledge that readers need to make sense of what they read, beyond what they would understand merely by pronouncing and decoding the words of a text’ (blau 2003:19). presented with multiple road texts, such as traffic signs and road markings, drivers have to activate their inter-textual literacy. by way of illustration, a learner-driver has to become competent in make meaning of these texts in relation to their context, by using prior knowledge of this information to explain correctly what the various forms of road signs designating ‘stop’ mean in legal terms, and to distinguish these from, and relate them to, other signs, such as the brake light of a vehicle. third, performative literacy has been identified as ‘knowledge that enables readers to activate and use all the other forms of knowledge that are required for the exercise of anything like a critical or disciplined literacy’ (blau 2003:19). thus, a learner-driver who is unable to integrate the meaning of road signs, the safety consequences, and the legal implications of ignoring the sign would demonstrate limited performative literacy, and in turn pose a public health and safety risk. by its nature this 3-d view recognises the existence of interrelated forms of literacy, which have implications for the producers and consumers of everyday texts, including efl/ esl adults learning to drive safely. this view allows us to supplement considerations of book-based literacy with the multiple message systems with which drivers must continuously engage to ensure public health and safety on the roads. the changes in the demographic features of australian society, especially its increasing linguistic diversity, suggest drivers’ engagement with these everyday texts may benefit from being understood in terms of how the learner-drivers construct, communicate and deconstruct them. having introduced the theoretical r o a d s a f e t y 55 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s framework to explain the concept of road safety literacy, we now review of the literature on road safety research. r o a d s a f e t y l i t e r a c y a n d p u b l i c h e a l t h road crashes are a major public health issue: ‘road trauma is a major contributor to diminished public health. it is the leading cause of death among young australians’ (australian transport council 2006:24). for each road death there are approximately thirteen serious injuries involving the loss of quality of life and requiring costly rehabilitation. the pain, grief and suffering of road trauma victims impose massive burdens on families, friends and the community. relative to native english speakers (nes), efl drivers do not have an increased frequency in the display of dangerous driving behaviours. an australian study found that the difference in road safety literacy between efl and nes road users was inconclusive (haworth, symmons & kowaldo 2000). predictors of an accident or involvement in illegal driving behaviours went beyond english language proficiency. efl women are, however, at a greater risk in terms of performative literacy relative to their nes peers. dobson, brown, ball, powers and mcfadden (1999) examined factors which affected the driving behaviour and accident rates among efl and nes women in australia. like the study reported in this paper, self-reported data were used. the study by dobson et al (1999) suggested the need to further investigate factors that might account for the higher rate of public health risk among efl women drivers. this could enable the development of driver education programs from which they and others could benefit. traffic accidents are a serious problem in the asia pacific region from where xiaohua, the participant in this study, came. according to china road traffic accident statistics, in 2005 there were 450,254 traffic accidents in that country, with 98,738 people killed. the death rate per ten thousand registered motor vehicles was 10.82 persons (zhang, huang, roetting, wang & wei 2006). the number of fatalities is expected to grow due to the increasing number of motor vehicles in china. in contrast, the number of people killed by traffic accidents in australia in 2005 was 1,636 (australian bureau of statistics, 2007). the australian fatality rate from road traffic accidents per ten thousand registered motor vehicles was 1.2 persons. zhang et al (2006) found that in contrast to drivers from western countries, chinese drivers did not concentrate on pedestrian safety. one possible explanation could be that institutions in china, which elsewhere had responsibility for road safety literacy, do not strongly support this field of public education. there are national and cultural differences between australia and china in road safety literacy. it is a very serious public health problem in china (hu, zhou, zhao & liu 2005). the limited driver education has not r o a d s a f e t y h a n , s i n g h , z h a o 56 been successful, with people’s literacy with respect to road safety being low. according to hu et al (2005), the high rate of traffic accidents in china is partly due to the low levels of textual, inter-textual and performative literacy among both pedestrians and drivers. apparently, neither grouping of road users is adequately educated in the public health issues of road safety, with many not demonstrating performative literacy at traffic signs. for example, people randomly cross streets in chinese cities rather than doing so at pedestrian crossings. likewise, cars dash through red lights, while drivers ignore speed limits or enter prohibited traffic zones. driving is a skill-based, rule-governed, expressive activity. parker and stradling (2001) found that novice drivers are likely to be involved in a crash in the first year after getting their licences. they argue that there are three phases in learning to drive. first, in the technical mastery stage the neophyte driver learns how to operate a motor vehicle. second, the stage of reading the road occurs when the driver learns to comprehend road signs, anticipate the actions of other road users and assess road surfaces and weather conditions. third, the expressive stage sees the driver develop his/her own driving style based on personal, attitudinal and motivational characteristics. parker and stradling (2001) found that novice drivers have poor performative literacy when handling ill-defined and unusual road conditions relative to experienced drivers there is much research-based knowledge relating to road safety issues across a wide variety of disciplines including transport, psychology, health and anthropology. this paper adds to this literature by looking at road safety as a literacy issue. the new south wales english teachers’ association (eta) and the roads and traffic authority (rta) (2007) are engaging young adults in exploring what driving means in terms of the ideas and practices of selfregulation in the community and civil society. this partnership between road traffic authorities and english language educators offers a means for achieving cross-professional linkages and effective collaboration in improving road safety literacy. it addresses the need, identified by the australian transport council (2006: 42-43) for sound driver education programs to improve higher-order cognitive skills, self-monitoring of driving behaviour, and appreciation of the consequences of performative actions. the study reported in this paper provides an initial exploration of the possibility of considering ‘road safety literacy’ as a way of developing selfreflective learning about road safety among speakers of english as a foreign or second language working in australia. the next section explains the approach to studying road safety literacy used in this project reported here. m e t h o d changes in the demographic features of post-white australia have increased the need to investigate how learner-drivers who speak english as an r o a d s a f e t y 57 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s additional language construct, communicate and deconstruct the everyday texts of the road. the aims of the study reported here are to open up to further investigation the idea of road safety literacy by providing a preliminary exploration of strategies for developing it among efl and esl learner drivers. using an autobiographical approach thirty-seven-year old xiaohua (pronounced sh-ow-wha) documented her experience of learning to drive in australia, just three and half years after arriving in this country. xiaohua, a speaker of english as foreign language, had no previous driving experience in either china or australia. wright (2003) argues that the legitimacy of autobiographical approaches in empirically grounded investigations has come with the increasing use of auto-ethnography and reflexivity in educational research. among the reasons for using an autobiographical approach to research literacy as a social practice, two are worth noting here: making the personal public, and opening up the possibility of moving from self-study to larger-scale research (bullough & pinnegar, 2001). first, because one’s troubles cannot be solved when framed merely as personal matters, autobiography provides a means of positioning them as public issues. thus, this project provided an opportunity for xiaohua (a pseudonym) to reflect on, and to turn her personal experiences of learning to drive into a public account that could speak to others. however, the description provided here is not meant to be read as representative of the experience of learning to drive of other chinese people in australia, let alone other efl speakers from asia. second, autobiography is a long established form of self-study that provides an entrée into developing large-scale empirical research, which can speak to the needs of both the producers and the consumers of research. the autobiographical evidence upon which this paper is based provides a basis for clarifying the concept of road safety literacy. this study of how one individual learnt to drive, uses an analytical procedure that gives preference to the literacy dimensions of road safety. in this way, this autobiographical selfstudy provides a means for opening up the prospects for more elaborate research. however, the use of autobiography does not mean that the argument made here has a weight that places it above and beyond criticism. no claim is made for the unquestionable authority or authenticity of autobiographical research. further, our methodological thinking has been informed by carr’s (1964) argument that the knowledge produced by an individual represents an accumulation of knowledge from different people and across different countries. xiaohua’s driving was not enacted in isolation: she is a social being who acted in context and under the rules and practices of australian society, while bearing the influence of related experiences in china. thus, it is important to appreciate the standpoint from which she herself approached r o a d s a f e t y h a n , s i n g h , z h a o 58 her driving, and to see that standpoint as having a social grounding and as being rooted in her life history. the method for data collection involved xiaohua writing down her experiences after each driving lesson. these recounts included her feelings about the differences between being a pedestrian and driver; being a foreigner learning to drive in australia; and being literate in both the chinese and english languages while being relatively illiterate in matters relating to road safety in both australia and china. as noted above, in this study, this evidence of her road safety literacy was then analysed using a three dimensional theory of literacy (lankshear, snyder & green 2000, blau 2003), namely textual, inter-textual and performative literacies. after the open coding of the data, the analysis was used to frame the interpretation of the evidence generated for this study in terms of these three dimensions of literacy (emerson, fretz & shaw 1995). f i n d i n g s this section presents an analysis of evidence of xiaohua’s reflections on her developing road safety literacy as she learned to drive. in doing so, she understood herself as becoming a productive member of society, learning english and learning about australian/chinese driving cultures. her learning experiences were not unlike those represented in the curriculum materials produced by the eta & rta (2007). the research found that xiaohua started with very limited textual capabilities for road safety literacy, which, to a large degree, were influenced by her personal experience or life history. her inter-textual level of road safety literacy was influenced by her bilingual processing of information, a function of her rich communicative repertoire. xiaohua’s performative level of road safety literacy was shaped by the culture of road use in both australia and china. t h e i m p a c t o f a l e a r n e r d r i v e r ’ s l i f e h i s t o r y o n t e x t u a l r o a d s a f e t y l i t e r a c y road texts only entered xiaohua’s consciousness when she started her driving lessons, ‘there weren’t many road signs in my life before i learned to drive. i looked but did not see them. i was not a driver so did not care about the signs’. xiaohua did not have the ‘textual literacy’ (blau 2003) to decode the formal or informal road texts. she had no self-generated or externally imposed purposes for doing so. barton (1994) points to the importance of considering the influences of personal goals in literacy learning and practices when these are being researched. for learner-drivers who are from another country it is worth considering their different transport and driver education systems. xiaohua’s experiences had marked her: r o a d s a f e t y 59 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s back to 1970’s when i was very young, there were not many motor vehicles on roads in china. there was no formal road safety education in my schooling. it was not necessary. primary school children are now given basic road safety knowledge. they are taught how to react to traffic lights, and how to use pedestrian crossings. road safety knowledge is still largely absent. xiaohua was not taught road safety literacy during her schooling in china. despite the increase in traffic since the 1980s, children’s education about road safety is still limited (yu, zhang, wang &yan 2003). while chinese school children can fluently recite traffic rules, a form of textual literacy, they are puzzled when it comes to the inter-textual and performative literacies these rules require. the concepts of driving and becoming a driver mean different things in different contexts. xiaohua had to deal with international differences in licensing procedures: when i lived there, there was no minimum of 120 hours of required practice in my city, a provincial capital in northern china. learner-drivers do not need to sit a test of road rules. there is only a driving test. reverse parking is the most important task in the test. if you can do that properly, you will probably get your licence. many people receive their driving licence before they can drive. when a young adult learns to drive, s/he not only moves across subject areas, but across semiotic systems, value systems and embedded meanings and their assumptions (pahl & roswell 2005). for xiaohua, who had been living in australia for three and half years before learning to drive, most of the road texts were new to her. this is because she had never had any driving practice in either china or australia. the research literature indicates that personal life history is important to literacy, particularly in understanding the self-regulation required to link social choices and individual behaviour (barton 1994). for xiaohua, an efl learner-driver, getting a driver’s licence in australia involved acquiring knowledge of road rules and driving practice in order to demonstrate this knowledge in action before taking the road test. in contrast, following parker and stradling (2001), it seems that novice drivers in northern china focus on limited technical aspects of learning to operate a motor vehicle. apparently, there is not enough training at the textual level of road safety literacy. in addition, the learner needs to understand the wide range of discourse strategies which go beyond the grammar and pragmatics of road use. interaction within wider social contexts needs to be analysed in order to focus on the needs of the learner-driver (pahl & roswell 2005). r o a d s a f e t y h a n , s i n g h , z h a o 60 a f o r e i g n l a n g u a g e s p e a k e r a n d i n t e r t e x t u a l r o a d s a f e t y l i t e r a c y besides concentrating on her driving skills, xiaohua needed a longer time to deal with the inter-textual issues of working in two languages: when i started, i couldn’t read the road signs because i needed to keep my eyes on the road and to make sure my car was centred in the lane. my driving instructor acted as the guide for my driving. my reaction time took the following sequence: the instructor read the signs – the instructor then spoke to me in english – i worked out the meaning in chinese – i then reacted. i felt 40 kilometres per hour was already too fast. i put my foot on the brake most of the time. i prepared to stop anytime when i was not sure. being an efl learner-driver, xiaohua was slow to react to the array of road signs and her reading of the traffic flow and the movement of individual vehicles. after the input of these multiple road texts, her mind’s processing of this inter-textual information meant that her reaction time was longer than might be expected of nes learner-drivers. that is, the language translation step she had to engage in, itself an inter-textual move, necessarily affected her performative literacy on the road. the time this took added to her sense of frustration and thus her risk to public safety on the road. the processes of becoming of a different type of person, a novice driver, presented problems at the level of inter-textual literacy for xiaohua: i was having difficulty changing my identity from a pedestrian to a driver. i seriously doubted whether i had the right to be on driving road. as a pedestrian my road use was always challenged by drivers. at the beginning i tried to avoid other motor vehicles. i was ready to stop for any other cars that would join me on the road. as soon as i saw a car was coming, i slowed down and prepared to stop. as a pedestrian xiaohua was used to seeing vehicles on the road but had no sense of how to read the road as a multi-dimensional text. as a pedestrian she lived in a different language field. for a period of time her eyes were blind and her ears were deaf to the inter-textual literacy she had to engage on the road. she worried about the other vehicles but could not see or work out the meaning of the various, often competing road texts whether it be the road signs, the traffic flows or the road surfaces. learner-drivers experience stress due to uncertainty about the safety of their driving because they are new to this experience. xiaohua confronted the inter-textual challenges of learning to drive: r o a d s a f e t y 61 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s i worried the road might disappear around the next corner or over a crest. so whenever in this situation i pressed the brake very hard. i did not know how to read the road signs. when i couldn’t see anything beyond the crest, i started to worry and react anxiously. inter-textual literacy refers to the ability to relate multiple texts to each other – ‘both those which texts implicitly take for granted or explicitly allude to, and those which readers bring to their reading of them’ (macken-horarik 1998:76). the inter-texts are all the other texts that we do or can use to make sense of a given text. these will vary from reader to reader, and from community to community. that is to say, learners bring into their learning not just experiences of ‘reality’ but experiences of different kinds of texts. the understanding a learner makes of a text to some extent depends on what other texts s/he views as relevant to its interpretation. inter-textuality involves two perspectives: the learner and his/her experiences, and the text and all the other texts it implicates. texts constrain the possible interpretations that can believably be made of them but learners take these up in different ways. inter-textuality depends on both the learner’s interpretive framework and the writer’s productive capabilities (mackenhorarik 1998) and these two aspects both need to be brought into considerations of road safety literacy. at one stage xiaohua was not able to read the warning signs and the changes in the road itself to make judgements about what she might anticipate or plan to take appropriate actions. she had to learn to read the road signs and link these to the condition of the road ahead, irrespective of whether it could be seen or not. xiaohua had to learn to read these texts together, and know that this required her to prepare for possible changes, while not worrying unduly about the part of the road she could not see. her inter-textual reading of road texts was made all the more difficult because initially she could neither see nor read the inter-textual relations presented. l e a r n e r s ’ l i t e r a c y i d e n t i t y a n d p e r f o r m a t i v e r o a d s a f e t y l i t e r a c y literacy is a social practice, involving specific literacy knowledge as well as social and cultural behaviours. learners’ literacy identity includes ’social and cultural resources, technological experience, and all previous life experiences, as well as specific literacy knowledge and experience’ (anstey & bull 2006:35). learners’ life experiences are essential resources for literacy practices. these resources contribute to each learner’s identity and inform their meaning making (barton, hamilton & ivanic 2000). xiaohua’s performative literacy was affected by her chinese identity and its socio-cultural resources. for example, once while driving across a r o a d s a f e t y h a n , s i n g h , z h a o 62 zebra crossing, she did not have any intention to slow down even though some pedestrians were crossing the road at that point. after this she reflected that: in australia “zebra crossings” give pedestrians safety to cross the road. drivers have to be cautious when pedestrians are using these. however, in the city where i used to live in china, i observed that drivers never stop for the pedestrians and pedestrians can only pass when there are no cars approaching. even then you have to run across it quickly. xiaohua’s example indicates how laws governing the relationship between drivers and pedestrians can be ambiguous. the traffic law in australia gives priority to pedestrians in this particular context, while in china zebra crossings do not guarantee their safety. literacy is embedded in larger social conditions governing what is possible (barton 1994: 43), and this applies specifically to road safety literacy. if instructors can help learners to reflect on their literacy identities and resources, they become more flexible and strategic in their literate activities (anstey & bull 2006: 35). lacking technological experience in her previous life distracted xiaohua from the performative skills needed for road safety literacy. for this learner-driver, being able to integrate her operational skills into developing performative literacy was a challenge: at first i couldn’t control the vehicle well. sometimes i drove into the next lane. i had to try hard to keep my eyes on the lanes. i had no sense of accurately judging distance. i felt as though my car was wider than the lane. i complained about the narrowness of the roads. because i was concentrating on the road lanes, i had no third eye to look at the road signs so had to ask my instructor what to do next. i gave the task of my eyes to my ears. learning to make and act on her own decisions was a key step in xiaohua’s performative literacy: i was used to getting guidance from my diving instructor. once i was approaching the traffic light, i had no idea whether i should keep driving when there was no car in front to lead me, while some others on my right were waiting. later i knew they were waiting for a ‘green’ arrow to turn right. when i approached the traffic lights, i only saw the colour of the light in front but didn’t see the arrows on the road. when i did see them, i did not make meaning out of them. at this time, i had to ask my instructor what to do. later i took the risk of making my own decision. r o a d s a f e t y 63 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s for xiaohua, there was a distance between knowing the textual meanings of the road signs and what or how to react to them. she had to learn to make the right decisions. she could read the green light, which meant to go. at the same time she needed to consider the other road texts such as arrows in each lane, differences in the types of white lines in front of her, and signs giving directions. while she was able to read and understand one single piece of road text, she could not read many road texts simultaneously and then perform appropriately with due regard to other road users. an important indicator of her capability to connect inter-textual and performative literacy was that xiaohua could understand and act on the legal dimensions of road texts: at the beginning, i did not believe that the signs meant the law, and that drivers must follow them. i always worried that some drivers wouldn’t obey the rules. so many times when the traffic light was green, i was still not sure whether i should go without my instructor’s words because i thought some one might break the rules and bump into me while i was driving through the green light. also when i saw a car come out of a side-road, i always slowed down even though i had the ‘right of way.’ while the authority of other drivers looked assured, xiaohua’s own sense of authority seemed tenuous. even as she started to understand road signs at a textual level, she still could not believe or trust herself. her worries were partially derived from her experience in china where the road culture is different from that in australia: an australian tv program about china showed pictures of a traffic accident in beijing. it looked like something from a movie, but it was a news report. the traffic lights did not work for some reason. a police officer stood in the middle of a major intersection. however, no drivers followed his instruction. cars flew into the intersection and crashed into each other. xiaohua could not believe that the road texts were expressions of laws governing public safety which drivers and pedestrians needed to follow. her scepticism was derived from her cultural experience. in china she knew that some people did not follow traffic rules, and so she doubted whether road users would do the same in australia. this affected her performance in reacting to road texts, reinforcing her insecurity in performing as a learnerdriver. as an efl learner-driver xiaohua took time to perform in a road emergency. for example, when visual information such as the image of a ‘camera’ and procedural texts such as ‘80’ appeared at the same time, she had to decode both simultaneously. this involved ascertaining the meanings of the two text types, establishing their interrelationship and preparing to r o a d s a f e t y h a n , s i n g h , z h a o 64 perform accordingly. xiaohua also had to decode the texts by translating them into her native language when she was not sure of how she should react. her performance came after she had sorted out the language issues, an added element in her performative road safety literacy. c o n c l u s i o n working within the framework of literacy as a social practice, this paper has opened up the possibility for more extensive investigations into driver education as a form of literacy learning. learning to drive is a domain of life that requires the development of multiliteracies (cope and kalantzis 2000) that involves learning a situated practice through real-life experiences and overt instruction and guidance by an instructor. moreover, it requires what cope and kalantzis (2000) calls critical framing as experienced by the learner-driver in this study who learned to critique what she knew, learned or inferred from the culture, politics and social economy of driving in china and australia, as well as transformation of practice that led this learner-driver to develop a meta-awareness of what it means to be a driver in australia as distinct from its meaning in her home country. road safety literacy involves beginning-drivers learning to read a diversity of texts, bringing in other relevant texts and performing, based on their understanding of these many texts. this is a process that is governed by the social relations established among drivers as much as by the institutional powers involved in creating roads, governing traffic flows and policing driver behaviours. road safety literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices. they are situated in terms of both the individual’s life history and societal changes. therefore, the pedagogy 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i and green, b (2000) teachers and technoliteracy, allen & unwin, st leonards, nsw. macken-horarik, m (1998) exploring the requirements of critical school literacy, in christie, f and misson, r, eds, literacy and schooling. routledge, london, pp 74-103. pahl, k and roswell, j (2005) multimodal literacies, in phal, k and roswell, j, eds, literacy and education. paul chapman, london, pp 25-47. parker, d and stradling, s (2001) road safety research report no. 17: influencing driver attitudes and behaviour, department of the environment, transport and the regions, london. street, b (1998) new literacies in theory and practice, linguistics and education, vol 10, no 1, pp 1-24. wright, h (2003) cultural studies as praxis, cultural studies, vol 17, no 6, pp 805-822. yu, q, zhang, q, wang, m and yan, j (2003) zebra crossings. asia pacific perspectives, vol 3, no 1, pp 50-55. zhang, w, huang, y, roetting, m, wang, y and wei, h (2006) driver’s views and behaviours about safety in china, accident analysis & prevention, vol 38, pp 22-27. microsoft word lns18.1_kelly_2aug.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 1 2010 19 explicating literacy activities at work: the use of ‘okay’ as an effective topic-changing device in service request calls ann kelly a b s t r a c t there is evidence from different spheres that the grounding of understandings of literacy within social practices has gradually become accepted within the adult literacy field in australia. however, what has not been sufficiently considered are those tacit literacies that underpin such practices in both everyday and work settings. this has been the case particularly for those literacies that are deployed through an oral communication mode in workplaces. this article offers a way of explicating such literacies by showing how the analysis of an audio-recording of a particular occupational activity, namely the reporting of a service request, can render visible particular key literacy features. in this case, such an analysis shows how the marker ‘okay’ is used in a critical way to close off segments of an interaction and to mark verbally that agreement about a particular aspect of the request has been reached. it is argued that the use of recordings, both audio and video, for the purpose of highlighting tacit competencies has implications not only for adult literacy teachers but for trainers, assessors and curriculum developers within the broader vocational education and training sector. k e y s o c i o c u l t u r a l i n f l u e n c e s o n c o n c e p t i o n s o f a d u l t l i t e r a c y i n a u s t r a l i a the position that literacy is not restricted to a set of individual’s attributes but is grounded in social activities has gradually become accepted within the research, policy and practice literature in the field of adult literacy. support for such a stance can be traced to the seminal theoretical work of street (1984), gee (1995) and barton, ivanič and hamilton (1999), ethnographic studies of literacy practices, policy initiatives and teachers’ reflections, especially those focusing on pedagogy in workplace settings. in particular, the situating of ‘autonomous’ forms of literacy within broader ‘ideological’ forms by street (1984, 1993) has been crucial in critiquing narrow notions of literacy as decontextualised and individualised and appreciating that all literacy is ultimately ideological. similarly, gee’s (1996) contention that small ‘d’ discourses (including literacy discourses) are always located within broader (large ‘d’) discourses encompassing ‘conventionalised ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k 20 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes’ (p. 127) have helped to promote notions that literacy is always contextual. one of barton, ivanič and hamilton’s (1999) major contribution was to situate literacy within a social practices model, commonly referred to as ‘the new literacy studies framework’, which is underpinned by a number of key propositions. these are that literacy must be understood as a set of social practices, ‘multiple, patterned by power relationships, purposeful, historically situated and changing over time’ (p. 2). it follows, then, that, in all literacy practices, even in the delivery of programs that are ostensibly generic and delivered in formal educational settings, there is an inherent valuing of certain ideas, identities and ways of behaving over others that is being enacted (street and street 1991). an attempt to situate literacy training within a social framework has also been evident within australian policy, on the basis that it is more effective. for example, a concerted effort was made by the australian government in the 1990s to integrate literacy (along with language and numeracy) into vocational education. initially, this was manifested in the incorporation of literacy into competency statements (courtenay and mawer 1996) and then into the delivery of competency-based training through as ‘built in: not bolted on’ (bradley, parker, perisce and thatcher 1998). as the phrase implies, the emphasis was placed on integrating literacy into vocational training, rather than separating it out from mainstream vocational provision. a further national initiative was the provision of funds to the adult literacy and numeracy australian research consortium to research how language, literacy and numeracy were being included in the delivery of courses based on training packages. publications such as those by kelly and searle (2001), sanguinetti (2001), and trenerry (2001) showed that, while there were some industry trainers who were integrating language, literacy and numeracy into their vocational courses, others continued to perceive these competencies as ‘bolted on’ and unrelated to their own responsibilities. from an international perspective, ethnographic studies, such as that undertaken by gowen (2001) in a hospital, show how important it is to understand literate practices as being embedded within particular social orders. in her study, gowen showed, among other findings, that the interpretations of workers’ literate behaviours by managers did not reflect the actual abilities of their employees. rather, workers learned when it was politic, or in their occupational or social interests, to adopt, ignore or sabotage particular literacy practices that were prescribed by hospital managers. a training approach based only on individual cognitive development would obviously not consider such factors. kleifgen (2005) also found that workers had endogenous ways of ‘consenting to, coping with, and contesting’ (p. 467) the authorised requirements for implementing the quality assurance program iso 9002 in a small circuit board manufacturing plant in e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k k e l l y 21 california, activities that would also not be appreciated without such close observations of actual worker practices. a further example is available in south african studies (prinsloo and breier 1996) which pointed out the importance of mediators in the accomplishment of literate activities, regardless of the acquired literate ability of the participants. thus, literacy ethnographers such as gowen, kleifgen, and prinsloo and breier have helped to promulgate notions of a social, as well as a cognitive basis for literacy teaching. this has important ramifications for the work of literacy teachers, policy makers and researchers in the field a final example of the differing but important influences on the development of social as well as cognitive approaches to literacy teaching is available in the reflections of teachers. as early as the mid-1980s, there was evidence that teachers in adult migrant education programs recognised that ‘autonomous’ basic skills literacy programs were not appropriate responses to workers’ literacy needs (campbell, foley and mortensen nd). one widespread response to this perception was the use of authentic workplace texts. through the employment of a systemic functional linguistic approach (eg prince 1992, wignell and boyd 1994), workers were shown how these were constructed to produce particular meanings through the use of both generic features and clausal devices. since that time, a more ‘ideological’ approach to literacy training has been promoted through the funding initiatives of the australian government in the form of the workplace english language and literacy (well) program (2009). this involves industry and registered training organisation staff working collaboratively to develop programs that are both pedagogically sound and responsive to workplace needs. while our understandings about social literacies, particularly those engaged in at work, have been expanded through the promulgation of theories, policies and practices, our knowledge of literacies at work remains scant. this is particularly the case for tacit literacies that are difficult to articulate (for example, those enacted through oral communication modes). the example that is analysed in the next section represents one way of extending knowledge about literacy in situ that has implications for theorists, policy makers and practitioners with an interest in adult literacy. it is based on a transcript of an interaction between an administrative trainee, employed in a local council office to record service requests made via the telephone, and a primary school staff member who is reporting a problem with a council sign. a key feature of the call is the use of the marker ‘okay’ that is used by the trainee, and in some cases, both parties to acknowledge an understanding has been reached and, by the trainee, as a device to move from one topic to another. it is the topic-changing function that is the focus of my analysis here. it will be argued that, while this marker performs valuable work in moving the call forward, this is not recognised in the documented business services e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s standards (national training information services nd) that ostensibly capture such work. initial attempts to document such minutiae as individual competencies, for example, in the metals industries (towards a new metal and engineering industry award 1988), have been recognised as not viable., however, i argue in this article that the device ‘okay’ performs such a pivotal function in the negotiating and reporting work undertaken in the request interactions that were recorded that it should be acknowledged in competency standards. this example is just one such important feature evident across my corpuses of local government activities that have not been incorporated into those units of competency which have been designed to reflect actual work practices. in the final section of this article, a case is made for using audio and video recordings to make such features of everyday practices visible and thus available for recognition. r e c o r d i n g s e r v i c e r e q u e s t s i n a l o c a l c o u n c i l o f f i c e as with any activity, the recording of telephone service requests comprised a number of stages. figure 1 represents the stages involved in actioning these requests by the bayside city council i when the data for my study were collected. the first stage involved the focal trainee and service requestors. in the call that is used as an example in this article, a school administration assistant requested attention to a council mobile library sign located near her school. the transcript shows in fine detail how the two parties verbally assembled the nature of the problem and then followed this with a discussion of its location and level of seriousness. at several points in the interaction the trainee committed the council to a response that was later formalised through the medium of a service request form. during the call the trainee took notes, the type of information recorded being influenced by the categories that featured on the council’s customer service request form. the electronic completion of this form, usually undertaken some hours following the request, is represented as stage 2 in the sequence shown in figure 1. this article centres on stages 1 and 2. e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k k e l l y 23 figure1: stages in responding to a telephone service request within the bayside city council a n e x a m p l e o f a s e r v i c e r e q u e s t c a l l the specific topic of the transcript that is examined in this article was a problem with two posts that were the structural supports for a mobile library sign. the initial phase of this call is not available for consideration here as it occurred prior to approval being granted for the call to be recorded. the abbreviations ‘c’ and ‘t’ refer to the caller and the trainee, respectivelyii. in this interaction an initial categorisation of the content of the call results in six components, namely, topicalising the problem, warranting the call, locating the source of the problem, establishing caller details, initial actioning of the complaint and closing the call. these components were common across all the calls in my corpus. it has been noted that lists of components such as this one show ‘ideal’ organisational structures of activities (eg drew and heritage 1992:44). however, they are of limited use because they do not capture the finer details inherent in accomplishing service requests sequentially in response to local contingencies. in examining such details, topic changing devices have been found to be critical. s t a g e 1 s t a g e 2 s t a g e 3 s t a g e 4 constitution of the service request by both c a l l t a k e r a n d c a l l e r & its documentation as notes by c a l l e r ⇒ documentation of the problem on customer service request form by c a l l t a k e r ⇒ actioning of response to the problem and documentation of this action by d e s i g n a t e d o f f i c e r ⇒ establishment of satisfaction with the resolution to the problem by c a l l t a k e r & c a l l e r e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s t o p i c c h a n g i n g d e v i c e s topic changing devices are common tools used to effect oral communication work. for example, west and garcia (1988) claim that ‘topical talk is as much about how speakers introduce, develop and shift between potential “mentionables” as it is a product of what they actually said’ [italics in original] (p. 551). specifically, such devices can contingently limit what is mentioned at particular points in an interaction. other conversation analysts (eg button 1987, 1991, button and casey 1984, maynard 1980) have also noted the importance of topic changing devices in effecting both organisational and mundane conversational work. topic changing devices can take a variety of forms but what is noticeable in this call is the trainee’s use of the marker ‘okay’ to introduce and shut down components of the call. beach (1993) has examined a large corpus of data showing multiple instances of the use of ‘okay’. he claims that: ‘okay’ is employed pivotally, in the midst of, yet at precise moments of, transition by recipients and current speakers alike, across a variety of speech exchange systems . . ., not just in any sequential environment but where what is ‘at stake’ involves movements from prior to next-positioned matter(s) (p. 326). instances of such work by the marker ‘okay’ are observable at three points in transcript 1. first, the trainee uses ‘okay’ in line 10 to close down the initial description of the problem by the caller and move to the elicitation of information regarding the location of the problem. similarly, in line 17 the employment of ‘okay’ by the trainee acts as a ‘pivot’ to move from locational information to the name of the caller and in line 49 from warranting work to the confirming of action to be taken. this marker, however, achieves additional functions in this call. in lines 25, 35, 46 and 52 both the trainee and the caller appear to use it to indicate an acceptance of the statements by the other and as a device for the closure of a particular focus. a number of authors analysing talk in institutional settings, particularly those of courtrooms (atkinson and drew 1979, drew 1990) and interview studios (greatbatch 1986, 1988), have observed that prosecutors and interviewers also change topics relatively abruptly. a contributing factor to this practice in the council office situation may be the existence of an economic imperative placed on the trainee to gather pertinent information quickly. in this local council setting the service request forms that were the outcome of each call were dated and were designed in a way that allowed for the insertion of particular information. this information included the nature of the problem, its location and level of seriousness and caller particulars. this level of detail may not have resulted if the talk were allowed to develop without such a constraint. e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k k e l l y 25 whalen (1995) noted that, in ensuring that critical details such as the location of the problem are entered into dispatch packages, disjunctions in the topicality of the talk may occur as relevant details are sought for the purposes of form completion. it is evident, though, in the interactions that i recorded between the service requesters and the trainee, that this transitional work was undertaken in a way which included the deployment of this marker in a pivotal manner that did not appear to disrupt the flow of talk between the participants of the call. t h e r o l e o f ‘ o k a y ’ i n m e d i a t i n g t a l k a n d t e x t i n i n i t i a l l y r e c o r d i n g s e r v i c e r e q u e s t s in figure 2 below, asterisks have been inserted into the text the trainee produced during the service request call to show how and where the marker ‘okay’ was used, predominantly by the trainee, in the first half of the call to manage the acquisition of required information about the problem that was the source of the call. in addition, arrows show the linkages that developed between the recorded components of the call. finally, a column of numbers reflects the lines in the transcript where this action occurred. figure 2: trainee’s note of the call *denotes the use of marker okay as a topic-changing device an examination of the content of the note reveals that the key details required to address the problem (stage 3 in the process represented in figure 1), namely its nature, location, and a warrant for the call, were documented. in addition, a record was made of the name of the caller and her contact phone number (for follow-up in stage 4). further, although there is no videorecording to support the claim, it might be assumed that these details were e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s garnered by line 35 of the call. the remaining interaction focuses on determining the seriousness of the problem. in examining the asterisks in figure 2, it is evident that the marker ‘okay’ played an important role in organising the call to meet the organisational requirements of the council. what is also noticeable is how the layout of the note recording the content of the call on the note did not match its sequential enactment but did match the layout of the council form developed later. if we now turn to an examination of the accredited competency standards relating to the processing of complaints (or, in this case, service requests) by which this trainee was assessed, it is clear there is no recognition of the use of topic changing devices to manage the organisational recording requirements of such calls. l i t e r a c i e s i n t h e e l e m e n t o f c o m p e t e n c y : p r o c e s s c u s t o m e r c o m p l a i n t e l e m e n t p e r f o r m a n c e c r i t e r i a 1.respond to complaints 1.1 process c u s t o m e r c o m p l a i n t s using e f f e c t i v e c o m m u n i c a t i o n in accordance with organisational procedures established under organisational policies, legislation or codes of practice. 1.2 obtain, d o c u m e n t and review necessary reports relating to customer complaints. 1.3 make decisions about customer complaints, taking into account applicable legislation, organisational policies and codes. 1.4 negotiate resolution of the complaint and obtain agreement where possible. 1.5 maintain a register of complaints/disputes. 1.6 inform customer of the outcome of the investigation. table 1: bsbcmm301a: process customer complaints (national training information services, nd, np ) what is clear, however, is the broad nature of the competencies and their linearity. an examination of the transcript and an understanding of the processes employed by the council in addressing complaints show that, in responding to the calls, the trainee showed she could ‘process customer complaints using effective communication in accordance with organisational procedures’, ‘. . . document and review necessary reports relating to customer complaints’, ‘make decisions about customer complaints, taking into account applicable . . . organisational policies’, ‘negotiate resolution of e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k k e l l y 27 the complaint and obtain agreement’ up to a point and ‘maintain a register of complaints’ (through the use of a file number on the official form). the final criterion was also likely to be addressed, as it is a key component in the process of attending to requests (stage 4). thus, it might be argued this list captures in a very global manner the key features of the task of recording complaints. however, while i concede that sets of steps such as these might have some initial value, unless they are supported by examples of actual practice, they leave the learners and trainers with little guidance with respect to how the separate components of the activities might be accomplished in a competent manner. for example, with respect to the focus of this article, there is no recognition that the smooth movement from one set of topics to another is important. i m p l i c a t i o n s f o r l i t e r a c y a n d v o c a t i o n a l p r a c t i c e s the use of the marker ‘okay’ is just one aspect of how this trainee enacted the moment-by-moment contingencies of service request calls. other features were noted in the larger doctoral study from which this article derives. however, additional investigations of the actual practices of workers as they are undertaken, using an ethnomethodologically-based approach, such as the one adopted in this study, are needed. such approaches are important because they explicate the ordered and moral ways in which work activities are accomplished. in particular, the analyses of audioand videorecordings make explicit the tacit knowledges and skills that are not recognised and thus cannot be articulated. while additional ethnomethodological and ethnographic studies are needed, they will never be enough. as concluded in my study of the work of thirty administrative trainees (kelly and foley, 1999), and evidenced by the sheer numbers of such workersiii, the scope of administrative work and, no doubt, other occupational areas, is wide. responses to such diversity have been to develop specialities within competency frameworks iv , to allow for a measure of customisation of the content of competencies and to identify acceptance variables within a somewhat limited range. however, a continuing and more pressing problem is the lack of power at the local level to determine the competency statements themselves. currently, it is standards developers with assistance from stakeholders who engage in this task. the problem with this arrangement is that the voices of the workers who actually accomplish activities, on which competency statements are ostensibly based, are silenced. on the other hand, it is recognised that the opening up of local sources of input for such statements may result in an unmanageable and undifferentiated number of knowledge types and skills. in promoting an ‘ideological’ view of literacy, street (1996) has noted that there may be a problem in the relativism that would result. however, he e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s argues that to impose from outside ‘fixed, universal and given’ genres and forms of literacy is also not the answer. what is 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self-study guide for teachers, nsw adult migrant english services and department of industrial relations, employment, training and further education, surry hills, nsw. prinsloo, mastin and breier, mignonne, (eds) (1996) the social uses of literacy: theory and practice in contemporary south africa, sached books and john benjamins publishing company, johannesburg. psathas george (1995) conversation analysis: the study of talk-ininteraction. sage, thousand oaks. psathas, george (1999) studying the organisation in action: membership categorization and interaction analysis, human studies, vol. 22, pp. 139-162. sanguinetti, jill (2000). the literacy factor: adding value to training: investigation of the inclusion of literacy in training packages in the food processing industry, language australia, melbourne. street, brian v (1984) literacy in theory and practice, cambridge university press, cambridge, ma. street, brian v (ed) (1993) cross-cultural approaches to literacy, cambridge university 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order: studies in the social organization of talk and embedded activities, international institute for e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k k e l l y 31 ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and university press of america, washington, dc, pp. 186-230. wignell, peter and boyd, kate (1994) kakadu national park as a case study in workplace literacy, national languages and literacy institute of australia, deakin, act. well workplace english language and literacy (well) program overview (2009) retrieved 1 april 2010 from http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/training_skills/programmes_funding/pro gramme_categories/special_needs_disadvantage/well/workplace zimmerman don h (1992) achieving context: openings in emergency calls in graham watson and robert m seiler (eds), texts in context: contributions to ethno-methodology. newbury park, london. pp. 3551. london: newbury park. e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s t r a n s c r i p t 1 ( t r a n s c a l 1 : 0 9 0 9 9 9 ) e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k k e l l y 33 e x p l i c a t i n g l i t e r a c y a c t i v i t i e s a t w o r k 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s i pseudonyms are used throughout this article. ii the notational symbols (psathas, 1995, pp. 70-85) used for transcribing the telephone complaint and their meaning are shown below: [ ] simultaneous utterance = latching of utterances (1.0) timed intervals in seconds between and within utterances (.) untimed intervals within utterances of less than a second (( )) description xyz loud delivery o soft delivery : sound stretch underlining stressed phonemes or words ↓↑ intonational markers iii recent data (march 2008) (national centre for vocational education research september quarter 2009) show there were 15,400 administrative trainees registered in australia. iv in the current business services framework microsoft word lns 16.2-17.1 pp 35-50 reder oct 27.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 2 & v o l 1 7 n o 1 2 0 0 9 35 scaling up and moving in: connecting social practices views to policies and programs in adult education stephen rederi a b s t r a c t the social practices framework has had a major impact on adult literacy and numeracy research over the past quarter century in the us, the uk and other countries. to date, the social practices view has had far less influence on the development of policies and programs in adult literacy and numeracy education. to help this happen, new kinds of assessment tools aligned with the social practices framework are needed to support appropriate changes in curriculum design, learner assessment and program evaluation. in this article research is presented that illustrates how measures of adults’ engagement in literacy and numeracy practices can be used in conjunction with well-entrenched proficiency measures to provide a richer quantitative framework for adult literacy and numeracy development. longitudinal data about learners indicate that adult education programs are more closely aligned with practice engagement measures than with proficiency measures. program participation leads to increased practice engagement that, over time, leads to the very gains in proficiency currently valued by policy makers. i n t r o d u c t i o n the social practices framework for literacy has had a major impact on adult literacy and numeracy research over the past quarter century. an accumulating body of research in this framework has created a new discourse about literacy, one that can effectively stand in opposition to the ‘dominant’ institutionally-based discourse about adult literacy. impressive as this research is, the social practices view has had far less influence on the development of new policies and programmatic practices in adult literacy and numeracy education (hamilton 2001). although the new understandings and discourses about adult literacy and numeracy generated by the social practices approach offer an important foundation for change, there is great need to develop corresponding innovations in curriculum design, learner assessment and program evaluation that will help adult education programs and practitioners deal with pressing practical needs. although proponents of the social practices approach have developed strong and persuasive critiques of the interpretive and policy schemes that s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s rely on standardised literacy test scores (e.g. street 1997, hamilton and barton 2000, hamilton 2001), alternatives have not been proposed that are practical for use on a large scale. there are many reasons this has not yet happened. the development of the social practices framework – as with the development of critical theory more generally – has relied on rich qualitative analyses of behaviours, discourses and texts in highly localised settings. some theorists are understandably hesitant to embark on a methodological journey that they fear might produce only narrow and reductionist measures of social practices. that is clearly a danger and something that must be guarded against. a second impediment may be the view that because literacy practices are locally situated, they can be meaningfully measured and interpreted only within local contexts. although this may be true for some literacy and numeracy practices, many other practices are constructed over broader contexts. indeed, some literacy practices have been sociohistorically constructed specifically to transcend the limits of the local (brandt and clinton 2002, reder and davila 2005). another barrier may be the widespread polarisation of qualitative and quantitative methods in many fields of educational research, including research on adult literacy and numeracy. erickan and roth (2006) argue against an extreme polarisation and propose an integrated approach that creates a continuum rather than a dichotomy of methods and generalisability. they suggest that the types of research questions being asked should determine the modes of inquiry (drawn from this continuum) used to answer them. luke and hogan (2006) provide a model for school-based research in singapore that draws on a range of qualitative and quantitative methods that cohere within a social practices framework of teaching and learning in schools. luke and hogan’s work is far more than just another call for the use of mixed methods in complex research projects. they assert it is possible to adopt what they term a ‘critical realist’ approach to evidence and theorybuilding that can embody the core principles of critical theory while interfacing with the complex embeddings and nested organisational structures of educational institutions. i argue that, for research on adult education, an analogous approach needs to be developed, one that acknowledges and takes into account the diverse settings, contexts and identities associated with adult literacy and numeracy practices and programs designed to foster them. there is some reason to believe that such an enterprise could connect practically with programmatic concerns. previous research has suggested that measures of literacy practices are related to adults’ experiences in basic skills programs while measures of literacy proficiency are not. sheehan-holt and smith (2000) examined the large-scale survey data from the national adult literacy survey conducted in the us in 1992, contrasting the results for s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n r e d e r 37 adults who participate in basic skills programs with results for those who do not. with education and numerous other background variables statistically controlled, their multivariate analyses found evidence of program impact on literacy practice measures but not on literacy proficiency measures. the use of practices-based measures cannot only provide evidence of program impact, it can identify effective programmatic models for adults. purcell-gates, jacobson and degener (2004) found that students from adult education programs that focus instruction around authentic literacy materials and practices report greater improvements in their literacy practices than students from programs not centered around authentic literacy practices. although each of these studies suggests that systematic use of practices-based measures may be invaluable for understanding and improving programs, neither utilised measures satisfactory for use in longitudinal work, essential for addressing these types of research questions (reder and bynner 2008). in this article, i will take a few initial exploratory steps in this direction. i will describe some key previous findings and present new analyses from a project that has followed adults over long periods of time, observing changes in their lives, in their literacy and numeracy practices, and in their standardised proficiency scores. by contrasting analyses based on measures of practices and proficiencies, i hope to show that carefully constructed practices measures can offer a stronger and more practical platform for the development of adult education policy and programs than a platform based on proficiency measures alone. the remainder of this article is organised into four sections. the first section will introduce the longitudinal study of adult learning (lsal). the second section will consider a few key recent findings from lsal, identifying important differences between proficiency and practices measures. a major question emerging from these findings is whether increased engagement in literacy and numeracy practices over time leads to increased proficiency. a positive answer to this question is crucial for making the case that measures of adult literacy and numeracy practices should be systematically used for developing better policies and programs in adult education. the third section conducts new analyses of the lsal data to address this question. the final section discusses the findings emerging from these analyses and their implications for reframing the dominant discourse about adult literacy and numeracy from its narrow focus on proficiency to a broader focus that includes literacy and numeracy practices. t h e l o n g i t u d i n a l s t u d y o f a d u l t l e a r n i n g the longitudinal study of adult learning (reder 2007, 2008, reder and strawn 2001a, 2001b, 2006) examines the nature and impact of literacy and numeracy development across the lifespan of youth and adults who dropped out of high school in the us. this multimethod project followed a panel of s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s about 1,000 randomly selected individuals over a period of nine years. periodic in-home interviews and skills assessments were complemented by qualitative work using in-depth interviews, videography and the collection of narratives and writing samples. the lsal followed and retained over 90 per cent of its panel as individuals moved, found and lost employment, married, separated, had children, went to prison, served in the military, struggled with poverty or addiction or poor health — in other words, the full round and range of life experiences one would expect of a diverse panel of 1,000 high school dropouts. six waves of interviews were completed, spanning about eight years of each individual’s life. p o p u l a t i o n a n d s a m p l e the lsal followed a target population for adult education defined as residents of the portland, oregon metropolitan area, aged 18-44, proficient but not necessarily native english speakers, high school dropouts (i.e., did not receive a high school diploma and were no longer enrolled in school) and without a general educational development (ged) or other high school equivalency credential.ii a statistically representative sample of this population was drawn from two sampling frames: random-digit-dialing for the general population and enrolment forms from the three major adult education programs serving the portland metropolitan area. sampled households were called and screened for members in the defined target population. the resulting sample contained 940 individuals. complex sampling weights were used to construct population estimates from sample data. at the beginning of the study in 1998, the population had an average age of 28 and was evenly divided among males and females. approximately one-third were members of minority groups, one in ten were born outside of the us, one third described themselves as having a learning disability, and one in three reported having taken special education classes (designed for students with physical and learning disabilities) while they were in elementary or secondary school. individuals dropped out of school for a variety of reasons. i n t e r v i e w s a n d a s s e s s m e n t s six periodic interviews and skills assessments were conducted in respondents’ homes. respondents were paid for each of these sessions, which took an average of about one and a half hours to complete. each wave of data collection consisted of an in-home interview followed by cognitive assessments. the skills assessments included a standardised functional literacy assessment in each wave. this proficiency measure was the document literacy scale of the test of applied literacy skills (tals). administered in a constructed response rather than multiple choice format, the tals assesses adults’ abilities to extract and process written information s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n r e d e r 39 in a variety of everyday document formats, such as forms, maps, tables, text displays, labels, and so forth. these written documents are utilised to perform simulated everyday literacy tasks. respondents are assigned proficiency scores on a 0-500 scale based on the simulated literacy tasks they are able to perform correctly. the tals instruments are highly similar to instruments used in the 1992 national adult literacy survey, the 2003 national assessment of adult literacy, the international adult literacy survey, the adult lifelong learning survey and in numerous state surveys in the us. self-reported measures of everyday reading, writing and math activities were collected each time respondents were interviewed. they were asked about how often they performed each of a set of specific reading, writing, numeracy and computer practices in various everyday contexts (home, community, work). two questions were asked about each practice. respondents were first asked if they ever engaged in the practice, (e.g. ‘do you ever read the news section of the newspaper’?). if respondents answered ‘yes’, they were asked a second question about their frequency of engaging in that practice (e.g. ‘how often do you read the news section of the newspaper?’), answering on a five point scale ranging from 1 (rarely) to 5 (every day). answers to the pair of questions for each practice were combined so that the possible range of scores for each practice was from 0 (never) to 5 (every day). confirmatory factor analysis was carried out on these practices data.iii fourteen practices from the home and community contexts were included in this analysis. confirmatory factor analysis is a highly sensitive technique that provides information about the degree to which items measuring the same concept are closely related as well as information about whether there are multiple concepts measured by the set of items. using this analytic approach, we eliminated items that tended to be poorly associated with the other items, and we discovered that two central concepts were assessed by the remaining items, which we termed engagement in literacy practices and numeracy practices. after finalising this confirmatory factor model with the wave 1 data, we conducted a series of analyses to ensure that the measurement properties of the scales were stable across waves of the study. it is essential that measurement properties are stable across waves for valid longitudinal analyses of change. without stable measurement properties, it is impossible to distinguish changes in literacy practices from changes in the measurement properties of the scale.iv in order to establish longitudinally stable measurement properties, we substantially reduced the number of items used per scale, so that the resulting scales are measured with considerable error (in terms of classical psychometric criteria) on any one occasion. for repeated s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n 40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s measures analyses, however, such measurement error may be acceptable if it is stable over time. the final literacy practices scale was comprised of three practices (how often fiction was read; how often non-fiction was read; how often notes, letters or emails were written), and the numeracy practices scale was comprised of two items (how often maths for bank accounts, credit cards, etc. was used; how often maths was used at home). it is noteworthy that the particular items comprising these longitudinally stable scales were relatively broadly specified practices (e.g. ‘how often do you read fiction’?) rather than more narrowly specified practices. s o m e k e y r e c e n t f i n d i n g s f r o m l s a l this section briefly summarises a few key findings from lsal about adults’ development of literacy and numeracy proficiency and practices. these findings are based on statistical modeling of the repeated measures of proficiency and practices collected over waves 1 through 5 (reder 2008). c h a n g e s i n p r o f i c i e n c y assessed proficiencies vary widely in the lsal population but are relatively stable within individuals over time. about 75% of the variance in scores in this large data set is located between individuals as opposed to within individuals over time. nevertheless, there are statistically significant and systematic changes in individuals’ proficiencies over time, and more importantly, significant heterogeneity among individuals’ rates of proficiency change: some individuals gain proficiency over time, others lose proficiency, whereas others maintain their proficiency at a roughly constant level. individual rates of proficiency growth are generally higher among younger adults and immigrants than among older and native-born adults. understanding the heterogeneity of change in proficiency – why some individuals gain proficiency in adult life while others lose proficiency – is likely to be very important for adult literacy policy and program design. key life events and economic forces seem to influence proficiency growth over the lifespan. for example, changes in an individual’s employment and earnings are associated with observed changes in their proficiencies; individuals gaining employment or increased earnings tend to show increasing proficiencies, and vice-versa (reder forthcoming). although changes in proficiency appear closely related to changes in economic activity, no relationship was observed between proficiency change and participation in adult basic skills programs. this is a striking finding because current accountability regimes hold programs accountable for producing short-term ‘learning gains’ on proficiency measures when, according to these results, programs do not have short-term effects on this type of literacy measure.v s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n r e d e r 41 c h a n g e s i n p r a c t i c e s statistical models, parallel to those constructed for the repeated measures of proficiency, were developed for the literacy and numeracy practices measures. comparing the models reveals some important similarities and differences between proficiency and practices measures. to begin with, the measures are positively correlated — individuals with relatively high levels of proficiency also have relatively high levels of engagement in literacy and numeracy practices. all of the measures exhibit systematic change over time as well as significant heterogeneity of change among individuals. although there is substantial correlation among individuals’ levels of proficiency and practices, there is not significant correlation between their rates of change over time in those levels. the proficiency and practices measures are subject to quite different dynamics of change (reder 2008). one important difference among the measures is how they reflect program impact. although there is not a clear relationship between program participation and changes in proficiency, there is a strong relationship between program participation and changes in practices. with many statistical controls in place, reder (2008) found strong relationships between participation in adult education programs and changes of engagement in literacy and numeracy practices. the temporal sequencing of the observed changes makes it clear that program participation influences practices rather than vice-versa. this finding is consistent with the relationship that purcellgates et al (2004) reported between types of adult education programs and changes in practices observed among program participants. purcell-gates et al found that adult education students from programs that focus instruction around authentic literacy materials and practices report greater changes in their literacy practices than students from programs not centered around authentic literacy practices. lsal contrasts the development of literacy and numeracy practices between program participants and non-participants whereas purcell-gates et al contrast the development of literacy practices among participants in different types of programs. these findings pose a critical dilemma for adult education programs. on one hand, programs have demonstrable impact on measures of literacy and numeracy practices but not on proficiency measures, at least not in the short-term. at the same time, proficiency measures are at the very core of the dominant discourse that justifies investments in programs in terms of the increased proficiency and associated economic benefits they produce. can we reconcile these two findings and argue that programs should be designed and evaluated in terms of the increased engagement they produce in literacy and numeracy practices? elsewhere i have suggested the possibility that programs in the short-term produce increased engagement in practices, and that those higher levels of engagement in literacy and numeracy practices might lead s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n 42 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s over time to increased proficiency (reder 2008). although this may seem a reasonable possibility, there has not been direct evidence to date to support it. we next turn to a new analysis of the lsal data that examines this possibility directly. p r a c t i c e e n g a g e m e n t t h e o r y a n d t h e l s a l d a t a practice engagement theory (reder 1994, sheehan-holt and smith 2000) holds that engagement in literacy practices leads to growth in literacy proficiency. since lsal collected parallel information about proficiencies and practices over time, it is possible to test the predictions of practice engagement theory with the lsal data. one way to do this is with the classic simplex modeling approach developed by humphreys (1960), joreskog (1979) and others. we look at relationships among the three variables of interest – proficiency, literacy practices and numeracy practices – at two different points in time, wave 1 (1998) and wave 5 (2004). we model how the relationships among the three variables change between the two time points. each of the three key variables is allowed to influence the other two, so that reciprocal influences or effects are allowed among the variables between waves 1 and 5. these can be lagged effects, that is, the effect of a variable at wave 1 on its own wave 5 counterpart, as well as cross-lagged effects between a variable at wave 1 and another variable at wave 5. wave 1 values are assumed to be predetermined within this simplex framework, with correlations allowed among the three measures. these potential lagged effects, cross-lagged effects and correlations are shown in figure 1 on page 43. we are particularly interested in the cross-lagged effects. given that the lagged effects of each variable are already taken into account in the model, a significant cross-lagged effect would reflect the influence of one variable on another over time (e.g the effect of earlier levels of engagement in literacy practices on later levels of literacy proficiency, a practice engagement effect). the simplex model shown in figure 1 is estimated by structural equation modeling. statistical tests are used to evaluate the estimated path coefficients and the overall goodness of fit of the model to the data and as well as to compare the fit of alternative models. s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n r e d e r 43 figure 1. simplex model of changes in three literacy measures from wave 1 (1998) to wave 5 (2004) i estimated four alternative specifications of the general simplex model shown in figure 1. results are summarised in table 1. model a is the fully saturated simplex model, meaning that there is a set of coefficient values that will fit the observed covariance data perfectly. thus, the goodness of fit for literacy proficiency1 literacy proficiency5 wave 1 wave 5 literacy practices1 literacy practices5 numeracy practices1 numeracy practices5 s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n 44 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s model a is not of interest (it will be perfect), but the fitted values of the lagged and cross-lagged coefficients that produce the perfect fit will be of considerable interest. all estimates shown in the table are standardised, so that coefficients correspond to effect sizes. in model a, each of the adult literacy and numeracy variables has a significant lagged effect on its subsequent value, reflecting the relative stability of these measures of proficiency and engagement in practices over long periods of adult life. the proficiency measure has a considerably larger lagged coefficient than does either of the practice engagement measures, reflecting its higher level of stability (reder 2008). only one of the cross-lagged effects is statistically significant, the effect of wave 1 engagement in literacy practices on wave 5 proficiency. this significant (t=2.355, p=.019) cross-lagged effect is theoretically important, being consistent with practice engagement theory. more frequent reading and writing activities lead over a long period of time to greater proficiency. interestingly, we do not see significant cross-lagged effects between numeracy practices and proficiency nor between numeracy and literacy practices. we do note a marginally significant (t=1.734, p=.083) cross-lagged effect of the earlier level of proficiency on the subsequent level of engagement in numeracy practices. weak to moderate correlations are also observed between the three measures at wave 1, consistent with reder’s (2008) earlier findings. model b removes the non-significant cross-lagged effects from model a. because model b is not fully saturated, its goodness of fit to the observed data can be evaluated. two customary goodness-of-fit measures from structural equation modeling are shown for model b in table 1. the small value (0.017) of the root mean square error of approximation (rmsea) and the large value (0.990) of the tucker-lewis index (tli) indicate that model b fits the observed data quite well.vi the coefficients estimated for the two cross-lagged effects in model b are quite similar to their counterparts in model a. the literacy practices-to-proficiency effect is still significant (t=2.851, p=0.004), whereas the proficiency-to-numeracy practices effect remains only marginally significant (t=1.807, p=0.071) to investigate further the marginally significant effect of proficiency at wave 1 on engagement in numeracy practices at wave 5, we compare the overall fit of models c and b. model c drops the marginal cross-lagged proficiency-to-numeracy practices effect from model b. the fit of model c is still quite good judging from its rmsea and tli indexes. since model c is nested within model b, the difference in the models’ chi-square values is distributed as chi-square with a single degree of freedom.vii the scalecorrected chi-square difference has a test statistic of 1.278 with one degree of freedom, which is not statistically significant. model c thus fits the data as well as model b does, and since it is more parsimonious, we prefer model c. s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n r e d e r 45 s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n 46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s model d adds seven time-invariant covariates to model c: • age (at wave 1) • gender • years of education (before dropping out) • minority status • us-born • self-reported learning disability • parents’ education the effects of these covariates on each of the three literacy measures are estimated at wave 1 and at wave 5. the basic structure of model c is not affected by adding these covariates to model d. the practice engagement effect – leading from engagement in literacy practices to literacy proficiency – remains significant with numerous demographic and background variables controlled. two significant wave 5 covariate predictors are worth noting here. age has a significant negative effect on wave 5 proficiency with wave 1 proficiency controlled. this is consistent with previous findings of lower rates of proficiency growth among older individuals (reder 2008). parental education has a significant positive effect on wave 5 engagement in literacy practices with wave 1 engagement levels and other variables controlled. family background, such as parents’ education, influences the growth of engagement in literacy practices across the adult life course. d i s c u s s i o n a n d c o n c l u s i o n s because of the problematic ways that key issues in adult literacy and numeracy have been framed by the dominant discourse, it is important for the social practices perspective to increase its practical leverage on adult education policies and programs. it seems unlikely that large-scale publiclyfunded programs will operate in other than a quantitative framework. although proficiency measures will likely retain a place in any such framework because of their close empirical relationship to schooling and economic status, additional measures are needed that better reflect a social practices perspective and that are more closely aligned with the impact that programs actually have on adult literacy and numeracy development. adding appropriate practices-based measures to policy and programmatic frameworks would broaden and enrich policy-makers’ perspectives on adult literacy and numeracy development and lead to more effective programs. this article has taken some initial steps to facilitate movement in this direction. first, differences were highlighted between proficiency and practices measures as indicators of adult literacy and numeracy development. previous research shows that proficiency and practices measures have distinct s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n r e d e r 47 dynamics of change that differentially reflect the influences of program participation, life events and economic forces. a key concern is that policies and public investments are frequently rationalised in terms of programs’ presumed or measured impact on adults’ proficiency, while research shows programs have their most direct and immediate effect on adults’ literacy and numeracy practices. there is thus a major misalignment between the effects programs are having on their students’ literacy and numeracy development, on one hand, and the short-term proficiency gains for which programs are accountable under the dominant policy and funding regimes. as the stakes rise in these accountability schemes, such misalignments are likely to produce substantial distortions in educational practice. a second step demonstrated the relevance of practice engagement measures to policy and programmatic concerns. analyses of recent longitudinal data provide clear evidence of practice engagement effects on long-term proficiency development. adults at similar proficiency levels at one point in time wind up many years later at different proficiency levels depending in part on their earlier levels of engagement in literacy practices. those with higher levels of engagement at an initial point in time have higher levels of proficiency at a later point in time even with initial levels of proficiency controlled. there is also strong evidence that programs – especially programs utilising authentic materials and practices in the classroom — foster higher levels of engagement in literacy practices in their students that persist after they leave the programs. there is thus a strong chain of evidence linking programs to increased engagement in practices and linking practice engagement over longer periods of time to increased proficiency levels. without the use of literacy practices measures, a systematic connection is not evident in these data between programs and proficiency. we can make the case for adopting such measures with the demonstration that increased levels of practice engagement – something that programs produce — have consequences valued by policy makers, that is, increased proficiency. as i suggest that adult literacy and numeracy education systematically adopt the use of practices-based measures, let me hasten to emphasise that great care must be taken in developing and using these measures. the particular practice-engagement measures presented in this article are not necessarily recommended. they were not developed for such administrative purposes, they were developed for longitudinal research. our experiences developing these measures, however, may provide some useful lessons for developing other such measures. the temptation to develop narrow and reductionist practices measures must be resisted – we do not want to create an ‘autonomous’ model of adult literacy and numeracy practices. the measures adopted should reflect learning outcomes that are broadly important to adults as well as to policy-makers and funding agencies. they s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s should be carefully developed from a theoretically driven social practices perspective. the measures should be based on literacy and numeracy practices that occur in a broad range of social contexts and geographical settings rather than on highly localised practices. development and use of such measures, of course, faces many methodological and interpretive challenges. the social practices perspective has systematically evolved through ethnographic inquiries focused on the meaning rather than the frequency of actions, an approach that does not readily fit with the concept of a psychometrically sound measurement scale. in this regard, it is interesting that our experience building longitudinally stable measures required the use of contextually broad rather than contextually narrow and discrete practices. we must also be vigilant in remembering that ‘more’ engagement in social practices is ultimately worthwhile as a policy objective only if it is ‘better’ for the individuals involved. keeping these limitations in mind, we should carefully move ahead with the enterprise of adding practices-based measures to the policy and programmatic frameworks in adult education. although the social practices perspective gives us good reason to proceed cautiously, the ‘critical realist’ perspective urges us forward. r e f e r e n c e s beder, h (1999) the outcomes and impacts of adult literacy education in the united states, national center for the study of adult learning and literacy, cambridge, ma. brandt, d and clinton, k (2002) limits of the local: expanding perspectives on literacy as a social practice, journal of literacy research, vol 34, no 3, pp 337-356. erickan, k and roth, w (2006) what good is polarizing research into qualitative and quantitative?, educational researcher, vol 35, no 5, pp 14-23. hamilton, m (2001) privileged literacies: policy, institutional process and the life of the ials, language and education, vol 15, no 2-3, pp 178196. hamilton, m and barton, d (2000) the international adult literacy survey: what does it really measure?, international journal of education, vol 46, no 5, pp 377-389. hu, l and bentler, p (1999) cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: conventional criteria versus new alternatives, structural equation modeling, vol 6, pp 1-55. humphreys, l (1960) investigations of the simplex, psychometrika, vol 25, pp 313-325. s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n r e d e r 49 joreskog , k (1979) statistical models and methods for analysis of longitudinal data, in joreskog, k and sorbom, d, eds, advances in factor analysis and structural equation models, abt books, cambridge, ma, pp 129-169. luke, a and hogan, d (2006) steering educational research in national contexts: the singapore model, in coulby, d, ozga, j, popkewitz, t, and seddon, t, eds, world yearbook of education: educational research and policy, edinburgh university press, edinburgh. muthén, l and muthén, b (2007) mplus user’s guide, fifth edition, muthén and muthén, los angeles. purcell-gates, v, jacobson, e and degener, s (2004) print literacy: uniting cognitive and social practice theories, harvard university press, cambridge ma. reder, s (1994) practice engagement theory: a sociocultural approach to literacy across languages and cultures, in ferdman, b, weber, m and ramirez, a, eds, literacy across languages and cultures, sunyalbany press, albany, pp 33-74. reder, s (2007) giving literacy away, again: new concepts of promising practice, in belzer, a, ed, towards defining and improving quality in adult basic education: issues and challenges, erlbaum, mahwah nj, pp 255-276. reder, s (2008) the development of literacy and numeracy in adult life, in reder, s and bynner, j, eds, tracking adult literacy and numeracy skills: findings from longitudinal research, routledge, new york and london, pp 59-84. reder, s (forthcoming) connecting literacy growth and economic development, national institute for literacy, washington dc. reder, s and strawn, c (2001a) the k-12 school experiences of high school dropouts, focus on basics, vol 4(d), pp 12-13. reder, s and strawn, c (2001b) program participation and self-directed learning to improve basic skills, focus on basics, vol 4(d), pp 14-17. reder, s and davila, e (2005) context and literacy practices, annual review of applied linguistics, vol 25, pp 170-187. reder, s and strawn, c (2006) broadening the concepts of participation and program support, focus on basics, vol 8(c), pp 6-10. reder, s and bynner, j (2008) introduction: the need for longitudinal studies in adult literacy and numeracy education, in reder, s and bynner, j, eds, tracking adult literacy and numeracy skills: findings from longitudinal research, routledge, new york and london, pp 124. satorra, a and bentler, p (1999) a scaled difference chi-squared test statistic for moment structure analysis, retrieved 20 june 2008 from http://preprints.stat.ucla.edu/260/chisquare.pdf s c a l i n g u p a n d m o v i n g i n 50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s sheehan-holt, j and smith, c (2000) does basic skills education affect adults’ literacy proficiencies and reading practices?, reading research quarterly, vol 35, no 2, pp 226-243. street, b (1997) literacy, economy and society: a review, working papers on literacy, the centre for literacy, montreal. i the author gratefully acknowledges grant support for the longitudinal study of adult learning from the us department of education and the national institute for literacy. ii these characteristics were determined at the time that the lsal sampling took place; individuals initially sampled from the defined population have been followed over time even though they may subsequently have moved from the portland area, received a ged, and so on. iii jason newsom conducted the scaling analyses of the literacy and numeracy practices. iv scales that work well on a single occasion of measurement will not necessarily be longitudinally stable when used as repeated measures. purcell-gates and colleagues (2004), for example, investigated literacy practices using questions similar to lsal’s. they were able to construct a highly reliable scale for one occasion of measurement but that scale was not longitudinally stable across interviews, so they were not able to measure change in literacy practices with the scale. v these results may seem at odds with those of program evaluation studies which report significant learning gains in pre-post comparisons of student test scores. these pre-post analyses, however, rarely consider the learning gains of a comparison group that does not participate in programs (beder 1999). lsal includes both program participants and non-participants, and finds similar proficiency gains in both groups. vi rmsea values less than 0.06 and tli values larger than 0.95 are generally considered to indicate good fit (hu and bentler 1999). vii we use the bentler-satorra scaling correction for the chi-square difference test because of the use of the mlm estimator with lsal’s weighted data (satorra and bentler 1999). microsoft word 20.1 notes on contributors.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 1 2 0 1 2 87 notes on contributors stephen black stephen black is a senior researcher in the centre for research in learning and change at the university of technology, sydney. he has been researching and teaching in the area of adult literacy for many years, mostly in the vocational education and training sector. his email address is: stephen.black@uts.edu.au brian doyle brian doyle is a proud bardi man working for kirketon road centre for the past six years. in april 2012, brian was awarded the nsw aboriginal health award: the gail may award, for his outstanding contribution to the health of aboriginal peoples in nsw. brian's email address is: brian.doyle@sesiahs.health.nsw.gov.au ross forman ross forman is a senior lecturer in the language studies group at the university of technology, sydney. he has been involved with tesol/applied linguistics for the past 25 years, and has worked as a teacher and trainer in australia, cambodia, laos and thailand. his email address is: ross.forman@uts.edu.au margaret franken margaret franken is co-director of the health literacy project, senior lecturer and chair of the arts and language education department at the university of waikato. her email address is: franken@waikato.ac.nz judy hunter judy hunter is co-director of the health literacy project, senior lecturer and co-ordinator of alne diploma programmes in the arts and language education department at the university of waikato. her email address is: jmhunter@waikato.ac.nz n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 88 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s maree keating maree keating is currently a lecturer in communication, in the school of communication and the arts at victoria university in melbourne. after completing her phd 'learning from retrenchment', which focussed on the experiences of learning and training amongst a group of retrenched textile workers, she is now researching the ways in which narratives of resistance emerge under de-collectivised and fragmented work conditions. she has previously worked as a teacher, manager and researcher in esl and adult education, based in trade union and community based programs. she can be contacted at: maree.keating@vu.edu.au christine kerr christine kerr has worked in the fields of health and education over the past thirty years, with particular emphasis on 'closing the gap'. her email address is: christine.kerr@sesiahs.health.nsw.gov.au ann ndaba anne ndaba has worked in the field of adult basic education and academic literacy for over 20 years, with extensive experience teaching indigenous students. her email address is: anne.ndaba@cshisc.com.au sue ollerhead sue ollerhead is a doctoral student in the school of education at the university of new south wales, sydney. she has worked as an adult literacy teacher and university lecturer in south africa, and as a tesol teacher in africa, europe and australia. she has also worked as an english language materials developer and commissioning editor. sue’s main research interests are literacy and language learning as a social practice. her email address is: s.ollerhead@student.unsw.edu.au microsoft word forman.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 1 2 0 1 2 85 review phonetics for phonics a review by ross forman phonetics for phonics: underpinning knowledge for adult literacy practitioners by maxine burton national institute of adult and continuing education (niace), 2011, leicester, uk isbn: 978-1-86201-453-4, 70 pages, http://www.niace.org.uk/ this is a slim volume of 70 pages, relating to the uk context, which represents an interesting and valuable resource for adult literacy practitioners. debate over the relative merits of the two principal approaches to reading – phonics and whole language – emerges from time to time. such debate is often initiated by a phonics camp, and gets the support of the popular press, the latter which rarely lets logic get in the way of a good story. but certainly teachers of reading at primary school in australia, for many years now, have drawn upon both approaches: integrating a focus on sounds, letters and words with reading as a social activity which is purposeful and meaning-oriented. the early chapters of this welcome book justify a role for phonics – hitherto neglected – in the teaching of adult literacy. i believe that if we consider what can be reasonably expected of a literacy teacher, ‘language awareness’ must be one key quality. that is, awareness of how language (in this case, english) works: how it sounds (phonology), and looks (graphology), to both native-speaking and second-language students. as the author points out, without an understanding of phonics, literacy teachers may provide less-than-helpful, or even incorrect guidance to their students. one of the big issues, however, is the place of phonics within literacy teaching. while the author affirms that phonics should occur within ‘a broad and rich literacy curriculum’ (p. 7), later in the volume she asserts that indeed phonics should be the ‘first port of call’ (p. 37). this is a view which differs from my own, and probably from the views of most adult literacy practitioners and researchers. r e v i e w 86 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s we are provided in chapter 3 with a brief explanation of the international phonetic alphabet (ipa), as a lead-in to chapter 4, which outlines the basis of phonetics. this complex area is not easy to explain, and the author has done a fine job of describing the sounds and symbols of english. this is essential knowledge for teachers of english literacy. my only suggestion here would be to clarify the presentation. in order to exemplify groups of phonemes, i would recommend new line, indent, and bullet points (rather than treating these as undifferentiated text); and the use of tables/charts wherever possible. for example, the grouping of consonant and vowel sounds could be based on the ipa chart itself, or upon schemes commonly used in esl teaching, such as underhill (2005). chapter 5 examines the uk’s adult literacy core curriculum guidelines for writing, and offers careful critique of various parts of that document. as such, this part is probably of greater interest to curriculum writers and teacher-educators. but chapter 6 includes many excellent points for practitioners, such as the care needed in order to ‘sound out’ words correctly. chapter 7 presents a thoughtful and accurate explanation of ‘accent’, taken here to mean regional or social variation of pronunciation. the author claims that such variation does not jeopardise phonics teaching. fair enough – but i feel that in the face of phonetic variation, the complementary cueing systems of meaning (semantics) and grammar (syntax/morphology) are bound to take on greater significance. the glossary is excellent; the appendices are clearly set out and of great value as resources and references. in appendix 1, table 2 on p. 56, there appears to be a mistake in the letters & sounds representation of the word ‘air’. i was glad to see the author’s objection to the uk core curriculum’s invention of two additional and unnecessary short-vowel phonemes (p. 61, note 2). finally, we need to consider how accessible is this book to an individual reader. to her credit, the author has included a number of doable tasks, and supplemented these with links to additional resources. the appendices alone would justify this book’s presence on any literacy teacher’s desk. nevertheless, without having previously studied some phonetics, i believe that most readers would require additional mediation/support in order to fully grasp and apply the wisdom contained herein. for this reason, i suggest that the book may best serve practitioners either as a source of reference, and/or as a basis for professional development sessions. references underhill, a (2005) sound foundations 2nd edn, macmillan, oxford. microsoft word 0705lns151taylor.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 1 2 0 0 6 23 mathematics for maths anxious tertiary students: integrating the cognitive and affective domains using interactive multimedia janet taylor and linda galligan abstract today, commencing university students come from a diversity of backgrounds and have a broad range of abilities and attitudes. it is well known that attitudes towards mathematics, especially mathematics anxiety, can affect students’ performance to the extent that mathematics is often seen as a barrier to success by many. this paper reports on the design, development and evaluation of an interactive multimedia resource designed to explicitly address students’ beliefs and attitudes towards mathematics by following five characters as they progress through the highs and low of studying a preparatory mathematics course. the resource was built within two theoretical frameworks, one related to effective numeracy teaching (marr and helme 1991) and the other related to effective educational technology development (laurillard 2002). further, it uses a number of multimedia alternatives (video, audio, animations, diarying, interactive examples and self assessment) to encourage students to feel part of a group, to reflect on their feelings and beliefs about mathematics, to expose students to authentic problem solving and generally build confidence through practice and self-assessment. evaluation of the resource indicated that it encouraged students to value their own mathematical ability and helped to build confidence, while developing mathematical problem solving skills. the evaluation clearly demonstrated that it is possible to address the affective domain through multimedia initiatives and that this can complement the current focus on computer mediated communication as the primary method of addressing affective goals within the online environment. introduction to be successful at university studies, students need to be academically numerate. this involves not only skills in manipulating and interpreting quantitative components of tertiary curricula, but having the confidence to engage with these components. in australia, universities are being required to cater for a growing diversity of students who are often not prepared for the academic numeracy rigours of their discipline. such students are often anxious about studying mathematics at any level, whether m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s it is in a traditional mathematics based course (for example, engineering or science) or a non-mathematical course (for example, nursing or business). in order to assist this diverse population, universities have been searching for alternative methods to support students prior to and after entering undergraduate studies. it is clear that in the search for alternative methods, the importance of the relationship between the affective and cognitive aspects of student learning cannot be ignored. this relationship is one of the lynchpins of constructivist learning theory, and instructional programs in mathematics, especially those designed for adult students returning to study mathematics, must develop both aspects simultaneously to be effective. in support of this, poststructuralists believe that the learning of mathematics is deeply bound in socially organised activities and systems of meaning (agre 1997), and that students need to communicate, argue and reflect in a social environment. bandura’s (1997) social cognitive theory maintains it is students’ beliefs about the value of a learning activity, their expectation of success and their enjoyment of it that will motivate them to undertake it (pintrich and de groot 1990). such components of the affective domain have been discussed widely in the literature for many years (eg tobias 1993, higbee and thomas 1999), especially in the adult education literature where historically, high levels of mathematics anxiety (for example) have been recorded in adult students returning to university study (benn and burton 1993, benn 1997, o'donoghue 2000, taylor and mohr 2001). the relationship between cognition, as measured by performance, and mathematics anxiety and other measures of the affective domain (mathematics self concept, mathematics self efficacy, and joy and beliefs about mathematics), have also been widely reported (pajares 1996, higbee and thomas 1999, hsiu-zu, sentark, lam, zimmer, hong, okamoto, nakazawa and wang 2002, cates and rhymer 2003, ma and xu 2004, stevens, olivarez, lan and tallentrunnels 2004). although these relationships have not been proven to be strong, many researchers are still concerned about the nature of the relationship. for example, evans (1999) believes that affect has a strong influence on the ability of students to transfer mathematical skills from one context to another, and argues that this has been largely ignored in accounts of mathematical thinking. researchers working with adult students report observing high levels of mathematics anxiety (mackenzie 2002, perry 2004) and express concerns that when this is associated with poor preparedness, poor mathematical proficiency can develop and be a barrier to further education experiences (benn and burton 1993, benn 1997, o’donoghue 2000). m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s t a y l o r a n d g a l l i g a n 25 in the university sector, the mathematical preparedness of students has been a concern for many years, not only in mathematics based programs (learning and teaching support network 2005, coutis, cuthbert and macgillvray 2002) but also in non-mathematical ones, such as nursing (pozehl 1996). moreover, many commencing students are also reported to have high levels of mathematics anxiety (mackenzie 2002, perry 2004). this research has been reinforced over the years by the authors’ work in the tertiary context for bridging and undergraduate students. for example, a series of studies, involving over 600 students enrolled in a tertiary preparation program, has been undertaken using both surveys and interviews to investigate the role of affective factors on success (taylor 1995, taylor and mohr 2001, carmichael and taylor 2005, carmichael, dunn and taylor 2006). results indicate that enjoyment, confidence and self-efficacy are generally lower in adult students than those seen in recent school leavers (taylor and mohr 2001), and are often accompanied by poor mathematical proficiency skills (taylor 1995, carmichael, dunn and taylor 2006). particular groups of undergraduate students can also show poor attitudes and mathematical skills. for example, some nursing students are not only anxious about mathematics, but their basic mathematics skills are often below desired entry levels (galligan 1999, galligan and taylor 2005). marr and helme (1991) provide curriculum solutions to this unpreparedness in their work with teachers of basic numeracy in which they present a pedagogical framework that incorporates strategies for effective face-to-face teaching to address mathematics anxiety. these solutions include: • realisation that mathematics anxiety exists and exhibits itself in different ways with different people • identification with others in the same situation • demonstration that they have mathematical skills already • exemplars and activities on how to solve mathematical problems • strategies to solve non-routine problems using problem solving techniques • exemplars and activities involving group discussions • examples and activities involving mathematics that occurs in everyday life to help understand concepts underlying procedural knowledge students often possess • examples and activities that indicate that there is more than one way to solve a problem • ways in which they can assess their own progress • realistic stories of success. m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in 2001, at the university of southern queensland, taylor and mohr reported on how this framework could be extended into the traditional (print based) distance education of students who exhibited anxiety and other poor attitudes to mathematics. this was later extended to video (taylor and galligan 2002) and online multimedia packages designed to support undergraduate students (taylor 2002). as outlined in the following sections, as new technologies became available and accessible, an integration of these approaches using multimedia was the next step in the development of a mathematics programs for adult students, to improve their access and engagement while studying at a distance or in isolation. laurillard’s ‘conversational framework’ (2002) for the effective use of technology was chosen to develop the program further. this framework matches well with marr and helme’s (1991) ‘effective pedagogy’ in that it espouses that ‘effective technology based pedagogy’ must include discursive, adaptive, interactive and reflective components. that is, for each of these components, the learner must not only have access to the major conceptions being explained or advanced, but must also be able to act on these explanations, to obtain feedback on their own conceptions, and be able to adapt as a result of reflection. this process can occur in any teachinglearning situation but in the case of educational technology a dialogue between a teacher and the student is developed through a multimedia medium. this paper reports on the design, implementation and evaluation of an interactive multimedia initiative that aimed to address explicitly the components of the affective domain in conjunction with cognitive achievement. the initiative, referred to as ‘the system’ below, is grounded in research on mathematics anxiety and framed within the pedagogies of marr and helme (1991) and laurillard (2002). the students students were located at the university of southern queensland (usq), a large multi-mode regional university (26000 students in 2005; 70% mature aged) in eastern australia. students targeted for this development were found in two places: • in bridging programs, such as the usq tertiary preparation program (tpp), where up to 400 adult students are routinely enrolled each semester in a preparatory mathematics course offered only at a distance; and • as participants in academic learning support programs, such as usq’s learning centre, which handles approximately 1000 mathematics inquiries per year from on-campus and distance education undergraduate students. m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s t a y l o r a n d g a l l i g a n 27 architecture of the system to create a collaborative, interactive and reflective environment as envisioned by laurillard’s conversational framework, the system focused on the experiences and stories of five characters (table 1) who were enrolled in an introductory mathematics course. the characters were from five different backgrounds and were based on composites of real characters the authors have met in their teaching experiences. the system developed from a traditional 20 minute video (vhs) described in taylor and galligan (2002), to a cd rom with the capacity to move to online delivery. mary-anne is a single mother, aged 35, who has secretarial training and experience. she has enrolled parttime at university to prove that she can still do it. david is a mature-aged external student, aged 35. he is a farm mechanic by trade but now wants to be a teacher. lenny is an aboriginal artist, aged 38, who has returned to study business externally. cindy is 25 and from asia. she needs to study statistics in order to qualify as a psychologist. susan has just left school to study nursing. she is 18 and is studying full-time table 1: descriptions of the five characters used to direct the initiative. the initiative is designed to address all of the principles of teaching and strategies to overcome mathematics anxiety detailed previously. the multimedia initiative uses a story telling approach to follow the characters through the highs and lows of studying as they use their own experiences to overcome their fears of mathematics and prepare themselves for success in tertiary studies such as nursing, teaching, psychology and business. each character is brought to life through images, text based life histories, video and audio clips of their participation in mathematics activities, and personal written reflections. each is further identified with a particular mathematics topic. for example, lenny is always associated with the fractions topics. in m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s conjunction with the story telling approach, students using the cd-rom will be able to: • see video clips of the characters solving mathematics problems in context • see video clips of the characters involved in group problem solving sessions • view and hear more formal instructional sessions which include animations and voice overs • participate in interactive examples • test themselves using self test • create and print a diary of personal notes and comments. figure 1 details the storyboard structure for the initiative. five mathematical topics were covered including whole numbers, calculations, negative numbers, fractions, and order of calculations. in addition to sections on mathematical examples (with interactive tools and animations) and a diary (with note taking and a reflective journal), the cd-rom uses a number of different techniques, outlined below, to engage the students and to address the objectives of the initiative. video story and group discussion – video and text the video story aims to put mathematics in a relevant context by getting the characters to discuss mathematics in a real life situation. for example, under the numbers topic, a video of two people comparing costs of bricks is used to introduce the topic of large numbers. it is presented on video and explained mathematically as screen text and symbols. the group discussion aims to represent a group problem solving session in a study group setting, either in a classroom or in a private home, and shows the characters battling with a particular problem by bouncing ideas off each other, taking risks and building on individual strengths to the benefit of the group. it also aims to show the advantages of group work and how alternative solutions are possible and correct. in the group discussion activity, actors were instructed to sometimes talk directly to the camera in an attempt to involve the viewer. both of these components involve a short video clip, linked to a written version of the spoken script (see table 2). beneath each clip is a formal written explanation of the mathematics involved. m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s t a y l o r a n d g a l l i g a n 29 welcome hello what the package is all about how to use the package story begins topics diary story ends introduction to the story five characters described text and images numbers calculations negative numbers order of calculation fractions (in two parts) video story group discussion learn more about... glossary, character's diary reflections examples self test figure 1: general story board m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s mary-anne: (looking at camera) oh hi! good to see you. i was just saying that i’ve been having a look through the course outline for one of the subjects i want to do next semester. you need a degree just to read through all this and find everything. but look at this........it says there are two sections to every assignment. one part is worth 35 marks and the other is worth 15 marks. lenny: what, for all the assignments! can’t be many assignments then. mary-anne: it says there are four, but that’s too many marks don’t you think? i thought it should add up to 100 david: i guess they can make it add up to how ever many marks they like....if you can do maths. what did it add up to? mary-anne: i haven’t really worked it out. well ......it’s four sections with 35 marks and four sections with 15 marks. hmmm what does that make? (susan writes in book) susan: i wrote it down as you were saying it. i’ve got four with 35 and four with 15. lenny: that’s easy, just write them all out and add them up. 35 + 35 + 35 + 35 + 15 + 15 + 15 + 15 let’s see (using calculator) that’s 200 marks. mary-anne: come on...there’s got to be an easier way than that. david: let’s go back to what you wrote out susan. i’ll do some maths translation here! hey, does this mean i speak a second language? (see him writing this down on paper) 4 with 35 well that’s 4 times 35 and 4 with 15 is 4 times 15 you’d have to do the multiplications and then add the answers together. susan: yeah, i remember a rule like that. mary-anne: let’s leave that to another time eh? all this multiplying and adding, i’m not going to worry about the marks, just think of it as four assignments, that’s not many! lenny: oh ok, but let’s do some more of these distributive law things, i think i’ve got the hang of these..............there’s five of us here let’s get cracking! (they all start to shuffle their books about)………… table 2 extract from script from order of operations ‘group discussion’ m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s t a y l o r a n d g a l l i g a n 31 learn more about … – animations and audio this section was designed to be expository in nature and leads students through an explanation of a particular topic. it focuses primarily on spoken explanations accompanied by images and animations (figure 2). the students, who can progress at any time using a next screen button, control the pace of instruction. at relevant points along the sequence, students are given the option to link to alternative parts of the package such as glossary, character reflections, personal diary, video stories, group discussions, examples and self test. ‘examples’ is designed to be interactive and give students practice with completing calculations and solving more complex problems associated with each topic. students are first encouraged to make an initial attempt, before prompts or solutions are given. musical sounds indicate the correctness or otherwise of the attempt. animations, text and a number of different tools are used in this component and include matching numbers, placing numbers on a scale and so on. in more complex word problems, students are given prompts to help them move through standard problem solving steps. at the end of the section students are able to link directly with self test if they believe they are ready. figure 2 screen grab of ‘learn more about’ … negative numbers m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s self test – interactive self assessment this section is a computer-managed test (called self test) that is characterised by its open structure (not based on multiple choice questions), its ability for students to submit a variety of different solutions to a mathematics question and to offer part marks for a submission. on the completion of self test students are provided with a plan for future study linked with learning modules, all available online within this program. self test is included at the end of each topic to allow students to assess their progress. on completion of self test students are given a list of mathematics subtopics that they have to master. the design and structure of self test has been described in detail elsewhere (taylor 1998). the diary the diary is designed to encourage students to reflect on their feelings and beliefs about their mathematics achievement and to assist them to develop a set of notes associated with the course. the diary is partitioned into five mathematics topics each with a ‘notes and reflection’ section. students can choose to make typed entries into any category or to insert links to other places within the package. the types of things that students might write in their reflections are modelled by the characters, informally, throughout the video stories and discussion groups, and formally, in ‘learn more about…’. students are also given prompts when it might be worthwhile to make such a reflection throughout the ‘learn more about…’ sections. printable copies of the diary are also possible. evaluation the evaluation of the package took place in two stages. in the pilot phase, the primary aim was to determine the technical usability of the package, while in the final phase the primary aim was to determine the educational effectiveness, after technical difficulties had been overcome. the methodologies used in the evaluations were varied to suit the situation of the students involved. fifty five different students in total, participated in both phases of the evaluation, which used one of three data collection methods: • focus group interviews of groups of students located within travelling distance of the university and following methodologies described in lederman (1990). these interviews aimed to probe deeply into students’ beliefs, feelings, thoughts and behaviour when using the software. in this research, the focus groups consisted of two groups (one of two participants and one of eleven participants) led by an experienced facilitator. student anonymity was maintained throughout. disccussions were taped and transcribed. using m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s t a y l o r a n d g a l l i g a n 33 grounded theory, the transcripts were analysed and key themes identified. • a questionnaire was mailed to remote students participating in the pilot (32 students) and final evaluations (10 students). the questions aimed to gather quantitative data on the usage patterns of the participants and their general comments and beliefs about the technical and educational effectiveness of the package. the questionnaire asked students to mark on a storyboard of the program which components they had visited, and to indicate where technical difficulties had occurred. students were then asked to comment specifically on whether the package helped with their mathematics learning and whether their feelings about mathematics had changed since using the package. • telephone interviews were conducted with 20 distant students after questionnaires had been received. during the interviews, after an initial discussion of their feelings and beliefs about mathematics, the students were asked specifically, about their use of the package. then they were prompted to discuss the package by responding to the following questions: • what parts of the package did you find useful and why? • what parts were least useful? • have your feelings about mathematics changed since doing the package? interviews were transcribed and analysed using the same methodology as the focus group interviews. pilot evaluation this stage of the evaluation used all three techniques described above. the first evaluation was conducted in a face-to-face setting, in a computer laboratory, using focus group discussion techniques, and the second, in a distance setting, was conducted through questionnaire and telephone interview. all participants were current tpp mathematics students. the face-to-face session attracted only two students while the distance evaluation involved 32 students who were sent a cd-rom, a questionnaire, and later interviewed by telephone. as indicated above, the questionnaire asked students to mark on a storyboard of the program which components they had visited and also to indicate where technical difficulties had occurred. students were then asked to comment specifically on whether the package helped with their mathematics learning and whether their m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s feelings about mathematics had changed since using the package. in both evaluations the team found unexpected difficulties associated with the participants’ lack of computer experience. the students who had technical difficulties were interviewed by phone to ascertain the nature of the difficulties, which were then logged for improvement. the majority of these difficulties were associated with unfamiliarity with program installation and browser use. package speed also proved to be too slow during the viewing of animations and video clips. only ten distant students were able to load the package and evaluate the learning materials. of these ten students, seven recorded that they believed the package had assisted them with their mathematics learning, while nine believed that their feelings about mathematics had changed after using the package. typically they made the following comments: the video story and group discussion was interesting .. they were ordinary people using ordinary examples the clear and easy to understand ways the story was written. the examples and the explanation of what was going wrong. the videos and diagrams made the subject much more interesting – sometimes when i am just reading (at home) it’s so boring it puts me to sleep. i am now more positive about mathematics. i think it will change anyone’s idea of learning maths. the two students who tested the package in the computer lab and were interviewed had views similar to the distance education students. this stage of the evaluation showed that the instructional design of the package was well received and easy to follow, but that the installation process had to be further refined to account for the low level of computer expertise of many of the target group. this was accomplished over the next year. final evaluation this evaluation involved two groups of tpp students. one group of eleven students was brought together as a focus group in a university computing laboratory, in which the package had been installed on all computers. after an initial discussion of their feelings and beliefs about mathematics, the students were asked to navigate their way through the package and complete some activities lasting about one hour. the students m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s t a y l o r a n d g a l l i g a n 35 were then interviewed as a group, using a series of questions as prompts. the transcript of the interview was analysed for key themes and comments. the results of this analysis indicated that of the eleven students who participated in the study, ten declared that initially they feared, were daunted, confused or even terrified by the prospect of doing mathematics, but they were very positive about using the computer to study mathematics. all had some prior computing experience. overall, after using the package all eleven students were very positive about the functionality and usability of the package and were keen to spend more time working through it. they found it fun to do, despite their feelings about mathematics in the beginning, and they were particularly responsive to the humour embedded within some sections. the results were as follows. • what parts of the package did you find useful and why? eleven responses related to the use of examples and self test and the enjoyment related with the package. a typical comments was: … you had a little hands on but you didn’t feel like you were diving right in, just dipping your big toe in. and i went into the self test after i did that. i felt confident. so i thought that was really good, it boosts you up enough to try. • what parts were least useful? there were two responses related to reading the instructions and use of pencil and paper to assist with examples and self test. a typical comment was: it was quite difficult doing <the examples> in my mind, when i was used to doing it on paper. and i couldn’t do it on the screen, but it was good when it came up, like when i made a mistake, it came up with the working out. that was good. • have your feelings about mathematics changed since doing the package? eleven responses indicated that their feelings had changed in the positive direction. a typical comments was: it was just very relaxing, you didn’t get tense or up-tight through any part of it. you felt part of what you were doing, rather than just facing a cold hard book. you were actually involved in the process. the second group of ten students was mailed the cd-rom together with a questionnaire and a consent form requesting them to participate in a follow-up phone interview. when interviewed, the students were encouraged to discuss technical difficulties, attitudes towards mathematics, overview of the package and its relationship to their feelings about m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s mathematics, parts of the package that they felt useful and those that were not useful. the transcripts of the interviews were analysed for key themes and comments. all students used the cd-rom in their own home with no access to direct technical support. no technical difficulties were encountered. the analysis of the phone interviews indicated that this group of students made more specific comments relating to their fear and anxiety of mathematics than the focus group students. all ten students, although experienced computer users, declared their feelings of dread, fear or hatred of mathematics prior to commencing the course. many also stated their concern about working alone on a mathematics course. i am as many students scared of maths. if this cd can help me in any way i would like to be part of the trial. i have never felt competent, but would be wonderful to feel confident. however, after participating in the package their feelings about studying mathematics were calmer, even relaxed. four students mentioned that they now felt that they were part of a group and one indicated that they were now encouraged to form their own study group. the characters had the same questions as me and made me feel like being part of the group i am now encouraged to make contact with other students and form my own study group. doing it with the people on the cd is very good for us external students i think. knowing there are people just like me is great. five students made comments indicating that they enjoyed the situations in which the mathematics was set, specifically signifying that they could relate to the characters and felt less isolated. although one student indicated that he thought the acting was poor. two students thought that the humour embedded in the storyline, especially the cartoons encouraged their enjoyment of the mathematics and was a relief from more serious book-work. four students reported that the video stories exposed them to real life mathematics they had never previously contemplated and that the group discussion allowed them to think about new ways of solving problems. didn’t realise how much maths in everyday life … i am starting to see maths everywhere. m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s t a y l o r a n d g a l l i g a n 37 it helped with the problem solving … gave us different ways to do them … i liked the way they did it … in relation to the mathematics presented, five students indicated that the topics of negative numbers and fractions were the most useful. typically these are the problem areas faced by most students. understanding fractions was most useful, especially with the visual in the ‘learn more about’ … section. good to see how they are useful in everyday life. in this evaluation, the diary was seen to be the least useful component. most students viewed it and appreciated seeing the characters’ diary entries, but did not want to take the time to make entries during the evaluation. current use of the cd-rom since the evaluation of the cd-rom, the package has been included in a number of courses as follows: • it was part of the supplementary materials available in tpp mathematics in 2002 and 2003 • in 2004 it was incorporated into a larger course based cd-rom and included in 330 distance education students’ study package for tpp mathematics • it is used within an orientation program for overseas students. between 2002 and 2004 it was used by students who enrolled with poor numeracy skills and low levels of mathematical self concept • it is used within the learning centre by undergraduate students whose numeracy skills are low and who lack confidence with their mathematical ability. discussion and conclusion interactive multimedia has assumed a growing place in instruction over the last decade, especially in the area of mathematics education. it has provided students with examples of mathematics in action through animations and video, control over when and what they do through interactive menus, and interactive experiences through simulations, interactive examples and self-assessment activities. however, in most of these situations students study alone, are not encouraged explicitly to value and build on their own experiences and are unaware of others in similar situations. in this educational package the underlying premise is that m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s knowledge is not an entity external to the student, but is constructed within the cognitive structure of every individual. in effect, it is fundamentally personal and dependent on the experiences in prior and current learning environments and social interactions (bostock 1998). this principle is implicit within the guidelines produced by marr and helme (1991) used in this development. with these in mind the course designers purposefully personalised the learning environment so that participants would feel they were a part of it rather than overlooking it. the cd-rom presents the instruction through the eyes of students rather than an instructor. in this way we have been able to address and achieve the more subtle effects of attitudinal change through the development of characters rather than the usual development of isolated algorithms for solutions to mathematical problems. we acknowledge limitations of the evaluative procedure. as many of our external students are geographically isolated both from our main campus and each other, it was only possible to have focus groups at the home campus. thus, students who undertook the evaluation were self, rather than randomly, selected. however, the results do indicate that students’ needs, as detailed in the introduction to this paper, were met, and after using the cd-rom many of the aims enunciated previously were achieved. many students’ feelings of anxiety were reduced. the realization that they were not the only ones to feel this way encouraged them to feel more confident with future mathematics studies, especially when they saw that students just like them (or perhaps worse) had succeeded. the range of problem solving strategies in real world situations (video story) and in the discussion groups opened students’ eyes to the wider world of mathematics that lay around them, and gave them the opportunity to reflect and then acknowledge that they had some useful mathematics skills already. the existence of the examples and self test allowed the students to attempt and to prove their mastery of specific numeracy topics. taken together, the achievement of these aims indicates that after using the cd-rom students had increased feelings of confidence in their mathematical ability and a positive outlook towards the rest of the course. the structure of the cdrom allowed students to reflect on their own experiences and to find that they did have something to offer. they now felt more confident to take charge of their own learning. the major aims of the development were met and the development fits well within the two frameworks (marr and helme 1991, laurillard 2002) put forward as goals of the design process. in the face-to-face classroom or consultation situation, the affective needs of students are met openly through discussion and the behaviours of both the teacher and fellow students. but students study in different contexts of isolation. some live in isolated locations, some work in different time zones and some feel isolated by their backgrounds and sentiments. more m a t h e m a t i c s f o r m a t h s a n x i o u s s t u d e n t s t a y l o r a n d g a l l i g a n 39 students than we would hope in higher education, view mathematics as their nemesis and have an aversion to it in all its forms. the educational design of this cd-rom, in which attitudes and beliefs towards mathematics are explicit components, clearly helps students adjust to the study of mathematics. with the increased diversity of students entering university and the increased demand for online education, strategies need to be developed where personalised interactions can be replicated in the virtual environment. the uses of interactive multimedia of this type are many and varied for mathematics education and 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r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 8 n o 2 2 0 1 0 58 back to the future?: timor-leste, cuba and the return of the mass literacy campaign bob boughton a b s t r a c t in december 2005, eleven cuban educational advisers arrived in timor-leste to begin work on a national literacy campaign. adapting the program known in latin america as yo, sí puedo (yes i can), the cubans trained over 400 local tutors to run classes in every part of the country, using a method they call ‘alphanumeric’, delivered via audiovisual technology. the campaign was launched in march 2007, and the first classes began in june of that year. by september 2010, three years later, over 70,000 adults, over one fifth of the total illiterate population, had successfully completed a thirteen week basic literacy course. drawing on original research undertaken in timor-leste between 2004 and 2009, followed by further investigations in may 2010 in havana, cuba, this paper describes the timor-leste campaign, locating it within the historical commitment of the country’s independence movement to adult literacy, and the broader context of cuba’s international literacy work. i n t r o d u c t i o n i enter the field of adult literacy with some trepidation, since i am not an adult literacy specialist. my background, before i became an academic, was in community development and adult education, working mainly with indigenous organisations. this work made me sensitive to issues of literacy and language, but unlike many who write for this journal, i do not have decades of experience as a literacy teacher or a deep knowledge of the debates. on the other hand, as someone with a strong interest in radical adult education theory and practice, my focus has been on understanding the role of adult education in social change, which has connected me to the tradition of popular education and the work of paulo freire. this interest, and my history of activism in the solidarity movement, led me to timor-leste in 2004, where a new independent government was grappling with the problems of how to build an education system to suit its needs. in september of that year, i was asked to give a keynote address at the country’s first national adult literacy conference on the links between literacy and other b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e 59 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s development goals (boughton and durnan 2004), drawing on research i have done around similar issues in aboriginal communities (boughton 2000, 2009). that conference passed a resolution calling on the government to mount a national literacy campaign, and in the six years that have passed since then, i have become closely involved with the campaign which eventuated, a campaign which is still underway, supported by a team of literacy educators from cuba who utilise a model best known by its spanish name, yo, sí puedo (in english, yes, i can). the aim of this paper is to share some of the story of the literacy campaign in timor-leste with the australian adult literacy community and its international colleagues. m e t h o d o l o g y data on which this paper is based were collected in a variety of ways. the author and a colleague conducted an initial inquiry into the role of adult education in timor-leste’s post conflict development in 2004, utilising a political economy framework developed by youngman (2000). this entailed a review of government and donor policy documents, interviews with key stakeholders and an initial mapping of programs, and is described in more detail in another publication (boughton and durnan 2007). on the basis of this initial work, a partnership agreement was signed between the author’s university and the government of timor-leste’s ministry of education and ministry of labour. this led to an australian research council linkage grant for a three year action-research project to work with the two ministries to collect data and work alongside timorese nationals to build their capacity to design a national adult education system appropriate to the country’s development goals (boughton and spence 2009). as part of this project, the minister of education invited the author to organise an evaluation of the national literacy campaign as it rolled out, both to provide a second source of advice to that being received from the cuban mission, and to assist the timorese leadership working on the campaign to develop their understanding of adult education principles and practices. the method chosen combined participant observation, working full-time alongside ministry officials and their cuban advisers in the first six months of 2007 as the campaign was getting underway, with subsequent research team field trips every three months for one to three weeks. these field trips were to review the data being collected by the cuban mission and the ministry, to observe classes in progress, and to interview the advisers, the timorese leadership, international donor staff, and selected campaign participants. the most recent visit was in september 2010. over the period 2007-2010, several hundred interviews, meetings and observation visits to classes were recorded in fieldwork notebooks, and documents and written reports were collected and catalogued, for cross validation. follow up interviews with a small sample of campaign students, teachers and local organisers were conducted by b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e b o u g h t o n 60 timorese research associates in two districts in 2009-2010. information on the earlier 1975-78 campaign was collected through a combination of interviews with surviving participants, secondary sources and archival material. finally, in may 2010, the author spent three weeks in havana, cuba, conducting interviews, meetings and seminars at the pedagogical institute for latin america and the caribbean (iplac) with cuban educationalists who had been involved with the development of the yo si puedo method or more generally with cuba’s international education work. the author was also given an unpublished collection of the written reflections of the first group of advisers (herrera 2008). additional material was collected from cuba’s museum of literacy, which records cuba’s own literacy campaign and its subsequent international literacy work. o r i g i n s next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the twentieth century’s most famous mass adult literacy campaign. in 1961, the new revolutionary government of fidel castro in cuba mobilised thousands of high school students, teachers and literate urban workers to go into the countryside to teach basic literacy to over 700,000 people (kozol 1978). the campaign inspired a generation of literacy activists and scholars, influencing among others, paulo freire, who not long after began his literacy work in brazil (perez cruz 2007). the cuban campaign also influenced campaigns in the african countries fighting for independence in the 1970s, including in angola, in mozambique, and in guinéa bissau, where freire himself was also involved. the nicaraguan literacy crusade of 1989 was the last of these campaigns to attract worldwide attention, but campaigns continued to be mounted throughout the 1990s in a variety of postcolonial contexts (arnove and graff 1987, abendroth 2009). paulo freire visited australia in 1974 (freire 2007), and many australian adult educators and literacy professionals became advocates of his emancipatory model of literacy work. but this was the period of the cold war, and the literacy campaign model which freire supported, in which the teaching of literacy was located inside mass movements for social and political change, had little chance of gaining traction, as we might say today, in australian adult education policy. freirean practitioners and scholars in this country had therefore to content themselves with smaller-scale efforts to embed emancipatory literacy learning theory inside existing literacy and adult basic education programs. unknown to australian literacy circles at the time, however, the idea of a literacy campaign had also found its way to the tiny island then known as portuguese timor, a few hundred kilometres north west of darwin. the australian film, balibo, released last year, tells in graphic detail the story of the illegal indonesian invasion of east timor in 1975. the film does not, however, tell the whole story. as the threat of invasion b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e 61 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s mounted in early 1975, the independence party fretilin sent teams of high school and university students from dili, the capital, into those western districts, to run literacy classes designed to conscientise the population to the aims of the independence movement. the students were trained to use a basic literacy manual, called timor is our country, developed the year before by timorese university students studying in portugal (which was then the colonial power in east timor). the manual incorporated some of the ideas of paulo freire, which the students had learned from their comrades in the liberation movements in portuguese africa, in guinéa bissau, mozambique and cape verde (basurewan 2004). the literacy campaign was reported briefly in the australian media in the months prior to the invasion, and mentioned in some studies of timor-leste’s independence struggle (for example, hill 2002), and a delegation of australians who visited timor in early 1975 saw the campaign in action. jill jolliffe, whose book balibo became the basis of the film (jolliffe 2009), was a member of that delegation, and she brought a copy of the manual back to australia1, to try to raise money through the australian union of students to support the campaign. but within a few months the invading indonesian army had closed the borders, and no further visits were possible until the late 1980s. most of the authors of the manual died at the hands of the indonesian troops, including rosa muki bonaparte, the founder of the timorese women’s organization, opmt (popular organisation of timorese women), vicente sa’he, hamis basurewan, antonio carvarino and the poet borges da costa. for over two years, however, the literacy classes continued in the areas in which fretilin’s armed wing, falantil, still maintained control, until indonesia’s superior firepower forced the majority to come down from the mountains to live in the indonesian controlled areas, while small guerilla bands continued the armed struggle. many of the young teachers and their literacy class participants then became the backbone of the clandestine underground resistance which supported the guerillas and continued to campaign for independence (interview, ildha da concecao, dili, october 2006; cabral and martin-jones 2008). inside this clandestine movement, the story of the literacy campaign lived on, inspiring a new generation of young student activists in the 1990s to turn once again to the works of paulo freire and the guinea bissau leader amilcar cabral (durnan 2005, da silva 2009). when indonesia was finally forced to agree to a united nations supervised ballot on independence in 1999, and the overwhelming majority of the population chose independence, some of these students formed literacy groups again, and went into the districts as volunteers to re-start the literacy campaign which had been 1 a copy survives in the archives of the national library of australia in canberra. b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e b o u g h t o n 62 aborted in 1978 (nicolai 2004). with support from some progressive international ngos, in particular oxfam, they continued to advocate for a national literacy campaign, one which they believed would help bring the vast majority of the population which had supported the independence struggle throughout the twenty four year military occupation, into the process of reconstruction and development as active agents. the need for such a campaign was also strongly supported by the new independent fretilin government, which took power in 2002, following a period of un rule. in december 2005, the fretilin prime minister mari alkatiri visited havana, to re-negotiate cuba’s program of medical assistance to his country (anderson 2010). in discussions with the cuban president fidel castro, he learned of cuba’s adult literacy work in latin america, and was offered a team of cuban literacy advisers to help the fretilin government mount a national literacy campaign (interview, mari alkatiri, dili, january 2010). t h e c u b a n l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n m o d e l the initial team of advisers which arrived a few weeks later consisted of eleven experienced educators, many with previous international experience. they had all been trained at the institute of pedagogy for latin america and the caribbean (iplac), a university established by the cuban government in 1990 to train teachers from countries in the region and its own extensive but little-known international education missions (hickling-hudson 2004). in the late 1990s, iplac began to develop a new method for providing mass literacy programs in countries of the south, initially via radio, and then later through audiovisual programs delivered via television or dvd. initially trialled in haïti, the method was then deployed to an increasing number of countries in the region, including venezuela, bolivia, ecuador, mexico, and nicaragua (interview, jaime canfux, havana, may 2010). while the technology was new, it also built on cuba’s own experience, not just in the campaign of 1961, but in the other countries in which campaigns had been mounted with cuban assistance in the 1970s and 1980s (boughton 2008). by december 2005, when alkatiri visited cuba, the iplac program had been adopted in fifteen countries: argentina, bolivia, dominican republic, ecuador, el salvador, guinéa bissau, haïti, honduras, mexico, mozambique, new zealand, nicaragua, paraguay, peru, and venezuela (lind et al 2006). the number of countries employing the method has now almost doubled, to twenty-eight (torres 2009). the cuban model, according to its proponents,2 has a number of distinct elements or features which can be separated analytically, but which are interdependent. the model grows out of cuba’s distinctive view of adult 2 this account is based on interviews and seminars at iplac in may 2010, and discussions in timor-leste with the cuban adviser team. b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e 63 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s literacy and the central place which it plays in building an education system geared to its model of development. cuban pedagogical theory shares with freire’s writings a deep egalitarian humanism, which the cubans trace back to the writings of josé martí, a leader of the anti-colonial independence movement which arose in cuba when it was still a spanish colony in the late nineteenth century. like freire, martí believed that education was a liberating force, because it was only with the opportunities provided by education that people could realise their full human potential. unlike, however, the more individualist liberal humanism of western democratic theory, martí’s humanism was social, and included the concept of ‘social solidarity’, whereby all humanity was seen to have a common fate. the duty of solidarity is inclusive therefore, not just of all the people in the nation, but in other countries of the world. martí is credited with initiating cuba’s first mass literacy campaign during the independence struggle in the 1890s. his writings were taken up by both castro and che guevara to argue for the centrality of education in the modern cuban revolution (holst 2009), and continue to exert a strong influence on cuban pedagogy. another important feature, which grows out of this philosophical position, is the role of political will. for a literacy campaign to succeed, it must have the support of all levels of society, and especially the state, though they have mounted successful campaigns, for example in nicaragua, in alliance only with civil society organisations. to ensure this political will is present as an active force in the campaign, a series of commissions are established, including a national commission representing key national political leader and national organisations, with sub-commissions at provincial or district level. in timor-leste, the fretilin government created a national commission led by the minister of education, but including other ministers, representatives of the churches, and civil society organisations. in venezuela, the president headed the national commission. the role of the national commission and the sub-commissions is to generate the support in the population as a whole for the mission of the literacy campaign, which is expressed as the ‘eradication’ of illiteracy throughout the district, the province and the whole country. in timor-leste, this work is referred to as the socialisation phase of the campaign. as the campaign progresses, villages, towns and districts are progressively declared ‘free of illiteracy’, and graduations and ceremonies are organised by the commissions to celebrate this achievement. however, what this means in practice is that people who previously identified as non-literate have completed a very basic introductory course, not that they have acquired literacy in a functional sense. these classes, described in more detail below, form the second phase of the campaign. this initial course is intended to provide a pathway into the third phase of the campaign, which is the establishment of post-literacy activities and courses. these b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e b o u g h t o n 64 include more intensive literacy classes, but also other literacy-based activities such as agricultural extension programs, health promotion and human rights education. the cubans argue that these post-literacy activities should eventually form part of a fully-articulated non-formal adult education system, which can only be developed over a much longer period. the mass literacy campaign thus forms part of a longer process, as it did in cuba, culminating in the development of an inclusive mass system of education, designed to bring those sections of the population which have in the past benefitted least from formal education into the process of development. importantly, for the cubans, authentic development, by which they mean social and cultural development as well as economic development, can only occur on the basis of mass education, because only people who are educated can solve the problems faced by countries which are attempting to break free from colonial and neo-colonial dependency to chart an independent course. for cuba, having a well-educated population means that the people can solve their own problems, participating actively in the development decisions of their village, their workplace, their neighbourhood and district, and the country as a whole. education, in other words, is a necessary condition for democratic participation (quiddington 2009, interview nydia gonzales, havana, may 2010). the third distinguishing feature of the cuban campaign model is the use of a modified distance education model in the initial classes. the introductory course is a set of sixty-five one-hour lessons on dvd/videotape, which students watch under the supervision of locally-recruited village-based ‘monitors’ over ten to fifteen weeks. the timor-leste government bought each suco (local administrative unit) a tv monitor and player, and every location without electricity was provided with a diesel generator and fuel, so that no village would be excluded from the campaign. each lesson shows on screen a class of adult students (played by actors) being taught literacy by an experienced teacher. under supervision, the local monitors are able to help their students follow the video teacher's instructions, and, using printed manuals and workbooks, complete oral and written exercises being modelled for them on the screen. the classes are based on what the cubans describe as an ‘analytic-synthetic’ pedagogy, in which words and phrases are broken down into component sounds and letters and then re-assembled. to facilitate the learning of the alphabet and the construction of words, each letter is associated with a number. this technique, which is called ‘alpha-numeric’, is based on an assumption that most non-literate or low literate people have some familiarity with numbers through the operation of markets and local exchange (interview, jaime canfux, iplac, havana may 2010). the method combines this distance education technology with a national system of coordination and quality control, allowing the use of relatively untrained local ‘monitors’, backed up by highly-skilled technical advisers. importantly, the b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e 65 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s method is adapted and modified to suit the local conditions in the country where it is running. the fourth distinguishing feature of the model is the way the advisers carry out their work. in timor-leste, there are now thirty-five cuban educators. the coordinator and one other adviser work in the capital, but the rest all live and work in the towns and villages. there they exist on a monthly allowance which is one tenth the norm for international advisers, renting rooms in local houses, shopping locally, and travelling on local transport, either microlets or on the back of the motorbikes allotted to the timorese district and sub-district campaign coordinators. living and working as closely as possible to the local monitors and students, they win enormous respect, and it also allows them to tailor their advice and supervision of the classes and monitors to the local circumstances. they also exercise close supervision and control, with every class being visited regularly, to monitor attendance and progress; and they run regular training sessions for the village based monitors to help with lesson preparation and to resolve problems being encountered. an interesting synergy has also developed between the literacy campaign and the cuban medical aid program. in a significant number of timor-leste’s 442 local administrative units, called sucos, cuban doctors and their timorese trainees are visiting the literacy classes to undertake health checks and carry out basic health promotion work. these visits are recorded as part of the central monitoring of the campaign, which takes the form of fortnightly statistical reports on the campaign’s progress to the minister of education. l o s h a u b e l e ! : y o , s í p u e d o ! g o e s l o c a l although the cuban model utilises the same basic approach in each of the countries in which it has been deployed, there is also significant customisation to local conditions, including local languages. the language ecology of timor-leste is highly complex, and the subject of much national and international attention and debate (hajek 2000). the constitution recognises two official languages, portuguese and tetum3, and two further ‘working languages’, indonesian and english. when they first arrived, the cubans based their choice of portuguese on the practical reality that they already had materials developed in this language for brazil, and until the program was underway, they had no guarantee that it would actually succeed in gaining the official and community support required for a successful national campaign. given the high cost of producing a program in another 3 tetum refers to dili tetum, a lingua franca based on one of the sixteen local indigenous languages; it incorporates a significant number of portuguese borrowings. b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e b o u g h t o n 66 language, and the lack of facilities and educators in timor-leste to assist with this work, the decision made good sense. as the pilot phase progressed during 2006, the cuban advisers became more aware of the challenges of teaching in portuguese. not only was it not the people’s first language, but also, during the period of indonesian occupation, portuguese was brutally repressed, because it was the language of the resistance. this had left insufficient people in the local villages and towns able to speak and write it with enough proficiency to work as monitors. it should be added, however, that a similar problem existed in relation to tetum in districts where it is not the first language and/ or is not widely spoken. the cuban advisers adopted a two-stage strategy to deal with this challenge. firstly, they produced local manuals which included tetum translations of most of the portuguese language words used in the dvds and exercise books, and they used the training sessions for monitors and coordinators to develop their portuguese language skills. however, they also set about producing a tetum version of yo, sí puedo!, once they had confirmed that the required political support existed across the political leadership in timor-leste to ensure the campaign would continue beyond the first year. the process to produce the materials in tetum was both complex and ingenious. firstly, rafael orteja, the deputy co-ordinator, utilised a cuban doctor with some film experience to shoot footage around dili and the districts which could be incorporated into the new program. he then recruited a multi-lingual timorese woman to travel to cuba, where she worked with the iplac staff to translate the basic script for the dvd and exercise books and manuals. finally, still in cuba, timorese medical students who were studying in havana were recruited to be the actors in the new tetum version of the classes on the dvds. the new set of master tapes, in tetum, was then flown back to timor-leste, where the ministry of education arranged for their duplication and distribution, along with the printing of new exercise books and manuals. the arrival of the tetum dvds and materials coincided with the start of the new adviser mission, and both events gave new impetus to the campaign which some months before had begun to flag. this loss of momentum had resulted from the change of government in july 2007, which was followed by a period of re-organisation and restructuring of the ministry of education, and a shift of priorities away from the national literacy campaign. the new minister, dr joao cancio freitas, closed down the national commission and campaign secretariat, returning overall leadership of the campaign to officials in his ministry. by april 2008, the number of sucos with active classes had shrunk from a high in december 2007 of over two hundred down to a mere thirty. at that stage it appeared that some of the forces which had opposed the literacy campaign would prevail, as the political leadership of the new government seemed to lack the commitment which fretilin had shown to this work (boughton 2008). b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e 67 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s however, despite the strength of the historic ties between fretilin and cuba, the cubans, following another principle of their model, maintained a strictly neutral stance in relation to timor-leste’s internal politics. in january 2009, the minister made his second visit to cuba, to attend the pedagogy congress in havana, where he publicly acknowledged the cuban team’s work. he has since agreed to pilot a more intensive phase of the campaign, opening classes in every village on the island of atauro, and in the district of oecusse, in an effort to accelerate the achievement of the campaign’s goals as part of his country’s commitment to the millennium development goals. by september 2010, classes were running in over 400 sucos, and the numbers of people who had successfully completed the basic introductory classes had reached 73,600, according to the cubans’ most recent report to the ministry. the country, it seems, is now well on the way to achieving its goal of eliminating illiteracy by 2015. this is a remarkable achievement. at the 2004 census, over 250,000 people aged fifteen and over had identified as illiterate, nearly 50 per cent of the country’s adult population. in the more remote regions, and especially among women, it was as high as 80 per cent. moreover, the campaign had survived a period of great political and social turbulence, coming on top of the twenty-four year military occupation of its giant neighbour, indonesia, which had caused the loss of up to 200,000 lives (boughton 2008). t h e p o l i t i c s o f l i t e r a c y the non-political character of the yo, sí puedo model and materials has caused some latin american educators to question its relationship to freirean popular education. concerns have also been raised in relation to the basic teaching method, which depends very much on the students and monitors closely following the tv classes and their manuals and exercise books, and is therefore less participatory and dialogic than most people would expect in a freirean campaign. three leading cuban educators, nydia gonzales, jaime canfux and felipe perez cruz4 discussed these criticisms in interviews in havana earlier this year. perez cruz pointed out that freire endorsed the use of manuals in angola, mozanbique, guinéa bissau and nicaragua, despite his criticism of them in his own writing. all three argued that in most countries where illiteracy is a major problem it is simply not possible to provide enough trained literacy teachers to utilise a more participatory and transformative methodology. yo, sí puedo, alone among 4 gonzales is the founder of the graciela butillos centre for educational research, and a leading member of the association of cuban pedagogues. canfux, a professor at iplac, is one of the architects of the yo si puedo method. both are veterans of the 1961 campaign. perez is an educational historian, and author of a book on cuba’s literacy work. b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e b o u g h t o n 68 the many models of literacy provision around the world, has nevertheless proven itself a low-cost method of reaching very large numbers of people in a fairly short period of time. they also argued that the highly-politicised campaigning which was possible in earlier periods is not appropriate in countries which do not have the same radical political traditions, and that unless a way can be found to bring non-literate people into the education system, then there is no hope of any progressive political change occurring. each of them also emphasised that this was a question of humanism, in the freirean sense, in that the key thing was to ensure that those who would otherwise be excluded were given an opportunity to enter the development process on their own terms. the cubans’ confidence that their actions in promoting mass literacy speak for themselves are echoed by other commentators. [the] extraordinary generosity and commitment of thousands of cuban internationalists providing medical and other services in conditions few others would accept is living testimony to the reality of the country’s socialist project (raby 2009:para 41). the internationalist ethic of the cuban education and medical missions, and the deep respect with which they treat the most disadvantaged among the local population, is a powerful lesson about the values promoted within their own society through its development model. our research team’s observations of the campaign in many different districts and villages in timorleste confirmed that the day-to-day relationships which have developed between the cuban advisers and the monitors and literacy class participants are having an emancipatory and empowering effect. one of the clearest indications of this is the way literacy class participants are very vocal when members of our evaluation team visit their classes, not only about issues in relation to the classes themselves, such as problems with equipment and resources, but also on other issues, such as the local rice distribution processes. nevertheless, it is of serious concern that the new minister of education in timor-leste has decided to dispense with the structure which the previous government established. while some subcommissions continue to operate at district and subdistrict levels, and the cuban advisers and cuban ambassador still have direct access to the minister, officials in the education ministry have neither the authority nor the organizational culture necessary to lead the social mobilisation demanded in the campaign. the national commission also helped to ensure timorese ownership and control of the campaign. most importantly, it was helping to build and maintain the political will which has been the hallmark of every successful literacy campaign for the last sixty years: b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e 69 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the success or failure of a literacy activity does not ultimately derive from economic or technical issues, but rather from the existence or not of a firm political will with the capacity to organize and mobilize the people around a literacy project (maria torres, ex-education minister, ecuador, quoted lind 1988:21). the lack of any literate culture in many of the smaller rural communities is another major impediment to the eradication of illiteracy, and underlines the need for a fully-developed follow-up post-literacy stage following completion of the cuban designed initial literacy classes. it is of serious concern that there are no post-literacy activities or classes being organised in any coordinated way for graduates, either by government or by civil society organizations, although some post-literacy classes are now being piloted in some districts. without a well-developed system of post-literacy activities, the international evidence demonstrates that most of the ‘neoliterates’ will ‘fall back’ into illiteracy within 612 months, putting all the gains made to date at risk (lind 2008). the most urgent priority therefore is to establish a subcommission to coordinate the planning and delivery of postliteracy activities to the ‘neo-literates’. this should involve ngos which are already working on literacy issues, as well as other ministries such as agriculture and health where there is a clear link between literacy and their own programs. the campaign to eradicate adult illiteracy in timor-leste is seen by the government and the cuban advisers as an essential element in building genuine national unity and an effective participatory democracy, one in which the whole population is actively engaged in driving the process of development. given the country’s low level of adult literacy, the formal education system on its own is unlikely to achieve this outcome. unless adult illiteracy is significantly reduced, and preferably eradicated, over the next decade, timor-leste will follow the pattern of many other countries of the south, developing into a more unequal society where the majority of the people are excluded from their rightful share in the benefits of the independence they fought so hard to achieve. c o n c l u s i o n in the 1970s and 1980s, it became clear that mass adult literacy campaigns led by governments, often with a revolutionary or decolonising agenda, were making significant inroads into the illiteracy rates in the countries where they were held (bhola 1984, arnove and graff 1987). for a number of reasons, chiefly ideological and political, the mass campaign approach fell into disrepute in the 1990s. the international community, under the influence of the world bank, shifted the focus of policy and b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e b o u g h t o n 70 funding onto basic school education, in the mistaken belief that this would eventually reduce population illiteracy levels as new generations with more schooling replaced those without it (lind 2008). the abandonment of the mass campaign approach was reinforced when new developments in literacy scholarship, referred to collectively as the ‘new literacy’ studies, helped to problematise a number of features of these campaigns, including their socalled ‘autonomous’ concept of literacy, their use of phonemic teaching strategies, and what the new literacies' leading exponent brian street has called their hegemonic centralising tendencies (street 2001). ironically, however, the main target of the new literacies scholarship was not in fact the mass campaign, but rather the human capital driven theories of neoliberalism, in which literacy was pronounced essential to economic development. in july 2009, aicha basurewan, who was a student volunteer in the first fretilin-led literacy campaign in 1975, reflected on those experiences in a panel discussion on popular education at the timor-leste studies conference in dili: any revolutionary process can succeed when it involves everyone. how can people participate in the revolutionary struggle against colonialism if they don’t read and write and don’t know how to analyse colonialists’ actions against them? ... it was not just a matter of teaching them to read and write but also to make them to change and stand up for themselves and to fight for our country’s independence ... young students (men and women) volunteered themselves and they really wanted to pass their knowledge to the others. they had received guidelines from comrades like sa’he, hata and mau lear. paulo freire’s method was used. the alfabetizador was not a teacher but he too was a student because he was also learning from his/her students. (translated from the tetum transcript) these comments are echoed in the testimonies of other timorese who survived this period, as they are also among cubans who participated in the 1961 campaign (abendroth 2009), and participants in nicaragua’s campaign in 1979 (arnove 1986). in every campaign, those who played a role as teachers or educators acknowledge how much they learned from doing this. certainly, in timor-leste, the survivors of that campaign became the leaders of the next generation of the independence movement. cuban pedagogical theory provides a powerful explanatory tool here. drawing on the strong influence of marxist theory in their intellectual training, cuban education theorists characterise the problem of mass illiteracy in terms of a historically-determined dialectical contradiction between those who are literate, because they have received an education, and those who are b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e 71 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s illiterate, because they have not. this contradiction, they argue, which arises from past patterns of inequality, plays a fundamental role in either the perpetuation of that inequality or in overcoming it. in order to build a more equal society, there has to be, not just a theory of liberation, but a liberatory practice, a practice which bridges that contradiction, allowing teachers and learners to work together on a mass scale to produce something different, a more equal society. how that is to be done can only be decided on the basis of the real existing conditions of the society concerned, and each society will need to approach the problem in the way which suits its conditions. by the same token, an ethic and a practice of internationalism allows different societies to learn from each other, as they too sit at different points in the world-wide contradiction between those who have received the benefit of schooling and the 800 million people who lack basic literacy. of course, we should be under no illusion that literacy is a panacea, and that it will produce a more just and equal society on its own. clearly, a literacy campaign such as the one occurring today in timor-leste must be accompanied by a raft of other progressive social policies. however, the impact of the campaign, not just on the newly-literate, but also on the teachers, organisers and community leaders who are part of the campaign, is an important part of the process of creating an environment in which such policies can emerge and gain mass support. further research is needed to establish the long-term impact, perhaps on the model of follow-up work done on the nicaraguan literacy campaign (lankshear et al 1995). however, what is beyond doubt is that the possibility of undertaking such research rests upon the material reality that there are now, as a result of the alliance between the governments of timor-leste and cuba, over 70,000 people who have newly acquired basic literacy, as first defined by unesco (lind 2008:42), that is, they can read and write a simple statement about their own life, in one of the country’s two official languages. a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s the author wishes to acknowledge the australian research council for its support of his work in timor-leste, and his many colleagues in australia, timor-leste and cuba who have helped him to develop the ideas expressed in this paper. r e f e r e n c e s abendroth, m (2009) rebel literacy: cuba's national literacy campaign and critical global citizenship, litwin books, duluth, mn. anderson, t (2010) cuban health cooperation in timor leste and the south west pacific in reality of aid management committee, southb a c k t o t h e f u t u r e b o u g h t o n 72 south cooperation: a challenge to the aid system?, ibon foundation, quezon city, pp 77-86. arnove, r (1986) education and revolution in nicaragua, praeger, new york, westport & london. arnove, r and graff, h (eds) (1987) national literacy campaigns. historical and 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perspectives, routledge, london. torres, r (2009) from literacy to lifelong learning: trends, issues and challenges in youth and adult education in latin america and the caribbean, regional synthesis report, unesco institute for lifelong learning, hamburg, retrieved 14 november 2010 from: http://www.unesco.org/fileadmin/multimedia/institutes/uil /confintea/pdf/grale/confinteavi_grale_lac_synthesis_en.pdf youngman, f (2000) the political economy of adult education and development, zed books, london & new york. microsoft word 0704lns151lekoko.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 1 2 0 0 6 61 intuitive mathematical knowledge as an essential aspect of contemporary adult learning: a case of women street vendors in the city of gaborone rebecca nthogo lekoko and kgomotso getrude garegae abstract the findings of a phenomenological interview study with women street vendors showed a strong link between participants’ perceptions of everyday use of mathematical literacy and the speculations that mathematical use arose spontaneously in response to a practical need. the concept of intuitive mathematics as used indicates that mathematical thinking is an indispensable element of everyday conversation. although the study finds that intuition and spontaneity are essential principles of lifelong learning, it concludes with recommendations for an empowerment curriculum that interweaves participants’ experiences and intuition with formal/academic mathematical literacy and psychosocial skills necessary for success in a highly competitive business world. introduction botswana is a sparsely populated country in the southern african region with a population of about 1.7 million, occupying a land with an area of 582,000 square kilometres (224,710 square miles). like a number of countries in this region, women represent the majority of the population (52%). statistically, batswana are said to be highly literate. by the year 2003, literacy rates of 77 percent for adult males and 82 percent for adult females were recorded (molefhe 2004). literacy in the context of adult basic education in botswana has been defined as the ability to read, write and handle simple numeric problems. in botswana, the department of non-formal education in the ministry of education is responsible for major activities relating to adult basic literacy. in this department, literacy is mainly viewed as ‘a set of language and communication skills, attitudes and knowledge involving an integration of listening, speaking, reading, writing, numeracy and critical thinking which people require and can effectively use to varying degrees’ (central statistics office 1997:3). as it may be seen, literacy is used as a broader term that encompasses issues of numeracy. numeracy embraces an i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e 62 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s adult’s ability to handle simple numeric problems including the ability to handle information and to express ideas and opinions. most importantly, in this paper, the conceptualisation of literacy focuses on the lived experiences of street vendors as poor women who have been forced to sell in the street by circumstances beyond their control (freire 1973). these women are disadvantaged in a number of respects. many of them are victims of a patriarchal botswana society. kincheloe (1999:269) purports that the original use of the term ‘patriarchy’ meant control by the father. this implies that some women are controlled and oppressed by their male counterparts. many men, for example, who abandon their families or obtain a divorce, refuse to offer assistance to the wife and children left behind, thus leaving women alone with the burden of fending for the children. at times, the women left behind are helpless in the sense that the men had been the bread winners. in addition, a number of girls still drop out of school due to pregnancy (bhusuman 1994, republic of botswana 2001). this increases the number of children born out of wedlock and hence the number of irresponsible fathers. these are some of the factors that push women to go to the street to sell, with the goal of fending for their families. most of the street vendors are either illiterate or semi-literate. the term semi-literate is used simply here to refer to people who did not successfully complete their basic education. in the botswana context, adult basic education starts from standard 1 (grade 1), that is, first year of elementary schooling, to form 3 (grade 10). it is a ten-year program. elementary schooling is seven years and junior secondary runs for three years. some have dropped out in the process of doing the ten-year basic education program. thus, these women use mathematics in context, guided mostly by their natural ability to handle numbers (johnston 2002:4). as a result, street vendors are considered literate to the extent that they can communicate well with their customers; they display attitudes that facilitate their buying and selling business; they can read and write to address the challenges of their businesses; and they can enumerate and use critical thinking well (central statistics office 1997:3). the idea of numeracy as presented here has been reflected in the botswana future vision, which states that by the year 2016, botswana would have citizens who are able to read, write and enumerate, as required by the local environmental challenges to adjust to the changing world (republic of botswanna 2004). women street vendors are citizens who cannot be left behind in our journey to an educated, informed and productive nation. literacy and numeracy are not only essential for these street vendors, but they are considered critical aspects of a growing and vibrant economy. i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e l e k o k o a n d g a r e g a e 63 background to the study in this era ‘no one can do entirely without cash’ (skjonsberg 1995: 225). using cash involves working with numbers. numbers are critical components of numeracy. calculations such as subtraction, addition, division and multiplication, are examples of numeracy practices. thus, the focus of this paper is on mathematical literacy, especially that of using numbers, as applied daily by women street vendors. as will be demonstrated, the women street vendors who participated in the study knew a great deal about their business, especially handling money. they added, counted and subtracted, and what they did was intuitive. johnston (2002) makes us aware that numerate behavior involves solving a problem in a real context. in the case of street vendors, real contexts mean selling and buying, that is, business transactions. mathematical skills are applied in many daily chores like cooking, dressmaking, ironing and shopping (lave 1988, manyika 2002, garegae 2004). in most of these cases, people need not go to school to attain formal mathematical knowledge; instead, they can use informal strategies for calculations and this is what most street vendors in botswana use. lave’s (1988) study, for example, showcases the use of informal calculation strategies mostly employed by women in their day-to-day buying activities. she concluded that the way these shoppers applied mathematics when calculating was different from the scholarly (formal or academic) ways of calculating. they only engage in meaningful calculations when there is a problem to solve. manyika’s (2002) study in botswana, similarly to lave’s (1988), discovered that housewives and street-vendors also apply what can be referred to as functional mathematics. that is, they can see meaning in numbers when applied to their own problems. overall, it is believed that people deal with numbers to respond to their specific real life needs or situations. in the african culture, for example, when africans reckon time, it is for a concrete and specific purpose, in connection with events, not just for the sake of mathematics (mbiti 1988). one example of this kind of mathematics use is with calendars in the traditional african situation. as mbiti (1988) purports, originally, numerical calendars did not exist in african traditional societies. instead of numerical calendars, there are what one would call phenomenon calendars, in which events or phenomena which constitute time are reckoned or considered in relation with one another and as they take place. for example, an expectant mother counts the lunar months of her pregnancy; a traveler counts the number of days it takes to walk from one part of the country to another. the day, the month, the year – are reckoned according to their specific events, for it is these that make them meaningful (mbiti 1988:17). i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e 64 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s it is against this background that one tends to agree with zaslavsky (1992) that there is no reason why one type of mathematics – formal – should be more valid than the other type – informal. there are people who can count and yet do not have academic literacy or numeracy education. women, for example, have been credited as the first mathematicians because they were able to keep records of their cycle of menstruation before being exposed to formal mathematics (kellerm 2005). zaslavsky (1992), for example, reported lunar markings found on prehistoric bone fragments showing how early women marked their menstruation cycles. these are examples of informal mathematics used in specific cultural contexts. furthermore, some people can tailor clothes to very precise measurements without having attained the necessary formal mathematical skills to do that. more examples can be given to show that mathematics is an indispensable part of everyday activities. failure to realise this natural use may result in failure to acknowledge the contextual and intuitive use of mathematics by women street vendors. the study informal mathematical use is part of day-to-day activities. at times one may apply it and not be aware of its application. for example, when walking or driving, people memorise routes and trajectories. all these involve the use of informal mathematics (manyika 2002). when, for example, we classify, order, select and memorise some things, we employ mathematics concepts. similarly, the type of mathematical operations considered in this study is informal mathematics. this entails generating, organising and using oral mathematical constructs to address an immediate challenge in the real life situations of buying and selling. learning that is intuitive leads to lifelong literacy. it is life-long because it is applied to real-life circumstances and as such it is not easily forgotten. learning continues throughout the times of the women street vendors’ business. for example, techniques such as counting, ordering, sorting, measuring, weighing and classifying are used by these women vendors on a daily basis. as these techniques are used regularly, they are refined and retained, to be used again and again in later life situations. the main goals of the study, therefore, were to find out how street vendors perform their calculations or deal with problems of calculations whenever they occur, and to explore the process of finding ad hoc solutions to calculation problems. i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e l e k o k o a n d g a r e g a e 65 the study site the study was carried out in gaborone, the capital city of botswana, a vibrant and colorful city which is primarily an administrative centre with government offices. it is the main centre for commercial, shopping, banking and telecommunication facilities. it also has a small manufacturing sector that produces metal and wood items, and beer. within the city centre, there is the national museum and art gallery. in addition, the city is the headquarters of all government offices and some private institutions. the city is expanding rapidly, with the number of unemployed people growing, as many people leave the rural areas and come to gaborone with the hope of gaining paid employment. when employment is not forthcoming, many people resort to other means of getting money, in most cases, selling on the streets. the urban vending scene: gaborone city street vendors can be described as ‘traders of any type of goods and services, which may include: fruits and vegetables, newspapers, cosmetics, jewelry, watches, bags and wallets, second-hand clothes’ (jimu 2004:19). the women street vendors in gaborone mainly concentrate on selling food stuff, including fruits and vegetables. street vending falls under the informal employment sector. as could be expected, street vending attracts consumers of low class, the low paid and non-working class. some of these people go to the street thinking they can get cheaper goods since they cannot afford to buy expensive things from supermarkets and convenience shops. wherever they are found, street vendors are strategically located where customers will easily spot them. in the case of gaborone, these people are mainly seen in big malls and shopping centers, and along main roads (such as in the street leading to the university of botswana) where they are sure they will be seen by a number of passersby. other places that attract street vending are residential places, especially the low, medium cost housing areas and squatter camps. also, bus/taxi ranks, petrol stations, motor vehicle garages, as well as school sites and industrial sites, are targets for the vendors. most vendors sell products ranging from food-stuffs to traditional herbs. as scott (1999) noted, this service is one of the mutually rewarding services to batswana women. because of the contributions women vendors make to the economy, as well as to their family lives, they consider themselves entrepreneurs, not petty vendors as they are sometimes referred to (malema 2004). some street vendors obtain proper licences to trade. others do not. thus, the existence of illegal vending makes it difficult for the city council to monitor the growth and quality of this industry. some vendors reside in gaborone while others come from the surrounding areas such as i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s molepolole, moshupa, mochudi and kanye. some of these villages are about 100km away from gaborone. some street vendors are foreigners. this group sells cheap textiles, musical products, vegetables and food (sithole 2004). the rate at which this sector grows has been a great concern for the city officials. established businesses, and some visitors too, have expressed concern over this growth and the laxity of its management (malema 2004). other businesses, for example those in the railway station, the city centre and the long distance bus terminal, as well as other shop owners, believe that these vendors are stealing their business, especially since some of these vendors are trading illegally. there is, therefore, the need for strong legal documents to facilitate and regulate the vending businesses. if not well regulated, illegal vending can hamper other businesses. while some street vendors welcome government/legal intervention others still resist. conflicts have thus arisen between city council officials and the street vendors. a recent case, in january 2005, occurred in the city of francistown where some street vendors found their cubicles removed and dumped in the trash pit. officials alleged that on several occasions they had asked the vendors to move out of that self-allocated plot, but they did not pay heed to the warning. this, as already said, was not the first incident in which street vendors clashed with the law. some disgruntlement of a different nature also occurred in the city of gaborone in 2002 when about 2000 demonstrators shut down their operations and participated ‘in the first ever big march in the history of the country by the informal sector’ (mmegi 2004). in their petition, which was read out to the then local government minister, the angry demonstrators accused the gaborone city council and the police of harassment and confiscation of their goods, hence denying them ‘a source of living’ (mmegi 2004). in the petition, they categorically stated that ‘the city council and the police are terrorising us from our operating centers, hence, we are constantly on the move; they are also confiscating our goods’ (mmegi 2004). included in the demonstration were other workers from the informal sector; street cooks, barbers, hairdressers, cobblers and itinerant fruit packers who braved the sweltering heat to join the march (mmegi 2004). it is not, however, known how the informal sector benefited from this 2002 march. what is known is that, to date, conflict between the city officials and street vendors continues. research design and methodology a qualitative research paradigm, phenomenology, was employed in this study. an important underlying principle of phenomenology is that ‘researchers need to explore evidence of the world not as it is thought to be, but as lived’ (morse and richards 2002:45). it was within the framework of this principle that the lived experiences of street vendors were sought. the i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e l e k o k o a n d g a r e g a e 67 goal was to solicit the active participation of women who are vending in the street of gaborone and to be certain that it was indeed their everyday life experiences that were being explored. we studied the daily selling and buying businesses of nine women street vendors in the city of gaborone. the use of phenomenological interviewing enabled us to go into the ‘business world’ of the women street vendors, to observe, to discuss with them and understand their use of mathematical calculations. the researchers believed that women street vendors held unique experiences about the concrete situations of their daily business of selling and buying. thus, the goal was to approach them and obtain from them their experiences of mathematics in context. some in-depth phenomenological interviewing was conducted. for the researchers, interviewing was very important. first, as inquisitive explorers, the interactive interviewing provided opportunities for them to ask a number of questions within the natural settings of these vendors – ie their business locations. they were able to get good and informed insights into the circumstances of the street vendors’ selling and buying business. it must be noted that an appreciation and understanding of the world of business for the women was important for us as phenomenologists because it provided opportunities to participate in the actual life-world and to share experiences with participants. an in-depth examination and probing of these women’s lived experiences started with a question: ‘what is it like to be a woman street vendor in the city of gaborone?’ researchers and participants became active communicative partners as these women shared their experiences and the challenges of their businesses. the interview was a ‘curious bilateral relationship’ (glesne and peshkin 1992:83) in which researchers became sensitive to the participants’ real experiences of selling and buying and the participants too responded to the questions posed and the probes that followed. selection and sampling in this study, purposive sampling was employed. maxwell (1996) defines purposive sampling as a “strategy in which particular settings, persons or events are selected deliberately” (69). based on this principle of purposefulness, the researchers selected gaborone, a site that is convenient in a number of respects. first, gaborone is place of both residence and work for the researchers, so it was convenient for them to visit the selected street vending site, especially at a time that did not interfere with their regular teaching responsibilities. purposive sampling was also suitable for this study because researchers needed to choose a few participants who were strikingly different in terms of their location of selling and the items being sold, as well as their target customers. these factors determined the nature of the experiences these women would have about their businesses. also, as this i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s study was self-sponsored, researchers chose one site in gaborone because they could afford (financially) to visit it as many times as they found necessary. this was not going to be possible should they have made decisions to explore more than one site. to select the participants, a purposive strategy was used. women street vendors had rich experiences which when explored could satisfy the purpose of carrying out this study, that of exploring street vendors’ use of intuitive mathematics. it was necessary that the research be blended with what was happening in the street vending scene, thus the interviews were conducted at these women’s day-to-day buying and selling locations. the women who participated ‘were centrally involved with the phenomenon, and have many life experiences to talk about’ (becker 1986:105). they were in the business for two or more years. to gain insight into the daily selling and buying businesses of these women both amongst themselves, and between them and customers, researchers visited businesses at a time when a significant number of customers might come. this allowed them to witness a number of transactions being made. procedures data collection phenomenological interviews were conducted with each participant. a semi-structured interview guide was used which enabled the researchers to pose similar questions to each of the respondents. the way the questions were framed, for example, “what challenges do you sometimes meet in your business?’ opened for probing when the researchers felt that the responses given needed to be elaborated. participants were free to talk about their experiences, especially given that the interviewing was conducted in a familiar place and using their day-to-day language of communication. participants used setswana, which is their first as well as the national language. using the language they were familiar with also gave them a democratic atmosphere in which to express their opinions and to communicate with their customers freely. researchers were, therefore, privileged to listen to these women as they described the dynamics of their businesses and as they encountered situations requiring them to use their mathematical knowledge. each participant was visited and interviewed three times. the first interview was actually the time for researchers to establish rapport with participants and subsequent visits were for the purpose of doing in-depth interviewing coupled with some observations. data analysis following the three levels of coding, namely, open, axial and selective (bogdan and biklen 1992, strauss and corbin 1998), a number of themes i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e l e k o k o a n d g a r e g a e 69 emerged around which the discussion in this paper is presented. the themes capture relevant information about the phenomenon of the study, that is, the use of intuitive mathematics by women street vendors in the city of gaborone. coding was also done using bogdan and biklen’s (1992) folder approach to data synthesis. in this approach, data with similar topics were cut into pieces and placed into one envelope. data in each folder were then re-read and arranged into themes and categories. findings the spirit of corporate-ness the findings shed light on how the african traditional ‘culture of corporate – to be human is to belong to the whole’ (mbiti 1988:2), has had an impact on the way women street vendors related to each other. in the african culture, people are socialised to believe that ‘to be human is to be part of a community.’ women vending close to each other regarded themselves as a community of sellers and being a community to them meant participating in each other’s activities and helping each other. as one of them indicated: i am a relative newcomer to this compared to these others. back when i was just thinking of selling, i kept on thinking about the oldies in the business and would start wondering how they would treat and look at me as a newcomer to their business. i feared that they might feel that i am taking their business away from them. i couldn’t start right away because every time i thought of starting, i would let my fears get the better of me. finally, i decided that if i get in, i get in. after joining, i realised that these women (pointing to other women vendors) are selfless helpers, patient and tolerant to a new comer. i am glad i found a community to belong to. yes, we work together and we are a community. the vendor further explained that this was her first opportunity to express openly her feelings of appreciation of the other vendors. what we see reflected in the above quotation is that an african person rarely detaches himself or herself from people around her or him, be it due to business or any other occupations in their lives, ‘for to do so is to be severed from his roots, his foundation, his context of security’ (mbiti 1988:2) and can amount to self-excommunication from people who can assist in times of need. generally, other vendors expressed similar sentiments of the need to be ‘sisters in business’. the women vendors interviewed were aware that the growth and sustenance of their business did not solely depend on the owner, but on everyone with an interest in helping it grow. this type of attitude is what we i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e 70 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s refer to as a ‘culture of corporateness.’ for example, when one of these women vendors was asked how she coped with her business, she expressed the fact that other women had been helpful. at times, after buying some new items, she was not sure how much to price them ‘i just see how much i bought them for and price according to the price of other vendors.’ but before making the final decisions, she asked them for advice. the whole environment of their selling gives a feeling of togetherness which also gives way to a feeling of security. any one of them felt it safe to leave her business for a short time with another one in the group, especially when there was some emergency to attend to. it can, therefore, be concluded that the interviewed vendors in the streets of gaborone do not completely eschew their cultural heritage. traditionally, batswana do not encourage anyone to do things solo, as reflected by proverbs such as kgetsi ya tsie e kgonwa ke go tswharaganelwa, (the more hands, the easier to carry a [heavy] bag of locusts – literally translated). thus, some of the basic underlying principles of the selling and buying for these women are cooperation, collaboration and sharing. principles of self-organisation participants in this study demonstrated an impressive level of selforganisation. self-organisation here implies the ability to team up when a challenge requiring attention by more than one person comes up. for them, organisation is something that has to come spontaneously. spontaneity here implies a ‘natural instinct’ to want to work with others. the importance of spontaneous self-organisation for women street vendors was demonstrated in a number of conversations such as: i usually go to someone who would not put me down; someone with a smiling face and someone who seems to be mature enough to understand that as human beings we can’t be jacks of all trades. but you know, some people forget themselves and think that they are complete. as implied in this quotation, there are some qualities that attract one vendor to partner with another vendor. it is important for these women to work with a vendor they accept. however, participants also expressed that working collaboratively is something that they do in their own cultures (at home, in schools, churches, and the community at large). to this effect, one participant stated that: we batswana women, we consider ourselves sisters. we therefore like to work in harmonious relationships. kana, we are born in interactive environments. we have siblings, friends and others that we may meet in the street. it is important for us to develop friendship so that in times of troubles and challenges we can sympathise and help each other. we meet new people i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e l e k o k o a n d g a r e g a e 71 all the time, in all these situations, we use our in-born capacity to relate and work together in a smooth manner. in further probing, it emerged that these women are motivated by certain qualities to work with each other. qualities such as friendliness, humility, open-mindedness and maturity were cited by the vendors. an interesting observation as we listened to these women was that they seemed to echo shotter’s sentiment that in ‘everyday life activities, we must interlace our actions in with those of others, their actions will determine our conduct just as much as anything within ourselves’ (shotter 1993b:174). reciprocal conversation one of the interesting situations of these women street vendors was that they spent most of the time talking to each other, especially during light days (that is, when consumers are few). when asked what they normally talk about, they delightedly explained how their talking together was not just passing time but mostly focused on their experiences as street vendors. during the time we did the interviews, there were some concerns from officials that vending should be strictly regulated, licensed and moved to a designated market. for that week and subsequently, these women were discussing this issue. they talked about the implications of what the officials were proposing. for example, they reacted to the suggestions that their sites be moved to a different location. thus, when these women engage in conversation, it is not empty talk. it is a conversation full of issues germane to their business world. these women also talked about monetary transactions. botswana uses pula (p) and thebe (t). one pula is an equivalent of 100 thebe. as an illustration, a conversation between one vendor and a customer is described below: a customer wanted to buy from her but she did not have change for a p50 bill. the customer wanted to buy two combs of maize at p2.50 each; two melons, one at p9.00 and the other at p8.00. she signaled (waving the p50 bill) to the other vendors indicating that she needed some help with change. after explaining to one vendor who volunteered to help her, she received the following notes and coins: a 20 pula note, two 10 pula notes, four 2 pula coins and four 50 thebe coins. upon receiving the changed money, she immediately placed a 20 pula note in the hand of the customer and explained that she was certain the customer’s change was more than the 20 pula note. she proceeded by arranging/separating two sets of p2.50 coins – the exact amount for the payment of two maize combs. as far as the payment of the two melons was concerned, she started working the change for the first melon costing p9.00. she took a 10 pula note and gave back the customer two 50 thebe coins (p1.00). the final transaction was for a i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e 72 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s melon costing p8.00. to work out the change for the customer, the vendor took another 10 pula note and placed it in her purse-basket and took as change one 2 pula coin. what remained in the plate were two 2 pula coins, and two 50 thebe coins. these were given back to the customer. the transaction was then completed. notably, this transaction involved only oral mathematics; nothing was written down. thus, conversation/oral communication constitutes an important aspect of the selling and buying business of the women street vendors. as they went through their calculations, the customer was being talked to so as to help the two of them (seller and buyer) to understand the transactions. they verbalised the calculation processes. for the women street vendors, oral mathematics formed an inseparable part of their day-today discussion; it was there in all situations. mathematical communication is part of our day-to-day activities a major theme that emerged from the study was that women street vendors engaged in mathematical conversation on daily basis. since they were dealing with problems of selling and buying, they found themselves manipulating quantitative information in their minds. the manipulation of figures was done through verbal exchange. this finding, too, concurred with shotter’s (1993a) conclusion that our daily lives are not rooted in written texts or in a contemplative reflection, but in oral encounters and reciprocal speech. in other words, we ‘live our daily lives within an ambience of conversation, discussion, argumentation, negotiations, criticism and justification’ (shotter, 1993b:29). the women vendors demonstrated this usefulness of the conversation. a quotation such as the one presented below reflects the value that women gave to their conversation: since some amongst us are more experienced in this area, we talk to them asking them if we are not really cheating ourselves. for instance, one day i told my neighbour that i have bought a box of 150 red apples at p72.95 and am intending to sell them at p1.50 each. she asked me why i want to sell them at p1.50 instead of p1.00? we started analyzing my pricing through verbal exchange. there was ample evidence from our conversations with the women vendors that indeed conversation is the pillar of their selling and buying businesses. when asked if their conversations at times interfered with their businesses, one of them responded: i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e l e k o k o a n d g a r e g a e 73 our discussions don’t stop us from attending to customers; our conversations sometimes take a long time before we can understand each other. but, since we realise the importance of discussion, it does not matter how long it takes one to be helped. and because each day has its own problems, we find ourselves discussing similar issues on daily basis. we even advise each other where to get the stuff relatively cheaper. the above quotations reveal that mathematical exchange is indeed part of the daily conversation of the women vendors, and it is through this conversation that this particular vendor copes in the field. discussion and summary what follows are possible suggestions about how women street vendors’ intuitive knowledge can be used to complement their formal training. the findings of the study indicate that when women street vendors encounter real-life mathematical challenges in their daily buying and selling business, they cope by using conversational mathematics (oral and mental mathematics). most of the knowledge they use is not attained from formal schooling systems but it is termed ‘intuitive mathematics’. this is the type of knowledge used to respond to the real life challenges of their businesses. intuition denotes spontaneity. when, for example, one of the women was confused about how to calculate change for a customer, mediators were readily available to help. while it is acknowledged that oral or mental calculations are important in the lives of these street vendors, it also has to be acknowledged that some formal mathematical skills and competency are essential too. the acquisition of such skills should occur in a highly practical and contextualised situation. street vendors are lifelong learners. the lifelong learners’ greatest passion is to see how what they learn works in real-life situations. immediacy of application is important to lifelong learners because putting an idea into practice provides a unique insight into how what has been learned can be modified to suit the changing situations. thus, what matters in their training is to be equipped with skills to satisfy the immediate needs of their businesses. it is also worth noting that business for the women vendors was considered to be something that needs collective thinking or helping each other. to think that a single individual person can deal with it on his or her own without the involvement of others contradicts the african tradition of corporateness – ‘i am because you are and you are because i am’ (mbiti 1988:106). thus, it is maintained that a business is a collective endeavor that opens the doors to working together and helping each other, in order for the business to grow. while the cultural thinking of these women should be appreciated, at the same time, the shortcomings of such thinking need to be i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e 74 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s explored. the discussion that follows addresses the need to use the informal practices to strengthen the formal learning so that these women are well equipped to handle the challenges of their businesses. conclusions and recommendations in this paper, the discussion tends to focus on how street vendors use mathematical operations in their daily business. mainly, they engage in the use of numbers. for example, they count the number of items sold or bought; they count the worth of money they get; they count how much change to give and they count how much money they have in their hands. however, counting is not the only mathematical skill they use. selling and buying also involve arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. johnston (2002:4), for example, defines numeracy as ‘the ability to perform arithmetic operations using numbers in real life context’ and this is what street vendors do on their daily business operations. against the background given above, there seem to be some problems in the use of intuitive mathematics alone, in as far as the selling and buying business of the women street vendors is concerned. one problem that we discovered was that these women vendors did not have clear guideposts to tell them how well they were doing and no clear outcomes to judge the profitability of their businesses. for example, when one of these participants was asked how she worked out the profit for the day, it became apparent that days might go by without her knowing whether she was profiting from her business or not. she responded that at the end of the day, she did not work out her profit nor did she keep a daily bank deposit. her signpost for profit was the sensing of the frequency or the number of customers who visited and bought some items from her. some of them would count loss by the number of items that spoiled (were rotten or expired). we believe that this kind of the use of highly informal strategies of calculating profits and loss are blinkered with regard to the actual calculations. they are, therefore, likely to mislead the women vendors. we realised that there is a need to provide a way in which women street vendors can be helped to keep track of their selling and buying activities. therefore, we suggest that book-keeping should be considered when ways to help them to be successful business women are being considered. there is also a need to strengthen the women’s mathematical skills to cope confidently with the mathematical operations required in their world of work. two areas needing attention are mathematical literacy and psychosocial skills. mathematics literacy as a tool for economic advancement cannot be over-emphasised. it is an ability to interpret and communicate quantitative and statistical data in different contexts. this even includes working with money. women in this study showed a limited understanding of formal calculations. as such, they may be victims of i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e l e k o k o a n d g a r e g a e 75 cheating in everyday transactions. we therefore recommend that street vendors be given some lessons on basic arithmetic. learning should be couched within the principles of lifelong learning: that, it has to address real life situations, as well as give learners opportunities to apply what they learn immediately and in an environment similar to their selling and buying businesses. one of the crucial elements of lifelong learning is experiencebased curriculum. thus, if the lived experiences of these street vendors are taken into consideration when their mathematics is enhanced, learning will become a process whereby their business life is appreciated in the context of mathematics teaching. when the learning of formal mathematics touches the lived experiences of these women vendors, a new feeling of motivation can be evoked. thus, any approach to learning for these women that ignores that intuition or any talk about intuitive mathematics, would deter their motivation and the love to learn mathematics. this means that working with oral and mental mathematical processes should be emphasised. on the part of the psychosocial aspect of their business, we also discovered that it may not be wise for the women street vendors to continue operating on the principle of ‘corporateness’ as they have demonstrated. while we do not dispute the value of communication and collaboration in businesses, we nevertheless believe that these women vendors live in a competitive world of businesses in which an individual business has to position itself for competition. thus, each individual woman street vendor has to develop capacity to keep her business going against all odds. these vendors need to understand that competitiveness is not tantamount to rivalry but is a way to improve and contribute to the growth of the business. in sum, we recommend an economic empowerment curriculum for these women. the economic empowerment will focus the learning for these women around their lived experiences as ‘poor’ women. poor here is used loosely to mean economically disadvantaged and lacking the knowledge, skills and attitudes that these women need to escape their undesirable situation (kincheloe 1999:260). it calls for a multidimensional holistic course where women will be helped to understand their situation holistically not just in ‘simply egoistic, self-centered and rationalist terms’ (kincheloe 1999:260). it should touch on the social, political, and economic aspects of the privilege vis-a-vis deprivation. they will be helped to make meaning of their lives, perhaps as people who have been disadvantaged by being born women in a patriarchal botswana society. as kincheloe (1999:260) contends, education for them should be education that could help each woman vendor to ‘pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps’. the curriculum for these women vendors should help them make ‘sense of the way power works and poverty develops’ (kincheloe, 1999:260) and provide options for them to initiate the growth of their business. in short, women street vendors need i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s a curriculum that will enhance their critical thinking and the motivation to want to struggle, to escape the situation that they feel uncomfortable with. this is a curriculum for lifelong learning. references becker, c s (1986) interviewing in human science, methods, vol 1, pp 192-124. bhusuman, d (1994) teacher and administrators’ attitudes and perceptions of barriers and strategies towards the advancement of women in education administration in botswana, unpublished master in education thesis, university of edmonton, alberta, canada. central statistics office/ department of non-formal education (1997) report of the first national survey on literacy in botswana. literacy survey report 1993, the department of printing and publishing services, gaborone. bogdan, r and biklen, s (1992) qualitative research in education: an introduction to theory and practice, allyn and bacon, boston. freire, p (1973) education for critical consciousness, the continuum, new york. garaegae, k g (2004) the role of mathematics education in poverty reduction: an investigation on female street hawkers, paper presented at the conference on adult education and poverty reduction: a global priority, university of botswana, gaborone, 14 – 16 june, retrieved on 31 january 2007 from www.gla.ac.uk/centres/cradall/docs/botswanapapers/garegaefinal_29.pdf. glesne, c and peshkin, a (1992) becoming qualitative researchers: an introduction, longman, urbana-champaign. jimu, i m (2004) an exploration of street vending’s contribution towards botswana’s vision of prosperity for all by 2016, pula: botswana journal of african studies, vol 18, no 10, pp 10-30. johnston, b (2002) numeracy in the making: twenty years of australian adult numeracy, retrieved on may 16th 2006 from http://www.staff.vu.edu.au/alnarc/publications/02johnston.pdf kellerm, j (2005). women and the origin of mathematics, retrieved on march 3, 2005, from www.tacomacc.edu/home/jkellerm/ethnomath/firstmath.htm. kincheloe , j l (1999) how do we tell the workers? the socioeconomic foundations of work and vocational education, westview press, boulder, colorado. lave, j (1988) cognition in practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday practice, cambridge university press, cambridge. i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e l e k o k o a n d g a r e g a e 77 manyika, l m (2002) an investigation on the skills in botswana’s junior secondary school curriculum in relation to the world of work: the case of street-vendors and housewives, unpublished bachelor of education thesis, university of botswana, gaborone. maxwell, j (1996) qualitative research design: an interactive approach, sage, thousand oaks. mbiti, j s (1988) african religions and philosophy, heinemann, london. malema, p, ed (2004) street vendors demonstrate over harassment, mmegi business week, vol 21, no 24, friday 13 february. morse, j and richards, l (2002) readme first: for a user’s guide to qualitative methods, sage, thousand oaks. republic of botswana (2001) education statistics, government printer, gaborone. republic of botswana, presidential task force (2004) vision 2016: towards prosperity for all, government printers, gaborone, downloaded on 30 march 2007 from www.vision2016.co.bw/pdf%27s/english%20full%20version. pdf. scott, e p (1999) women caterers: gaborone colorful street-side restaurants, focus newsletter, january 1. shotter, j (1993a) conversational realities: constructing life through language, sage, thousand oaks. shotter, j (1993b) cultural politics of everyday life. berrett-koehler, san francisco. skjonsberg, e (1995) documenting women’s views through participatory research diaries of daily activities in rural zambia, in fahy bryceson, deborah, ed, women wielding the hoe: lessons from rural africa for feminist theory and development practice, berg publishers, oxford, pp 225-236. straus, a and corbin, j (1998) basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, sage, thousand oaks. zaslavsky, c (1992) women as the first mathematicians, international study groups on ethnomathematics newsletter, vol 7, no 1, retrieved on january 1, 2005 from http://web.nmsu.edu/~pscott/isgem71.htmf. i n t u i t i v e m a t h e m a t i c a l k n o w l e d g e 78 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s lns16-1brzeskifinal l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 1 2 0 0 8 25 portfolio building: the relationship with literacies in studentsʼ everyday lives angela brzeski introduction this article explores some propositions about how students’ everyday lives may interact with their success at learning in a large further education college in england. some students, on paper, have all the appropriate entry qualifications, but still struggle to complete their courses. indeed, some do not complete at all. so, what could be done to help these students achieve success? as a member of a large-scale research project team, i have been investigating the home literacies of further education students. papen (2005a:14) points out that ‘it is useful and necessary before any intervention can be planned, to carry out research which identifies learners’ everyday literacy practices’. of course, there are many other aspects of people’s everyday lives that will influence their learning success. however, in this article i want to focus on the possibility of the influence of home literacy practices, by exploring how the reading and writing in the everyday lives of students could be drawn upon and utilized in order to help these students to succeed on their chosen college courses. i start by providing some background about the literacies for learning in further education (lflfe) research project on which this article draws. this is followed by a discussion of one of the theoretical arguments that are emerging from the lflfe research project team following early data analysis. to illustrate this theoretical argument, i provide case studies of two further education students, studying on similar courses within the same vocational area of the same college. these case studies, generated from data derived from interviews and observations, detail the students’ contrasting experiences of portfolio building. i suggest that the differences in students’ experiences of portfolio building are influenced by the literacies in their everyday lives and the literacy practices they entail. the article concludes with recommendations as to what practical steps could be taken in future to assist students who might otherwise struggle or even fail to complete their chosen college courses. p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the literacies for learning in further education (lflfe) research project the literacies for learning in further education (lflfe) project is a collaboration between two universities – stirling and lancaster – and four further education colleges – anniesland, perth, lancaster and morecambe and preston. the lflfe research is grounded within a social practices approach to literacy. rather than seeing literacy as a discrete set of skills to be acquired by the individual, the lflfe research team’s conceptual approach understands literacy as a social practice involving people, places, values, purposes, and a range of artefacts and media (papen 2005b, barton 2006). the project draws on work already done on literacy practices engaged in by people in schools, higher education and the community (see, for example, barton and hamilton 1998, barton, hamilton and ivanič 2000, hull and schultz 2002, pahl 2005, smith 2005, ivanič and satchwell forthcoming), and seeks to extend the insights gained from these studies into further education. it aims to explore the literacy practices of students and those practices developed in different parts of the curriculum. this project involves examining how the literacy practices across the many domains of people’s experience are mobilized and realized within different domains and their capacity to be mobilized and recontextualised elsewhere to support learning. through four partner fe colleges, the lflfe research team worked closely with over 100 students, ranging in age from 16 to 58. the case studies within this article are generated from data collected with two of these students, who were studying at the same college, on similar courses within the curriculum area of painting and decorating. in these case studies, the focus was on the literacy practice of portfolio building. to understand the literacy practices of the students in detail involves an understanding of what is going on from the perspective of those who are involved in these practices. therefore, the team needed to research with students, rather than treating students as the subject of the research. the lflfe team were committed to working collaboratively and participatively. the team were not carrying out research on these students, but were working with them in order to appreciate the role of reading and writing in their lives from their point of view (brzeski and fowler 2006). resonance and dissonance as mentioned in the introduction, many students are successful on their courses but some do not achieve their goals. based on the evidence provided in the case studies, i suggest that the differences in students’ experiences of portfolio building are resonant with their literacies in their p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g b r z e s k i 27 everyday lives. this argument is consistent with examples provided by mannion and goodman (2006:3) of the lflfe project of how, for a given student on a given course, ‘some aspects of what they read and write in their everyday lives seems to strike a chord with them in relation to their coursework’. the lflfe project team are currently exploring how the term ‘resonance’, a concept drawn from the field of music to describe when two objects are vibrating in sympathy, can usefully be applied to these experiences. placing this within a theoretical context, it is proposed that literacy resonance (or a harmonious relationship) between college, home or workplace contexts is brought about through different aspects of the process of reading, writing and communicating. the diverse ways in which resonance can be experienced exist along different wavelengths, for example resonance of genre, resonance of audience, resonance of purpose and resonance of medium (for further discussion about resonance, see goodman, mannion and brzeski (2007), ivanič, barton, edwards, fowler, mannion, miller, satchwell and smith (forthcoming 2009), mannion (2006). schwartz (1973) has a theory of resonance that argues that messages need to be designed to ‘harmonize’ with information already stored within an individual audience member. only then will resonance occur. so, resonance takes place when the message stimuli in the communication process create meaning in a receiver’s mind. schwartz’s resonance theory underlies his approach to persuasion. this theory maintains that the persuasiveness of a message is strengthened when it gives rise to a set of sympathetic experiences, memories, and values stored within receivers. this process leads to a recall of positive experiences or symbols encouraging the audience to make positive associations. here, then, schwartz is using the term ‘resonance’ to refer to ‘meaning’. the lflfe project uses the term ‘resonance’ to refer to actually doing something, that is, the literacy practices, thus extending and applying schwartz’s theory. however, dissonance could also occur between aspects of the literacy demands of the course and the students’ everyday literacy practices, thus preventing transference between the activities. therefore, locating and identifying which aspects of the literacy practices contribute to dissonance may help teachers to provide ways of reducing students’ difficulties on their courses. portfolio building as a key literacy practice in vocational courses schwartz’ theory of resonance and dissonance can be applied to the case studies of two students observed and interviewed during the lflfe project. college students have a wide range of literacy demands placed upon them, both inside and outside of the classroom. in the two case studies that are the subject of this article, the main literacy demand encountered by both students is that of the mandatory requirement to compile a portfolio of p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s evidence. in vocational courses, a portfolio lists all of the performance criteria (standards), which the students have to prove they can meet. to provide this proof, the students write in how they have met these standards, providing practical evidence from their vocational area. the written claims are authenticated by a college tutor. the portfolios also include additional work produced by the students, including written assignments to prove knowledge and understanding. in the case studies, i focus on the curriculum area of painting and decorating. the two painting and decorating students have to compile a portfolio of evidence as part of their assessment. in addition to meeting all the standard requirements of portfolio building, these students also have to incorporate photographs that prove that a range of practical activities has been completed. the contrasting experiences of the two students are presented and discussed in relation to the portfolio building process. i suggest that the differences in these students’ experiences of portfolio building are to some degree dependent on their literacies in their everyday lives. in my case studies, both students are classed as ‘adult’ (i.e. are above 18 years of age). both students are part-time, attending college two days per week. out of these two days, half a day is spent in class covering painting and decorating theory and one and a half days is spent in practical workshops. in these workshops, the students are provided with small rooms within which they carry out all the required painting and decorating skills for example sanding, painting, papering and varnishing. in the workshops the students write down details of all the work that they do in a diary format. they also have photographs taken of them as they carry out the required practical activities. the student is then responsible for incorporating and organizing the diary accounts and the photographs into the portfolios. in the case studies, i explore the students’ home and work literacies and attempt to identify what it is that either helps (resonates) with or prevents (creates dissonance) with the ‘mobilisation’ of the students’ literacy practices from outside to inside of college, or vice versa. the literacy practice of portfolio building – two contrasting approaches case study one – ‘russell’ at the time of the research, russell was a foundation painting and decorating student. he was in his first year, carrying out a basic introductory course. russell is in his late 40s/early 50s and he worked as a lecturer in computing and it at another local further education college before choosing to take early retirement. i first met russell during the preliminary semester of his course. i met him in one of his practical workshops and he showed me his portfolio, which, even so early on in his p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g b r z e s k i 29 course, was well structured, and was already illustrated with photographs showing him carrying out the various required practical activities. in addition to the compulsory components of the portfolio, russell was also choosing to type up notes, in diary format, in a meticulous, detailed fashion, of all the practical activities he had carried out each day at college. these notes would be taken by russell as he watched tutor demonstrations and listened to their commentary of every step of the demonstration, for example papering a ceiling. russell then placed these diary pages in his portfolio as additional evidence. russell provided details of the steps that he goes through to create his diary pages. russell explained that, when he started the course in september, he looked at the calendar for september to july (when his course concluded) and worked out the dates when he would be in college, ie the monday and tuesday of every week during term time. he then put these dates into a table in word, allocating approximately one page for each day. each page is framed within a box. each week, by wednesday or thursday, he has typed into those boxes what he has done in the workshop sessions at college at the beginning of the week. as a result, russell knows, from the day he started the course, what he has done in the practical workshop each week, for example demonstrations from his tutor and what he has carried out personally. in addition, russell methodically takes photos, organizes them and neatly labels all the photos in his portfolio as an on-going process. in the creation of his diary at college, russell ‘touch types’, so he does not spend a lot of time physically typing this up. russell explained to me that he intends to use his diary for reference purposes in the future, hence saving himself ‘time’ in his future pursuits. therefore, russell’s desire and ability to manage his time resonates with his desire to turn his diary into a ‘memory jogger’. what to some students may seem a laborious, longwinded task is, for russell, an invested effort in the creation of a time-saving device in the future. in addition, the value that russell places upon this diary equates to the value the college places on the creation of this diary, so this also creates resonance. during the course of the research, i met with russell’s tutor on a number of occasions. below are excerpts from these interviews regarding russell’s portfolio and his progress on his course: [it is] an impressive portfolio … i didn’t expect anything else, to be honest, from russell. [i]t is so well organised [and the use of the photographs] brings the whole portfolio to life. [the diary is] absolutely accurate, accurate to the letter … i have found it fascinating that he has gone into such detail. p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s russell is so interested, motivated, keen to learn that he would not allow anything to pass him by. he would not like to miss any information, so he has recorded everything. as a result of that, he has progressed so quickly and his standard of work is absolutely outstanding. russell managed to produce an exemplary portfolio, well in advance of the deadline given to him by his tutor. as can be seen from his tutor’s comments, he was an extremely engaged student right from the start of the course, always keeping on top of his work and the portfolio building process. why is this? to respond to this question, i now focus on russell’s home and then his work literacies. russell’s home literacies as a resource for his college literacies russell’s home life is mediated by many literacy practices. each week, russell creates a weekly shopping list. he has paper and a pen out in the kitchen permanently so that he can add to the list ‘bit by bit during the week’. his list is ‘organized around the plan of the supermarket for the sake of economy of time.’ regarding his household bills, russell has an established filing system: … because of all the bills and everything coming in we need to organise it so that there is no paper around the place. again, it all revolves around time, knowing where everything is … russell is also responsible for opening and sorting out all the junk mail received by the household. he explained: ‘i tend to skim-read it … get a flavour for it … probably discard it but not all junk mail.’ russell then clarified that some is put to one side for reconsideration later, stating: ‘i might come back to it to give it a closer reading and form a judgement about it, for example, is it a complete waste of time?’ these interview extracts suggest that time and time management is one of the keys to russell’s success on his chosen course. his home literacies have been tailored around making the best use of his time. therefore, a detailed revelation of russell’s home literacies has led to an understanding of russell’s college literacy practices. at home, russell’s main objective of saving time is demonstrated through his literacy practices of creating a shopping list in advance of going to the supermarket, filing all the bills away in an orderly fashion and organising the junk mail. in college, russell’s intention is, again, to save time in future. this can be seen in his literacy practice of keeping a meticulous, detailed diary. in this case, therefore, the aspects of the student’s home literacy practices which lead to his successful experience of portfolio building are time management and the student’s perception of value. p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g b r z e s k i 31 russell’s work literacies as a resource for his college literacies russell’s work life was also mediated by a variety of literacy practices. before joining his college course, russell worked as an administrator, became a student and then, more recently, worked as a teacher. russell explained: when i was in teaching i used to do that [keep a diary] with my classes. it was something that i had done for 21 years, religiously keeping records of what i had done with classes, what i planned to do and what i had actually done … i religiously wrote up every night when i went home at the end of the working day. this seems an extension of it here, really, keeping a diary. he clarified that the process of keeping a diary ‘comes from my work experience, both before i went into teaching … before i became a student and then a student into a teacher. i think it is a throwback that i need to be organised …’ just as russell kept a diary of his day-to-day activities in the workplace, he is again adopting this approach at college, methodically recording the details of work carried out in college on a day-by-day basis. however, it is important to note here that, although russell kept a diary in his past employment, the organisation of the photos into a portfolio and the labelling of each photo are literacy practices that russell has not carried out previously. this is a new literacy practice to russell. therefore, it is not simply a case of russell producing an excellent portfolio in college because he is already familiar with all the required literacy practices the requirements of the college course are very much resonant with russell’s work literacy practices. the literacy demands of building up a portfolio on his course very much resonate with the literacy demands within russell’s employment prior to him becoming a student, then as a student first time around and then as a lecturer. it is not that someone has to be an ex college lecturer to be an exemplary student. russell is just one example and, as can be seen from my earlier comment regarding his organisation of his photographs, his college course has not only drawn on existing literary practices but required him to engage in new ones too. p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s case study two – ‘paul’ when i met paul he was a student on the intermediate painting and decorating course at the college. so, paul was a second year student who had successfully completed his foundation course in the previous college year, including the compilation of a portfolio of evidence (very similar to the one described in russell’s case study above). unlike russell, however, paul lacked motivation and had become increasingly disengaged from his course, resulting in being absent from classes and failing to meet his portfoliobuilding target dates. paul was in his mid 20s. in the year of the research, he had to compile another portfolio of evidence, identical in structure to the one he had put together the previous year. the only difference with the intermediate portfolio is that the practical tasks he had to complete and record in his portfolio were more challenging. therefore, bearing in mind that paul had already managed, successfully, to put a portfolio together, i talked to him about his experience of portfolio building this year. in his interview, i was struck by how relaxed he appeared to be until we began to discuss his portfolio. below are excerpts from my interview with paul on this subject: this is the one [showing me his foundation year portfolio] i did last year, it just looks professional to me, and i won’t be happy with myself if it is not done properly. this year, i’ve not been motivated at all, i’m just sick of doing all this. i have missed a few weeks, i’ve been off a month because i’ve been working and that … it is clear, then, from the above extracts, that paul was becoming increasingly disengaged with his course. however, it was also clear to me that he was aware of what he needed to do to put his portfolio together, as he was able to explain the process to me in detail. he also appeared to have high standards as he stated that he ‘won’t be happy’ with himself if the portfolio was not put together properly. however, despite this, he lacked motivation and had become increasingly disengaged with his course as he admitted that he had ‘missed a few weeks’. this lack of progress is puzzling to his tutor, who shook his head when i spoke with him about paul, declaring that paul had ‘already gone through it [the portfolio building process] once’. the tutor was at a loss to explain why paul was finding it so problematic to put his portfolio together this year, stating ‘it is strange, i don’t know, i don’t know’. so, why was paul struggling so much? i now focus on paul’s home literacies. p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g b r z e s k i 33 paul’s home literacies as a resource for his college literacies it became clear when talking to paul that he was engaged in a wide variety of literacy practices at home, most of which were collaborative. for example, paul started working as a dj with the help of his girlfriend as he told me ‘my girlfriend bought me some decks’ and ‘she bought me two or three records a week and then i started collecting them’. in addition, paul advertised his dj functions to the general public with the assistance of a university student who designed the advertisements, from text provided by paul, and posted them on the internet. to expand his vinyl collection, paul bought vinyls via the internet, using a friend’s computer and with his friend’s help to access the appropriate site: ‘i do it on my mate’s computer, go on certain websites… he gets us on; i just pick my vinyl …’ another interest that paul had was that of owning his own property. paul was a joint investor in a property, together with his father. he explained this investment to me: ‘the house that i am in at the moment with my dad, i own i think it’s a quarter of it, i gave him a lump sum towards that.’ at the time of my discussion with paul, he was also considering developing property, with his girlfriend, to sell on for a profit. paul revealed the plans that he and his girlfriend had for her current house: ‘we’ll buy that, do that up and then hopefully sell it’. at home, paul enjoys reading books and writing with his girlfriend’s children. he gave me an example of one collaborative reading and writing activity that he had recently carried out with his girlfriend’s daughter: ‘we got a cornflake box, cut it out and made wheels and that … from a plan … she had to write it in and then i had to write underneath…’. in our discussion, paul also revealed that he was revising for his driving theory test with the use of his girlfriend’s friend’s computer: ‘her best mate … she’s got a computer … i’ll just practise on the computer’. however, paul explained that he only used the computer after the friend had loaded up the programme for him. concerning his paperwork, paul explained to me that he completed simple forms but usually in collaboration with his girlfriend, explaining: ‘we’d probably do it between us.’ as these examples show, in his home life, paul’s literacy practices for purposes of his own choosing all involve a lot of collaboration with those around him. however, at college, as an intermediate student, paul has already put a portfolio together, and so there is an expectation by his tutors that he can put another one together quite easily and should therefore work much more independently. when i interviewed paul, he spoke fondly of his tutor in his foundation year at college who worked highly collaboratively with paul during the portfolio building process. in the same interview, paul p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s was critical of his tutor this year, whom paul referred to as being pedantic and unhelpful. he also perceived his current tutor’s attempts to make him work alone as not caring about his progress. his tutor this year has reduced the level of collaboration during the portfolio building process, expecting paul and his classmates to go through the process on their own. therefore, the literacy demands of paul’s current course create dissonance with his home literacies. much educational discourse of literacy (and literacies for learning) represents it as an individual and lone activity. however, this view, as can be seen in my example of paul, can clash with research on literacies in everyday life. in paul’s case, many of his everyday literacies are carried out together with other people and it is this networking that allows him to accomplish and enjoy his literacy related activities. this argument is supported by ivanič, edwards, satchwell and smith (2007), who suggest that students preferred to work collaboratively, writing and/or reading together rather than independently. collaboration is an aspect of literacy practices in many domains of life, particularly in the workplace but also, as we have seen in the case of paul, in the home too. achieving resonance so what can be done to help the literacy demands of college courses resonate with the home literacies of students? i do not suggest that what follows are definitive solutions, but rather that they are simply steps heading in the right direction and that we can help to facilitate resonance firstly by finding out about the home literacies of students at the start of their courses. with the knowledge and understanding of what may contribute to either resonance or dissonance, we are then in a position to bring changes into the classroom which can allow for more resonance and less dissonance. as can be seen in the examples of russell and paul, an appreciation of home literacies could contribute to this understanding. of course, learners’ lives and their relationship to learning are highly complex and achieving greater resonance is just one element that could be changed. also, we can try to avoid making assumptions of what a student can and cannot do simply on prior achievement alone. to be more congenial to the ‘pauls’ who are trying to obtain a college qualification, resonance may be encouraged by continuing to offer one-to-one help with portfolio building or even introducing ‘study buddies’ (paired working). this suggestion is underpinned by the vygotskian theory of development. vygotsky (1981, cited in dowley mcnamee and sivright 2002:172) argued that ‘development begins in interactions among people; it does not begin within individuals themselves.’ vygotsky proposes that it is through others that we develop, which supports my suggestion of one-to-one help by the tutor or the introduction of ‘study buddies’. learning through others ‘often involves mentoring provided by more culturally knowledgeable persons, usually p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g b r z e s k i 35 elders, who engage in activity with less experienced or knowledgeable persons in a process known as scaffolding [authors’ emphasis] (bruner 1975, cited lee and smagorinsky 2000:2)’. however, the knowledge is not simply handed from one person to another. the exchange of information is considered to be mutual and ‘cognitive change occurs within this mutually constructive process’ (lee and smagorinksy 2000:2). in addition to the changes in approach that could be taken by college staff, the awarding bodies (or examination boards) could also be more flexible. for example, in the case of the painting and decorating qualification undertaken by paul, the requirements for ‘demonstrating competence’ might be brought more in line with the literacy demands of the industry. what is done in industry has been reformulated into a portfolio to meet the college’s requirements. thus, the actual practices of the industry are recontextualised in the pedagogic context. at present, within college the production of the portfolio is a very powerful literacy practice. there is great emphasis on the standardization of literacy accomplishments, tests and uniform learning outcomes. students are ranked on a ‘literacy ladder’ in terms of what they cannot do rather than what they can do. this leads to a deficit model where those on the bottom rung, the ‘pauls’ of this world, are positioned as lacking the skills that they need. the frameworks used to create the ladder are top-down ones, constructed in terms of what is seen to be vocationally relevant by the assessor (paul’s tutor) and the awarding body. there is no recognition of the validity of the students’ own definitions, uses, aspirations and preferred ways of working so they are ‘disempowering’ in the sense that they are not negotiable or learner-centred and not locally responsive. in summary ‘they define what counts as “real literacy” and silence everything else’ (crowther, hamilton and tett, 2001:2). paul, therefore, has little choice. he has to produce a portfolio, independently, as pedagogic convention dictates that he do so. to help to empower paul, his home literacy practices would make a good starting point for developing independence in the literacy practices of the industry, and that would be more value to him than completing the portfolio. this suggestion is supported by the humanistic school of learning, the main contributors being maslow and rogers. the humanistic psychologists believe that emotional factors, personal growth and development should be of highest value. they believe that ‘schools and colleges [should] exist to meet the needs of the individual learner, not the other way round’ (petty 2004: 16). according to the humanists, the learner should be able to negotiate a unique ‘learning contract’ or ‘action plan’ for each individual. if paul were to complete his own action plan, he could choose an assessment method that embraces his home literacy practices. therefore, paul’s assessment methods would be customized to meet his own individual needs (petty 2004). p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in conclusion, the concept of resonance has been found to be extremely illuminative within the lflfe project in its application to the contrast between two students on very similar courses within the same curriculum area who have responded totally differently to the portfolio building process. the focus on these two students has clearly illustrated the value of involving students and tutors in researching the resources that students can bring with them into the classroom, and in finding out how these resources might assist learning. this article suggests that there are aspects of literacy practices with which students identify in their everyday lives that have the potential to be mobilized within the classroom context. the home and work literacy practices of the students are therefore potential resources for learning and indeed for remodeling the pedagogic landscape within further education establishments. references barton, david (2006) literacy: an introduction to the ecology of written language (second edition), blackwell, oxford. barton, david, and hamilton, mary (1998) local literacies: reading and writing in one community, routledge, london. barton, david, hamilton, mary and ivanič, roz, eds, (2000) situated literacies: reading and writing in context, routledge, london. brzeski, angela, and fowler, zoe (2006) researching with students: challenges and possibilities, in caldwell, j, cleary, p, crossan, b, edwards, r, gallacher, j, gray, p, macfarlane, k, mcgavock, k, mayes, n, miller, k, osborne, m, remedios, r, smith, j and toman, n, eds, what a difference a pedagogy makes: researching lifelong learning and teaching, conference proceedings of 3rd international crll conference, glasgow, centre for research in lifelong learning, pp 706-711. crowther, jim, hamilton, mary and tett, lynn (2001) powerful literacies, the national institute of adult continuing education (niace), leicester, england. dowley mcnamee, gillian and sivright, sarah (2002) community supports for writing development among urban african american children, in hull, glynda and schultz, katherine, eds, school’s out! bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom practice, teachers college, new york, pp 169-197. goodman, ronny, mannion, greg and brzeski, angela (2007) reading, writing and resonance: an experiential workshop for practitioners, research and practice, adult literacy journal, vol 61 (special issue for rapal conference 2006, pp 10-14. hull, glenda and schultz, katherine (2002) school’s out! bridging out-ofschool literacies with classroom practice, teachers college, new york. p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g b r z e s k i 37 ivanič, roz, edwards, richard, satchwell, candice and smith, june (2007) possibilities for pedagogy in further education: harnessing the abundance of literacy, british educational research journal, vol 33, no 5, pp 703-721. ivanič, roz, barton, david, edwards, richard, fowler, zoe, mannion, greg, miller, kate, satchwell, candice and smith, june (forthcoming 2009) improving learning in college: rethinking literacies across the curriculum, routledge, london. ivanič, roz and satchwell, candice (forthcoming) boundary crossing: networking and transforming literacies in research processes and college courses’, journal of applied linguistics, 2008. lee, carol, d. and smagorinsky, peter (2000) vygotskian perspectives on literacy research, cambridge university press, cambridge. mannion, greg (2006) viewpoint: ‘striking a chord’, broadcast, vol 71, summer, pp 40-41. mannion, greg and goodman, ronnie (2006) striking a chord: making coursework and curricula more resonant with students’ everyday lives, literacies for learning in further education project newsletter, no 4, spring/summer 2006, pp 4. pahl, kate (2005) literacy and education: understanding the new literacy studies in the classroom, paul chapman, london. papen, uta (2005a) literacy and development: what works for whom? or, how relevant is the social practices view of literacy for literacy education in developing countries, international journal of educational development, vol 25, pp 5-17. papen, uta (2005b) adult literacy as social practices – more than skills, routledge, london. petty, geoff (2004) teaching today, third edition, nelson thornes, cheltenham. smith, june (2005) mobilising everyday literacy practices within the curriculum, journal of vocational education and training, vol 57, no 3, pp 319-334. schwartz, tony (1973) the responsive chord, anchor, garden city, new york. p o r t f o l i o b u i l d i n g 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word editorial.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 1 2 0 1 2 1 editorial keiko yasukawa and stephen black social practice approaches to literacy and numeracy provide a framework for examining and interpreting people’s local literacies and numeracies within a dynamic relationship with the wider social environment of their lives. these approaches help to uncover the importance of paying attention to how the local and the global interact in tension to shape adults’ lives and learning, and how this in turn poses critical questions about the role of literacy and numeracy in improving people’s lives. this issue of literacy and numeracy studies illustrates some of these tensions between the local and global. the first article by maree keating questions the basis upon which australian policies in vocational education and training (vet) and labour market and workplace literacy and numeracy programs rests. the official rhetoric suggests that improved literacy and numeracy creates vet pathways which in turn improve labour market outcomes. while this is a neat logic for policy makers, keating’s study suggests that completion of vet qualifications has not led to employment outcomes for many retrenched workers in the australian manufacturing industry except for some in limited low-paid employment. she emphasizes the significant structural barriers that retrenched workers, and particularly the older workers face when breaking into a job market that is increasingly characterized by casualisation and income polarisation. these structural barriers can neither be explained nor overcome by individuals obtaining qualifications or improving their literacy and numeracy skills. however, what keating has found among the workers in her study that helped them to navigate their way through the transition from retrenchment was the social capital – the enduring friendships and connections – that developed through the particular post-retrenchment support program that was developed for them. the second article by judy hunter and margaret franken shifts our gaze to health literacy in new zealand. health literacy, a dimension of adult literacy that was highlighted in the 2006 international adult literacy and life skills survey, has been a growing area of work for both health and literacy professionals, and as the authors show, the subject of research in recent years. the authors argue that the assumption that sits behind dominant discourses about health literacy is that patients’ health improvement is impeded by poor compliance with medical advice resulting from patients’ being unable to properly read the relevant medical information texts. this linear logic is challenged by the authors through e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s their analysis of medical information texts and interviews with health professionals. they show how both the texts and the practitioners’ views do not reflect understanding of the complex cultural, affective, political, economic, as well as linguistic challenges, and that they in turn remove, rather than build, agency for decision making away from the patients. keating’s and hunter and franken’s articles remind us of the need to attend to the local contexts – the learners’ needs as well as resources, when planning programs that aim to reposition them in the wider economic and social environments that are shaped by larger global discourses. the next two articles in this issue present us with analyses of pedagogical practices within health literacy and labour market programs that show us how learners’ needs and resources are being negotiated at particular sites of learning. stephen black, anne ndaba, christine kerr and brian doyle report on a partnership between a health centre and an aboriginal college in a major australian city that provided a literacy program to the health centre clients. the client group included ‘at risk’ young people, sex workers and people who injected drugs who would come to the health centre for a range of health related issues. although many ‘health literacy’ programs focus on literacy and numeracy related to the various health services sought by their clients, the program that emerged was quite different. the teacher taught what might be characterized as a formal workbook-based literacy program because this is what the clients asked for and wanted. however, because of the way support was provided to the clients in the literacy program – including the classroom dynamics, removal of any stigma attached to attendance or lack of attendance, ease of access, and the presence of an aboriginal health officer and counsellor in addition to the literacy teacher, there were significant social capital outcomes that emerged within the client group over the course of the literacy program. referring back to the earlier discussion of keating’s article, these social capital outcomes may prove as significant, if not more, than particular literacy skills development that may emerge from such programs. in the final article, sue ollerhead examines the classroom pedagogies of working with very low-literate learners participating in a labour market program in australia. the author examines how the teachers she observed were responding to the changes in and development of their learners’ identities through the learners’ period in the course. here, she found two teachers negotiating the tension between the local (what the learners bring to the classroom) and the global (what the dominant, universalising curriculum requires of teachers) in different ways. this article highlights how it is not only learners who are navigating their own needs against the more powerful discourses of what literacy and numeracy learning is about e d i t o r i a l 3 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s and for, but the teachers who are caught between what the learners bring and seek, and what they are being required to do by accountability regimes from above. finally, we have in this issue a book review by ross forman. he reviews a resource on phonics for adult literacy teachers. forman provides a helpful walkthrough of the book and assesses its potential value as a reference or professional development resource for adult literacy teachers. e d i t o r i a l 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word 20.2 notes on contributors.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 2 2 0 1 2 87 notes on contributors james m bebko james m. bebko is a professor in the department of psychology, york university, toronto. his research is on the interface between language and cognition in individuals with diverse abilities and needs. yiu ming chan yiu ming chan is a phd student in mathematical and statistical department, university of south florida, florida, usa. he specializes in health statistics. dong feng dong feng is the director of sun yet-sen university library at eastern campus, guangzhou, china. he specializes in health librarianship. chris holland chris holland has worked in the uk, europe and new zealand to research and address learning issues for low paid workers that are often attributed to low functional language, literacy or numeracy (lln). in new zealand, chris is the director of work & education research and development services, which advises and conducts research and professional development mainly with government departments, industry training organisations and the council of trade unions. since 2007 chris has been exploring mentoring for apprentices. hong huang hong huang is an assistant professor at the school of information, university of south florida, florida, usa. he specializes in health information behaviors. carly mcmorris carly a. mcmorris is in her fourth year of her phd in clinical developmental psychology at york university. her primary research interests are related to children with autism’s information processing abilities, such as short-term visual memory and attention. additional research interests include examining the diagnostic histories and experiences of children and individuals with autism. thomas rhee thomas rhee is a clinical psychologist at holland bloorview kids rehabilitation hospital in toronto. he is part of a diagnostic assessment n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 88 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s clinic and his work primarily focuses on the cognitive abilities and communication skills in individuals with various developmental disorders. magali segers magali segers is a phd student in clinical developmental psychology at york university, toronto. her research focus is on the cognitive processes involved during speech and language perception and understanding these processes in both typical and atypical populations. rosie wickert rosie wickert has extensive experience in adult education and training, with a particular interest in adult education policy. rosie was a professor at the university of technology sydney where she trained numerous adult educators, furthered research activity in language and literacy education and managed a number of university wide change initiatives. rosie’s particular area of expertise is adult language and literacy education policy as evidenced by her multiple publications in that field, including the ground breaking first national survey of adult literacy in australia, ‘no single measure’ in 1989. microsoft word lns18_2_dennis_finalformatted_edited21dec[1].doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 2 2010 26 is the professionalisation of adult basic skills practice possible, desirable or inevitable? carol dennis a b s t r a c t this paper explores the meaning and implications of a policy-driven professionalisation of adult basic skills practice. written amidst competing theoretical conceptualisations of professionalism, the paper focuses on a particular policy moment in adult language, literacy and numeracy (alln) practice in england: skills for life. the paper argues that the possibility of implementation of this policy is limited. the policy is filtered through the fragmented nature of the field, the embeddedness of literacy and what this paper calls an 'anti-professional' stance of alln practice. for policy makers, professionalisation is desirable, and its impact is far-reaching. it enables control of a key aspect of the service sector implicated in the supply of flexi-workers required by a globalised economy. in discussing the inevitability of professionalisation the paper draws on a small-scale research project to locate a space for the professional imagination, a space in which alln practitioners express motivations at odds with policy imperatives and enact professionalisation in ways that arguably hijack the momentum and resource that the policy provides. i n t r o d u c t i o n in this paper i interrogate the possibility, desirability and inevitability of professionalising adult basic skills practice. the discussion is written amidst an almost meteoric rise in the last 30 years of theoretical conceptualisations of what it means to be a professional (harper and jephcote 2010, shore and zannettino 2002). the temporary settlement of classical sociology, which defined professionalism in terms of fixed traits and social functions, has given way to critical onslaught. in contemporary discourse, professionalism is in a state of crisis (elliott 1996, robson 1998, frost 2001, gleeson and james 2007), a crisis precipitated by a particular policy climate in which issues of trust, authority, moral integrity and expertise – once embodied by the professional – have become disaggregated (morley 2003:5) or dissolved (sardar 2000). in this shifting and diverse terrain, i frame the professional as ‘an uncertain being with disparate allegiances’, but more significantly as an ‘implementer of government policy’ (stronach 2002:109). in doing so i explore a particular moment in the development of adult basic skills or to p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s 27 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s use its more contemporary name – adult language, literacy and numeracy (alln) in england when what had been a loosely bound and informal occupational space was shunted towards a controlled, defined and closely monitored profession. i focus on alln – with an emphasis on adult literacy. but the discussion is situated within and reverberates across other territories. alln is part of the uk’s learning and skills sector – lss – and so included in the policy wave that has engulfed this area. the experience of lss connects to other occupational groups, health, welfare and schooling, which have all been reconfigured in similar policy driven ways (clarke and newman 2005). the uk experience connects to trends across the english speaking centres of economic power which have all, with divergent formulations, translations and transformations responded to the ‘globalisation of risk’ with a form of policy hyperactivity (edwards and usher 2008). s k i l l s f o r l i f e in 2000 the uk government, new labour, developed skills for life, a policy that connected poor levels of language, literacy and numeracy achievement among adults living in england to the absence of a ‘coherent and consistent set of national standards to guarantee the quality of what was being taught [to adults attending basic skills classes], how it was taught and the qualifications […] awarded to learners’ (dfee 1999:para 1.9). the skills for life strategy (dfee 1999) included: • greater participation in alln • nationally defined core-curricular documents • subject specialisms of adult literacy, adult numeracy and english for speakers of other languages • teaching and learning materials to accompany the core-curricular documents • qualifications for teachers • qualifications for learners • instituted and devolved national targets for learners’ qualifications • a ring-fenced 40% funding uplift making alln a lucrative curricular proposition • a new and formalised approach to recording learners’ progress • the establishment of an evidence base to inform practice it is difficult to overestimate the impact these changes have had. what appears as a neat list is actually a pervasive infrastructure requiring a great deal of local activity. this is what i frame as a policy driven attempt to professionalise alln practice. it is worth pointing out that, in this shifting and diverse theorisation, processes i here associate with professionalisation p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s d e n n i s 28 have elsewhere been characterised as deprofessionalisation (randle and brady 1997) or alternatively reprofessionalisation (avis, bathmaker and parsons 2002) as well as a simultaneous process of both deprofessionalisation and reprofessionalisation (shain 1999). i have also favoured the term professionalisation – a verb and therefore something active (harper and jephcote 2010:5) to place greater emphasis on a fluid, orchestrated process of negotiation and change. other social theorists have more often used the term professionalism – a noun and by implication something that is or may become static. the paper draws on theoretical and empirical work to explore the professionalisation of alln. in the final section i incorporate interview data of a small scale research project ‘controlling the imagination’ conducted over two years between 2007 and 2009 into the different meanings embedded in the notion of quality when applied to alln. while professionalisation was not the focus for this study, what it meant to implement skills for life was an ever present concern. the data therefore allows a glimpse of a key aspect of professionalisation. t h e p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a l l n : i s i t p o s s i b l e ? in exploring the possibility of professionalisation, i explore the disparate nature of the occupational field that falls within the boundary of alln. it is the porous fluctuating nature of alln provision that conspires against the idea of alln practice as professionalised. i then explore strands within alln work that are distinctly anti-professional. by invoking antiprofessionalism, it is not my intention to draw on ‘discourses of derision’ (ball 1990) or argue that professionalism amounts to a ‘conspiracy against the laity’. i rather suggest that the hallmarks of alln practice are antithetical to the distancing and privilege associated with professionalism, shards of meaning that echo its classical conceptualisation. l i t e r a c y a n d c o n t e x t in defining and defending a moral purpose for adult education, wilson (2001) equates its inability to attain professional status to the nature of the field. the lss in the uk is vast. it incorporates all post-compulsory education provision: general further education (fe) colleges, sixth forms (when these are not part of a school), work based learning, community and voluntary organisations, prisons, local authority funded adult education as well as private training organisations. in 2009 fe colleges employed 260,000 staff in various teaching related roles. there are some 20,000 alln teachers, an estimated 50% of whom are employed on a part-time basis (lluk 2010). as part-time staff they typically exist on the ‘slippery edges’ (jameson and hillier 2008) of organisations. often working in isolated peripheral centres, they are a ‘casualised’ workforce who work in conditions p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s 29 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s that make it difficult for them to form and maintain close working contacts with colleagues and managers. in these diverse contexts practitioners, teachers, lecturers, tutors, assessors, section leaders or advanced practitioners (the associated nomenclature indicates the porous nature of the role) out of necessity, develop localised ways of working. professionalisation is strongly determined by local learning culture (james and biesta 2007). what it means to be a professional does not easily translate from one context to another. working with a group of homeless adults in a large city may require a very different approach to working with primary school parents attending a family literacy class, which may be very different to offering study skills support for students working towards a national vocational qualification (nvq) in construction. policy may define good practice, but its implementation requires quite considerable degrees of reworking (coffield and edward 2009). practice is constantly recrafted and recreated to suit the changing context. it is this process of engagement, the enactment of policy and professionalisation that creates its multiple but fractal possibilities. practitioners out of necessity adopt a dynamic approach to teaching literacy in response to learners lives (castleton 2001). the depth of activity required is echoed in several studies of localised literacy practice (crowther, hamilton and tett 2001), and the work of the national research and development centre (ivanic et al 2006) enlivens the decisive importance that context plays in this renegotiation. it is possible that this idea of context, and the extent to which it shapes practice, is a re-articulation of the mutually constitutive nature of the world as constructed by the individual, and the individual as shaped by the world. it implies a discussion about the relationship between policy structure and professionalisation agency. to emphasise the locality of learning, and the occupational requirements that facilitate it, haggis (2009:58) offers a version of socio-cultural theories of learning that position cognition as ‘far more situated than theories of situated learning imply’. this fragmentation does not preclude the possibility of any sense of common ground. skills for life is after all monolithic policy. its defining features, targets, qualification curriculum documents, inspection, while mediated by a local context, echo in each place they appear. a part-time practitioner may work in several different main and peripheral centres at any one time. there is fluidity and movement within and between the sectors. practitioners coalesce around these common themes in how they experience the new infrastructure (coffield et al 2008). however, even when practitioners travel from one centre to another, the ways in which they perform their role changes considerably to suit their context. prescriptions of what counts as appropriate practice precludes the possibility of enactment of p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s d e n n i s 30 any monolithic policy. the one-size-fits-all policy provides a backdrop, but practitioners reshape their stance as required. as practitioners move between the centres in the peripheries and the main centre, key relationships between students, and between teaching and non-teaching colleagues assume an unexpected fluidity (crossan and gallacher 2009). in part (though not wholly) this connects to a longstanding and abiding discussion within alln practice – namely the distinction made between literacy as skills and literacy as social practice, in as much as a social practices approach to literacy insists on the primacy of context as implicit in what it means to be literate. once these different conceptualisations of literacy are connected to professionalisation they bring into sharp relief strands within alln practice that are distinctly anti-professional. a n t i p r o f e s s i o n a l i s m i link these anti-professionalisation discourses to the influential work of freire (1970) who emphasised teaching as part of a process of ‘conscientisation’: critical thinking that linked pedagogy to developing a wider understanding of the conditions in which adult literacy learners find themselves. freire advocated a situated approach to understanding literacy, an approach at odds with the autonomous model of literacy that pervades policy constructions but one that has been elaborated upon by the new literacy studies (barton 2007b, 2007a, crowther et al 2001). according to freire authentic literacy is not limited to simply getting what the text says, but entwines reading the word and the world. illiteracy is best understood as an injustice rather than a personal failure. teaching literacy is an inherently political activity that involves dialogue, mutuality and exchange. literacy can only be understood when it is placed in a context. it is relational and thoroughly embedded in social and communicative practices. the interest of new literacy studies is therefore on literacies rather than a single literacy, to reflect the different literacy practices of an individual negotiating situtations in different contexts, and the different literacy practices that are used to negotiate similar situations by different cultural and social groups. i describe the freirean discourses as anti-professional because they are at odds with the professionalisation inscribed in skills for life. from a literacies perspective the literacy learners’ preferred approaches to managing the various texts that are part of their lives emerge from the particularity of the situation in which they are placed: their context of use. literacy teaching, to be effective, has to be responsive (barton 2007b). literacy learning is here constructed as a rhizome. it precludes the imposition of hierarchies, structures and uniformity and consists of entanglements and contingent dis /connections. this is somewhat at odds with the rigid hierarchical construction of literacy inscribed in the professionalisation of alln practice. p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s 31 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s tusting (2009) explores a further aspect of the professionalising process – notably the extent to which it generates increasingly burdensome amounts of paperwork. amidst the flurry she notes teachers engaging in a discourse of what it means to do their job well as including the construction of particular types of teacher-student relationships. these include placing value on mutual respect and minimising hierarchy. crossan and gallecher (2009) develop further this idea of ‘learning relationship’ as key to understanding the stance adopted by practitioners based in community learning centres. they deploy concepts of emotion work, underground working and habitus to enliven an understanding of those relationships. they stress the importance of informal, relaxed and friendly pedagogic encounters. the stance that is highly regarded here is one of equality and horizontality. these commitments bear close resemblance to approaches that may be found in contemporary liberatory or freirean-inspired literacy pedagogy (jacobson 2009). what i describe then as anti-professionalisation is a refusal of the distancing and privilege that attends the idea of achieving the professional status partly inscribed by skills for life, and partly found in the semiotic lingering of earlier classical associations: the idea of professionals as a high status, special occupational group. to be a literacy tutor is to adopt an antiprofessional stance compelled by a desire to make connections with the learners and their particular contexts. the possibilities of the professionalising process are limited. the bullet-point lists do not enter a blank slate of alln practice, and practitioners do not merely absorb and react with robotic obedience (ball 1993:12) to their determinations. they read, interpret, mediate and translate (coffield et al 2008). they then form an opinion and work out what and how to do. the required policy is one of the resources they draw upon to achieve this. within the professionalisation process there is always much more going on and much less going on than policy makers imagine (kelchtermans 2007). t h e p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a l l n : i s i t d e s i r a b l e ? in exploring the desirability of professionalisation, i ask whose interests does it serve? i have so far framed the process as policy rather than practitioner driven. i am mindful here that it is not always possible to separate policy makers and practitioners since a single individual may occupy several different spaces (wickert 2001). nor should describing professionalisation as policy driven be taken to mean practitioners are not interested in improving practice (hamilton and hillier 2006). what i suggest here is the following. while social theorists have tended to associate professionalisation as connected to the agitations of practitioners to secure a more prestigious and rewarding place in an occupational market place, the shift of alln practice p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s d e n n i s 32 from what was a campaign to a national strategy has, in its tone and texture, emerged from a space that is at some distance from practitioners and learners. m a n u f a c t u r i n g f l e x i w o r k e r s within an environment where ‘risk has been globalised’ (morley 2003) professionalisation represents the possibility of control amidst the inevitability of chaos. it is the antithesis of all that is multivocal, heterogeneous and unpredictable. here enshrined in policy is the belief that the literacy a professionalised alln practitioner delivers the literacy inscribed in skills for life is the silver-bullet that pierces the heart of economic decline. the capacity to read and to write in a prescribed way is imbued with super-hero like qualities. the status of literacy skills as super-hero is a leitmotif that has dominated educational policy discourse re-represented here: in the 21st century, our natural resource is our people – and their potential is both untapped and vast. skills will unlock that potential. the prize for our country will be enormous – higher productivity, the creation of wealth and social justice. the alternative? without increased skills, we would condemn ourselves to a lingering decline in competitiveness, diminishing economic growth and a bleaker future for all (leitch, 2006:1). this faith in the power of skills was translated into a series of targets for qualifications. 95 per cent of adults to achieve the basic skills of functional literacy and numeracy, an increase from levels of 85 per cent literacy and 79 per cent numeracy in 2005 (leitch, 2006:3). several interweaving strands of argumentation define the technical, cultural, political and economic changes that characterise globalisation. the internationalisation of production, restructuring of the labour market, the hyper-fluidity of capital and the need for flexible workers are some of its pick and mix features (morley 2003). in this environment, education and training have become direct objects of, rather than adjuncts to, economic policy. what a globalised economy creates – according to some theorists is a reduction in state power and an enhancement in the market. policy attention shifted towards education in the 1980s onwards largely because with power residing in international corporations, it had nowhere else to go (hodgson and spours 1999:5). the increased focus on skills amounts to an increased focus on creating conditions that make the uk an attractive investment proposition for international corporations. the new economy requires flexi-workers: workers imbued with desirable behaviours and attitudes. while skills have p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s 33 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s for a long time been valued by policy makers as the backbone of industry, their invested meanings have expanded exponentially (payne 2000). my suggestion here is that the professionalisation of alln is a policy driven attempt to monitor and control a section of the service economy, which is key to the production of the kind of workers required in the new globalised work order. professionalisation creates the mechanisms through which the literacy practices and citizenship status of sections of the population are marginalised, consecrated or stigmatised (albright and luke 2008). this implicates the alln practitioner in the creation of the flexiworker who is able to not only survive, but also thrive within the conditions created by a volatile international market place. the flexi-worker is willing to adapt their lives to accommodate the needs of the corporation; is willing to develop the personal skills and dispositions that enable them to cope with the insecurity of un / under (or over) employment. they are controllable and complicit in their own exploitation by being infused (enthused) with the ideals of the corporation (peters and austin 1985). devoid of political ideals they are prepared to accept a redefined welfare state as springboard rather than safety net (edwards 2003) and become responsible citizens i.e. literate learning citizens. they are positioned by the policy as one being in a perpetual state of deficit, a deficit healed when they are willing to l/earn. professionalisation implicates alln practitioners in this recreation of learner subjectivities (hamilton 2009). u b i q u i t o u s m a n a g e m e n t professionalisation also creates anxieties in the micro world of practitioners (morley 2003:6). it enables the policy maker to tell practitioners who their learners are (dennis 2009:58), how they are envisioned, that is brought into the public gaze (client, customer, student or learner), and how their learning is valued and described. through performance monitoring – performativity – new ways of steering / directing are created and the structure and culture of public services are recast. the processes here characterised as professionalisation, ensure that alln tutors are subject to judgements, classifications, and targets against which they are evaluated. performativity defines the value of literacy and numeracy teaching as contained within that which can be recorded and quantitatively measured. literacy, literacy learning and literacy learners are reduced to a series of observable tasks, activities and outcomes. that which cannot be measured or which does not contribute directly to performativity is without value. this philosophy filters through the everyday experiences and the social relations between tutors and students. in delivering the literacy inscribed in skills for life, the aim is to ensure that students are able to work towards p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s d e n n i s 34 individually defined learning goals that are an expression of their personal aims, aspirations and interests. at the same time they have to comply with pre-defined outcomes listed in a core-curriculum. this is a conundrum of biblical proportions: how do practitioners reconcile free choice with predetermination? the two only become reconcilable through translation and betrayal. students define goals and use a language that does not fit the learning outcomes that professionals are required to deliver – i want to feel more confident, i want to improve. these legitimate goals are not acceptable. they are difficult to record, monitor, list as performance indicators, and prove as achieved. the practitioner is required to change these expressions – and the goals themselves and the language they are described in to meet what has been set out in core-curriculum documents, inspected though the common inspection framework and defined as quality. management is thus ubiquitous and indivisible, inescapably embedded in everything we do. the learning relationship and with it the trust between practitioner and learner is interrupted. the intrinsic value of education – the notion of literacy learning as anything other than an economic imperative, the idea of literacy as a human right, is outside the discursive framework. there is within this context a displacement of anything that approaches a metaphysical discourse – principles of social justice and equity are made irrelevant or at least are only viewed through the prism of economic imperative; fables of hope, promise and opportunity are no longer part of the geography of alln. there are then several possible answers to the desirability of professionalising alln. to answer yes, it is desirable, is to adopt the perspective of a government subject to the imperatives of globalisation, struggling to re-orientate policy to ensure it is able to create conditions that promote economic competitiveness within the new international economic order. but the professionalised alln practitioner is a fantasy suffused by depthlessness and transparency. they are an anaesthetised, hollowed-out spectacle (ball 2003) prepared to draw on inner resources for the corporate good: passionate about excellence, passionate about anything the corporation requires. they are prepared to teach not what students have struggled to articulate but that which has been predefined: dupe or devil (bathmaker 2001) within a process that admits no other criteria for success. the pervasiveness of professionalisation demands a response – but not one that has been pre-defined. one may choose to be absorbed (prepared to act superficially in a way that suggests acquiescence while maintaining a quietly subversive stance) – ‘no one after all knows what’s going on in my mind’) or to be colonised (prepared to abandon any self-determined principles and become completely pre-defined by the corporation) by the new cultural ethos. either way practitioners have no choice but to position themselves in relation to it. they are thus positioned by it. p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s 35 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the above discussion suggests that from the perspective of the policy maker, professionalisation is wholly desirable. it hints that for alln learners and practitioners it may be less so. but what about an exploration of the inevitability of professionalisation? the new framework impacts upon the role of alln practitioners in profound ways. but the professionalisation invoked by policy makers is not an inevitable construct. to award it the status of predefined and unstoppable, is to award it the status of natural phenomenon, like the flow of a river. inevitability it suggests there is nothing to be gained from exploring the ways practitioners may influence professionalisation – as policy or as practice. if alln practitioners are to locate agency, it is necessary to imagine what is and what might not be inevitable about the professionalising process. t h e p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a l l n : i s i t i n e v i t a b l e ? in this section i am more speculative. the prescribed professionalisation of skills for life is one of the discursive resources practitioners draw upon when deciding 'what and how to do'. but the only inevitability of policy prescription is its uneven implementation. my concluding section draws on a small scale research project, controlling the imagination, into the different meanings embedded in the notion of quality when applied to the teaching and managing of skills for life. it offers a glimpse of the inevitability of professionalisation. i draw, through a series of semi structured interviews with 16 alln teachers and managers in 10 different organisations, on the voices of practitioners who teach and / or manage alln in the south of englandi. the approach is one based loosely on grounded theory, with transcribed interviews analysed with the help of atlas ti. goodrham’s (2005) research with lss workers is unequivocal. when asked about the status of their occupation, research participants did not see their practice as a ‘true’ profession. nor did they regard the status of lss practitioners as having ever been professional. in part this non-professional status was attributed to the fragmented nature of the practitioners’ role. this disassociation with professional status does not undermine the value placed on the important role practitioners play. in these shifting discourses ‘working professionally may signify something different from being a professional’ (lather 1991 cited by edwards 1997:157). the alln practitioners i interviewed1 had no doubt about the intrinsic value of their role, as one participant expressed it, we all assume an air of integrity about what we’re doing because i think it’s important […] alln, program manager (1) p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s d e n n i s 36 despite years of radical redefinition, practitioners retained what is most often associated with motivations that predate skills for life. i asked participants what made them start working in the field of alln. that’s really easy. it was almost as soon as i left university, i wanted to be involved in community development work. i wanted to be involved in learning and be involved in work i felt that addressed issues of disadvantage, poverty, and under achievement for the adult population. almost pretty much the first thing i did on leaving university was to start as a literacy volunteer […], and loved it and thought, ‘this is great!’ alln, senior manager (1) yes … coming from an aei background. adult education institute background. […] brought me into contact with an awful lot of people who [....] would [...] be described as being underrepresented in education, but also disadvantaged in basic skills. alln, senior manager (2) it is not that these participants were unaware of the policy prescriptions regarding why alln mattered. at other points during our conversation they were able to recount an in-depth understanding of the economic imperative that lay behind skills for life policy. what i notice here is that they make no reference to policy definitions of why skills for life matters in its economic framing when talking about their own motivations. there is an inconsistency between policy imperative and practitioner motivation. the data on how alln practitioners talk about what mattered to their practice gave rise to a framework that located a tension between what practitioners aspired to, and what was demanded of them. for example, i think there are two elements of [my role]. in terms of what the college demands as the quality program. there’s my role within that. and there’s also my role providing what i consider to be good quality service to the students. alln, program manager (2) this statement suggests that while practitioners strive to meet the external professionalisation requirements placed upon them, the actual needs, desires and possibilities of learners may remain unmet. there was also tension between the prescriptions of professionalisation as an ambiguous abstraction in contrast to something that was embodied, the actual experiences of quality – sometimes at odds with publicly sanctioned policy or professionalisation discourses. these were shifting constructions and i made no attempt to locate fixed professional types or types of responses. p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s 37 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the line of thought i want to pursue here is one that imagines a space between aspiration and embodiment, a space that was reminiscent of alln as a community-based campaign. in riding the crest of the professionalising wave, alln practitioners commit themselves to implementing a policy not through any sense of allegiance to the policy itself but because of what the policy momentum enabled them to do. what it provided was an institutional resource to pursue alln practitioners’ long-held commitments. in the teams themselves, there’s a real commitment to skills for life. [...] i think it’s correct to say, to the learners within the skills for life area. the skills for life thing is incidental. it’s the commitment to the learners. alln, senior manager (2) in some instances skills for life has enhanced to a significant extent what had been a marginalised and misunderstood activity, for many years literacy, numeracy and esol was always the poor relation. and didn’t get the funding, didn’t get the priority in colleges, didn’t get the support, didn’t get the staffing. we had to make do with part-timers. all that stuff that went on years ago. alln, senior manager (2) with skills for life policy sponsorship, alln teachers and managers have struggled to position themselves in the mainstream activities of their organisation. in an attempt to embody, to make real their aspirations of skills for life, alln practitioners hijack the momentum and resource attached to policy to achieve their own purposes. there are glimmering shards here of the anti-professionalisation that pre-dates skills for life. policy merely creates a particular environment and resources that in some instances practitioners are able to mobilise to meet what they see as the needs and entitlements of their learners. this ‘campaigning’ alln practice makes aspirations real. this is one of many potential spaces for the nurturing of a ‘professional imagination’ (power 2008); a space in which practitioners trace careful and expert steps between individualism and determinism. it is a space that denies the inevitability for professionalisation. it opens a space for further exploration. c o n c l u d i n g r e m a r k s in this paper i have argued that the possibility of a professionalised alln practice may represent a road along which policy makers and practitioners may travel without ever reaching a final destination. this relates to some extent to the nature of literacy and professional learning as a p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s d e n n i s 38 thoroughly situated social practice, a shape shifting entity that refuses fixed form. it also relates to aspects of alln practitioner sensibilities that are at odds with the privileging and distancing implied by professional status. central to this argument is the policy defined and driven nature of professionalisation. policy prescription creates an environment within which practitioners work and implicates them in fulfilling an economic imperative for literate learning citizens with flexible dispositions able to service a globalised economy. professionalisation is desirable for some. it allows policy makers to closely monitor the micro world of practice. through professionalisation, policy makers become part of the pedagogic encounter. for the practitioner, driven by a commitment of horizontality in relationships, to equity and social justice, it is less so. yet how policy makers imagine practice is other than how practitioners experience it. once 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teacher; i don't do all their paperwork': teacher resistance to accountability demands in the english skills for life strategy', literacy & numeracy studies, vol 17, no 3, pp 6-26. wickert, r (2001) politics, activism and processes of policy production: adult literacy in australia, in lo bianco, j and wickert, r eds, australian policy activism in language and literacy, language australia, melbourne, pp 75-91. p r o f e s s i o n a l i s a t i o n o f a d u l t b a s i c s k i l l s d e n n i s 42 wilson, al (2001) professionalization: a politics of identity, new directions for adult & continuing education, vol 2001, no 91, pp 73-84. 1 pen portraits of research participants who were involved with ‘controlling the imagination’. pen portraits of project participants quoted in this paper alln, program manager (1) has worked in adult education as an esol specialist for some years. her role includes a considerable amount of teaching and supporting other teachers. although based in an fe college she is also responsible for off-site community provision. employed as a manager with some teaching, she saw herself firstly as a teacher and placed great emphasis on the importance of this throughout our conversation. she narrates an organisational biography that equated quality with nothing more than hard work. she views alln provision as peripheral in a college that would rather be doing other more glamorous subjects. alln, senior manager (1) is a long standing alln professional. her role no longer had a direct alln focus and our conversation came about primarily because of her past connection. i have had an extended day-to-day working relationship with this participant. she has a ‘holding brief’ for alln rather then direct line management responsibility. she had worked in the organisation for a number of years and at times had been a manager and teacher of alln in the college. the college has a very high profile reputation for quality in the area of work and has maintained a grade two for some time. there is a strong narrative through the college of it having changed from a failing organisation to one with a national profile. alln, senior manager (2) as a senior manager her role did not include teaching. she is a long time veteran of skills for life and has retained much of the evangelical zeal that led her to this area of work. at the time of the interview she was just about to be promoted to a more senior management position. the department has had a varied recent past. having sustained a grade two for a number of years and a self-referenced reputation for quality and innovative provision, it expanded exponentially in a very short period of time and in the inspection before last was graded as unsatisfactory. she has worked for the college throughout this time and her role has changed in relation to alln, from a direct curricular to overall strategic responsibility. alln, program manager (2) had a role that included both teaching and managing, two joined fractional posts to make up a single full-time role. based in a further education college in london she has an english as a foreign language (efl) background and had taught overseas for some years. the experience of working in the private sector and the entrepreneurial flair that came with it is something she carries with her into her current role. she arrived back in england at the start of the skills for life policy and has little recollection of a pre-skills for life fe sector. microsoft word editorial.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 2 2 0 1 2 1 editorial keiko yasukawa this issue of literacy and numeracy studies takes up three topical areas in adult education policy and practice: health education, program efficacy and apprenticeship learning. although this journal has featured several articles on health literacy, including two articles in the last issue (hunter and franken 2012, black, ndaba, kerr and doyle 2012), we have not featured articles focused specifically on health numeracy. hong huang, yiu ming chan and dong feng provide us with our first article on this subject in ‘health numeracy confidence among racial/ ethnic minorities in hints 2007: sociodemographic, attitudinal and knowledge correlates’. their us based research focuses on examining differences in health numeracy confidence of white, black and hispanic americans. as health policies in many oecd countries increasingly focus on effective health education and prevention and reduce the load on hospitalization, confidence in accessing, interpreting and taking action on health related information becomes critical. health numeracy, as the authors explain, is linked to making decisions about risks associated with illnesses as well as various forms of interventions for treating the illnesses, thus deserving much greater attention. based on their research findings, the authors make recommendations about approaches to improving health numeracy for specific social and ethnic minority groups. the measurement and assessment of literacy continues to be a major focus of discussion in international bodies such as the oecd and in national policies. in the second article of this issue, james bebko, thomas rhee, carly mcmorris and magali segers report on their research examining the factors that impact on outcomes and retention of literacy skills. they work from the hypothesis that ‘automatization’ – that is, automatic recognition of words, is a significant factor impacting on outcomes and retention, and discuss the implications of their findings for practitioners as well as researchers. in policy discourses in new zealand as well as in australia and other english speaking countries, successes and failures in vocational training, including apprenticeships, are often attributed to learners’ literacy and numeracy skills. chris holland’s article ‘cultural/ community mentoring with maori and pacific electrical apprentices’, the third article in this issue, reminds us that there are some more fundamental issues that need addressing to support learners facing multiple barriers to formal training, such as those related to institutional, financial, and social capital factors. the author presents her research on a pilot project establishing culturally appropriate mentors for maori and pacific electrical apprentices. there are e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s important recommendations for the design of apprenticeship programs from the findings that would apply in many programs where there are participants from minority ethnic and cultural groups. finally, in this issue, rosie wickert farewells, on behalf of all of us associated with the journal, one of the members of the original editorial team of literacy and numeracy studies. alison lee passed away in september this year after a brave struggle with cancer. many readers of the journal will know that alison’s interests and influence extended to academic fields beyond literacy education in recent years. but her dedication and support for this journal continued until her illness prevented her from contributing further. we are greatly saddened and will miss our colleague, co-editor and friend alison. references black, stephen, ndaba, anne, kerr, christine and doyle, brian (2012) methadone, counselling and literacy: a health literacy partnership for aboriginal clients, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 20, no 1, pp 4562. hunter, judy & franken, margaret (2012) health literacy as a complex practice, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 20, no 1, pp 25-44. microsoft word 0712lns152scheeres.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 2 2 0 0 7 5 talk and texts at work: beyond language and literacy skills hermine scheeres abstract in this paper i discuss changing work practices in post-bureaucratic organisations (heckscher and donellon 1994, iedema 2003) as a move from a focus on how those in control formulate what is to happen at the level of work, towards requiring workers to verbalise how they see themselves as being able to contribute to the organisation. workers are increasingly asked to talk about their work, and to negotiate their understandings of their work with others in the workplace – they are becoming discourse workers. this discourse work is integral to the increasing textualisation of work. these work practices are imbued with tensions as workers try to make sense of, and learn, new ways of ‘being’ a worker, and an important site of this struggle and learning is working in teams. the article begins with a brief outline of some key aspects of the changing workplace and changing worker. it goes on to present these organisational shifts in terms of worker identities and suggests that workers are engaged in identity-work and the increasing textualisation of the workplace. i draw on theorisations of identity and the production of the subject (gergen 1991, hall 1996, rose 1996, 1999) to provide a frame to explore textualisation (belfiore, defoe, folinsbee, hunter and jackson 2004, iedema and scheeres 2003, jackson 2000). the paper then turns to a presentation of empirical data from case study research on teams in a large manufacturing company in sydney, australia, to demonstrate that workers are struggling with who to ‘be’ as their work shifts from manual labour or ‘doing’ work, to include social labour or talk as constitutive of work. the workers that i focus on are, in the main, production-line workers, together with the facilitators and trainers who are charged with producing the linguistically competent workers that organisations desire. the paper concludes with some implications for workplace learning, and for language and literacy programs and practitioners. introduction: changing work, changing workers in the contemporary workplace, management structures are changing to allow for a flatter hierarchy leading to new roles and responsibilities for all employees. traditionally, the onus has been on managers and t a l k a n d t e x t s 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s supervisors to spell out what is to happen and to do this they have deployed different kinds of commands. now there is an increasing expectation that workers will not only make statements describing their work, but that they will discuss how they will do their work in the future and who they will be as workers. these changes are interpreted by some as signalling an improvement in work conditions on the strength of enhanced kinds of participation and ‘say’ (eg adler, 2001). for commentators like gee, hull and lankshear, (1996), du gay (1996) and others, the calls for worker involvement and self-expression are generally rejected as managerialist ploys seeking to engender ‘entrepreneurialism’ and ‘responsibilisation’ on the part of workers. notwithstanding this binary, there is a growing expectation that employees not only talk and write about their work in new ways, but they are positioned so that they offer ways of taking their work further. what we are seeing in today’s organisations is a determined move to foreground social relationships amongst employees and to draw on their knowledge and experience no matter what their occupational level. (re)inventing organisational selves a focus on work practices in terms of social relations and knowledge work, leads to an exploration of the implications for managers and employees in terms of identity (rhodes, iedema and scheeres 2007 in press; caldas-coulthard and iedema 2007 in press; farrell 1999; scheeres and solomon 2006; du gay 1996; hall and du gay 1996; gee, hull and lankshear 1996). what is now expected, indeed what is essential to being a competent worker, is not only an awareness of and ability to ‘invent our selves’ (rose 1996) but the capacity to re-invent ourselves as different kinds of ‘organisational selves’ throughout our working lives. gergen (1991) characterises this as the postmodern condition where: persons exist in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction; it is a world where anything goes that can be negotiated. each reality of self gives way to reflexive questionings, irony, and ultimately the playful probing of yet another reality. (p 5-6) in their discussion of the growing prevalence of portfolio workers (handy 1995, fenwick 2004), grey and garsten (2001) think beyond the development of new identities in their proposal that the ‘flexibilisation of working practices and organizational forms are matched by attempts to flexibilise the self’ (240). for employees and managers, especially those who have been in the workforce for some time, work on the self and reflexivity are new but persistent experiences in this new world of working (on) identities. this work involves building continuous learning into jobs and t a l k a n d t e x t s s c h e e r e s 7 into organizations (marsick and watkins 1999, senge 1990). alongside the variety of formal and informal ways of learning, the textualising workplace involves workers learning about all parts of the organisation in order not only to ‘own’ the goals and practices but also to be able continually to recognise problems and offer innovative solutions. textualisation of work and the workplace the shift to a textualised workplace has implications for what work is and how to learn to be a worker. it is not just that there are new communication demands that workers may or may not be competent in, but the workplace itself is increasingly one that is a site of textual practices that affect everyone in some way. workplaces are becoming increasingly textualised through the introduction of technological hardware and software; through increased inhouse continuous, education and training; through making explicit to workers at all levels how the organisation functions by posting production reports and the like; through participatory practices such as teams for everything; through complex quality and accountability processes; and through a myriad of other textual processes and products. knowledge in workplaces is expected to be discursively constructed knowledge in meeting rooms, around walls, on computer screens, in manuals, and so on. the notion of textualisation of work has been discussed by jackson (2000) and others in their research on the intensification of literacy demands in industrial workplaces. however, other texts are produced and displayed in the workplace as both new kinds of texts and in new contexts. so, for example, at arturo1, the workplace i focus on in this paper, the new space, the meeting room, is a location that every worker is now familiar with, its walls lined with texts related to work, workers and the workplace in a range of ways. similarly, around the walls of the factory floor, graphs, diagrams, spreadsheets of faults, production numbers, pictures of teams and team members, texts that were non-existent five or ten years ago, and texts that would only have filled managers’ in and out trays, now form part of what it is to be a new order workplace. together all of these represent the textualisation of the workplace, a workplace where a proliferation of texts in public spaces is part of the identification of a ‘normal’ industrial workplace. there has been considerable research and pedagogical work in relation to workplaces and workers that has focused on some of the kinds of texts mentioned above. there has been work on the literacy demands of new work, on language skills, especially for language background other than english (lbote) workers, and on broader areas of communication such as negotiation and conflict resolution and the like. notwithstanding this valuable work, i want to propose a somewhat different perspective. underpinning this perspective is an understanding of arturo as a workplace t a l k a n d t e x t s 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s where the relationships between the doing work of the production-line and the discursive work of the meeting room are not only about moving from one physical space to another, and from making things to talking and writing about making things. the relationships amongst employees are also redesigned as the workplace itself becomes a site where interactions are salient. the workplace is at one and the same time a textualised workplace, where produced texts and talk proliferate, and a textualising workplace where the production of texts and talk has become everyday work. hence, i want to suggest a broad interpretation of textualisation of the workplace that a colleague, rick iedema and myself have been developing and working with. for us: the textualisation of work is about people … ‘discoursing’ across what used to be hierarchical, occupational, professional or organisational boundaries. workers are called on, or volunteer, to engage in ways of speaking (and writing), that call into question conventional conceptions of what it means to be and speak like … a line operator, or a shop floor supervisor. these people are expected to embody not only the discourses that they were conventionally inducted into as workers, or those that have been functional in supporting their work. ( …. ) increasingly, workers from all backgrounds are confronted with kinds of workplace reform and restructuring that put cross-professional and cross-occupational negotiation centre-stage. (iedema and scheeres 2003) more and more work is talk, and the discursive practices that constitute this talk provide a means for workers to engage in interactions about their work to others with whom they would not normally negotiate the details of what they do. the focus for us, then, has come to be on textualisation as processes of networking and aligning, of developing new social relations implicating changing identities. the social relations are not static, they are characterised as potentially always on the move and therefore the ways of being are dynamic and contested positions or identities. the discussion now turns to the research site, arturo, an australian workplace where ongoing restructuring and reorganisation are taking place. this manufacturing workplace is one where texts and talk are producing new work practices and new worker identities. the research project reported on here involved ethnographic methods of observation and semistructured interviews plus analyses of a variety of company documents. a major part of the research involved the taping, transcribing and discourse t a l k a n d t e x t s s c h e e r e s 9 analysis of team meetings. the focus of discussion in this paper is team meeting interactions and the textualising and identity work they enact. the research site arturo’s continued existence is dependent on maintaining or, more importantly, improving its competitive position in the national and international marketplace. the non-unionised site in an industrial suburb of sydney, australia, employs approximately 800 workers, the majority of whom are from language backgrounds other than english. most of these workers are deployed on production lines manufacturing gaming machines. a shared vision is being created and built up in the organisation wherein all workers must understand the big picture and the company goals, and become informed of, and intimately involved in, current productivity targets and levels. in answering the expectation that they show awareness and knowledge of these goals, workers are spending increasing amounts of time on discourse work. a unit comprising a manager and five facilitators has been created in the company to organise and develop teams. the five facilitators chosen to head these teams had been leading hands on the ‘old’ workplace factory floor. one of the facilitators, carol, began work in the factory as a process worker soldering components four years earlier. she had been a leading hand for some time before becoming a facilitator in this new unit. as a leading hand, she was still located on the factory floor and still engaged in some process work. as a facilitator, by contrast, carol has shifted from doing the work of the production line to textualising work that is more discourse-focused. carol is responsible for organising teams in the main manufacturing plant of the company. she recognises that her work is involved with the formidable process of ‘changing workplace culture’ (interview: carol, team facilitator). she explains how she goes about trying to accomplish this cultural change using ‘tools and techniques’ including ‘problem solving plus’ and ‘station control’, both of which are highly structured, step-by-step procedures designed to lead to predictable production improvements. working in teams the teams that have been set up to use these tools and techniques are cross-functional teams made up of between eight and 12 employees. they meet for one hour every week either at the beginning or end of a shift. each member of a particular team works in a different area of the manufacturing process, and the team may include people from different hierarchical levels of the workplace. the key focus is efficient production: improving and streamlining the ‘doing’ of the work. the pathway to this improved and t a l k a n d t e x t s 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s more efficient ‘doing’ is deemed to be located within the successful ‘workings’ of teams. training for teams, that is, how to be a(n effective) team member; how to work (effectively) in a team; how to participate (effectively) in team meetings and so on, has been a focus for training at arturo. the training is part of the textualising workplace and the training itself, as well as the focus of the training, is discursive work. production-line workers are expected to have command over a variety of texts and talk. they have to be able to describe, explain, report on, argue, problem-solve, negotiate and generally discuss not only what is involved at their own work station but they are also expected to competently engage in talk about other parts of the production process that may or may not be closely related to their own. central to these practices is the expectation that these team members will take the floor (edelsky 1993), in particular through offering ideas and solutions to problems. the positioning of workers as experts or knowledge workers (drucker 1993) who have ideas and solutions to offer, means that the ensuing social relationships they are expected to develop are in contrast to more traditional ones where they merely respond to directives. this talk (and it is predominantly talk) usually occurs in and around the team meetings. from doing work to talk and texts as the data presented below aim to illustrate, this engagement is evident in the discursive strategies that team members enact in front of one another. the interactions discussed here involve production-line operators and carol, the team facilitator. the team talk implicates further and related activities: there are tasks to be completed in between meetings, documents to be drafted and re-edited, and resources to be tracked down for consideration or inclusion, as well as, of course, carrying out regular production-line work. the majority of the meetings i observed and taped, were facilitated by carol, and were dominated by the psp (problem solving plus) procedures. meetings often opened with carol prompting reflection on the last meeting together with an outline of a clear direction and task(s) for that day’s meeting. tools and techniques like psp provide a procedure and a structure for meetings, but they are also important in standardising an approach to finding and fixing problems. developing and learning a documented, common and collaborative approach is understood as a way of being pro-active, of minimising reactive and crisis behaviours, and as a way of standardising future procedures. t a l k a n d t e x t s s c h e e r e s 11 team meeting 1: missing components in the extract below carol plays a principal role in making the meeting ‘work’. the team in this example is focusing on a particular missing component and they have spent the last two meetings talking about the ‘problem’ (describing, reporting and explaining) and translating the talk into a written text called a ‘problem statement’. now carol (c) introduces the next step, the writing of the ‘target statement’ (discussing and negotiating) as the current task. she encourages participation, in particular she works to elicit responses. the target statement should be composed by the workers as an outline of what they had previously agreed was a problem, then include suggested ways of ‘fixing’ the problem. at this meeting there are six workers/team members (tms) present, plus their team leader (who does not speak) and the facilitator. extract 1 c we’re going to go on with the psp. you have the tally sheets. now the psp, we follow the psp. we’ve written our problem statements and now we’re about to write our target statements and then we’re up to stage two. [5] okay? so, what should a target statement have? it says there the target statement is a written description of the results that you expect to achieve. yeah. we wrote last week, the week before last, what the problem is. from there what do we want to achieve, what’s our goal? okay? the target statement must be specific and the target statement describes the following. number one, what is it that you are going to achieve? so when we look at what we want to achieve, what did we have? tm1 [mumbles an inaudible response] c okay, so we’re getting on average four missing components per week. are you gonna be happy if you get three? tm2 yeah. c ya, is that your ultimate aim? would you like to get three or would you like to get two or one or zero? [many speak at once with answers] tm3 zero would be the best [laughter from team members] carol sets the agenda, and the team members wait for and expect her to control the work of the meeting. carol’s talk consists of a series of statements about what ‘we’ have done and what ‘we’ now need to do, interspersed with questions encouraging input from the team members. in this sense, carol’s talk enacts complex social relations that are (re)negotiated here. carol’s task, then, is to produce new kinds of talk, talk that shifts interpersonally from following orders to offering knowledge, expertise and t a l k a n d t e x t s 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s services. through these kinds of elicitations she is enacting and teaching new ways of being a worker. however, there are struggles evident here. one struggle is concerned with moving from the factory floor discourses to the meeting room discourses. the meeting opens with and foregrounds meeting room psp procedures. this discourse is aligned with the texts on the table: tally sheets with production figures and numbers of faulty machines; copies of the previously written problem statements; and definitions and models of target statements. there is a large chart of the steps of psp held up by carol from time to time to reinforce the standard procedure and remind people what point ‘we’ are at. carol is the one who clearly engages in the psp talk. it is only when she moves away from ‘problem statements’, and ‘target statements’, to ‘goal’(s) and achievements, and then even closer to the factory floor with the concrete ‘missing components’ that others join in the talk. in her attempt to involve the others, carol moves from the reflective language about this work (‘problem statements’, ‘target statements’) to language closer to the process work and the language accompanying the actions of day to day process work. another struggle around social relationships is played out in this team meeting and others like it. one reading of the excerpt above could be that carol dominates the meeting. this is evidenced by her talk-time, her statements and her questions aimed at getting people to learn and participate in the meeting-work. the general knowledge that carol now has the title ‘facilitator’, a non-factory floor position, may contribute to the view that she is the one who has a position of power here. however, there are complexities silenced by such a reading. carol’s shifts from ‘we’ to ‘you’ throughout the excerpt, and then using only ‘you’ once some kind of response is forthcoming from her ‘audience,’ demonstrates shifts in roles and relationships. the ‘we’ used in the meeting room draws the process workers into this new work as new kinds of workers – ones who, for example, devise and write problem statements and target statements. carol’s pedagogic self is moving these employees from the comfort zones of their production-line selves to the more uncomfortable team meeting selves. team meeting 2: incorrect light towers the second team meeting discussed here presents a different team and a different quality problem to solve. this team is concerned with the number of machines that proceed along the production-line with incorrect light towers. each type of gaming machine has a specific configuration of flashing lights called a light tower, but there is an ongoing problem matching the right light tower with its particular type of machine. t a l k a n d t e x t s s c h e e r e s 13 in this extract carol (c) again takes the first long turn to begin the discussion with six team members, only two of whom speak during this extract (tm 1-2). this team is further advanced in their project than is the team in team meeting 1. they have written out problem statements and target statements; they have visited the light tower assembly part of the production-line; and they have presented some of their research findings in written and diagrammatic forms. notably carol has done much of the written work translating comments from members of the team into written texts on the whiteboard and then on appropriate forms. they are now talking about possible ways of implementing solutions extract 2 c i need light towers now. now i need to find out what kind of light towers. yeah? then they can start thinking what parts do they need for those light towers, where do those parts come from for those light towers. start ordering. yeah? what we’ll do is we’ll set off like a, er, checklist of reminders or whatever for the person making the light towers. then we still need to look at, well if she hasn’t got the parts for the light tower … fill out an nci [non-compliance] tag. make sure nci tags are available there. make sure she knows how to fill out an nci tag and understands how to use them. [2] mmm? tm1 yep. tm2 ah another thing er in this part in comments c mmm. tm2 what about if they put one more thing [inaudible] no? they put er er every light tower what part number? if they put maybe we need er 40 part number that’s it? c that’s it. tm2 so we put for example light tower the number c yeah. tm2 don’t need to write everything about what kind of part [inaudible two or three words] the part number and the quantity. c yeah yeah yeah yeah tm2 that’s it? c yeah. tm1 yeah. tm2 singapore is coming 120. okay i need 80 part number of this ah 40 of this. tm1 yeah. tm2 and that’s it? tm1 yeah. c mmm. tm1 yeah. t a l k a n d t e x t s 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s tm2 and that’s it. it is difficult for me to say [ = write in words] that c section four comments. yes comments. tm2 i’ve got the number that’s it. carol’s introductory turn again sets the agenda. she outlines what the team has already achieved and what work is next for the team. the extract focuses on developing a written checklist for the operators working on assembling the light towers, so that there is more chance of the right ones being attached to the right machines. the second task carol mentions will be to make sure the nci (non-compliance) tags that need to be attached to the machine when a fault or missing component is detected, are available, understood and easy to fill in. following carol’s turn, two of the team members immediately take up speaking positions agreeing with carol (tm1) and offering suggestions (tm2). apart from the opening turn, carol does not dominate the talk here. even though the exchanges in the rest of the extract are short ones, it seems that tm2, through his offers and requests for confirmation, has taken on the problem-solving work of meetings, whilst tm1 interacts with one-word affirmative statements that represent his involvement and possibly his support. as in team meeting 1 above, at this team meeting there are statements and questions, but now it is not only carol who asks the questions, and it is not only these team members/production-line workers who are positioned as the doers back on the factory floor. statements in this example begin with carol using ‘i’ as someone on the production-line needing a particular part, thereby perhaps signifying solidarity with the workers, well as reconstructing the context of production. she then moves to the here-and-now work of the meeting room where ‘we’ are going to produce a checklist to be used in the action-at-a-distance on the productionline by others referred to as ‘they’ and ‘she’, the workers who assemble the light towers. these shifts are indicative of the different working identities carol and the team members are embodying. for carol, ‘we’ are discourse workers who are doing textualising work. later in the extract tm2 demonstrates that he is part of this ‘we’ when he says, ‘so we put for example light tower the number’. he is involved in talk and texts that are constructing a standardising procedure to be followed by other workers. tm2 immediately gets down to the business of suggesting what should go in the checklist to be filled in by the light tower assemblers. he is the only one who offers and suggests during this interaction, as he demonstrates his knowledge and expertise around what happens on the factory floor. most of his comments are tagged by the question ‘that’s it?’ as he seeks confirmation from carol and perhaps from fellow workers. then, t a l k a n d t e x t s s c h e e r e s 15 in his final two turns he uses the same words but as statements rather than questions. he positions himself as more assured with ‘i’ve got the number that’s it’. at the same time he is struggling with writing this up in ‘section four comments’. what is particularly notable here is that the textualising work of the meeting room consists of at least two layers. firstly, the psp procedures are talked about and forms are being filled in, for example, tm2 has the final form outlining implementation in front of him and is struggling with ‘in this part, in comments’. secondly, what is being talked about and then written is a checklist that should become an integral ‘component’ of the productionline as operators will be required to write or fill in sections, for example, ‘they put er, er, every light tower what part number …’. thus the new meeting room work is creating new production-line work and both are part of the textualisation of work and of the workplace. the work of teams discussed through the data extracts from team meetings show some of the struggles and positionings going on for workers in their daily work. the discussion focuses on micro-level interactions among production-line workers/team members. the identity-work that is going on in these team meetings is influenced by how teams are understood and viewed by the organisation – its managers and other employees. the history of teams and team meetings at arturo has spanned 6 years so far and a key aspect is the organisation’s commitment to teams and the work of teams. effective teams autonomy, self-management and empowerment are the discourses of the facilitators and their manager. the principal path towards greater selfmanagement by teams is, for adrian, one of the team facilitators, education, – a kind of expertisation of the ordinary worker through knowledging. his expressed belief in the role of training is foregrounded when he states that ‘they need to ... acquire the knowledge and skills that are required ... that’s probably the main thing (interview data: adrian, team facilitator). his manager, adam, states: but a lot of the team discussion . . . depending on who’s leading, and carol has a certain outcome which she would like to achieve, so she’s going to point the team within that direction. (interview data: adam, manager) for this manager, autonomy and authority are based on a bottom-up process, that is, one in which the teams themselves decide on and ‘come in and talk about the issues that go on’. allowing the teams to find their own direction would constitute giving them ‘the authority to work as teams’ and at the moment he sees them as too directed by facilitators like carol. he t a l k a n d t e x t s 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s takes seriously the new work order devolution of authority and breaking down of hierarchical boundaries. implications of identity work for language ß literacy practitioners the term ‘discourse register’ is used by du gay (1996) to define particular, institutionalised ways of talking at work. this concept could be applied to the discourse work that this organisation’s workers are undertaking when they are, for example, making offers and suggestions during team meetings – the particular kind of talk that is expected of the team members and facilitators. however, my understanding of the textualisation of work and the workplace – the offers and suggestions, their relationship to the literacy tasks and practices of psp, and the further relationships with the doing work beyond the meeting room, are complex in that they construct different meanings for the participants as they put at risk their ‘old work’ selves. the factory workers’ hitherto naturalised position of little status and limited expertise is being re-formed as they take up and learn new positions (whether they are complying or resisting). these experiences involve them learning to be knowledge workers and articulating expertise as teams and team members – it is identity-work. in this paper i have posited textualising work and the textualisation of the workplace as a useful way of understanding and deconstructing some new work order participative practices, particularly in relation to one workplace. this is an important understanding for workplace research and pedagogical practices where the new work order’s participative agendas have created a proliferation of training practices and understandings of learning that seem often to be about requiring sets of new skills or learning roles and values through preordained activities and tasks. i am suggesting that textualisation of work and the workplace is primarily about social relations, and that learning the textualising work involves, notably, identitywork. endnote 1 pseudonym references adler, p (2001) market, hierarchy and trust: the knowledge economy and the future of capitalism, organization science, vol 12, no 2, pp 215-234. belfiore, m, defoe, t, folinsbee, s, hunter, j and jackson, n (2004) reading work: literacies in the new workplace, lawrence erlbaum associates, new jersey. t a l k a n d t e x t s s c h e e r e s 17 caldas-coulthard, carmen and iedema, rick (2007 in press) identity trouble: critical discourse contested identities, palgrave, basingstoke. drucker, peter (1993) post-capitalist society, harper, new york. du gay, paul (1996) consumption and identity at work, sage, london. edelsky, carole (1993) who's got the floor? in tannen, d, ed, gender and conversational interaction, oxford university press, oxford, pp 189-227. farrell, lesley (1999) reconstructing sally: narratives and counternarratives around work, education and workplace restructure, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 9, no 1, pp 5-26. fenwick, tara (2004) learning portfolio work: anchored innovation and mobile identity, studies in continuing education, vol 26, no 2, pp 229-245 gee, james hull, glynda and lankshear, colin (1996) the new work order: behind the language of the new capitalism, allen and unwin, sydney. gergen, k (1991) the saturated self, basic books, new york. grey, c and garsten, c (2001) trust control and post-bureaucracy, organization studies, vol 22, no 2, pp 229-250. hall, stuart (1996) who needs identity?, in hall, s and du gay, p, eds, questions of cultural identity, sage, london, pp 1-17. hall, stuart and du gay, paul, eds (1996) questions of cultural identity, sage, london. heckscher, c and donnellon, a (1994) the post-bureaucratic organization: new perspectives on organizational change, sage, thousand oaks, california. iedema, rick (2003) the discourses of post-bureaucratic organization, john benjamins, amsterdam, philadelphia. iedema, rick and scheeres, hermine (2003) from doing work to talking work: renegotiating knowing, doing, and identity, applied linguistics, oxford university press, oxford, england, vol 24, no 3, pp 316-337. jackson, nancy (2000) writing-up people at work: investigations of workplace literacy, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 10, no 1 and 2, pp 5-22. marsick, v and watkins, k (1999) facilitating learning organizations: making learning count, aldershot, hampshire. rhodes, carl, iedema, rick and scheeres, hermine (2007 in press) identity, surveillance and resistance, in pullen, a, beech, n and sims, d, eds, researching identity: concepts and methods, routledge, london, pp 83-99. rose, n (1999) governing the soul: the shaping of the private self, (2nd ed.) free association books, london. rose, n (1996) inventing our selves: psychology, power, and personhood, cambridge university press, cambridge, england. scheeres, hermine and solomon, nicky (2006) the moving subject: shifting work(ers) across and beyond organisational boundaries, in billett, s, fenwick, t and somerville, m, eds, work, subjectivity and t a l k a n d t e x t s 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s learning: understanding leaning through social life, springer, dordrecht, the netherlands. pp 87-103. senge, p (1990) the fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization, doubleday/currency, new york. microsoft word 0705lns151hartleyhs2.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 1 2 0 0 6 5 researching literacy and numeracy costs and benefits: what is possible1 robyn hartley and jackie horne abstract assessing the social and economic benefits of investing in adult literacy and numeracy and the costs of poor adult literacy and numeracy, is largely uncharted territory in australia. some interest was evident in the late 1980s leading up to international literacy year, 1990 (for example, miltenyi 1989, singh 1989, hartley 1989); however, there has been little work done in the area since then, with the exception of recent studies concerned with financial literacy costs and benefits (commonwealth bank foundation 2005). assessing the benefits (returns) of workplace training in general has received some attention (for example moy and mcdonald 2000), although the role of literacy and numeracy is often implied rather than explored in any detail. in contrast, there is a considerable body of relevant research emanating from the united states, canada, the united kingdom and some european countries. the release of data from the international adult literacy survey (ials) in the 1990s contributed to some of this research, as did policy developments for example, in the united kingdom. the much greater use of ials data in some other countries compared with australia, seems to be related to a combination of factors in the overall policy and research environment for adult literacy and numeracy in each country. mapping the costs and benefits while there is a very large body of literature linking related measures such as years of schooling or qualifications levels with a whole range of social and economic outcomes, it should be borne in mind that research that has examined the link between literacy and numeracy levels and economic and social outcomes, is still relatively new. contrary to prior expectations, however, the literature on frameworks and methodologies for estimating the costs associated with poor literacy, and the benefits of improving literacy is relatively wide and rich. for example, hartley and horne (2006) discuss the frameworks identified and the methodologies used in some detail, and at the same time they present information about a wide range of benefits and costs across quite diverse areas. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in this paper, we first briefly outline factors that need to be considered in any framework for exploring social and economic benefits and costs, and summarise the main methodologies used. we then review the state of play, including relevant australian research, in health literacy, consumer and financial literacy, and literacy and numeracy and small business. these areas were selected as worthy of follow up in australia because of the robustness of international research, the range of methodologies available and a preliminary assessment of interest and potential for further development in australia. we also include brief comments on family literacy research and research linking poor literacy and crime. the project this paper is based on findings from a recent project carried out by the australian council for adult literacy (acal) with funding from the commonwealth government through the adult literacy national project (http://literacynet.dest.gov.au/). the research drawn on here (hartley and horne 2006, hereafter referred to as the report) explored the frameworks and methodologies available for determining and measuring the benefits of improving adult literacy and numeracy and the costs of poor literacy and numeracy across what might be called various life domains. this was done through a literature review. the focus was on social domains such as health literacy, financial literacy and family literacy rather than traditional economic areas, although the latter literature was briefly reviewed. consultations were then undertaken to explore in a preliminary way, the capacity and interest within australia to move ahead with research into costs and benefits, and to identify the key issues that would need to be addressed in order to arrive at australian estimates of benefits and costs. this work was intended to lay the ground-work for further research, however this has so far not eventuated. reflecting the content of the literature, the report does not explore in any detail the benefits and costs associated with adult numeracy (hartley and horne 2006). we acknowledge that while literacy and numeracy are frequently linked in the literature, poor numeracy has a different overall set of consequences to poor literacy, although some may be similar. nevertheless, the general frameworks identified and some of the representative methodologies which have been used to assess the benefits and costs of literacy, together with some of the general issues which emerged from the literature, are likely to be relevant and useful for exploring costs and benefits associated with numeracy. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s h a r t l e y a n d h o r n e 7 why research benefits and costs? why focus on researching benefits and costs of literacy and numeracy? what are the potential benefits of doing so? first, more reliable and useful information about individual, social and economic costs and benefits across various ‘domains’ of life and across the life span of individuals provides valuable information for literacy and numeracy policy development. such information also both encourages and provides a basis for more robust evaluations of existing programs. second, recent research highlights the importance of pursuing a broad and integrated approach to language, literacy and numeracy policy (beddie 2004, wickert 2004). an increasingly diverse body of research shows that poor literacy and numeracy skills can have a pervasive impact on individuals (on their identity, health, family life and capacity to fully participate, socially and economically) and on communities, affecting the maintenance and growth of social capital. rapid changes in information and other technologies are likely to continue to extend the range of literacies we need to function fully in society (see for example the review by lonsdale and mccurry 2004). in addition, individuals are increasingly being expected to self-manage areas of their lives which require relatively high levels of literacy and numeracy. negotiating individual employment contracts, making decisions about retirement income and managing chronic health conditions are just a few examples in the australian context. literacy is thus a social as well as an economic issue, a matter for communities as well as for governments and educational policy makers. in light of this, there is a strong case for a much wider understanding of the social and economic benefits of improving literacy and numeracy and the costs of poor literacy and numeracy across different areas of life. in the broader arena, better community understanding has the potential for more diverse and widespread support for an increased allocation of resources for adult literacy and numeracy, and for increased government and private investment in adult literacy and numeracy. third, we would argue that more reliable information about a broad range of social and economic benefits and costs associated with adult literacy and numeracy would help to ensure that data from the adult literacy and lifeskills survey (alls), taking place in australia in 2007, is put to the best strategic use. in relation to numeracy, a considerable amount of international effort, including input from australia, went into developing an appropriate framework for directly measuring numeracy. however, the strategic use of the data needs to be encouraged and promoted amongst government departments, funding bodies, researchers, employers, teachers, community and other agencies. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s it is also the case, however, that identifying benefits and costs does not necessarily tell us how to go about reducing costs and enhancing benefits, except in the broadest terms. that is another issue, requiring cooperation among governments, literacy and numeracy practitioners, learners, researchers in diverse social areas, communities and other interested parties, working together and across areas where literacy has an impact. measuring costs and benefits at the outset, it needs to be said that there are undeniable challenges in assessing and measuring benefits and costs associated with adult literacy and numeracy. the impacts (and therefore the costs and benefits) of multiple literacies are complex, cumulative, and interactive. measurement of costs and benefits is rarely straightforward. this is particularly the case given that researchers from different backgrounds will approach the issue from a range of perspectives. it is therefore useful to refer to a number of measurement issues and concepts. economists typically approach the valuation of costs and benefits with their ideal standard of measuring everything in monetary terms. this allows them to undertake cost benefit analyses; that is, to compare the balance of costs and benefits over time, and to calculate a rate of return on an investment in a particular intervention, program or policy. often, both the economic return (based on output or income) and the social return will be calculated. the social return has a wider base than the economic return and includes the monetary valuation of the costs and benefits to individuals, taxpayers and society at large. it goes without saying that it is not always possible to value costs and benefits in monetary terms, especially in the fields of education and health. depending on the research question and the extent of available data and techniques, together with the availability of funding for collecting new data on costs and benefits, the unit of measurement may be in monetary terms, for example the costs of health care. but more frequently, costs and benefits will be measured in another unit, for example rates of hospitalisation or smoking rates. therefore, in exploring benefits of higher levels of literacy or the costs of poor literacy, a variety of approaches and estimation techniques have been used. there are, of course, a whole host of issues to consider when it comes to reliably measuring costs and benefits and undertaking statistical analysis. in general, it is worth highlighting the need to control for other variables that may impact on the accurate measurement of the costs of poor literacy and numeracy and the benefits of improving them, as many socio-economic factors interact with literacy and outcomes of interest such as health. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s h a r t l e y a n d h o r n e 9 general frameworks the most comprehensive available frameworks for investigating benefits and costs are concerned with adult learning, rather than with literacy per se. however, we would argue that they are useful for the concepts used, the types of research they have led to and the issues they raise. overall, they indicate the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach to determining and measuring benefits and costs and the need to integrate so-called human capital and social capital approaches. literacy and social capital is a burgeoning area of interest; however, the present focus is predominantly on social capital outcomes of literacy learning, rather than on measuring the social capital benefits and costs associated with literacy. the frameworks reviewed suggest that attempts to measure the benefits and costs of literacy and numeracy need to consider a number of factors. while some may seem obvious, they are not always reflected in the relevant literature. many of the factors listed below are drawn from the work of the centre for research into the wider benefits of learning in the uk (see particularly schuller, bynner, green, blackwell, hammond, preston and gough 2001 and schuller, preston, hammond, brassettgrundyand bynner 2004). • benefits are both ‘transforming’ and ‘sustaining’. the terms refer to the fact that learning (including literacy learning) may change people’s lives in noticeable and measurable ways but the benefit may also be that learning supports, maintains and ensures that people and communities are able to keep being effective in doing what they do. • benefits are both individual and collective, affecting individual lives and interactions with others at all levels, as well as impacting on society as a whole. sustaining and transforming benefits are possible at both an individual and collective level. • benefits are direct and indirect. indirect benefits are often mediated by factors such as attitudes, values, self-esteem and confidence. in this way, literacy learning and proficiency are linked to areas such as health, family and social capital. for example, improved literacy may directly benefit the understanding of medical instructions and management of one’s health, and indirectly lead to increased confidence in one’s abilities and ultimately to increased psychological health. • benefits are cumulative; they build on previous experience. • benefits can be lost or reduced without continued practice; this relates back to the sustaining nature of literacy and numeracy benefits. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s • benefits are dynamic; benefits gained in one domain impact on functioning in other domains, for example there is evidence to suggest that financial literacy impacts on health. • outcomes of learning, and this includes literacy, may be perceived (by the learner and/or others) as negative, at least in the short term. an example is the change in power balance in a relationship which may occur when a female partner learns new skills. this point raises questions beyond the scope of the review. however, it reminds us that what constitutes a benefit or a cost may be debatable and sometimes depends on one’s point of view. • learning (and literacy) is a collective experience which has implications for personal and social identity. • benefits (and costs) are not ‘all or nothing’. the ‘degree’ of benefit or cost will be affected by other and multiple factors, including the nature of initial and later (adult) learning. as far as the impacts of learning on well-being, mental health and effective coping are concerned, the wider benefits are maximised when ‘pedagogy, curriculum, student mix and institutional context match the strengths, interests and needs of learners’ (schuller et al 2004, p37). • benefits and costs may vary for different groups of people. while some attention has been paid to differential benefits for example for older people, the question of whether and how benefits and costs vary, for example, across the life cycle and for women and men, needs to be included in the overall picture of benefits and costs. methodologies a number of studies have used large datasets to measure the economic and social benefits of improving literacy skills or the costs of poor literacy to individuals and/or the economy and society. this includes the international adult literacy survey (ials) dataset and longitudinal cohort studies. the ials data has been used to examine the link between literacy and a number of economic variables, including labour market outcomes, earnings and the returns to different levels of education, and immigrant earnings. analysis of ials data (williams 1999, quoted in hagston 2002, desjardins 2004) has also shown that receipt of welfare benefits, health, criminal activity, and community participation are linked with literacy skills and educational achievement. health has been a particularly fruitful area of investigation. although health outcomes were not directly measured in the ials, analysis of ials findings has shown that high levels of literacy are associated with better health outcomes, for example, higher life expectancy and healthier habits and lifestyles (oecd and statistics canada 2000). similarly, roberts and fawcett’s (1998) analysis of canadian ials data r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s h a r t l e y a n d h o r n e 11 found that people with lower literacy levels were more likely to be at higher health risk, with an increased effect on senior citizens. in australia, chiswick, lee and miller (2003) used data from the ials to examine the effects on labour market outcomes of literacy, numeracy and schooling. it was found that approximately half of the total effect of schooling on labour force participation and on unemployment could be attributed to literacy and numeracy skills. most recently, data from the ials was used by coulombe, tremblay and marchand (2004) to identify a significant relationship between investments in human capital and a country's subsequent economic growth and labour productivity. the study is of particular interest because it was the first to identify a clear and significant association between a country’s investment in human capital and its economic growth, and secondly, because it used a direct measure of skills, that is literacy levels, as measured by the ials, to identify this link. previous studies which focused on educational qualifications had failed to prove a link between human capital and economic growth. coulombe et al (2004) concluded that a rise of one percent in a country’s literacy score relative to the international average is associated with an eventual 2.5 percent relative rise in labour productivity and a 1.5 percent increase in gdp per head. in the uk, two longitudinal cohort studies, the national child development study which began in 1958 and the 1970 british cohort study, have been well used data sources for measuring non-economic and economic costs of poor literacy and numeracy, and the benefits to individuals and society of improving literacy and numeracy. this is no doubt because they include rich data on both economic and social outcomes. a representative study, which measured both the economic and noneconomic impacts of improving adult literacy and numeracy skills, is that of bynner, mcintosh, vignoles, dearden, reed and van reenen (2001). using data from the national child development study and the british cohort study, together with data from the uk family expenditure survey and family resources surveys, and using statistical modelling techniques, they found that individuals who increase their literacy and numeracy levels: • improve their chances in the labour market, moving up the occupational status scale and resisting unemployment; • suffer less from poor physical and mental health; • are less likely to have children experiencing difficulty at school; • are more likely to be active citizens, as shown by voting behaviour and expressing interest in politics, and • are more liberal and less discriminatory in their attitudes. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s these effects persist after controlling for earlier family circumstances and educational achievement. labour market effects were found to be stronger for the younger british cohort study cohort and the health and citizenship effects stronger for the older national child development study cohort. within australia, the impact of low school achievement in literacy and numeracy on unemployment has been measured using the longitudinal survey of australian youth (lsay) dataset. marks and fleming (1998) found that low school achievement in literacy and numeracy was consistently associated with youth unemployment, with effects continuing through to the age of 33. similarly, gleeson (2005) used the lsay dataset to examine the economic returns to training for adults with low levels of literacy and numeracy. the uk use of longitudinal cohort studies, especially studies which include a range of social and economic indicators, points to the possible use of similar longitudinal study data in australia. this potential was explored in the consultations for the acal project. health literacy some useful frameworks for examining health literacy exist. one is nutbeam’s (1999) framework which describes functional, interactive and critical health literacy, and places health literacy in the broader arena of health promotion. functional health literacy is broadly defined as the ability to read and comprehend medical information and instructions. interactive health literacy refers to the development of personal skills that improve the capacity to act independently and improve both motivation and self confidence to act on advice received; critical health literacy refers to personal and community empowerment to act on the social and economic determinants of health. a considerable amount of work on health literacy benefits and costs has been carried out and some comprehensive summaries and discussions of research exist (for example, rootman and ronson 2003, berkman, dewalt, pignone, sheridan, lohr, lux, sutton, swinson and bonito 2004, shohet 2004). however, while most studies to date have investigated either the benefits or costs of different levels of functional literacy from a medical perspective, there is growing recognition of the need to go beyond functional literacy. higher levels of health literacy have been linked to knowledge and understanding of such things as mammography, cervical cancer screening, emergency department discharge instructions, smoking, contraception, hiv, asthma, and post-operative care. representative studies have found associations between lower literacy levels and for example, higher risk of hospitalisation, not having had a pap smear or mammogram in the previous two years, not having a flu injection, and higher rates of depression in r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s h a r t l e y a n d h o r n e 13 various populations (williams, parker, baker, parikh, pitkin, coates and nurss 1995, berkman et al 2004). most attention has been paid to literacy and aspects of physical health or specific health issues such as asthma or diabetes, although the literature does include studies of ‘mental health literacy’ and ‘depression literacy’, broadly defined as knowledge, understanding and beliefs about mental health. the extent to which findings can be generalised across different populations and different environments needs further investigation. some studies (for example, gillis and quigley 2004) suggest that there are particular costs of poor health literacy in a rural environment. tools for assessing functional health literacy are available and have been relatively widely used. the most well-known are the rapid estimate of adult literacy in medicine (realm), test of functional health literacy in adults (tohfla) or s-tohfla (shortened version of tohfla), and the wide range achievement test (wrat). however they have some limitations and they have not yet been validated in a variety of cultural and social contexts. there are other important issues with the use of such tests, such as the ways in which they are administered and their potential negative impacts on people’s self-esteem. some of the identified impacts of poor literacy are based on the knowledge and behaviour of individuals in the research sample rather than actual health outcomes. only one study sought a monetary measurement of the costs of poor health literacy and found no association between health care costs and literacy. we did not identify studies to date which have valued the benefits of improving health literacy or of conducting a costbenefit analysis of investing in health literacy. the cost of studies is an important consideration. they are generally not cheap, especially studies which involve face-to-face interviews to measure individuals’ literacy levels and to collect data on the outcome in question. in australia, health literacy has not received the same attention as in some other countries. nevertheless, there is evidence of increasing interest from some medical researchers, for example buchbinder, hall, grant, mylvaganam and patrick (2001) have investigated the readability of patient information used by australian rheumatologists; and griffin, mckenna and tooth (2003) have examined written health education material in the area of occupational therapy. while health literacy is being recognised as a factor which pre-disposes people to participate in screening programs, most existing research focuses on functional health literacy. however, there are also attempts to explore issues beyond functional literacy, to view communication between health professionals and patients more broadly, to take account of patients’ understandings, expectations, beliefs and r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s anticipations about the interaction, and to explore the ‘cultural competencies’ of those involved (see, for example, www.ahrq.gov/browse/hlitix.htm#literacy). financial literacy of the reports that have formally defined financial literacy, jacob, hudson and bush (2000:8) refer to: personal financial knowledge and skills … financial literacy involves the ability to understand financial terms and concepts and to translate that knowledge skillfully into behaviour … literacy implies knowledge of the terms, practices, laws, rights, social norms, and attitudes needed to understand and perform … vital financial tasks. it also includes the fact that being able to read and apply basic math skills is essential to making wise financial choices. schagen’s (1997) uk report for the national foundation for education research (nfer) defines financial literacy as ‘the ability to make informed judgements and to take effective decisions regarding the use and management of money’ (18). nevertheless, problems of definition, and of a well established framework for financial literacy, remain. some argue that financial literacy should be seen as an essential life skill. further, the place of numeracy in relation to financial literacy is not well defined; although most definitions incorporate elements of numeracy. various studies from the us have measured the benefits of improved levels of adult financial literacy gained through work-based financial education programs or through high school-based programs. a few studies have extended this to look at the return on investment to employers of investing in work-based financial literacy programs (for example, garman 1998). research relating to costs and benefits focuses substantially on those who are employed; few studies explore in detail costs and benefits of financial literacy for unemployed people. the most robust approaches to measuring the benefits of investing in financial education include the utilisation of pre and post-test designs, together with the use of control groups who do not receive financial education. important measurement issues include: accounting for the interaction between financial literacy and low income (for example, lack of income/ease of budgeting, or forcing people to choose the more expensive payment option for electricity), as well as the influence of attitudinal, psychological and ‘lifestyle’ factors, and different life stages. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s h a r t l e y a n d h o r n e 15 areas where current research is limited include the relationship among the financial literacy levels of employees and general literacy and numeracy skills, their impact on employees and employers, and the impact of financial literacy levels on physical and mental health. in australia, research for the anz bank (roy morgan research 2003) and for the commonwealth bank (commonwealth bank foundation 2005) surveyed literacy levels within the population. two reports include estimates of costs of poor financial literacy. the consumer and financial literacy taskforce (commonwealth of australia 2004) modelled the effects of ‘bad’ financial decision making over the course of a person’s life. the commonwealth bank foundation’s (2005) study modeled the effects of improving financial literacy levels on individuals and the economy. the increase modeled was a relatively modest target, that is improving the scores of the ten percent of the population with the lowest levels of financial literacy on the financial literacy questionnaire, over a period of ten years. it was estimated that this would increase the average annual income of people with the lowest ten percent of scores by $3,204, increase australia’s gdp by $6 billion and create 16,000 new jobs. it was also estimated that improving the financial literacy of this group would reduce the incidence of persistent sleeping difficulty amongst the australian population by two percent and the incidence of regular smoking by two percent. business, employers and employees there is a sizeable literature that demonstrates the positive returns to employers of investing in workforce training generally (that is improvements in firm productivity and in some cases higher levels of innovation and/or better financial performance); however studies that focus on costs and benefits of literacy and numeracy are far fewer. studies (for example, spilsbury cited in ananiadou, jenkins and wolf 2003) suggest that it is the larger companies that are making the most investment in work-based training in this area. further, uk studies suggest that most small business employers are largely unaware of poor literacy and numeracy skills (atkins and marchant 2004). these findings complement earlier australian research (long 1990). we would suggest, however, that small business, which includes self-employed individuals, is an area where costs and benefits of literacy and numeracy are very important. while there is an obvious link between financial literacy and small business, the importance of broad literacy and numeracy skills is equally important. we did not identify any directly relevant studies examining costs and benefits of literacy and numeracy to small business (employers and employees). however, some of the methodologies used in examining larger enterprises are likely to be useful, although our consultations suggested that the small business sector differs in significant ways from larger enterprises. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s these differences need to be taken account of in any research. flexible and multiple approaches are likely to be most useful. methodologies used to measure the benefits of improving literacy and numeracy amongst the workforce have typically focused on cost savings and/or productivity gains to the company, although some studies looked more widely and included employee focused outcomes such as levels of promotion and rates of absenteeism. the issues of ideal methodologies based on large datasets (panel data is the most ideal) versus achievable methodologies based on availability of data, and the costs of new data collection are important considerations. relatively few studies include measures of factors that impact directly on employees, and indirectly influence company profits, that is through employees’ job satisfaction, internal promotion, absenteeism, access and take-up of further training and education. in australia, while workplace education and the skills of workers has received considerable attention, the most directly relevant study is that by pearson (1996). he found that language and literacy training was considered to have had a positive effect on five aspects of the workplace: direct cost savings, access to and acceptability of further training, participation in teams and meeting, promotion and job flexibility, and the value of training (which included issues such as worker morale, confidence to communicate, etc.). the study included respondents’ quantitative estimate of savings to their companies based on the positive impacts identified. family literacy to date, there have been no research studies in australia that have measured the costs of poor family literacy, although there are a fairly large number of studies which have measured the benefits to adults and/or children from participating in family learning programs. many of the measures used to assess benefits have focused on outcomes such as changes in confidence and attitudes towards literacy and learning by adults and children, or have focused on reading gains (for example, brooks, gorman, harman, hutchison, kinder, moor and wilkin 1997). the few studies that have managed to measure a wider range of benefits have tracked parents and/or children over time, as many of the benefits of family literacy, such as educational and employment gains for adults and educational and developmental gains for children, can only be adequately measured once time has passed. longitudinal cohort studies are relatively expensive and require established family literacy programs to be in place so that a sufficient number of participants can be identified and followed-up. these types of programs do not generally exist within australia. ideally, the adults and children who had participated in family literacy would be compared against r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s h a r t l e y a n d h o r n e 17 a control group who had not. this would further increase the costs of the research. crime most studies related to crime have focused on education levels and crime, rather than on literacy and numeracy per se. the basic relationships between poor education and crime, and between learning and crime reduction, are quite strong as indicated in a number of studies that show benefits from prison education programs. the few studies reviewed (hull, forrester, brown, jobe and mcmullen 2000, feinstein 2002, proliteracy america 2003) which have focused on literacy and numeracy are promising and show the benefits of decreased recidivism and individual costs, such as a greater likelihood of being picked up repeatedly by police. there are, nevertheless, inherent difficulties in investigating the relationship between literacy and numeracy and crime, because of the complexity of the individual, social and cultural factors that contribute to crime and the diversity of illegal activities subsumed under the term ‘crime’. all of these factors make the measurement of benefits and costs difficult. further, there is an unknown amount of ‘hidden crime’ that is rarely taken account of in studies. data to adequately assess benefits and costs are rarely available. taking measurement of costs and benefits forward in australia our study concluded that there is sufficient interest and a small research base in australia for obtaining better information about social and economic costs and benefits in relation to health literacy, financial literacy, and literacy and numeracy and small business. there is quite a strong interest in financial literacy from the commonwealth government and from financial institutions. health literacy does not, at present, have any obvious champions but some researchers are working in the area. overseas research has established the link between health literacy and improved health outcomes, and the general level of government and community interest could change in light of ongoing concerns about rising health care costs. as we suggest above, there is a strong case to be made for the importance of literacy and numeracy in relation to small business, and there is some evidence of interest in the area. the consultations for the project clearly suggested that developing useful research depends on a number of things. firstly, there is a need to convince government and other research funding bodies that the issue of adult literacy and numeracy costs and benefits is an important individual, community and national issue. secondly, getting commitment from researchers and others in each of the three selected areas is essential. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s thirdly, realistic and viable means of taking research forward through partnerships between the adult literacy and numeracy fields, people working in the three sectors, and researchers with particular expertise in modelling and longitudinal study research must be found. to take forward a research agenda, it is suggested that: • small, collaborative, cross-discipline working groups are established to obtain agreement on priorities and appropriate methodologies and to jointly seek funding for further research; • the possibility of ‘buying in’ to existing australian longitudinal studies is further explored in order to measure the range of social and economic costs associated with literacy and numeracy; • further targeted consultations are undertaken to reach a wider range of people in regard to health literacy, financial literacy and literacy and small business; • the diverse research findings in the report, and the possibilities shown by the overseas research, are widely disseminated; • steps are taken to ensure the best strategic use of information from the forthcoming adult literacy and lifeskills survey (alls), for example, carefully considering the scope of the sample and the demographic information collected; wide promotion of the potential uses of the alls dataset; exploring the possibility of using the monash model of the australia economy in conjunction with the alls to model costs and benefits; and planning for a separate analysis of numeracy data from the alls. more broadly, collaboration across sectors and research partnerships is crucial to take forward the assessment and measurement of social and economic costs and benefits associated with literacy and numeracy. there is considerable scope for a range of small and larger research undertakings in health literacy, financial literacy, and literacy and numeracy and small business the uncharted nature of research into benefits and costs associated with multiple literacies in australia, together with what has been learnt from the diverse overseas literature, leaves the way open for some focused initiatives which could ultimately contribute to a broader understanding of the social and economic costs and benefits of literacy and numeracy and to strong policy development. endnote 1 this article is based on a paper prepared for ‘connecting voices: practitioners, researchers and learners’, adults learning mathematics r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s h a r t l e y a n d h o r n e 19 (alm) 12 conference sponsored by alm and the australian council for adult literacy, melbourne, july 4-7, 2005. references ananiadou, k, jenkins, a and wolf, a (2003) the benefits to employers of raising workforce basic skills levels: a review of the literature, 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with finance, national foundation for education research, london. schuller, t bynner, j green, a blackwell, l hammond, c preston, j and gough, m (2001) modelling and measuring the wider benefits of learning: a synthesis, institute of education, university of london. r e s e a r c h i n g c o s t s a n d b e n e f i t s 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s schuller, t, preston, j, hammond, c, brassett-grundy, a and bynner, j (2004) the benefits of learning: the impact of education on health, family life and social capital, routledge falmer, london. shohet, l (2004) health and literacy: perspectives, literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol 13, no1, pp 65-83. singh, s (1989) the hidden costs of illiteracy, business review weekly, june, p. 72-74. wickert, r (2004) everyone’s responsibility: towards meeting the adult language, literacy and numeracy needs of a modern australia. retrieved from www.dest.gov.au/literacynet/ williams, m, parker, r, baker d, parikh, n, pitkin, k, coates, w and nurss, j (1995) inadequate functional health literacy among patients at two public hospitals, journal of the american medical association, vol 274, pp 1677-1682. microsoft word 0705lns151martin.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 1 2 0 0 6 45 flexible mathematical understanding in an ironworking apprenticeship classroom lyndon martin, lionel lacroix and lynda fownes abstract the relationship between learning and context has long been an issue of interest and concern in the field of adult mathematics education. in particular, the questions of whether and how learning can be transferred from one context to another, remains a focus of researchers (lave 1988, lerman 1999, evans 2000, carraher and scheliemann 2002). in this paper we look at the mathematical understanding of a group of apprentice ironworkers working on a construction task, and explore the flexible nature of their understanding. we consider the ways in which they are able to use quite formal mathematical ideas and operations and make sense of these within the specific context of their trade. then we discuss how this process is more than one of simple transfer. mathematical understanding in workplace training in workplace training, mathematical concepts are generally engaged with within a ‘task context’ (wedege 2002:70), where the production of a performative solution is required; for example, that of producing a cut length of pipe to meet given specifications. to be able to learn and apply appropriate mathematics and perform the relevant calculations is something of a secondary aim. what matters in the workplace is the resultant product of the mathematics. even in cases where mathematical ideas are introduced without the context of a particular task, they are usually framed in terms of the specific trade, for example; a worksheet might be titled ‘mathematics for plumbers’ and include mathematical ideas specifically relevant to plumbing. this is in contrast to the purpose of mathematical problem-solving as posed in the school classroom. here, the focus is more likely to be the development of mathematical concepts, with the problem merely providing a context for this to occur (see wedege 2002). further, the solution to the problem would likely be a calculated answer, rather than an artefact; for example, a piece of pipe suitable for the task in hand. as nunes, schliemann and carraher (1993:74) note ‘school mathematics is learned mostly as written mathematics. representations of the situation are abandoned as much as possible for the sake of generality. in consequence, mathematical f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g 46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s relations represented in school mathematics have poor ties with problem situations’. mathematics in the workplace-training situation is generally engaged with as an integral part of the practices and demands of a specific trade. as a result, what it means to understand and use mathematics becomes more complex in this environment. thus, in workplace training, it is insufficient to merely talk about the understanding of a particular mathematical concept without considering how such understanding is appropriate to and useable for real workplace tasks. in workplace training there are situated forms of mathematical understandings at play, which are a consequence of the need for mathematics to serve a purpose, to complete a task, or to produce a physical output. pozzi, noss and hoyles (1998:117), in their study of the use of mathematics by nurses, stated that ‘from our point of view as researchers, the question is not: “do these nurses understand sufficient mathematics?” but rather “how do they make sense of the ways a tool represents a patient’s state or outputs the correct data?” ’. in a similar way, our question becomes ‘how does their mathematical understanding enable apprentice ironworkers to complete a specific task?’ nunes, schliemann and carraher (1993), in considering the approaches to a task by apprentice and master carpenters state: mathematical problem solving involves the use of two types of representation (a) representation of the problem situation and (b) representation of mathematical relations. a good problem solver must be able to connect the two types of representation quite easily, pulling out the mathematical relations from a problem but also turning the mathematical relations around in ways not suggested by the meanings in the problem situation (74). like nunes, schliemann and carraher (1993), our work recognises the vital importance of a workplace apprentice being able to make sense of the problem, being able to pull out the mathematical relations, and then being able to work with this mathematics with understanding. however, we prefer to use the term ‘task’ rather than ‘problem’ as this more closely describes the nature of workplace actions. we also introduce a third element into the process, that of understanding the specific mathematical practices of the particular trade, of knowing how things might actually be done on the job, and what this implies for the use of mathematics. we are suggesting that mathematical understandings in the workplace can take a variety of forms, and that there is a range of ways of acting mathematically while working on a task. we continue to acknowledge the importance of formal mathematical ideas and operations, what wedege f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g m a r t i n , l a c r o i x a n d f o w n e s 47 (2002) terms ‘school mathematics (what people learn and practice in formal education)’ (71), and in this paper we illustrate how a group of ironworkers understand and work with such ideas. however, following noss, hoyles and pozzi (2000), we suggest that alongside such images, other images or ways of acting mathematically, can also be observed and these are vitally important for contextualising the formal mathematics. these images are embedded in either the nature of the specific problem and its representation or, and of particular importance in this paper, in the particular local practices of the trade. this third kind of image or representation is something different from those offered by nunes, schliemann and carraher (1993), as it involves understanding mathematics in a way that makes sense for the task or problem in the real life ‘situation context’ (wedege 2002:64). understanding mathematics in this way can involve a number of elements. these include, recognising what is ‘usual’ in the workplace, being familiar with quick ways of doing specific calculations, being aware of how calculated answers are appropriate to the actual task, and knowing what constraints the carrying out of the task might put on the mathematics. for example, in ironwork, after calculating the size of the choker needed to lift some assembled beams into place, it is common practice to always go up a size – for safety purposes and to allow for extra stresses in the lifting of the piece. thus, not only is there the need to be able to calculate the size of choker required, but it is also necessary to know that this is actually a minimum specification. in such a case the ‘correct’ answer is both the one that is calculated and the one that is found by moving up a size from this. however, only one is actually useable in completing the task. we do not see these three ways of understanding as being alternatives or incompatible with one another. instead we suggest that apprentices are likely to engage with these different kinds of understandings many times as they progress through their training. in conceptualising understanding, and its growth as a multi-faceted and emergent phenomenon, we are influenced by the work of pirie and kieren (see for example pirie and kieren 1994, kieren, pirie and gordon-calvert 1999) and their theory for the dynamical growth of mathematical understanding which characterises ‘mathematical understanding not as a product of actions but in terms of the actions themselves’ (kieren, pirie and gordon-calvert 1999:212). in particular, and of significant relevance to this paper, is the notion that: growth in understanding is not simply a matter of acting in more abstract ways with more and more abstract mathematical objects. such growth in fact entails a dynamic and a connection between more and less formal, abstract and sophisticated activities. because such growth in understanding occurs in contexts, a study of the growth of understanding must f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s necessarily take into account the interactions that a person has with and in such contexts, including interactions with materials, other students and teachers. (kieren, pirie and gordon-calvert 1999:229) in this paper, we focus on one group of apprentice ironworkers and explore the ways in which they draw on and work with these three different forms of mathematical understandings as they successfully complete a challenging construction problem: understandings of the task as posed; understandings of the mathematical relations required by the task; and understandings of the task as an actual job to carry out. we contend that it is the way that these apprentices are able to build an understanding that shifts and builds connections across these three dimensions, that leads to their success with the task. the group and task: planning the assembly of a building the larger study, of which this research forms a part, is made up of a series of case studies of apprentices training towards qualifications in various construction trades in british columbia, canada. the case studies involved video recorded observations, together with field notes and interviews with selected apprentices. data were collected in the training classroom and workshop. both whole classes and smaller groups of learners were observed, depending on the structure of the session. in observing and analysing the ways in which the apprentices used their mathematical knowledge in the context of workplace tasks we drew on elements of the pirie-kieren theory for the dynamic growth of mathematical understanding. this paper presents some initial findings and discussion drawn from one of these case studies, with a particular focus on identifying the mathematical images held, accessed, made, modified and worked with by three apprentices although our conclusions are specific to this case, we would suggest that there are implications that may be relevant to the wider field. the three apprentices discussed in this paper, and known as joe, andy and mike, are in a larger class of about 20 students who are in the second year of an apprenticeship training program to become credentialed ironworkers. the course is part time, and consists of an initial six months at an institute of technology in vancouver, bc, canada, followed by four years in the workplace interspersed with three further six week block release sessions back at the institute in this session the apprentices have been posed the task of establishing the size of a choker sling required to lift an assembled structure of four large iron beams into an upright position, and later of determining where the f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g m a r t i n , l a c r o i x a n d f o w n e s 49 crane should be positioned to accomplish this. figure 1 illustrates this as an actual event. the structure consists of two upright beams, one top crosspiece and one middle beam. as can be seen in the photograph, this structure is lifted into position using two chokers in a sling arrangement around the top beam. it is the size of these chokers that the apprentices have been asked to calculate, something that is dependant on the total weight of the structure to be lifted. although figure 1 shows the final result of the task, that is, the practical act of the beam being lifted, the session discussed here was classroom based and involved the apprentices working with technical plans to determine the appropriate configuration prior to its practical implementation. at no time in this session were the apprentices involved in actually working with or lifting beams. it was a ‘pencil and paper’ exercise, but an essential one that would have to be completed on any worksite prior to the job being carried out. the apprentices, joe, andy and mike, worked closely together for about one hour at a table where they were video and audio recorded. figure 1: the four beams, assembled and being lifted by a two-choker sling the apprentices are required to work with a set of eight technical plans, showing different elevations and views of the framework for the building. the plans contain all the information necessary to assemble the framework, but the form in which this is presented requires considerable extraction from, and interpretation of, the various diagrams. figure 2 is one of the plans from which the group often work. it is not necessary to be able f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g 50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s to read the diagram here, it is provided merely to illustrate the complexity of such plans. figure 2: an extract from one of the technical plans the first part of the task requires that the group calculates the total weight of the structure to be lifted (that is, the sum of the weights of the four beams). beams of this kind are labelled with two pieces of information: their depth and their mass/weight per metre or foot, depending on whether f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g m a r t i n , l a c r o i x a n d f o w n e s 51 metric or imperial measures are being used. for example, in this task one of the beams ‘w’ is 10 by 21 indicating a depth of 10 inches, and a weight of 21 pounds per foot. on a plan this would be written simply as ‘w10 x 21’. however, what makes the task more complex is the fact that on the set of plans, not all the measurements and specifications are in imperial units. some of the eight drawings are solely labelled in metric, whilst others actually mix imperial and metric units, depending on what it is that is being labelled. this is not an uncommon practice in the workplace, and thus it is necessary that apprentices become familiar with using both systems of measurement, and are able to move flexibly between the two. for example, on one of the diagrams, the specification of a beam is given in metric units – w250 x 33. (note this is not an exact conversion, but the nearest equivalent standard available metric sized beam). the question is further complicated as the length of the beams (on any of the diagrams) is always given in metric units. these lengths are either 3048 millimetres or 9144 millimetres, which in this case is simply a conversion from the imperial lengths of 10 and 30 feet (although this conversion is not printed on any of the plans). thus, the apprentices are working in a mathematically complex environment, involving different units and representations that are mixed together in a variety of ways. case study we join the apprentices at the start of the task, as they are looking at a number of the technical plans, locating the relevant beams on these and determining their specifications in order to calculate their weights. mike: it’s a w 10 by 21. it’s right here (pointing to a drawing of a beam on one of the pages of drawings where the specifications are in imperial units). joe: it’s not what it says here partner (pointing to the same beam on a different plan where metric units are used). mike: yeah, i know. maybe that’s f……g metric or something? i don’t know. andy: w 250 by 33? (reading from the same page as joe) they begin by working with the drawn elevations, extracting the mathematical information contained on them that will be necessary for the calculation of the weight of the beam. they understand how to read the plans, and they are able to locate the correct beam and its specification from a complex diagram like figure 2. however, mike and joe are using two different diagrams; one is a plan view (the structure from above), the other a cross-sectional elevation of the structure. because the first of these gives a metric specification and the second an imperial, they become concerned about what they are working with. mike has found the beam specification in f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g 52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s imperial units, whilst joe has it in metric. although mike recognises that this might be the case, he is not confident, or happy to just assume this is the case. the apprentices have an understanding of the visual representation of the task, and of how to use the diagrams to locate and extract appropriate mathematical information. mike: there’s no way that’s 250 inches deep. its way easier if you ... joe: that’s mills (millimetres). yeah. mike: its way easier if we do it with inches. it’s a w 10 by 21. the comment by mike ‘there’s no way that’s 250 inches deep’ illustrates how he is able to use his understanding of the task as an actual workplace job to reflect on the value they have read from the diagram. this is crucial for them being able to make sense of what they are doing. it is mike’s knowledge and understanding of how inappropriate a beam with a depth of two hundred and fifty inches would be, gained from his experience in the field, that instantly alerts him that something is wrong with the number as an imperial measure. for mike the number has a meaning, it is more than an abstract object to be operated on – he is drawing on an image of a real beam and of what an appropriate depth should be, and is using this to inform his mathematical thinking. he now proceeds to try and find the total length of the beam from the diagram. joe: okay. see its right there? mike: i’m just trying to find out how long it is. (pause). all i need is one measurement. maybe it’s 3,048 (reading a length from the plan). andy: for what? (pause and mumbling from all three apprentices. joe and mike are looking at the drawing.) andy: that’s what our centimetres will be, 3048. mike: you think so? oh yeah, it will. it will be, 3,048. we know how long it is. andy: i already got that (laughs). mike: well. that’s what we were after. here they return to the diagrams, and are now looking for the stated length of the beam. they locate the correct dimension, 3,048, though they think this is centimetres rather than millimetres. as noted earlier, this is a metric dimension on the page where the beam specifications are given in imperial units. there is a slight sense of them not being sure about this measurement, but they are confident that they have the correct information, again showing an ability to use the diagrams and to understand what the f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g m a r t i n , l a c r o i x a n d f o w n e s 53 numbers on these mean. as noted, 3,048 millimetres is equivalent to ten feet in imperial units, and has resulted from the conversion of this to metric before adding to the diagram. again, this illustrates how measurement is a messy system in these workplace environments, unlike the structured setting of school mathematics. joe: so 21 times 348 (working on calculator). you already got this down don’t you? (talking to andy) equals? is that what you got? (asking andy). andy: yeah (he sounds uncertain) joe: in mills? andy: in mills. that’s f…..g joe: sixty-four (he has actually calculated 3,048 x 21) andy: sixty-four thousand. so it would be 64. joe: that’s not right. andy: sixty-four? joe: kilograms? having found the required specifications joe now begins to calculate the weight of the beam. he knows the calculation to perform and obtains the correct answer. on seeing that the answer is 64,000, they decide this must mean a weight of 64 kilograms, a more likely weight for a beam than 64,000 kilograms. again, here it is their knowledge of workplace practice and of the actual weight of real beams that informs this, rather than any mathematical rule. however, the mistake here is that they have incorrectly chosen to multiply a metric length by the pounds per foot specification, 21, which has given the wrong answer. andy: kilograms. yeah. (pause). that can’t be right though. we did something wrong. those beams ain’t a hundred pounds. andy is able to bring his understandings of actually working with beams into play here saying ‘that can’t be right though. we did something wrong. those beams ain’t a hundred pounds’. this is a particularly important and powerful statement. he is able to not only think practically about the question as an actual task, but also is mathematically able to approximately convert the calculated weight into an imperial equivalent (albeit a rather inaccurate conversion). without having a working knowledge of beams then it would perhaps be unlikely that they would have a sense of the previous answer being incorrect. f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g 54 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s mike: well, you have to do it the metric way. you can’t times anything by 40.8. (pause) joe: no, i’m not. i’m just timesing it by the weight per kilogram which is 21. mike: oh yeah. andy: is that per metre? mike: no, that’s per foot. andy: yeah, we’re doing metres though. mike: we got to change something around before we do that. andy: because if we’re changing that. no… mike: yeah, yeah yeah. this is per foot. although all three apprentices recognise now that the calculation is incorrect, they are not instantly able to determine what to do instead. however, mike and andy use their understandings of the mathematical relations involved to realise that they ‘need to change something around’. they understand the notions of pounds per foot and kilograms per metre, that these have different values and thus some conversion may be necessary. there is a sense of reasoning taking place here, of the apprentices understanding what they are trying to accomplish, and how to use mathematics in this process. they do not simply reach for a formula, nor seek help from the instructor, but neither do they use some informal method. andy: this one that you had over here (indicating the other plan) the 350 and the 250 times 33, that would be the millimetres. mike: yeah. joe: yeah, you’re right. mike: that can’t be 250 by 33. andy: that’s just the… mike: oh yeah, 33 kilograms per? andy realises that they don’t actually need to convert from imperial to metric, but instead could simply use the metric specification offered on the other diagram, and mike and joe agree with this. mike knows this specification is in kilograms, but is not sure ‘per what’. it should be noted that no units are printed on the diagram, so the beam is simply labelled as w250x33. andy: per? mike: per metre. (they both nod). okay, yeah. we’re happening now. do it like this. times it by 33. f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g m a r t i n , l a c r o i x a n d f o w n e s 55 andy: thirty-three kilograms mike: thirty-three kilograms per metre. mike is clear about the mathematics to use here. now that he realises they are working with metric measurements, he knows quickly that all that is required is to multiply the length by the weight per metre, though it has taken him a moment to be sure of this. interestingly, he even corrects andy who perhaps is not as confident with exactly what the 33 means here. mike is precise and accurate with his statement and again there is a sense of him understanding the mathematics he is using, and not merely applying a memorised formula. sarah, a visiting tutor to the session, intervenes here to ask how they knew that the specification of the beam was in metric units. sarah: how do you know that? mike: just because if the beam was 250 inches deep it would be a really, really big beam and we don’t have any of those. mike justifies his thinking by drawing on his knowledge of actual beams, of what sizes they come in on the job. he knows that a beam with a depth of 250 inches is not realistic. again, it is this facility to situate the mathematics within the real workplace context that allows him to make sense of his choice of numbers and subsequent calculation. joe: (completing the calculation while mike talks to sarah) three zero forty-eight is the length? andy: yeah. (joe continues to work on the calculator) andy: one hundred point five eight kilograms? joe: yep. joe is able to correctly complete the calculation with an answer of 100.58 kilograms, and they agree that this is now the weight of the beam in kilograms. although he does not verbalise it here, he has also converted the weight into kilograms, as the initial calculation would give the answer in grams (due to the use of millimetres rather than metres for the length). although we do not see how he does this, again it seems that he has an awareness that a beam with a weight of one hundred kilograms is reasonable whereas one with a weight of 1,000 kilograms would not be. f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g 56 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s andy: see that makes a little more sense. joe: multiply two point two. two hundred and twenty one pounds, that’s more like it. andy: that’s a little more like it. having got what they are confident is a correct answer, they still do not simply accept this, although they seem happy with their use of mathematical operations. instead, they choose to check this answer (which is in metric) by converting it to imperial units, as the weight in pounds has a greater practical meaning for them. joe and andy agree that a weight of 221 pounds is ‘a little more like it’, thus validating their calculated answer in the context of the actual task, and of the size of beams involved. joe knows what a beam should weigh, and that this is an appropriate specification. they are thus confident in their use of mathematics, and in the correctness of their answer, through drawing on understandings developed from the workplace. whilst it is true here that the apprentices could have immediately found the weight in pounds by recognising that 3,048 centimetres was the same as ten feet, and simply multiplying this by 21, there is nothing in the diagrams to indicate this – nor any reason for them to notice this. what is striking though, both in the transcript extracts offered here, and in the whole session, of which these form a part, is the commitment of the students to the completion of the task, and of ensuring their answers are not merely mathematically correct, but make sense in the context of actually erecting the construction. they are not deterred by the complexity of the diagrams, nor that the required information and mathematical operations are not immediately obvious. they see problem solving of this kind as a natural part of their career choice, and of getting the job done. flexible mathematical understanding in workplace training mike, andy and joe move continually between three different ways of thinking mathematically and demonstrate a flexible understanding of the mathematics involved in the task, and of how to work with this in a meaningful way. firstly, they are able to make sense of and work with the mathematics of the task, as embedded in the complex set of plans they are working from. secondly, they understand and confidently use the mathematical operations required by the task – what to multiply together, why, how to convert units and so on. thirdly, they understand what their mathematical answers actually mean in the context of the task, and the appropriateness of these for the beam construction they are working with. f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g m a r t i n , l a c r o i x a n d f o w n e s 57 what we suggest is important is the way that the three apprentices are able to find the solution to the task through bringing these different forms of understandings together as they work. this facility to work with mathematics in such a fluid and flexible way suggests that they do not see more formal mathematical operations as distinct from the context of the task, but instead, as embedded within it. their knowledge of actual beams informs their reading of appropriate specifications from the complex plans, and also the correctness of their answers. they do not resort to the simple use of a memorised formula for the conversion of units, nor do they use some informal ad-hoc method that is often the case in the workplace. instead they use standard mathematical operations purposefully, with an understanding of what these will achieve and why. when an answer does not seem correct, they look to the workplace context to help consider why. in observing the ways that andy, joe and mike work, we would suggest that what is seen is not a process of transfer – that is ‘a relatively passive “carrying over” and deployment of learning from one situation to another once learners recognize the “similarity” between those situations’ (carraher and schliemann 2002:19). instead we observe what evans terms ‘translation’ wherein ‘a making of meaning across discourses’ (2002:223), in this case those of mathematics and workplace practice, is occurring. the three apprentices are simultaneously able to operate in the domain of mathematical operations and also that of the workplace, and to see the task they are working on as simultaneously drawing on elements from both sets of practices. this flexible understanding is similar to what carraher and schliemann talk of as an ‘active accommodation of knowledge to the demands of the situation’ in which the apprentices have ‘not simply unloaded a prior solution from their storehouse of knowledge’ but instead have ‘crafted it on the spot, adjusting and adapting their prior knowledge in the process’ (carraher and schliemann 2002:19). this facility to build or craft a powerful and dynamic understanding, that recognises the relationship between formal mathematical operations, the representation of mathematics in the task posed, and the use of mathematics in the situation context, is what enables andy, joe and mike to be successful in the completion of the task, and to understand why their answer is appropriate and useful. for settings such as construction sites and workplaces, such an understanding and awareness is not merely desirable, but essential. as noted by martin, lacroix and fownes ‘in the school classroom, an incorrect answer will likely result in nothing more than a mark on a piece of paper, whereas in the workplace there are real costs associated with such errors’ (2005:23). on a building site involving large constructions, such costs may be human, as well as financial. for example, the choice of an incorrect size of choker could lead to expensive materials being dropped, or to a crane tipping over, potentially causing injury or death. f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g 58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s it is beyond the scope of this paper to consider what aspects of the learning experiences of andy, joe and mike might have played a significant part in the development of such a flexible way of thinking and working. however, clearly their training allowed and encouraged them to make dynamic connections between what they learned whilst working on actual construction sites and what they learned in the trades training classroom. all three apprentices are able to make sense of the mathematics they know and use, and, perhaps more importantly, they are confident in their understanding and see it as sufficient to be able to complete complex tasks of the kind discussed here. in the field of adult mathematical learning, where it is often the struggles of learners that are reported (eg. gal 2002, ingeleton and o’regan 2002) then the example of andy, joe and mike is both hopeful and exciting and suggests that adults in apprenticeship training programs can be both successful construction workers and successful mathematicians. acknowledgements the research reported in this paper is supported by the social science and humanities research council of canada, (sshrc) through grants #831-2002-0005 and #501-2002-005. we acknowledge the assistance of the british columbia institute of technology, the ironworkers union local 97 and the course instructors. we would also like to thank andy, joe and mike for their willingness to be involved in the study. references carraher, david w and schliemann, analucia d (2002) the transfer dilemma, the journal of the learning sciences, vol 11, no 1, pp 1-24. evans, jeff (2000) adults’ mathematical thinking and emotions – a study of numerate practices, routledge falmer, london. gal, iddo (2002) dispositional aspects of coping with interpretive numeracy tasks, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 11, no 9, pp 47-62. ingleton, christine and o’regan, kerry (2002) recounting mathematical experiences: emotions in mathematics learning, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 11, no 9, pp 95-108. kieren, thomas e, pirie, susan e.b and gordon-calvert, lynn (1999) growing minds, growing mathematical understanding: mathematical understanding, abstraction and interaction, in burton, leone, ed, learning mathematics: from hierarchies to networks, falmer press, london, pp 209-231. lave, jean (1988) cognition in practice, cambridge university press, cambridge. f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g m a r t i n , l a c r o i x a n d f o w n e s 59 lerman, stephen (1999) culturally situated knowledge, in burton, leone, ed, learning mathematics: from hierarchies to networks, falmer press, london, pp 93-107. martin, lyndon c, lacroix, lionel and fownes, lynda (2005) folding back and the growth of mathematical understanding in workplace training, adults learning mathematics, vol 1, no 1, pp 19-35. noss, richard, hoyles, celia, and pozzi, stefano (2000) working knowledge: mathematics in use, in bessot, annie and ridgway, david, eds, education for mathematics in the workplace, kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht, netherlands, pp 17-36. nunes, terezinha, schliemann, analucia d, and carraher, david w (1993) street mathematics and school mathematics, cambridge university press, cambridge. pirie, susan e b and kieren, thomas e (1994) growth in mathematical understanding: how can we characterise it and how can we represent it? educational studies in mathematics, vol 26, pp 165-190. pozzi, stefano, noss, richard, and hoyles, celia (1998) tools in practice, mathematics in use, educational studies in mathematics, vol 36, pp 105122. wedege, tina (2002) ‘mathematics – that’s what i can’t do’: people’s affective and social relationship with mathematics, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 11, no 9, pp 63-78. f l e x i b l e m a t h e m a t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word 21.1 notes on contributors_230613.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 1 n o 1 2 0 1 3 111 notes on contributors aileen ackland aileen ackland is a teacher educator at the school of education, university of aberdeen, scotland. from 2006 to 2012 she was the curriculum and research leader for the scottish consortium which developed and delivered the first professional qualification for scottish adult literacies practitioners. prior to joining the university, she worked in adult and community education, mainly in the voluntary sector. a.ackland@abdn.ac.uk donna ah chee donna ah chee is the ceo of central australian aboriginal congress and chair of the aboriginal adult literacy campaign national steering committee. peter aubusson peter aubusson is associate professor in teacher education at the university of technology, sydney. his recent research has concentrated on professional learning models and focussed on relationships between formal and informal spaces in 21st century learning. jack beetson jack beetson is an adjunct professor at the university of new england, and the aboriginal adult literacy campaign national coordinator. bob boughton bob boughton teaches adult education at the university of new england, and is the chief investigator on the aboriginal adult literacy campaign evaluation. bob.boughton@une.edu.au deborah durnam deborah durnan is the australian senior technical adviser on the aboriginal adult literacy campaign. janet dyne janet dyne has worked in lln and cultural programs in indigenous communities in the northern territory and around fitzroy crossing in the kimberley region of western australia. she is currently teaching in foundation studies at ultimo campus of tafe in sydney. janet.c.dyne@det.nsw.edu.au n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 112 jane furness jane furness has worked in adult education for eighteen years and has taught in the areas of family and community literacy, cultural and linguistic diversity and community psychology at the university of waikato. an associate of the community psychology programme at the university of waikato, hamilton, new zealand and a registered psychologist, she recently completed her phd in family literacy exploring links to wellbeing. jfurness@waikato.ac.nz jose ‘chala’ leblanch josé chala leblanch teaches at the enrique josé varona pedagogical university in havana and was the cuban technical adviser to the aboriginal adult literacy campaign in 2012. alison reedy alison reedy is manager, higher education and training, in the office of learning and teaching at charles darwin university in the nt. her teaching background is in adult language and literacy and her research interests are in learning technologies, online learning design and the experience of indigenous learners with elearning. alison.reedy@cdu.edu.au karen rivera karen rivera is the evaluation and audience research manager at the powerhouse museum, sydney. in this role, karen is responsible for overseeing all audience analysis and exhibition/ program evaluation for the powerhouse museum, sydney observatory and powerhouse discovery centre. during her time in this role, karen has undertaken numerous exhibition evaluations, audience tracking projects, visitor segmentation studies and economic impact studies. vic smith vic smith is an independent consultant working in cross-cultural communications, research and evaluation with aboriginal and torres strait islander communities and new and emerging communities. michael van tiel michael van tiel is the manager of family and community experiences at the powerhouse museum. he leads the team that is notes for contributors l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 113 responsible for the development and delivery of innovative museum experiences for children and the adults they visit with. michael has a special interest in theatre as an alternative engagement tool to exhibitions in museums. helen whitty helen whitty is currently a doctoral candidate with uts researching the relationships between museums, families and literacies. this triumvirate arose from her twenty plus years producing public programs for the powerhouse museum along with authoring books and leading exhibition teams to develop a series of collection based exhibitions for families. jacquie widin jacquie widin is a senior lecturer in language and literacy at the university of technology, sydney. her research interests focus on the ways learners in school, adult and university settings engage with learning opportunities. keiko yasukawa keiko yasukawa is a lecturer in literacy and numeracy at the university of technology, sydney. her research interests focus on adult literacy and numeracy pedagogy, practices and policies, and how tensions between them are negotiated. keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au microsoft word editorial 21.1.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 1 n o 1 2 0 1 3 1 editorial stephen black, diana coben, katherine gordon, niki mccartney, hermine scheeres, jean searle, rosie wickert, and keiko yasukawa this issue of literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults marks the 21st volume of the journal, previously published as open letter: australian journal for adult literacy research and practice. the first issue of open letter appeared in 1990 in the international literacy year under the editorship of ian reid at curtin university in western australia. seven years later, the editorship of the journal was transferred to a team of rosie wickert, hermine scheeres, alison lee and mike baynham at the university of technology sydney, and the the current journal name was adopted. since then there have been some further changes to the editorial team – the very sad passing away of alison last year, mike’s departure to leeds university, and then over time jean searle, katherine gordon, stephen black and keiko yasukawa joining the team. while retaining literacy and numeracy studies as the name, this year marks another major milestone for the journal. we are very pleased to announce that the journal will now be published by a trans-tasman editorial team – whose names appear in the author list above – and welcome diana coben and niki mccartney from the national centre for literacy and numeracy for adults in new zealand to our team. they will add new perspectives and experiences to our work, and our respective local and combined international networks in adult literacy and numeracy can only help to strengthen the journal’s reach and profile. by the time the second issue for this volume is published, we will have an expanded editorial advisory board, welcoming back many of our long time members and welcoming some new members, including a larger number of members who can assist us in strengthening the journal’s profile in the adult numeracy arena. we look forward to the continued support of our current readership and support from new readers and authors. since the publication of the first issue of open letter, the articles in the journal have strongly, but certainly not exclusively, embraced the new literacy studies perspective, that is, a view of literacy and numeracy as social practice. in the current issue too, this view of literacy and numeracy features strongly in new and challenging ways. the first article by bob boughton, donna ah chee, jack beetson, deborah durnan and josé chala leblanch, ‘an aboriginal adult literacy campaign pilot study in australia using yes i can’ reports on a mass literacy e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s campaign in wilcannia, an aboriginal community in australia. the campaign is modeled around the cuban yo si puedo literacy campaign that boughton also facilitated in timor leste and wrote about in an earlier issue of this journal (boughton 2010). in the current issue, boughton and his coauthors write that the value of a mass campaign approach to literacy is viewed critically in some arenas of literacy research, including social practice theorists of literacy. the authors’ account of the campaign in wilcannia is interesting to think about in relation to new literacy studies because the approach to the community campaign is described in a way that resonates strongly with a social practices perspective, even though the literacy pedagogy itself is described in ways that might resonate with a more instrumental approach. readers may be interested to read boughton’s online discussions with alan rogers and brian street on the topic of the similiarities and differences between a freirean literacy campaign, new literacy studies and literacy as a social practice perspective at the british association for literacy in development website (www.balid.org.uk/onlinediscussions). the second article by jane furness, ‘family focused adult literacy programs: towards wellbeing in diverse communities’ is more explicitly affirming of a social practices view of literacy and numeracy. it is based on her study of family literacy programs in new zealand in which she sought to understand what adults brought to family literacy programs, and what benefits linked to individuals’, families’ and communities’ wellbeing were afforded by these programs. her article concludes with some common principles and practices that surfaced in her study of the different programs. aileen ackland’s article, ‘a play in the space: the concept of “the social practice approach” in the scottish adult literacies field’ presents challenges to adult literacy and numeracy teacher educators. her paper reports on her research that suggests that there is a disconnect between the new literacy studies perspective on literacy and numeracy that is enshrined in scottish policy and how the social practices view of literacy and numeracy is interpreted by practitioners. her contention is that the radical possibilities of new literacy studies has eluded many of the practitioners, and concludes that there is as much a need for teachers to adopt a critical pedagogical stance as there is a need for teacher educators to do so. the paper is sobering for those of us who are thinking ‘if only our government would adopt a social practices view in their adult literacy and numeracy policy’; much work in teacher education is needed to captialise on such a possibility. the final article by a large team of academics and museum professionals keiko yasukawa, jacquie widin, vic smith, karen rivera, michael van tiel, peter aubusson and helen whitty, ‘examining museum e d i t o r i a l 3 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s visits as literacy events: the role of mediators’, takes the theoretical resources of new literacy studies to the study of visitor experiences in a museum exhibition, a terrain not frequently trodden in this journal. their article is based on a small study examining how literacies in museum exhibitions influence visitors’ engagement. their paper focuses on data about two groups of visitors from statistically ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups: culturally and linguistically diverse family groups, and adult literacy learners. they find ‘literacy mediators’ a useful concept in helping them see the ways museum experiences are not only individually produced, but often collectively produced, depending on the nature of the mediation. in their paper, they also show how the democratic goals of new literacy studies resonate with the new museology movement in the museum studies arena. thus, in this issue, we see new connections and new challenges in theories that inform the field of adult literacy and numeracy. later this year, we will also see the results of the oecd programme of international assessment of adult competencies (piaac), the successor to the 2006 adult literacy and lifeskills survey (alls). this will no doubt activate policy work in the surveyed countries, and we hope that the journal can play a role in promoting critical discussions and debates both about the meaning of the survey results, and what researchers can usefully do with the results. finally, we have two book reviews, one by alison reedy and the other by janet dyne. they review different but related books on indigenous literacies based on books by inge kral and jeremy schwab, learning spaces: youth, literacy and new media in remote indigenous australia, and a sole-authored book by inge kral, talk, text and technology: literacy and social practice in a remote indigenous community. reedy’s and dyne’s reviews suggest that much literacy learning takes place in informal settings in the remote indigenous communities that the authors studied, and it challenges both the dominant deficit views of indigenous communities in regard to literacy and the increasingly narrow definitions of literacy on which these deficit views are based. the reviews – and the books that the reviews are based, if read together with the article by boughton and his co-authors in this issue, provide us with some welcome optimism that is often denied in the mainstream discourses about indigenous education. the editorial team welcomes responses and debates about issues arising in this and future issues in the refractions section of the journal. references boughton, b (2010) back to the future? timor-leste, cuba and the return of the mass literacy campaign, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 18, no 2, pp 23-40. e d i t o r i a l 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word makingconnections_020810_final.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 1 2010 35 making connections to re-engage young people in learning: dimensions of practice andrew chodkiewicz, jacquie widin & keiko yasukawa a b s t r a c t in the field of literacy and numeracy education, a social practices approach has gained prominence among researchers who are sympathetic to the socio-cultural concepts of multiple literacies and numeracies in different social contexts. this article examines a case study of teaching literacy and numeracy to socially excluded young people in an australian inner city youth centre. in their research, the authors critically challenged their taken for granted assumptions about what a pedagogy informed by a social practices approach to literacy and numeracy should look like. in understanding the apparent contradictions between what the authors had expected to see and what they were seeing, kemmis’s framework for the study of practice, based on the notion of practices as reflexive and dialectical, proved fruitful. the framework allowed the authors to interpret both the theory (the social practices approach to literacy and numeracy) and the practices at the youth centre in ways that deepened their appreciation of the theory – practice relationship. i n t r o d u c t i o n it’s fun …you get to be yourself… yeah. they’re not like other teachers, they’ll sit down with you and explain it all…you know what you are doing. one, you get a lot of help, two, you actually get work done and three, there’s no pressure…it’s relaxed and laid back. these quotes are from some key actors in this story about a group of young people, their teachers, youth workers and volunteer tutors. the story is about how the young people, previously disengaged from education, successfully reconnect to school learning. often work in this field is described as an arena of failure, and educators have great difficulty attracting and retaining learners (long and curtain 2006, mcneil and dixon 2005, aylward 2008). the young people at the centre of our research, and others in similar contexts, are often considered to be ‘at risk’. for us, this term is problematic. it carries values and attitudes that construct the learners in negative ways. this article presents an alternative story of the way one group of so-called 'at risk' learners engage with learning, and it uncovers the elements that build and m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s sustain a program to successfully meet the needs and concerns of the learners and the teachers who work with them. a significant feature in this story is that this group of learners occupy an unnamed space between school and adult-focused education. the learners, as we show below, could not inhabit anything that resembled a school-type space, however, they are not yet self-directed adult learners. this presents pedagogical challenges for teachers in both school and adult education settings, as well as struggles for institutions like tafe (technical and further education) colleges. if these programs exist they are not given guaranteed ongoing funding and are most often located in the outreach sections of tafe. this particular story is part of a larger study that investigated effective adult literacy and numeracy teaching. we drew on a longstanding partnership between an adult literacy and numeracy professional organisation (alnpo) and an australian university (metro university – a pseudonym) in which we work, to research and document literacy and numeracy teaching in four different sites. in this article we focus on one site comprising an educational partnership between two sections of a tafe college (partnership leader), a community youth service, and volunteers from the local community, including a local benefactor. in particular, we explore the educational program of two experienced teachers, jean a literacy and numeracy teacher, and peter a community outreach teacher, who work with young people attending a youth centre in an inner city suburb of sydney. broadly speaking, we adopted a critical case study approach that engaged with the language, literacy and numeracy (lln) field and provided insights into the learning and change dimensions of the practices described and investigated in this paper. the case study approach by its very nature is partial, particularistic and explanatory of the specific practices in the youth centre described here, however our analysis does lend itself to lln programs in other contexts. our analysis draws on multiple sources of data: interviews with teachers, learners, volunteers and youth centre staff; researcher observations; and video footage. the advantages of collecting data from multiple sources are many in this particular field of teaching practice; we were able to give voice to multiple points of view and were open to differing interpretations of events. the case study approach to research is often concerned with effecting change in the particular field of inquiry, (yin 2008, merriam 1998) and in this sense the results of the study may be used for professional development and in other related ways for practitioners in the field. jean’s and peter’s educational program (within the tafe and community centre partnership) was selected as a site of study for the project as a result of consultation with leaders of alnpo and other experienced teachers in the field. the aim of the project was to capture some of the salient m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s chodkiewicz, widin, yasukawa 37 features of effective literacy and numeracy teaching practices that could be shared in the practitioner community, support new teachers, and inform policy. the teachers, jean and peter are well known in the general lln field and specifically for their work in the youth centre. they are both highly experienced and are advocates for lln services through their professional organisations. as part of our research, we were invited to observe and document the teaching and learning in their program over a 20 week semester. we visited the youth centre on a regular basis during the 20 week semester (every second week) and held long discussions with the teachers (four meetings), youth workers (two meetings) and volunteer tutors (one meeting each) in the form of semi-structured interviews; observed six of the classes; and videotaped one day of classes. the educational partnership program was part of our broader teacher training work; jean and peter accepted a student teacher each and as university teacher educators we were involved with supervision visits and feedback meetings. we also took groups of student teachers for one-off observations over a much longer period (four groups during a 12 month period). we had a longstanding collegial relationship with jean and peter, and this created the opportunity for a joint approach to determining when and how data collection could be most fruitfully conducted. in many senses, we were participant observers; we had an established role in the scene under study and were insiders in the field who shared the concerns of the teachers we observed and interviewed (atkinson and hammersley 2007). as researchers and teacher educators, an additional interest in exploring this program was to gain insights into the complexities of working in community-based educational programs and to explore teacher and learner practices in the broadest possible sense. in our view, the broad dynamics and relationships in the lln field shape the teaching and learning practices. the questions below emerged both from our own understandings of social practices theory and critical literacy education, and our involvement with the program: what are the processes by which the participants engage in the program? what sustains and motivates the teachers to work in this context? what are the ‘teaching practices’ and core beliefs that enable the teachers and volunteers to maintain the confidence that they are not going to fail? how are the multiple relationships established and maintained in this particular context? m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s we set out to examine teaching and learning practices in this unnamed space between school and adult education. we initially draw on what we knew: contemporary social practice theories and approaches to adult literacy and numeracy teaching. however as we discuss in detail below, approaches based on the learners’ social context were not used to the extent or in the way we expected; as researchers we had to rethink the relevance and role of these approaches and thereby gained deeper understandings of teaching in this context. f i n d i n g a f r a m e w o r k f o r t h e r e s e a r c h in the field of literacy and numeracy education in the united kingdom and australia, a socio-cultural theory of literacy and numeracy (street 1995, baynham 1995, baker 1998, barton et al.2006, papen 2005) has gained currency as a useful point of departure for studying adult literacy and numeracy practices in different contexts, and in turn for informing adult literacy and numeracy teaching and learning practices. it is tempting to simply ‘look for’ evidence of pedagogical approaches that the social practices view suggest (appleby and barton 2008). indeed we did do so, however, initially we found some unexpected and disturbing contradictions or deviations from the theory that led us to examine and analyse the theory and our data more closely. an approach to the study of practice as discussed by kemmis (2005, forthcoming 2010) is helpful in understanding the apparent contradictions that could emerge in researching practice when one frames a study with a particular theoretical stance about what practice should ‘look like’ in the field. in particular, kemmis argues that we need to expect and study practice as ‘reflexive’; that is, that the practice of teaching is mutually constituted by tensions between the objective and subjective accounts of what makes a practice effective or professional. using kemmis' (forthcoming 2010) analytical framework for studying practice, in the context of teaching practice, a teacher’s practice may be described ‘objectively’ by an outsider or someone who is expecting certain normalised behaviour to be followed, and also ‘subjectively’ by the teacher who would have their own beliefs and moral stance about what makes teaching meaningful to them. furthermore, both of these accounts have to be interpreted within the wider social and political contexts in which the practice is taking place, and by which the teaching practice is both being shaped, and which the practice is shaping. these tensions in any teaching practice are also dynamic because there are different types of strategies employed by the teacher, learners, the teaching institution, and other near and distant stakeholders to exercise agency; not all of the stakeholders can exercise agency to resolve all of these tensions. however, rather than being puzzled by or ignoring the changes that are required and occur in practice as ‘exceptions’ to some established set of rules about what m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s chodkiewicz, widin, yasukawa 39 the practice should be, kemmis suggests that experienced, ‘knowing’ practitioners ‘search for saliences’, that is, they ‘search for knowledge in and through practice to correct and amend practice in light of changing circumstances and new perspectives’ (2005: 421). for investigating teaching practice in an environment that is imbued with uncertainties about funding, learner attendance, and learners’ outside circumstances that could impact on their learning, the idea of ‘searching for saliences’ provides a useful lens. noddings (2003: 249) explains that teaching is fundamentally a relational practice between teachers and their learners that involves generating a safe environment and enthusiasm for learners to engage in a quest for new knowledge. in our analysis, we will focus on how the dynamics of this relationship is enacted by the teachers and the learners in the youth program. using approaches to the study of teaching practice proposed by kemmis (2005, 2007) and noddings (2003) enable us to expose the political nature of teaching generally. we also reveal the particular politics around working with learners who are socially excluded from mainstream institutions and have a range of possibly negative expectations about re-engaging in learning (long 2006, mcneil and dixon 2005). in this paper we firstly describe the learners, their context, and their program. we then discuss the key insights into how the program engages and retains learners. we critically examine the multidimensional layers of the teaching and learning practices in the program, and interpret these observations drawing on, and at the same time critically reflecting on, a social practices approach to understanding literacy and numeracy. t h e l e a r n e r s the learners in our case study are a group of 12 young people, aged 15 to 18 years, half of whom are aboriginal. these learners have dropped out of school before year 10, and have not been linked into any further education, training or employment. most have experienced difficulties with school-based learning, often as a result of significant gaps in their school literacies and numeracies. in addition to being excluded from formal learning and disconnected from school-type education, many of the young people have struggled with various behavioural issues such as anger and swearing, and have found it hard to concentrate. a number have minor physical difficulties that have never been addressed, such as being unable to read effectively because their eye-sight has never been tested. others have ongoing alcohol and drug issues. several are on juvenile justice orders, while there are some who have served time in juvenile detention. they live in an inner city housing estate, where many young people are in precarious or chaotic home situations. they also have little financial security. the youth centre provides a safe and easily accessible space where m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s 40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s they can meet, make friends and take part in a range of activities and programs that are supported by a mix of paid and volunteer staff. when asked about what they needed out of a learning program, the young people attending the centre said that among their main concerns, a primary one was how to ‘get a piece of paper to help them move on with their lives’. one of the ways of addressing this concern was to develop a program that provided a way for them to work on the school subjects they had missed out on, to further develop their literacy and numeracy, and to start achieving some successful completions. t h e p r o g r a m the program began as a result of an approach by the youth centre to a local tafe college. two sections at the college outreach and adult basic education (abe) became involved. with the involvement of workers at the youth centre and some of the young people, a program was designed that could be delivered at the centre. at the same time the program organisers reached out into the local community to bring in volunteers to work with the learners, other key local school education and community agencies, and to gain the financial support of a local benefactor. over its first three years the program ran three times a week, with a core time when both teachers were available to work with the learners. the volunteers from the local area are key participants in the program as they provide additional one-on-one support for the learners. by enrolling in the program the young people are able to work on year 10 school certificate or equivalent modules and subjects, take a tafe preparation for work and study course and be part of excursions in and around the city. a number of short courses have also been arranged to help develop other work-related skills or qualifications. t h e c e n t r e the youth centre is situated on a main street amongst cafes, restaurants, bookshops, music shops and a range of other shops and services. upstairs, on the second level of the youth centre, is a ‘classroom’ space, an attic area that is particularly brightly painted with vivid animations and graffiti like images. this classroom space contains a number of tables and chairs arranged in groups, with whiteboards and literacy and numeracy resources. significantly for most of the young people the program is often the first time that they have worked in groups. the youth centre is a place where the learners feel comfortable, a separate but safe haven, where they are encouraged and able to learn at their own pace. the outreach teacher, peter sees the centre as a place where the learners are able to re-connect with teachers and school learning in different and positive ways and where they are able to achieve successes with formal learning, for the first time. m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s chodkiewicz, widin, yasukawa 41 t h e p r o g r a m d e v e l o p s our initial visits to the centre and the college where some of the classes are held, presented us with some of the ‘regular’ elements of the field, with some learners coming in late and some attending irregularly, with the learners' outside world breaking through and impacting on their learning. at one class a student lay on the floor of the computer room for part of the session and other students found it difficult to concentrate. at another session, some students left during the break not to return and we found out the next day that the students had been arrested at the local shopping centre. the teachers, working as a team, maintain connections with the students through all of these seemingly disruptive elements. the teachers are committed to providing educational opportunities for the learners and to enabling learners to achieve some success at each session. for outreach teacher peter it means: if we sense that they feel that they are failing on the day, then we redesign what we are doing, so that they can always leave here [feeling] wow, i had a day there and i did well. at times the behaviours they experience from some young people severely test their ability to keep the learners connected with the program. but the teachers still find ways to reconnect with the learners and keep them engaged: there are times i know that when a student is angry … we have little cues. we have that sense of when to jump in and when to get out…. it’s being able to navigate around all of these students and around their issues that come in with them (peter, outreach teacher). we see that the teachers’ practices embody the role of helping the learners achieve success by creating an environment of trust and safety. the learners describe their learning in the centre as ‘fun’, that the teachers are there to ‘help’ them through any difficulties with their particular studies, and that the teachers complement each other and work together. they feel strongly supported in their learning. both teachers comment a number of times on this aspect of working in the program. they work well together, seamlessly negotiating a ‘division of labour’ with the students and keeping in constant contact with each other: i suppose that’s how we work … there’s a lot of communication that goes on outside of the room in between the breaks... during class and after class (jean, abe teacher). the teachers demonstrate how knowing one’s learners takes on a special dimension and how the context and particularities of the learners are m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s 42 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s paramount to the success of the program. below we discuss what we have learned from observing the teachers and learners and how we have developed a new understanding of the notion of literacy and numeracy as social practices. k e y i n s i g h t s a n u a n c e d u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f t h e s o c i a l p r a c t i c e s a p p r o a c h t o l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y t e a c h i n g the key tenets of a social practices approach to literacy and numeracy, drawing from the work of barton et al. (2006), papen (2005) and others, are that the approach: • recognises people’s literacy practices are shaped by their personal histories as well as the wider social and cultural environment in which they live, and this explains how particular practices have been learned and valued by individual learners; • sees the personal histories and lives of individuals as rich sources of learning, and it provides both a validation of what the individuals know and a connection between literacy and numeracy and their life experiences. in the youth centre, the learners live complex lives in which different forms of literacy and numeracy are practised. while there are gaps in their academic literacy and numeracy, they are not ‘empty vessels’ that wait to be filled with literacy and numeracy skills and knowledge. however, the teachers do not constantly refer to the learners’ everyday experiences as a starting point in the way many social practices-based literacy and numeracy pedagogies might suggest. what is more noticeable is a focused attention on the work outlined in the standardised distance learning materials. does this mean that rich life experiences and prior knowledge and skills are not being given recognition and validity in this program? close observations and interviews with the teachers suggest otherwise. the teachers are closely aware of the lives of their learners: the chaos and uncertainty that surround meeting basic needs, such as housing and food, and the teachers say that for some learners these uncertainties present themselves on a day-to-day basis. some might argue that as survivors of these challenging situations they would have very sophisticated ‘street’ literacy and numeracy skills and experiences from which the classroom literacy and numeracy teachers could draw. however, there is no sign that the teachers elicit the learners’ out of school experiences in this program. but neither do the teachers make any value judgments about the learners’ street literacy and numeracy. m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s chodkiewicz, widin, yasukawa 43 what is evident in the way the teachers work is the very strict observance of a ‘contract’ between learners and teachers. within the boundaries of the youth centre, the teachers provide almost unlimited support for the learners to achieve the learners' stated goal of completing the school curriculum. peter, the outreach teacher, commented on how the students are able to go off and work independently in different areas of the centre but they are keenly aware that the teachers are close by to help at any time. far from denying the learners’ histories and cultures, the physical environment of the centre represents strong affirmation of the learners’ cultures. there is acknowledgement by the teachers and the centre staff and volunteers of the undeniable economic, social and educational disadvantages that these learners have faced in their lives through the historical tensions between aboriginal and ‘white’ australia. the teachers both acknowledge that they ‘do need to be aware of the social world they are coming from because that’s what is really impacting on their learning’ (peter, outreach teacher). however, rather than focusing on the learners' disadvantages and their past, the teachers focus on the goals that the learners have identified for themselves: achieving the formal school credentials. the teachers work on creating an environment where they can shut out, as much as possible, the challenges of their students’ ‘everyday’ lives, in order to create new possibilities. the learners said that at the youth centre, they felt supported and the teachers were there to help the learners achieve their stated goal(s). peter (the outreach teacher) was keenly aware of how the program needed to differentiate itself from formal schooling: ‘i think one of the key ingredients for maintaining the program has been not to come with a model that has failed them before, such as a typical school model’. a social practices approach to teaching literacy and numeracy often encourages the use of learners’ personal histories to reveal how literacy and numeracy are socially and culturally contingent (papen 2005, appleby & barton 2008). for the young people in this program, their past and present lives were at times chaotic and unresolved in ways that took their focus away from their possible and positive foregrounds. it was not that the teachers encouraged the learners to abandon their community or deny the complexities of their lives. there was much in their lives that was beyond their current abilities to repair. the school certificate on the other hand was within their reach and for most of the learners provided a reason to remain involved and to access the support available in the youth centre. when a learner was disrupted or disengaged, both teachers played a key role in contacting them and re-engaging them with the program. at a superficial level, the teaching in the youth centre may seem to be surprisingly functional and ‘traditional’ in its textbook-centred approach. an example is the use of print based distance-learning materials. we initially m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s 44 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s wondered where the authentic texts were that adult literacy and numeracy teachers have been taught to use? at a deeper level, however, this program enacts aspects of the fundamental rationale for a social practices approach. as barton et al. (2006: 27) state, ‘people use literacy to make changes in their lives; literacy changes people and people find themselves in the contemporary world of changing literacy practices’. the individuals who participate in the youth centre program are experiencing change, and in so doing are participating in the politics of literacy and numeracy. their success in learning challenges any preconception that might have been held by themselves, their own community or people who prejudge the success of learners based on their backgrounds – be they social, cultural, economic, or educational. the education that the learners from this youth centre gain affords benefits to the learners individually and for their community. their learning increases their human capital, that is the knowledge and skills that will enable them to increase the economic resources for them and their community. it also increases, arguably more importantly, their social capital, that is, both the networks and relationships between the young people themselves, and the new relationships between them and groups outside the community, such as with the tafe college. these networks and relationships become resources to achieve shared goals (schuller 2004, balatti, black and falk 2007). these benefits are not achieved by accident or as a minor side-benefit, but rather as an intended consequence by virtue of the design of the program and the ways in which the teachers see their roles. t a k i n g t h e ‘ r i s k ’ o u t o f t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g as mentioned earlier in this article, the notion of ‘at risk’ is at best problematic and its main role is discriminatory and negative in the way it demonises young people (kelly 2007). there is an expectation that learners who have become excluded from formal schooling are difficult to teach and keep engaged in educational programs. there is, arguably, a high risk of ‘failure’ for the teachers in engaging with programs that require them to work with learners who can be easily distracted by the unpredictable events in their personal lives and who need induction into formal ways of learning. indeed, there is a high risk of failure for all concerned: the learners, teachers and the partner organisations. the teachers in the program are well aware of the fragile relationship between the students’ participation and continuing attendance and the demands of daily life. the teachers’ response to this situation is to operate from what they perceive as the needs of the learners. the teachers emphasise the importance of being empathetic to the learners literacy needs. jean, the abe teacher describes how the learners often have fundamental literacy needs and she is aware this makes them feel at a disadvantage: m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s chodkiewicz, widin, yasukawa 45 some of the students come in with big needs in their literacy, some students have a lot of difficulty reading simple text… they’re a little bit ashamed about it too (jean, abe teacher). jean and peter both talk about the possible interruptions the learners experience to their study and how they as teachers need to understand that the learners may take more time than usual to finish their course of study. both teachers stress the need to support the students through this process rather than punish the students or make them feel as though they are not achieving their goals. anger presents a real risk to the learners’ fragile relationship with this program. some of the learners are often at risk of letting their anger determine how they participate on the day. the teachers are highly sensitised to the possibility of an explosive situation and respond in ways to diffuse the tension, picking up on clues and navigating around these situations. in addition to the above strategies both teachers repeatedly refer to how the students need to be respected and to feel safe in their learning environment: ‘they need to be able to feel trust, be respected and not to made fun of’ (peter, outreach teacher). the way this project takes the risk out of learning is to provide a place where the learners feel welcomed, their goals can be realised and the teachers genuinely engage with them as people as well as learners. a key issue for us as ‘interlopers’ into this learning environment is the connectedness between and amongst the participants, teachers, youth workers and other interested people. the next section examines this more closely. r e l a t i o n a l d i m e n s i o n s c o n n e c t e d n e s s a c r o s s m u l t i p l e l a y e r s a n d d i m e n s i o n s the connections are not only between the structures, the different centres and the key stakeholders, they are within the centre itself. we are struck by the subjective aspects of practice where the teachers embody the multilayered elements of the field and facilitate relations with and between the students, the volunteers and future educational partners. the teachers’ ability to establish these strong and meaningful relationships demonstrates how connectedness is a key feature of teaching practice. the teachers' practices reflect noddings’s (2003) description of teaching as being a relational practice with a moral core. the idea of teaching as a relational practice is illustrated by an event the teachers organised to celebrate the participants' achievements at the end of a teaching term. the learners’ families and friends attended this event and the teachers recounted the positive impact that the celebration had on the learners and their respective guests and the wider community. most had m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s 46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s never experienced or been recognised for any positive learning outcome and the event acknowledged the participants as successful learners. another example of connectedness related by peter (outreach teacher) is his willingness to maintain the relationships that are established during the youth centre program. a group of learners had finished the school certificate program and wanted a vocational qualification (rsa – a short hospitality certificate), but they were not confident to undertake the certificate in the formal educational setting. peter offered to do the short course with the group; he did this to encourage the young people and act as an ‘anchor’ for them in the course, but he too was learning the particular skills and so in all respects he believes they felt that he was genuinely participating in the course. in a program such as this one it is important to recognise the different dimensions and layers of relationships that are established in order to get the program off the ground and to sustain it. initially, there was the connection that the college had with the community in which the learners’ lives were located. one of the teachers, peter, comes from a community outreach unit of the college, the central function of which is to broker educational programs with community groups and organisations. the success of the outreach unit relies on the teachers having real connections and knowledge of their local community, as well as a cooperative working arrangement with the abe unit in the college where the other teacher, jean, works. ‘brokering’ the type of partnerships on which this program is based is not straightforward. the program exists in an economic environment of reduced resources in public education institutions, where mainstream vocational and technical education is privileged over access and general education and where there may be complex local community politics that need to be sensitively considered. this program also relies heavily on being able to recruit suitable volunteers from the community. here the cooperation of the community youth worker in being able to identify people who are willing to work with the learners on a one to one basis, and who have attributes that are likely to support them in their roles, is critical. this shows the importance of bringing together and maintaining the network of outreach, abe, youth centre, the learners’ community, and the volunteers to support the program. the teachers actively form relationships of trust and respect with the learners. this is evident in the way they talk to the learners as people who are expected and able to take responsibility for their own learning. but it is a relationship that also acknowledges the variable and perhaps negative experiences that the learners have had with education prior to engaging in this program. the teachers listen to what the learners want most of all out of this learning – to be able to accomplish the school modules that they could not engage with in the formal school environment. one of the key aspects of the relationships between the teachers and the learners is that learners can rely on m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s chodkiewicz, widin, yasukawa 47 the teachers to help with any aspect of their work, to know that the teachers are on hand to give assistance when they need it. the teachers and students maintain this connection as long as the learners stay within the boundaries of the youth centre. both teachers comment on the level of trust that needs to develop between the teachers and learners with regard to maintaining the boundaries. jean describes how the learners need to leave the centre at times, for example, to go for a smoke, to visit a café, or just unwind. this is permitted and the teachers trust that the students will return; the learners also trust that the teacher will carry on from where they left off. the learners and teachers are developing their relationships beyond the usual teacher-student roles. a c r i t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f p r o g r a m f l e x i b i l i t y both teachers and learners in this program attribute some of the successes to the program’s ability to be flexible. however, the flexibility in this program is many layered, and in some areas, qualified. the notion of flexibility is often associated with good adult learning principles, such as: teachers and learners negotiating the process of learning, adapting the teaching focus to the learner’s individual goals and interests, and encouraging self-assessment rather than reliance on teacher assessment (jarvis et al. 2004). these expressions of flexibility assume a high level of self-direction and ownership of learning by the learners. these principles do not necessarily apply to this program. we have already discussed the reasons for not drawing directly on the learners’ lives as a central component of their curricula, but rather, using a standardised set of learning resources with exercises that the learners work on with the assistance of the teachers and volunteers. observing the learners work through the exercise sheet could easily invite criticisms of instrumental learning, arguably the very opposite to a social practices approach. the idea of flexibility is not often tied to instrumental learning. however another benefit of allowing space for instrumental learning can be seen when we consider the nature of instrumental learning compared to more conceptual or relational learning. skemp (1976 cited by selinger 1994) explains that learning instrumentally or by rote, provided the ‘rules’ or procedures to follow are stated clearly, is easier and quicker than learning relationally. for learners who carry the stigma of ‘failure’, being able to present a page of completed exercises with correct answers is an important achievement. in our case study, we see the teacher, peter, checking the folder of completed worksheets of one of the learners, and sending her off to complete the next module. this apparently routine relationship of teacher and learner in this exchange illustrates the significant trust that has formed between the teacher and learner. here the learner is being expected and m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s trusted to go away and do the work, and the teacher is being seen as someone who would acknowledge their achievements and who would have expectations of them as learners. these developments in the relationship between the teacher and learner are critical in taking the risk out of learning for the learners, and in turn the risk out of teaching for the teachers. in addition to the individual work, we see the teachers bringing learners together in a group to play word game. the teachers say that it is a way of making the learning of words fun and connecting them through language to other parts of the real world. [when] doing things like these word games, words come up that are a mystery to them, that they may have heard and are not quite sure of, so they get a curiosity about it and doing it in this game way makes it fun (jean, abe teacher). word games also enabled the teachers to extend the learners’ literacy learning, for example, to work on spelling patterns and rules that emerge out of the games. we do not argue that instrumental learning is therefore what should be promoted in a program such as this. however, its value in enabling students to gain successes and interest in learning must be acknowledged, particularly given their previous experiences of school as a place of failure and exclusion. f l e x i b i l i t y i n t e a c h i n g a prominent theme in teaching in non-formal / informal contexts is the notion of ‘being flexible’ in one’s approach to teaching (brookfield 2006), and clearly this is a significant factor for the teachers working in this program. the teachers use this notion of flexibility to describe how they make decisions to continue or not continue with a particular teaching segment; working with particular students or changing how they relate interpersonally with students. peter describes the complexity of this teaching context: it is good the way we can switch into something very quickly… we might have 10 students doing 10 different things individually and we need the flexibility to be able to turn them onto a [maths] question about sign or trig and then go back to the spelling or to move over to the project. so we move very quickly in terms of subject area. it’s not stand at the front of the room and deliver a lesson (peter, outreach teacher). these quick decisions that teachers make are in line with the notion of professional ‘discretionary judgement’ (beckett 1996) that involves decisions contingent on relevant factors including the teachers’ beliefs about the particular circumstances and the people present. in other words, the way teachers decide what they will do, continue with and so on, is dependent on what else is going on. the teachers draw from their practical and theoretical m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s chodkiewicz, widin, yasukawa 49 knowledge about teaching and from their deep understanding of the historical, social and material conditions which shape the situation they are currently working in. kemmis (2005: 392) names this aspect of practice as searching for 'saliences', that is, the teachers drawing on their knowledge and life experience reflexively and responding to changing situations as they unfold. to call this flexibility does not fully acknowledge or describe the store of knowledge the teachers are drawing on to make the moment-to-moment decisions in this teaching environment. c o n c l u s i o n the teaching and learning practices demonstrated in this program show how with skill, knowledge and a deep commitment to relational practice, a group of learners previously excluded from formal education reengage to achieve their learning goals. attempting to make sense of practices while assuming that practices should reflect theory and knowledge in a particular way is fraught with uncertainties and the uniqueness of learning events (kinsella, 2007). it also ignores the transformation of teaching practices when the teachers interact with the particularities of the learners and their lives that may be different from one day to the next. kemmis’s idea of ‘knowing practices’ as ‘searching for saliences’ (2007; 2005) enables us to see the dynamism of both teaching and learning practices in a critical way. the alternative is to understand teaching practices as something stable and predictable, that could then lead to positioning the uncertainties and unpredictability that learners bring to the class as disruptive forces. coming with the expectation that a ‘knowing practice’ is about interacting with, sometimes resisting and sometimes responding to unanticipated events with thought, the hindsight of experience, theorised understanding as well as a deep appreciation of the ‘here and now’, enabled us as researchers and the teachers to interrogate constructs such as ‘youths at risk’. an objective research based on some of the dominant discourses about ‘youths at risk’ might have focused on how teachers managed the learners who in many dominant discourses could be categorised as ‘at risk’ and difficult learners to work with. the connectedness of the learners to learning and connectedness to the ‘real world’ both played a role in focusing on both individual and contextual aspects. while this study was qualitative and limited in its generalisability, it points to the value of seeing teaching practices more broadly. it is hoped that along with other practitioner led research it will contribute to further discussion and inquiry into teaching practices in community settings. m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s 50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s r e f e r e n c e s appleby, y and barton, d (2008) responding to people's lives, national research and development centre for language and literacy, london. atkinson, p and hammersley, m (2007) ethnography: principles in practice, 3rdedition, routledge, new york. aylward, n (2008) learning from the edge, adults learning, vol 19, no 5, pp 24-25. barton, d, appleby, y, hodge, r, tusting, k, and ivanic, r, (2006) relating adults’ lives and learning: participation and engagement in different settings national research and development centre for language and literacy, london. baker, d (1998) numeracy as social practice, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 8, no 1, pp 37-50. balatti, j, black, s, and falk, i (2007) teaching for social capital outcomes: the case of adult literacy and numeracy courses, australian journal of adult learning, vol 47, no 2, pp 245-63. baynham, m (1995) literacy practices: investigating literacy in social context. longman, london. beckett, d (1996) critical judgment and professional practice, educational theory, vol 46, no 2, pp 135-149. brookfield, s (2006) the skillful teacher, jossey-bass, san francisco. jarvis, p, holford, j, and griffin, c (2004) the theory and practice of learning, routledge falmer, london. kelly, p (2007) governing individualised risk biographies: new class intellectuals and the problem of youth at-risk, british journal of sociology of education, vol 28, no1, pp 39-53. kemmis, s (2005) knowing practice: searching for saliences, pedagogy, culture and society, vol 13, no 3, pp 391427. kemmis, s (forthcoming 2010), what is professional practice? in kanes, c, (ed), developing professional practice, springer, amsterdam. kinsella, ea (2007) embodied reflection and the epistemology of reflective practice, journal of philosophy of education, vol 41, no 3, pp 395– 409. long, m and curtain, r (2005) how young people are faring, dusseldorp skills, glebe, nsw merriam, sb (1998) qualitative research and case study applications in education, jossey-bass, san francisco. mcneil, b and dixon, l (2005) success factors informal learning: young adults’ experiences of literacy, language and numeracy, national research and development centre for language and literacy, london. m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s chodkiewicz, widin, yasukawa 51 noddings, n (2003) is teaching a practice? journal of philosophy of education, vol 37, no 2, pp 245-251. papen, u (2005) adult literacy as social practice: more than skills. routledge, london and new york. schuller, t (2004) three capitals: a framework, in schuller, t, preston, j, hammond c, brassett-grundy, a and bynner, j (eds), the benefits of learning: the impact of education on health, family life and social capital, routledge-falmer, london, pp 12-33. selinger, m (1994) understanding, in selinger, m, (ed), teaching mathematics, routledge, london, pp. 185-194. street, bv (1995) social literacies : critical approaches to literacy development, ethnography, and education, longman, london yin, rk (2008) case study research: design and methods, volume 5 of applied social research methods, sage, new york. microsoft word lns18.1_wallace_2aug.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 1 2010 3 the grit in the oyster does an appreciation of threshold concepts in an adult literacies teaching qualification result in pearls of practice? david wallace (from a paper presented at the australian council for adult literacy conference (surfers paradise) – october 2—4 2008) a b s t r a c t this paper draws from the experiences of a new adult literacies teaching qualification in scotland that has been designed for experienced but unqualified adult literacies tutors. created to respond to an approach to adult literacies as social practices (scottish executive 2001, 2005, tett et al 2006), the course team employs a sociocultural pedagogy that explicitly rejects transmission and seeks to build critical reflection through learning from experience, collaborative activities and the creation of an on-line community (ackland and wallace 2006). recognising that ‘moments of conflict and disjuncture may form the spaces in which learning occurs’ (lewis, enciso and moje 2007:5) the paper explores whether ideas about liminality and threshold concepts (cousin 2006:1, land, meyer and smith 2008) illuminate the learning process. it concludes that engagement with these concepts may assist adult literacies tutors to develop transformed practice (cope and kalantzis 2003:35). a p i l o t t e a c h i n g q u a l i f i c a t i o n i n a d u l t l i t e r a c i e s ( t q a l ) the first students in scotland to have undertaken a part-time course to obtain a teaching qualification in adult literacies graduated in november 2008. the course lasted 20 months and was undertaken by experienced literacies tutors from around scotland. drawn from a range of statutory and voluntary organisations these literacies tutors operate in diverse settings and with a wide range of terms and conditions of employment. being fully funded by the scottish government, the program was designed as a pilot to meet policy priorities regarding the professional development needs of adult literacies tutors (scottish executive 2001). the pilot program has been developed by a consortium of partners including universities of strathclyde, aberdeen, and dundee; cardonald and forth valley colleges of further and higher education; the scottish further education unit; and practitioner representatives, one from highland council and the other formerly of the workers education association. the professional requirements of the qualification were published in benchmark statements drawn up by the quality assurance agency and t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s learning connections in 2005 specifying a qualification that could be offered at two levels — a bachelor of arts degree or diploma of higher education. required to be accessible to tutors across scotland, the course has been offered in four study centres around the country. the program started in january 2006 with forty-eight students. thirty-three students have now completed the course that encompassed engagement with four sequential modules each worth 30 credits and each with 300 hours notional student effort. in summary the four modules are: 1 l e a r n i n g w o r l d s : exploring the diversity of socio—cultural learning experience and addressing aspects of informal learning, situated learning and aspects of professionalism; 2 m a k i n g m e n t a l m o d e l s : exploring the evolving stories of literacies, learning and education through a variety of lenses (e.g. sociological, psychological, and philosophical). theoretical perspectives form a means of critical engagement with and understandings of practice; 3 e x p a n d i n g o u r r e p e r t o i r e : working on the basis that no clear consensus exists about the best ways to develop reading, writing and mathematical concepts, practitioners will build a repertoire of strategies for particular purposes, on which they can draw creatively in the specific situations they encounter; 4 t h e e n a b l i n g n e t : this module further contextualises literacies and learning. exploring the concept of the activist teacher, participants explore the need for comprehensive networks, partnerships and activism among literacies tutors. the program involved regional groups of students coming together in study blocks for each module (each of a week in duration); undertaking workbased learning in which the principles of the program are explored in literacies practice; and engaging with a virtual learning environment (vle) to scaffold learning in each module, linking students with their peers and actively encouraging dialogue and collective reflection through an on-line community. assessment is designed to be sustainable (boud 2000) in that there is a strong formative component — through tutor comment on on-line contributions, through on-line tutorials and through observed practice. these forms of assessment fit with social practice thinking (green and howard 2007:18) and are central to the principles for learning on the program. there are a range of assessments including a case study, a professional development plan, a literature review, a presentation on an ethnographic study undertaken with learners, and observed practice reports. complementing the work of students studying for the adult literacies teaching qualification, a group of experienced practitioners operate as practice tutors to offer professional guidance and mentoring to students with whom they are paired. supporting learning through observation, dialogue and reflection on practice, this group of practitioners has also contributed to t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r w a l l a c e 5 the ongoing evaluation of the pilot and to testing the principles of the program. t h e t q a l s t a n c e in colin kirkwood’s (1990:11) collection of essays he begged questions about whether we, personally or communally, could influence the shape of the future; or whether this was not possible since we are determined by forces beyond our control. the pilot program of which i write is permeated with a conviction that we can influence the future personally and communally through critically informed adult literacies practice. the starting point for this stance is the social practices ethos that informs adult literacies in scotland — one that affords the potential to engage with adult learners on everyday matters that are of interest or concern to them. a key purpose of the literacies tutor in a social practices approach is to uncover and understand everyday uses of literacy and numeracy over ‘schooled ways of knowing’ (papen 2005:129). this is extended by our choice of a framework for teaching and learning that is deliberately socioconstructivist (de corte, vershaffel, entwhistle and van merrienboer 2003:25) and in which the student identity and experience is the foundation for our engagement with them. it is from these starting points that we then draw from and interrogate a canon of literature on the repertoires required for the teaching of reading, writing, assessment, numeracy and information and communication technologies (ict). this constructivist approach is in turn advanced by a systematic approach to building critical reflection (moon 2006). in our selection of an anthropological epistemology for learning (over more traditional psychological paradigms), our approach aims to develop a community of practice to build and to capture aspects of collaborative learning. to build social knowledge we wanted to move beyond the individual approach to reflection to embrace the experiences of the community of participants. we aimed to maximise opportunities for interaction between adult literacies practitioners as students ‘in ways that interlock their stakes in histories of practice’ (wenger 1998:276). we agree further with wenger (1998:277) that if ‘learning is a matter of identity, then identity is itself an educational resource’. this is therefore a professional development program for literacies tutors that explicitly engages with their identity as a means of grounding learning through exposing and critiquing tacit knowledges, creating foundations for new understandings and affecting new knowledge and new practice. contrary therefore to a trend toward education being transformed into training, we have consciously avoided transmission models in our approach to continuous professional development (cpd) and have sought to open up the requirement for students themselves to consider metacognition — to think more, question more and practise more as means to initiating transformation of their identity t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s (brookfield 2000:89-100). we require students to build an understanding not only of the repertoire required for adult literacies practice but also to appreciate and engage with what kirkwood (1990:11) termed ‘the forces beyond our control’ — i.e. the hegemony, ideologies and structural inequalities that shape and influence our lives and the lives of the literacies learners with whom we are engaged. the process encouraged me to challenge my own ideas about the way we do things and why. it also made me re-evaluate my own understanding to be more in tune with practical application of policy against its theoretical assertion. [student comment] following moje and lewis (in lewis, encisco and moje 2007:46) we were concerned to ‘…uncover the positions students are willing to take up and the agency they have to resignify, disrupt or examine prevailing discourses’ for deeper literacies learning. these foundations for professional development may not necessarily have been familiar to participants prior to the program. as a consequence our methods presented both additional and critical dimensions for learning and a challenge to the course team as we sought to adhere to an untested and new set of principles that we aimed to constructively align (biggs and tang 2007). although drawing from contemporary literature to inform this stance there is, never the less, an acknowledged experimental dynamic in the program. to the extent that we also adopt a blended learning strategy to enact these pedagogical principles (including a mix of study—centre, work—based and on—line learning) there is a departure from the framework of disciplinary study at university to develop new pedagogies for learning (boud, solomon and symes 2001:4). central to our design are the following core principles: • the overall process of learning is built on a framework of curriculum design in which intended learning outcomes, teaching methods, and evaluation are all interdependent and only by truly integrating these components together, do we achieve efficient student learning (drawing from biggs and tang 2007); • staff involved in teaching must themselves commit to a reflective practitioner approach to their work and be prepared to learn from their mistakes and successes (drawing from cranton 2006, moon 2006, brookfield 2000); • meaning is not imposed or transmitted by direct instruction—it is created by the student's own learning activities (drawing from eraut 1994, engerstrom 2001, cheetham and chivers 2001, de corte et al 2003). t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r w a l l a c e 7 as a foundation for enacting these principles, professional enquiry and action learning are features across modules. the intention is to keep the practitioner/student and their experience at the centre of the pedagogical model, raising awareness amongst them of the potential to learn lessons together and to disseminate good practice by means of research. this acknowledges the grounded experience of the literacies tutors whilst seeking to develop new aspects of learning and the construction of new knowledge. we concur therefore with howard ( in davies, hamilton and james 2007:5) who notes in her foreword how practitioner research ‘…encourages critical and reflective enquiry…throws light on, explores and challenges accepted practices and received wisdom from the inside as well as the outside’. t h e f r a m i n g o f p r o f e s s i o n a l d e v e l o p m e n t f o r a d u l t l i t e r a c i e s t u t o r s although there is an ambitious vision for adult literacies through the social practices approach in scotland, our experience suggests a number of tensions within and between policy, management and practice (maclachlan 2006). these may be expressed in the form of conceptual dualisms – a continuum on which there are opposing positions at the extremities e.g. functional literacy models and critical literacy models (papen 2005) or managerial professionalism and democratic professionalism (sachs 2000). these continuums may be visualised as professional barometers with an indicator needle that fluctuates and is positioned somewhere between one or the other extreme depending on prevailing influences on practice. the framing of practice is therefore contingent and variable. practice norms vie for prominence in the context of pressure from dominant discourses routinely around functional models and much more rarely around critical models of literacy. thus adult literacies tutors in their practice may encounter and experience taken-for-granted operational arrangements — in agencies in which routines of practice are pre-configured (particular groups meeting in particular places using particular teaching methods); in the way that planning takes place at a macro and managerial level (routinely at some distance from the literacies tutors); and in the processes of management, audit and inspection (in which the returns required for stakeholders and funders can tend to be data rather than learner centred). the voices of adult literacies practitioners, who are often in the weakest positions within their various organisations, may not be supported by the language of policy that is routinely interpreted and filtered for them by those in positions of authority and hence presented as a given. under such conditions the space for adult literacies tutors to critically engage with policy, in the light of their experiences as practitioners, may be limited or off-limits. t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s this position is consistent with research into the scottish adult literacies strategy through which tett, hall, maclachlan, thorpe, edwards, and garside( 2006) commented that those with most contact with learners tend to be those on part-time contracts and with little access to support and training. we are mindful, therefore, that the practices we as teachers see as meriting analysis and change are largely configured through relationships of power and ideological hegemony (moje and lewis in lewis, encisco and moje 2007:17), an appreciation of which is crucial to understanding the milieu in which the adult literacies tutor is located. whilst we subscribe to the community of practice as a model for social and collaborative learning, we have learned that a contradiction in the model is that legitimation of knowledge — legitimate peripheral participation (wenger 1998) — is moderated not simply by the efficacy of the knowledge or new ways of doing something, but may be dependent on who created the new rule or knowledge: …certain types of knowledge and understanding might be privileged or inhibited, encouraged or prevented not on the basis of work practice knowledge, but on the basis of status and power. (saunders 2006:17) although we are reminded of the dangers of placing too much emphasis on agency and the potential of individual employees to enact change, this scenario resonates with the tensions identified by sachs (2000) in teaching discourse in australia between democratic professionalism and managerial professionalism. agreeing with sach’s (2000) exposition of trust and reciprocity as central characteristics of democratic professionalism, we have subsequently endorsed her conception of the activist teacher throughout the tqal program. whilst we sought to tailor the program to balance institutional, employer and individual learning goals, at the outset we defined pedagogical principles consistent with an aspiration to a social practices view and have avoided compromising this position. although these principles are authoritatively promoted (largely as a result of our privileged position in the academy), feedback suggests that in some quarters they may be received as radical or even esoteric. this reaction may be underpinned by what maclachlan (2006:32) identifies as dissonance in scottish policy and practice between the ideological model of social practices and the employability imperative. the tension here is between instrumental approaches to learning and more associational, creative and expressive approaches to learning. our position of sticking to the principles of an aspirational discourse meant therefore that we contested the experience of other stakeholders including some employers (and some participants on the program) whose reality is t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r w a l l a c e 9 shaped by literacies discourses that may be inconsistent with social practices approaches. it cannot be taken for granted, therefore, that adult literacies practitioners and prospective students will readily subscribe to notions of learning expressed as functions of reflexivity, collaboration or action enquiry. for many of them, problems may be subjectively important, set in a particular social context of employment through which learning may be shaped by expectations that reside in already established experiential patterns (illeris 2007:255). indeed participants on the tqal program, shaped by these social relationships at work, may hold to a view of higher education as expert instruction and anything which does not conform to these preconceptions may be regarded as inferior and second rate (hagar 2004). although we see the work community as an important learning environment, the informal learning processes of work communities have been described as under-researched and remaining obscure (collin and valleala 2005:401). whilst our approach has been predicated on new literacies studies, social practices and the sociological and anthropological lenses afforded by authors such as eraut , alderton, cole and senker (1998), and wenger (1998), it may be the case that what is learned in the workplace remains partial and personalised, subject to the limitations of agency. it may also continue to be shaped ‘by past habits and routines…and by the contingencies of the present moment’ (evans and kersh, 2006:2-3). the interesting question, then, is what assumptions underlie our tacit decisions to use or not use certain activities and tasks with learners. and what does this tell us about our theory of learning and teaching writing? [student comment on vle] we agree with wenger, mcdermott and snyder (2002:9) who identify with embodied expertise that may reside in tacit knowledge. however the social aspect of knowledge development may equally have the potential to be corrupted through institutional, structural or cultural norms. the adult literacies tutors who have embarked on our program are products of a set of cultural norms and values framed by scottish adult literacies policy and filtered through the variety of domains and contexts in which such practice takes place. it is no surprise that, for many, their intuition — viewed as a product of identity, prior learning, tacit beliefs, assumptions and values — may, as claxton (2000:42) attests, be fallible. their intuition may derive from limited knowledge and narrow experience; non-reflexive observation and unchallenged assumptions — the embodiment of a pre-liminal state set out by cousin (2006:1) and others that i will revisit in the next section of the article. although more accepting of core pedagogic principles as the program progressed, we encountered reaction from some students (and from some practice managers) to the effect that the collaborative and group learning t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s approach was not what was anticipated — i.e. it was not instruction and did not conform to expectations about ‘lectures’ and input by ‘experts’. our rationale for the program, however, was informed by an understanding that adult-literacies tutors operate in diverse settings and with a wide range of cultural networks and situated knowledges. in such circumstances, seeking to apply one key system (if one indeed existed) would not be appropriate or meaningful given the range of contexts, experiences and cultures that literacies tutors encounter. this is therefore a core site for critical reflection and learning that requires the nurturing of dialogue and conversation through which presuppositions, ideas and beliefs and feelings can all be made explicit and available for exploration (hakkarainen, palonen, paavola and lehtinen 2004). in such circumstances it was recognised that we cannot teach everything that must be known and that we were required to account for dynamics of practice which are evolving and unfolding. our concern therefore has been to create a space, both real and virtual, in which knowledge is treated as being in design mode (bereiter and scardamalia 2003:55) and through which participants working together are encouraged and supported to be reflexive, enquiring and creative. our intentions on the program align with earl and timperley (2008:22) who observe that ‘the merging of the process of deep collaboration with evidence and inquiry can create the conditions for generating new knowledge’. we further concur with cranton (2006:182) who argues that technical knowledge about teaching cannot be overlooked but that ‘technique should not drive an educator’s perspective of practice, rather a perspective on practice should determine what technical knowledge is required’. typically, adult learning, of which continuous professional development is one domain, may be viewed as a function of identity. wenger (1998:215), advancing this idea, described it as a process of becoming or avoiding becoming a certain person. such learning may therefore be selective and sceptical or may result in active resistance, defensive rejection, blocking or distortion (illeris 2007:255). it is to this area of troublesome knowledge (meyer and land 2006) that i now turn to provide an analysis of how the ideas of liminality and threshold concepts (land, meyer and smith 2008) may assist in providing insight into the process of professional development and learning within the program. l i m i n a l i t y a s a n e c e s s a r y c o n d i t i o n f o r p r o f e s s i o n a l d e v e l o p m e n t in many individual cases, learning for participants appears to have been transformational. however, from student dialogue and reflection we are aware that this is not always an enjoyable or comforting experience. learning in this way may be troubling, may result in unexpected outcomes and may provoke a state of stasis if the learner resists or is disinclined to move through t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r w a l l a c e 11 transition to transformation. it is common parlance among the students to define the learning process in relation to the comfort zone and, consequently, to stepping out of the comfort zone. we ask learners to go outside their comfort zones in their learning — without this it is difficult to progress\— so why should we not be pushed outside ours? and it’s good to see how this feels (on reflection of course!) and be reminded of how valuable it is to face challenges. [tqal student comment] i have theorised, therefore, that it is these pivotal moments of uncertainty, contestation or resistance, associated with moving from the comfort zone, that may be construed as the locus for creative tensions – a liminal stage in reflection at which there is a nexus for learning. arguably, it is these contested or uncertain spaces – the stage of liminality (meyer and land 2006:2) — that are true sites for professional development for the participants. these stages provide a locus for reflection, analysis and dialogue resulting in the participant either dwelling in an existing, if questioned, knowledge space or departing to a new way of knowing. a pre—liminal stage may also be theorised, one that occurs prior to the student’s encounters with other people in a community of practice and with other ideas about what constitutes practice. mastery of the threshold concepts (land, meyer and smith 2008) in our sociocultural pedagogy may at this stage be inhibited since they may seem to a student to cut against common sense or intuitive frames of reference to which they hold dear. cousin (2006:2) subsequently posits that getting students to reverse their intuitive understandings is also troublesome because the reversal can involve uncomfortable emotional repositioning. the general point i am making, however, is that having reached a stage of awareness on the program through a combination of experience, dialogue, reading and collaboration with others, neither the dwelling nor the departing are necessarily comfort zones. the state of liminality will be experienced differently by every student but represents a zone beyond which the impact of reflexivity cannot be readily set aside. meyer and land (2003:4) reinforce this irreversibility and equate the mastery of threshold concepts with deep and long lasting learning. however the move out of the comfort zone may connect, in the student’s reaction at these stages, to what brookfield (2000:9699) identified as the loss of innocence and sense of impostership – stages in identity transformation that are problematic and that require careful support and nurturing from teachers and peers. the engagement with liminality and threshold concepts would appear therefore to be central concerns for this program if we are to seek the most effective and powerful forms of learning. in going forward we want to challenge as brookfield says those ideological toxins that are deeply embedded both within our t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s institutions of learning and in us. by so doing we will challenge accepted practice, inform policy and be more effective in reaching those who require the most help. [student comment on the vle] in freirean terms this process may be equated with the journey from naïve consciousness to an emerging critical consciousness (conscientisation) and, when articulated through informed action, to praxis (freire 1972). sommerlad (2003:157) contends that what one learns and how it is learned cannot be separated from the groups one belongs to, nor from their wider location in the social structure. for some students on the program however, the experience of critical reflection on adult literacies has seen them question their place in existing work communities——a situation that may find them at odds with previously comfortable and supportive work relationships. such powerful learning, in realigning identity, may be emotionally charged and we concur therefore with sachs (2003:31) who notes that learning for teachers has personal, professional and political dimensions. we will all take many positives from our tqal experience i am sure but the most positive aspect for me is that we are more active in our practice, more critically aware of how and why we practice and apply more critical analysis to our profession. [student comment on the vle] as cousin (2006:1) attests ‘new understanding is assimilated into our biography, becoming part of who we are, how we see, how we feel’. it appears that the experience of being on this program may lead some to a transition stage at which the student/practitioner will reconsider, reconfigure or exit a community of practice. the powerful role of identity in learning is again embodied in these propositions. it may be constructed ‘to include different meanings and forms of participation into one nexus’ (paechter 2003:75) and developing as multimembership (wenger 1998:159). once we adopted the constructivist paradigm for professional development it could be argued that certain concepts — social practices, critical reflection, metacognition, collaborative learning and constructivism — became threshold concepts (meyer and land 2006) that are central to the mastery of our subject (adult literacies learning). for some students the experience involved troublesome knowledge and the oscillating back and forth between previous and emergent understandings (cousin 2006) and between previous and emergent identities. it has therefore been our intention to structure the virtual learning environment in such a way that the students could save and exchange material and navigate back and forth between current and earlier modules. the shared areas on—line provide a repository of ideas that could be revisited and revised throughout the program. the vle became an important open channel to the wider community of practice; a mechanism for t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r w a l l a c e 13 providing a sounding board and access to critical peers that could support transitions. in this respect the vle potentially offers a forum and a number of guides to assist in navigation through the experience of liminality. i strongly feel that the vle was a major asset to this course. the ability to interact with both fellow students and our tutor on an almost daily basis removed much of the feelings of isolation that i had experienced on a previous part time degree course. the blog element allowed us to discuss not just within a specific course subject viewpoint but as a social 'meeting point'. the file sharing and website exchanges made the research elements of assignments highly effective. [student comment on the vle] p e a r l s o f p r a c t i c e ? theorising about the applicability of threshold concepts and the experience of liminality assists in understanding the experience of professional learning for adult literacies practitioners on this program. these concepts may also have applicability for continuing professional development in other professional areas such as further education, social work, community work or youth work. the articulation of core pedagogical principles and their assertion through action inquiry, literature and modelling in practice appear from our experience to create powerful learning environments (de corte et al 2003) through which transformation may be attained. kirkwood (1990) posited a question about the degree to which we can shape the future (in adult literacies) and outlined the notion that we are determined by forces beyond our control. in reflecting on the principles and analysis encountered in this article i am reminded of his caveat: u n l e s s . we are determined unless we take on the task of knowing ourselves, that is to say both the inner potential self, and the self that we have become through our responses to environmental impingements. we are determined unless we take on the task of knowing our context, the interacting forces and themes of our society and the world as a whole. we are determined unless we make a move from an orientation of passivity to one of reflective engagement. this can only be done in collaboration with others. but we cannot genuinely collaborate unless we seek to know ourselves. the personal and the communal are not alternatives: they are co—essential dimensions of human emergence. (kirkwood 1990:11) the design of the teaching qualification in adult literacies appears to meet these ideals. though the experience of all students on the program cannot be generalised there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the course has initiated a potentially regenerative learning process – a process of t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s transformation that may continue beyond the conclusion of the tqal course. as 'professionals' i feel we need to keep stretching the boundaries, doing the requirements of the job but always, always broadening this out to include a critical analysis of what we are doing, why and in whose interest. if we don't challenge these and put forward alternative visions then we are not active participants in anything, we are merely deliverers of governmental economic policy and we limit not only what we do but what literacies are! [student comment on the vle] we in the consortium know that there remain lessons for us to learn from the tqal pilot. the strategies for exploiting notions of liminality and threshold concepts remain to be fully tested and should be more explicit in our design for teaching and learning. we remain convinced by the activities of students on-line, in practice and in assignments that pearls of practice have been evidenced. the final evaluation of the program (hillier 2008) confirms the benefits of the tqal approach to professional development for adult literacies tutors who require a professional qualification. in feedback and reflective tasks students routinely confirmed the merits of the process both in expanding their learning and in influencing local literacies. the context for adult literacies education in scotland is configured by neoliberal policies, by imprecisely demarcated notions of informal education and social practices and is consequently framed by dualisms that are ideologically inconsistent. approaches to social practices that are truly learner-centred may be subverted by the influence of didactic instruction, deficit models of literacies and the drive for certification as the primary measure of success. this however is not the regulated or hierarchical world of industry, commerce or school. rather it is the world of loosely coupled systems in which the tutor operates at the end of a chain of command whilst engaging with local people (literacies learners) to create practice (negotiate learning). this infers a degree of discretion, choices that if made on the basis of appropriate reflection may advance critical practices. participants on this program who adopt its principles have demonstrated the potential to build, shape and enhance future adult literacies practice collaboratively and as activist professionals. our approach to the program offers a mechanism for opening up the multiple meanings attached to practitioners’ subjectivities. through building collaboration, critical reflection and action inquiry we aim to render these subjectivities contingent and mobile in and against a historical hegemony that wants teachers to have a pre-defined identity as represented by powerful and dominant discourses about institutional education and learning (zemblyas 2006:301). our explicit approach to learning on the program is therefore to t h e g r i t i n t h e o y s t e r w a l l a c e 15 build on the social practices ethos and through the community of practice to create possibilities of action which include[s] the creation of new rules that nurture and advance new learning practices i.e. ways that reformulate discourse and practice (zemblyas 2006). thus the activist teacher suggested by sachs (2003:92) is influential in guiding tqal students to see themselves as part of a wider network, drawing from and contributing to partnerships reinventing their professional identity and redefining themselves as teachers. it is in the enactment 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education and work, vol 19, no 3, pp 291—303. lns template l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 9 n o 1 2 0 1 1 35 'you have to find a location where you will sell, where you think you will sell most' – exploring the numeracy skills of female microcredit clients in nicaragua sonja beeli-zimmermann abstract using lindenskov and wedege's (2001) working model for numeracy, semi-standardised interviews with self-employed women in nicaragua were analysed. the analysis illustrates that the women’s numeracy skills are not limited to counting and calculation skills when dealing with financial matters. the interviewees display a broad understanding of patterns and relations, and there are indications of an awareness of data and chance. while the medium of money plays an important role, the women also refer to specific products, time or people when displaying their numeracy skills. if the livelihoods of these women are to be improved and international development goals and educational commitments are to be reached and fulfilled, it is suggested that these skills that the women already possess should be investigated more systematically in order to better understand the transfer of knowledge between different contexts. introduction context is a fundamental and frequently discussed term in debates about numeracy. context and skills constitute two core aspects of numeracy development. two different meanings of context can be distinguished: that of location or situation, and that of problems or tasks. for this article, the situational context is foregrounded. it has been found that a person's numeracy skills depend on where they have to be displayed (see for example lave 1988, saxe 1991, nunes, schliemann and carraher 1993) and the transfer of skills between different contexts, particularly between educational and work settings, is a much debated issue. however, as will be seen below, understanding and facilitating transfer in the other direction, namely from work to learning contexts, is equally important. as situational context also includes wider aspects such as historical and social relations, the fact that this article – unlike many others dealing with numeracy – is not based on information gathered 'in the western hemisphere and developed nations of the world' (naresh 2008:9) needs to be mentioned. numeracy studies from developing countries are rare, but seem to be increasing. lekoko and garegae (2006), for example, describe the skills of ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s women street vendors in botswana, a target population closely related to that of this article. naresh (2008) describes the workplace mathematics of bus conductors in india, and gahamanyi (2010) explores mathematics use at various workplaces and educational settings in rwanda. the data for this article were collected in 2008 in nicaragua, with the aim of learning more about the planning skills of microcredit clients with little or no formal education. notably, the initial motivation for the data collection was not a focus on numeracy but a concern with planning, making this article a reanalysis of the data from a numeracy perspective. this presents both advantages and disadvantages with the former being the fact that the informants were under no pressure to solve any quantitative problems or perform set tasks. their quantitative statements can indeed be considered as having occurred spontaneously without specific prompts and are therefore an illustration of how relevant quantitative issues are in their lives. the main disadvantage is that the data are insufficient for systematic assessment, therefore limiting the nature of this article to exploration and description. there are two main reasons for describing numeracy in non-western and non-industrialised countries: adding to a broader understanding of context in the numeracy debate, and political relevance. education is considered to be a key ingredient for development (see for example barton and papen 2005, archer and jeng 2006). more specifically, literacy (understood in a broader sense to include numeracy) is considered to be 'the invisible ingredient in any successful strategy for eradicating poverty' (archer and jeng 2006:2). the international community has committed itself repeatedly to both the reduction of illiteracy (world education forum 2000) and poverty (united nations 2000). these goals cannot be achieved by merely focusing on getting all children into school, there also needs to be considerably more investment in getting adults into effective literacy programs. effective literacy programs are characterised, among others, by participatory methods that ensure their relevance to the learners' lives (archer and jeng 2006). a better understanding of poor people’s livelihoods in general, and their literacy and numeracy use in particular, could therefore contribute to more effective educational programs and – hopefully in the long term – to achieving the international community's commitments and granting adults their right to education. theoretical background the initial theoretical research framework relating to planning (friedman and scholnik 1997) that was used to collect the data was not considered to be adequate for a reanalysis from a numeracy perspective. at the same time, a purely skills based or autonomous numeracy model was considered to be inadequate as it negates contextual factors (baker and street 1994), one of the key characteristics of the available data. finally, a ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' b e e l i z i m m e r m a n n 37 working model for numeracy as an analytical tool described by lindenskov and wedege (2001) was found to be suitable. it has an empirical basis and 'is not seeing skills and understandings isolated' (lindenskov and wedege 2001:11), but together with three other dimensions. the other three dimensions are media, context and personal intentions. media refers not only to written and oral information, but also to concrete materials, time and processes. context is understood as situational context referring to historical, social and other relations where numeracy skills are used. and finally, the dimension of personal intentions includes conscious and unconscious conceptions. the two latter dimensions, context and personal intentions, allow for both an objective and subjective approach to numeracy. indeed, lindenskov and wedege stress that contrasting contexts 'both inside and outside the system of education [… are needed in order] to see that personal intentions, media and situational contexts emerge as being equally important to skills and understanding' (lindenskov and wedege 2001:12). a similar research approach is taken by street, baker and tomlin (2008) who contrast home and school numeracy practices. their conceptualisation of numeracy practices resembles lindenskov’s and wedeges, as they also differentiate four dimensions, namely content, context, values and beliefs, and social and institutional relations. and while a detailed comparison of the two conceptualisations is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that in spite of some overlaps and similarities, there are some important differences: most notably the explicit inclusion of hierarchy and power in the dimension of social and institutional relations by street, baker and tomlin. however, the concept of numeracy practices understood as an expansion of numeracy events and as such more than numerical activity, was not considered adequate for this reanalysis of the data which had not been gathered under the same theoretical perspective, particularly as no actual numeracy events were observed. lindenskov and wedeges’ model, on the other hand, was considered to be an ideal instrument to explore the role of numeracy in the daily lives of women working in the informal sector. study background nicaragua is located in central america and is one of the poorest countries in the region. out of its population of 5.9 million almost half (48 percent) live in poverty (central intelligence agency 2010). one important characteristic of nicaragua's economy is the fact that a large share of its gross domestic product is generated in the informal sector; vuletin (2008) estimates this rate to be at 65–70 percent. apart from the agricultural work force, home based workers and street vendors form the two largest subgroups of the informal work force (international labour organisation 2002). the data used for this article were collected from women who fall ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s into these two subgroups. at the time of the interviews they all lived in matagalpa, a city located 130 km north of the capital managua. matagalpa has some 130,000 inhabitants and is the centre of national coffee production with coffee being one of the country’s main export goods. economic prosperity is a key concern in international cooperation. one instrument that has become increasingly popular is microfinance – particularly microcredits. access for poor people to such services is difficult for various reasons, among them the comparatively high transaction costs and the fact that they cannot offer traditional securities, such as a piece of land or a house. apart from strengthening the poor's economic basis, microfinance has also been found to have an empowering effect by allowing people to move from a reactive to a more proactive mode of managing their assets (sebstad and cohen 2003). access to financial services in the form of microfinance therefore not only provides poor people with the opportunity to build up their economic assets, but also addresses other dimensions of poverty such as exclusion and powerlessness. worldwide, numerous organisations implement an equally varied number of microfinance programs. the women interviewed for this study participated in an international program called trickleup which is administered by local non-governmental organisations (ngos), namely odesar (a local nicaraguan organisation working for the economic and social development of municipalities) and aldea sos (a branch of sos children's villages international). they provide selected women with an interest-free $us100 credit, which is paid out in two tranches of $us50, three months apart. the women have to repay it one year later i , also within a time-frame of three months. one requirement of the program is that the money has to be used to either start or enlarge a business. furthermore, the women participate in short workshops in which not only important information with respect to the credit is shared, but also specific skills, such as basic bookkeeping or saving strategies, are imparted. however, being affiliated with aldea sos means that many of the women also attend other workshops on topics such as alphabetisation, handicrafts, childcare, selfesteem or domestic violence. data collection and analysis data for this article were collected using semi-standardised interviews with 19 women, and the interviews were conducted by the author in spanish. the interview guidelines included the following: a description of the interviewees' business, financial aspects of the business, use of the credit and the process of paying it back. socio-economic data of the interviewees were obtained through aldea sos. the interviews were held in various locations such as the women’s point of selling in the street or at the market, an office on the premises of aldea sos or at the women’s ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' b e e l i z i m m e r m a n n 39 homes. they lasted 30 minutes on average (minimum 18 minutes, maximum 50 minutes). in many interviews third parties were present (aldea sos staff or children), and some interviews were interrupted by customers. another aspect that had an influence on the interview situation was the fact that they were conducted by a person with a faulty knowledge of spanish and – from the women's perspective – with a very different social background. for the analysis, the digitally recorded interviews were transcribed (in spanish) and then analysed with maxqda, a program for qualitative data analysis. following mayring's method of qualitative content analysis (mayring 2008) different categories were formulated. as a first step, deductive categories derived from lindenskov and wedege's working model were used to gain more insight into those statements considered relevant to numeracy. as a second step, inductive categories were added in order to further analyse and describe these categories. the deductive categories correspond to the four dimensions and their specific elements as described above. as most codes fell into the category of skills dimension, this will be described here in more detail. the subcodes in this category include the following: dealing with and sense of (a) quantity and numbers, (b) dimension and form, (c) patterns and relations (d), data and chance, (e) change, and (f) models (lindenskov and wedege 2001). while statements for all of these categories could be identified, the focus of this article is on patterns and relations. on one hand this is due to the fact that most statements were categorised in this area (almost 300), on the other hand many of the statements indicate a close relationship to other categories, namely models, and to a lesser extent data and chance, which means that these categories will also be discussed in passing. statements that were coded as belonging to the category of patterns and relations (from now on referred to as patterns only) had to meet the following criteria: they had to identify elements, and relationships between these elements, and possess an explanatory power. typical examples include the title of this article, and the following seasonal observation: 'in december it's better, sales are good in december, until april, but in september not'. results following wedege's argument that 'whether or not an adult knows mathematics can only be answered after the questions such as who, where, when, what and related to what' (wedege 1999:206) have been asked, the results are presented under these headings. in line with the priorities outlined above, the answers to 'what' will be discussed most extensively. ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' 40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s who at the time of the interview the average age of the women was 31 years (the youngest being 21, the oldest 51, most being younger than 35). the 19 informants were chosen on a layered random basis by representatives of the two ngos according to the following criteria: (1) their status in the program, i.e. half of the women had just received the first half of the credit while the other half of the group was already in the process of paying it back; (2) their educational background – of the 19 women only one had no formal schooling, nine completed six years or less, six completed between seven and ten years, and three women completed 11 years of schooling; (3) the location of the women's business – ten women had a business in a fixed location in the city (market booth or specific street corner), two worked from home and the rest were so called 'vendedoras ambulantes', meaning that they walked the streets selling their products; and (4) the type of products sold – half of the women sold food or drinks, the other half clothes, accessories or cosmetics. in addition, two shared personal characteristics emerged from the interviews: all of the women had a strong desire to succeed and move ahead (in their words: 'salir adelante'), not least of all because they wanted to provide a safe future for their children. furthermore, many of them stressed that they liked working for themselves and not being dependent on an employer or middle(wo)man. where and when as stated before, the focus of this study lies in the work context of the interviewed women. however, in passing comments it became clear that their work life is not the only context where they make use of numeracy. like many other women around the globe, they divide their resources between work, their families and households and in some cases evening school. various quantitative skills and understandings can be identified in the women's statements relating to their children, their daily routines, and in references to the nicaraguan schooling system or a location in the city. with respect to the last point it is worth mentioning, that in the city of matagalpa the concept of blocks (of houses) is also used, and the address of many places is given by saying how many blocks to the north or south of a prominent location the place of interest is – a geometrical concept that is also familiar to many north americans. what there are two important issues when starting any business: access to seed money and estimating the future sales volume. these two terms were also used as codes for subcategories, even though the line between them is ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' b e e l i z i m m e r m a n n 41 not always easy to draw and as will be seen in the following paragraphs, there is a smooth transition between them. starting a business seed money – you can't make something out of nothing. there was widespread agreement among the women about this piece of general knowhow: 'in order to have a good shop, which moves, one has to have money'. or: 'i did not work, because i had nothing to work with'. the microcredit was one possibility for the women to have access to such money. in this respect it is interesting to note their knowledge related to credits: because with this, odesar is not charging any interest. and it gives me a one-year grace period, do you understand? so i would have had to go to another institution with loads of interest. or: there [financial institutions] they offer us credits, but one has to pay daily quotas or fortnightly. and sometimes, when sales are low, one does not get these quotas. and with the credit you offer we have the option to collect the money over some time, over the time given. it is important to note that most women do consider the credit as their working capital that should not be used otherwise. they also aim at setting aside enough money during the year, in order for them to still have enough working capital after paying back the credit: and in the first week of august it is my turn to pay. but i think by august, in these two months, that a little bit will be left, a little bit, to have a business with less worries. sales volume – any vendor has to think about the generation of a certain sales volume, as his/her income directly depends on that. there are two factors the women consider in this context – the location of their business and the choice of products they offer: 'in september there is more movement because other kinds of fruit come into the market. a kind of plum, oranges. and these fruits sell better, there is more demand.' or: 'well, in having things that others don't have so that the customers come here.' the women's arguments always reflect the model of proportionality: 'with the credit i bought more merchandise and made more clients.' and: 'if you have little [choice], you earn little. if you have more, then you also earn more.' ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' 42 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the more they sell, the more income they have, even if there is only a small profit to be made: 'investing in things which one sees are popular, which sell more [...] one will earn little, but will sell quickly.' their statements also reflect their experience that there are times during the week or year when one sells more or less and that products have to be adapted: 'when school starts again i offer backpacks and school shoes. and in december i sell clothes, clothes for boys and women'. the choice of products offered is therefore an issue which is not only relevant for the starting phase, but also when running the business, as will also be seen in the next paragraph. running a business financial management – unsurprisingly this category is the broadest and most comprehensive. this has not only to do with the topic of the interviews, but also reflects the fact that money issues are omnipresent. more specifically the following skills could be identified in the women's statements: basic accounting, namely keeping an overview of their business income and expenditures, calculating profits, using profits as savings or reinvestments, economising and managing risks and debts. all women know that profit is what remains after all expenses have been paid: but if i have an employee, i earn nothing. but if i don't have an employee, i get to keep the super income. yes, because in the maize business [when making tortillas] you have to buy wood, calcium hydroxide, pay for the milling[…] and if you have an employee you have to pay her. this is also an area that indicates that many of the women do not completely separate their work and family lives, as very often expenses include food for their families or utilities such as light and water. more detailed accounting skills generally relate to written procedures, so they will be discussed under the next heading. when calculating their profit margins, the women not only stress the importance of buying cheap merchandise: i buy in managua, my merchandise. i have to look for the cheapest. if i buy here, it's very expensive. everything. so i have to go down there in order to be able to sell anything. because if i buy here, well, what will i earn? one does not earn anything. they are also aware of the impact of intermediary trade: ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' b e e l i z i m m e r m a n n 43 yes, before i bought from her. and there i earned very little, because she was the one earning. and so i bought my own merchandise and it turned out a little cheaper. after calculating their profits, the important question is what to do with them – save or reinvest? most women do both and in doing so many set aside a certain proportion of their profit: 'half [of the profit] for merchandise, half i save.' this strategy of setting aside a certain amount of their profit is one the women also employ in view of paying back their credit: we are collecting a share of what we are selling. and every now and then, not daily, but every fortnight, we see how much we have collected and go and buy dollars. since this strategy is also taught at workshops, it is not surprising that more than half of the women mention buying their dollars 'little by little' and one of them is even aware of risks of currency exchange: 'it's better little by little, because the dollar could rise.' apart from saving money to pay back their credit or to secure their future, the other important issue in the women's financial management is reinvestment: 'i always invest in more merchandise and earn more.' in this context most of the women stressed that the money used for their business should be invested in productive matters, rather than being spent on (from the business perspective) unproductive matters such as housing or food or ... luxuries and all that. this will bring me no good. so i say it is better to invest into the little shop and over time, i already know that there will be a little bit more left and i can buy my luxuries. this also points to another skill used to make most of the available money, namely economising: because one cup of soup here in guanuca [the local market] costs 30 pesos. so for two that'd be 60 pesos. so it’s better, by cooking at home we save. while saving, reinvesting and economising skills are mentioned by all women, only a few use risk and debt management skills. one woman ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' 44 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s who is selling three different brands of cosmetics targeting wealthier buyers uses two interesting strategies to secure her income: they have to give me half the money, when i go. when i bring the product, they have to pay me the rest of the money. and if they do not pay the rest, i do not give them the product. she even has a specific strategy for the acquisition of new customers: if i do not know this person, then the one who has to vouch for her is you, because i do not know this person, so who will pay for that perfume or that eau de cologne? nobody, so you are the one who has to vouch for it. a less refined way of managing debts is used by some other women who keep lists of people to whom they have given credit: 'yes, in a booklet i keep taking notes: xy owes me that much.' in doing so they remarked on different benefits of such lists, that they ease the load on their working memory and that the people in question cannot challenge the fact that they owe money. furthermore, some women mentioned managing risks relating to their private lives, namely providing for their children: because i don't know if god will give me many more years to live, i don't know. but, what i'm looking for is an improvement for our home, for my children. if tomorrow i have to go or something happens to me, that they can stay in their house with their things, right? growth – to not only have a well-functioning but rather a growing business which provides a stable income is the aim of all women: my dreams are to enlarge the shop to have a source of life. well above all for that. not so much to enrich myself, but rather to have a way of living decently. in this context the right – and wide – choice of products is considered to be an important precondition of growth: to put up a shop one has to keep up to date with what sells best. and even if you earn little, this money will keep coming ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' b e e l i z i m m e r m a n n 45 back and coming back, right? so the money will keep coming, the profits, and that one will invest again. reinvesting their money is a key business strategy identified by many women – which is not surprising, as it is also one imparted at the workshops. looking at these identified patterns it can be said that most of them are based on the mathematical skills of addition and subtraction as well as proportionality. all of these skills have already been identified as central to numeracy, for example, nunes and her colleagues argued that 'the concept of proportionality does not have to be taught. it can develop on the basis of everyday experience' (nunes, schliemann and carraher 1993:126). relating these skills to the women's personal intention, it can be seen that many of them are used to evaluating decision making processes: where and what to buy or where and for how much to sell. it is worth noting that almost all of the above described skills and understandings refer to orally communicated knowledge. related to what there are, however, a number of women who do basic bookkeeping: well, i wrote down what i bought. i've always written down what i bought. and, this, i write this down, always, what i sell in a day. those who do so, find it useful: because this helps, so that i control my expenses. [...] it helps me to plan and know on which days i earn.' or: for example in these things, at the end of the week we take stock to see how much we have spent, how much money we have and how much we will buy. such statements indicate a more systematic manner of looking at sales and can be classified as a sense of data and chance. they can also be seen as an indication of a close relationship between the medium in which information is available (in this case written information) and the related skills since it is rather difficult to systematically deal with data and chance based on oral information only. in this sense, lekoko and garegae (2006) amongst many others recommend that basic bookkeeping skills are taught to street vendors. however, there are indications from the interviewed women ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' 46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s that teaching particular skills without taking into account the learners' previous experiences is not always successful: but in the workshop we haven't learned it like this. […] you know, in the workshop we made a frame like, like this [draws while talking] with a line here […] and in this block here we put the quantity, mmh, the price. no, it seems it was here […] it's really nice what is in the booklet. what is happening now is that i don't remember well, how, how we put it. numeracy skills are clearly not only related to a particular medium but also the learners' previous experiences. furthermore, there were a number of women who spoke in a somewhat distant manner about keeping books ('they have told us to do it.') and a few of the group who had just received the first tranche of their credit had not started keeping records for various reasons, but often promised they would start soon. such statements can be seen as indications that the imparted skills might not be considered useful or do not integrate into the women's knowledge and are therefore not applied – by no means a new insight! in their analysis of successful literacy programs, archer and jeng identified participatory methods which should 'ensure active engagement of learners and relevance to their lives' (archer and jeng 2006:43) as one of twelve benchmarks which characterise successful adult literacy programs. they also point out that with respect to this benchmark there is a gap between rhetoric and practice. to sum up the findings related to the various skills and understandings of the interviewed street vendors, the following can be said: the women show a number of skills relating to, and a broad understanding of patterns, in addition to dealing with and having a sense of quantity and numbers as well as models. these often relate to their work context – even though sometimes the line between work and family life cannot be drawn clearly – and are used in decision making processes, mainly when dealing with money: where and what to buy or where and for how much to sell. while most of these skills are based on oral information and communication, there are some women who keep books and particularly in this context dealing with, and having a sense of data, was also observed. the use of the two remaining categories (dimension and form, and change) of lindenskov's and wedege's (2001) working model of numeracy have been identified as marginal with only a few statements being coded in these two categories. however, this is attributed to the method with which the data were gathered (namely not systematically with the working model as a theoretical framework). ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' b e e l i z i m m e r m a n n 47 conclusion the previous section has shown that street vendors working in the informal sector not only use quantities and numbers or basic mathematical skills such as addition in their work, they also make extensive use of a variety of patterns, and there are indications of them dealing with data and chance. while this assessment remains at the level of description with a focus on lindenskov’s and wedege’s (2001) dimension of skills and understanding, it seems worth exploring the identified skills in a more systematic manner by comparing and contrasting them in different situations. contrasting educational and work settings in countries of the south as has been done by other authors (see for example, nunes, schliemann and carraher 1993, saxe 1991), seems to be of interest also in this case, where the educational setting is an informal workshop rather than a formal school setting. there are indications, however, that also in this specific setting the often demanded relevance for the learners’ lives is not given, and the transfer of imparted knowledge is not happening. in view of the richness of the women’s skills, the link between their (oral) knowledge as displayed in a work context and other forms of knowledge in other contexts needs to be better understood before it can be improved. such an improvement of the women’s skills is a prerequisite for both their personal as well as nicaragua’s development. looking towards a further study, a combination of the two mentioned conceptualisations of numeracy described by lindenskov and wedege (2001) and, street, baker and tomlin (2008) might prove fruitful, as it would also addresses issues of power, which are key in a development context. references archer, d and jeng, y (2006) writing the wrongs: international benchmarks on adult literacy, retrieved dec 27 2010 from: http://www.aspbae.org/index.php?option=com_phocadownload&vie w=category&id=5:writing-the-wrongs&download=17:writing-thewrongs&itemid=54. baker, d and street, b (1994) literacy and numeracy: concepts and definitions, in husén, t and postlethwaite, t, eds, the international encyclopedia of education, 2nd edition, pergamon press, oxford, pp 3453-3459. barton, d and papen, u (2005) linking literacy and numeracy programmes in developing countries and the uk, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy (nrdc), london. ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s central intelligence agency (cia) (2010) the world factbook, retrieved dec 30 2010 from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/geos/nu.html. friedman, s.l and scholnick, e.k (1997) an evolving ‘blueprint’ for planning: psychological requirements, task characteristics, and social-cultural influences, in friedman, s.l and scholnick, e.k, eds, the developmental psychology of planning, lawrence erlbaum associates, mahwah, pp 3–22. gahamanyi, m (2010) a study of mathematical organisations in rwandan workplaces and educational settings, dissertation, linkoeping university, linkoeping. international labour organisation (ilo) (2002) women and men in the informal economy: a statistical picture, ilo, geneva. lave, j (1988) cognition in practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life, cambridge university press, cambridge. lekoko, r.n and garegae, k.g (2006) intuitive mathematical knowledge as an essential aspect of contemporary adult learning: a case of women street vendors in the city of gaborone, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 15, no 1, pp 61–77. lindenskov, l and wedege, t (2001) numeracy as an analytical tool in mathematics education and research, danish university of education, roskilde. mayring, p (2008) qualitative inhaltsanalyse. grundlagen und techniken, beltz, weinheim. naresh, n (2008) workplace mathematics of the bus conductors in chennai, india, dissertation. illinois state university, illinois. nunes, t, schliemann, a.d and carraher, d.w (1993) street mathematics and school mathematics, cambridge university press, cambridge. saxe, g.b (1991) culture and cognitive development: studies in mathematical understanding, lawrence erlbaum, hillsdale. sebstad, j and cohen, m (2003) financial education for the poor, retrieved jan 26 2011 from: http://www.globalfinancialed.org/documents/wp1_fined4poor.pdf. street, b, baker, d and tomlin, a (2008) navigating numeracies – home/school numeracy practices, springer, dordrecht. united nations (2000) united nations millennium declaration, retrieved jan 6 2011 from: http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm. vuletin, g (2008) measuring the informal economy in latin america and the caribbean, international monetary fund, washington. wedege, t (1999) to know or not to know – mathematics, that is a question of context. educational studies in mathematics, vol 39, no 1–3, pp 205–227. ' y o u h a v e t o f i n d a l o c a t i o n . . . ' b e e l i z i m m e r m a n n 49 world education forum (2000) the dakar framework for action. education for all: meeting our collective commitments, unesco, paris. endnote 1 this condition has been changed since the time of the interviews – the women no longer have to pay back the money, it has therefore become a donation rather than a credit. acknowledgements the author would like to express her heartfelt thanks to all those who attentively read and critically commented on various drafts of this article. microsoft word lns18.2_yasukawa_finaldec 21.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 2 2010 75 refractions breaking out of the package: educating literacy and numeracy teachers with agency keiko yasukawa a b s t r a c t what knowledge, skills and dispositions are needed by adult numeracy and literacy teachers to help their learners imagine and build better lives for themselves and sustainable futures for their children and community? what resources can teachers draw on to be able to exercise agency as a group of professionals to give voice to the needs and aspirations of their learners? using the contemporary australian adult numeracy and literacy context as a point of reflection, i argue that some degree of propensity to take risks is needed by teachers if they are to exercise agency as professional educators, and that the universities have a renewed role to play in creating spaces for educating risk-taking educators. i n t r o d u c t i o n australian bureau of statistics data shows almost half of all working australians have less than the minimum literacy and numeracy levels required to meet the demands of everyday work. (harrison 2009) such was the way in which many people in australia were informed by the media about the levels of adult literacy and numeracy in australia at the start of national literacy and numeracy week (nlnw) in 2009. like many other oecd countries, australia was part of the adult literacy and life skills survey (alls) that was conducted in 2006 to measure the literacy and numeracy levels of adults (australian bureau of statistics 2008). the results from the survey, based on criteria developed by statistics canada and the oecd, do indeed suggest that over fifty percent of those australians surveyed in alls have below the ‘minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy’ (statistics canada cited in australian bureau of statistics 2008:5). the statistics, even given the limitations of large scale surveys, could not be ignored by the australian federal government, and one of its responses, announced at the start of nlnw, was to award r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s half a million dollars to the australian industry group, the peak industry employer association in australia, to examine the literacy and numeracy issues more closely (harrison 2009). it would be hard to criticise the provision of funding for a closer examination of the literacy and numeracy issues of the workplace. however, what is concerning many adult literacy and numeracy practitioners is the almost exclusive interest by the government in the human capital dimensions of adult learning, with little apparent regard to the social and personal benefits that learning brings to many adults and their communities. as argued in black and yasukawa (this issue), adult literacy and numeracy in australia is at the cross roads. there is an opportunity to influence the opening up of new spaces for reaching adults who can benefit from literacy and numeracy, influencing pedagogies in vet and investigating the benefits of literacy and numeracy through research. there are also big challenges for the education and professional development of adult literacy and numeracy teachers. in particular, they relate to the competitive nature of the funding of adult literacy and numeracy programs that has recently resulted in the significant loss of provision in a number of the public providers (job 2010). there is a high level of casualisation in the vocational education and training (vet) sector, over 56 per cent of practitioners according to 2008 figures (nechvoglod, mlotkowski and guthrie 2010: 31). the lln workforce within vet does not appear to be an exception. mackay et al (2006), for example, found that only 31.8% of the adult lln practitioners in their national study were permanent. as a representative of the national and state peak professional organisations for adult literacy and numeracy, and as a coordinator of a university-based adult literacy and numeracy teacher education program, i struggle to respond positively when prospective trainee-teachers ask me about career prospects in the adult lln field. and similarly, when a newly qualified teacher asks what level of mentoring they can expect as a new casual teacher working in a highly casualised private college which has yet to establish a reputation as a quality adult literacy and numeracy provider. in studying the professional development needs of lln practitioners, mackay et al (2006:21) found that time, funding constraints and the relationship between employment status and access to professional development were key barriers to professional development, and that teachers sought professional development in the form of short, practical, and hands-on sessions rather than formal qualifications. moreover, although university qualifications have been the norm for adult lln practitioners (mcguirk 2001), the number of university-based qualifications specifically in the area of adult literacy and numeracy 'has dwindled dramatically since the mid-1990s' (innovation and business skills australia 2010: 3). against this r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e y a s u k a w a 77 backdrop, it is not surprising that the australian government supported the development within the vet system of a qualification that could be delivered by the vet sector and focused on meeting the immediate needs of the practitioners, rather than trying to renew the university sector's involvement in adult lln teacher education. these challenges, however, pose new challenges to the development of the future adult literacy and numeracy workforce. where should education occur that focuses beyond the immediate hands-on, practical needs of the current policy environment and that seeks to engage practitioners in critical inquiry about their own professional practice and the direction in which their field is developing? i will argue here that the professional development of adult lln practitioners should include the development of qualities of resilience, robustness and imagination, three of eight qualities that claxton (1999 in brown and liebling 2005:181) identifies to improve people’s capacity to learn. b u t i t ’ s a l l i n t h e p a c k a g e ! since the mid 1980s, a competency-based paradigm of training and assessment has dominated the vet sector in australia. vet programs are now derived from nationally endorsed competency-based industry training packages that can be defined as: [a]n integrated set of nationally endorsed standards, guidelines and qualifications for training, assessing and recognising people's skills, developed by industry to meet the training needs of an industry or group of industries. training packages consist of core endorsed components of competency standards, assessment guidelines and qualifications, and optional nonendorsed components of support materials such as learning strategies, assessment resources and professional development materials. (naidu 2008:73) much debate continues about ‘packaging’ the training requirements of different industries in this way. one argument for this approach is that it makes the competency requirements for a trade or a vocation explicit, and not dependent on a particular course or the number of hours a person spends in training. if a person can demonstrate all the competencies for a trade according to the assessment guidelines, then they should be awarded the qualification through a process of rpl (recognition of prior learning), irrespective of how they learned these competencies. there is undeniably much attraction and logic to this approach from the perspectives of the trainee, industry peak bodies, and the employers. if a person can demonstrate that they can ‘do the job’ that the employers need done, why r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e 78 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s waste everyone’s time putting the person through expensive and timeconsuming courses? but can adult educators’ professional development be understood in the same way? the australian government recently initiated the development of training packages at vet graduate certificate and diploma levels for language literacy and numeracy (lln) in order to increase the number and capacity of qualified adult lln teachers and trainers. the training packages on the surface do consist of relevant skills for working in the adult lln field, for example, units of competencies on analysing and applying adult lln teaching practices in the vet contexts; designing and implementing assessment; and implementing and evaluating lln programs (innovation and business skills australia 2010). however, there are some reasons to be concerned about the extent to which these training package qualifications can lead to developing practitioners who have the capabilities to critique or contest taken for granted assumptions about how the lln field should be understood and evolve. there has been criticism in australia from educators about the way competency-based training and education was conceived, one being that the whole movement was driven by industry stakeholders and that educators were not involved in the early thinking about what competency-based education should look like (gonczi 2000). many of the educational critiques of training packages were concerned that there was little attention given to pedagogy or any educational framework for understanding how work practices are learnt. harris and hodge (2009:131) found in their interviews with vet educators who experienced the change to competency-based training, that they felt the imposition of new externally produced training materials posed 'an attack on the educators' profession[,] producing a resentment that lingers to this day'. some educators argued vehemently against competency-based training and in particular, the packaging of education and training into training packages. there were analogies drawn between the itemisation of work into atomised steps in taylorist workplaces and the compartmentalisation of work practices into atomised skills in the training packages (hunter 2001). the early training packages were subjected to a review by the australian national training authority in 2003-2004 (schofield and mcdonald 2004 cited in smith 2010). in relation to the critique of atomising skills, smith (2010:58) notes: assessment practices in the early days were often fragmented and based on observation of work performance only (known as 'tick and flick' assessment) but there has been an effort to encourage practitioners to assess more holistically and to ensure that underpinning knowledge is adequately addressed. r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e y a s u k a w a 79 however, it is generally agreed that there remains more room for improvement in these areas. w h a t i s i n t h e p a c k a g e ; w h a t i s n o t ? to illustrate the ways in which the training packages are organised, the names of the four core units (there are also five electives) in the new vocational graduate certificate in language, literacy and numeracy practice are: analyse and apply adult literacy teaching practices; analyse and apply adult numeracy teaching practices; develop english language skills of adult learners; and implement and evaluate delivery of adult language, literacy and numeracy skills (innovation and business skills australia 2010: 6). the names of these core units are not fundamentally different to the names of some of the subjects that are in the undergraduate lln major in the bachelor of education in adult education course that i coordinate. also, in the unit 'analyse and apply adult numeracy teaching practices', for example, and using the 'skills recognition guide' (innovation and business skills australia 2010) published by the skills council responsible for the abovementioned vet qualification as a guide to what knowledge is valued, one can see that there are assessment criteria requiring analysis with reference to theories, selection of appropriate resources and strategies, and evidence of evaluation of practice (innovation and business skills australia 2010:29). on the surface, one could argue that a qualification derived from this training package may not be all that different to what a trainee-teacher studying a university qualification can be expected to achieve. however, there are 'rules' for the design of training packages that suggest a different story. the 'rules' stipulate that knowledge should 'only be included [in a training package] if it refers to knowledge actually applied at work (dest 2006 cited in wheelahan 2009:231). this means that, while trainee-teachers may learn what is needed to manage the demands of the their immediate workplace contexts (or that which is assumed by the trainer to be the demands of the workplace), they may not be afforded the knowledge that can help them to contemplate alternate models of teaching and learning that have not yet been tried. these vocational qualifications have been developed as part of the australian federal government's initiative for renewal of the adult literacy and numeracy field, including its workforce. this makes it even more concerning that a capacity for future teachers to not only be unafraid to question the status quo, but also to use theoretical tools to imagine and create new possibilities for the field, may be constrained by the particular requirements of the training package design. there are tensions in r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e 80 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s educating workers, including teachers, who are both 'job ready', critically thinking, and imagining and creating new possibilities. however, being 'job ready' in the current adult literacy and numeracy field in both australia and also the uk can itself stifle any creative instincts even for the 'here and now'. black (this issue) and tusting (2009) describe the demand on teachers to keep extensive and detailed records and be prepared for the auditors, at the expense of time they feel they ought to be spending on their teaching and learning responsibilities. dennis (this issue) problematises defining the idea of a professional lln practitioner in terms of what the uk skills for life policy values in a practitioner. in australia, in light of the trends in teachers' work as discussed in black (this issue), defining a professional practitioner simply as someone who is able to do what is required of the current policy can lead an uncritical novice in the adult literacy and numeracy field to think that being a professional equates to being compliant with whatever policy is in place. n o t e v e r y t h i n g c a n b e p a c k a g e d ! what does it mean to educate teachers on the basis of a national training package? packaging learning using detailed specifications around learning outcomes, evidence and performance criteria that ensure teachers can comply with the workplace requirements runs the risk of giving the illusion that it is teacher-proof and learner-proof; that nothing that is ‘essential’ is missed or mis-interpreted, or delivered and learned in a nonstandard manner. it is a form of risk management. risk management has become an increasingly core activity in organisational life (hutter and power 2005), and this has led to what power (1999) calls the audit society and strathern (2000) calls ‘audit cultures’. audits are part of the process of risk management, to keep records and monitor compliance as a way of minimising the undesirable consequences of uncertainties that are present in any organisations or systems, including educational. managing all the known and unknown uncertainties that might exist in a system is at best aspirational; however, even if it were possible, the end result of this may not always be desirable, particularly from the perspective of learning. analysing the responses of nation states to catastrophic disasters, jasanoff (2005:210) argues that risk management can create and explain stability in groups and systems, however, in so doing makes it difficult to make or account for change, and poses challenges for learning that can be stifled through certain approaches to risk management. her challenge can be brought to bear in the way we think about the way teacher development is managed. there may be people – presumably those who have been designing the lln teacher training package – who believe that the competency units that constitute the package address all the skills and r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e y a s u k a w a 81 knowledge that teachers and trainers need in order to work in the current adult lln policy environment. but policies change, because a policy is about ‘the operationalization of values’ and ‘the power to determine what gets done’ (bell and stevenson 2006:18, 23). when governments change, policies change. when the social, political and economic conditions change, governments exercise their power to re-prioritise their agenda to determine what is more urgent than other agendas. at this time, australia like many countries, is facing the aftermath of a global financial crisis, and an increasingly urgent imperative to address global warming. each of these bring challenges to the ways australian people can imagine their own and their children’s futures. what are the implications then of only presenting adult teacher-trainees with a packaged set of competencies? change, by definition, cannot be packaged. neither can uncertainties. the more intractable and far-reaching the uncertainties are – such as the global economic and environmental futures – the more difficult it is to know ahead of time exactly what it is to plan and prepare for. certain types of carbon intensive jobs may disappear, resulting in a large number of displaced workers. a whole industry may collapse if producers decide to relocate their production to countries with cheaper sources of labour. new technologies and the globalisation of work can lead to the end of work practices in certain workplaces, such as the long standing team-based execution of work that depended on the sharing of skills and knowledge among the team members. social policies can limit access to education for some, and increase it for others. changes in immigration policies can significantly alter the socio-economic and cultural demographics in certain locations. all of these possibilities would pose challenges to individuals, their families and communities in terms of their economic wellbeing, but also their social and personal wellbeing. if adult learning is to be valued and promoted for its wider benefits of increasing human capital, social capital and identity capital that have been demonstrated in many large and small scale studies (schuller et al 2004, balatti, black and falk 2007, rhys warner et al 2008, yasukawa, widin and chodkiewicz 2008), then teachers of adults, particularly those who are working with the most disadvantaged groups of adults, cannot be limited by out-dated or narrowly conceived and inflexible practices. unless teachers are going to accept that social disadvantage and exclusion are ‘standard’ and entirely predictable, teachers need to actively imagine and create new practices that engage learners faced with their own particular challenges in learning that in turn will help them imagine and create their own futures. teachers need the freedom to imagine new possibilities, and trial new ideas that are based on emerging learner needs, critical inquiry and negotiation with the learner groups. the national vet equity advisory council on r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e 82 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s developing an 'equity blueprint' to address disadvantages faced by learners suggests that much work is still needed by teachers and in policy to address the range of needs expressed by different learner groups (nveac 2010). f r o m r i s k m a n a g e m e n t t o r i s k t a k i n g teachers entering a compliance-oriented and risk-averse policy environment have a choice of becoming packaged with protective coating and adhesives to stop them from deviating into new territories or breaking out of the package and adopting what sachs (2001, 2003 cited by groundwater smith and mockler 2009:6) calls an ‘activist identity’, whose professionalism is characterised by acting with democratic principles, negotiation, collaboration, ability to be socially critical, a future orientation, and strategic and tactical insights. these characteristics call for teachers to have the confidence to exercise professional judgment within their practice, rather than to rely on a set of pre-determined rules and regulations to guide how they do their work. they call for courage, that according to groundwater-smith and mockler (2009:32) means: to have a concern for procedural justice; to engage with teaching’s moral purpose; to be truly professional in undertaking practice; to be progressive and take a transformative and libratory stance; to tolerate ambiguity; to have hope; to ask difficult questions; and to propose the challenging solutions. such courage is not something that is easily developed or exercised. it would be particularly difficult to develop these kinds of courage within a training regime that focused on achieving certainty and conformity with a pre-determined set of outcomes. neither are they the kinds of competencies that appear in training packages. these qualities of courage are about having a robust understanding and commitment to democratic and social justice principles. it is about being able to show resilience when initiatives don’t work the first, second or third time, and springing back again and again using whatever resources they have at hand in order to achieve what is required by one’s core moral commitment. it is about not giving up on themselves or their learners because their learners haven’t understood the addition of fractions, or the learners can’t see why the text they have written is not formal enough for a job application, or the learners haven’t quite achieved some other goal that they have negotiated. it is also about being r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e y a s u k a w a 83 able to transcend the narrow certainty and safety of the here and now to imagine alternative futures that hold greater potential for realising a more socially just world. it is about being open to possibilities so that even if the funding for the program in which the learners are enrolled is designed to improve their employability, if learning opportunity arises in the teaching and learning process that taps into the learners’ broader interests or concerns, those opportunities also get taken up and capitalised upon. what i am putting forward is not that teachers should simply rebel and refuse to comply with requirements. rather, it is that teachers need to develop a strong sense of professional identity that is grounded in their relationship with and in their responsibility to the learners. this means being a thinking teacher who can make judgments on the pedagogical utility of particular instruments, resources and methods in the context of particular learner needs and environments, rather than be driven by the tools and rules. it means assuming the right and responsibility to question taken for granted assumptions, and to think outside the box, or perhaps, 'outside the package'. becoming an activist professional requires intellectual and moral strengths – attributes that are not explicitly found in training packages. it asks of the teacher-trainees to take a risk – the risk of learning not only what already exists and is known, but learning what is possible through acting upon their moral conviction and their professional judgment. it requires some of what mathematics educators brown and liebling (2005 citing claxton 1999), say teachers should develop in young children to help them learn: resilience, robustness and imagination. these are attributes equally necessary for adult learners, and are qualitatively different to the kinds of competencies that can be included in a training package. brown and liebling (2005) argue that resilience ‘helps to develop a belief in self [that relies on having] a mature resting place, a place that can be returned to, and a flexibility that can tolerate anxiety experienced when reaching out into the unknown’ (182). a blind belief in one’s self without the ‘mature resting place’ and ‘flexibility’ would simply lead to arrogance and inflexibility. but teachers can be educated to engage with theories. theories can provide explanations both of what has worked for the teachers in one instance and what has not, and more importantly, theories can help teachers to ask questions about their own practice. through engagement with theories and asking questions, teachers can find direction in their own ongoing learning, reflection and changing practices. in an address to australian mathematics teachers, the australian educator garth boomer (1986:4) argued the need for teachers to have a sound theoretical underpinning to their practice: r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e 84 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s while teachers operate at an intuitive level as pragmatists, not articulating to themselves the present theory which drives their practice, they are effectively paralysed in terms of their capacity to change radically. the non-theorised practitioner is a kind of well-intentioned misguided or unguided missile in the classroom likely to take up a new idea and add it to the repertoire but unable to generate infinite practice for new contexts. wheelahan (2009), in her critique of competency-based approach in vet, shares the concerns that boomer expresses above about the 'unguided missile'. she argues that competency-based training in australia gives vet learners access to 'contextually specific applications of knowledge, and not the system of meaning in which it is embedded' (231). she uses bernstein's sociology of knowledge to say that teachers who are trained within a competency-based framework are taught the skills and knowledge to manage the 'here and now' – what bernstein calls 'horizontal discourse', but are denied the abstract theoretical knowledge – what bernstein calls 'vertical discourse' – in which the integration of knowledge occurs through the integration of meanings and not through relevance to specific contexts' (wheelahan 2009:230). one needs to be concerned about whether this limitation of competency-based training will be evident when the new vet qualifications for lln teachers are implemented. the practitioner who can make informed decisions rather than one who unquestioningly sticks to rules or gets lured to anything new and different has to have a robust sense of purpose in what they are doing. the aims of the curriculum they are using may be written down on paper, but the reason why the teacher is involved in the education of adults has to have a deeper and a more personal conviction than something that can be externally specified. this conviction is what teachers will need to draw on to sustain their practice, to make sense of and learn from set backs and errors, as well as successes that teachers will experience in their work. if teachers have a robust sense of purpose in their work, then they also need to be able to imagine new possibilities when the theories, past experiences and common sense do not appear to be helping them achieve their purpose. no ‘tool kit’ that they can gain – from a vet training package or even a university teacher education course – can sustain a teacher who sees teaching as a dialogic, relational practice that derives meaning through the connections teachers make with their learners. hence what the preparation of teachers ought to do is to provide them with the spaces and places for them to examine what they know, to ask questions and to create new understandings and knowledge through critical inquiry with other practitioners. r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e y a s u k a w a 85 c o n c l u s i o n – h o w r i s k y i s r i s k t a k i n g ? learning the practice of teaching beyond what is prescribed in the ‘risk-management’ package is risky. mistakes might be made. some ‘essentials’ might be left off. some requirements may not be able to be accounted for. and these pose real risks for teachers whose employment has become increasingly precarious, and whose employers have to win competitive tenders to get funding to deliver programs. i am not arguing that teachers should risk their livelihood or their employers’ funding sources. nor am i in a position to pre-judge the quality of the teacher preparation that can be achieved through the new vet teaching qualifications. at the same time, i think that giving up the struggle to find places and spaces for teachers to engage in critical inquiry to change and develop their practices in order that their learners can change and grow is unconscionable as a teacher educator. although the position i am taking on teachers’ professional development can easily be criticised and dismissed as self-serving – after all, i coordinate and teach in an adult education teacher development program at a university – there is one key feature of the university environment that deserves attention when we (lln teacher educators in universities as well as other stakeholders in the field of lln) are debating where the education of teachers can or should take place. universities, at least in australia, have a mandate to engage in and promote open and critical inquiry and both students and academic staff are protected by the principles of academic freedom. if teacher-trainees are going to be exposed to a critical analysis of current theories and practices, they and those who are teaching them must be part of a community of scholars who can safely and productively engage in this kind of inquiry. it is also important that the university academics are guiding the teacher-trainees in an informed critical analysis that recognises the history and the social and political contexts of the current policy contexts that are influencing teachers’ practices. it is through this kind of collective inquiry that new knowledge and new practices can emerge, and teachers as a collective can begin to imagine productive change. there is a mandate for university lln teacher education academics to renew their engagement in the provision of programs that give space for teacher-trainees with vision and a willingness to explore new possibilities. r e f e r e n c e s australian bureau of statistics (2008) adult literacy and life skills survey, summary of results, commonwealth of australia, canberra. r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e 86 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s balatti, j, black, s and falk, i (2007) teaching for social capital outcomes: the case of adult literacy and numeracy courses, australian journal of adult learning, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 245-263. bell, l and stevenson, h (2006) education policy: process, themes and impact, routledge, london. boomer, g (1986) from catechism to communication: language, learning and mathematics, australian mathematics teacher, 42 (apr), pp 2-7. brown, t and liebling, h (2005), the really useful maths book: a guide to interactive teaching, routledge, london. gonczi, a (2000), review of international trends and developments in competency-based education and training, in arguelles, g and gonczi, a, eds, competency based education and training: a world perspective, noriega, balderas, mexico, pp 15–39. groundwater-smith, s and mockler, n (2009), teacher professional learning in an age of compliance: mind the gap, springer, milton keynes. harris, r and hodge, s (2009) a quarter of a century of cbt: the vicissitudes of an idea, international journal of training research, vol 7, no 2, pp 122-133. harrison, d (2009) ‘poor literacy at work costing millions’, the sydney morning herald, 30 august, accessed 30 august 2009 at http://www.smh.com.au/national/poor-literacy-at-work-costingmillions-20090830-f3z0.html hunter, j (2001) training packages: the scientific management of education, in research to reality: putting vet research to work: proceedings of the australian vocational education and training research association (avetra) conference, adelaide, retrieved 28 nov 2010 from http://avetra.org.au/publications/conference-archives/conferencearchives-2001/2001-papers hutter, b and power, m, eds (2005) organisational encounters with risk, cambridge university press, cambridge. innovation and business skills australia (ibsa) (2010) user guide for tae70110 vocational graduate certificate in language, literacy and numeracy practice , tae80110 vocational graduate certificate in language, literacy and numeracy leadership, innovation and business skills australia ltd, east melbourne. jasanoff, s (2005) restoring reason: causal narratives and political culture, in b. hutter & m. power (eds), organisational encounters with risk, cambridge university press, cambridge. job, p (2010) language, literacy and numeracy programs under threat, the australian tafe teacher, winter, p15. mackay, s, burgoyne, u, warwick, d and cipollone, j (2006) current and future professional development needs of the language, literacy and numeracy r e f r a c t i o n s : b r e a k i n g o u t o f t h e p a c k a g e y a s u k a w a 87 workforce, national centre for vocational education research, adelaide. mcguirk, j (2001) adult literacy and numeracy practices 2001: a national snapshot, tafe new south wales access division, new south wales department of education and training, sydney. naidu, r (2008) vet glossary, national centre for vocational education and training, adelaide, south australia. national vet equity advisory council (nveac) (2010) equity blueprint: creating futures: achieving potential through vet, tvet australia, melbourne. nechvoglod, l, mlotkowski, p and guthrie, h (2010) national tafe workforce study 2008, national centre for vocational education research, adelaide. power, m (1999) the audit society: rituals of verification, oxford university press, oxford. schuller, t, preston, j, hammond, c, brassett-grundy, a and bynner, j, (eds) (2004) the benefits of learning: the impact of education on health, family life and social capital, routledge, falmer, london. skills australia (2010) australian workforce futures: a national workforce development strategy, commonwealth of australia, canberra. smith, e (2010) a review of twenty years of competency-based training in the australian vocational education and training system, international journal of training and development, vol 14, no 1, pp 54-64. strathern, m, ed (2000) audit cultures, routledge, london. rys warner, j, vorhaus, j, appleby, y, bathmaker, a-m, brooks, g, cole, p, pilling, m, and pearce, l ( 2008) the learner study: the impact of the skills for life strategy on adult literacy, language and numeracy learners, national research & development centre for adult literacy and numeracy, london. tusting, k (2009) "i am not a good teacher; i don't do all their paperwork": teacher resistance to accountability demands in the english skills for life strategy, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 17, no 3, pp 6-26. wheelahan, l (2009) the problem with cbt (and why constructivism makes things worse), journal of education and work, vol 22, no 3, pp 227-242. yasukawa, k, widin, j and chodkiewicz, a (2008) the benefits of learning numeracy, j. matos, p. valero & k. yasukawa (eds) proceedings of the fifth international mathematics education and society conference, albufeira, portugal 16th – 21st february, 2008, pp 495–504. lns template l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 9 n o 1 2 0 1 1 19 someone like us: trades identities and support for work/learning chris holland abstract this paper reflects on specific findings from a 2009 study of on and off-job learning that explored apprentices’ learning experiences, formal and informal learning connections, and implications for language, literacy and numeracy in vocational learning. the study was conducted in the glazing industry in new zealandi, and as part of that study, apprentice profiles were developed. this discussion focuses on three of those profiles and reflects on two emerging themes. the first theme is employer and apprentice perceptions of the value of apprentices coming from a ‘trades family’. the second theme is the range of inclusions and exclusions, advantages and disadvantages that apprentices experience depending on their ‘trades family’ status in both on and off-job learning. the paper then considers what kind of learning support might help integrate the different identities required within an apprenticeship. introduction over the last decade there have been many studies of factors impacting on learning on the job, and in both in-house and formal courses (see for instance billet 2003, billett and sommerville 2004, belfiore et al 2005, kell et al 2009, vaughan 2009). this discussion draws broadly on a series of qualitative research projects and associated development activity carried out between 2006 and 2010 in new zealand for the tertiary education commission, the new zealand council of trade unions (nzctu), various new zealand industry training organisationsii (itos) and their umbrella organisation, the industry training federation (itf). the industries involved included transport, glass and joinery, hairdressing, and fire and rescue. the research explored both how people learn on and off the job, and learning support practices at work (holland 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007a, 2007b). this paper focuses on three apprentice profiles that explore the relative advantages and disadvantages to learning afforded by identification with a trade prior to apprenticeship. the profiles consolidate data from other apprentice profiles developed during wider research and development work for the glass and joinery ito in nine glass and joinery companies during 2008 and in six of the nine original companies in 2009. questions for this paper are: s o m e o n e l i k e u s 20 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 1. what do employers who value apprentices who come from ‘trades families’ gain, or lose in the long run? 2. what advantage/disadvantage is it to apprentices if they come from a ‘trades family’? 3. what are the implications for learner support? nature of apprenticeships in new zealand modern apprenticeships in glazing involve 85 percent on-job learning (which includes a 16 module distance learning certificate) and 15 percent off-job learning in block courses. itos currently provide both internal and external support for trainees. in terms of external support, a large number of trainees working towards national certificates have access to training advisors, regional managers and apprenticeship co-ordinators. however, women, maori and pacific people are under-represented in the industry and in the modern apprenticeship scheme generally. in 2003, females represented 6.6 percent of total modern apprenticeships, maori people represented 14 percent and pacific people represented 1.9 percent (mcgregor and gray 2003). anecdotal reasons for low numbers of maori and pacific apprentices include institutional barriers, the difficulties many families have supporting apprentices on low wages, and the relatively few examples of maori and pacific trades people that aspiring apprentices can look up to. efforts are being made within the tertiary education sector and within itos to attract under-represented groups into modern apprenticeships. all three apprentices profiled here were male, and they were either of maori or pacific ethnicity. trades family apprentices the 2009 joinery and glass ito study had set out to discover how learners were supported in on and off-job learning and about facilitators and barriers to learning. an emerging theme was that employers placed a higher value on apprentices who were known to identify with the trade prior to apprenticeship, or, as employers put it, came from a ‘trades family’. in different ways, almost all of the nine employers worked with in the study revealed that they had learned over time to recruit such apprentices in preference over others. a ‘trades family’ is one where at least one member is, or has been a tradesperson. the actual trade other family members are involved in, seems to be less important than that they understand and value the trade world. nature of workplace identites billett and somerville (2004) have written about how identities are constructed through engagement in the workplace, and how workplace cultures are also shaped by subject identities. a second theme emerging s o m e o n e l i k e u s h o l l a n d 21 from these profiles was that the identities new recruits bring to the workplace also shape that engagement. apprentices from trades families seem to begin their apprenticeship not on the periphery of a community of practice (lave and wenger, 1991), but already inside the trade community, in terms of cultural capitaliii, employer recognition and employer preparedness to recruit. in exploring these themes, it emerged that the extent to which new apprentices are recognised as ‘someone like us’, seems to improve employer willingness to provide learning opportunities on the job. however, analysis of the profiles also suggests that the very advantages afforded by an apprentice’s trades identity at entry to his/her apprenticeship, may hinder his/her progress in off-job learning, unless he/she also identifies as a formal learner. further, the analysis suggests that apprentices who do not bring a trades identity to the job may face barriers to inclusion on the job. the apprentices discussed here illustrate the inclusions, exclusions, advantages and disadvantages that seem to be a function of being able (or not) to draw on a trades background. the paper discusses implications for integrating apprentice support for both formal and informal learning. research methods in 2008 and 2009 nine glass and joinery companies were visited on a regular basis to learn how apprentices managed on and off-job learning, how the two sites of learning were connected and how apprentices were supported at each learning site. connections and interviews with managers about their experience with their current apprentices were facilitated by the joinery ito. managers in turn offered time and space for research to be undertaken with their apprentices. in order to learn more about apprentices’ learning experiences and formal and informal learning connections, profiles of apprentices at six sites were constructed through on-job and on-course shadowing and interviews with apprentices, workplace mentors, supervisors, and course trainers. three apprentices were observed and talked with in depth, in a range of circumstances: domestic glazing, commercial glazing and glass processing workplaces, and in one second year block course that several of the apprentices attended together. one apprentice worked for a small contractor business and two apprentices worked for large national glazing companies: one domestic and one commercial. during the profiling period, each apprentice was visited between one and two days a fortnight in the months from february to april 2009, totalling seven days per apprentice. job shadowing, observations and conversations, as well as more formal apprentice, supervisor and mentor interviews, all took place on these days. one of the three apprentices discussed here was job shadowed at his station in a glass processing factory, s o m e o n e l i k e u s 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s one was shadowed at various commercial glazing sites and the third was shadowed during several domestic glazing jobs. on-course observations and interviews (with these learners and their trainers) took place over three consecutive days during the middle week of the course. the final on-job interviews took place as a follow-up to the block course. during job shadowing, apprentices were invited to talk through their tasks as well as any issues they had experienced and how they had overcome these issues. they were also invited to talk about their goals, thoughts and feelings about work practices (and later, the course). additional, semi-structured formal interviews away from their work site invited apprentices to reflect on their experiences of learning on and off-site and on influences with regard to working in the glass trade. finally, facilitators and inhibitors to learning on the job and on the course were explored through observations and interviews with the apprentices, and with supervisors, mentors, employers and course trainers. interview data were audio taped while notes were taken during discussions at work stations or on the road. the data were analysed qualitatively and cross checked for verification and checked against findings in the literature. patterns, or ‘regularities of behaviour or forms of interaction which occur over and over again’ were explored (altrichter, posch and somekh 1993:134). the aim was to identify emergent themes and patterns of response across a range of workplaces where apprentices were employed. findings the employers knowing the trade all employers interviewed seemed to have established fixed assessments of their apprentices’ capabilities at the time of the research, which was in the second year of the apprentices’ time. some of the employers’ assessments of their apprentices had been made through observation over time, others at recruitment, where a candidate’s familiarity with the trade was expected to lend the apprentice an advantage. for example: take glen. at sixteen, he’s just out of school. but he comes from a ‘trades family’ and is already quite knowledgeable and keen. we used to get apprentices who weren’t up to it, but we are more careful with recruitment now. we prefer it if they know something about the trade. s o m e o n e l i k e u s h o l l a n d 23 as will be shown in the apprentice profiles, coming from a trades family provides an advantage not only in terms of knowledge of the trade but also in terms of cultural fit. apprentice profiles cultural fit the apprentices in the 2008 and 2009 glass industry studies learned safe workplace practices. they took pride in their workspace, whether in a factory, at a commercial site or in a van. however, they were expected to work at a fast pace and most seemed to be prepared to engage in unsafe work practices in order to meet the expectations of their co-workers. taking the lead from more experienced workers, apprentices frequently took safety risks if it meant getting the job done more quickly and efficiently. for example, some would lift and carry a sheet of glass that would be more safely lifted by two people. apprentices showed with pride lacerations to their bodies resulting from glazing accidents. cultural fit was as important on the course as it was on the job. the ito used one glazing course site in new zealand for all glazing apprentices so most apprentices travelled to attend the three week block course. the block course experience demanded concentrated classroom learning but it was the ability to fit in with the group during time off that won approval among classmates. as one apprentice stated: the best part is not being at the [block course]. i would have liked to stay in [the city]. some of us went in to [the nearest city] and had a good time. apprentice learning the three second-year apprentices selected for this discussion range in age between 18 and 23, and i have called them bryan, andy and pierre. they learn on the job every day, through watching, trial and error, and through instructions and warnings given by others. in addition, they are required to complete one three week block course a year, and a 16 module distance learning certificate. distance learning requires that trainees complete a number of self-paced learning workbooks, and that they complete distance assessments. vocational course learning occurs in trade classrooms (with work benches, machinery, tools and desks) involving same year apprentices brought together from all around the country. apprentices’ coursework is divided into three sections: theory, calculation and practical, and they are tested every morning on the theory and calculation they learned the previous day. s o m e o n e l i k e u s 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s on the job bryan tells me he is a boy racer as the company van squeals out of the site onto the road. he comes from a ‘trades family’, and his father, hemi, is a senior tradesman at another glazing site. this gives bryan a degree of cultural capital in that he knows what to expect in a trades environment and what is expected of him. bryan fits in well with the workplace culture, is quick to learn and keen to be independent of his father. bryan is confident about his knowledge of the trade and of his ability to achieve success. in the van he reviews his job sheets, calls customers on his cell phone, makes appointments, reads maps and locates job sites and rationalises the route for the day (all while driving). once at the domestic repair site, he estimates job costs, carries out repair work, and prepares invoices and receipts. he is proud of his level of responsibility and enjoys the challenge and opportunity of interacting with customers and making onthe-spot decisions about jobs and pricing. having sole responsibility for a company van is unusual for a second year apprentice, and this underlines the company’s trust and confidence in his work. he in turn keeps his van tidy, makes special storage compartments and develops other time and space saving improvements. bryan has a passion and commitment to his work, identifying with the organisation’s goals and working to enhance his own practice. but he is also prepared to take shortcuts, as more experienced tradesmen do, such as handling glass without gloves. bryan is able to identify what he needs to know and has sought support from a tradesman at his workplace, who has allowed bryan to watch him working in areas where the apprentice does not yet have experience. for example, bryan has difficulty with some pricing and is now able to work out prices with the aid of a matrix provided by the tradesman. andy is conscientious, reflective and deliberate. he does not come from a trades family but from one involved in formal learning – his mother is a teacher. he works with two senior tradesmen and another apprentice. andy is unsure of how things should be done and is often anxious on the job, frequently asking what he can do next to be helpful. he works carefully, with much attention to detail. his employer has little patience with andy; from his point of view the apprentice is not doing things the right way. he is teased. andy attempts, with varying success, to return the teasing of his employer, but these efforts are inappropriate in their eyes. he asks a lot of questions because that is how he is used to learning. these behaviours appear to his employer to indicate uncertainty, and so andy is not trusted to work without supervision and all decisions about equipment, tools and materials are made by the senior tradesmen. andy is seen as ‘slow’ and a drawback when work has to meet deadlines. he is expected to s o m e o n e l i k e u s h o l l a n d 25 act more independently, but does not realise this. he is aware of how people react to him, but unaware of cultural gaps. he asserts he is gradually becoming one of the tradesmen and that he has learned a lot on the job. he reflects on his learning and is continually seeking opportunities to solve problems, and to learn new skills. pierre is 23, and moved to new zealand from a pacific island six years ago. he is married with young children. although he is quite a fluent english speaker, he is shy and quietly-spoken. he is not familiar with the cultural environment of the glass trade in new zealand and is confused at work. at first he was put out on the road with senior glaziers, but didn’t cope well – little was explained and little of that made sense. he does not assert himself, but instead begins arriving late for work. this causes the supervisor to place him permanently in the factory. he works at the same table every day, lining up and machine cutting glass, trimming it, loading scrap into bins, emptying the bins and sweeping the floor. his supervisor promises that at some stage he will be moved to other parts of the factory to learn how to do new tasks. however, the supervisor is also clear that he finds that having to supervise and look after pierre as an apprentice glazier is a burden. he says he would prefer to replace this apprentice with a cheaper labourer. pierre learns very little in the factory as there is no variety, but is helped a little by a fellow countryman who works on the shop floor. the man was once a supervisor in this factory but left, and when he returned the supervisory position had been filled. he shows pierre how to do tasks on the job in between his own work commitments but is given no dedicated time to work with pierre. block course and distance learning if we look at how bryan, andy and pierre cope with different spheres of learning, we see that having a trades family background is helpful for understanding and adjusting to the culture of the workplace and for on-job learning opportunities and progress. it is less helpful, however, for off-job learning, where a formal learning culture prevails, and where literacy and numeracy are called upon in ways not required in the workplace (for example reading/calculating to learn rather than reading/calculating to do). it is also less helpful for self-directed distance learning, where a measured strategy is needed to identify and deal with difficult areas of learning and to complete all the modules within the expected time frame. bryan enjoys the social side of the block course, while still competing to finish the twelve practical projects before the others. although his speed and self-reliant approach seemed to work for him on the job, difficulties with listening, reading, studying and completing reports does not serve him well here. he says: s o m e o n e l i k e u s 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s my first course i did it quite well but in this one my timing was pretty out. in my second week i over-estimated, i should be able to do this many, first week full on second week laxed out and third week, shit, so no i didn’t really crank it this time. if i did a project and something small went wrong and i didn’t have time at the end to repeat it i would just hand that one in and that would do. it was hard for me to do those reports. it’s just annoying, remembering what you do and writing it down in detail, step one to nine. ten minutes before the test they give you to look over the notes, that’s all i did. bryan’s physically active and speedy approach is also unhelpful for completing his 16 module distance learning certificate, where hours of disciplined engagement in reading and writing are required. for the distance learning modules, bryan was fortunate for the first six months of his apprenticeship to have had a company appointed mentor to support him. the mentor, an office administrator, supported him to complete five modules, but since she left, he has gone no further. for andy, the reflective, careful, double-checking behaviours that negatively impact on how he is perceived on the job, work well for him in distance learning and on the block course. he has developed excellent time management with distance learning, downloading his workbooks and assessment papers, locating information and sticking to his study times. andy explained: i do the theory side of it at home in my own time and when the book’s finished i go to craig and he signs it off. i just have to make sure that i go over the books and do them. i suppose you just have to get into a routine. although he has not been briefed by his employers about what to expect on the course, he is comfortable in a classroom-like environment, and asking questions of the trainers gets a positive response. he can cope well with problems on paper that are isolated from their physical context. he has developed a learning strategy, so he does well with reports and in tests: i found it easy to write the reports after i learned, myself, to take a couple of notes while i was making the projects. so as i’m making the projects i quickly make notes of what i did step s o m e o n e l i k e u s h o l l a n d 27 by step and re-wrote the report at night in such a way that the tutor wanted it. i reckon time management is really important just for the simple stuff like putting your projects together and that. i saw a lot of guys dicking around and then they are surprised that they didn’t finish all their projects. i think you can tell who does well in the tests because they sat down and went over their notes. the people who didn’t do well in their tests didn’t do the preparation. cos it’s pretty simple it’s easy to pass. all you need to do is go over your notes. in practical work he takes time to watch others and he double checks his own measurements. he achieves very high results in the class. this surprises the senior tradesmen and causes them to review their assessment of andy: everybody thinks he’s not the full quid but i don’t think so, sometimes. pierre has not begun his distance learning modules, nor has he been offered any help with them. he has no idea where to begin. he is not briefed about the vocational course, and asks me what he should take. he struggles with his coursework, especially the written components, as he has difficulty with reading and writing in english. he is not confident asking for help from tutors, but has initiative to ask for help from his fellow students on the course. some give him their project reports to copy and help him with practical work. he admits: i got help from other guys. it was ok, i copied. got lost with theory. just copied what he wrote on the board. only the beginning made sense and then i got lost when it came to writing down the (calculations). i just wrote down what i remember. however, this kind of help does not improve his understanding and builds resentment among some students. someone like us bryan’s employers recognise someone like themselves in the apprentice. in turn this helps him make progress with work (he is given his own van in his first year as an apprentice) and with learning on the job (he s o m e o n e l i k e u s 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s can access appropriate support). bryan understands expectations of the trade and his role in it, and quickly makes sense of job sheets. he is able to communicate effectively with contractors who call to pick up glass orders, problem solve, measure and calculate glass sizes and completion times, plan jobs and solve problems. the knowledge that bryan brings to his apprenticeship wins him approval, inclusion and greater independence on the job. success in formal courses requires a different set of values, dispositions and behaviours. in formal learning, learners are required to demonstrate disciplined behaviours linked to school learning they are required to sit for a period of time listening, reading, discussing and reflecting on what is being taught. they have to study and retain written information, construct written reports and pass tests. thoroughness, perfect finish and safety are valued on the course, rather than speed and efficiency. all these formal learning expectations run counter to bryan’s identity as a tradesman who typically identifies and solves practical work problems at speed through talking and doing – and then moves quickly onto the next job. andy brings no identity as a trades worker and this is demonstrated in his nontrade approach and behaviours. his reflective skills, his critical thinking and questioning annoy his employers, and he somehow misses the mark with on-job banter. unlike bryan, he is not well able to identify what he doesn’t know in terms of the culture of the workplace, and there is noone to support him with this and to help him access a wider range of job skills in order to practice, build and demonstrate competence. andy’s employers form an opinion of him as mentally slow and limit his opportunity to practice his emerging skills on the job. he is given little opportunity, for instance, to greet customers and discuss the job with them, to complete job sheets, and to measure spaces and panels. although andy brings no identity as a trades worker he does identify strongly as a student and copes well with formal learning. he succeeds markedly at formal learning, and the perceptions of his employers are changed towards him. he also succeeds with distance learning and now in his second year, he has completed eight modules unassisted. pierre does not identify either as a trades apprentice or as a formal learner. he struggles with written language, with course expectations, with the culture of the workplace, and with the different cultural expectations of new zealand. he has not begun his self-directed distance learning modules and is not aware that they need to be downloaded from the internet. pierre is the apprentice who would most benefit from learning support in the workplace to address the multiple barriers he faces, yet he is least able to access support in his current job, which in any case has been reduced to a minimal amount of measuring and job sheet checking, by a supervisor who s o m e o n e l i k e u s h o l l a n d 29 has made up his mind about the apprentice. pierre knows he needs significant help in all areas and also that that help won’t come. he just wants to keep his head down and hold onto his job, in order to provide for his family. the advantages/disadvantages of coming from a trades family much research has identified the importance of conceptual knowledge such as understanding the bases for work tasks, and learning the ‘tricks of the trade’ (billett, 2000). these profiles suggest that those who come from a trades family may have an immediate advantage in terms of knowledge of the trades world. bryan was recognised as a trades identity immediately and given opportunities to develop quickly. the profiles also suggest that trades family apprentices may lose some of this advantage on the block course and with self directed distance learning, and so these aspects of their trades identity need to be strengthened. for those with no trades identity, it is cultural knowledge that needs building. andy, unfamiliar with the trades world, struggled at first with communicating effectively and with the expectations of tradesmen. he needed guidance to adapt to the new environment before finally earning respect through high performance on the block course. pierre had many barriers to overcome on the job and on the course. guidance and support could have made a big difference to this apprentice and to his ability to win the respect of his supervisor. supporting apprentices each of the profiled apprentices had recognised the need for such support and had tried to get help. but what was actually available to bryan, andy and pierre? none of the apprentices were given adequate support by their employers, although of the three, bryan had the most support. bryan and pierre were prepared to seek out help but andy tried to manage on his own resources. in terms of on the job mentoring, bryan called on a tradesman for advice who invited him to watch and assist with new and complicated tasks. bryan also had effective, ongoing mentoring for the distance learning modules in in-house classes run by a woman in the office until late 2008, and had completed assessments for five workbooks during that time. he wishes he could have a return to the 2008 classes: [i could do] some of them, but it’s sort of like the work down at the block course aye. you sort of need someone to show you. the guys at tech, most all of them got given the workbooks. s o m e o n e l i k e u s 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s when i told them that i had a class for it, used to, three days a week, go upstairs for an hour, they couldn’t believe it. on the job andy seems at first to be luckier than bryan, in that he has two senior tradesmen /employers who are constantly explaining the intricacies of the work as well as what is expected of him as an apprentice, but he’s unluckier in that the relationship is very hierarchical and the tradesmen don’t trust him to do anything without their tight supervision. andy is also lucky to have a discipline for study that brings rewards. perhaps the new respect felt by his employers following andy’s block course results will bring in a change of employer practice, as he clearly demonstrates a need for a supportive mentor on the job. pierre carries out his limited daily tasks competently. it is possible that with more time his co-worker might have made a positive difference for pierre, but he was blocked from providing assistance to the apprentice by the new supervisor. pierre is not helped by anyone at his workplace to understand the requirements of his coursework or distance learning modules and he is unable to begin his self directed study without assistance. he asks people for help indiscriminately. very uncertain about all requirements related to the certificate and learning on his apprenticeship pierre asks me for help in getting information. he is in desperate need of a mentor who can help him negotiate both on and off-job learning requirements. employer value judgements while employers seem confident that employing an apprentice from a trades family is all that is required, these stories seem to indicate that focused support needs to be provided to enable trades family apprentices to extend their trades identities so that they encompass not only on-job learning, but also off-job and distance learning. the judgements made by employers about apprentices who do not come from a trades family tend to be hard to shift, yet these judgements may hold back great potential. for apprentices with non-trades identities at the start of their apprenticeship, more support is needed to help them understand the culture of the workplace and to develop their own trade identity. implications for learner support mentoring the 2009 research in the joinery and glass industry showed that there was little connection between on and off-job learning and little support given to apprentices to prepare them and help them through off-job learning. the research also found that where there was support, apprentices made significant gains in achievement towards their national certificate. in s o m e o n e l i k e u s h o l l a n d 31 several new zealand itos mentoring is receiving greater attention as a means of assisting apprentices to complete their apprenticeship and national qualifications. the training agreement between the glass and joinery ito and employers specifically states that apprentices should have a workplacebased mentor, however, this requirement was not audited at the time of the research. the recommended model of mentoring by the glass and joinery ito is a relational model, consistent with a social capital approach, where the learner is regarded as a valued equal who happens to have specific support needs, and where issues of respect and trust play a larger part. the relational model is regarded as the ‘highest quality mentoring state’ (ragins and verbos 2006:21). it is also consistent with a maori model of mentoring, or awhina, which is closer to a befriending of the mentee (ratima and grant 2007:4). in relational mentoring the mentor is proximal and the relationship is not hierarchical bryan and pierre looked for such mentors. vaughan (2008) and billett (2003) note that while the responsibility for mentoring may be held by one person, it may also be distributed among several people. again, bryan and pierre sought help from more than one person. mcmanus and russell note that ‘repeatedly, researchers have suggested that individuals who have multiple sources of support fare better than those who do not’(2007:294). recent research (holland 2008, 2009, 2010) has shown that workplace mentors can include people who do not have trades skills but who can help apprentices to manage their time, understand all the study requirements of their apprenticeship, prepare for new learning before each block course and complete qualifications. such people might be drawn from administration, where the mentor has no hierarchical relationship with the learner. administrator mentors can also discuss course progress and further development on their return to the workplace. such a mentor supported bryan for a time, and might well have supported pierre, whereas andy would have benefited from on-job support provided by a more experienced co-worker. summary and conclusion i have presented profiles of three apprentices taken from research carried out between 2008 and 2009 and drawing on broader research carried out between 2007 and 2010 in a range of new zealand industries. the profiles are of apprentices involved in three areas of learning: on-job, offjob block course and distance, and they show how different advantages are afforded to apprentices coming from a trades family in terms of on-job learning. these advantages may not be attributable to real advantages a trades family identity gives the apprentice, but to the assumptions employers make about such apprentices. the perceived advantages do not s o m e o n e l i k e u s 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s necessarily follow through to formal block course and distance learning, because these modes of learning demand a different, formal learning identity. the study examined the identities of glazing apprentices, associated with masculine competitiveness, self reliance, physical activity and risk taking. it showed that the apprentice from a trades family more strongly identified with these characteristics, and more easily integrated into the culture of the trade workplace, thus facilitating learning on the job. it further showed that the apprentices who did not come from a trades family had more difficulty with employer perceptions of their potential and with on-job learning. where one apprentice was able to balance this disadvantage with success in formal learning, the other apprentice suffered from a double disadvantage in that he struggled to cope with on and off-job cultural expectations and learning requirements. these findings highlight the difficulties faced by non-trades apprentices, many of whom are maori and pacific apprentices. such apprentices in glass, joinery and other trades are less likely to come from a trades family, since their older family members are less likely than pakeha apprentices to have been employed in the trades. further exploration into the barriers faced by maori and pacific apprentices, and by women in modern apprenticeships, is required. bryan, andy and pierre showed that mentoring was able to make a difference in on and off-job learning. bryan was supported with his distance learning components, but this support was withdrawn early, and he was unable to complete modules unassisted. pierre was supported for a short time with on-job learning by his co-worker, and in off-job learning by fellow students. andy was not mentored at all. he had no real support from his employers who judged him because he didn’t fit the typical profile of a glazing apprentice. fortunately, he possessed his own resources for managing study and was eventually able to win some employer confidence through demonstrating success in off-job learning. an analysis of the three apprentice profiles was not able to determine whether or not mentoring could change fixed employer perceptions of apprentices (including negative perceptions of recruits who do not identify with the trades and overly positive perceptions of those who do). but it does seem to suggest that mentoring might go some way towards integrating the development of on-job and off-job learning identities. references altrichter, h, posch, p and somekh, b (1993) teachers investigate their work: an introduction to the methods of action research, routledge, london. s o m e o n e l i k e u s h o l l a n d 33 belfiore, m, defoe, t, folinsbee, s, hunter, j and jackson, n (2004) reading work: literacies in the new workplace, lawrence erlbaum, new jersey. billett, s (2003) workplace mentors: demands and benefits, journal of workplace learning, vol 15, no 3 ,pp 105-113. billett, s and somerville, m (2004) transformations at work: identity and learning, studies in continuing education, volume 26, issue 2, pp 309-326. holland, c (2007a) an exploration of trainers’ and trainees’ attitudes to ito training support in the road transport industry, tranzqual industry training organisation, wellington. holland, c (2007b) report to the fire and rescue service industry training organisation on training in the rural fire service, fire and rescue industry training organisation, wellington. holland, c (2008) under no illusion: a research report into vocational tutor learning and practice in embedded literacy, prepared for the hairdressing industry training organisation and the tertiary education commission, wellington. holland, c (2009) on and off the job: learning experiences, connections and implications for lln, report for the joinery and glass industry training organisation, wellington. holland, c (2010) survey of mentoring in volunteer and combined brigades, fire and rescue services industry training organization, wellington. kell, c, guy, s, hastwell, k and harvey, s (2009). in-house literacy, language and numeracy (lln) initiatives in new zealand workplaces. summary report to the department of labour,department of labour, wellington. lave, j, and wenger, e (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation, cambridge university press, cambridge. mcgregor, j and gray, l (2003) modern apprenticeships: training for the boys? an equal employment opportunities discussion paper, human rights commission, wellington. mcmanus, s and russell, j (2007) peer mentoring relationships, in ragins, b and kram, k, the handbook of mentoring at work, sage, california, pp 273-298. ragins, b, and verbos, a (2006) positive relationships in action: relational mentoring and mentoring schemas in the workplace, in dutton, j and ragins, b, eds, exploring positive relationships at work: building a theoretical and research foundation, routledge/taylor & francis, london, pp 91-115. ratima, m and grant, b (2007) thinking about differences across and within mentoring,maori and indigenous review, vol 3, peer commentary 1. s o m e o n e l i k e u s 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vaughan, k (2008) workplace learning: a literature review, new zealand council for educational research, wellington. endnotes i holland, c. on and off the job: learning experiences, connections and implications for lln, may 2009. jito: wellington ii the role of itos in new zealand is to develop industry qualifications and to arrange and facilitate trainee and apprentice learning. iii the term ‘cultural capital’ was introduced by bourdieu (1977) to discuss access to different ‘capitals’ or advantages afforded by different classes. here it means advantage in terms of understanding how things are done in a local environment such as the workplace or community. microsoft word reviews_formatted.doc   l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 1 n o 1 2 0 1 3 105 reviews learning spaces a review by alison reedy         learning spaces: youth, literacy and new media in remote indigenous australia by inge kral and jerry schwab australian national university e press, 2012 isbn 9781922144089 (print version) isbn 9781922144096 (online) http://epress.anu.edu.au?p=197731 in inge kral and jerry schwab’s new book learning spaces: youth, literacy and new media in remote indigenous australia, a fresh and optimistic perspective is shown of the learning taking place outside of formal educational settings, by indigenous youth in remote communities in central australia. this timely offering provides an alternate view to the deficit perspective overwhelmingly presented by the media, as well as by educators and scholars, to explain the failure of indigenous learners in mainstream educational settings. the ethnographic research and case studies presented in the book, instead, provide ‘an affirmation of indigenous youth potential’ and a demonstration of the initiative, creativity and learning that is taking place, quietly, in non-institutional settings out of view of governments and policy makers. the research suggests that explanations for disengagement and poor learning outcomes for indigenous youth are more likely to be systemic rather that cultural. the research in learning spaces is wrapped in an easy to read format that is accessible to anyone interested in the here and now of youth learning and culture in remote indigenous australia. while the case studies show the intense connection of youth to place, learning spaces also makes the link between generational changes taking place internationally, as a result of digital media and the changing communication, learning and cultural practices of indigenous youth.   106 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the case studies in learning spaces show youth engaged in a range of projects over which they have ownership and agency. in these projects, literacy, language and technology are interwoven with culture in meaningful ways. the projects encompass art, music, performance, media production and small enterprise. digital technologies are central to the projects and integral to the learning that takes place within them. digital technologies are also shown to provide indigenous youth with the means to represent themselves to a world-wide audience and to do so in ways of their own choosing. the learning showcased in the case studies is ‘variously self directed, peer-based, observational, experimental and often playful’. similarly, the youth representations of themselves, their communities and projects reflect keen observation, a light-hearted view of community life and invariably a sense of humour. while each case study in learning spaces is situated in the unique context of a particular community, eight design principles emerge that can be used to guide other communities seeking to establish or enhance community spaces where youth can extend their oral and written language and literacy skills, and creatively engage with digital media in meaningful ways. the design principles are also relevant for educators, academics, social workers, government agencies and policy makers grappling with questions on how to provide meaningful learning opportunities for indigenous youth in remote locations. while the authors acknowledge the relevance and effectiveness of mainstream schooling for some young people, the research recorded in learning spaces is a response to the disillusionment of many indigenous youth in formal education and training. the case studies presented in the book provide examples of what can be done to re-engage disenfranchised indigenous youth living in remote communities with learning. the next step is to reflect on the design principles that have emerged from the research, and to question if, and how, these principles relating to non-institutional learning spaces, can be applied to engage and retain indigenous learners in formal educational contexts.   reviews 107 talk, text and technology a review by janet dyne talk, text and technology: literacy and social practice in a remote indigenous community by inge kral multilingual matters, 2012, bristol uk, isbn-13: 978-1-84769-758-5 (pbk) 311 pages this is a wonderful book emerging from the author’s 30 years of close and active engagement with remote indigenous communities and their social practices. in particular, it traces the history of the uptake and embrace of literacy practices by the people of ngaanyatjarra lands of the western desert region, centred in the community of warburton in western australia. inge kral understands literacy as ‘one facet of a rich and nuanced language environment’ (p.2), an environment that includes oral, written, visual, gestural and symbolic forms of communication. her study is not concerned with literacy in terms of ‘competence,’ but rather in terms of ‘performance’: what people do with it. talk, text and technology is an ethnographic study telling the story of how contemporary literacy practices are being adapted and integrated into life around warburton. throughout the book, kral brings together a wealth of scholarship, drawing from anthropology, sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, social learning theory, language socialisation and the social history of the region to throw further light upon her findings. her style of writing is at once scholarly and an excellent read. some passages read like wellreferenced and insightful yarns. another strength of the work is the use of the direct accounts of members of the community, telling the stories of literacy practice in their lives in their own words. the book opens with an introduction to the people, the yarnangu, of the ngaanyatjarra lands and aspects of their culture. it includes family trees showing the intergenerational connections of people whose accounts feature in the book. at the end there is a glossary of ngaanyatjarra terms that are used in the text and an appendix with data concerning assessments of adult literacy   108 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s competence, both in english and in ngaanyatjarra language, that have been carried out in the community for other research purposes. the main body of the study is divided into three parts. part 1 focuses on the current role of literacy in a broad range of social practices within the community with many well-documented examples, ranging from naming practices for new-borns and children’s birthday parties through to funerals. in the second part, kral traces the historical development of language and literacy practices in the community from ‘mission time’ from the 1930s to the early 1950s, through to ‘native welfare time’ from the 1950s to the early 1970s, to ‘self-determination’ from 1972. at the same time as giving an account of the taking up of western literacy practices in the region, this section provides a fascinating documentation of its broader social history. it traces the way in which access to interpreting western culture was facilitated through the early practice of bible reading and how literacy practices went on to be developed and used by young adults, versed in the modern style of literacy through schooling and bible colleges, to deal on behalf of elders and their communities with government agencies, governance issues and land rights claims. in part 3, kral returns to the issue of leadership coming from young people as agents of change, a huge shift in the social order, this time with respect to the current generation of young adults and adolescents. here she discusses the impact and embrace of digital technology among youth in remote communities and the ‘explosion in creative multimodal literacies’ that it is enabling (248). this comes alongside the recent phenomenon of on-going connection with ‘global culture’ while living in ngaanyatjarra lands embedded in ngaanyatjarra culture with the potential opportunities and challenges this situation presents. part three also brings an anthropological focus to other factors influencing literacy practice in the community, including the use of living space and related issues around the keeping of personal effects, such as ‘the artefacts of literacy’ (208). in tracing the history of literacy development in the communities of the ngaanyatjarra lands kral points out how from mission days ‘literacy … was imbued with a social purpose and cultural meaning, rather than advanced as a technical skill that would enhance employability in the labour market economy. this in turn has shaped the manner in which people have taken hold of literacy for cultural and political purposes and how they have integrated alphabetic literacy into their existing communicative repertoire’ (204). the publication of kral’s observations and analyses appears timely and very relevant to current concerns over the direction in which mainstream language, literacy and numeracy policies seem to be globally trending, that is,   reviews 109 towards a narrow focus on industry-driven employability skills. in the reality that an ethnographic study such as kral’s is able to document, we find demonstration of the nature and importance of literacy practices within the much broader spectrum of social practice in the life of a community. at times kral’s ethnographic study draws from an even deeper well, touching on ways in which literacy practices from the early days when people began to read the bible and the hymn book to the contemporary use of digital literacy have modified concepts of personhood among the people of the ngaanyatjarra lands. in such a way the study also points far beyond ngaanyatjarra lands, a way beyond warburton, indicating the role of the development of literacy practices in the formation of persons and communities generally. kral’s ethnographic study is an important book that should contribute much to the way in which literacy programs are understood and delivered. in particular, it will assist those planning and working on literacy programs in remote indigenous communities to understand the big picture of ‘what literacy might look like’ in a community and how it might operate in community life. a significant implication of talk, text and technology is that before importing literacy ‘interventions’ into a community, the development of literacy capacity might best begin with recognition of the literacy practices in which people are already engaging, alongside the social, cultural, political, and historical contexts in which these practices are ever evolving.                 110 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   microsoft word wickert_formatted.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 2 2 0 1 2 49 vale alison lee rosie wickert literacy educators world-wide will be saddened to hear of the death of professor alison lee following a tough struggle with pancreatic cancer. alison has been one of the editors of literacy and numeracy studies since 1994 and her commitment to ensuring its quality and its future will be much missed. alison’s interest in literacy education goes back many years, starting with her early career as a secondary school english teacher. she soon moved into higher education as a literacy adviser for undergraduate students, from whence began her long standing research interest in literacy, pedagogy and knowledge-making. her phd study of gender, literacy and curriculum politics was recognized as outstanding by the australian association of research in education and was published in book form by routledge soon after. after joining uts in 1992, alison’s interest in literacy pedagogy extended to numeracy and it was through her early publications in literacy and numeracy studies that many became familiar with alison’s distinctive approach. i know alison as doctoral supervisor, co-author, co-editor, co-teacher and above all as friend. she changed my life as she opened the door to other ways of seeing and understanding literacy and its interconnections with the world. team teaching alongside her was a wonderful experience. alison is perhaps best known for her passionate interest in the pedagogy of doctoral education, for which she holds a national citation from the australian learning and teaching council (altc). with carolyn williams, an early (1999) article forged in fire: narratives of trauma in phd supervision pedagogy immediately connected with the travails of doctoral students and gave them a sense of community. since then she published widely on doctoral supervision, research writing and the changing nature of the doctorate. her publication record in these areas is matched only with the consistently warm and generous support she offered to so many doctoral students in australia. i recall how her workshops on academic writing revolutionized not only how participants understood what they were trying to achieve in their writing, but also how academic literacy support was conceptualized. alison’s relationship with many of her doctoral students was ‘bothways’. they led her into their worlds too. her interest in professional learning, such as the pedagogies of health was a more recent interest in v a l e a l i s o n l e e 50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s particular the complex issues of implementing and sustaining change to professional practice. without question, alison was a life-changer. not perhaps a term she would welcome but, as others have acknowledged, she changed the way many think about and theorise literacy and doctoral study. it is hard to reconcile with the fact that she has gone. but her truly impressive publication record ensures that she lives on. vale alison. you are much loved and will be much missed. microsoft word 0705lns151sandlin.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 1 2 0 0 6 79 horatio alger and the ged (general education development) diploma: narratives of success in adult literacy education jennifer a sandlin abstract this article presents a qualitative analysis of stories of successful students told in adult literacy education. these stories follow a similar narrative, beginning with a protagonist who must overcome life obstacles, makes a conscious decision to change her life, rejects dependency, is of high moral character, remains optimistic despite challenges, and who ultimately succeeds through determination, perseverance, and hard work. after presenting these stories i argue that they are the latest manifestation of a genre of stories told for centuries in the united states and that comprise what many have called the ‘american myth of success’. this myth, which has its roots in seventeenth-century puritanism, states that every person, as a result of hard work and effort, can create the life they want for themselves. while these myths might provide hope for some adult literacy learners and teachers, i conclude that unquestioningly telling these success stories help to perpetuate the assumptions of this myth of success, and results in blaming adult learners for their own failure while ignoring social and structural factors that impede success. introduction in this article i explore stories told by adult literacy teachers about successful students in adult literacy programs in the united states. these stories are common within both popular rhetoric about adult literacy as well as in the field of practice of adult literacy education. in popular rhetoric, these stories show the ‘personal face’ of adult learners, and appear in popular media (quigley 1997). within the field of adult literacy education, student success stories are often shared by keynote speakers at local, state, and national conferences (often accompanied by an appearance of the learners profiled in the stories). they are distributed through newsletters to state legislators, are printed on posters that appear as classroom decorations, are found in promotional materials distributed to adult learners, and are used as examples in curriculum materials. these stories chronicle the lives of students who have typically experienced great hardships, have enrolled in an adult literacy program, worked hard, and have succeeded in reaching h o r a t i o a l g e r 80 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s their goals of obtaining a general education development diploma (ged) (which functions as a high school equivalency diploma in the united states and canada) or finding employment. these stories can also be viewed as narratives that have a particular socializing function, as they ‘introduce individuals or groups into a particular way of life through their authorial voice and legitimating functions’ (mclaren 1995:91). a closer look at these stories is needed because they help shape popular consciousness about how we should measure and judge a student’s success and provide adult literacy students with a model of how to behave and what kind of person to become in order to achieve success in the classroom and in the world outside the classroom (st clair 2004). these stories also help shape curriculum in adult education as well as contain ideological messages transmitted and negotiated in adult education classrooms. they provide the public and politicians with a vision of who adult literacy learners are and how they should act. the purpose of this research, then, was to explore these success stories, by addressing the questions: (1) what is their content? and (2) what purpose do they serve? in the discussion that follows i argue that these stories are the latest manifestation of a genre of success stories that have been told for centuries in the united states and that comprise the ‘american myth of success’. what’s the story? in order to understand these stories, i conducted a qualitative content analysis of 26 of them, gleaned from ten newsletters published by one state’s office of adult literacy (available at http://www.dtae.org/adultlit/perspectivesarchive.html), a federal monograph highlighting the secretary’s awards for outstanding adult education and literacy programs (u.s. department of education 2000), and from field notes from a research project i undertook in two education programs serving welfare recipients (sandlin 2004, sandlin and cervero 2003). i developed storymaps (richmond 2002) for individual stories, in which i plotted major events outlined in the stories. i paid close attention to each story’s orientation (setting and character), the abstract (what ‘happens’), the complicating action (the narrator’s evaluation of what happens), and the resolution (the final outcome) (mishler 1986). richmond (2002:2) explains that these storymaps can help to organise the narrator’s ‘recounting of past and present experiences and future intentions under the rubric of character, setting, events, conflicts, incidents, themes, and resolutions (or outcomes)’, and thus help structure the individual stories. narratives, however, do not operate in a vacuum, divorced from social and political contexts. narratives contain visions of the world, and these visions typically work in favor of dominant discourses and ideologies. h o r a t i o a l g e r s a n d l i n 81 the stories we tell and the language we use to tell them help create social reality (chandler 2002). green and dixon (1996) argue that language is a way of ‘inscribing the world, of framing an issue, and of talking perspectives into being’ (294). analyzing the stories to determine their plots did not fully address this more political view of narrative, however. i therefore also sought to determine these stories’ ideological orientations – to ask ‘in whose interests do these narratives operate?’. it seemed especially important to do so in this research because these stories were not written by students, but by teachers about their students. in the context of this research, ideology refers to those worldviews that ‘we tend to accept as natural and as common sense’ (mclaren 1998: 180). the construction of ideology thus represents an ‘intersection of meaning and power in the social world’ (mclaren 1998:180). that is, ideologies can provide individuals with frameworks to help them make sense of the world, but these frameworks are always selective – pointing us towards one way of looking at the world while pointing us away from alternative portrayals. this more political view of narrative is thus informed by williams’ (1977) notion of the selective tradition and mclaren’s (1995) discussion of the socialising function of narrative. mclaren (1995:91) argues that ‘theories, ideologies, and social and institutional practices – and our relationship to them – are all informed by narratives’. he further explains that narratives help to create – to liberate and constrain – our identities. he states: we use different kinds of narratives to tell different kinds of stories, but we also sanction certain narratives and discount others for ideological and political reasons. to a large extent, our narrative identities determine our social action as agents of history and the constraints we place on the identities of other. (mclaren 1995:89) as i conducted my analysis, i saw that the stories followed a similar narrative structure, best represented by the genre of myth, recently described by st. clair (2004:82) as a ‘guiding story’ which serves to ‘help to shape beliefs and behavior to meet the needs of society’. more specifically, the stories i analyzed follow a kind of ‘archetypal plot’ similar to the quest, which typically involves the ‘archetypal character’ of hero. while the heroes of these success stories appear far removed from traditional mythological quest heroes, they are similar in that their lives are filled with struggle, and that they ultimately succeed through perseverance and strength. one particularly american spin on the hero’s quest comes in the form of what some writers have called the ‘american myth of success’ – a ‘deeply rooted cultural belief’ infusing american society (marsden 1978:38). the h o r a t i o a l g e r 82 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s ‘american myth of success’ posits that ‘all men [sic], in accordance with certain rules, but exclusively by their own efforts, can make of their lives what they will’ (weiss 1988:3). this myth endures in the united states despite evidence casting doubt on the ‘nature and extent of social mobility’ in america (weiss 1988:3). some academics assert that this myth originated in the 1600s, when, as british colonists began experiencing hardships upon arriving in america, they began to believe that the ‘great promise held out by america was not ease, but hard work’ (marsden 1978:39). despite the obstacles they encountered, however, hard work in the new world was seen to be worth the effort, as it was believed that hard work led to rewards that were impossible back in england. settlers thus embraced the idea that ‘the condition of even the lowest in america was far superior to the plight of the average man [sic] in england’ (marsden 1978:39). puritan settler william woods expressed these ideas succinctly, stating, ‘the diligent hand makes rich’ (new england’s prospects 1634, cited in marsden 1978:39). this myth of success began appearing in american literature shortly after the first colonial settlements were established in the 1600s. these very early diary entries and settlement memoirs led to puritan ‘guides to living’, which gave advice on how to achieve material success, which was tied to moral living and hard work. this genre continued with benjamin franklin’s poor richard’s almanac in the 1700s, which contained such maxims as ‘god helps them that help themselves’ and ‘the sleeping fox catches no poultry’ (cited in marsden 1978:41). the height of popularity of this genre occurred in the nineteenth century and is typified by the horatio alger’s fictional ‘rags-toriches’ stories – which are centered on the ideals of prudence, frugality, and industry. while the details differ by story, horatio alger stories all contain the same general plot: a poor boy (who is usually an orphan) is struggling to make ends meet as a bootblack, errand-runner, or some sort of street merchant. though the hero is almost always on one of the lower rungs of the economic ladder, his personal moral code is quite high. he is always generous, self-sacrificing, honorable, and gentlemanly. he has an innate sense of self-worth and a good deal of respect for others, especially those who are in positions of authority … this combination of innate moral goodness and a mature devotion to diligence pays off for them in the end. in the process of seeking his fortune, the alger hero must often confront an assortment of thieves … seeking their own fortunes in unscrupulous ways. but the hero’s common sense, which seems to derive from his innate sense of what is right and wrong, always saves him from ruin, and what he h o r a t i o a l g e r s a n d l i n 83 might lose in material gain, by taking a moral stance, is compensated for later. (marsden 1978:42) the inspirational writings of twentieth century authors such as norman vincent peale continued this tradition of the american success myth, which can be seen today in the vast numbers of self-help books on the market (weiss 1988). a typical adult literacy student success story goes something like the one that follows, which appeared in a quarterly newsletter sent to adult literacy teachers and state legislators by one state’s office of adult literacy. it tells the story of a former temporary assistance to needy families (tanf, or what is commonly referred to in the u.s. as ‘welfare’) recipient, terri: terri could have taken an easier path, going from agency to agency letting others solve her problems. instead, she chose to take responsibility for her life and the lives of her three children by using the resources of the departments of technical and adult education, human resources, and labor to overcome obstacles and become self-sufficient. in a few short weeks, she learned through difficult experience the value of education as she prepared to become part of [the state’s] workforce. terri, 28, is a 1998 local technical institute graduate. she began receiving tanf in january. by june, she had passed her ged exam and participated in job readiness and computer classes, and completed work experience. only then did she land a job. terri’s is a story of determination born of need and hope that grew out of despair. she became a single mother in october 1997 when her husband abandoned her and their three children, then ages five, seven, and eight. lacking skills and a high school diploma, she searched unsuccessfully for a job. after two months, she turned to the county dfcs [department of family and child services, which administers various welfare programs] for help. her case manager sent her to the local technical institution adult education center for ged preparation, basic computer classes, and job readiness workshops. studying at the center prepared terri to take and pass the ged exam. at the same time, she took a computer class and participated in job readiness programs. during the same period, terri entered a dfcs work experience program. after completing the ged, she went to her work experience site in the mornings and h o r a t i o a l g e r 84 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s attended the computer skills classes in the afternoon. at the end of ninety days of work experience at the professional nursing services, the owner hired her. the path terri followed was full of obstacles. raised by her grandmother and an aunt, she knows little about the parents who deserted her. she quit school in the 10th grade, got pregnant at 16, and married. her three children were born in less than three years. her husband’s truck-driver job took the family to wayne county. when she was abandoned, terri was left without a support system or family. at the ged graduation, her guests were three small children sitting on the first row of the auditorium. in the job readiness workshops, she was enthusiastic and an active participant, according to the director. her dedication to meeting the goals she set is evident in her class attendance record. ‘she attended 100 percent of the classes in the six week computer course’, the director said. ‘she is very capable, highly motivated and not afraid to try new things. moreover, she has a very pleasant personality, gets along well with other people, and is quite modest about her accomplishments.’ terri went to work december 1, 1998 in the adult literacy office as a data entry clerk. she plans to enroll spring quarter in the office technology program. she has learned that her best resource for competing in the workforce is her education. (wren 1999) overcoming obstacles this story has all of the elements typically found in similar success stories. first, in the stories protagonists must overcome life circumstances, including getting pregnant at a young age, having to care for a sick relative, suffering from learning disabilities or physical disabilities, and becoming homeless or jobless. the harder off the student is, the more compelling his or her story, and the more ‘hard-earned’ the success is viewed. in addition to terri’s story, above, another example of overcoming obstacles comes from the story of a student profiled in the secretary’s awards for outstanding adult education and literacy programs: in 1989, when she was just 17 and a 10th grader, sherry became pregnant. not only did she leave school, but her mother no longer wanted her at home. sherry moved to florida with her boyfriend. things went well for a while, but the young couple’s happiness was short lived. when her son’s father abused her, h o r a t i o a l g e r s a n d l i n 85 sherry had no choice but to return home. (u.s. department of education 2000a:15) making a conscious decision to change in these success stories, the protagonist must make a conscious effort to overcome the difficulties and obstacles they are facing. in terri’s story, we learned that she was not happy with her situation, so she decided to change it. a similar decision is seen in the following excerpt from the story of deborah, told in a state office of adult literacy’s newsletter: i cared nothing about the world outside my bedroom, including my kids. i isolated myself, not answering the telephone or the front door,’ she said. for weeks, deborah would not get out of bed, unless it was absolutely necessary. then, one day, her twoyear-old approached her carrying a can of beer. he placed it by the bedside and said, ‘here’s your beer, mommy.’ the most painful feeling came over her, and she found the courage to get out of bed, and dispose of all the alcohol in the house. ‘i realised i was ruining not only my own life, but my children’s lives as well.’ (pierce 2000) before positive changes can occur in a learner’s life, he or she has to believe she can change. thus, changes are linked with the power of positive thought and a determined mind. changes do not occur through happenstance, but only after the protagonist makes up his or her mind to proactively address certain problems. rejecting dependency as women on welfare are increasingly moving into adult literacy classrooms (dirkx 1999), many of the success stories told are about students who come to adult literacy from the welfare system. when such protagonists make a conscious decision to change, in this process they typically reject ‘dependency on welfare’ and strive towards ‘self-sufficiency’. the women in these stories represent the ‘ideal tanf recipient’ – they strive for selfsufficiency and ultimately reject dependence on the government. in these stories, these single mothers all desire to make a better life for their children and for themselves. despite many of the life obstacles these women have faced, only two women are profiled as long-term welfare recipients. the rest are portrayed as struggling to make ends meet and using welfare as a last resort, after trying other options like moving in with family members or scraping by. for instance, we see in the story of glenda how one mother gave up her welfare benefits in order to stay in school a little while longer and earn her degree. in this story, halfway through a four year nursing h o r a t i o a l g e r 86 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s program, glenda was told her welfare benefits would be cut unless she decided to give up her welfare benefits and struggle through on her own, without government help. in the story we hear that ‘life was tough, but glenda’s grades were excellent and most of all, her self-esteem was growing stronger and stronger. it was glenda’s persistence that allowed her and her family to carry on. basic necessities were obtained by standing in line at the community food pantry and by simply doing without things other families take for granted’ (u.s. department of education 2000b:30). in many of these stories, part of striving towards self-sufficiency includes a short stay on public assistance. while some learners opt to use welfare benefits, it is clearly pointed out in the stories that they used welfare only for a few short months, as a stepping stone to employment. in the stories, it is deemed morally correct to use public assistance as a temporary stop-gap measure to help a learner get back on her feet. there is an implicit judgment against using welfare for a longer period of time or being ‘dependent’ on ‘the system.’ of good moral character the learners in these stories are likeable—they get along well with others and have friendly personalities. many learners are also described as warm, honest, and decent people. for instance, in the story of roselunde, we learn about her positive qualities: it isn’t just the drive for learning that makes roselunde an extraordinary person; it is her outgoing personality and her curious and empathetic nature that make sets her apart. when she walks into a room; she smiles, talks to people, and remembers the little things that people have told her. most of all it is her infectious sense of humor that others quickly observe. (u.s. department of education 2000c:5) protagonists are often also described as being religious, and particularly possessing a strong christian faith. we learn, for example, about emilia’s religious commitment in her story: the students in her class find emilia to be a warm and generous woman who gives to her church, family, friends, and community. she conveys a deep respect for education and inspires others to do the same. those who know her best describe her as being a thoughtful person with a kind word for everyone she meets. (drew 2000) h o r a t i o a l g e r s a n d l i n 87 the learners in these stories are, above all, people with high morals, even if sometimes their ‘former lives’ are portrayed as being riddled with alcohol or drug abuse. remaining optimistic the learners in these stories typically have the ability to draw upon their strong and moral characters to remain optimistic, despite difficult circumstances. for instance, terri in the story above, devoted time and energy to schoolwork, and managed to remain hopeful and determined even though she was going through hardships. this optimism is also seen in the story of cassie: ‘this eternally optimistic young woman can pack more into her mornings than most people can do all day. cassie makes it look easy, does it all with a smile that is contagious’ (morton 2000). another example of a learner keeping a positive outlook despite life difficulties is brenda: the youngest member of her household is her eleven-year-old son, bobby, who suffers from cerebral palsy and requires constant care. sometimes, brenda comes to class exhausted if bobby has had a restless night, but maintains a positive outlook and strong work ethic in the classroom. using her lunch break to assist fellow students with math problems, she is a constant source of encouragement for her classmates. (vonier 2000) succeeding through determination, perseverance, and hard work these success stories have happy endings, as protagonists achieve success as a result of their optimism, moral character, perseverance, and hard work. in the story of emilia, for instance, we see a determined protagonist who ultimately succeeds because of hard work: despite encountering numerous obstacles, she is determined to pass the ged test. every task is viewed as a challenge to be met with grace, dignity and perseverance. through hard work and dedication, emilia has enriched her own life as well as the lives of her friends and family. she never lost sight of making her ‘dreams come true’. she is goal oriented and continues to attend adult education classes. (drew 2000) these stories make it clear that although sometimes the protagonists are helped by other people, institutions, and agencies, success is ultimately achieved as a result of learners’ own personal effort. this is stated directly in h o r a t i o a l g e r 88 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s glenda’s story: ‘although she has had help from a significant number of people, her move to a more hopeful and prosperous life is largely due to her hard work’ (u.s. department of education 2000b:30). the successes achieved by the learners in these stories typically consist of getting off welfare, getting the ged, and finding employment. these stories also typically describe a change in the self-perception of the protagonist—there is usually some kind of increase in self-esteem that is a result of achieving these successes. for instance, we see in roselunde’s story evidence that hard work leads to the rewards of a full-time job with benefits: for three years roselunde attended classes faithfully and every year she received attendance awards … roselunde is a good worker and she is committed to her tasks. not surprisingly, the visiting nurse’s association noticed her dedication and promptly offered her a full-time day job with very good benefits. (u.s. department of education 2000c:5) the american myth of success: placing success stories in context success stories of the kind told in adult literacy programs are not new. in fact, stories highlighting similar paths to success have been told throughout the history of the u.s. and comprise the ‘american myth of success’ (wyllie 1954, cawelti 1965, madden 1970, huber 1971). this myth states that anyone who exhibits the right combination of hard work and effort can create the life they want for themselves. the term ‘myth’ in this context refers to a ‘complex of profoundly held attitudes and values which condition the way men [sic] view the world and understand their experience’ (weiss 1988:3-4), and does not simply signify something ‘false.’ the american myth of success is a particular ideological viewpoint upholding these beliefs: ‘to work hard in order to succeed in competition; those who work hard gain success and are rewarded with fame, power, money, and prosperity; [and] since there is equal opportunity, it is claimed, those who fail are guilty of either insufficient effort or character deficiencies’ (devitis and rich 1996:5). this myth of success is deeply ingrained in the collective u.s. psyche. while a great deal of empirical evidence has criticised the veracity of this viewpoint, ‘the idea that ours is an open society, where birth, family, and class do not significantly circumscribe individual possibilities, has a strong hold on the popular imagination’ (weiss 1988:3). the myth of success has been organised around different ‘strands’ throughout the last several centuries, each emphasising a different ‘way’ or ‘path’ to success. the most popular of these strands have been called ‘the character ethic,’ ‘the personality ethic,’ and the ‘mind-power ethic’ (devitis h o r a t i o a l g e r s a n d l i n 89 and rich 1996). while the paths to success are different, these strands are similar in that they all stress the power of the individual to achieve success. of the different ‘strands’ of the success myth, the two most reflected in the adult literacy success stories are the ‘character ethic’ and the ‘mind-power ethic’. the character ethic the character ethic is the oldest manifestation of this myth, having its roots in seventeenth-century puritanism. this ethic represents a ‘group of traits and a way of life considered to have significance and moral quality,’ including ‘perseverance, industry, frugality, sobriety, punctuality, reliability, thoroughness, and initiative’ (devitis and rich 1996:11). while success stories stressing the character ethic differ throughout time concerning their religious or secular contexts, they all stress the link between ‘proper’ living and worldly success. the focus on moral character as a path to success started with puritan inspirational writings in the seventeenth century, a trend that continued into the 18th century with benjamin franklin’s ‘guides to good living.’ evidence of the character ethic is also found in the mcguffey readers which appeared in 1836 and which were widely read by school children throughout the united states during the following century. these readers were some of the earliest and widest read books of what came to be known as the ‘self-help genre’ and contained character ethic ideas such as that ‘opportunity existed for everybody’ and that being honest and of good character is the ‘surest, the happiest, and the best’ path towards success (weiss 1988:34). the character ethic reached its peak in the nineteenth century with the ‘rags-to-riches’ literature tradition, which included its most famous examples – the fictional stories of author horatio alger. this tradition focused around the behavioral patterns enjoyed by the protestant ethic (weiss 1988). while in many alger stories the heroes gain success due to a turn of fate, financial success only appears accidental. in fact, it is not accidental at all; it is grounded in the morality of the protagonist. in alger’s world, ‘virtue is the necessary antecedent to good fortune. it alone is the spring which triggers the lucky payoff’ (marsden 1978:44). the mind-power ethic what has been termed the ‘mind-power ethic’ is also present in the adult literacy success stories. the mind-power ethic has its roots in the early twentieth century ‘new thought’ movement which arose as economic upward mobility in the united states was no longer based on an entrepreneurial model, but was shifting to a white-collar business model. opportunities for individuals to ‘make it’ seemed to be diminishing. with h o r a t i o a l g e r 90 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the growing industrialization of the country came a ‘naturalistic world-view which contradicted theological notions of a purposive and moral universe’ (weiss 1988:129), where individuals were rewarded on the basis of their moral worth, a worldview held by many of the writers in the character ethic tradition. as a response to these changes, a spontaneous religious movement emerged, called variously ‘new thought, mind, mental science, harmony, metaphysical healing, and mind cure’ (weiss 1988:130). instead of focusing on moral virtue, this mind-power movement focused on the power of the individual to use positive thinking to achieve success. one of the early proponents of this movement, bolton hall, argued that the reason successful people succeed is that they expect to succeed and then do succeed. advice about how to succeed changed from encouragement to overcome ‘objective obstacles’ and toward getting rid of the ‘subjective inhibitions’ within one’s mind (weiss 1988:168). thus in the mind-power movement there was a shift away from the idea that the keys to success were character traits and towards the idea that, instead, states of mind determined whether one succeeded or failed. this faith in the power of the mind to determine success has been a lasting legacy from the mind-power ethic, and can be seen in subsequent movements echoing the same general idea, including the development of psychotherapy and the work of mind-power ‘gurus’ such as emile coué (1924) (who originated the mantra ‘day by day, in every way, i am getting better and better’) and norman vincent peale’s (1952) ‘power of positive thinking’ movement. this tradition is alive and well today, as evidenced by the popular ‘self-help’ genre of books, encouraging success in everything from weight-loss to finding love to smoking cessation to growing rich through positive thinking (harris 1999, johnson 1999). unpacking success stories the stories of successful students told in adult literacy circles contain elements of both the character ethic so prevalent in horatio alger stories and the mind-power ethic popular in more recent rendition of the myth. in the adult literacy stories those who are successful are good, honest, and moral people who work hard, think positively, and persevere even through desperate times. these stories promote the idea that success comes about as a result of having a particular kind of character, remaining positive, never giving up, and working hard. however, because all narratives also contain a particular view of the way the world is or should be, i would now like to return to the questions i posed above – ‘what is the purpose of these stories’, and ‘in whose interests do they operate’? quigley (1997) states that on one hand these stories can serve as inspiration to adult learners and adult literacy programs – even the ‘most cynical of our veteran practitioners [are] touched by the success h o r a t i o a l g e r s a n d l i n 91 stories of learners’ (243). quigley (1997:31) further explains some of the reasons literacy teachers tell these stories: beyond trying to lobby through ‘gut-wrenching testimony’, there is a deep gratification in hearing the successes of at least some of our learners. ours is a caring field and a field of optimism and romance. selected heroic victims fulfill a personal need in most of us who commit time and energy to this field. these stories almost certainly serve to inspire students and teachers, to give them hope to overcome obstacles in their way to success. in american society, robertson (1980:151) suggests that the myth of upward mobility through hard work symbolises freedom – and upholds the peculiarly american ideal of the ‘independent individual’. this ideal stands in contrast to the lives americans actually lead – which are often ‘immobile and frustrating’ (robertson 1980:151). thus the myth offers hope to people. those who have least power, money, and status: have known the facts for a long time, by living with them from day to day. but they are not content with facts, for facts are dull companions, and dangerous besides. men [sic] on the bottom need dreams. (wyllie 1954:174) however, these myths also serve purposes that do not necessarily work in the favor of adult learners, literacy teachers, or adult literacy programs. the stories, like their predecessors, draw upon two main ideologies to create their vision of the way success occurs: individualism and meritocracy. individualism is a set of ideas ‘emphasizing the importance of the individual and the individual’s interests’ and is used to ‘describe a political philosophy usually described as ‘liberal individualism’ that stresses the importance of the individual and the value attached to individual freedom and individual choice’ (marshall 1998:304). meritocracy is ‘a social system in which status is achieved through ability and effort (merit), rather than ascribed on the basis of age, class, gender, or other such particularistic or inherited advantages. the term implies that the meritorious deserve any privilege which they accrue’ (marshall 1998:410). the focus on individualism and meritocracy in these success stories parallel an increased focus on self-sufficiency found in two policy initiatives that have greatly influenced the field of adult literacy education in the united states, the 1996 personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act (also know as president clinton’s welfare reform act), which linked adult literacy education and welfare-to-work education more closely than ever before, and the 1998 workforce investment act, which h o r a t i o a l g e r 92 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s consolidated all adult literacy education under the umbrella of workforce development. in this policy arena, there is increasing preoccupation with self-reliance, which reflects the interests of a strong conservative movement that began in the 1980s in the u.s., and which has worked to dismantle any remnants of a safety net leftover from the 1960s ‘war on poverty’ era of u.s. history (micklethwait and wooldridge 2004). in the literacy success stories, as well as in the public policy arena, the narratives promoted, like all ideologies, are not natural, neutral, or commonsensical. instead, they serve the ideological purpose of selecting for us one way of looking at the world, while distracting us from other possible ways of viewing the world. the narratives promoted reflect a conservative agenda that ‘scorns the ideal of collective empowerment and social responsibility in the name of economic realism’ (mclaren 1995:103). educational narratives within this age of conservatism ‘are aimed at producing compliant workers and loyal consumers’ (mclaren 1995:103) and uphold a ‘master narrative’ constructed by the new right which outlines who their ideal subjects are, and how these subjects ‘personify the sacred values of religion, hard work, health, and self-reliance’ (denzin 1991:150, emphasis mine). citing denzin (1991), mclaren (1995) argues that contained within this master narrative is the ‘ancient myth’ of rugged individualism. the ideology of self-reliance found in these narratives is linked to domination and unequal power relations because it reifies our current system, instead of illuminating how this system was historicallyproduced. these myths run the ‘risk of oversimplification’, which can result in ‘restricting one’s critical capacity for raising important questions and challenging existing forms of knowledge, valuation, and social organization’ (devitis and rich, 1996:167). because these myths ignore issues of power, they serve to ‘camouflage the ubiquitous harshness of social repression’ (devitis and rich, 1996:169). in the realm of education, perpetuating such myths sets up false expectations for students and places blame for failure solely on learners, ignoring contextual social, political, and economic factors. as adult literacy educators and program directors through the telling of these stories focus on self-sufficiency and the ability of adult learners to ‘lift themselves up by the bootstraps’, they may be unwittingly obviating the perceived need for adult literacy programs, and thus further jeopardizing what has become already scarce funding. funders could ask, ‘if learners succeed solely as a result of their own hard work, why do they need literacy programs?’ what’s the alternative? it is easy enough to critique these myths; a much more challenging task involves envisioning an alternative. what does critiquing these myths mean for the practice of adult education? if teachers do not tell these stories h o r a t i o a l g e r s a n d l i n 93 in their classrooms and when lobbying politicians, what stories should they tell instead? what is the alternative for an adult literacy educator not wishing to perpetuate myths of success in their classroom? does not upholding these myths necessarily mean taking away any hope or inspiration for learners, and presenting them with a bleak picture of their futures? critical educators must ask themselves: ‘what is worse – holding out false hopes to students in the form of success myths or presenting a bleak structural analysis of economic opportunities and crushing any hope for the future?’ one huge challenge for critical adult literacy educators who wish to problematise such myths is how to do this without simultaneously taking away any incentive to try or any hope for the future. there are no clear answers, but hopefully educators struggling with these issues can begin to create a classroom discourse that avoids the simple dichotomy of either promoting false expectations or dooming students to failure. how might one achieve this? adult literacy educators could try creating critical discussions in their classrooms around these success stories, perhaps tied into reading and discussing their historical precedents, including the horatio alger stories. through group discussions of success stories, students could first come to a collective understanding of the hidden or unstated assumptions underlying these stories. they could then begin questioning these assumptions through a comparison of the stories with their own life biographies and biographies of people they know. discussions could address the alternative endings found in many real-life stories – what about people who work hard, have positive attitudes, and still do not succeed? or people who gain material success despite lacking a work ethic or a moral character? the reasons for these stories remaining popular for hundreds of years could be discussed, and set into both a broad context of the way our economic system works, and also into a more localised context involving a realistic examination of local employment trends and opportunities. students could then be invited to create alternative success stories, and to work together to envision different ways to describe and/or achieve success. discussions combined with action research projects around unemployment in their local areas could lead to new understandings about the connections between education and employment. would the new understanding arising from exposure to a different discourse about education, work, and success present a bleak picture for students? perhaps, but through the process of group inquiry, students would have been challenged to think critically about issues affecting their daily lives, and to work together to come up with alternative points of view. while exploring the possibly grim realities of employment opportunities and the social, political, and economic contexts of work might raise more issues than it solves for learners, it seems that the alternative – continuing h o r a t i o a l g e r 94 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s unproblematically to perpetuate myths of success – does not serve students well, as it positions failure as the sole fault of lack of effort or character deficit. with regard to the ‘public face’ adult literacy practitioners and programs should wear, quigley (1997) reminds us that adult literacy teachers and programs are ‘part of the myth-making process’ (8). he urges that, in order to operate in the best interest of learners, and to create a more stable infrastructure for the field, adult literacy educators need to pay close attention to how the field is perceived in society and how we help shape that perception. over time adult literacy educators might have moved away from the ‘soft maternalism’ discussed by quigley (1997) and are now focusing on success stories on self-sufficiency. while it is commendable to no longer portray adult literacy learners as helpless and in need of nurturing, embracing stories that uphold neo-conservative ideologies of individualism and self-reliance does not seem to be the answer, either. a decade later, quigley’s statement that ‘simplistic analyses and the assumptions behind them are an insult both to our learners and to our profession’ (240) still resonates; adult educators need to continue to heed quigley’s call to reflect on, and challenge, its central values. references cawelti, john g (1965) apostles of the self-made man, university of chicago press, chicago. chandler, david (2002) semiotics: the basics, routledge, london. coué, emile (1924) conscious auto-suggestion, tf unwin, london. denzin, norman k (1991) images of postmodern society: social theory and contemporary cinema, sage, newbury park, ca. devitis, joseph l, and rich, john martin (1996) the success ethic, education, and the american dream, suny press, albany, ny. dirkx, john m (1999) new skills for literacy educators, in martin, larry and fisher, james, eds, new directions for adult and continuing education, the welfare-to-work challenge for adult literacy educators, jossey-bass, san francisco, no 83, pp 83-94. drew, h r (winter, 2000) introducing emilia, perspective: from the office of adult literacy, retrieved from www.dtae.org/adultlit/perspectives6/emilia.html green, j and dixon, c (1996) language of literacy dialogues: facing the future or reproducing the past, journal of literacy research, vol 28, no 2, pp 290-301. harris, carol (1999) think yourself slim: a unique approach to weight loss, element books, ltd, shaftesbury, england. h o r a t i o a l g e r s a n d l i n 95 huber, richard (1971) the american idea of success, mcgraw-hill, new york. johnson, debbie (1999) think yourself loved, unity school of christianity, unity village, mo. madden, david (1970) american dreams, american nightmares, southern illinois press, carbondale, il. marsden, madonna (1978) the american myth of success: visions and revisions, in nachbar, j, weiser, d and wright, john, eds, the popular culture reader, bowling green university popular press, bowling green, oh. marshall, gordon, ed, (1998) a dictionary of sociology, (second ed) oxford university press, oxford. mclaren, peter (1995) critical pedagogy and predatory culture, routledge, new york. mclaren, peter (1998) life in schools: an introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education, (3rd ed), longman, new york. micklethwait, john and wooldridge, adrian (2004) the right nation: conservative power in america, the penguin press, new york. mishler, elliot g (1986) the analysis of interview-narratives, in sarbin, t, ed, narrative psychology: the storied nature of human conduct, praeger, new york. morton, r (summer, 2000) cassie salter beats the odds, perspectives: from the office of adult literacy, retrieved from www.dtae.org/adultlit/perspectives7/cassie.html peale, norman vincent (1952) the power of positive thinking, prentice-hall, englewood cliffs, nj. pierce, d (summer 2000) like a phoenix rising (story of deborah), perspectives: from the office of adult literacy, retrieved from: www.dtae.org/adultlit/perspectives7/phoenix.html quigley, b allan (1997) rethinking literacy education, jossey-bass, san francisco. richmond, heather j (2002) learner's lives: a narrative analysis, the qualitative report, vol 3, retrieved from: www.nova.edu/ssss/qr/qr73/richmond.html. robertson, james oliver (1980) american myth, american reality, hill and wang, new york. sandlin, j a (2004) ‘it’s all up to you’: how welfare-to-work educational programs construct workforce success, adult education quarterly, vol 54, no 2, pp 89-104. sandlin, j a, and cervero, r m (2003) contradictions and compromise: the curriculum-in-use as negotiated ideology in two welfare-to-work classes, international journal of lifelong education, vol 22, no 3, pp 249-265. h o r a t i o a l g e r 96 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s st. clair, ralf (2004) success stories: aspirational myth in the education of adults, international journal of lifelong education, vol 23, no 1, pp 81-94. u.s. department of education (2000) outstanding results – tomorrow’s challenge: the secretary’s awards for outstanding adult education and literacy programs, office of vocational and adult education, washington, dc. u.s. department of education (2000a) adult learner success story: sherry sanders, in outstanding results – tomorrow’s challenge: the secretary’s awards for outstanding adult education and literacy programs, washington, dc: office of vocational and adult education, p 15. u.s. department of education (2000b) adult learner success story: glenda borgen, in outstanding results – tomorrow’s challenge: the secretary’s awards for outstanding adult education and literacy programs, office of vocational and adult education, washington, dc, p 30. u.s. department of education (2000c) adult learner success story: roselande jeanbaptiste in outstanding results – tomorrow’s challenge: the secretary’s awards for outstanding adult education and literacy programs, washington, dc: office of vocational and adult education p 5. vonier, m l (summer 2000) who is the typical adult literacy tanf student? (story of brenda), perspectives: from the office of adult literacy, retrieved from: www.dtae.org/adultlit/perspectives7/tanf.html weiss, richard (1988) the american myth of success: from horatio alger to norman vincent peale, university of illinois press, urbana, il. williams, raymond (1977) marxism and literature, oxford university press, oxford, uk. wren, d (winter/spring 1999) profile of self-sufficiency (story of terri), perspectives: from the office of adult literacy, retrieved from: www.dtae.org/adultlit/perspectives4/self.html wyllie, irvin (1954) the self-made man in america, rutgers university press, new brunswick, nj. literacy and numeracy studies 2014. © 2014 keiko yasukawa. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2014, 22, 4175, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v22i1.4175 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 2 n o 1 2 0 1 4 1 editorial keiko yasukawa this issue of literacy and numeracy studies farewells one of our founding editors, rosie wickert. rosie was instrumental in bringing the predecessor journal open letter to the university of technology, sydney in 1997, and giving it a new name and life as literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults. rosie brought to the journal her strong commitment to developing a research informed field of adult literacy and numeracy in australia, and her own strong research and policy engagement in the field. even after her retirement from the university, rosie continued her active involvement in the journal. on behalf of the editorial group, i wish to express our deepest thanks to rosie for her tireless work with the journal. this issue welcomes articles from two new researchers in the field: michael atkinson and ana pinto. both are currently studying for their research degree qualifications in australian universities, and share their research in our journal. atkinson takes a critical perspective of the ways in which the neo-liberal underpinnings of the esl programs for adult learners from refugee backgrounds in australia limit their educational and social journey. his study suggests that by attending not only to the learners’ functional literacy skills, but also to learners’ sense of their emerging identities, these programs could be sites of much more meaningful learning for the learners. ana pinto’s article is focused on the design of networked learning for adult literacy learners. pinto combines pedagogical and architectural perspectives to develop a way of understanding design features of networked learning environments. her article leaves readers to contemplate how well designed networked learning environments may, not only facilitate successful literacy learning in a narrow sense, but also facilitate the democratic distribution of social capital and critical engagement in socio-political issues. the third article in this issue is by robert prince and arlene archer. their article explores how academic voice is constructed multi-modally in quantitative texts. starting from an example from a student’s thesis, they illustrate the ways in which different graphic texts can construct and negotiate modality. their article poses questions for the teaching of https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s academic literacy and numeracy in higher education, particularly in disciplines whose work rely heavily on quantitative texts. the refractions piece in this issue is a presentation made by lesley farrell at a 2013 forum organised by the australian council for adult literacy on the topic of promoting research in adult literacy and numeracy. in this piece, farrell advises researchers and practitioners to take heed of some of the research that is being undertaken outside the familiar boundaries of academic research in adult literacy and numeracy, and which is influencing policy makers transnationally. she cites a few such research studies to illustrate who are the people undertaking these studies, what influence are they having on policy makers, and why. farrell’s aim is not so much to promote these studies as good research, but rather to argue that if we, as adult literacy and numeracy researchers, wish to undertake research that has impact on policy, we need to be mindful that traditional academic research is but one small source of influence in an increasingly global policy making process arena. finally, this issue features a review of mike rose’s back to school: why everyone deserves a second chance at education, his 2012 publication. the book is reviewed by pam osmond, whose entire career has been in adult basic education in australia. at a time when debates about literacy and numeracy are led and dominated by employers and governments in purely economistic terms, rose’s book and osmond’s review implore us to remind ourselves what education is really about and what our moral imperative is for researching in adult literacy and numeracy. microsoft word lns18 2_black final version 21dec.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 2 2010 6 working the interstices: adult basic education teachers respond to the audit culture stephen black a b s t r a c t this paper provides the perspectives of adult basic education (abe) teachers on how they are responding to curriculum changes which form part of the regulatory regime referred to as the audit culture. the focus is on abe programs conducted in the vocational education and training (vet) sector in australia where most accredited abe courses are delivered. the paper indicates the many tensions abe teachers experience between the compliance requirements of audits and their professional judgements as experienced abe teachers. while responses vary, many teachers adopt an approach where they can comply with the prescriptive demands of audits, though often in a minimal fashion, and at the same time teach in a way that fits within their philosophy and practices as abe teachers. in the classroom these teachers are seen to be ‘working the interstices’ (the small ‘spaces’) in the official curriculum. concern was expressed, however, that future abe teachers may not adopt such an approach. i n t r o d u c t i o n an interstice can be defined as ‘an intervening space’ or ‘a small or narrow space between things or parts: a small chink, crevice or opening’ (macquarie concise dictionary 1992:506). ‘working the interstices’ was a phrase i used as the heading for the final section of my phd thesis submitted almost a decade ago (black 2001:282-286). my argument then was that, for teachers working within the tight curriculum parameters of workplace literacy programs in the neo-liberal/conservative education era of the late 1990s, there was, nevertheless, always space for critique, even if it involved an element of deception. as i stated at the time, ‘it may mean giving the impression of playing the dominant game while diverting at times from the prescribed curriculum and engaging in a critical agenda’ (black 2001:283). the context for such comments was the prevailing absence of critical accounts of australian workplace literacy programs and the perception that adult basic education (abe) teachers were not engaging sufficiently with the discourses of human capital and economic rationalism. one study of abe pedagogy stated, ‘their position could perhaps be characterised as a mute opposition beneath a passive acquiescence’ (lee and wickert 1995:145). w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 7 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the context for this current paper shifts to more than a decade on, and it features abe teachers involved not just in workplace literacy programs, but more broadly, in mainstream abe programs conducted in technical and further education (tafe) colleges, the main public vocational education and training (vet) institutions where most accredited abe programs in australia are delivered. the central message of ‘working the interstices’, however, remains, except that this time, rather than being promoted by the author, the voices of abe teachers themselves are heard in various ways expressing this message. to date, few studies have considered in a critical way how abe teachers respond to the broader curriculum discourses they are expected to work within. this paper reports on a small study, conducted with individuals and small groups of abe teachers, which begins to explore what they think about, and how they respond to, the constraints of the curriculum they are employed to teach. the paper is framed largely within the current compliance measures of the regulatory regime described as an ‘audit culture’ in vet. t h e a u d i t c u l t u r e i n v e t it has been argued recently that the scale of compliance with audit requirements has transformed the work of teachers in the vet system, and that this aspect of vet work has not been recognised sufficiently by researchers, thus leading to the perception that it represents, ‘the elephant in the room’ (black and reich 2010). audits have been referred to as ‘the use of business derived concepts of independent supervision to measure and evaluate performance by public agencies and public employees ...’ (leys 2003, cited in apple 2007:7). power (1997), a key authority on audits, explains that in the united kingdom from the late 1980s there was an ‘audit explosion’ in which, ‘a growing population of ‘auditees’ began to experience a wave of formalised and detailed checking up on what they do’ (power 1997:3). audits are now common place worldwide and essentially they are promoted as a means of reducing risk and providing value for money, especially in public sector management contexts. by applying the accounting principles of the business world, audits are designed to regulate the activities of public officials. so pervasive are the regulatory mechanisms of audits in various fields, and especially public education systems, that the term ‘audit culture’ has become a popular descriptive term (see apple 2007, hodkinson 2008, shore and wright 1999, strathern 2000). in the context of this paper, the term audit culture is used quite broadly to encapsulate the massive increase in ‘paperwork’ that abe teachers in vet are required to undertake as part of their role as teachers. it includes, for example, the emphasis on documenting many aspects of the assessment of learners and course w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s b l a c k 8 outcomes, the continual checking and verifying that all elements of the curriculum and the participation of students have been complied with during the delivery of courses, and providing documentation to prove this to both internal and external auditors. the audit culture is particularly dominant in vet systems, and especially in relation to the british further education (fe) sector, due in part to the relatively low status of the sector and the insecure and highly competitive basis for much of its funding (see avis 2007, hodkinson 2008). hence, fe colleges in the united kingdom spend considerable time collecting data to ‘prove’ their performance and to meet the demands of internal peer reviewers and external inspectors from the office for standards in education (ofsted). the result has been a marked intensification of work in the fe system with teachers ‘drowning under paperwork’ (ainley and bailey 1997: 62). there has been similar audit culture dominance in australian vet for more than the past decade as governments and industry together have sought to establish a national vet system. in order to deliver nationally accredited courses all vet providers, public and private, are required to become registered training organisations (rtos). these organisations are subject to national, standardised regulation under the australian quality training framework (aqtf), a system of quality assurance focused ‘squarely on training and assessment, client service and management systems’ (australian quality training framework 2008 cited in seddon 2009:69). one researcher describes the aqtf indicators as invoking, ‘blunt top-down instruments that demand systemic conformity with non-discipline-specific, externally developed documentation for verifying generalised provider compliance with legislative requirements’ (tudor 2009:79). this accountability system promotes industry perspectives to the exclusion of educational stakeholders, and according to one leading vet researcher, for the vet teachers, ‘there is compliance but not commitment’ (seddon 2009:69). for vet teachers in australia and overseas, there appear to be two main issues of contention. firstly, there is a considerable increase in workload and stress resulting from time spent working on computer-based audit procedures. respondents in a study of head teachers in tafe nsw said audits were a ‘nightmare’, and typically, one manager stated, ‘... no matter how hard i work, i know i am not meeting all the audit requirements’ (see black 2009:15). but the issues for teachers are not just about work intensification and increased ‘paperwork’. in this highly regulated environment with ever closer surveillance of their work, vet teachers are lamenting their loss of control over what is taught. avis (2007:99) in the british fe context states that, as a result of this closer surveillance, ‘spaces for autonomy have become severely circumscribed’. following a similar line of argument, groundwater-smith and mockler (2009), while not referring w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 9 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s specifically to the vet system, suggest the need to ‘mind the gap’ that has developed between the subjectivity of teacher professional judgement and the objectivity measures of standardised audit processes. the argument is that teacher professional judgement is being diminished through the need to comply with regulatory audit processes which are often presented as unquestioned ‘quality assurance’. hodkinson (2008), also referring to the british fe system, draws attention to a similar dichotomy. he refers to the ‘ecologies of practice’ of the teachers conflicting with the audit driven ‘economies of performance’ of the national and college systems. as a result of this conflict, we find ‘underground working’, the work teachers undertake in vet which is not part of their official employment contract. this tension between on the one hand, teacher professional autonomy, and on the other hand, audit regulation, is the key issue in this paper. some educational researchers have framed this tension within a broader politics, seeing the audit culture largely as a manifestation of neo-liberal/conservative ideology; a means of controlling and regulating public officials in the interests of ruling capitalist groups (see, for example, apple 2007, shore and wright 1999). applying such a perspective to australian vet, for example, we see that the vocational content of courses is based on government sponsored training packages developed by leading industry councils representing largely private industry. through the regulatory mechanisms of the aqtf and the rto status of providers, the audit culture in effect ensures that vet practitioners teach only that which is prescribed in these training packages. assessment validation, for example, a fairly recent audit mechanism, regulates the work of teachers by ensuring teachers use assessments that do not deviate from the prescribed curriculum unit purposes and outcomes. on the face of it, there would appear to be little flexibility left for teacher autonomy. interestingly though, especially in view of the title and theme of this current paper, avis (2007:125) concludes his analysis of the british fe system by making the point that while curriculum embodies the interests of those with power in society, and while the regulatory mechanisms of the audit culture ensure compliance, curriculum is nevertheless: ... accomplished through classroom processes and subject to a series of mediations by teachers and learners. it is this very indeterminacy that offers a space for struggle as well as outcomes that are contrary to those of policy makers and curriculum designers. further, lawy and tedder (2009) have recently demonstrated in relation to fe teacher training in britain, that agency in the cases of both experienced and relatively new fe professionals is not necessarily closed down by regulatory audit regimes. w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s b l a c k 10 a b e t e a c h e r s a n d t h e a u d i t c u l t u r e abe teachers, especially those who are part of vet systems, have long been subject to similar types of professional conflict as those outlined above. merrifield (1998), in a us publication, set the scene more than a decade ago, indicating the ‘contested’ nature of the trends to performance accountability in adult basic education. more recently, campbell (2007) has drawn together many international perspectives on the complex issues of assessment and accountability in abe. the ‘skills for life’ strategy for improving basic skills in the united kingdom, with its focus on largely human capital outcomes, has been the focus for some critical discussion in relation to its prescriptive, evidencebased reporting frameworks (see cuban 2009:8-10). tusting (2009) has recently provided a detailed account of how some abe teachers are resisting elements of the accountability regime of the ‘skills for life’ curriculum with its core curriculum and prescriptive outcomes. she refers to the massive increase in ‘paperwork’, and how teachers are struggling to maintain their valued practices as ‘good’ abe teachers, by which she refers to the need to respond to learner needs, negotiate learning, and be flexible ‘in the teaching moment’. other british studies have also indicated the growing discontent of basic skills teachers in a vet sector which has been subject to ‘endless’ policy changes in the past decade or more (for example, edward, coffield, steer and gregson 2007). similar to some of the vet researchers cited previously in this paper, hamilton (2008) focuses on the effects of these policy changes and audit requirements on reducing the space for professional judgement and decision making and thus limiting teacher (and student) agency. but while outlining how such spaces for autonomy have been reduced, hamilton (2008), like avis (2007:125) cited above, also acknowledges that teachers still maintain agency: nonetheless, tutors (abe teachers) are still – inevitably – enrolled as active agents in change, through the mediating role they play in managing student identities and progress minute by minute through the lifelong learning infrastructure. in fact, not only are abe teachers acknowledged to have some continuing autonomy in the face of a dominating audit culture, but they may also have the possibility for ‘subversion’. as hamilton, hillier and tett (2006:10) note, as important elements of the audit culture such as performance indicators attempt to shape the field of abe: these requirements also have unintended effects as people react to the demanding and messy day-to-day realities of filing returns, filling in individual learning plans with students, or mustering evidence about achievement within busy schedules. impossible demands almost set people up to subvert them. w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 11 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s merrifield (2006:161) appears to add to this perspective, and also links with the title of this current paper by suggesting that there are opportunities for teachers to cross boundaries: ‘there are cracks within the system, boundaries are more permeable than they look ...’ in australia, only occasionally in the research literature is an abe teacher’s voice heard complaining about the undue administrative burden they now face in implementing particular abe programs (for example, doemling 2005:6-7), and occasionally such perspectives are presented at a national organisational level when demands for accountability are seen to threaten the integrity of educational provision (australian council for adult literacy 2009). the abe field, and indeed the vet field generally in australia (with a couple of exceptions, see black 2009, black and reich 2010), has lacked documented discussions over the effects of the audit culture on the work of vet teachers. r e s e a r c h m e t h o d s the data for this paper were obtained through two main methods. firstly, the views of thirteen abe head teachers on their changing work roles and responses to the audit culture were obtained through the selective extrapolation of qualitative survey data from a much larger study of the role of head teachers in tafe nsw (see black 2009). head teachers play a significant role in tafe colleges in new south wales, as educational leaders, managers of their teaching sections, and as classroom teachers themselves. the data were based on an emailed survey questionnaire involving both open and closed questions which sought the views of head teachers on a wide range of issues relating to their changing role in recent years. data for this paper were drawn from responses to open questions that were asked about how their role had changed in relation to audits, workloads and the degree of autonomy they felt they had in their role. a total of 109 head teachers across tafe colleges throughout new south wales responded to the survey, of which six stated they were abe head teachers, and a further seven can be included in this sample from tafe institutes which use other terms such as foundation studies and employment preparation to describe what was once abe. the survey data from these thirteen head teachers provide useful insights into how abe pedagogy in a broader sense, which includes the frontline management of the teaching section, has changed in response to the audit culture. the second method involved audio recorded, focus group discussions with mainly full time abe teachers at three australian tafe colleges. each of the three focus groups took between 60 and 90 minutes, and the tapes of the meetings were transcribed in full. each focus group comprised approximately 10 respondents who formed the core teaching staff in the three w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s b l a c k 12 abe teaching sections. with the agreement of each head teacher and their respective abe teachers, the focus group replaced their weekly scheduled staff meeting. the focus questions asked respondents to reflect on how they had experienced changes in their role in recent years, including the type of programs they teach, what they teach, how they teach, the students they teach, how they comply with the demands of the curriculum, and whether their enjoyment/satisfaction with their role has changed. they were also asked about their views on the future of abe pedagogy in vet. the majority of respondents in both of the two research methods were female (in fact all of the focus group participants), and almost exclusively in the 50-59 years age category. the abe head teachers had spent on average a decade in their current work role, and a likely similar statistic can be gauged for the focus group participants (though specific demographic data were not sought from focus group participants). all the teachers were long term and very experienced in abe. there were no ‘new’ teachers to abe in the focus groups due to the staffing stability of these teaching sections over many years. when occasionally a position did become available through retirement or a teacher transferring to another college, the successful new candidate had usually been a long term part time teacher in that section. the qualitative data from both the survey questionnaire and the focus groups covered many aspects of change affecting pedagogy. for this paper, data were selected for analysis which focused on change in relation to the audit culture. the data were coded according to several key themes which comprise the headings of the ‘findings and discussion’ section of this paper. they include: general participant responses to the new accountability regime; tensions experienced between audit compliance and professional teacher roles; workload and job satisfaction issues; emotional responses, including resentment, anger, and disillusionment; how teachers ‘balanced’ their professional teacher role with the need for audit compliance; and the future of abe pedagogy in vet. f i n d i n g s a n d d i s c u s s i o n t h e a c c o u n t a b i l i t y r e g i m e head teachers of abe were more likely than regular abe teachers to experience the pressures of audit compliance given their greater managerial/administrative role as heads of their teaching sections. head teachers specifically mentioned compliance with: the aqtf, rto status, iso (international organisation for standards), internal audits, icc (internal control checklists) and a wide range of curriculum standards. in each case, compliance required verification in quantifiable ways that all elements of activities had been performed correctly, according to set standards, and that they would stand the scrutiny of auditors who may know little about w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 13 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s pedagogical processes. this focus on accountability and audits of various kinds has clearly become a central feature of abe work. one head teacher commented: we’re now always being audited, either internally or externally, so that you always have this unseen audience there. sometimes you feel they are ready to pounce, and so you need to make sure you are covered maybe for something that will never eventuate. similarly, another head teacher stated: audits appear to be never ending. there is no way we can question what we are being audited on. this year we were audited on learner support and the documentation we had to provide was unreasonable. so audit-driven is this work, one head teacher commented that to do her job these days, ‘an accounting degree would have equipped me better than my dip ed and various postgrads in education.’ but audit processes are not just a matter for frontline managers, the abe classroom teachers found their regular pedagogical roles had changed as well, especially in relation to the curriculum they were employed to teach. comments from focus groups included: it’s all totally assessment-driven now. the curriculum ... has taken control of identifying learner needs. formerly, and for many years in australian vet systems, assessing learners in abe was fairly straightforward and not a major focus. one popular abe course involved just several modules/units and each of these units had the single aim for individual students to meet their personal goals which were to be negotiated with the teacher. current abe courses, by contrast, stipulate multiple learning outcomes for each unit undertaken, and the trend is for many units to be undertaken concurrently. thus, abe students may be enrolled in an abe course with possibly six or more integrated units. in order to comply with the auditors, teachers need to be able to demonstrate that students have achieved the learning outcomes for each integrated unit (i.e. they are assessed as either ‘competent’ or ‘not yet competent’). further, for every teaching session, it needs to be documented exactly how students participated in each of the integrated units. linked lesson plans need to indicate the content of each session, and how this content relates to the learning outcomes of each unit of work. in addition, teachers need to develop assessment tasks in order to determine if students have achieved competency or not in their enrolled units. these assessment tasks need to be ‘validated’, a peer review process that involves checking that w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s b l a c k 14 the assessment tasks relate to the learning outcomes for the unit and are appropriate for a group of students at the level of the course they are enrolled in. these assessment validations are standardised in their format and need to be signed by fellow teachers and stored in the event of an audit. compounding and including within these audit processes are budgetary factors where funding for courses is based on an ash (actual student hours) formula. the aim in the highly competitive budgetary times of recent years is usually to maximise ash figures in order to maintain funding for the abe section, and the only way to do this is to increase the number of students in classes and/or increase the number of units they enrol in. this explains a couple of abe teacher comments: we are driven to putting in more outcomes and modules because of ash, and it’s just ridiculous ... i don’t remember the drive on ash. it wasn’t the ash, it was the students’ needs. the result of this audit compliance for teachers is a huge increase in the time they spend documenting information that they consider may be of limited educational value, and which ‘sit in a drawer, just in case, in case an auditor comes around.’ t e n s i o n s b e t w e e n a u d i t c o m p l i a n c e a n d a b e p e d a g o g y in the research cited earlier, reference was made to the ‘gap’ or tensions between on the one hand, the standardised measures of audit compliance, and on the other hand, the subjective professional judgements of teachers. the findings in this research show these tensions everywhere in relation to the current work of abe teachers. head teachers, for example, provided examples of the priorities they are forced to make in their daily work and that time and time again by focusing on audit compliance, they neglected pedagogy and the principles that underpin their professionalism as abe teachers. what follows are just some of the many examples of such tensions as expressed by head teachers: being an educator is not possible. we are trainers, assessors, rpl (recognition of prior learning) experts, workforce practitioners, centrelink prison officers ... the fact that audits wag the tail of everything we do means we have to focus on auditable tasks when we could be focusing on promoting courses and designing curriculum. this year my section has had an internal audit and last year an internal audit and an iso audit. the pressure is always on to have all the paperwork up to date in case of an upcoming audit. w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 15 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s as a result of this, quality teaching and learning has taken a back seat. other head teachers spoke of their neglect of their own staff, with so little time to mentor new teachers and even meet with their staff, ‘really sitting down and having time to think through things ...’ one head teacher said he was constantly thinking of all the administrative tasks he needed to undertake out of class, ‘when i should be on the way to class.’ sometimes audit processes were seen to have a direct negative effect on sound pedagogical principles. for example, one head teacher commented on a ‘youth at risk’ program: ... they’re required to have a report on every student, every fortnight. [they are] supposed to show how their goals have changed every fortnight, which is not only educationally unsound, it will frighten the students away. the ‘gap’ between audit compliance and teacher professional judgement can be seen at a broader level too. some teachers spoke of the absence of discussions about pedagogy generally. one stated: we don’t speak about pedagogy much, but i don’t think anybody does either. i haven’t seen new ideas around at all, reading theory, writing theory, what’s new? maybe it’s there, but we’re not seeing it. no professional development, no one speaks about pedagogy anymore. it was as though the priorities of being a vet teacher had moved beyond pedagogy to ensuring that systems worked and the auditors were happy. one teacher commented, ‘auditors are ruling aren’t they, basically.’ some abe teachers spoke about the absence in particular of ‘critical literacy’ in the classroom and they related this to curriculum changes, with prescriptive learning outcomes for students and the need to document evidence of participation and performance. critical literacy skills are not so easily documented and there was the feeling it was neglected in the current curriculum as the following two comments from abe teachers suggest: i feel that the critical literacy kind of got lost along the way and there’s nothing within the curriculum that promotes it and reinforces it. (to which another teacher in a focus group responded: ‘because they don’t want people to think, you just toe the line’) if you came in and observed what happens in classrooms now, you’d see a lot of computer-based stuff, meeting individual needs, but also worksheet type stuff on computers ... i don’t w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s b l a c k 16 think you’d see the same sort of critical literacy that we flirted with a few years ago ... again, at a broader level, the ‘gap’ between audit compliance and teacher professional judgement can be seen to be at least partly responsible for the fragmentation of the field of abe. in a competitive funding environment where efficiencies in the form of dollars per ash formulas and achieving key performance targets distinguish some sections as better performing than others, cooperation between colleges and between individual teaching sections is not necessarily encouraged. one abe teacher stated: we used to have interdisciplinary meetings where people, you know, everyone got together on a regular basis from abe. and then they started splitting up the institutes and the colleges. now, do we know another college exists? no. do we ever meet them? no. another teacher commented: ‘it seems to me we’ve been fragmented out of existence.’ w o r k i n t e n s i f i c a t i o n a n d j o b s a t i s f a c t i o n as some overseas studies have shown, and as previous work on head teachers in vet (black 2009) demonstrated, the most tangible consequence of audit compliance is an increase in workload. one abe teacher commented, ‘everything is much more frenetic than it used to be ... lot more admin, accountability, the constant bits of paperwork, the constant audits, they all impinge on the amount of time you have ...’ another teacher stated, ‘i actually feel sick to the stomach at times with all the extra admin. everything seems to be done at a rush ...’ typically, one teacher said of the current curriculum, ‘there’s no way we can get through all the learner outcomes’. other teachers complained of the constant pressures for improved performance, which inevitably led to doing more with less. class sizes, for example, had increased: ‘a 6:1 class would now be a 10:1. what was 10 would now be 15, 16, 17 ...’ one teacher spoke of trying to combine two classes to enable team teaching, but class numbers prevented this: ‘the number of people in the room, it became physically stressful and unmanageable.’ but the respondents in this study indicated it wasn’t just a workload issue, it was the nature of work in an audit culture. for head teachers in particular this seemed a significant issue affecting their morale. one said, ‘most days i feel i am a well paid clerk’. another detailed the tedious nature of much of the head teacher’s work and the effects it had on some head teachers: w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 17 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the constant fear of audits, especially chilling stories from colleagues of what they had to undergo for an external audit, ensures head teachers comply reluctantly. constant change, especially curriculum change and perennial electronic system changes ensure head teachers can never relax and look beyond to adopt a broader perspective on their work. instead, they are mired in internal, inward-looking administrative trivia that in time destroys even the most enthusiastic and skilled of head teachers. it’s sad to see. another head teacher similarly stated: absolutely everything has changed, everything that made the job satisfying has been reduced and in most cases eliminated. key performance indicators are driving our lives and ruining the quality of work, services, products and our capacity to assist students. l a c k o f t r u s t , r e s e n t m e n t , a n g e r , d i s i l l u s i o n m e n t as the literature (e.g. power 1997) indicates, ostensibly, by regulating the work of public officials, audits are designed to reduce the possible misuse of public resources and thus reduce risk and encourage trust in the management and operation of public services. by enforcing audit compliance, this demonstrated for some abe teachers a lack of trust in them and their professional expertise. as one abe teacher clearly articulated, ‘the thing that annoys me is always having to validate stuff, verify stuff. nobody trusts us as professionals anymore, which i find a bit sad actually, really do.’ following on from this, another teacher expressed the view that as professional abe teachers, there shouldn’t be the need to go to such lengths with audit compliance, because as professionals, they trust each other: things like assessment validation really make us angry, because we have professional staff, people who have been teaching for a long time and they do come with a pretty sound theoretical basis ... we don’t go over the top about things because there’s a trust. another teacher said she found the whole process of checking and validating her work quite ‘belittling’, ‘you know, like 15 years of practical experience under your belt you feel pretty confident and ok’, but not trusted to work autonomously. other teachers resented spending so much of their non-teaching time doing validation and accountability work at the expense of developing resources and preparing for their classes. perhaps the most unfortunate consequence of constant audit work was the wearing down of enthusiasm for their work. several head teacher comments illustrated this: w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s b l a c k 18 a growing sense of not being able to complete work to a satisfactory level – unfortunately a sense of not caring. i was always passionate about working in tafe because of the opportunities it gave me and what it did. now i am increasingly disillusioned ... i believe the mentoring of staff, my mental health and my enthusiasm have all departed. it is a daily slog ... as explained in the methods section, the head teacher data in this paper were drawn from a much larger study of head teachers in tafe nsw (black 2009). the above comments regarding disillusionment with their role appear to be quite widespread, and they have implications for the morale of the teaching workforce in tafe generally. g e t t i n g t h e b a l a n c e r i g h t so far in these findings the central theme has been discontent with how the audit regime operates and the negative impact it has had on abe pedagogy and the professionalism and morale of the teachers. what has not featured is how abe teacher agency plays a role, and how these teachers attempt to work within a highly regulating audit culture, but without sacrificing their skills and values as abe professionals. how these teachers balanced their own teaching philosophies and practices with the often competing demands for audit compliance, varied for individual teachers. it was the focus groups that provided insights into these issues, and selected quotes from individual teachers are used in this section to indicate the perspectives of these teachers. some teachers explained that the needs of students have always come first and the needs of the curriculum second. as one teacher said, ‘we’ve never looked at the units first and gone along and delivered.’ another teacher explained, ‘we’ve become sharper about the accountability, even though we are still flexible and we do it the way we think is best for the student.’ in fact, there appeared to be two realities operating, an official one and an unofficial one, both in opposition to one other, and the teachers were expected to navigate their way through. as a head teacher explained in a focus group: we’re getting mixed messages. we’re saying we’ve got accountability, but teachers are saying, well, i haven’t got enough time to deliver these units. and then on top of that we’re saying (and this was said in a whisper), ‘don’t worry about that’... so that’s mixed messages ... we want you to be accountable, but don’t get anal about it. w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 19 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the responses of abe teachers to audit compliance seemed to vary, depending on the personal convictions of the teacher, and to some extent the culture, or what can be termed the ‘community of practice’ (wenger 1998) operating within the abe sections in particular colleges. there were some teachers who basically denied that audits had any significant role to play or made any difference to what and how they taught (the deniers). for example, in response to a question on whether curriculum learning outcomes made any difference to how they teach, one teacher responded: ‘not to me. i just have to do a lot more paperwork around it.’ another teacher, when asked if she felt some sort of obligation to meet the learning outcomes of the curriculum, stated: ‘i don’t. give me a box, i’ll tick the box, i’ll tick it. i’m not going to be driven to teach by what that says there.’ thus for these teachers, while audits could not be ignored altogether, they refused to acknowledge their importance, and instead they trivialised them. another form of denying the importance of the regulatory mechanisms of audit compliance was to take the risk that you wouldn’t be audited, and in the worst case scenario, that of being audited, be prepared to manufacture at short notice what was required in the audit. this seems to be implicit in the following comment which was underpinned by the conviction of the abe teachers that they were nevertheless doing a good job in their primary role of meeting the needs of students and enterprises: if someone comes along and does an audit, we either have to have advanced notice to fix it (laughing in the focus group) or you have to be able to argue it ... you know, you’ve got what the student needs, what the company needs, you’ve got the tafe units, and if it ain’t accurate, something’s got to give, and i’d rather it give tafe-wise ... you take the risk that you’re not going to be audited that year, or you take the risk that, you know, you can write it the day before. the above examples indicate that some teachers were prepared to subvert the audit processes if these processes conflicted with what they considered were the greater interests of their students and other stakeholders. many of the teachers in the focus groups, however, took what might suitably be described as a pragmatic approach to audit compliance. there were auditing procedures that were expected to be adhered to in their teaching programs, but they managed to deal with these almost as separate from their actual abe pedagogy. for example, one teacher said, ‘my teaching has not changed, and then half way through i’ll think, oh my god, i should have done dah, dah, dah, dah and dah, so i will do something that will fit the criteria.’ in other words, the audit work was an add-on which had to be undertaken but was considered to have little to do with ‘real’ abe teaching. another teacher similarly claimed: w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s b l a c k 20 i’ll be honest with you, i’ll throw in an assessment, but ... my assessments are specifically aimed to keep that side of things happy (the auditors). i’ll do it in one session, tick the boxes. but the rest of the time i’ll do what’s needed. finally, of course, there were those who complied as best they could with the audit processes (the compliers). they were simply doing their job as abe teachers subject to the same audit compliance as all other teachers in the vet system. for some teachers, however, the issue was a little sensitive. they wanted to do the right thing by their employers, and technically they had no choice but to comply, but they sometimes worked harmoniously in their community of practice with long standing abe staff who adopted a different approach (the deniers or pragmatists). the following short dialogue between two teachers illustrates such a dilemma: (teacher one): so far i’ve got no ticks in the box (laughs) (teacher two): well, what if you just tick them anyway? (response by teacher one) i probably could, but some things i just can’t. i’ve got to do some things related to it, even if it’s one lesson. in other words, this teacher was unable to be untruthful, even with pressure from her fellow colleagues. if she hadn’t addressed a set of learning outcomes in her class, then she wasn’t prepared to state otherwise and simply tick the boxes. another teacher explained the situation facing teachers who were concerned that they should follow the correct procedures: ‘you can get caught in it because you feel like, you know, you’ll get into trouble.’ individual teacher responses regarding how they accommodated or balanced the need for audit compliance with their own professional teaching philosophies and practices might best be seen as fitting along a continuum, which at one extreme ascribed little or no importance to audits, and at the other extreme, were as compliant as possible. terms such as deniers, pragmatists and compliers are used in this paper as broad descriptors only, and not as part of a definitive typology. t h e f u t u r e o f a b e p e d a g o g y i n v e t the abe teachers in the focus groups were asked their views about the future of abe pedagogy in vet. one of the key concerns of the teachers was the impending retirement of many abe teachers in the next few years and the implications this would have for abe pedagogy. one teacher stated: there’s going to be a vacuum and i’m worried about what’s going to fill that vacuum. there won’t be enough of us with all of the knowledge that we’ve got to keep what’s special about it. w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 21 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s there was concern in particular that younger teachers, and those new to the abe field, may be more accommodating of the audit culture. the following abe teacher comments clearly convey these concerns: if you came in as a young person, i think starting out, then you’d be handed these assessment tasks that you have to meet, and so that’s where you’d be coming from. the induction for a new teacher is, here are your learning outcomes, this is your clams roll (a computerised roll), and these are what you have to tick off for assessment validation. there was concern that these new teachers ‘will only know this (audit culture).’ some teachers linked these developments to the recent minimum qualification to teach in australian vet, the certificate iv in training and assessment. formerly, new teachers to vet were required to undertake a teaching degree qualification, usually from a higher education institution, and in fact, the majority of current full time abe teachers have first degrees plus post graduate teaching qualifications. one teacher, for example, explained how these new teachers without teaching degrees were likely to lack a ‘philosophy’ of education: ... they’re not teacher trained, and they are very much, teacher talk, stand in front of the room, pass out worksheets ... and that’s what we are concerned about the cert iv people coming in, if they don’t have a philosophy of education. on a broader, more optimistic note though, some teachers expressed the view that ‘our day has arrived’ in vet. they considered that only abe teachers had the flexibility to teach the ‘foundation’ skills in vet that are currently needed and are being promoted by a new federal government (see gillard 2009). it was precisely because abe teachers seemed to have the ability to move beyond the prescribed curriculum and to deliver negotiated and tailored courses, that abe teachers were so valued. as one teacher explained in relation to some workplace programs: they’ve got workers who can’t pass the test, but who do they go to in tafe to get people up to that higher level? there is nobody else. there isn’t a course that teaches, you know, year 10 advanced maths in 8 weeks, and communication skills to get through an interview. w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s b l a c k 22 c o n c l u s i o n s there are limitations to this paper in so far as the data were based on the selected comments of thirteen head teachers of abe and recorded discussions in three focus groups totalling approximately thirty abe teachers. it is thus not appropriate to attempt to generalise the findings to larger cohorts of abe teachers. nevertheless, on the basis of these data, it has been shown that some abe teachers are finding it difficult to work as required within the regulatory mechanisms of the vet audit culture, and they are finding various ways of teaching that operate along a continuum of resistance and accommodation to this culture. many opt for a form of compromise, referred to as a pragmatic approach, in which they try to teach according to their perceptions of ‘good’ abe pedagogy principles, but yet at the same time try to satisfy, at least in a minimal way, the requirements of various audit procedures. by means of subterfuge and pragmatism these teachers can be seen to be subverting the audit culture in so far as they are not engaging with audit compliance in the spirit in which it is intended. instead, audit work is often an ‘add-one’, paperwork usually requiring extra work time which is reluctantly undertaken just to please the auditors. what the findings clearly show is that abe teacher agency continues to play a role. quite a few of the teachers teach, or at least try to teach, as they always have in abe, notwithstanding the extra paperwork required for auditors. the issue for these teachers is essentially whether the best interests of their students are being served by the current audit culture, and if not, they are prepared to work outside of these requirements to varying degrees (‘underground working’ according to hodkinson 2008). these teachers can be seen to be ‘working the interstices’, the spaces that still exist for them to undertake what they consider to be ‘good’ abe teaching. some abe teachers, head teachers in particular, appear to be growing weary of the continued stress of trying to maintain what they believe in as abe professionals whilst also managing the constant pressures of audit compliance. the result in some cases is disillusionment and occasionally a loss of enthusiasm which may have serious implications for the morale of their teaching sections. adding to this negativity is the realisation that many current abe teachers are at the latter end of their teaching careers. there was concern expressed among these current abe teachers that those who will replace them in coming years may not share the same principles and beliefs of abe pedagogy and thus may more readily accede to the demands for audit compliance. new abe teachers may not be prepared to ‘work the interstices.’ they may not even be aware that there are interstices to be worked. w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 23 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s i wish to acknowledge the support of the tafe teachers 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insights into the changing role of head teachers in tafe nsw, tafe teachers association, sydney, retrieved 8 may 2010 from www.voced.edu.au/docs/estore/td_tnc_96_109.pdf black, s and reich, a (2010) ‘the elephant in the room’: audit culture and tafe teachers, refereed paper presented at the avetra conference, surfers paradise, 8-9 april, retrieved 8 may 2010 from http://avetra.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/21.00-stephenblack.pdf campbell, p (ed) (2007) measures of success: accountability in adult basic education, grass roots press, edmonton, alberta. cuban, s (2009) outside practices: learning within the borderlands, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 16, no 2/vol 17, no 1, pp. 5-18. doemling, c (2005) a practitioner’s perspective of the nrs three years after the introduction of llnp, literacy link, vol 25, no 2, pp 6-7. edward, s, coffield, f, steer, r, and gregson, m. (2007) endless change in the learning and skills sector: the impact on teaching staff, journal of vocational education and training, vol 59, no 2, pp 155-173. w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s b l a c k 24 gillard, j (2009) speech at the big skills conference, darling harbour, sydney, 5 march, retrieved 18 january 2010 from www.ala.asn.au/images/document/guillard_speech_march_2009.pdf groundwater-smith, s and mockler, n (2009) teacher professional learning in an age of compliance: mind the gap, springer, amsterdam. hamilton, m (2008) agents of change? tutors managing learner identities in lifelong learning, paper presented at the 38th annual scutrea conference, 2-4 july, university of edinburgh, retrieved 18 january 2010 from www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/172362.pdf hamilton, m, hillier, y and tett, l (2006) adult literacy, numeracy and language: policy, practice and research, open university press, maidenhead. hodkinson, p (2008) scientific research, educational policy, and educational practice in the united kingdom: the impact of the audit culture on further education, critical methodologies, vol 8, no 3, pp 302-324. lawy, r and tedder, m (2009) meeting standards: teacher education in the further education sector. what of the agency of teacher educators?, studies in the education of adults, vol 41, no 1, pp 53-67. lee, a and wickert, r (1995) reading the discourses of adult basic education teaching, in foley, g, ed, understanding adult education and training, allen and unwin, sydney, pp 134-146. leys, c (2003) market-driven politics: neoliberal democracy and the public interest, verso, new york. macquarie concise dictionary (1992) macquarie library, sydney. merrifield, j (1998) contested ground: performance accountability in adult basic education, national centre for the study of adult literacy report no.1, ncsall, boston. merrifield, j (2006) crossing borders – and back again: a life of building bridges, squaring circles and living literacy as social practice, in hamilton, m, hillier, y and tett, l (eds) adult literacy, numeracy and language: policy, practice and research, open university press, maidenhead. power, m (1997) the audit society: rituals of verification, oxford university press, oxford. seddon, t (2009) contestability, information asymmetry and quality signals in a competitive training market, in karmel, t, beddie, f and dawe, s (eds) competition in the training market, national centre for vocational education and research, adelaide, pp 65-78. shore, c and wright, s. (1999) audit culture and anthropology: neoliberalism in british higher education, journal of the royal anthropological institute, vol 5, no 4, pp 557-575. w o r k i n g t h e i n t e r s t i c e s 25 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s strathern, m (ed) (2000) audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy, routledge, london. tudor, r (2009) discussant in karmel, t, beddie, f and dawe, s (eds) competition in the training market, national centre for vocational education and research, adelaide, pp 79-81. tusting, k (2009) ‘i am not a “good” teacher, in terms of the college; i don’t do all their paperwork’: reasons for teacher resistance to the new accountability demands of the english skills for life strategy, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 17, no 3, pp 6-26. wenger, e (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity, cambridge university press, cambridge. microsoft word holland_formatted(171212).docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 2 2 0 1 2 37 cultural/community mentoring with maori and pacific electrical apprentices chris holland abstract new zealand government policy documents over the last decade have committed to supporting maori and pasifika learners, yet still today there is little real support in place for learners in apprenticeships. there is even less support in place that acknowledges the cultural dimension of learning in the workplace. this paper discusses the establishment and review of a development project which sets out to provide culturally supportive mentoring for maori and pasifika apprentices. the project sought to do this by engaging experienced maori and pasifika tradesmen who were located in the local communities of their learners. introduction this paper discusses research and development in apprentice mentoring in new zealand, in particular the mentoring of maori and pasifika apprentices. recent new zealand tertiary reports observe that significant numbers of enrolled apprentices, particularly maori and pasifika learners, have been failing to complete their qualifications (tertiary education commission 2008), and these observations are backed by government statistics (mahoney 2010) and qualitative case studies (holland 2008, 2009, 2010). arguments have existed in government policy documents for over a decade about the need to turn around low qualifications for apprentices – particularly maori and pasifika in order to improve employment opportunities and outcomes, business competitiveness and national productivity (ministry of education 2001). as the above mentioned government documents show, embedding literacy and numeracy delivery and assessment in vocational education, and targeting maori and pasifika learners, has been seen to be the primary solution to low achievement over the last decade. yet more recently, strategy documents are exploring the effectiveness of existing non-teaching support for apprentices, and strategies to improve support (kopu 2010). this reflects a broadening of perspective from simply making chunks of learning more accessible to learners, to understanding the part that relationships and culture play in learning. c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g 3 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s while tertiary education agencies have been carving up learning into graded unit standards, embedding literacy and numeracy into programs and materials, and assessing apprentices on-line at enrolment, employers and management texts tell us that relationships are the key. that is, who you are, how you engage with people, how you fit in, how you contribute your skills to the team (see, for instance covey 1990, 2000, peters 2010). identity and relationships do seem to be crucial to job retention, learning and progression for workers at all levels. research indicates that cultural identity and the ability to identify with the culture of the workplace are important factors in apprentice success (billett 2003, billet and somerville 2004, holland 2011). where such identification is weak, relationships at work and therefore success with learning may be at risk (holland 2009). this paper discusses relational mentoring (clutterback and lane 2004) in which culture plays a significant part. since 2008, a small number of development projects have taken place with the co-operation of the industry training federation (itf). industry training organisations (itos) have been supported to establish mentor training and mentoring within their industries, and that mentoring has been monitored and reviewed. participating itos have included glazing and joinery, fire and rescue services, hairdressing, electrotechnology and hospitality. mentoring guidelines have been produced and existing mentoring systems have been strengthened (see: www.itf.org.nz/assets/publications/literacy-publications/itf-mentoringguide-aug09.pdf). a range of approaches have been implemented in companies to improve apprentice learning support. two glass companies have established weekly mentoring sessions with young apprentices led by female administrators. the apprentices were completing distance learning modules, and the administrators were able to assist with time management and to provide the literacy and numeracy support they needed to complete the modules. the hairdressing ito has successfully instituted trainers in every salon, and established professional development for these trainers that raises their skills in mentoring their young apprentices. in the volunteer fire services, brigade members who have been in the service for little more than a year have demonstrated that they can support new members to complete their learning modules (one-up mentoring). recently in the hospitality industry, companies and non-profit organisations have been supported to establish mentoring and mentors have so far taken part in initial training workshops. mentoring in the electro-technology industry has focused on maori and pasifika apprentices. in 2011 the electro-technology ito (etito) introduced a groundbreaking approach to mentoring. maori managers in the organisation understood that maori and pasifika apprentices would need c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g h o l l a n d 39 cultural support as well as support with issues such as literacy and numeracy, to complete their apprenticeships and study. their belief is backed up in the literature. durie (2001) writes that for maori to be successful in tertiary studies, they need to acknowledge their maori identity and be nurtured in their maori values. hook, waaka and raumati (2007) suggest that maori can become disenchanted when the european workplace does not acknowledge important principles and connections such as whanaungatanga (relationship/togetherness/collectivity), the preservation of mana, mahakitanga (humility) and wairuatanga (spirituality). smith (1999) contends that these maori cultural values are underpinned by concepts such as reciprocity, nurture, support, group responsibility, and sharing. hook, waaka and raumati (2007) and ratima and grant (2007) add that collective learning is important for maori learners’ success. policy context apprentice mentoring is not yet recognised by the new zealand government as a key strategy for improving job retention and qualification completions. functional literacy and numeracy assessment and delivery remain a key focus of government agencies concerned with improving industry productivity through workplace learning (see: www.tec.govt.nz/funding/fund-finder/intensive-literacy-andnumeracy/). since about 2005 ‘embedded literacy’ in vocational course materials and delivery has been required (see: www.tec.govt.nz/documents/reports%20and%20other%20documents/lit eracy-numeracy-ito-embedded-literacy-numeracy-supportinginformation-and-requirements.pdf).text books and tutor guides have been re-written, and tutors have attended workshops and practised embedded delivery. in addition, a national literacy assessment is required of new apprentices (see: www.tec.govt.nz/resource-centre/softwaretools/literacy-and-numeracy-for-adults-assessment-tool/). apprentices undertake the on-line assessment at the start of their apprenticeship and may be referred to literacy and numeracy specialist support if they do not score well. many young people taking up apprenticeships do not score well on these assessments, for a variety of reasons. for example, they tend to enter the trades because their strengths and interests involve working out concrete, practical problems and engaging in hands-on tasks in their day-to-day world, and they have little or no interest in school-like literacies though a great interest in understanding the literacies of their chosen trade (holland 2011). another reason is culture, as discussed by other authors cited in this paper (e.g. durie, smith, hook, waaka and raumati, and ratima and grant). c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g 4 0 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s according to government statistics, literacy appears to be a more of a barrier for maori and pasifika in schools and therefore for youth enrolling in apprenticeships. the literacy, language and numeracy action plan 2008-2012 (tertiary education commission 2008) states that maori and pacific youth tend to perform less well than pakeha new zealanders in standardised adult literacy assessments. the strategy states a strong commitment to supporting maori and pacific island communities in particular. yet there is little evidence of the incorporation of particular maori and pacific cultural approaches to learning as recommended by maori academics. a modern apprenticeship (ma) program was introduced by the new zealand government in 2000 in order to rebuild trades training towards nationally-recognised qualifications for young people in new zealand. yet the number of maori and pacific apprentices in most trades continues to be low in comparison with the population as a whole, and completions are comparatively low. the latest available figures on apprentice completions (mahoney 2009) are as follows: of 529 enrolled maori apprentices in 2003, 21% completed, and of only 63 enrolled pasifika apprentices in 2003, 13% completed. in the electro-technology industry, completion rates for all apprentices were 55%. there are no separate statistics for maori and pasifika completions in this industry. shortly after the introduction of mas, modern apprenticeship coordinators (macs) were put in place to support apprentices by engaging in meetings with them approximately every three months. a 2010 mayors taskforce report stated that the success of the mac program was linked to ‘the ability of the mac to provide: quality, meaningful and effective interventions at key points in the apprentices’ learning and employment’ (kopu 2010). kopu elaborates that completion rates are linked to the delivery of support and that the culture of industry towards workplace diversity needs to be challenged. other research (holland 2009, 2010) indicates that the three-monthly meetings the macs were paid to undertake were too infrequent to be effective and also that over time, many macs came to have a joint role of co-ordinator/assessor. this joint role creates a conflict between power and support in the relationship, impacting on the level of trust that can be developed. relational mentoring current literature on mentoring recognises that mentors need to build a trust relationship through empathy, and the focus has been gradually shifting from a traditional paternalistic model to a relational model (clutterback and lane 2004). under a relational mentoring model, the worker is regarded as a valued equal who happens to have specific support needs. the relationship is one of generalised supportive friendship. ragins c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g h o l l a n d 41 and verbos (2006) believe that relational mentoring is the highest quality mentoring state. they attribute to relational mentoring the ability to develop empathic, empowering processes that create personal growth, development and enrichment for both mentors and learners. in relational mentoring the agenda is mutually driven; there are specific development areas and goals and a clear purpose; it is non-discriminatory and discussions are non-reported (clutterback and lane 2004, connor and pakora 2007). in the best examples of relational mentoring, power and authority are irrelevant. face to face meetings are regular, scheduled, and structured to include specific and mutually agreed development areas and goals. it was this model of mentoring that influenced the electro-technology industry training organisation’s mentoring pilot. etito mentoring pilot – a cultural / community model late in 2010 the electro-technology industry training organisation (etito) began planning a pilot mentoring project. the organisation was aware that a low number of maori and pacific people apply for apprenticeships in their industry, and also that the drop-out rate for those whose applications are successful, is high. in january 2011, etito established training for mentors and a pilot mentoring scheme for apprentices, using a cultural/community model that was more relational than traditional in its approach. it also commissioned an evaluation project to run alongside the work. etito personnel were aware that the industry employed relatively few maori and pasifika electricians and that it would be hard to find mentors who could support apprentices with cultural issues. they looked then to the apprentices’ local communities for self-employed maori and pasifika electricians or those working in the building industry generally. mentors were chosen firstly because they shared a common cultural background with the apprentices, secondly because of their proximity to the apprentices’ local communities, and only thirdly because of their specific electrical trade knowledge. it was important that the mentors were not in a position to exercise power over the apprentices – except in one instance, they were not supervisors or bosses, but experienced trades people who cared for the wellbeing of young maori and pacific apprentices. at least two mentors were from allied trades such as plumbing and building. the mentor group were trained over two days, three months apart. the central messages of the training were that mentoring should have clear goals, trust is vital, mentoring should support apprentices at regular face to face meetings in order to help with learning issues, and mentors should be prepared to act as advocates. mentors also learned that they were not expected to teach, but simply to share their experience and knowledge of c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g 4 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s how to get on in the workplace, manage documentation and complete the required study. some mentors found the work demanding. a month after the induction weekend, two mentors withdrew – one because of an injury and the other because of other commitments. two new mentors were introduced. one was a maori tradesman and the other was a pakeha manager from etito. the latter choice was a risk because the mentor was in a position of authority over his apprentice. the cultural/community aspect of the mentoring program was innovative. etito managers believed that drawing maori and pacific mentors from the local community would help to build apprentice trust in the mentor, and would give mentor and learner greater access to each other. the mentors were paid a small sum and were required to visit apprentices face to face once a month and to contact them regularly by text, phone or email. the electrical apprentices in each community attended evening classes at the local technical college in their locality. ten were chosen for the pilot – all were young men. the apprentices on the scheme were introduced to all the etito selected mentors at a three day launch/induction event at a country retreat south of auckland. this was a collective exercise, where the new apprentices were supported by older pacific and maori management and mentors, and encouraged to support each other. while the apprentices worked hard over the three days, relationships were also being built with each other and with managers through communal eating and lots of socialising. each apprentice was given the opportunity to choose his own mentor at end of the weekend through a five minute rotating discussion. apprentices were then placed with a large electrical service company working with a range of small contracting businesses. the research project the monitoring and review of the pilot program was commissioned by etito in february 2011 and tracked the impact that mentoring was having on both the learners and mentors over a year. we wanted to test how a uniquely supportive relational mentoring environment for maori and pacific apprentices might make a difference to apprentices’ work relationships, negotiation of the new workplace culture, and learning and development. research participants included etito management, the mentors’ group, the modern apprenticeship co-ordinator/assessor, and members of the apprentice group. a qualitative, participatory action research methodology drawing on maori research methodologies (smith 1999) was used, where trust relationships were built between the researcher and all participants through meetings, formal interviews, observations and social gatherings. gatherings c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g h o l l a n d 43 in the first six months included the induction itself at the country retreat, mcdonald’s, a barbeque and a traditional maori meal at a marae1. in addition, a private ‘electrical apprentices’ group was set up on a social network site facebook. six apprentices joined. four of these engaged in research related conversation for approximately two months. however, texting and face-to-face meetings proved to be a more ready and reliable form of communication. some quotes from observations, interviews and focus groups, social gatherings and the electrical apprentices group on facebook are presented in the following section. the apprentice experience of mentoring apprentices talked about feeling privileged and grateful to be selected for the program. they felt respected by the mentors, recognised culturally, supported and championed. they trusted the mentors. the apprentices also recognised that this special opportunity had implications not only for themselves but for future generations of maori and pacific apprentices. two examples of their comments are as follows: i look at this opportunity with the back of mind of say who knows, maybe this will be the first and the last opportunity for maori pacific and i take it. sometimes it brings me to tears because that’s what i want to do in the future. i want somebody to trust me and if i move on and be successful i want to mentor. i like paving the way. it’s a good feeling. apprentices and mentors usually met away from the workplace, such as in cafes or mcdonald’s. mcmanus and russell (2007: 294), writing about peer mentoring relationships, note that ‘repeatedly, researchers have suggested that individuals who have multiple sources of support fare better than those who do not’. there was evidence that mentors in this project were swapping notes about their proteges in ways that added value to the support that was being offered. this sharing of information was a means of mentors gaining support from each other. two mentors worked together regularly as they each had two apprentices to mentor. collaborating in a group of six improved the support they could offer. a disturbing trend was the increasing expectation by mentors that the apprentices should call the mentor (rather than the mentor calling the apprentice). the mentors concerned felt that this showed the apprentices 1 a traditional maori tribal meeting place, originally one in the open air, now frequently a purpose-built building c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g 4 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s were taking responsibility. indeed, some apprentices, while very happy to be part of the mentor program, had asserted that they did not need help right now, and would say so if they did. the difficulty was that while this approach may have built independence in more confident apprentices, others felt less supported. waiting for the apprentice to call also meant that time between contact was more likely to be extended beyond once a month, and this risked a stretch in the very fragile thread of trust that was being built between mentor and apprentice. one apprentice experienced difficulties which were not picked up by the mentor until it was too late and he lost his job. for most of these apprentices, the needs of the family – and church came first, and life decisions were strongly influenced by both. pacific apprentices’ first responsibility was to give earnings to the family in new zealand, so that they could send it to family outside of new zealand or to give a percentage to the church. because of the requirement to distribute earnings in this way, many families needed their young people to be earning high wages, and therefore there was sometimes parental resistance to apprenticeships, where only the minimum wage is offered in the first year. hook, waaka and raumati (2007:5) comment that within a maori framework mentoring is not restricted to individuals and can extend to whole whanau (close and extended family). the pakeha mentor had learned that his apprentice’s family was taking his apprentice earnings, leaving him no money for public transport, lunch, and learning expenses (he needed to get his driver’s licence). the mentor did not feel confident to visit the family on his own, so he called on another mentor and together they talked with the family, providing information about their son’s apprenticeship, and eventually finding a solution that suited the family as well as the apprentice. doherty and dreher (2007) suggest that a mentor can bring about greater visibility of the trainee in the workplace, and can make decisionmakers more aware of the trainee’s potential. the greatest successes that the mentors have had with the apprentices tend to be in terms of breaking down attitudinal barriers. the mentors commented: [the electrical service company] is a prime example ‘cos at the end of the day they didn’t want to take them on but all the tutors that supported the process at the time said these are the best young men we’ve ever had. jay came back to me and he said ...’we’ve got a big job at the prison but these guys would feel at home there’, just a stereotype we’ve got to deal with. lack of cultural capital in terms of the workplace culture is a further barrier – there are few role models in maori or pacific families who can show new young apprentices what to expect. in only four cases, members of c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g h o l l a n d 45 apprentices’ families had worked in a trade (one of these was the electrical trade). the mentors helped in very practical ways to overcome these and other barriers, often working together to resolve an issue. one apprentice was helped to get his driver’s licence and to keep his placement with the electrical service company while he was immobile. another mentor helped an apprentice to work through his debt crisis. others helped their apprentices to negotiate with polytechnic course tutors where the apprentices had not completed the pre-course work required before entering the apprenticeship. yet another mentor was able to support an apprentice when he was considering leaving and this resulted in him continuing much more enthusiastically with his apprenticeship. the apprentice commented: ... the stuff we talked about, all i can say is he really changed my perspective on this apprenticeship in a positive way ... made me look at the big picture ... changed my attitude ... now things are great. the mentors had earned the trust of their learners. they understood their apprentices’ cultural values such as reciprocity and the importance of family, and how these impacted on their performance. they had acted as powerful advocates for their apprentices. although the mentors have made an important difference to apprentices’ ability to learn in the job, more professional development is needed. there is still work to be done in terms of structuring mentoring sessions, setting goals, reviewing progress from session to session, and in identifying supporting apprentices with tasks involving literacy and numeracy. for instance, an area where literacy and numeracy related support could be offered is in understanding log books and completing log book entries. the books the apprentices had been issued with comprised a front section where apprentices were required to record the jobs they undertook each day, and a back section where they were to identify the relevant unit standard and map it to the job. several apprentices demonstrated or admitted that they did not understand how to do this. our examination of the log books revealed that the unit standards pages took up almost half of the book, and that the apprentices had to read through these standards in order to find the one that most closely matched the job they had just completed. it was slow and laborious – the qualifications jargon was difficult for first year apprentices. most guessed at the matching unit standard number, and getting it wrong was common. overall, the pilot was a success. the most convincing results for etito were that of the ten apprentices, only one apprentice withdrew (to go on to further and higher education) and only one lost his position with c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g 4 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the electrical company (partly due to a break in mentoring). this reflects an 80% success rate in terms of job retention. while it is too early to assess the impact of mentoring on qualification completions, indications on the retention rate are that completions will be higher than current rates for maori and pasifika and for all electrical apprentices. summary we have learned from previous research how learning is being supported in the workplace. we have learned from this research, some of the strengths and weaknesses of cultural/community mentor support. we know that the mentors understand maori and pacific cultural values such as reciprocity, nurture, tribal support, group responsibility, and sharing and support the mentors have acknowledged their own, and their learners’ maori and pacific identities and have nurtured apprentices in the appropriate values. we discovered that the apprentices face multiple barriers to success in the chosen field. these include institutional, financial and social capital barriers. we explored the extent to which some of the characteristics of relational mentoring were evidenced in this cultural/community mentoring program. these included making contact and showing equal respect, recognising cultural diversity and learner strengths in language use, understanding how important trust is in relation to supporting learning, identifying specific development areas and practising advocacy. have mentors made a significant difference to apprentices’ formal learning results? not really, but that was not the focus of the pilot, which was to provide support that enabled learners simply to continue with and complete their apprenticeship and study. as mentors develop their skills they will increasingly be able to work with their apprentices to, for instance, identify literacy issues with documents and fine tune and monitor progress towards apprentices’ learning goals. without goals against which progress can be checked, the structure of engagement between each party and the strength of the relationship may start to unravel. the impact that mentoring has on these young learners reminds us that human connection is central to the learning process. we know that mentoring can re-inspire an enthusiasm for learning and success. we also know that the cultural/community mentor model, with its special focus on maori and pasifika values and needs, is successful for such apprentices. not only successful, but necessary. for low paid learners frequently blamed for poor productivity and performance at national and local levels, we need to keep improving mentoring models that build apprentices’ confidence in themselves and show what they can contribute. we need to establish and develop first-year apprentice mentoring across a wider range of industries, to c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g h o l l a n d 47 track the impact on apprentices and to monitor and review progress. this will provide evidence of what still needs to be done to ensure the ongoing improvement and success of apprentice mentoring. whangia ka tupu, ka puawai. that which is nurtured, blossoms and grows. references billett, stephen (2003) workplace mentors: demands and benefits, journal of workplace learning, vol 15, no 3, pp 105-113. billett, stephen and somerville, margaret (2004) transformations at work: identity and learning, studies in continuing education, vol 26, no 2, pp 309-326. clutterbuck, david and lane, gill, eds (2004) the situational mentor: an international review of competencies and capabilities in mentoring, gower, aldershot. connor, mary and pakora, julia (2007) coaching and mentoring at work: developing effective practice, open university press, berkshire. covey, stephen r (1990) principle-centered leadership, simon & schuster, new york. covey, stephen r (2000) the 7 habits of highly effective people, perseus books group, new york. dougherty, thomas w and dreher, geroge f (2007) mentoring and career outcomes: conceptual and methodological issues in an emerging literature, in ragins, br and kram, k, the handbook of mentoring at work, sage, california, pp 51-94. durie, mason (2001) cultural competence and medical practice in new zealand, paper presented at australian and new zealand boards and council conference, wellington. holland, chris (2008) under no illusion: a research report into vocational tutor learning and practice in embedded literacy, report prepared for the hairdressing industry training organisation and the tertiary education commission, tertiary education commission, wellington. holland, chris (2009).on and off the job: learning experiences, connections and implications for lln, report for the joinery and glass industry training organisation, joinery industry training organisation, wellington. holland, chris (2010) mentoring survey for volunteers in volunteer and combined brigades, fire and rescue services industry training organisation, wellington. holland, chris (2011) someone like us: trades identities and support for workplace learning, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 19, no 1, pp 1934. c u l t u r a l / c o m m u n i t y m e n t o r i n g 4 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s hook, g raumati, waaka, tū and raumati, l parehaereone (2007) mentoring maori within a pakeha framework, mai on-line review, vol 3 no 1. http://ojs.review.mai.ac.nz/index.php/mr/issue/view/8 kopu, bry (2010) modern apprenticeships: an examination of the current challenges and opportunities facing the modern apprenticeship programme in new zealand, bmk group and mayors taskforce for jobs, new zealand. mcmanus, stacy e and russell, joyce ea (2007) peer mentoring relationships, in ragins, br and kram, k, the handbook of mentoring at work, sage, california, pp 273-298. mahoney, paul (2009) modern apprenticeships completion analysis, ministry of education, tertiary sector performance analysis and reporting wellington, new zealand. ministry of education (2001) more than words: the new zealand adult literacy strategy. ministry of education, wellington. peters, tom (2010) the little big things: 163 ways to pursue excellence. harper collins, new york. ragins, belle r and verbos, amy (2006) positive relationships in action: relational mentoring and mentoring schemas in the workplace, in dutton, je, and ragins, br, eds, building a theoretical and research foundation, california, sage, pp 91-115. ratima, matiu and grant, barbara (2007) thinking about differences across and within mentoring, mai review, 3, peer commentary 1, pp 1-5. smith, linda t (1999) decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples, zed, london. tertiary education commission (2008) literacy language and numeracy action plan 2008 – 2012, tec, wellington. lns template literacy and numeracy studies 2015. © 2015 tao bak et al. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2015, 23(1), 4426, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v23i1.4426 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 3 n o 1 2 0 1 5 73 notes on contributors tao bak tao bak is an educational developer in the academic support and development unit at victoria university in melbourne australia. taobak@vu.edu.au sonja beeli-zimmermann sonja beeli-zimmermann is working at the university of bern, switzerland where she also pursues a phd. her article in this issue is part of her phd research. sonja.beeli@edu.unibe.ch jeffrey johnson-abdelmalik jeffrey johnson-abdelmalik is a senior researcher with the school of public health and social work, at queensland university of technology. his research interests are in social policy and nonprofit organisations of the welfare sector. johnsonam@iprimus.com.au greg marston greg marston is a professor of social policy, in the school of public health and social work, at queensland university of technology, brisbane, australia. his current research focuses on poverty and economic insecurity, street-level policy practice and welfare subjectivities. greg.marston@qut.edu.au pauline o’maley pauline o’maley is an educational developer in the academic support and development unit at victoria university in melbourne australia. pauline.omaley@vu.edu.au https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v23i1 mailto:taobak@vu.edu.au mailto:sonja.beeli@edu.unibe.ch mailto:johnsonam@iprimus.com.au mailto:greg.marston@qut.edu.au mailto:pauline.omaley@vu.edu.au microsoft word lns_18_2_black&yasukawa_final_formatted21dec[1].doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vol 18 no 2 2010 43 time for national renewal: australian adult literacy and numeracy as ‘foundation skills’ stephen black and keiko yasukawa i n t r o d u c t i o n those working in the field of adult literacy and numeracy are currently anticipating changes in the near future as the federal government has flagged the development of a national foundation skills strategy (australian government 2010). ‘foundation skills’ is a term that has recently been suggested as a way of simplifying discussions about literacy and numeracy (perkins 2009:8), and it has gained traction in various australian national policy environments (e.g. gillard 2009, council of australian governments [coag] reform council 2009, australian government 2010). foundation skills appears to encapsulate adult language, literacy and numeracy, and more broadly, it may also include so-called employability skills such as communication and teamwork (roberts and wignall 2010:1). in this paper, our main focus is on the adult literacy and numeracy dimensions of what is needed in the policy renewal. while there are no specific details available at this stage, the general focus of a new national foundation skills strategy seems clearly evident. a strong and influential call for a new national strategy came from skills australia (2010), an organisation with a mandate to develop the nation’s industry skills (see http://www.skillsaustralia.gov.au/about-us.shtml). similar ‘human capital’ arguments supporting the development of adult literacy and numeracy skills have been presented recently by the australian industry group (2010) and the coag reform council (2009). already, the federal government in its recent 2010 budget has allocated significantly increased funding for workplace and jobseeker literacy and numeracy programs which are designed primarily to contribute to economic skills development (australian government 2010). these initiatives are in line with a commissioned publication designed to inform national directions for adult literacy and numeracy which suggests that ‘work-based and workfocused programs should feature strongly in future strategies’ (perkins 2009:31). the purpose of this paper is not to undermine the primacy of the human capital underpinnings of a new national foundation skills strategy. in the current highly competitive, globalised economy, it is to be expected that a new national strategy will build on the perceived advantages of skills t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l b l a c k & y a s u k a w a 44 development for productivity and international competitiveness that were promoted in the previous national policy some twenty years ago (the allp australian language and literacy policy, see department of employment, education and training 1991). however, we maintain that in the development of a new national strategy, there is more than one perspective on the rationale for investing in adult literacy and numeracy. lo bianco, in his address to the 2010 australian council for adult literacy conference (http://www.acal.edu.au/2010conf/presentations.htm) reminded the audience that while the oecd has consistently taken the human capital argument for literacy and numeracy, unesco has focused on human rights. while there may be some tensions between the two perspectives, we argue that a new national strategy cannot ignore the diminution of rights of people with economic and social disadvantage that can occur by pursuing a human capital based agenda alone. in fact, increasing social inclusion is part of the mandate for the vocational education and training (vet) sector that has been flagged in the work of both the national vet equity advisory council (nveac 2010) and skills australia (2010). in this paper we highlight four dimensions of the adult literacy and numeracy field which we consider should be incorporated in a new strategy. we draw on recent work on social capital which has direct implications for social inclusion, but also for complementing the human capital rationale for adult literacy and numeracy. we link this work to calls for more cross-sectoral partnerships, and we then highlight an area of vet that should receive greater prominence in a national strategy, the integration of literacy and numeracy in the delivery of vet courses. finally, we consider professional learning and partnerships with universities in adult literacy and numeracy, and how the field can be revitalised. s o c i a l c a p i t a l twenty years ago social capital did not feature in government thinking in relation to adult literacy and numeracy policy, but much has happened in the intervening years to change this. adopting the australian bureau of statistics (2004) definition for social capital to mean ‘networks, together with shared norms, values and understandings which facilitate cooperation within or amongst groups’, the concept is now seen to have considerable value in adult education and adult literacy and numeracy in particular. social capital can be seen as a resource, along with other forms of capital, including human capital, that contributes to the socio-economic wellbeing of individuals and communities (coleman 1988, putnam 2000). further, there is recognition at national and international levels that social capital, often in conjunction with human capital, can have an important part to play in the prosperity and well-being of nations (productivity commission 2003, oecd 2001). t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l 45 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s to date, studies relating adult literacy and numeracy with social capital have been relatively limited, but nevertheless significant in their implications. falk (2001) was instrumental in demonstrating that social capital was implicated with adult literacy and numeracy provision. he argued, for example, that in jobseeker literacy programs the focus on developing employment skills may be insufficient to result in employment outcomes unless participants have the requisite social capital, including access to the right networks. research by balatti, black and falk (2006) demonstrated that there are significant social capital outcomes from accredited adult literacy and numeracy courses, and further, that the development of social capital, often in combination with human capital, has an impact on the socio-economic well being of individuals in areas such as health, education and learning, employment, and their social environment. balatti, black and falk (2009) in a later study provided guidelines for a social capital approach to pedagogy that was likely to enhance the production of social capital outcomes. such an approach included viewing students as members of networks and developing bonding, bridging and linking ties through drawing on existing networks and building new networks for participants. most of the above research focuses on the role of social capital at an individual level, but there is evidence in the broader adult learning research to demonstrate the positive role of social capital in the well-being of communities (falk, golding and balatti 2000, falk and kilpatrick 2000, kilpatrick, field and falk 2003). we consider that the role of social capital in adult literacy and numeracy learning is sufficiently significant and established to warrant its recognition alongside human capital as a rationale for adult literacy and numeracy provision. adult literacy and numeracy programs are not just about developing the technical skills of reading, writing and doing sums. these skills in themselves count for little unless they can be put to good use (for example, in employment), and it requires social processes (i.e. social capital) to enable this to happen. elements of social capital such as how people identify themselves in relation to others, their levels of trust with others, how they work with others in various networks, and the number and type of networks people can live and work within, are significant and should be explicitly acknowledged and written into a new strategy. the literature sometimes presents human and social capital as a dichotomy, involving a choice to be made between one or the other, a form of vocational/social divide (perkins 2009:31). we maintain, however, the two forms of capital are interrelated and that socio-economic well-being requires both forms of capital (balatti, black and falk 2006). t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l b l a c k & y a s u k a w a 46 c r o s s s e c t o r a l p a r t n e r s h i p s drawing on the concept of social capital and also integrated or embedded literacy and numeracy (see next section), wickert and mcguirk (2005) argue the need for the field of adult literacy and numeracy to extend beyond formal learning sites to become engaged as partners with a whole range of social policy areas. literacy and numeracy learning has a significant role to play in other sectors such as health, youth work, and welfare. to date, integrated literacy and numeracy has featured primarily in workplace and vet support programs, and has been slow to feature in these other social policy areas. there have been a number of local crosssectoral initiatives reported in the areas of health (black, innes and chopra 2008), family literacy (leske, harris and francis 2005), youth studies (widin, yasukawa and chodkiewicz 2008) and aspects of community development (black, lucchinelli and flynn 2006, shore 2009), but these initiatives have been undertaken primarily with short term innovative funding from the federal government. these local partnerships are often difficult to sustain due to the absence of underpinning partnerships at the broader policy and funding levels. balatti, black and falk (2009:33) provide a visual representation (figure 1) of vertical and horizontal partnerships at the macro, meso and micro organisational levels. importantly, we argue that what is needed are partnerships at the macro, foundation level involving, for example, government departments and peak professional organisations, to provide the policy and funding framework to support and sustain the community level partnerships (meso level) and the micro level of interaction where the learning happens. without these macro partnerships, the other partnership levels tend to be short term only. to a large degree it is the absence of government support and funding that currently restricts the potential for productive partnerships in a number of key social policy sectors. in the area of health, for example, overseas in countries such as the united states (anderson and rudd 2006, california health literacy initiative 2008, hohn 2002 ) and canada (rootman and gordon-el-bihbety 2008) there are considerable ‘health literacy’ programs involving active partnerships between adult literacy and numeracy and health professionals. in australia, there are few significant health literacy partnerships involving health and adult literacy and numeracy professionals, and the concept of health literacy is almost exclusively the domain of health professionals. take the case of ‘mental health literacy’, where there is macro organisational level support (coag 2006), which in turn has resulted in extensive mental health literacy programs (presented as ‘mental health first aid) being managed in local communities throughout australia, but exclusively by a health organisation t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l 47 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s (orygen youth health research centre, see www.mhfa.com.au). through partnerships with adult literacy and numeracy professionals, health literacy programs can be informed by pedagogies that assist participants to manage the literacy and numeracy demands involved in accessing, interpreting and acting upon information and strategies for improving their health. f i g u r e 1 : p a r t n e r s h i p l e v e l s health is but one sector, though a key one, where there is considerable scope for partnerships involving both health and adult literacy and numeracy professionals. low levels of health literacy are generally a strong indication of lower levels of health (hartley and horne 2006:7). as the australian bureau of statistics (2008) ‘health literacy’ survey indicates, those with the lowest health literacy levels are often older, poorer, with lower formal education levels, with their first language not being english, and unemployed. these demographic characteristics fit the profile of many students in adult literacy and numeracy courses and thus their needs are well understood and addressed by literacy and numeracy teachers. the indications are that health and adult literacy and numeracy professionals t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l b l a c k & y a s u k a w a 48 work well together in partnership, especially in providing education for the prevention of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes (black, innes and chopra 2008). interestingly, health promotion professionals, like adult literacy and numeracy teachers, promote similar discourses of individual and community ‘empowerment’ (lavarack 2007, world health organisation 1986) another area of potential cross-sectoral partnerships involves employers, unions and literacy and numeracy providers. some of these partnerships have been enacted in workplace english language and literacy (well) projects in terms of improved work skills, but not in terms of engaging workers in broader learning projects. in the uk for example, there are successful union learning representatives programs involving partnerships (clough 2010, alexandrou et al 2005) which are underpinned by literacy and numeracy support. these programs are funded largely through the uk government’s union learning fund, an example of the macro policy and funding foundation which is required for the sustainability of partnerships. new zealand (holland 2007) and other countries (e.g. ireland, denmark, finland) have adopted union learning programs along similar lines. at the national policy informing level there are strong calls by the nveac for cross-government, community and employer partnerships and for sustainable investments (nveac 2010:20,11) in light especially of stakeholder frustrations about short term and inconsistent funding. australian adult literacy and numeracy researchers have strongly promoted the idea of partnerships in a number of sectors (figgis 2004, hartley and horne 2006, perkins 2009:33, wickert and mcguirk 2005) and cross-sector representatives likewise have been receptive to such partnerships (e.g. keleher and hagger 2007 in relation to health). but without federal government policy and sustainable funding, partnerships will remain short term and ad hoc. i n t e g r a t i n g l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y i n t h e d e l i v e r y o f v e t c o u r s e s in addition to literacy and numeracy programs conducted in workplaces (i.e. well – workplace english language and literacy programs) and those that target the unemployed (i.e. the llnp – the language, literacy and numeracy program), a further program area in need of federal government funding is one which involves the integration of literacy and numeracy in the delivery of the full range of vet courses. these programs have been a traditional focus of adult literacy and numeracy provision in public vet systems (e.g. johnston 2002:25, wickert et al 2007:251), often referred to as ‘support’ programs (as in tutorial support t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l 49 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s and learner support), but to date they have been funded primarily from state/territory budgets. this type of program is based on the theoretical concept of the ‘integration’ of literacy and numeracy with vocational education and training, which involves concurrently developing literacy and numeracy and vocational skills and competences ‘... as interrelated elements of the one process’ (courtenay and mawer 1995:2). in other words, literacy and numeracy are not taught as separate or discrete skills, but are contextualised or ‘situated’ within the process of learning vocational skills. in its practical application in vet, it often involves team teaching between literacy and numeracy teachers and vocational teachers, which has long been promoted as good practice in technical and further education (tafe) in new south wales (e.g. glossop 1990, randazzo 1989), and is obligatory in the certificate in applied vocational study skills (cavss) developed in western australia (bates 2008). in most states and territories, there is a mixture of team teaching and withdrawing individuals or small groups of students in order to provide the additional literacy and numeracy support for them to complete their vocational studies. integrating literacy and numeracy in the delivery of vet courses has for many years worked effectively to improve workplace skills in the federal government’s well program (woods et al 2006). in a current research project (black and yasukawa forthcoming), interviews with vet teachers in different states and territories indicate that in college-based vet programs, the primary focus of these integrated programs is to provide support to enable students to complete what is often termed the 'theory' component of their vocational studies. this form of provision would appear to be basic to improving course completion rates and assisting the progress of students in vet, but nationally the extent of this provision is ad hoc, with funding levels and delivery methods varying considerably across the different states and territories. while clearly this form of provision has implications for human capital development – including vocational knowledge, course completions and work skills, it has implications for social capital and social inclusion too. the new ‘communities of practice’ which vocational students are being apprenticed into, are new social networks with new sets of values, norms and behaviours involving bonding, bridging and linking ties to various other networks. for example, in one case study in a current research project (black and yasukawa forthcoming), multi-lingual literacy and numeracy students described their new peers as ‘family’, and several members of the group were actively planning to start a business together to serve the distinct needs of their ethnic communities. apart from acknowledgement that integrated literacy and numeracy support is needed and ought to be provided, there is little agreement or t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l b l a c k & y a s u k a w a 50 indeed debate, about the theoretical underpinnings of the pedagogies that are used. further, with the exception of western australia, there is no designated funding for these programs, and therefore their funding is in competition with many other priorities in declining (in real terms) state vet budgets. interestingly, the nveac (2010:13) has recently suggested in its blueprint for the future in vet that funding options should take account of ‘foundation skills being embedded into vet delivery at all levels of the australian qualifications framework’. integrated literacy and numeracy delivery has been recognised overseas as an essential aspect of vet provision (e.g. casey et al 2006, hegarty and feeley 2009) and is worthy of a national approach and funding. in fact, the case for such provision is stronger than ever given the recommendations arising from the bradley review of australian higher education (2008) along with the coag targets (coag 2009) to increase the proportion of the australian workforce holding university qualifications. foundation skills can be seen to underpin courses that extend from vet to higher education level and the world of work beyond. there are however, some cautionary notes to consider if integrated literacy and numeracy support is to join the workplace and jobseeker program initiatives currently funded by the federal government. firstly, effective programs involving partnerships between adult literacy and numeracy teachers and those from vocational areas require additional investment costs in order to account for the shared planning, delivery and evaluation for continuous improvement (casey et al 2006: 9, nveac 2010:20). these extra investment costs are unlikely to be compatible with the contestable funding model currently favoured by the federal government which, with its cyclical funding rounds, can lead to unsustainable provision. the nveac (2010:13) has recently drawn attention to the negative impact in vet of the contestable funding model. a second cautionary note involves the casualisation of teachers. the investment in time and resources to make partnerships work between literacy and numeracy teachers and vocational teachers may be problematic when one or both categories of teachers are paid on a sessional/hourly basis. necessarily, many part time/sessional teachers, by the very nature of their insecure employment, may have neither the time nor the inclination to invest their (often unpaid) time and energies into a partnership program where they can have their work terminated at very short notice (see perkins 2009:34). the nveac (2010:17) reports that the high level of casualisation in vet is viewed as a critical issue for the vet workforce, and the employment status of teachers would appear to have an influence on the effectiveness of programs involving integrated delivery. a final cautionary note involves the assessment of vet learners. many vocational students, especially apprentices, are young, having left t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l 51 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s school fairly recently. they need literacy and numeracy support, but they may well resist and resent being identified as lacking or deficient in skills through the processes of receiving literacy and numeracy support. in the western australian cavss, the guidelines make clear that no students are assessed for their literacy and numeracy skills because the course is aimed at assisting the whole class (bates 2008). while ‘screening’ to identify students in need of literacy and numeracy support is widespread in vet systems, less formal assessment methods which avoid a deficit approach to teaching and learning are likely to be more effective. p r o f e s s i o n a l l e a r n i n g a n d p a r t n e r s h i p s w i t h u n i v e r s i t i e s this final section considers the professional learning of adult literacy and numeracy teachers. it is a dimension of the adult literacy and numeracy field that has reached a parlous state and is badly in need of national renewal. this has been picked up in recent key publications (skills australia 2010, roberts and wignall 2010), and is beginning to be addressed through federal government initiatives, including a scholarship scheme to encourage and support initial teacher trainees in adult literacy and numeracy (australian government 2010). alongside these initiatives are various projects examining aspects of workforce development, quality and qualification standards for the vet workforce more generally (productivity commission 2010, wheelahan 2010, nveac 2010). our main concern in this paper is the continuing professional learning of current adult literacy and numeracy teachers. for the past decade or more, the mechanisms that have supported the professional learning of adult literacy and numeracy teachers in australia have been crumbling. in the post-allp era (in particular the mid 1990s) there were many national professional development opportunities supported by the federal government via the national staff development committee for vocational education and training, but from this time onwards, at both federal and state levels, professional learning mechanisms have declined. national practitioner-based journals such as good practice in adult literacy and basic education and literacy now have come and gone. organisations which provided resources and professional development, such as the adult literacy information office (alio) in sydney (johnston, kelly and johnston 2001), and the adult education resource information service (aris) in melbourne (hazell 2002), have ceased operating and haven’t been replaced. through their regular publications (broadsheet and aris bulletin) both these organisations provided important national networks for professional learning. other important information links through organisations such as language australia and the national centre for language teaching research (nceltr) have also now ceased. the peak professional organisation for the field, the australian council for adult literacy (acal), t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l b l a c k & y a s u k a w a 52 contributes to professional learning with its annual conference, but the council’s longstanding newsletter, literacy link, has also now ceased publication through lack of funds. research in adult literacy and numeracy, which helps to inform the practitioner field, developed strongly for a short while with federal government support in the early 2000s with the adult literacy and numeracy australian research consortium (alnarc). with the demise of alnarc, continuing federal government research support was provided for a number of years via the national centre for vocational education research (ncver), but this designated adult literacy research stream ceased from around 2007. annual federal government adult literacy innovative projects funding also ceased at about the same time. beyond the federal government’s well and llnp initiatives, there are now no national funding sources for research specifically in adult literacy and numeracy. many adult literacy and numeracy teachers have every reason to claim they are isolated, with few professional learning opportunities, and an almost complete absence of information about recent developments in the field (though the ncver has made attempts to convey research findings to practitioners through their adult literacy resource website, see http://www.adultliteracyresource.edu.au/). the nveac notes stakeholder concerns generally about access to professional development in vet (nveac 2010:17). in public vet institutes, much of the current professional development initiatives seem to be focused not on pedagogy, but on compliance with accredited standards (see black, this volume). it should be no surprise in the current climate to hear the following comment from an experienced adult literacy and numeracy teacher in a focus group: we don’t speak about pedagogy much, but i don’t think anybody does either. i haven’t seen new ideas around at all, reading theory, writing theory, what’s new? maybe it’s there, but we’re not seeing it. no professional development, no one speaks about pedagogy anymore (black this volume). and yet, while practitioners such as this teacher are asking ‘what’s new?’, researchers are making claims about new ‘paradigms’ for adult literacy and numeracy studies (balatti, black and falk 2009, ivanic 2009:103). the research-practice nexus thus appears largely absent. what is needed is a re-focus on pedagogy and professional learning that goes beyond compliance with accredited standards. adult literacy and numeracy teachers need a focal point, a national ‘centre’ where they can engage with ideas and theories, draw on recent developments in the field, and make a contribution themselves. a practitioner journal (which could be electronic) and a specific website should be available to all adult literacy and numeracy practitioners. the national research and development centre (nrdc) for adult literacy t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l 53 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in the uk, with its consortium of partners, provides a working model for such recommendations, though necessarily in australia we may be talking of more modest proportions. another area of need is practitioner research in adult literacy and numeracy, almost completely undeveloped in australia, unlike in the uk (see barton et al 2006, davies, hamilton and james 2007, hamilton and appleby 2009). this form of research would contribute not only to professional learning but to developing the capacity of the research community. the field of adult literacy and numeracy pedagogy appears to have has lost much of its vibrancy and enthusiasm. it needs re-energising. the call for re-energising however, begs the question of who will lead and sustain it. the number of universities that focus on adult literacy and numeracy teacher development and research has never been large in australia, but in recent years, the number has diminished further. while courses in tesol feature in many universities, courses focused specifically on adult literacy and numeracy teaching are now almost invisible. the decline in these teaching programs has also meant a lack of renewal in the academic workforce who specialise in adult literacy and numeracy. concomitant to developing practitioner research capacity therefore should be a program of academic renewal in adult literacy and numeracy so that the field has research partners in universities who can mentor practitioner researchers. working together they can synthesise the research in the field and inject new theoretical constructs that can foster innovation and reflection. to facilitate this, teaching qualifications obtained in the university sector in adult literacy and numeracy that provide a pathway to a research degree program must be recognised as legitimate qualifications alongside vet qualifications in the field. c o n c l u s i o n s the field of adult literacy and numeracy in australia stands at the cross roads. a new national foundation skills strategy is an opportunity for renewal at a time of apparent decline. there are opportunities to develop further the important human capital rationale for adult literacy and numeracy provision, but also, as we have indicated, a social capital rationale which in turn complements skills development and enhances the socioeconomic well-being of individuals and communities. there are considerable opportunities for extending the influence and value of adult literacy and numeracy skills into other sectors with partnerships, but without national policy and subsequent sustainable funding, they will remain largely unfulfilled opportunities. and finally, those who work in the adult literacy and numeracy field, and for those who are new entrants, new opportunities and support mechanisms are urgently required for their professional learning and for re-building a sustainable and strong professional community. t i m e f o r n a t i o n a l r e n e w a l b l a c k & y a s u k a w a 54 r e f e r e n c e s alexandrou, a, davies, jd and lee, j (2005) union 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adult literacy and numeracy practices, commonwealth of australia, sydney. woods, d, cully, m, bowman, k, hargreaves, j, harris, la, priest, s and beddie, f (2006) review of literature: workplace english language and literacy: report prepared for strategic analysis and evaluation group, ncver, adelaide, retrieved 2 september 2010 from http://www.voced.edu.au/docs/dest/td_tnc_89_714.pdf world health organisation (1986) ottawa charter for health promotion, who, ottawa, retrieved 2 september 2010 from http://www.who.int/hpr/nph/docs/ottawa_charter_hp.pdf lns16-1hoodfinal l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 1 2 0 0 8 77 revisiting reading: exploring an intensive reading pedagogy in adult literacy helen de silva joyce, susan hood and david rose abstract applied linguistic research into genres of written communication has had a considerable impact in recent decades on the pedagogy of writing in all sectors of education in australia, from early schooling to post-secondary and workplace contexts (eg. christie and martin 1997). attending to the social purpose of language and modelling and deconstructing texts in preparation for supported writing has become a common feature of many programs, including those in the field of adult english as a second language (esl) and adult literacy. however, effective engagement with model texts for writing is dependent on students being able to read those texts. while reading continues to be explicitly identified as a component of most adult literacy programs, there is evidence to suggest that less attention may be given to the deliberate supported development of reading skills (burns and de silva joyce 2000, 2005). this paper reports on a project funded by the national centre for vocational education research (ncver) in australia. the study, investigating the impact of intensive reading pedagogy in adult literacy, was designed to explore the relevance and the potential of an intensive, explicit reading pedagogy, reading-to-learn, in adult and community education (ace) and tafe colleges in metropolitan sydney, teaching literacy in esl and adult basic education (abe) classes. the study was a partnership between practising teachers and researcher/teacher educators. it identified positive outcomes for students, with advances in reading abilities for many students well beyond those anticipated by teachers and students alike. teachers also reported very positive outcomes for their own professional development. importantly, the study also identified a number of system-level features that would need to be in place to support a broader adoption of the pedagogy. introduction genre-based literacy pedagogy, emerging from work in educational linguistics in australia over the past two decades, has contributed to fundamental changes in literacy curricula locally (eg. hasan and williams 1996, christie and martin 1997) and internationally (eg. johns 2002, r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g 78 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s schleppegrell 2004). the pedagogy has been characterised by a strong focus on writing, and ongoing research and resource development in writing pedagogy continues to inform and support teachers of adult learners. however, some research suggests that it is time to invest more in understanding effective processes for teaching reading (burns and de silva joyce 2000, 2005), and in particular the relationship between learning to read and learning to write (barton, tusting, hodge, appleby and ivanič 2006, brooks, torgersen, porthouse, burton, robinson, wright and watt 2004), and between learning to read and reading to learn (rose 2004). the role of reading as critical for the educational success of schoolaged learners is recognised in the recent teaching reading: report and recommendations from the national enquiry into the teaching of literacy (committee for the national inquiry into the teaching of literacy 2005). it is equally crucial in the context of education for adult students of english language, literacy and basic education. students who cannot access the key texts they need in order to learn, in whatever their educational sector or field of study, are at very serious risk of failure. in social contexts and workplace contexts adults who are limited in their ability to read are also limited in their ability to participate in their communities and workplaces. the study reported here was designed as a deliberate and carefully planned and monitored intervention in the teaching of reading in adult and community education (ace) and tafe classes for adult esl and adult basic education students. the study drew on an innovative approach to teaching reading referred to as reading-to-learn. it involved the professional development of six self-nominating teachers in relation to a specific set of pedagogical practices, ongoing monitoring of processes of implementation by the teachers and documentation of outcomes and issues. all teachers and students who participated in the study, and from whom data were collected, gave their willing informed consent to contribute to the study. ‘reading-to-learn’ pedagogy the reading-to-learn pedagogy has been principally developed by dr david rose, who is a research fellow with the faculty of education at the university of sydney. developed initially in the teaching of academic reading and writing with indigenous and other students in secondary schools (rose 2004), and with indigenous tertiary students at the university of sydney (rose, lui-chivizhe, mcknight and smith 2004), it has since been adapted to other educational sectors and settings, including primary and secondary years of schooling and reading in tertiary academic contexts across australia, africa, china and latin america (culican 2006). in brief, the pedagogy involves episodes of carefully designed structured and scaffolded intensive reading of short passages of key texts deliberately selected to be highly relevant to the student in terms of their r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g d e s i l v a j o y c e , h o o d a n d r o s e 79 educational goals and beyond what they can read independently. students use notes made from the intensive reading process to jointly construct writing texts that are closely patterned on the reading. the approach is detailed in, for example, rose et al. (2004) where the authors summarise it in these terms: the scaffolding strategies for reading and writing are designed to focus students’ attention on patterns of language and to recognise the meanings they express (…). these language patterns are very different from the language patterns that most of us use in everyday spoken discourse, and are often impenetrable to adults with limited or no experience of tertiary study. however, through the use of scaffolding strategies, a teacher can support learners to read and write far more complex texts than they normally could on their own (42). the reading-to-learn approach incorporates principles of a languagebased theory of learning (halliday 1993, painter 1989, 2007) and a social constructivist perspective in terms of the concept of scaffolded interaction in learning (vygotsky 1978, van lier 2004, mercer 2002). as such, it is compatible with many current curricula descriptions and approaches in adult literacy. what is innovative in the reading-to-learn approach is the level of detailed and specific guidance in which teachers engage as they scaffold student achievement of tasks from the macro-level to the very micro-levels of texts. the approach introduces a more systematic, explicit and carefully scaffolded kind of intervention in the teaching of reading. evaluative studies of the reading-to-learn pedagogy in a number of sectors of education, particularly in schooling and in pre-academic contexts, have begun to generate a growing body of empirical data on implementation and outcomes (culican 2006, luke et al 2003). however, there had been no systematic exploration of how the pedagogy might function in the teaching of reading and writing in adult language, literacy and basic education programs. the specific nature of the learner profiles in this sector, the knowledge, expertise and training of teaching staff, the policy contexts and structures and the learning environments are all factors to be considered in any designed intervention in pedagogy. the most appropriate methodology for exploring the potential of the pedagogy was considered to be collaborative action research. practising teachers self-nominated for the project and a selection from nominating teachers enabled the research to include a variety of program types, classroom contexts and teacher expertise. the teachers worked in partnership with researchers and teacher educators to investigate the processes and consequences of their own teaching in their own classrooms. this was done through cycles of designed interventions and ongoing data collection (eg. burns 1999), followed by collaborative forums for problematising and solution-seeking. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g 80 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s implementing the approach a key aspect of the approach is the careful selection by the teacher of genres and texts that are beyond the current reading ability of students, texts with which the students are unable to engage if unsupported. at a general level the teacher moves students through stages of detailed reading of those texts to joint rewriting and independent writing in a six-stage teaching cycle as illustrated in figure 1 and described below. this general level of description of stages is explained in more detail later in the paper. independent writing individual rewriting joint rewriting prepare for writing detailed reading prepare before reading sentence making spelling sentence writing figure 1: reading-to-learn teaching cycle (rose 2007, book 1:26) stage 1 preparing before reading students are oriented to the genre and field of the text and are prepared to understand the text in general terms. [the teacher gives a commonsense account of the content and sequence of that content, before reading the actual wordings to students]. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g d e s i l v a j o y c e , h o o d a n d r o s e 81 stage 2 detailed reading the teacher supports all students to read each sentence in a short passage, enabling students to read a passage with complete understanding and to understand how the author has constructed it. [the teacher gives a commonsense account of the first sentence, then reads it to students. students are then carefully prepared to match meanings to wordings within that sentence. these connections are reinforced with elaboration moves]. stage 3 preparing for writing students plan exactly what they are going to write, based closely on the passage they have studied. in narrative texts, they will use the structure of the narrative as the scaffold. in factual texts they will use highlighted wordings as the scaffold. stage 4 joint rewriting the teacher supports the class to write a new text patterned on the reading text. stage 5 individual rewriting students practise writing a new text using the same patterns as the reading and joint rewriting texts. stage 6 independent rewriting students use what they have learnt from the preceding stages to write an independent text. as can be seen in figure 1, at each stage of the cycle students undertake activities that focus their attention on different levels of text structuring. as rose explains in the professional development materials that are part of the training program (2007, book 1, part 1:4): reading and writing are hugely complex tasks that involve recognising and using patterns of language at three levels: • at the level of the text, readers must recognise what a text is about and how it is organised, for example as sequences of events in stories, or as chunks of information in factual texts. • at the level of the sentence, readers must recognise how words are arranged in phrases, and what each phrase means, such as who or what the sentence is about, what they are doing, where and when. • at the level of the word, readers must recognise what each word means, and how letters are arranged into patterns that spell the word. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g 82 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the teacher engages in scaffolding moves that build connections between meaning and wording at each of the levels identified above. because of the carefully designed nature of the teaching intervention in reading-to-learn, and because it requires teachers to rethink and learn new ways of interacting with the language of written texts, in-service training of the teachers was an integral part of the project. the implementation in this study was centred on five workshops, conducted at intervals throughout the project. these workshops provided an introduction to the theoretical rationale, observations of videos of other teachers implementing the approach, opportunities for feedback and discussion of implementations and a review of the project upon completion. they also developed skills in identifying, analysing and preparing texts for teaching, lesson planning strategies, planning carefully sequenced interactions to scaffold students' engagement with texts, methods of data collection and assessment tools and strategies. the teachers were resourced with professional development booklets and a dvd of demonstration lessons. the three researcher/teacher educators worked with the teachers in delivering professional development workshops, coordinating data collection, observing classes and guiding teacher implementation of the pedagogy. as a first step the teachers were provided with detailed lesson plans but later in the project the teachers planned their own lessons with the support of the researchers. these lessons were either audio-recorded or video-recorded for reflection with the researchers and the other teachers in subsequent workshops. data were collected from multiple sources during the project, and included recorded and transcribed group discussions, classroom observations, teaching practice records kept by teachers, student feedback, assessment of student reading and writing performances, and audio and video recording of lessons. these data and the teaching practice records were collaboratively reviewed and analysed by the teachers and researchers. the researchers analysed workshop discussions, samples of classroom discourse and other data for preparation of the final report and recommendations for future implementation of the pedagogy in adult literacy contexts. outcomes the project was limited to six teachers who participated over a total of seven months and the classes involved covered a range of reading ability levels from beginner to intermediate. while limited in the number of teachers involved, the interaction with the research team meant that a considerable depth of data could be collected over more than one course during the project. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g d e s i l v a j o y c e , h o o d a n d r o s e 83 outcomes for teachers one source of data was the teachers' ongoing records of their interventions and of observed consequences. the following extracts in figure 2 are illustrative of this data. they identify a number of specific issues in relation to the teachers’ evaluations of their own control of the pedagogy, the progressive development of confidence in the method, evaluations of student progress and responses and system issues that impact on implementation. teachers also collected student texts, produced in the different stages of the pedagogy. across the duration of the project teachers recognised changes in their practice and in their confidence as reading teachers. initially they expressed a felt tension between finishing the sequence of tasks and a concern that their students were losing concentration. they also found it difficult to select appropriate well-constructed texts, to identify key phases of texts, to prepare texts for reading and manage exchanges that enabled students to connect meanings and wordings. however, as the teachers strengthened their professional knowledge in the workshops and developed a greater awareness of language and the implications of this knowledge for their teaching, these issues were no longer a concern. the teachers reported changing their practice in terms of developing clearer and more conscious planning processes. outcomes for students transcriptions of workshop discussions showed increasingly positive responses from students, and anecdotal incidences offered important insights. for example, one teacher reported spontaneous applause in her group when one student with a disability read a text aloud for the first time. teacher feedback suggested that students responded positively to the more intensive and scaffolded approach to reading. they experienced success in reading in the successive cycles of reading-to-learn and became more confident in approaching reading tasks, as this comment from a beginnerlevel teacher shows. then i said ‘okay, you want me to read this one again’? they said ‘no, this time we want to have a go’. i said ‘that’s called “confidence”. let’s do it’. and they did it. and when someone was reading, other students were helping. that’s real nice … that’s something i want to see. so when they did it, i just stopped and i looked at them … they managed to read the whole passage. so i mean they were quite comfortable with that one … now they can read much better than before, all three of them. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g 84 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s figure 2: extracts from one teacher’s ongoing records of interventions and observed consequences 1.8 during the detailed reading i realised i hadn’t explained the sentences sufficiently therefore i couldn’t elicit the correct words to be highlighted. at the end of the lesson one student said she felt she would learn to read better with this method. most students seemed to enjoy the lesson. everyone was involved. some students remembered the exact words in joint rewriting. 5.11 this was the first narrative text i have done with this class using this method. the text turned out to be a good choice, with enough complexity and new vocabulary to work well with the detailed reading phase. the students really enjoyed the joint rewriting in a new context. the original story was about a neighbour who came to a person’s home to complain about loud music. the students chose a classroom as the new context, with an old woman from next door coming to the classroom to complain about the rubbish being thrown into her yard by the school children. i wish i had had time to complete the cycle, however, i need to keep moving through other parts of the curriculum. next week’s lesson i plan to complete the whole cycle through to independent writing. 15.11 the students are now very comfortable with this method and are enthusiastic to do each lesson. this time we did individual rewriting – some students were very keen to have a go at this, but some were a bit hesitant. however, everyone tried and they were still writing at 2.10pm although our class should have finished at 2. most of them took it home and finished it for the next day. each student wrote an interesting variation on the ghost story and some included their own experiences. it was a successful lesson. although i had read and explained the whole story at the beginning of the lesson one of the weakest students commented that she understood the first 3 paragraphs really well (which we had of course covered in the detailed reading), however she found the other paragraphs really hard to understand. i realise it is not possible to keep to the timings in the book (although i know these are meant to be a guide). explaining in common sense terms is not as easy with esl students as it would be with native or fluent speakers. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g d e s i l v a j o y c e , h o o d a n d r o s e 85 it was generally agreed that students improved their grasp of grammatical structures and became more interested in observing and talking about language, as this comment illustrates: my students have learnt, have really appreciated unpacking nominal groups but also we did some work repacking which wasn’t what we did here but i wrote the sentences up, four sentences and we repacked them into one sentence. a lot of work. it was also reported that the use of electronic dictionaries by second language students greatly reduced over the duration of the project, with some students prepared to give them up altogether as they were provided with more effective means for understanding texts. another unexpected reported outcome was a significant improvement in attendance patterns, attributed to the fact that students came to anticipate more rewards for attendance. the following comment by one of teachers shows that students were unwilling to miss out on classes: my students and i are both sold on it, so we’re sold. it’s been very successful. in fact it’s kept my students coming to class. you know um in that particular level in our tafe college, it’s only a small tafe college, we have had historically a problem keeping people coming to class because of our population. we have older students who usually have family or work pressures, and increasingly work pressures in the government climate these days. um so, starting off with say a small class of around 12, you’re getting 12 enrolments and it gets whittled back and whittled back. but they’ve kept coming, primarily because they’re enjoying the reading classes ... but they have gotten so much out of the reading because quite often, you know we've been focusing on media, they get stuck on the vocabulary or with the reference from outside, exophoric reference. so they’ve appreciated very much the classes and as i said they’ve kept coming. data collected during the project indicated improvements in student reading and writing skills. these improvements were, in many cases, unexpected and significantly beyond those predicted in curriculum outcomes. student responses to the pedagogy were generally positive, with attendance patterns improving significantly and, in some classes, a noticeable increase in peer support. the pedagogy extended the grammatical resources of students and increased their enthusiasm for talking about the language of the texts they were reading and writing. teachers also kept records of student written feedback. in this instance of email reflection sent from an intermediate student to his teacher, the approval is very marked. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g 86 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s recently, [x] has been using a new teaching method to help us learn english in our class. it’s a brand new experience for everybody. x chooses one piece of a little bit harder essay to let us read. he asks us to speak aloud one by one even if we don’t know some of words in the essay and he records each of our reading with a recorder. the second part of his teaching is that he explains the whole essay, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. he emphasises on new words pronunciation and asks us to practise as well so that he can correct us gradually. he also analyses the structure of the sentences with grammar. he demands us to highlight every main word, phrase and clause when he explains it to us. and then, he asks us to read aloud again, sentence by sentence, and follow his reading. the third part of his teaching is that he asks two of us to write a list of main words, phrases and clauses on blackboard we have highlighted in each paragraph and we help them to do the job. then we work together with his help to make up the paragraph on the board without looking at the essay he gave us. it doesn’t matter whether the paragraph is the same as the essay’s one. after we make our own paragraph up correctly he erases it and suggests us to rewrite it on our own paper by using the same method. he corrects our works later on when we have finished it. he might ask someone to write his/her paragraph on the board and we can examine it again together. what a fantastic teaching method it is! it involves reading, reading aloud, pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, comprehension, discussion, grammar as well as writing. i think it is very creative and every member of class gets involved in this procedure. students can get the biggest benefit from this teaching method even if it is run a little bit more slowly than usual lessons. 16th may 2007 figure 3: student email reflection reading-to-learn focuses on reading, and reading as foundational to writing, so data on student writing were also collected. teachers reported widespread improvement in writing, which they attributed to students’ improved language awareness and growing confidence in engaging with written texts. in particular teachers noted an increased interest in expanding their vocabulary and a growing sense of grammar on the part of the students, as this teacher explains. and the third cycle i’ve done letter writing, i’ve used a really complex government written letter as a model and i’ve got some really good results in their writing and can see a really big improvement in the complex sentences and the grammar that they, even what i was really amazed with is that they’ve picked up articles, prepositions, um all those little things that r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g d e s i l v a j o y c e , h o o d a n d r o s e 87 normally we wouldn’t expect them to pick up. so the third cycle i’m really pleased, i’ve got some good results. i’ve been through, i did everything, sentence-maker and note-taking. teachers also reported that students were able to write a wider range of story and factual genres, and were actively interested in considering textual organisation. intensive engagement in reading original texts included highlighting meanings/wordings and the students drew on these highlighted wordings to make notes on the board. using alternative wordings to the notes on the board they then jointly reconstructed a version of the original text. from this the students proceeded to writing an independent construction in which they would drew on the organisational structuring and wordings from the jointly constructed text. the following student factual texts, in figure 4, illustrate this process. text 1 jointly constructed class factual text thomas edison was an inventor, electrical engineer, businessman and industrialist. born in dublin, ireland he was an ethnic irish subject of the british empire and later became an american citizen. edison is famous for inventing electric light in the late 19th century. edison’s work and inventions laid the foundation for the direct current battery power system (dc) including the invention of electric light bulbs which helped bring the age of electricity into the 20th century. text 2 sample a of independently constructed student factual text bruce lee was born in san francisco in 1942. when he was just a baby of 12 months old, he moved to hong kong with his father. at the age of five, he became a child actor and was know as lee xiao long. he was famous throughout south-east asia. figure 4: student factual texts produced in joint construction and independent construction comparative results one important aim of this study was to collect evidence of any impact (or otherwise) on students’ literacy skills as a result of the interventions of the study. to this point we have noted sources of evidence in the form of teacher and student feedback on observed changes in literacy abilities, and indirect evidence in terms of behavioural and attitudinal shifts towards more positive engagement in learning. however, there was also a concern to identify more directly the changes in reading and writing practices for individual students. while a methodology of experimental design of pretest/intervention/post-test might suggest itself as an obvious choice in r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g 88 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s evidence gathering in a study such as this, there were several factors that restricted such a design. the timeframe for the project necessitated workshopping the methodology with teachers throughout the period of action research and data collection, rather than frontloading training. this meant that teachers were developing knowledge and skills that would inform effective initial assessment practices in reading across the duration of the project. preintervention and post-intervention reading data were complicated in this regard. part-time employment conditions, part-time provision, very varied teaching spaces and resources, irregular student attendance patterns, and students from multiple first language backgrounds were characteristics of the field. rather than presenting factors to be controlled, these variables were seen as needing to be accommodated in the design and accounted for in the methods of data collection, reporting of findings and recommendations flowing from the study. an extended study would enable a second cycle of independent implementation in which teachers would attend more systematically to initial data collection of reading performances. nevertheless, it was considered important to provide evidence of a comparative nature beyond the important records of observation collected. towards this end, samples of student independent writing were compared with benchmark performance samples for the relevant stage of the certificates in spoken and written english (cswe) (nsw ames 2002). an example of such a comparison is provided in figure 5 for a student studying at level ii of the cswe. in this case the genre that is compared is that of a recount. table 1 compares text 3 and text 4 in terms of 14 criteria at the levels of genre, register, discourse, grammar and graphic features. to produce a scaled comparison, each criterion is given a score between 0 and 3, with the cswe ii sample as a baseline with average scores of 1-2. the assessment resource illustrated in table 1 has been developed in the readingto-learn program. the analysis in table 1 identifies how far student competence in story writing had progressed during their participation in reading-to-learn beyond the expected outcomes for their level. the writing of all students in this cswe ii class was within this range of 10 or more points above the expected average standard for that level. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g d e s i l v a j o y c e , h o o d a n d r o s e 89 text 3: sample benchmark text from nsw adult migrant english service (ames) assessment booklet for cswe ii. text 4: sample of cswe ii student independent writing from project data figure 5: comparison of cswe ii benchmark performance (text 3) to text produced by student studying at cswe ii level in the study (text 4). r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g 90 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s text 3 text 4 purpose simple personal recount 2 successful narrative, resolving complicating events 3 staging orientation, record of events 2 orientation, complication, resolution 3 field events and places in personal travel experience 2 imaginative, intricate plot 3 tenor some feelings and appreciation of places 1 engages with series of problems and reactions 3 mode simple spoken english, few written features 2 more written features, elaborations, variety of sentence structures 3 phases series of episodes in tour 2 series of problems within complicationbuilding tension 3 lexis common lexis of places spain, country, museum, city, sculptures, statues, lake, view 2 rich lexis building field – humid summer afternoon, wrung out rag, turned back to go inside… 3 conjunction simple succession – on the first day, after that, then, on the last day plus cause because 2 variety of time resources – ten minutes, just as, two minutes later, quickly, on time 3 reference simple reference to self and preceding things – i, it 1 variety of reference to people and things 2 appraisal common feelings and appreciation – beautiful, liked, biggest, very nice, greatest, 1 appraisal used to build problems and reactions – stared in terror, very anxious, hurriedly, overjoyed 2 grammar problems with number and tense – an mony photos, small souvenirs, i don’t go swimming 2 few problems, variety of sentence structures used creatively 3 spelling one error, mony 2 accurate spelling of infrequent words 3 punctuation accurate sentence punctuation 2 accurate sentence punctuation 2 presentation uses paragraphs for each episode 2 uses paragraphs for stages, title, fair handwriting 2 total 25 38 table 1: comparative analysis of student story text performances r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g d e s i l v a j o y c e , h o o d a n d r o s e 91 summary reflections on impact and implications for methodology in adult literacy at the end of the project, the teachers and researchers reviewed a range of issues that the project had highlighted about the teaching of reading to students in adult english language, literacy and basic education classes. these included reflections on past practices and the challenges that participation on the project had presented, as well as recommendations for further broader implementation. one challenge that emerged early and persisted to some extent was the issue of choosing texts of sufficient challenge to students to enable learning to take place. initial reading assessments of students were undertaken by teachers using miscue analysis techniques that involved the students reading aloud and the teacher recording ‘miscues’ of different kinds on a copy of the text. a review of the initial assessment data revealed a tendency to select unchallenging texts for the students to read, reflecting an underestimation of their reading abilities or a reluctance to challenge. if unchallenging texts are chosen for teaching reading, this can result in students not being sufficiently stretched to indicate directions for intervention and development. the pace for teaching is therefore unclear. a reluctance to introduce challenging texts into the classroom can also contribute to a prevalence of reading tasks that essentially test rather than teach reading, as is the case with the many kinds of read-and-answerquestions activities. once the teachers in this study acquired more familiarity with the pedagogy and more knowledge about the language of texts they were prepared to choose texts that presented a more difficult challenge for students. in terms of overall impact of the project and future potentials, the following emerged as key issues: • the reading-to-learn pedagogy had positive impacts in the adult literacy classrooms involved in the project. these included improvement in student achievements in reading and writing and in attitudes to learning as evidenced, for example, in active participation and attendance patterns. for the teachers there was growth in professional knowledge, especially knowledge about language, with flow-on impacts in systematic and principled planning and teaching. • implementing the reading-to-learn pedagogy required some intensive retraining of teachers and periodic intervention by experts over an extended period. the means by which the pedagogy was introduced to teachers in this study, through professional development workshops interwoven with periods of implementation, reflection and classroom observation, proved effective. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g 92 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s • such an introduction to the reading-to-learn approach on a broader scale in the adult literacy sector would require commitment of time and funds and ongoing institutional support. for this reason it is predicted that the reading-to-learn pedagogy would be most easily introduced within organisations that already have strong literacy strategies and supportive senior staff and program managers. ongoing institutional support would be needed so that teachers could be released for workshops, teamwork would be facilitated and teachers could work consistently on the pedagogy with groups of learners over more than one course. teachers would need to volunteer and commit to training, implementation and evaluation. the detailed training resources that support the precise approach of the pedagogy would need to be revised for adult contexts and linked to the curricula used in adult language and literacy contexts. • there are a number of aspects of programming and teaching which characterise adult literacy contexts and which need to be accommodated in the design of further implementation. these include part-time employment conditions, part-time provision, very varied teaching spaces and resources, irregular attendance patterns, disparate student groups and students from multiple first language backgrounds. it was also felt that this difficult teaching context also provided an imperative for more carefully planned approaches if students are to develop sufficient reading and writing skills for social and work contexts during the time available. • to deal with the complexities of adult literacy teaching contexts, teachers adapt and make on-the-go decisions about what to do next in classrooms. however, to maintain the integrity of the reading-tolearn pedagogy teachers need to appreciate the rationale for the very precise steps of the pedagogy. the careful attention to wording and meaning relations within texts required teachers to unlearn some common practices. to conclude, we argue that in the current climate, where there is an increasing pressure on adult language and literacy providers to prepare students for the reading and writing requirements of the workplace, it is vital that more explicit and carefully planned methodologies are adopted. the results of the ncver project outlined in this paper indicate that the reading-to-learn pedagogy can greatly assist students to develop sufficient reading and writing skills for social and work contexts during the short time they have available to access language and literacy programs. acknowledgements the authors would like to take this opportunity to thank the teachers who took part in the national centre for vocational education and r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g d e s i l v a j o y c e , h o o d a n d r o s e 93 research (ncver) project during 2007 for the insights into adult literacy they provided and their dedication to improving classroom practices for their students. the full report on the project, as well as a good practice guide is available from ncver at www.ncver.edu.au/publications/1714.html. references barton, d, tusting, k, hodge, y, appleby r, and ivanič, r (2006) linking learning and everyday life: a social perspective on adult language, literacy and numeracy class, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy, london. brooks, g, torgersen, c, porthouse, j, burton, m, robinson, a, wright, k and watt, i (2004) adult literacy and numeracy interventions and outcomes: a review of controlled trials, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy, london. burns, a (1999) collaborative action research for english language teachers, cambridge university press, cambridge. burns, a and de silva joyce, h (eds) (2000) teachers’ voices 5: a new look at reading practices, national centre for english language teaching and research, sydney. burns, a and de silva joyce, h (eds) (2005) teachers' voices 8: explicitly supporting reading and writing in the classroom national centre for english language teaching and research, sydney. christie, f and martin, j r (1997) genres and institutions: social processes in the workplace and school, cassell, london. committee for the national inquiry into the teaching of literacy (2005) teaching reading: report and recommendations from the national enquiry into the teaching of literacy, department of education, employment and workplace relations, canberra. culican, s (2006) learning to read: reading to learn, a middle years literacy intervention research project, final report 2003-4, catholic education office melbourne, http://www.cecv.melb.catholic.edu.au/research and seminar papers, www.readingtolearn.com.au halliday, m a k (1993) towards a language-based theory of learning, linguistics and education 5, pp 93-116. hasan, r and williams, g (eds) (1996) literacy in society, longmans, london. johns, a (ed) (2002) genre in the classroom: multiple perspectives, lawrence earlbaum, mahwah nj, luke, a, elkins, j, weir, r l, carrington, v, dole, s, pendergast, d, kapitzke, c, van kraayenoord, c, moni, k, mcintosh, a, mayer, d, bahr, m, hunter, l, chadbourne, r, bean, t, alvermann, d, and stevens, l (2003) beyond the middle: a report about literacy and numeracy development of target group students in the middle years of schooling, vo1 1, commonwealth department of education science & training, queensland. r e v i s i t i n g r e a d i n g 94 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s mcrae, d, ainsworth, g, cumming, j, hughes, p, mackay, t, price, k, rowland, m, warhurst, j, woods, d and zbar, v (2000) what has worked, and will again: the iesip strategic results projects, australian curriculum studies association, canberra, pp 24-26 www.acsa.edu.au, www.readingtolearn.com.au mercer, n (2002) developing dialogues, in wells, g and claxton, g (eds) learning for life in the 21st century, blackwell, oxford, pp 141-153. nsw adult migrant education service (2002) certificates in spoken and written english (cswe), nsw adult migrant english service, sydney. painter, c (1989) learning the mother tongue, oxford university press, oxford. painter, c (2007) language and learning in early childhood, in christie, f and martin, j r (eds) language, knowledge and pedagogy, continuum, london. rose, d (2004) sequencing and pacing in the hidden curriculum: how indigenous children are left out of the chain, in muller, j, morais, a and davies, b (eds) reading bernstein, researching bernstein, routledge falmer, london, www.readingtolearn.com.au rose, d (2007) reading-to-learn professional development materials book 1, part 1, http://www.readingtolearn.com.au/, pp 32-71 rose, d, lui-chivizhe, l, mcknight, a and smith, a (2004) scaffolding academic reading and writing at the koori centre, in australian journal of indigenous education, 30th anniversary edition, pp 141-153, www.atsis.uq.edu.au/ajie, www.readingtolearn.com.au rose, d, rose, m, farrington, s and page, s (2008) scaffolding literacy for indigenous health sciences students, in journal of english for academic purposes, pp 165-179, www.readingtolearn.com.au schleppegrell, m (2004) the language of schooling: a functional linguistic perspective, lawrence erlbaum associates, mahwah, new jersey. van lier, l (2004) the ecology and semiotics of language learning: a socio-cultural approach, kluwer academic publishers, amsterdam. vygotsky, l s (1978) mind and society: the development of higher psychological processes, harvard university press, cambridge massachussetts. microsoft word lns 17.3 gopalakrishnan pp57-64_231209[1].doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 7 n o 3 2 0 0 9 57 extending accountability: from compliance to learning ajit gopalakrishnan a b s t r a c t the mandates of the us national reporting system (nrs) accountability framework presented adult education at the state and local levels with a quantitative, outcomes-based, mandatory system. in the early years of the nrs, researchers explored the challenges of implementing largescale accountability systems and documented its early impact. with the continued implementation of the nrs over the past four to five years, this paper takes a fresh look at the impact of those accountability requirements with particular reference to implementation by the connecticut state department of education (csde). it presents some positive developments with respect to curriculum, instruction, and the use of data, while highlighting some of the shortcomings within the nrs approaches. it discusses the organisational implications for local programs, presents strategies for state agencies, and offers suggestions for improving the nrs. i n t r o d u c t i o n in 1998, the federal law that governed us adult education activities was included within the workforce investment act (wia): an act primarily concerning job training and workforce development. in response to the requirements of wia, the federal government established the national reporting system (nrs) as a unifying accountability framework for states to report learner outcomes (division of adult education and literacy (dael) 2005). qualitative, process-oriented, and voluntary approaches to program standards were thus replaced by a quantitative, outcomes-based, mandatory system (condelli 2007). as the wia and nrs dawned on adult education, researchers explored the challenges of implementing large-scale accountability systems (merrifield 1998) and documented the early impact of these mandates on local programs and state agencies (belzer 2003). with their continued implementation over the past five years, this paper takes a fresh look at the impact of those accountability requirements on local programs in one state, connecticut. the following questions guide this inquiry: how have the responses of local adult education programs to the wia accountability requirements changed since the early years? o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s how have the services offered by local programs changed because of these requirements? what lessons have they learned about their services? how have the policies and practices of the state agency influenced the local responses and services? what future considerations do these developments offer for the accountability mandates of the nrs? b a c k g r o u n d two critical performance outcome measures are mandated by wia. educational gain: the nrs established educational functioning levels (efl) as a framework for measuring improvements in literacy and numeracy abilities (dael 2005). educational gain reflects the progress achieved by learners on these efls as determined through standardised assessments that are administered preand post instruction; follow-up outcomes: these are the successes achieved by learners after they leave adult education and include entry into postsecondary education/training, job attainment, job retention, and achievement of a high school diploma. the nrs expects state agencies to have assessment policies that mandate preand post-testing using standardised assessments and to establish electronic data systems in order to collect individual learner data with regard to demographics, entry characteristics, attendance, and test results. the nrs also requires states to attest to the quality of their data and related processes through a comprehensive checklist (dael 2005). the connecticut state department of education (csde) had implemented a standards-based framework and an individual learner data system within adult education for several years prior to the nrs .the standards-based framework, developed by the comprehensive adult student assessment system (casas), connects curriculum, assessment, and instruction (casas 2004). to administer standardised casas assessments and ensure their incorporation into instruction, connecticut providers are expected to maintain program facilitators with the necessary training and certification. these facilitators are teacher leaders who play a critical role in maintaining the integrity and quality of the assessment process (alamprese 1993). they also assist teachers with curriculum issues and help integrate test results into instruction. each provider must also have staff who are trained annually by the csde to accurately collect and enter data into the connecticut adult reporting system (cars). e x t e n d i n g a c c o u n t a b i l i t y g o p a l a k r i s h n a n 59 r e s e a r c h a p p r o a c h systematic data about the impact of the accountability requirements on local programs were gathered through phone interviews with ten program facilitators across a range of urban and regional programs each interview lasted about 45 minutes. with one exception, these facilitators are members of a csde advisory group and had been involved with assessment/accountability issues in a local program prior to wia implementation. thematic analysis (boyatzis 1998) was applied to these data and then supplemented with relevant comments from the facilitators, nrs data from connecticut, and insights from the author’s experiences with accountability in adult education. the results are presented through four themes – curriculum, assessment and instruction; from ‘data for accountability’ to ‘data for program improvement’; organisational alignment through instructional leadership; and mixed results with follow-up outcomes.each theme is explored through changes in practitioner responses and the modifications to program services that have occurred since the early years of wia. also discussed is the impact of the nrs on the complete and accurate presentation of the successes achieved by learners in adult education. the mediating role of the state agency in implementing these accountability requirements is also examined. t h e m e 1 : c u r r i c u l u m , a s s e s s m e n t a n d i n s t r u c t i o n : a r e t u r n t o a n i n t e g r a t e d p a s t because of connecticut’s history with casas implementation, the nrs requirement for standardised pre-post assessment was not a new concept or expectation. however, with the onset of the nrs, several facilitators felt that the stakes had been raised. they began to take the accountability requirements much more seriously. this new attitude has brought about a renewed interest in utilising assessment results for instruction. in the past, the impact of casas implementation was borne mostly by the central office staff and not diffused throughout the program (rogers 1995). teachers may have reflected a ‘give the test and file it’ mentality with regard to standardised testing and delivered instruction that ignored the results of this assessment. with each year since wia, however, this attitude has changed. one facilitator observed: we used to just give tests, but i think as the accountability and data requirements have evolved, we have really started to be much more focused and clearer with our teachers about connecting the testing and the instruction, realising the part it plays in terms of their role as teachers and instructors and o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s encouraging them to recognise that piece, and take it more seriously. typically, assessments used for accountability purposes do not yield results in a timely manner to inform instruction (linn 2001). nrs approved assessments, however, are administered locally and the results are readily available. therefore, teachers are receiving extensive professional development in using pre-test results at the individual and class level to identify learner needs and develop lesson plans. these efforts to utilise test results for instructional planning are focusing attention on the broader curriculum standards that undergird the standardised assessments: the competencies and content standards (casas 2006). they are prompting a renaissance of the integrated competency-based education (cbe) model (figure 1) that was more prevalent in the initial years of casas implementation during the late 1980s. figure 1: the casas model though standards-based education was being implemented in connecticut prior to the introduction of the nrs, the increased stakes of the nrs requirements is prompting programs to reassess their commitment and attentiveness to the diligent implementation of those standards. for example, this renaissance is casting employability/workforce skills in a new light. programs that did not incorporate workforce skills extensively in the early years of wia are revisiting the potential for a workforce-infused, curriculum competencies and content standards instruction materials correlated to competencies and content standards assessment standardized tests and individual/class profile e x t e n d i n g a c c o u n t a b i l i t y g o p a l a k r i s h n a n 61 contextualised curriculum (jurmo 2004). workforce skills are also being integrated within some secondary programs where the curriculum usually has a strong academic orientation (vernon public schools 2006, ferraiolo 2007). this change has not been without resistance from teachers, ‘more because of its newness than because of the employability focus.’ nonetheless, all facilitators spoke of these developments in positive terms. one facilitator commented that aligning lessons to curriculum standards and test results has required teachers to offer instruction that is sometimes outside their comfort zone but ultimately beneficial to learners. in the past, the content of this instruction may have been up to whatever the teacher felt was important, or determined completely between the tutor and the learner. now, the minimum expectation is that the curriculum standards and the results from standardised assessments will be incorporated into instruction and lesson planning. such instruction is seen as being more goaldriven, focused, and targeted, that also meets the broader needs of all learners. while the nrs has definitely renewed interest in the comprehensive and integrated casas model, it has not been without its shortcomings. for many learners, attainment of a secondary school diploma through passage of the general educational development (ged) test is their primary purpose for attending adult education. according to nrs policy, however, passage of the ged tests cannot serve as an indicator to complete an efl, except at the adult secondary high level, primarily because the ged tests have not been evaluated against the nrs criteria. this presents practitioners with a dilemma: should they help learners to pass the ged test or achieve progress on the nrs levels? to analyse the extent of overlap between these two purposes, the csde studied the relationship between learner abilities on casas and ged tests (csde 2008). though these tests differ with regard to their purpose, content, and administration, the results from this study demonstrate that as learner abilities on casas assessments increase, so does their general likelihood of passing the ged tests. facilitators are learning from the standardised testing [results] that many students who come to prepare for the ged exam are in fact very deficient in basic skills. the study encourages local practitioners to use ‘results from casas assessments to place learners into ged programs, present learners with progress benchmarks toward ged readiness, and recommend learners for the administration of the official ged practice test and the ‘real’ ged exam’. this study also illustrates that learners functioning below the nrs adult secondary high level, especially in math, can also pass the ged test at reasonably high rates. in light of such evidence (casas 2003, csde 2008), it is odd to think that the national adult education reporting system does not acknowledge passing the ged tests as a success at all levels. assisting adults o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 62 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s to complete secondary school is one of the three purposes of adult education in the wia legislation. however, because level completion cannot be determined unless a learner is post-tested (dael 2005), programs are forced to utilise their limited resources to procure a post-test score from learners who are close to passage of the ged test or may have even accomplished that goal. these learners have limited incentive to demonstrate their progress on the nrs levels. if diploma attainment were reportable as an achievement, connecticut’s performance on the nrs at the abe high intermediate and adult secondary low levels for 2007-08 would have been greater by 62% and 91% respectively! because gain cannot be reported within the nrs system without a post-test score, some providers may feel pressured to post-test learners before they have attended the suggested minimum number of hours. this happens especially when learners start towards the end of the year, have few instructional hours to attend, but are expected to complete the efl in that year. premature post-testing can be a waste of resources because greater gains generally occur after learners have attended 100 hours (csde, 2007). the focus on educational gain also does not permit programs to demonstrate the life-changing achievements made by some learners. the nrs accepts reporting on ‘secondary outcome measures’ (dael 2005) such as learner achievements in family literacy, community, or citizenship. however, a majority of states do not report on those measures probably because: a) they are optional; b) they are not used to determine state incentive awards; c) there are no clear standards for collecting such achievements; and d) they usually have limited reliability (condelli and kutner 1997). t h e m e 2 : f r o m ‘ d a t a f o r a c c o u n t a b i l i t y ’ t o ‘ d a t a f o r p r o g r a m i m p r o v e m e n t ’ by establishing a uniform reporting framework and supporting it with high quality training, the nrs helps states to establish data systems, collect high quality data, and use nrs data for program improvement. in connecticut the mechanics of data collection were firmly in place when wia was introduced. the central office staff at local programs used data to complete grant reports; however, the use of data for program management and improvement was not fully realised. facilitators observed that ‘in the past, we were more concerned with getting the paperwork in’ and that ‘nothing made sense to teachers, nothing clicked.’ a key turning point was the institution by the csde in 2004 of a report card called the program profile report. though facilitators could previously access multiple reports that provided comparable data, the profile consolidates the key process and outcome information into one succinct report. facilitators use the ‘common language’ of the profile report to e x t e n d i n g a c c o u n t a b i l i t y g o p a l a k r i s h n a n 63 converse with teachers about the impact of their class on the programs’s performance. a culture of testing assumptions against the data has permeated the adult education community. for example, one facilitator’s inquiry into transient learner attendance patterns revealed ‘the need for three terms.’ another program expanded its ‘esl program from three to six levels to accommodate the wide range of english language proficiency that we discovered.’ a volunteer program discovered that ‘the more students come, the more intensity and duration, the better progress they are making’. the csde also models the use of data for decision-making by conducting and presenting analyses that make explicit its rationale for new policies and initiatives. for example, one study regarding learner persistence in adult secondary education (gopalakrishnan 2008) introduced a longitudinal approach to learner retention and informed the csde’s policy decision to expand access to secondary completion programs for adult learners. the profile report was also revised to indicate the number of learners who returned to adult education from a prior fiscal year. one facilitator spoke of using the longitudinal data to work on ‘retention plans to re-engage students in the next year’. however, though nrs training sessions encourage and support the use of accountability data for program improvement, some nrs policies and practices limit the usability of nrs data for that very purpose. for example, the nrs ‘level completion’ approach is to some degree predicated on where a learner enters in the level. because each efl is wide (spanning between two to three grade levels), a learner who enters in the upper range of a level is that much closer to the finish line than someone who enters in the lower range of that same level. a report commissioned by the us department of education levelled the same criticism about this arbitrary aspect of the nrs ‘level completion’ approach (rose and wright 2004) and stated that: for analytic purposes, the best way to measure learning gains is to compute the change in scale scores when the student takes an appropriate matched test from the same company. by contrast, change in nrs level is a much cruder measure. …these boundaries [of the nrs levels] may not be that important for summary measures of gains by program, but they severely undermine the power of statistical models to identify the factors most strongly associated with learning gains. (22) to counteract the limitations of measuring gain by levels, the csde reports on the percent of learners who achieve a four-point casas scale score gain from preto post-test. table 2 expands on the data from table 1 to contrast the nrs methodology with connecticut’s alternative approach. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 64 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s compared to the nrs method, the connecticut method for educational gain captures, more fully, the learning gains that are achieved by learners in the lower range of the level. unlike the nrs method, the connecticut approach also reflects minimal difference between the performance of learners who are placed in either the upper or the lower range of that level (table 2). casas pre-test score range fiscal year 221-227 228-235 2006-07 19% (n=59) 60% (n=87) 2007-08 34% (n=70) 69% (n=67) table 1: percent of learners attending between 60 and 80 hours who completed a level in reading at abe high intermediate level (source: connecticut adult reporting system) n r s m e t h o d c o n n e c t i c u t m e t h o d casas pre-test score range casas pre-test score range fiscal year 221-227 228-235 221-227 228-235 2006-07 19% 60% 63% 55% 2007-08 34% 69% 64% 70% table 2: comparison of approaches to educational gain for learners at the abe high intermediate level who attended between 60 and 80 hours another drawback of the nrs approach is that the nrs results do not separate learner performance into the discrete basic skills of reading, writing, math, listening and speaking. this conflated view diminishes the usefulness of nrs results for evaluating the impact of instruction on specific skill acquisition. the csde addressed this limitation by presenting in the profile report, disaggregated results by skill area that are computed using the connecticut method. under wia, states can qualify to receive financial incentives if their performance on the core outcomes exceeds their negotiated targets. because 11 of the 15 targets relate to educational gain, this critical policy relies heavily e x t e n d i n g a c c o u n t a b i l i t y g o p a l a k r i s h n a n 65 on the results from standardised testing based on the nrs methodology and does not consider the impact of other milestone achievements (e.g. high school diploma) or measurement error (linn 2001). contrary to this ‘test-centric’ approach to accountability, the csde’s framework for accountability and program improvement evaluates each local program on a range of measures such as program retention and completion. success on the nrs is only one of the indicators. utilising a broad approach to accountability that considers both process (i.e. recruitment, retention) as well as outcome (i.e. test-score gains, credits earned, diplomas attained) measures sends a message to all programs that the csde is concerned not only with test-score gains, but also with accessibility, learner persistence, credit attainment, and diploma achievement. the csde expects local programs to learn from these results when establishing goals and objectives (reeves 2004). though there were early misgivings about a report card, practitioners ‘are [now] saying that the profile is a working document that helps you to know what you are doing and what you are not doing; not to point fingers but to give you insight’. casas assessments, cars data collection, and cars reporting are no longer activities performed only to satisfy funders. they are tools that are integral to program management. prior to wia, assessment and data collection for accountability purposes were viewed as being separate from assessment and data collection for program improvement and classroom instruction. today, there is overlap between these two components as standardised assessment results support instruction, and data collection for accountability informs program improvement. t h e m e 3 : o r g a n i s a t i o n a l a l i g n m e n t t h r o u g h i n s t r u c t i o n a l l e a d e r s h i p the increased alignments of instruction to curriculum standards and test results, combined with the availability of data at the program and classroom levels, are changing the relationship between the leadership and instructors in adult education programs. elmore’s (2000) description of the impact of standards-based education on the ‘loose-coupling’ paradigm of public education systems helps to understand this changing relationship. according to elmore, the loose-coupling model assumes the following: decisions about curriculum objectives, lesson content, instructional approaches, and evaluation are best made in individual classrooms. this classroom ‘expertise’ cannot be replicated or subjected to a reliable external evaluation. the role of school leadership is to manage the processes that surround instruction but not instruction itself. o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s with each passing year of wia and nrs implementation, administrators and facilitators are viewing their role as more than a ‘buffer’ for teachers from outside influences (elmore 2000). they are proactively implementing systematic instructional and organisational interventions to improve the quality of teaching and learning. the following examples exemplify this hands-on approach. one program administrator articulated his goal that all learners must demonstrate improvements on the state-approved standardised writing assessment. he knew that students did not write consistently in all classes. therefore, to infuse writing instruction, he expected teachers in all areas to have students write in class at least once a week. teachers were trained to score student writing ‘informally’, but using the standard rubric. they also learned instructional strategies to teach writing. when the above expectations and staff development activities were introduced in 2004-05, 43% of learners in this program completed an nrs level in terms of their writing skills. when the instructional enhancements were implemented in the following year, 2005-06, 75% of learners completed an nrs level in writing. in the two subsequent years of 2006-07 and 2007-08, 77% and 79% of learners achieved the same outcome. some programs are expecting teachers to submit lesson plans weekly to the facilitator/director. such oversight is not to dictate the content of daily instruction but to see evidence that testing data is informing instruction. one facilitator observed that, ‘if teachers receive no formal monitoring or supervision, it almost makes them feel like no one cares about what they do’. recruiting and retaining high quality instructional staff who possess a solid background in education and teaching has become an increasing priority. in summary, leaders are beginning to see accountability not as a gimmick but as a stimulus for action. they are not content with hoping for results; they know what needs to be done and are willing to take action to make that happen. these changes have not been without growing pains. facilitators talked about the importance of ‘buy-in’ at all levels including students. they also emphasised the importance of the director’s public validation of their role as facilitators in order to give them the authority to work with teachers and influence classroom practice (gopalakrishnan 2006). t h e m e 4 : m i x e d r e s u l t s w i t h f o l l o w u p o u t c o m e s because learners come to adult education with a variety of goals, the nrs follow-up outcomes are required only for those who have the corresponding goal(s). these outcomes have spurred interesting conversations about goal-setting and the intake process. the csde has tried to promote the use of goals as motivators for learner persistence (comings, parrella, and soricone 1999). one facilitator commented that goal-setting e x t e n d i n g a c c o u n t a b i l i t y g o p a l a k r i s h n a n 67 was something new and not paid much attention. nrs forced the conversation around goal-setting. esl students were saying they needed to learn english but we are now asking why. however, methodological and policy issues with the follow-up outcome measures appear to limit their ability to inform practice. goal-based outcomes are double-edged swords. on the one hand, they ensure that learners are not expected to achieve outcomes that are not appropriate for them. on the other hand, because goal-setting is a voluntary process, it can lead to an under-reporting of goals and outcomes even if there is no intent to inflate outcomes artificially (belzer 2003). one facilitator observed that she does not ‘pressure students to commit to something unless they are ready to – they may not be driven or not ready to share yet’. the notion of exit also muddles the follow-up outcome measures. nrs policy specifies that follow-up is required only for those learners who have ‘exited’ i.e. they have not received instruction for 90 days, and are not scheduled to receive further instruction (dael 2005). though the policy is clear, if exit status is established by program-reports, then it may be unreliable and under-reporting can occur. in 2004-05, when the csde began utilising learner attendance from cars to establish the exit date instead of relying on program-reports, it saw a dramatic increase in the number of learners being reported as exited. in light of these issues, the csde has utilised other state reports instead of nrs reports for a complete picture of the employment outcomes achieved by learners (connecticut employment and training commission 2006). it is also considering strategies to ascertain the total number of graduates who enter postsecondary education, not just the subset of those with the nrs goal. one unintended consequence of the csde conducting data matches for the employment outcomes is that local programs rely more on the state for follow-up. not conducting the follow-up locally may deprive programs of the opportunity to learn directly from their students about happens to them after adult education. s t a t e w i d e r e s u l t s state-wide cars data from the past seven years of learners in abe, ged and esl programs areanalysed to determine the extent of overall improvements in performance. because of changes in state practices and nrs policies over the past eight years, the nrs reports are not comparable across years. therefore, cars data from past years were re-analysed using the current nrs methods. moreover, to compensate for the limitations with the nrs methods discussed earlier, the cars data are also analysed based on a method that is used in connecticut for reporting outcomes to the state legislature (table 3). a learner achieves a measurable educational outcome o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s by attaining either a four-point scale score gain from preto post-test or a high school diploma. in light of the changes in practitioner responses and program services that were explored through the thematic analysis, it is not surprising that overall performance is greater in the years after the early wia years of 200102 and 2002-03. additionally, the performance using the connecticut method has continued to inch upward. fiscal year n nrs method of ‘level completion’ connecticut method* 2001-02 14,367 41.1% 46.2% 2002-03 15,411 41.8% 46.5% 2003-04 15,822 44.3% 49.0% 2004-05 15,418 45.7% 49.6% 2005-06 16,806 43.1% 50.2% 2006-07 17,360 44.3% 49.9% 2007-08 18,575 44.0% 50.8% table 3: percent of abe, ged, and esl learners state-wide who achieve a measurable educational outcome (source: connecticut adult reporting system) c o n c l u s i o n the response of local programs to the nrs accountability requirements has changed. in the early years of wia, programs may have been satisfied with meeting the minimum requirements. today, accountability is not implemented solely to satisfy reporting or funding requirements; it is a tool for instructional and organisational learning (reeves 2004) and increasingly representative of program quality (condelli 2007). a state’s ability to respond to accountability requirements can pave the way for the local response and impact (belzer 2003). connecticut’s experience confirms that its history with implementing the casas system, collecting individual student data, and building critical local capacity enabled the csde and the local programs to implement the minimum requirements of wia seamlessly as well as progress to higher levels of learning and action. the services offered by local programs have also changed substantially. curriculum standards are being diffused among all instructional areas; even e x t e n d i n g a c c o u n t a b i l i t y g o p a l a k r i s h n a n 69 volunteer programs are expecting tutors to utilise these standards. data from accountability frameworks are increasingly informing new program offerings (e.g. transition-to-postsecondary classes), intake requirements, attendance policies, class schedules, class groupings, and program priorities. sincere efforts to implement accountability requirements at all levels in the program have changed the very nature of these programs. hands-on instructional leadership has led to increased organisational alignment while the utilisation of data for decision-making, coupled with a willingness to change and grow, has made these organisations more adaptable , credible, and viable over the longer term. staff roles to support the implementation of standards-based education and facilitate the collection and use of student data have become further institutionalised. some of these changes may have been attainable without the nrs. for example, the casas approach to standards-based education was being implemented in several states prior to the nrs, which also likely fostered some level of program alignment. reliable management information systems may also have been in use in some states, as it was in connecticut, prior to the nrs. despite these early efforts, connecticut cannot overlook the critical impetus provided by the nrs to spur these changes and encourage their continued refinement. states that had minimal systems with regard to assessment policies and practices, management information systems, data collection procedures and data-use supports have utilised the nrs to institute those systemic components. for accountability to also serve as a learning tool, its goals, measures and methods must be consistent with the reality of the system it is evaluating. the nrs ‘educational gain’ measure has proved to be a fair reflection of the outcomes achieved by learners and programs but it does have some limitations. to improve this measure, the nrs should consider the following: expect states to maintain longitudinal databases and evaluate learner gain across fiscal years; evaluate learner progress based on scale score gain to counteract the arbitrary elements in the ‘level completion’ approach (rose and wright 2004); include the attainment of a secondary credential as an indicator of success in the educational gain paradigm; and display the post-test rate alongside the nrs results in the nrs outcomes table to improve the use of data for program improvement. an accountability framework should also be meaningful to the learner. at a minimum, learners should receive feedback on their test scores using the nrs level descriptors (dael 2005). this feedback can be more valuable to learners if their nrs performance can be correlated to their potential for achieving future success such as passing the ged, attaining employment, o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 70 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s achieving higher earnings, and meeting the requirements for entry into postsecondary education. such correlation data exist for other performance scales such as the national assessment of adult literacy (national centre for education statistics 2007). new research is needed to establish the relationship between performance on nrs assessments and the outcomes that learners achieve beyond adult education. the nrs follow-up measures fail to provide a complete picture and present limited value for program improvement and policy development. the goal-based approach to these outcomes needs to be revisited. for example, in today’s environment where postsecondary education is considered a minimum requirement for achieving self-sufficiency, the nrs should consider a national follow up through an agency like the national student clearinghouse on all learners who graduate from adult education, not just those with the corresponding goal. state administrators can also adopt policy leadership roles to minimise unintended consequences from test-based accountability frameworks such as the nrs. accountability does not have to be punitive. time spent on accountability activities such as testing, data collection, and reporting can directly affect program quality and help to improve instruction (reeves 2004). non-financial consequences such as on-site monitoring or even the public dissemination of local program data can raise the stakes sufficiently and bring attention to curriculum standards, instructional approaches, and the data. a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s i would like to thank the program facilitators who agreed to be interviewed for this study. their insights about adult education are stimulating and their commitment to the success of adult learners is truly inspiring. i also thank larry condelli and carl paternostro for their feedback. the inferences and suggestions presented in this paper are those of the author and may not necessarily reflect the views of the connecticut state department of education. r e f e r e n c e s alamprese, j (1993) systematizing adult education: final evaluation report of the connecticut adult performance program (capp), cosmos corp., washington, dc. belzer, a (2003) living with it: federal policy implementation in adult basic education, national centre for the study of adult learning and literacy, cambridge, ma. boyatzis, r, (1998) transforming qualitative information: thematic analysis and code development, sage, thousand oaks, ca. e x t e n d i n g a c c o u n t a b i l i t y g o p a l a k r i s h n a n 71 comings, j, parrella, a and soricone, l, (1999) persistence among adult basic education students in pre-ged classes, national centre for the study of adult learning and literacy, cambridge, ma. comprehensive adult student assessment system (2003) study of the casas relationship to ged 2002, casas, san diego, ca. comprehensive adult student assessment system (2004) casas technical manual, casas, san diego, ca. comprehensive adult student assessment system (2006) aligning casas competencies and assessments to basic skill content standards, casas, san diego, ca. condelli, l, (2007) accountability and program quality: the third wave, in belzer, a, ed,toward defining and improving quality in adult basic education: issues and challenges, lawrence erlbaum and associates, mahwah, nj, pp 11-32. condelli, l and kutner, m, (1997) developing a national outcome reporting system for the adult education program, report for the u.s. department of education, pelavin research institute, washington, dc. connecticut employment and training commission (2006) 2006 report card for employment and training programs, retrieved on 1 aug 2006 from http://charteroakgroup.com. connecticut state department of education (2008) the relationship of casas scores to ged results, csde, middletown ct. connecticut state department of education (2007) the relationship between learning gains and attendance, csde, middletown, ct. division of adult education and literacy (dael) (2005) measures and methods for the national reporting system for adult education: implementation guidelines, u.s. department of education, washington, dc. elmore, r, (2000) building a new structure for school leadership, albert shanker institute, washington, dc. ferraiolo, j, (2007) student orientation and project-based learning: a systematic learning to jump-start the low-functioning student. unpublished paper, department of educational leadership, southern connecticut state university, new haven, ct. gopalakrishnan, a, (2008) learner retention in adult secondary education: a comparative study, adult basic education and literacy journal, vol 2, no 3, pp 140-149. gopalakrishnan, a, (2006) supporting technology integration in adult education: critical issues and models, adult basic education, vol 16 no 1, pp 39-56. jurmo, paul (2004) workplace literacy education: definitions, purposes, and approaches. focus on basics, vol 7, issue b, pp 22-26 o u t s i d e p r a c t i c e s 72 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s linn, r, (2001) the design and evaluation of educational assessment and accountability systems, university of california, centre for the study of evaluation, los angeles. merrifield, j, (1998) contested ground: performance accountability in adult basic education, national center for the study of adult learning and literacy, cambridge, ma. national center for education statistics (2007) literacy in everyday life: results from the 2003 national assessment of adult literacy, nces,washington, dc. reeves, d, (2004) accountability for learning: how teachers and school leaders can take charge, association for supervision and curriculum development, alexandria, va. rogers, everett (1995) diffusion of innovations (4th ed.),the free press, new york. rose, sj and wright, mm, (2004) using state administrative data for research on adult education, u.s. department of education, washington, dc. vernon public schools (2007) student handbook, retrieved 10 feb 2007 from http://www.vrabe.org/. literacy and numeracy studies 2015. © 2015 keiko yasukawa. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2015, 23(1), 4419, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v23i1.4419 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 3 n o 1 2 0 1 5 1 editorial keiko yasukawa i begin this editorial by expressing sincere thanks on behalf of the editorial team to a retiring member of the editorial team, jean searle. jean has been a member of the editorial team of literacy and numeracy studies since 2005, and prior to that, she was a member of the journal’s editorial board. she has provided helpful and insightful editorial advice to many of our authors, and has been a strong proponent of our journal. we have benefited greatly from her editorial expertise as well as her strong involvement as educator and researcher in the field. we wish her the very best in her retirement. this issue features contributions which, on the surface, are very disparate. greg marston and jeffrey johnson-abdelmalik write about a community based adult literacy program in brisbane, australia. sonja beeli-zimmermann writes about adult educators learning to become numeracy teachers in a german-speaking town in switzerland. and in the third article, tao bak and pauline o’maley write about vocational education and training practitioners assuming responsibilities for the language, literacy and numeracy development of their learners in melbourne, australia. a strong common thread in all three articles is the identity work being undertaken ‒ by the adult learners, in the case of the first article, and by teachers in the second and third articles. the article by marston and johnson-abdelmalik presents accounts of learners in a community-based adult literacy class where the program is built first and foremost around each learner’s acknowledged needs and goals. although notions of ‘literacy as empowerment’ and social capital as outcomes of participation in learning are not new, the stories in this article illustrate how real and tangible these were in transforming the lives of learners in the program. it is an important piece of research that help us to make the case for more spaces for community based provision of adult literacy and numeracy learning that are not constrained by the too common pre-packaged learning outcomes and performance criteria that can be at odds with the learners’ aspirations and needs. beeli-zimmermann’s article explores how teachers’ beliefs shape their identities as emerging numeracy teachers. her research adds to existing literature about mathematics teachers’ beliefs which are largely https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s researched in the school education contexts. for emerging adult numeracy teachers, the beliefs influencing their identities and practices as numeracy teachers are more complex, and include beliefs shaped by their school experiences of mathematics learning as well as their experiences of working as adult educators. the role of vocational education and training practitioners in addressing their learners’ language, literacy and numeracy needs has become a very topical issue in australia, new zealand and the united kingdom. while the idea of literacy and numeracy being critical dimensions of pedagogy may be easy to accept in principle, the idea of taking responsibility for students’ literacy and numeracy development may not be so simple in practice for teachers who identify as experts in the electrical trades, or child care, or hospitality. bak and o’maley examine the journey of these teachers’ learning to expand their understanding of what it means to be a vocational teacher. together the three articles contribute to deepening our understanding of how learners and teachers build new identities – in some instances motivated from the start by their own personal needs, in others by external demands and policy changes. lns template literacy and numeracy studies 2014. © 2014 arlene archer et al. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2014, 22, 4181, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v22i1.4181 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 2 n o 1 2 0 1 4 75 notes on contributors arlene archer arlene archer is the co-ordinator of the writing centre at the university of cape town, south africa. she teaches in applied language studies, higher education studies, film and media. her research interests include drawing on popular culture and multimodal pedagogies to enable student access to higher education. she has published in journals such as language and education, teaching in higher education, english in education, social dynamics, visual communication. michael atkinson michael atkinson is a teacher with the centre for adult education in melbourne where he teaches adult literacy and esl. he is also doing a phd at latrobe university's centre for dialogue which focuses on dialogical approaches to adult learning. michael has an interest in freirean perspectives to learning inclusive of issues of power, identity and aspiration. lesley farrell lesley farrell is professor of education at the university of melbourne and previously professor and associate dean research in the faculty of arts and social sciences at the university of technology, sydney. her research focusses on language, literacy and social change especially in relation to global workforce education. pamela osmond pamela osmond has worked in the field of adult basic education in australia since the 1970s. she has taught in a range of adult basic education contexts and occupied a number of management roles in technical and further education (tafe) colleges in the state of new south wales. she is the author of a wide range of teaching / learning resources, including so you want to tech an adult to read…? and literacy face to face. pamela’s present role is as teacher educator at the university of technology sydney and at tafe nsw. ana pinto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s ana is a phd candidate at the university of sydney. her research focuses on the design of networked learning environments in the context of adult literacy education. ana˙s research interests also include lifelong learning, digital inclusion, and social justice. her academic background encompasses literacy education, pedagogy, educational psychology, and information technology. currently, she is part of a team working on the project ‘learning, technology and design: architectures for productive networked learning’. robert prince robert prince is the director of the alternative admissions research project at the centre for higher education development, university of cape town, south africa. he is interested in appropriate interventions to develop the academic practices of students, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, and various disciplines and at various levels across the tertiary curriculum. arlene archer michael atkinson lesley farrell pamela osmond ana pinto robert prince microsoft word 01_5304_editorial 24.2_final © 2016 keiko yasukawa. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative  commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the  material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any  purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies 2016, 24(2): 5304,  http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i2.5304    l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 2 2 0 1 6 1 editorial keiko yasukawa in recent years many of us in the field of adult literacy and numeracy have become used to grieving the loss of university based teacher development programs and centres promoting research, professional development and debates in our field. eighteen months ago, we learnt of the closure of the centre for literacy in montreal, and twelve months ago, the effective closure of the national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy in the uk, both of which made major contributions to promoting and giving public access to resources, research findings and policy debates in the field of adult literacy and numeracy. each year a few more researchers in the field ‘retire’ from their institutions, and while many are remaining active in publishing research, there is a sense of fear about who and what will be left in our field when they decide to really retire! this issue of literacy and numeracy studies marks a welcome shift from this sense of looming doom and gloom. the authors of the three research articles are all currently candidates in a research degree. pamela osmond, an adult basic education teacher, teacher educator and writer of many teacher resources with many years of experience in the field is researching the history of her field in the state of new south wales in australia. her article describes the vibrant community of practice among adult basic education teachers that evolved in the field in the 1970s and 1980s. she analyses the stories of the teachers from this early period using stephen kemmis’ theoretical ideas of professional knowledge and practice architectures. her analysis of how the social, historical and political contexts of the time enable us to understand the agency that was afforded to practitioners – an agency that practitioners now struggle to exercise – or perhaps even to imagine. janet mchardy is pursuing her doctoral studies, and she and her coauthor elaine chapman have written about their study on the different approaches adult literacy teachers take to teaching reading. through their research, they have identified a typology of pedagogical approaches. they argue that often teachers are not aware of how their beliefs are driving the pedagogic choices they are making. making the connection between one’s e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s teaching practice and beliefs, they argue, is critical to being responsive to their learners’ needs. the third article by janna klostermann, another doctoral candidate, takes us to the art world in canada. her paper draws on literacy theories and institutional ethnography to examine how literacy practices are closely intertwined with the professional lives of visual artists. writing plays a critical role in the way artists can represent themselves to successfully navigate the institutions and processes of art galleries and exhibitions. the final contribution to this issue is a book review of beyond economic interests: critical perspectives on adult literacy and numeracy in a globalized world, an edited collection of studies largely by researchers working in australian and new zealand. the review is written by adult literacy researchers tannis atkinson and nancy jackson from canada. lns161princearcherfinal l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 6 n o 1 2 0 0 8 63 a new literacies approach to academic numeracy practices in higher education robert prince and arlene archer abstract this paper explores the terms ‘mathematical literacy’, ‘quantitative literacy’ and ‘numeracy’, in order to gain theoretical clarity on their meanings and the ways in which they are used. the teaching-learning situation and the learner are constructed in particular ways by these terms, and different understandings of these terms may reflect the values and rationales of various stakeholders who promote them. we propose the term ‘academic numeracy practices’ in order to emphasise the socially situated nature of all practices, to avoid reifying ‘numeracy’ into a set of discrete skills that an individual can either possess or lack, and to avoid extending the characteristics of one mode (namely, writing) to other modes. in arguing for the new term, we draw on the theoretical orientation of new literacies studies and multimodality. we exemplify our position by looking at charts as conventionalised practice in higher education in south africa, focusing on bmi charts in the health sciences. introduction this paper has two related focus areas. the first is to explore the terms ‘mathematical literacy’, ‘quantitative literacy’ and ‘numeracy’ in order to gain theoretical clarity on the meanings of these terms and the ways in which they are used. attempts at definitions can reaffirm the emergence of a new area of study, but can also indicate cross-fertilisation of different theoretical paradigms. in south africa at the moment, ‘numeracy’, ‘mathematical literacy’, ‘quantitative literacy’ and mathematics are topical terms. ‘mathematical literacy’ has been introduced as an alternative subject to mathematics in the final three grades in south african schools. this has raised issues for debate in various educational arenas, including programmes in tertiary institutions where the controversy has focused on performance in mathematics as the criterion for admission. the second focus area is an exploration into the applicability and transferability of theories from new literacies studies (nls) in order to theorise the use of a new term, namely ‘academic numeracy practices’. along with theorists such as brian street (2005), we examine terms derived from nls to draw an analogy between numeracy and literacy. street, baker and tomlin (2002) use notions within nls to explore the relationship a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h 64 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s between acquisition and formal learning, and between ‘home’ numeracy practices and ‘school’ numeracy practices. here ‘home’ is often socially or culturally situated, such as rural india (street, rogers and baker 2006), and ‘school’ deals with the mathematical classroom. we are also interested in the quantitative resources that students bring from a range of contexts, but in contrast to these theorists, our educational context focuses on higher education, rather than secondary schools. in looking at new literacies studies, we also focus on the ‘multimodality’ of all meaning-making. by this we mean the increasing multiplicity and integration of modes of meaning making, including, the audio, the spatial, and the gestural (kress and van leeuwen 1996, kress 2000, stein 2003, the new london group 1996). a ‘multimodal’ approach to pedagogy and to theorising communication recognises the different semiotic dimensions of representation and their inter-connection. utilising a range of modes is one way of harnessing the diverse representational resources, including quantitative, that students bring with them (archer 2006, stein 2003). theorists such as street and baker (2006), archer, frith and prince (2002), bezemer and kress (2007) have begun to illustrate and apply views of multimodality to theorising numeracy practices, but this has not been done in any depth yet. we are particularly interested in looking at the use of the visual in academic disciplines, and in this paper focus on the use of charts as conventionalised multimodal texts within the health sciences. problematising terms the three main terms currently circulating in the literature and in practice include ‘mathematical literacy’, ‘quantitative literacy’ and ‘numeracy’. ‘mathematical literacy’ and ‘quantitative literacy’ are often used interchangeably. the south african department of education, national curriculum statement uses the term ‘mathematical literacy’, and describes it in the following way: mathematical literacy provides learners with an awareness and understanding of the role that mathematics plays in the modern world. mathematical literacy is a subject driven by life-related applications of mathematics. it enables learners to develop the ability and confidence to think numerically and spatially in order to interpret and critically analyse everyday situations and to solve problems. (department of education 2003:9) perhaps differently to ‘mathematical literacy’, the term ‘quantitative literacy’ includes statistics in its subject area. however, both of these terms rely on the concept of ‘literacy’, which we argue is a theoretically and a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h p r i n c e a n d a r c h e r 65 politically contested term, and should thus be questioned and problematised. there is the common-sense understanding of the term ‘literacy’, as referring to reading and writing, particularly in the school setting. this is what street (1995) refers to as the ‘autonomous’ view of literacy, namely the view that literacy has cognitive effects apart from the contexts in which it exists and is used. this understanding of the term is often used in conservative arguments about the ‘literacy crisis’, the poor state of the education system, and the decline of the english language. to counter this view of literacy, the new literacy studies attempts to give a social practices account of literacy, where the term ‘literacies’ refers to any form of social communication or practice that requires a semiotic code. this view of literacy as social practice, argued by, among others, heath (1983), street (1995), baynham (1995), barton and hamilton (1998) and gee (1996), baynham and baker (2002), engages with diverse notions of reading and writing that are emerging from current social and technological changes. to be ‘literate’ then does not simply mean having acquired the technical skills to decode and encode signs, but having mastered a set of social practices related to a set of signs which are inevitably plural and diverse. this is what street refers to as the ‘ideological model’ of literacy (1984, 1995) where literacy learning involves learning particular roles, forms of interaction, and ways of thinking. according to the ideological view, there are many literacies, linked to the social institutions in which they are embedded. ‘literacies’ are therefore understood as multiple, socially situated and contested. the spirit behind the pluralising is an attempt to value what particular groups in society are doing and, in this sense, it is a political move. we, however, query the theoretical clarity of the pluralising move, which becomes even more theoretically complex when the term ‘literacy’ gets extended to include notions of mathematical competence. in contrast to this inclusive view of ‘literacy’, gunther kress, in his later theoretical work, moved away from the new literacies studies position to oppose the use of the term to encompass all modes (2003:23-25). he argues against extending metaphors from language to other forms of representation, and defines literacy as a label for ‘lettered representation’. by using a homogenising term like ‘literacy’, he argues, the characteristics of one mode are extended across the others, precluding certain questions and tending to reify literacy into skills. what is most worrying about the use of a term like ‘literacy’ from an educational point of view is that it passes implicit value judgements where literacy is used as a metaphor for competence (as in ‘emotional literacy’ or ‘cultural literacy’). this is often how the term is used in everyday speech. the term ‘numeracy’ has been problematised by amongst others coben (2003), fitzsimons et al (2003), swain et al (2005), gal et al (2005). a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s we wish to focus on three problematic aspects of the term. firstly, the term does not capture the inextricable link between language and mathematics. kress (2003: 23) makes a three-way distinction in naming practices: naming the mode or resources for representing (writing, numbers), naming the mode in use (literacy, numeracy) and naming the means of dissemination (book, website). this distinction is somewhat problematic, as it seems not to include the mode of writing in ‘numeracy’, which he defines solely as the use of numbers. however, in a given context, numbers do not exist on their own – they are always embedded in language. the number 60 becomes more meaningful, when it is stated as 60 kg, for instance. also, we cannot count water without introducing something discrete with which to measure it, such as ‘five cups of water’ or ‘five gallons of water’. ascher (1991: 5) reflects on the inter-relation between numbers and language: our written words, one, two, three, and so on, are symbols that represent the sounds of the spoken words; we also represent numbers by the written symbols 1, 2, 3 … we say the word two when we encounter the letter combination t-w-o or the symbol 2, but we do not need these symbols to know or use the spoken word. chapman and lee (1990) also talk of the importance of the use of language in mathematics and give the words ‘fertility’ and ‘mortality’ as examples. these might be classified as “signifying rates of change, numbers of births and deaths, cultural patterns or personal experiences, each requiring very different reading operations to be carried out” (1990: 283). given these considerations, we can critique the notion of separating numbers and language by looking at graphical representations such as charts. charts represent numbers, but comprise all three modes, namely, numbers, writing, visuals. the second issue with the term ‘numeracy’ is that, like the terms ‘mathematical literacy’ or ‘quantitative literacy’, it implies ‘competence’. interestingly, numeracy has connotations of very basic levels of proficiency, whereas literacy has developed connotations of increased competence, such as ‘emotional literacy’. thirdly, ‘numeracy’ often refers to workplace practices, and indexes an adult education environment (jablonka 2003). the concept of ‘academic numeracy practices’ we propose the term ‘academic numeracy practices’ to foreground the connection to the disciplines of mathematics and statistics in the first instance and language in the second. centrally, we are concerned with the practices in which these competencies are required. ‘practice’ offers a way of linking semiosis with what individuals as socially situated actors do, both at the level of context of a specific situation and at the level of context of a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h p r i n c e a n d a r c h e r 67 culture. the term ‘practice’ is defined as ‘habitualised ways, tied to particular times and places, in which people apply resources (material or symbolic) to act together in the world’ (chouliaraki and fairclough 1999: 21). bourdieu (1977: 78) suggests that a practice is an action with a history. this notion of ‘practice’ has been applied to numeracy by a number of theorists such as street (2000, 2005) and baynham and baker (2002). for these theorists, numeracy practices are: more than the behaviours that occur when people ‘do’ mathematics / numeracy, more than the events in which numerical activity is involved, and so enable the conceptualisations, the discourses, the values and beliefs and the social relations that surround numeracy events as well as the contexts in which they are sited to be explored (baynham and baker 2002:6). as opposed to a skills-based view of student learning, a practices view is not a deficit view. in curriculum design, we cannot ignore the current south african and global context, and looking at numeracy as a social practice could be a way of including aspects that were traditionally sidelined by mainstream curricula, such as indigenous knowledge systems and ethnomathematics, for instance. ethnomathematics is defined as ‘the study of the mathematical ideas of nonliterate peoples’ (ascher and ascher 1986: 125), although there is a broad range of perspectives within its terrain. it has broadened the history of mathematics by imbuing it with a multicultural, global perspective. it recognises that belief in the universality of mathematics can limit one from considering that different ways of thinking may lead to radically different ways of counting, ordering, sorting, measuring, inferring, classifying, and modelling. according to d’ambrosio (1997:6): once we abandon notions of general universality, which often cover for eurocentric particularities, we can acquire an anthropological awareness: different cultures can produce different mathematics and the mathematics of one culture can change over time, reflecting changes in the culture. what is extremely valuable about the ethnomathematics movement is that it invites us to look at how knowledge was built throughout history in different cultural environments. it involves a comparative study of techniques and modes, of explaining and understanding. these aspects of knowledge are usually studied in isolation and are identified with disciplines like history, sociology, education. the holistic approach taken by ethnomathematics is useful for our notion of ‘academic numeracy practices’ as we too look at the interrelations of all these disciplines in the analysis of knowledge. a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s however, although the concept of ‘academic numeracy practices’ is inclusive of ethnomathematics, it is not equivalent to it. it is clear that mathematical ideas take shape within particular contexts and different cultural groups have distinct ways of reasoning, of measuring, coding and classifying, including academic mathematicians. however, it does seem to us that both new literacies studies and ethnomathematics are political projects, taking place at a particular point in history. we need to be critical of them and move one step beyond these historical moments. both approaches seem to reify culture to an extent by linking specific practices to specific groups in more or less deterministic ways. a criticism could be that the terrain of ethnomathematics is circumscribed and limited to the mathematical ideas of ‘nonliterate’, non-western peoples (powell and frankenstein 1997). curriculum development in developing countries requires a more global and clearly holistic approach. perhaps kress’s notion of ‘representational resources’ is a more productive one here. ‘representational resources’ imply agency and potential, rather than a concept such as ‘home’ literacies which implies a boundedness in time and space. a notion of home literacies assumes a distinct difference between school, home and university, plus a particular linear timeline of literacy practices, which are in fact more fluid. the notion of ‘representational resources’ is more inclusive and covers both home practices and past schooling practices. in conceptualising the term academic numeracy practices, it is worth noting some of the differences between mathematics and academic numeracy practices. firstly, mathematics requires students to enter the realm of abstraction which rises above context, whereas academic numeracy requires students to stay in context. secondly, mathematics is about general principles that can be applied to a range of contexts while a focus on academic numeracy practices sees every context through a quantitative lens. thirdly, statistics is the quantitative tool that is closer to academic numeracy practices than to traditional school mathematics (see hughes-hallet 2001). from the above characterisation, it is clear that more mathematics does not necessarily lead to an improvement in academic numeracy practices. charts as situated social practice in order to exemplify our notion of practice in higher education, we look at a common representational form, namely charts. charts are employed as a rhetorical means in publications to both construct phenomena and provide proof of phenomena. they are used as a means of analysing data (often in real world contexts) and to communicate information about these data. charts allow for the quantification of aspects of humans, such as age, sex, weight, length, head circumference, stature, and the use and creation of ratios and indices, such as body mass index a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h p r i n c e a n d a r c h e r 69 (bmi), that relate to their physical growth. data on its own is not very useful until it has been used to create ‘information’. statistics can be used to make sense of data, including notions such as mean, median, range, percentiles, quartiles, inter quartile range, standard deviation and tables, and graphical representations, such as bar charts, scatter plots, line graphs. our premise is that charts (and their written or spoken subtexts) are multimodal texts that are read by individuals of varying backgrounds. roth and bowen (2001) identify two difficulties that students have in reading charts. the first is difficulty with the structuring process, namely identifying aspects that signify, and the second, difficulties with the process of grounding signs in the world (2001:185). we agree with roth and bowen that graphs contain little circumstantial information to ground signs in the world in order to recreate the situation on which the chart is based. because charts, like other sign forms, have arbitrary but conventional relations to the things they represent, one cannot elaborate their content without knowing these conventions. an orientation toward charts as social practice avoids a deficit approach to student graphing-related activities. take the following scenario as an example. a student is faced with a graph that is increasing from left to right. when asked about the graph, she replies that it is decreasing. upon being questioned about this she uses her finger to trace the graph from right to left to confirm that it is decreasing. she clearly understands what it means for a graph to decrease (and presumably increase), but does not fully understand the convention of reading graphs from left to right. in archer, frith and prince (2002) we examined an example of a student poster showing hiv/aids infection rates. the students chose from a range of semiotic resources to produce a message deemed appropriate for a particular audience. although, it was not completely accurate mathematically, the visual representation of the data had a specific impact. it managed to put a human face to the talk about statistics. this human face is important in a discussion about hiv/aids where numbers can easily become a distancing mechanism from the issue. both of these examples demonstrate the importance of understanding what resources students bring to their graphicacy practices, and the importance of working with these in the curriculum. bmi charts in health sciences the understanding of growth and bmi charts (see figure 1) is important in screening and monitoring growth in individuals and populations, and is thus vital knowledge for prospective health science professionals. in prince and archer (2006) we look at how growth charts, with considerable limitations and based on small and unrepresentative samples, are largely developed in the united states but have been used in a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h 70 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s south africa since the early 1900s. in 2000 south africa had an infant mortality rate of 59 per 1000. infant mortality rate refers to the number of children less than one year old who die in a year, per 1000 live births during the year. we also had an under five mortality rate of 100 per 1000. under five mortality rate refers to the percentage of children born who die before the age of five, per 1000 live births during the year. even though hiv/aids was the leading cause of death among young children, accounting for 40 percent of the deaths in 2000, low birth weight, diarrhoea, lower respiratory infections and protein energy malnutrition accounted for a further 30 percent of the childhood deaths. in the chart for the bmi of boys from two to 20 years in figure 1 it is tempting to interpret the individual line charts as the bmi of an individual. however, the line charts are lines connecting the bmi values for the same percentiles of different age groups, so that the fifth percentile for the four year age group is 14kg/m2, where the fifth percentile for the bmi value of 17, 5 year olds is 18kg/m2. data from the measurement and study of the human body and its parts and capacities are valuable indicators of attained size and physical growth in children and adults. in looking at body mass index charts as situated social practice, it is interesting to look at the history of these charts. the body mass index of a person is determined by measuring the weight (in kg) and height (in m) and calculating weight over height to the power of two and then comparing this value (in kilograms over metre squared to the values that have been determined, by statistical means, for their age and sex either in a table or on a chart. in an attempt to unpick the use of this particular measure amongst health science students and professionals it soon became clear that the reasons for using this ratio are by no means well understood by them and yet it is such a pervasive practice within this discipline, as well as in everyday life. for a time we could not find a ready reference to where this measure was first introduced and finally found a reference to a facsimile reproduction of the 1842 english translation of a book by quetelet (1969), a treatise on man and the development of his faculties. quetelet had recorded various body measurements in an attempt to look for patterns within and between the measurements. this is a statistical rather than mathematical approach. a statistical approach tends to be more comfortable with uncertainty, whereas a mathematical approach often assumes something inherent in the phenomenon itself, such as an underlying equation. to decide on such a measure requires one to make various assumptions, about the ‘normal person’ and the ratios of various body measurements that will be a proxy for this ‘ideal’ person. it is interesting to question which ratio would provide a proxy for this ‘normal’ person, for instance, whether weight over height or any other ratio using weight and height to various powers would give a similar or better proxy for this ‘ideal’. a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h p r i n c e a n d a r c h e r 71 quetelet (1969) somewhat arbitrarily uses the ratio weight over height and it is only later that the current bmi ratio came into use. boys: 2 to 20 years bmi bmi bmi bmi boys: 2 to 20 years bmi bmi bmi bmi figure 1: a bmi chart the bmi growth chart is a good example of how a mathematical model is arbitrary but can become naturalised as the ‘norm’ and thus unquestioned. in this process, the model often becomes infused into a society’s practices – for instance the measurement of bmi when you take out a gym membership. it is precisely due to the uncritical view of numbers and charts that mathematical models such as the bmi charts become ‘black boxes’. by ‘black box’ here we mean weights and heights of individuals are used to calculate bmi’s and compared to values on charts without considering the complex nature of the body, such as fitness level, muscle mass, bone structure, gender and ethnicity. charts are reified (abstract but considered to be real) and their construction is often rarefied (reserved for a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h 72 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s an elite group or reserved to be constructed using a software package). bmi charts are constructed, arbitrary conventionalised representational forms. we have shown how they are largely treated as a line chart or a time-series chart with often a fair amount of misconception about what the lines mean. demystifying and critiquing academic numeracy practices bmi charts can enable us to critically explore the academic numeracy practices of the discipline. the bmi chart can be effectively used in the classroom by, for example, getting students to use their own weights and heights to develop their own models which they can then test out. this is one way in which students can be exposed to the arbitrary nature of the mathematical models that are employed and allow a debate about what is ‘ideal’ or ‘normal’ and the assumptions underlying the bmi model as a ‘black box’ can be exposed. it is important to talk through and understand the conventions for the representation of data in tables and graphical representations. it needs to be made clear that many phenomena (such as growth patterns and the diagnosis of certain illnesses) are uncertain and that the chance of uncertain events can be quantified using empirical data. we also need to interrogate with students the rhetorical uses of graphical representations. charts can be used as argument, as an explanatory tool, as evidence, as decoration or as a reference. the rhetorical purpose depends on the context since charts are used by a range of audiences, including medical practitioners, doctors, nurses, parents from differing educational and socio-economic backgrounds. they are also used in diverse contexts, such as clinics and homes. charts can be used to develop an understanding of the context in which the graphical representation is situated and how graphical representations can be used to interpolate, to extrapolate, to reference (what is) and to point to a standard (what should be). the rhetorical function of a chart in a certain context often leads to particular representational choices. it is also worth pointing out to students how representational choices are influenced by the intentions of the producers, or what kress would call the ‘interest’ (2003) of the signmakers and the purpose to which the information is to be put. conclusions this paper has presented a new literacies studies approach to teaching and theorising academic numeracy in higher education, emphasising the situated and multimodal nature of these practices. this approach emphasises the need to recognise ways of negotiating numerical graphical information as resources for generating meaning. we have proposed the term ‘academic numeracy practices’ in order to emphasise the socially situated nature of all practices, to avoid thinking of a set of discrete a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h p r i n c e a n d a r c h e r 73 skills that one can either possess or lack, and to avoid extending the characteristics of the written mode to other modes. this involves being aware and critical of the uses made of different modes. arguments made with symbols and charts tend to be more highly valued than those made with words in certain disciplines, but also in popular discourses where they are used to legitimise information. particular practices, including knowledge-making ones within disciplines, become part of the everyday, implicit life routines of the individual and of social institutions. thinking of academic numeracy practices as socio-historically situated, such as the arbitrary nature of the bmi ratio, draws attention to the contested nature of dominant conventions. in order to be able to operate as critical readers and citizens, we need to interrogate the truth and authority claims made by specific mathematical representations in published texts, and examine how these work. references archer, arlene (2006) change as additive: harnessing students’ mutimodal semiotic resources in an engineering curriculum, thesen, l and van pletzen, e, eds, academic literacies and languages of change, continuum, london, pp 224-251. archer, arlene, frith, vera, and prince, robert (2002) a project-based approach to numeracy practices at university focusing on hiv/aids, in literacy and numeracy studies, vol 11, no 2, pp 123-131. ascher, marcia (1991) ethnomathematices, a multicultural view of mathematical ideas, brooks/cole publishing company, california. ascher, marcia and ascher, robert (1986) ethnomathematics, in history of 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kress, gunther (2000) multimodality, in cope, bill and kalantzis, mary, eds, multiliteracies. literacy learning and the design of social futures, routledge, london and new york. kress, gunther (2003) literacy in the new media age, routledge, london and new york. kress, gunther and van leeuwen, theo (1996) reading images. the grammar of visual design, routledge, london. new london group (1996) a pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures, harvard educational review, vol 66, no 1, pp 60-92. a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h p r i n c e a n d a r c h e r 75 powell, arthur b and frankenstein, marilyn, eds (1997) ethnomathematics. challenging eurocentrisim in mathematics education, state university of new york, new york. prince, robert and archer, arlene (2006) quantitative literacy as situated social practice in higher education, international journal of learning, common ground publishers, vol 12, no 7, pp 227-234. quetelet, lambert adolphe jacques (1969) a treatise on 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street, brian (2005) applying new literacy studies to numeracy as social practice, in rogers, alan, ed, urban literacy: communication, identity and learning in development contexts, institute for education, london. street, brian and baker, dave (2006) so, what about multimodal numeracies?, in roswell, jennifer and pahl, kate, eds (2006) travel notes from the new literacy studies, multilingual matters ltd, cleveden, buffalo, toronto. street, brian, baker, dave and tomlin, alison (2002) home and school numeracy practices: where are the borders and overlaps?, in valero, paolo and skovsmose, ole, eds, proceedings of the 3rd international mes conference, copenhagen: centre for research in learning mathematics, pp 1-10. street, brian, rogers, a. and baker, dave (2006) adult teachers as researchers: ethnographic approaches to numeracy and literacy as social practices in south asia, convergence, xxxix, 1, pp 31-44 swain, jon, baker, elizabeth, holder, deborah, newmarch, barbara and coben, diana (2005) ‘beyond the daily application’: making numeracy teaching meaningful to adult learners, national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy, institute of education, london. a n e w l i t e r a c i e s a p p r o a c h 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s lns template © 2016 keiko yasukawa. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy & numeracy studies 2016, 24(1): 4902, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4902 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 1 2 0 1 6 75 notes on contributors stephen black stephen black is a research associate in the faculty of arts and social sciences at the university of technology sydney. his research focuses mainly on socio-cultural understandings of literacy and numeracy in adult education contexts. stephen.black@uts.edu.au lauren hund lauren hund is an assistant professor of statistics in the department of family & community medicine, university of new mexico school of medicine in albuquerque. lhund@salud.unm.edu erik jacobson erik jacobson is an associate professor in the early childhood, elementary and literacy education department at montclair state university in new jersey (us). holly e. jacobson holly e. jacobson is an associate professor of linguistics. her areas of research and teaching include health discourse, intercultural communication in healthcare settings and health literacy, within the frameworks of interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis and translation and interpreting theory. jacobson@unm.edu alzira manuel alzira manuel is a senior lecturer in the department of education at eduardo mondlane university in mozambique. alzira.manuel@umu.se oleg popov oleg popov is an associate professor in the department of science and mathematics education at umeå university in sweden. oleg.popov@umu.se francisco soto mas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4902 mailto:stephen.black@uts.edu.au mailto:lhund@salud.unm.edu mailto:jacobson@unm.edu mailto:alzira.manuel@umu.se mailto:oleg.popov@umu.se n o t e s f o r c o n t r i b u t o r s 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s francisco soto mas is an associate professor of public health and conducts cross-disciplinary research on health equity and latino health. fsotomas@salud.unm.edu mailto:fsotomas@salud.unm.edu stephen black stephen black is a research associate in the faculty of arts and social sciences at the university of technology sydney. his research focuses mainly on socio-cultural understandings of literacy and numeracy in adult education contexts. lauren hund erik jacobson erik jacobson is an associate professor in the early childhood, elementary and literacy education department at montclair state university in new jersey (us). holly e. jacobson alzira manuel alzira manuel is a senior lecturer in the department of education at eduardo mondlane university in mozambique. 4tualzira.manuel@umu.seu4t oleg popov oleg popov is an associate professor in the department of science and mathematics education at umeå university in sweden. 4tuoleg.popov@umu.seu4t francisco soto mas 16 july conference paper acal literacy and numeracy studies 2014. © 2014 pamela osmond. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2014, 22, 4180, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v22i1.4180 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 2 n o 1 2 0 1 4 69 review back to school a review by pamela osmond back to school: why everyone deserves a second chance at education by mike rose the new press, new york, 2012 isbn 978-i 59558-786-2 the back to school of the title refers to postschool or second chance education in america. mike rose’s focus is on adult remedial (sic) and occupational education. however, although he writes about america, it is hard not to read this little book without a constant alternative reading of second chance learning or technical and further education in the australian context. the book is based on interviews with a number of students and teachers in community colleges and adult education programs across america. rose’s style is anecdotal. he writes movingly of the students who have taken this second chance at learning. australian language and literacy practitioners will recognise many of our students among the vignettes he presents to us. rose was once a remedial teacher in the community education sector and the warmth and empathy with which he writes reflects this. the book opens with henry telling us that ‘you might discover somebody you never knew you were. that’s basically what happened to me when i started taking classes here’. rose’s style is deceptively populist. these moving vignettes are of working class and under-class americans who are in the process of re-inventing their lives. heart-warming stories. however, they serve to highlight a powerful political message concerning the malaise of https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ r e v i e w : b a c k t o s c h o o l 70 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s much of america’s adult education sector and the policies that drive it. through the voices of these students, rose makes the case for the transformative effect which education can have on a sector of the population that doesn’t make it to the ivy league universities. the sub-title of the book is ‘an argument for democratizing knowledge in america’. the knowledge he looks for is that which is provided by a liberal, humanist education, not that which is now offered to the already educationally disadvantaged of america. the book is a strident lament for the shrinking possibility of a second chance at a real education for these adults ‘partly because of a damaged and unstable economy but more so because of our political response to the economy’ (p xiii). it is sprinkled with case histories of people such as henry (who discovered somebody he never knew he was). henry was in a wheelchair, the tragic result of ‘doing young, foolish, dumb stuff’. his goal now is to work with teenagers such as he once was, who are ‘searching for an identity’(p 1). some of the stories are of young people who, like henry have been through the criminal justice system, but most are of people who for a mix of systemic and personal issues didn’t do so well at school. these stories parallel closely those of our australian students in the range of adult literacy, language or basic education classes. also reflected in the australian context are the range of hurdles placed in the way of these students and potential students which include the overly bureaucratic enrolment procedures and the difficulties for educationally disadvantaged and disaffected people navigating their way through a complex web of offerings and institutions to find the course best suited to them . he argues also against reductive assumptions about learning which are reflected in the curricula, workbooks and online exercises. he sees in them an atomistic approach that has not kept pace with contemporary understandings of language and learning. a further echo of the australian context is rose’s description of the many short term job seeking programs offered in the community education sector. he provides a trenchant critique of the argument that an increase in basic occupational skills will lift the country’s productivity. this, he sees as blame shifting and argues that this short term training in job seeking strategies or basic skills doesn’t make an r e v i e w : b a c k t o s c h o o l osmond 71 appreciable difference in helping people to get a shrinking number of jobs. whilst accepting the argument that second-chance programs can enhance employment prospects, rose wants to move the focus to the number of other personal, social and civic benefits that can flow from educationally rich curricula and programs. he discusses the ‘binary polemic’ in the division between vocational and academic courses of study and seeks to enhance the liberal studies possibilities in a vocational curriculum, including humanistic, ethical and aesthetic dimensions. he shares with us the stories of a number of students in a particular vocational college where liberal arts electives are possible and shows us the intellectual and imaginative possibilities that this gives rise to. however, such programs are rare and the economic imperative threatens them also. publication of this book is timely with the oecd programme for the international assessment of adult competencies (piaac) results released in 2013. back to school presents a counter to piaac’s raw statistical data. it presents the rich data that looks to the personal stories behind the statistics. as rose reminds us, ‘[in the statistical data] there’s no reflection of the lady coming to class to keep her mind alert, of the man’s posture changing over time as he begins to decode print’ (p 53). rose’s stories demonstrate the hunger of many educationally disadvantaged people for what education promises. “to learn more … to have a better life … to learn new things i never thought of before’ (p 69). it is unlikely that these dreams will be realised by short term job skills programs. ‘what we lack in the reports’, says rose, ‘is the blending of the statistical table with the portrait of a life.’ back to school provides that portrait. mike rose’s most salutary words need no further commentary: the de facto philosophy of education we do have is a strictly economic one. this is dangerous for without a civic and moral core it could easily lead to a snazzy twenty-first-century version of an old and shameful pattern in american education: working class people get a functional education geared only toward the world of work. for all the hope and opportunity they represent, our initiatives lack the imagination and heartbeat that transform institutions r e v i e w : b a c k t o s c h o o l 72 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s and foster the wondrous, unrealized abilities of the full range of our citizenry. (pp 141-2) r e v i e w : b a c k t o s c h o o l osmond 73 microsoft word hunter & franken.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 1 2 0 1 2 25 health literacy as a complex practice judy hunter and margaret franken abstract as attention to health literacy grows as an area for policy intervention, policy discourse continues to draw on skills deficit and patient compliance, buttressed by the dominant political discourse of individual responsibility. but for patients, the health domain is interwoven with linguistic challenges, significant affective issues, underlying cultural dimensions, political and economic exigencies, variable access to resources, and cognitive and situated complexity. from these perspectives, this article reports on findings of an ongoing study of health literacy demands in the midlands region of the north island of new zealand, an area of high ethnic and socio-economic diversity. the study focuses on patients with diabetes and cardiovascular disease two chronic areas strongly associated with ‘failure to care’ and identifed as having reached epidemic proportions. it analyses work to date: health professionals’ conceptions of and responses to perceived patients’ health literacy needs, and health information documents for patients. implications of the study support the need for improvement in language and literacy skills among patients, but also the recognition of complexity and a collective responsibility for effective health communication. the context over the past decade, the health care sector has driven international attention to health literacy, with several widely accepted tenets. health literacy challenges are seen to affect a significant proportion of the population in western developed countries (nielsen-bohlman, panzer, and kindig 2004, nutbeam 1999). low levels of health literacy are taken to correlate with a wide range of poor health outcomes for patients. for example, health researchers have found low health literacy associated with poorer general health relative to patients with higher levels of health literacy (adams, appleton, hill, dodd, findley, and wilson 2009), more hospital admissions (adams et al. 2009, paasche-orlow and wolf 2007), and poor management of chronic disease like diabetes (osborn, cavanaugh, wallston, white, and rothman 2009, schillinger et al 2002). low health literacy is seen to add significantly to a wide range of health care costs. accordingly, there has been discussion and development of health literacy assessment tools (bass, jordan, osbourne, and buchbinder 2010, parker et h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s al. 1995), appropriately simplified information resources for patients, communication guides for health practitioners, and broad health literacy policies around health information (e.g., doak, doak, and root 1996, the scottish government et al. 2009, u.s. department of health and human services, 2010, wizowski, harper, and hutchins 2008). as noted above, most of this work has been conducted within the health care sector, with patients’ comprehension of health information texts as the central focus. in the current decade, government policy makers have increasingly turned their attention to health literacy, influenced by the work on literacy from the health care sector and concern about health care costs. this move also dovetails with the notion that literacy skills are linked to productivity and economic outcomes, as publicised through the oecd international literacy surveys of the 1990s-2000s. the literacy/economic prosperity paradigm has lifted the profile of adult literacy education dramatically. while this is a positive shift, health literacy is underpinned by a discourse of individual blame and deficit, along with a reductionist view of literacy. adults with low literacy skills are labelled as unable to participate in 21st century society. their backgrounds are frequently characterised as consisting of school failure, dysfunctional families, addiction and crime, inadequate ‘life skills’ and employability skills. low literacy is seen both as a central cause and consequence, rather than a possible complex correlate of these problems. the recent new zealand ministry of health publication, kōrero mārama: health literacy and māori (2010) for example, is based on the findings of the most recent international literacy survey, adult literacy and lifeskills (all). it highlights the large proportion of māori with poor health literacy levels, that is, with ‘insufficient skills to cope with the health literacy demands they typically face’ (2010:9) and compares them to consistently higher non-māori scores. on one hand, such an approach can help promote further efforts toward eliminating new zealand’s social inequalities. on the other hand, it reflects the dominant discourse driving literacy policy since the 1990s, that of individual blame and responsibility, together with a degree of cultural ascription. it is important to note that these dominant discourses are not just the province of neoliberal policy makers. in an analysis of 257 adult literacy success stories over 35 years tracing the shift from public programme support to individualism, sandlin and clark (2009) maintain that adult literacy educators have also adopted the discourse of self-sufficiency and individual responsibility. sandlin and clark comment that the individualist discourse ultimately diminishes the important role of adult literacy education in people’s lives. at the same time, however, academic health literacy research, drawing on social practice perspectives of the last two decades, has also h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e h u n t e r a n d f r a n k e n 27 begun to challenge the dominant paradigm of skills deficits contributing to broader social and economic ills (balatti, black and falk 2009, freebody and freiburg 1999, nutbeam 1999, papen and walters 2008, papen 2009). for example, balatti, black and falk’s research on health literacy and social capital has established the value of expanding social networks as resources in literacy learning. in the late 1990s, freebody and freiburg emphasised the important influence of the social sphere on literacy practices in health care: the nature, value, significance and productivity of various literacy practices are shaped by the nature of the social relationship between institutional providers, such as doctors, and their clients. literacy practices themselves derive their moral significance from the enactment and maintenance of institutional relationships within the local setting . . . (1999:64)   more recently papen and walters’ (2008, 2009) research on the social practices of health literacy has contributed significantly to our understanding of health literacy’s social dimensions, by identifying a range of social factors that impact on health literacy and by acknowledging the importance of textual mediation of health care information. they found health literacy practices to be embedded both in hierarchical social relationships with medical authority figures and in institutional processes. they also found that patients drew on a range of information resources and their own social networks to help mediate health information. issues of affect additionally influenced how patients received health information. this work has shown that in the health domain, a reading and writing skills focus, even if contextualised to health information topics as in the adult literacy and lifeskills survey (alls), is inadequate for a conceptualisation of health literacy as understanding, accessing and using health information. while skills are clearly important, they are inadequate for conceptualising health literacy in use. our approach builds on papen and walters’ health literacy project. it takes the perspective that health literacy presents complex cognitive, social, cultural and affective challenges for patients at multiple levels, including: • disease domains and documentation, • patient support, and • the construction of patient identity the health literacy project the researchers were approached by a not-for-profit health management organisation that supports the delivery of primary and community healthcare in the midlands region of new zealand a region h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s covering nearly half a million people enrolled in medical practices and an area of high ethnic and socio-economic diversity. the organisation had identified the goal of improving health literacy of patients as an important feature in their request to government to fund an extensive programme of research and development to improve the health outcomes of patients in the area. of particular interest were cardiovascular health and diabetes, which are health conditions particularly associated with “at risk” communities in new zealand such as māori and pasifika1. they saw that literacy researchers conducting research work with practitioners and patients in their region would support achievement of better health outcomes. in our negotiation of the research work, we proposed a broad research approach to investigating health literacy, which included not only health care information texts, but also health practitioners, who provide and disseminate health care information, and patients, who are the users of that information. although conventional responses to health literacy focus on health information texts, we believed that to identify the challenges patients face with health literacy, it was vital to include participants as well. we offered to subsequently develop two research-based sets of guidelines on communicating about health care, one for practitioners and one for patients. we asked midlands for samples of information that was typically given to cvd and diabetes patients, and we collected over one hundred health information documents from their general practice clinics. most were published by agencies such as the new zealand heart foundation or diabetes new zealand. to gain an overview of health care practitioners’ perceptions of health literacy issues, we constructed an email questionnaire, which the midlands health network sent to every practice. the promotion of the questionnaire and the approach to practices was mediated by the midlands health network, the research funders, as per the contractual relationship for the project. we asked for participation from all the staff in each practice, potentially up to 1000 people, but received 143 responses. this is a seemingly low response rate, but those who did respond, in the main provided substantive comment. the first set of questions was designed to establish whether the health sector recognized a local need for attention to health literacy, important at the policy level. it asked three questions about their views on the impact in new zealand of internationally identified health literacy issues: efficient and equitable use of health services; effectiveness of preventative care for patients; and overall system-wide health costs. over 60% of respondents rated these issues as having much or very much relevance in new zealand. more importantly to us, the questionnaire also asked respondents to describe incidents where health literacy might have been an issue. the instruction stated: ‘please detail a specific event or situation where language, h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e h u n t e r a n d f r a n k e n 29 literacy, or numeracy appeared to play a part in a patient's ability to access and use health care services.’ respondents were prompted as follows: who? (describe but don’t name); what? (describe context and condition); problem?; outcome? in the present paper, we report on data collection from phase one of the project, an analysis of cardiovascular disease (cvd) and diabetes information texts collected from mhn’s practices and an email questionnaire of staff in all the mhn practices. for the purposes of this paper we draw our examples from a single diabetes brochure, ‘it’s time to shed some light on … type 2 diabetes’ (2005). together these two complementary sets of findings create a rich image of the complexity of health literacy demands on patients.   an overview of the two data sources the diabetes brochure, ‘it’s time to shed some light on … type 2 diabetes’ (2005) has many features typical of the documents we collected. it is attractively presented, with colour photographs, diagrams, paragraphed print, contrasting headings, and ample white space. headings in the brochures are brief or presented as questions patients might ask. patients are directly addressed as you to create a personable, interactive tone. people in the photographs generally appear healthy and happy, physically active, and sociable. images of fresh food appropriate for diabetics are colourfully presented. at the same time, various aspects of the text, particularly the language, were not inclusive to those considered most at risk. the results of the incident description question provided data showing a range of difficulties, interpretations and responses to practitioners’ and patients’ experiences with health communication. not surprisingly, many responses also reflected the widely-disseminated discourse of deficit, although practitioners’ attitudes varied from supportive to unsympathetic. the findings of the two data sources will be discussed below as they contribute to a picture of health literacy challenges for patients. disease complexity and the language of print information the semantic constituent analysisi of the cvd and diabetes texts showed two major types of information: explanations of the health condition and guidance on self-care. the first step in our analysis of the brochure was to analyse the information ‘topography’. we did this by means of mapping the information constituents against a taxonomy of constituents previously derived from an analysis of some one hundred cardiovascular and diabetes texts we analysed as part of a scoping project (see franken hunter & balmer, 2010). the diabetes brochure covers 28 pages of text. all information constituents identified in our document analysis are presented in this h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s brochure. examples of constituents from different pages in the brochure are listed in table 1 below. what is immediately apparent is the complexity of information. one page of the brochure may be taken up with a single constituent. this occurs in the detailed information around diet, representing a response or intervention. some pages contain almost all types of constituents. this type of information arrangement can be complex, as in the case of the pages explaining hypoglycaemia and hyperglycaemia, which link precise blood glucose measurements, general symptoms, timed recommendations about food intake, and a range of hypothetical preconditions. information constituents associated with condition definition of condition or aspects of condition type 1 diabetes is.. type 2 diabetes is… causes: physiological insulin production is sluggish or the body is resistant to insulin as a result of being overweight symptoms you may have type 2 diabetes for a long time without symptoms effects long term complications – eye, kidney and nerve damage associated with care responses/interventions type 1 requires insulin type 2 is treated with lifestyle changes, regular physical activity… tablets may be required effects of responses/interventions without a food plan and physical activity, tablets won’t keep glucose levels stable status of/responsibility for responses/interventions you can prevent or delay long term damage it cannot be cured but it can be controlled when to seek medical advice seek early treatment if… how/when to take medication take tablets if diabetes is not managed by diet and exercise effects of medication these tablets cause… the following tablets do not cause… monitoring of symptoms and condition check daily sources of further advice see your doctor nurse or dietitian table 1 information constituents in ‘it’s time to shed some light on … type 2 diabetes’ note: the representation of constituents in the table above are in some cases paraphrases of the way they are encoded in the text. h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e h u n t e r a n d f r a n k e n 31 however an initial analysis of information complexity only begins to touch on what potentially makes this healthcare text difficult for readers to understand. as well, the language of most texts we examined typically assumed educated readers who are competent and comfortable with complex sentence patterns and with specialised or infrequent vocabulary. the examples below, about conditions that can lead to undesirable outcomes, illustrate: example 1 if you require one of the tablets that can drop your blood glucose too low, of if you also require insulin to manage your diabetes, these medications will not enable you to keep good control of your blood glucose levels (2005:13). example 2 even though you may require tablets or insulin to help control your blood glucose, if you regularly eat foods that are high in sugar and fat, or eat more food than your body requires for energy, you could experience hypoglycaemia (2005:5). both are cautionary statements that establish the importance of managing one of the significant effects of diabetes. as with other cautionary statements typically present in the brochure, the main clause depicts the possible negative consequence of patient treatments or actions. these are introduced with concessive and conditional clauses, coordinated by or with additional, alternative possibilities, each clause further modified with embedded phrases and clauses. their presence assumes that patients can comfortably understand such sentence patterns. the examples are also illustrative of the complexity of vocabulary. throughout, the presence of specialised medical terminology such as blood glucose, insulin, pancreas, and hypoglycaemia assumes that patients can comprehend easily. the brochure does contain a glossary, but the definitions offered do not necessarily mitigate the problem of specialised vocabulary. for example, insulin is defined as ‘a hormone produced in the pancreas; helps glucose enter the body cells, where it is used for energy’ (2005:28). variable patient support and mediation of health information when health information texts are unclear, they raise further questions or omit critical information, patients may benefit greatly from another party explaining or ‘mediating’ the information. we found, however, that mediation of health information by health practitioners and h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s social network support may be unpredictable and inconsistent. responses to our questionnaire indicated a range of support for patients, which, on the part of practitioners, may have depended on the time available, the disposition of the practitioner and the availability of support agencies. the nature of practitioners’ support for patients with difficulties varied widely. some practitioners detailed lengthy interventions to help patients with limited literacy and few family resources; others were unable to intervene successfully. the data included evidence of the limitations of service. one rural practitioner, expressed the exigencies of short staffing and high patient workload. the practice was ‘always fully booked’ and besieged by upset patients who needed to wait and who ‘don’t understand the pressure . . . stressed tired drs seeing too many patients in a day. tired staff coping with upset demanding patients’ (respondent 126). our understanding from those in the sector is that medical practices are regularly working at, if not beyond, capacity. health practitioner support reports of practitioner interventions included help with navigating the health care system, individual support with form-filling, patient advocacy, brokering additional treatment, and reviewing and adjusting office procedures to meet new needs. such inteventions nearly always involved additional work and follow-up. for example, one report described arrangements for an obese patient to join a hospital-based weight management programme. the patient was sent a questionnaire that he did not understand and did not complete, and so ‘was taken off for consideration of this programme.’ the respondent continued: i contacted the adult weight management programme and asked that a copy of the questionnaire could be sent to the general practice, i then invited the patient in, went through questionnaire and completed it with and on behalf of the patient, the patient [was] then added back on programme. a lot of additional work and follow-up. assumption is made that patient can read and understand questionnaires, etc that are sent out. the diabetes brochure analysed above makes frequent references to sources to consult for further help or information (see table 1, sources of further advice). these include references to individuals with prescribed roles such as: doctor, nurse, diabetes nurse or specialist, dietitian, eye specialist, and podiatrist. a connection between these sources of help is expressed on h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e h u n t e r a n d f r a n k e n 33 one occasion when the document specifies, ‘your doctor or nurse can refer you to a dietitian’ on two occasions the notion of a team to support a patient is expressed as follows: ‘your diabetes healthcare team’ and ‘talk with your healthcare team’. the information on sources of professional help expressed in this generalised way assumes that the patient is fully aware of the ‘team’, and would know how to access them – as well as the individuals identified. however, our questionnaire indicated that numbers of patients had difficulty understanding the health care system, hence did not access it fully. one respondent (48) told of an ‘elderly patient [who] injured his shoulder swinging from tree, given instructions on how and where to ring for an xray and the process. the patient didn't inform radiologist that it was an accident and was given an appt for 10 days time.’ as reported, the patient was in considerable pain, but thought that the delay was ‘part of the system’. the practice identified the need for clear guidelines to support patients in what to say to the x ray department personnel, and conversely the need to support them to ask relevant questions of patients. further, the practice aimed to make referral appointments for patients. practitioner respondents found, as well, that support for patients’ diverse needs could prove challenging. for example, respondent 11 described the case of ‘an asian man who presented with a fish hook in his finger was unable to give us any details.’ the telephone interpreter services were unable to help, and eventually, the patient was ‘sent to ed where they sought further help from alternative interpreters.’ patients’ own support networks black, innes, and chopra (2008) found wide networks of health information sharing among immigrant groups in their australian study patients’ independently selected support networks are not acknowledged in the brochure. however, patients in our questionnaire were reported as using them, albeit in a variable or less than ideal manner. several immigrant patients brought their children to translate; others relied on interpreter services, which weren’t always available. one was reported to bring a friend to medical appointments. other patients, not identified as migrants, were reported to have difficulties. for instance, one respondent (68) described a patient who didn’t ‘understand the medico language given to them at hospital, no extended family there when explained, don't realise the importance of taking [warfarin] and testing regularly.’ the result was hospital re-admission. another poignant example was an ‘older māori lady ... unable to read.’ she had no phone, no transportation, no other adults in her home, and three children to care for. she was unable to read posted notices for breast screening appointments, and so did not attend. the health practitioner h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s negotiated repeatedly with the patient, the breast screening clinic, and later with the hospital oncology department to support her and find ways for her to recognise and respond to posted health information. overall, then, these snapshots suggest that both migrants and local residents experience uneven support. the brochure we analysed urges patients to ‘ask family and friends for help’ or the ‘diabetes society support group’ – in an unspecified way. the patients would arguably benefit from knowing what the support group can offer, and also how family and friends could potentially help. issues of patient identity practitioners’ construction of patients we received many questionnaire responses indicating sympathetic, supportive attitudes toward patients with difficulties managing their condition. the following comments about an indian woman newly diagnosed with diabetes illustrate: couldn't read information we could supply to reinforce teaching. there is a lot to take in all at once. this required many more visits and extensive follow-up. (respondent 39) despite the extra work entailed in supporting this patient, the practitioner took an understanding perspective. judging from the entry above, the patient was presented as someone struggling with a great deal of new information. the following patient, however, was depicted as unresponsive to self-care education, and a negative attitude is implied. his noncompliant behaviour is linked to welfare dependency, an alcohol problem, as well as gout attacks. middle aged maori male. uncontrolled gout, frequent gout attacks at least monthly. not compliant with medications. on sickness benefit because of this. severe alcohol problem. did not respond to repeated education and was still non compliant. [outcome?] poor (respondent 81) one respondent stood out as highly negatively disposed toward the notion of health literacy issues and also to patients who experience them: there is no problem created by people with nothing else to dodo gooders, tree huggers & societies bluggers [sic]anyone not able to access health care is a lazy , ignorant individual not worth anyones trouble (respondent 64). h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e h u n t e r a n d f r a n k e n 35 although this attitude was extreme in the data, the negative labelling that characterises those with health literacy challenges as unworthy is often echoed in the popular press and political discourse of individual blame. our data showed no evidence of diminished treatment of patients who did not take up health care education. it did however suggest frustration and resentment on the part of practitioners at spending time and energy on supporting patients who appeared not to be self-motivated. on the other hand, as in the example above, those patients who were seen to be trying or failing through no fault of their own (e.g., inability to read documents) were often reported to receive willing extra support. the discourse of patient responsibility for self-care similarly permeated the health texts we analysed. the diabetes brochure states the philosophy of self-management explicitly in the closing: diabetes puts you in the driving seat. you are in charge of the daily decisions and what road you take to manage your health. . . . approximately 95% of diabetes care is self-care (2005:26-7) the final photo in the brochure shows a pensive white-haired man leaning on a fence. absent from such images and the associated discourse is acknowledgement of patient diversity and knowledge. like the white male image, western medical knowledge dominates over folk knowledge or indigenous knowledge. also lacking is any consideration of the complexities of the health care system including the still developing paradigm of care for chronic disease. patient affect and dignity turner and kelly (2000) maintain that the emotional aspects of chronic disease are underplayed in the health sector and that medical providers are often ill-equipped to deal with them. many of the health information texts did however acknowledge the emotional stress of being diagnosed with cvd or diabetes but in a superficial or ‘light’ way. they gave tips for beating depression or advice to draw on friends or family for support. the diabetes brochure encourages newly diagnosed patients who ‘may feel anxious, sad, or angry’ . . . [to] give yourself a “pat” on the back for your successful [lifestyle] changes’ (2005:26). such an approach may be reductionist and misleading. bundesmann and kaplowitz (2010) make clear for instance that self-care for diabetes patients is a ‘constant challenge’. practitioners reported patients who were not only emotionally affected by their disease, but also by their embarrassment at not h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s understanding health information, as in the following response about a patient trying to explain his needs to the practice receptionist: [he] was very hard to understand, i think he had a cleft pallet [sic] and because he was having to repeat himself he was finding it frustrating as well as embarrassing in front of the entire waiting room full of patients. i took the patient into my office where he could feel comfortable and had all the time in the world to make himself clear (95). another respondent commented on the dilemma common to many with low literacy levels: people who aren’t very literate have huge problems filling in the multiple forms required by winz [work and income nz] acc [accident compensation corporation]. they sometimes don’t attend these places or get the help they are entitled to because it is too stressful for them or they don’t tell anyone they can’t fill out the paperwork (113). cultural and linguistic diversity diversity was not a strong feature of the health information texts we viewed. diverse cultural traditions and values in nearly all the documents were recognised primarily by including non-traditional food names and photos of patients who were seemingly from māori or pasifika backgrounds. the diabetes brochure analysed here contains seventeen photos of people. fourteen seem to be recognisably white, which does not reflect the degree of concern about the high prevalence of diabetes among the māori population (ministry of health 2010). this brochure includes only taro (common to pasifika people) as a food outside the dominant culture. a diagram of a plate of food shows ideal relative proportions of a traditional meat-and-twovegetables meal. health information texts in a variety of languages do exist, but they are few, and we have not surveyed them. however we do know that by and large the visual material is replicated. questionnaire respondents reported communication difficulties with immigrant patients. a few were able to contact interpreter services for patients. others described children accompanying parents to doctor visits and having to translate intimate health information. there was concern about children missing school as well as perhaps not interpreting information accurately. practitioners’ responses ranged from not charging a patient for a visit where communication failed to, in some cases, frustration: h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e h u n t e r a n d f r a n k e n 37 ‘do new immigrants have to pass a literacy test? surely everyone should have to pass a certain standard before entering nz’ (respondent 134). some respondents recognised the possibility of different cultural attitudes toward health care; nevertheless they did not seem to be confident of their own interpretations of cultural aspects of patient behaviour. although not a part of our research, one promising development is the one heart many lives (he manawa tahi koiora tini) programme and website (http://www.oneheartmanylives.co.nz/), sponsored by pharmac, the pharmaceutical management agency, a crown agency of the ministry of health. the programme is specifically aimed at māori and pacific islands men, with the slogan, ‘get a heart check, bro’. it is designed to promote heart health awareness, heart checks and action to deal with any diagnosed heart problems. a key feature of the website is inspirational stories by māori and pasifika men who are actively taking control of their heart health. these stories, told by the men themselves, are in video format as well as in print with photos. however, the dominant discourse of individual responsibility remains, as well as the question of accessibility for those without easy internet access. nevertheless, in our view, the programme constitutes an important step in appreciating the dignity and identity of people rather than marking them as deficient. conclusions and implications for health literacy education interpretations of the alls survey (e.g. ministry of health 2010) depict health literacy simplistically. health literacy is seen as needing adequate reading levels for health-related documents, as being the responsibility of individuals, and as being associated with particular cultural groups. yet if we take health literacy as patients’ ‘ability to understand, access, and use health-related tools and services in a given location’ (papen and walters 2008:10), then as this study has shown, it is clearly a much more complex issue. the health information documents we examined displayed syntactic and information complexity, together with specialised and infrequent vocabulary items. we maintain that texts displaying such text features are considerably more accessible to educated middle-class members of the dominant white population in new zealand than to those of the nondominant population. the fact that effective uptake of health information is represented largely as the responsibility of individual patients, reflects the dominant discourse of literacy deficit. we need to recognise, however, that the wording of our question, ‘. . . an event or situation where language, literacy, or numeracy appeared to play a part in a patient’s ability to access and use health care services’ may have contributed to the responses. with diseases as complex as diabetes, patients are doubly challenged to cope with their condition. in sum, health-related texts appear h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s to pose greatest challenges for those segments of the population considered to be most in need. the study has also shown that patients have variable access to support and mediation of health information. health practitioners may not always have the time or resources to support patients in the ways many of our respondents described. patients’ individual social networks, which help them share information and provide material and emotional support, are also variable. as noted by black, innes and meenakshi (2008), some immigrant groups have well-established, wide networks that serve as ample social capital. but our questionnaire, albeit focussed on difficulties, provided evidence that immigrant support networks were limited, at least in medical treatment encounters. moreover, questionnaire respondents also described a number of māori patients with limited support networks. practitioners’ views of the extent to which patients were motivated to comply with self-management regimes appeared to influence their dispositions toward patients. one expressed highly negative views of patients with communication difficulties, labelling them lazy bludgers, providing at least some evidence of possible stereotyping (see hill 2010, for example). issues of patient identity also appeared to impact on patients’ access to health information in several ways. most of the health information texts we analysed minimally acknowledged new zealand’s population diversity. immigrant patients who were not proficient in english seemed to have ad hoc arrangements for interpreting, relying on children, friends, or agencies that weren’t always available. health care respondents referred to embarrassment and anxiety observed in patients over lack of understanding and disabilities. the brochure acknowledged but minimised the emotional impact of diabetes on patients. finally both questionnaire respondents and health information texts presented relatively positive images of informed patients who readily and competently self-managed their disease, were able to overcome minor distress, and were served by a ready, knowledgeable health support sector. in sum, the study has suggested that the language and content of health information documents favour white, middle-class, educated patients who are predisposed to comply with medical advice. moreover, the above discussion shows that access to health care support and mediation of information is influenced by additional factors that marginalised patients especially may not be aware of or be able to control. all these factors may coalesce to further disadvantage patients with low health literacy, poor health, and social, economic, and educational disadvantage. the research may have implications beyond cardiovascular disease and diabetes. increasing chronic disease worldwide has meant new challenges for the health sector, that is, a need for long-term care in times of h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e h u n t e r a n d f r a n k e n 39 limited public health resourcing in developed as well as developing countries. in the words of a recent united nations report: while non-communicable diseases have traditionally afflicted mostly high income populations, current evidence shows that the spread of such diseases is associated with increasing levels of development. death and disease from non-communicable diseases now outstrip communicable diseases in every region except africa, where the rate of such diseases is quickly rising. by 2030, non-communicable diseases are projected to cause nearly five times as many deaths as communicable diseases worldwide, including in lowand middle-income countries. (secretary general, 2011:2). in effect, the un statement throws the issue into relief. while this situation implies on-going health care needs and calls for greater urgency, the prevailing orthodoxy of individual health literacy as reading skills alone cannot stand as a discrete component of what is a complex, multifaceted problem. what is the role of literacy educators? one important initiative is for literacy and numeracy educators to work together with the health sector to develop and deliver health literacy resources and programmes, like the current health literacy project and like the work begun in australia, canada and the us (black, innes and chopra 2008, neilson-bohlman, pnazar and kindig 2004, the centre for literacy nd). such work would build on the international development in vocational and workplace literacy pedagogy of embedding, or integration of literacy teaching with vocational education, based on the understanding that literacy is best learned in the context of use (casey et al 2006, sefton, waterhouse and deakin 1994). casey et al’s (2006) research at the nrdc in london showed that jointly-planned team teaching between literacy and numeracy educators and vocational educators had the best results for learners, for it drew optimally on the expertise of each sector. implementation of such approaches is not necessarily straightforward, however. for example, anecdotal evidence from new zealand suggests that much literacy embedding in joint vocational/literacy teaching practice is operationalised simply as decoding key texts with an emphasis on specialised vocabulary. black and yasukawa (2011) report similar findings in their study of australian vocational education courses. what is critically important in the context of healthcare is the recognition of the need for expert knowledge. and this demands a true partnership with literacy experts and those from the field of medicine. this has to date not been an unproblematic connection. another important approach, which would circumvent the deficit image of patients, is to support patients as agents in their health care. this means more than the ask me 3 campaign (1. what is my main problem? �2. h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e 40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s what do i need to do? � 3. why is it important for me to do this?) conducted by the american national patient safety foundation (nd). while the programme encourages patients to ask questions of their physicians, it still constructs them as people who above all need to be compliant to doctors. moreover, zarcadoolas (2010) points out that teaching low literacy patients to ‘parrot’ simple questions is unlikely to improve treatment compliance or doctors’ clear communication, and it may perpetuate stereotypes about those with low literacy. patient agency, rather, would involve knowledge and strategies for navigating the health care system, for critically analysing health texts, and for taking the initiative in identifying and engaging support networks. these measures do not imply a confrontational approach. rather, they aim to support patients as owners of their health, who have the capability to search out information as they need it, make informed decisions and enlist the expertise of the health sector. in the spirit of critical discourse analysis, critical analysis of health texts, for literacy practitioners, document designers, and for patients, involves understanding the underlying identities and ideologies constructed by the texts, so that patients do not need to internalise their marginalisation as normal. health literacy could easily develop along a path that not only constructs marginalised people as deficient literacy learners but as patients responsible for their own poor health. patients deserve to be treated as worthy agents facing a complex social system, new knowledge, the imposition of new life styles, and new demands on resources. the challenge for 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lindsay, harper, teresa, hutchins, tracy (2008) writing health information for patients and families, 3rd ed , hamilton health sciences, hamilton, canada, retrieved 15 february 2011 from www.hamiltonhealthsciences.ca zarcadoolas, christina (2010) ask me 3 fails to live up to its billing, retrieved 10 october 2011 from http://publichealthliteracy.blogspot.com/2010/03/ask-me-3-fails-tolive-up-to-its.html acknowledgments this project was funded by the midlands health network through a research project with the university of waikato. the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the midlands health network. h e a l t h l i t e r a c y a s a c o m p l e x p r a c t i c e 44 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s endnote i the term constituents has been used to refer to structural elements in genre analysis (paltridge 1995, ventola 1987); or in the analysis of text types (johns & davies 1983). microsoft word 0712lns152batt.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 2 2 0 0 7 39 keeping up with princess diana in the late 90s: a story of denied literacy in remote central australian indigenous communities melodie bat introduction this paper has a purpose and that purpose is to tell a story. an important story. a story that will sadden you and perhaps give rise to dismay. but it’s not a story about a princess. this story takes place, not in the glitz and glamour of europe with fast cars, great shopping and an avid and enthusiastic paparazzi, but rather in the desert of central australia where you need a good four-wheel drive to get home on the dusty roads, where shopping is limited to the basics at the local store, but where people are still avidly following the life and times of the ‘princess of our hearts’. this paper will tell this story and for many reading this, the story will be enough, for much of what i will say is self-evident, so much so that it seems almost ludicrous to have to analyse the impact of the events i will describe. however, in the interests of academic analysis and to further understand and appreciate the impact of these events, i will firstly frame the context of emergent literacy, give the background to the story and detail the findings of some research which i undertook within this community. finally, i present the broader implications of these findings and make some recommendations. the story in a small, one-store community, three hours drive from alice springs, two women went to visit the local store. one woman was a member of the school teaching staff and the other was a project officer working for the local education department. the first woman was a local indigenous woman (sally) who was born and raised in the community and who was at that time studying to become a teacher. the other woman was a non-indigenous visiting adviser to the school (the author). these two educators had been working together with mums and little kids exploring ways to make connections between home and school. we went to the store with the best of intentions and with a small request really – to ask the store to sell reading and writing materials. at that time, the only places in the community where you could access reading and k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a 40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s writing materials were at the school, the clinic and the local council office – all government-run agencies where equipment ‘belonged’ to that agency. the only place to buy your child a reading book, a colouring-in book, a pencil, was a 250 kilometre drive away. the community store manager, who was a non-local non-indigenous man employed by the community-run store committee, was very keen to support the children by giving us $1000 for the project officer to buy books, pencils and other materials from alice springs. then the store would add the usual mark-up and sell them. this was great. we were running the project on very limited money – and anyway, we had talked together about shifting literacy to home rather than it ‘belonging’ to the government. his enthusiastic response was really heartening and we were very happy. but only for a moment. because the next thing he said was that we were not to buy newspapers or magazines because, ‘nobody in this community reads’. and he was very adamant about this. we couldn’t get him to change his mind. sally was very upset by this. as a matter of fact, she and a number of other community members were undertaking further study and training and we knew that community members were literate and interested in current events. one of the things she and i had talked about was the ‘princess diana’ phenomenon and how everyone wanted to know all about this princess. magazines featuring her were very popular at that time and were passed around the community. we did not stay around to further argue the point as we had no authority to change the decision. just by chance, that storekeeper went on leave and so i added newspapers and magazines to the shopping list. i kept a database of everything i had bought and updated it after each visit to the community. the relieving storekeepers were very keen to be of help and placed a lesser mark-up on the materials to make them more affordable. some books and textas sold, with the more expensive children’s books being bought by a family from a different community who were passing through. the highest selling items were the magazines and newspapers. in fact, the relieving storekeepers could not keep up with the supply. we had proved that the adults in the community wanted to read for pleasure and information (including information about princesses). not that we felt we had to prove this to anyone, but we did feel vindicated by this result. surely, we thought, now the store will have to keep selling newspapers and magazines. however, when the usual storekeeper returned from holidays this supply stopped. ‘not enough profit in it’, he said. k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a b a t 41 the context for the project literacy levels in the northern territory there is strong evidence that australian indigenous students, especially remote area students in the northern territory, are not achieving very high literacy levels. at the time of the project, in 1998 in the northern territory, out of all the non-urban, indigenous esl students, only two percent achieved the national reading benchmark in year three and three percent in year five (northern territory department of education 1999). while there is criticism of the mechanism used to collect this data and participation rates of non-urban indigenous students are lower than for any other sector, these results are still astonishing. there is a growing body of research into this situation and various government policies, frameworks and projects have been developed to address this problem. in the search for answers there has been much discussion and many explanations offered. most of the work is done by the system, within the system and so, many of the children in remote central australia only begin to access interventionist programs when they begin school and many of these programs focus only on ‘book literacy’ with little or no connection to the home literacy that children have already developed. defining terms what does the process of learning to be literate look like? i have used some terms in this paper with some quite defined meanings for this context: emergent literacy refers to behaviours observed in young children who are still ‘playing to learn’ either at home or at preschool and are typically aged from birth to five-years-old (barratt-pugh and rohl 2000); early literacy refers to a child’s literacy development when the formal teaching of literacy begins – at school (hill, comber, louden, rivalland and reid vol 2 1998); family literacy refers to literacy at home and is the child’s first experience of this world. in this context, in a remote indigenous australian community, family means more than just one’s immediate family. rather, it includes the whole community as an extended family connected through kinship, relationship and obligation; k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a 42 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s school literacy in aboriginal communities takes on an extended meaning from the ‘mainstream’. here, the very idea of literacy belongs to the school and this is where you ‘catch it’. it is important to define what emergent literacy behaviours might look like in this particular sociocultural, linguistic and pedagogical context. dunn (1999) provides us with work in this field, having researched the development of emergent literacy behaviours in indigenous australian children, albeit in an urban setting. she identifies six broad areas of emergent literacy and presents assessment tools to support the gathering of data. dunn’s work seeks to define the elements of emergent literacy in order to be able to both research development and to strengthen teaching practice. 1. oral language competence 2. story knowledge 3. book handling knowledge 4. print knowledge 5. book reading knowledge 6. writing knowledge. (dunn 1999:50) language and literacy practices the first element in the development of emergent literacy is oral language competence. you need to be able to speak a language before you can read and write it. durre (1985:18) asserts ‘it cannot be assumed that children from non-literate societies will automatically make the leap from oral language to written language. this is important, because durre is talking about the development of literacy, rather than the development of emergent literacy behaviours. this distinction becomes important at a later point. durre also makes the point that children need exposure to literature and a literacy-based environment before formally learning to read. interestingly, both durre (1985) and dunn (1997) rely on a values-based analysis rather than that of access. the research presented here will clearly show that there is a more fundamental issue here of resource and knowledge. children need books to become literate. the benefits and advantages of coming from a literate home life are widely acknowledged (dunn 1997, 1999, reid 1997, hill, comber, louden, rivalland and reid 1998). ‘it is clear that, no matter what the culture, those children with experience of k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a b a t 43 books, stories and writing before they go to school, have less trouble learning to be literate than those who do not have that experience’ (dunn 1999:62). for some indigenous children these books are not written in their first language. in fact, their first language may not be a written language and they may not learn to speak the language of the books until they start school. further, in many remote communities, school may be the only place where english is used regularly. even then, aboriginal children are likely to use their first language when communicating or playing with each other. where children do not have access to books at home before they start school and do not develop emergent literacy behaviours, the school then works to ‘bridge the gap’. whilst there is much that can be written here about bilingual education and the efforts that schools make in this area, this paper is about ensuring that there is no ‘gap’, thus minimising the need for interventionist strategies. there are other factors that may impact on the strength of this connection to literacy. dunn’s (1997) research identifies a significant link between literacy competencies at the end of the pre-school year and four years later. in searching for possible determinants of this, dunn suggests that it is parental values in relation to literacy that make the difference. she states that: ‘aspects of parental values included modelling of positive values in relation to literacy activity, the amount of literacy knowledge that children arrived at school with and parental involvement in school’ (1997: 245). this then shifts the discussion away from the mechanics of reading, away from the pedagogical classroom considerations and moves the discussion back to the family. in a 1997 position paper prepared by the curriculum development unit, institute for aboriginal development (iad), the rationale behind the iad adult vernacular literacy program and its benefits are discussed. another benefit of adult vernacular literacy in the community will be the expanded awareness of the importance of family literacy practices instead of seeing literacy as a skill acquired only in a classroom. indigenous adults will become more aware of the importance of home literacy practices, leading to a recognition that successful literacy acquisition in later years is highly dependent on early childhood practices such as bedtime story reading, language games and modelling of reading/ writing behaviour. (institute for aboriginal development 1997: 3-4) a child’s literacy life should ideally begin at home, before school commences. current classroom practices tend to be based on the k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a 44 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s presumption that children who are learning to read are coming from a home life where they have had early exposure to literacy (hill, comber, louden, rivalland and reid vol 2 1998). not only do we expect that children will have had bedtime stories but that children will have observed their families reading and writing in many different situations and for many different purposes – and have been part of this ‘literate world’ from birth. the project overview this research was conducted over a two year period, commencing in 1998, in three different remote indigenous communities in central australia. the connections and disconnections between home and school were studied with a view to looking for solutions and strategies to meet the needs of communities where literacy levels were low and falling (bat 2003). this research project focused on before school activities and learning in order to map and detail the knowledge and skills that the children and families need to make an effective transition to school. it explored the literacy lives and learning of twenty-three children and twenty-six family members from three communities over a period of two years. this research reported on the establishment and sustainability of playgroup programs; on supporting literacy development at a community, family and individual level; on the issue of transition to school; and on the methods and strategies for assessment of literacy in this context. methodology the project officer (myself) was the central researcher. the research methodology itself evolved alongside the programs and with my own growing understandings. certain elements were there as intentions, but their specifics could not be determined without first beginning the research. for example, it was my intention to assess the children for ‘readiness for school’ type behaviour and for literacy behaviours. just what that would look like and the process of developing some sort of useful tool was in itself part of the research. various data collection techniques were employed. these include the following: • participant observation • interviews • careful listening to what family members and others were saying • trialling assessment techniques • observing children’s responses and recording through: – photographic records k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a b a t 45 – videos – samples of work – diary notes • playgroup planning, evaluation and reporting. an action research method was integrated into the literacy project in an ongoing way entailing detailed documentation of what was being observed and of my thoughts about the effectiveness of the strategies being employed in the literacy project. in order to validate that my observations were valid, i would consult with parents and colleagues. these consultations added to my own critical reflections and served to refocus the research. obviously, one of the critical events that stimulated reflection in this research project was the story of the storekeeper at community b. the community the community has a population of approximately 250 people and is 250 kilometers from alice springs. the local indigenous language, anmattyere, is predominately the first language of the children, with a small amount of english being learned by the children before they start school. the major instruction in english occurs in school. services in the community are the local council, a health centre, a school catering for primary and secondary children, a store and a women’s centre. at the time of the study, the community had a cdep (community development and employment program) scheme. during the project, a program catering to children under the age of five was established in the school. at the time, the school did not have an official preschool program or facilities. there was no childcare service in the community. this community was established to house indigenous people who had primarily been working on cattle stations after losing their land to pastoralists. there is still a strong ‘cattle station’ bank of knowledge in the community and the community run their own cattle. it is always exciting when the community gets the helicopter in to do some mustering before selling off a few head. the community is a cohesive unit of extended families and although there is often social disruption it is generally a peaceful and protective place to live. there are however regular occasions when alcohol is brought into the community and there will be a few days of fighting when the clinic will be run ragged with tending to injuries and evacuations of the more seriously injured. k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a 46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s fig 1: the northern territory and the research site this community was established to house indigenous people who had primarily been working on cattle stations after losing their land to pastoralists. there is still a strong ‘cattle station’ bank of knowledge in the community and the community run their own cattle. it is always exciting when the community gets the helicopter in to do some mustering before selling off a few head. the community is a cohesive unit of extended families and although there is often social disruption it is generally a peaceful and protective place to live. there are however regular occasions when alcohol is brought into the community and there will be a few days of fighting when the clinic will be run ragged with tending to injuries and evacuations of the more seriously injured. k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a b a t 47 the project families the participants from community b were mostly women and children. only once did one of the fathers come to playgroup and that was when we held it ‘out bush’ for the day. photographic records show him reading, drawing and writing with the children watching. most of the women had very few literacy skills and at first were embarrassed about this and reluctant to do any writing or reading at all in front of me. over time this changed and everyone enjoyed writing stories to make our books. all the women spoke english very well and some of the women were undertaking tertiary study. participating children there were seven children who participated in this project – two girls under two; three girls and one boy aged between two and three and one boy aged between three and four. there were some other little children living in the community who did not participate in this research but who did participate in the playgroups and in the preschool program when it began at the school. an important characteristic of each child in terms of the research findings was the language/s spoken in the home of that child. this was quite an interesting question to ask the families because it raised the question of definition of ‘speaking a language’. in every case, when enrolling a child in the program, when i asked the question ‘what languages do you speak at home?’ i was asked to clarify the question. in the participant communities there was a very complex linguistic environment within each family and within each house. it was possible to understand a language without speaking it. this was usually the case with a language of one parent who had come into the community from another language group. the children could understand their parent but did not speak their language. in other cases, the children were learning to speak all the languages present in the home. the information gathered and presented in table 1 represents the languages that the child could hear in the home and records those languages the child was learning to speak. it does not represent the full linguistic diversity surrounding the children. where the answer was qualified with ‘some’ as in ‘some pitjantjatjara’ or ‘some english’ i have taken this as a yes and included it in the data. k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s language monolingual speaker bilingual speaker trilingual speaker western aranda 0 0 0 pitjantjatjara 0 0 0 english 0 2* 0 central/eastern arrernte 0 0 0 anmattyere 2 5*~ 0 warlpiri 0 3~ 0 subtotals 2 5 0 *same 2 speakers; ~ same 3 speakers table 1: languages the children were learning to speak project implementation the literacy project was conducted through the local school. one of the women working at the school, sally, was released from her classroom duties to participate in the playgroups. from the beginning, she and i ran playgroups together, with sally providing contact with the mothers while i took on more of a trainer role. a typical ‘playgroup’ evolved to consist of a fairly standard routine, which was followed for all playgroups at all sites. we found it to be the easiest way to be able to both maintain a consistent routine for the children as well as to allow the flexibility of being able to run a playgroup anywhere. the ‘tarp’ was a fundamental resource of this project. i used a big round canvas tarpaulin, specially made from swag tarp, to define our playgroup space. sitting on the mat was something that the schools were expecting the children to be able to do when they started and so it was something that we could teach the children. using this tarp allowed us to be able to define our playgroup space no matter our location. in discussion with some mothers and with another teacher, i found that some mothers use a blanket in the same way – to make a ‘kitchen table’ on the floor/ground and use this as a way to encourage their children to sit on the blanket to eat meals. this tarp also gave us the flexibility to be able to hold a playgroup anywhere – from a more formal school setting to a creek bed. the tarp itself gave the children the connection into the specific learning situation. k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a b a t 49 literacy artefacts in the community in order to assess what reading materials existed in the community, i looked for what literature was available for the adults to read, and what writing the children were observing the adults doing. this was a topic that i would bring up in discussion time during playgroups. i found that a lot of people, especially those aged over about thirty or so, were reading anything they could find but that younger people were not reading much at all, other than official paperwork. it was my observation that there was not much reading material available anywhere. the community that is being used a case study for this paper, did not have a local library that people used and the shop did not sell magazines or newspapers. i also looked for whether the children had any role models for writing. were the adults writing where the children could see? during the two years of my visits to the families and the community. i observed that all reading and writing practices were in english. i observed no writing in the community other than that done at the office, the health centre and the school. i know, from talking with other families, that there is writing in the community, but in other families. there are adults doing tertiary studies in the community – however, all their assignment work is usually done off-community. in view of these observations, and through discussion with the women, we decided to try and do something about this situation. one strategy i employed was simply to give the families story books to read with the children. some of these books were donated, some bought, some we made. none of the bought, published books survived for more than the week between visits and i never saw any books that the families had bought themselves. the books that lasted were the ones we made that had photographs of the families and were laminated and heavy duty stapled. at the end of the project, sally commented to me in discussions over the content of the project’s final report, that they had one book in their house, ‘making damper’, made during the project. her daughter was coming home from school frequently and asking for that book to be read to her. sally said that she had to ‘hide’ the book away so that it didn’t get taken and lost. this came after 18 months of the ‘targeting early literacy – family and school’ project running in the community. this project was targeted at supporting families to develop their own family literacy rather than having them rely on someone from outside the community to bring in the materials. to investigate the issue of community demand i instigated a trial with the local store with the aim of perhaps initiating a change at a community level rather than on an individual family level. this issue was discussed during playgroup times and then discussed in greater depth between sally and myself, with the results as depicted in the opening story. k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a 50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s findings and discussion frameworks for understanding in order to fully appreciate the impact of this one decision made by this one store person, i would like for a moment to travel to europe and consider a model of capitals and capabilities proposed by schuller, bynner and feinstein (2004) in a paper developed by the centre for research in the wider benefits of learning. very briefly, their model is that there is interconnectedness between the more traditional economic notion of capital and the more recent notion of capability in terms of returns to learning. if capital is based on the development of assets, (social, cultural and psychological as well as financial and human) and capability is the potential that individuals may possess to do or to be, then the interconnectedness can be explored on a an individual and community level. schuller et al represent this interplay using the following diagram, figure 1 below, (2004:4). schuller et al use the concept of social exclusion or integration to expand their model, and cite sen, who argues that ‘variation in these capabilities is the underlying cause of inequity’ (sen, cited in schuller, bynner and feinstein 2004: 3). the authors further represent the process of social exclusion or integration through the diagram, figure 3 below, (schuller, bynner and feinstein 2004:7). what these two diagrams give us is a framework to understand the wider implications of the delayed or non-development of emergent literacy skills of the children in this case study. a lack of education resources and social services, combined with all the other factors listed, will present obstacles to the development of capability, which will then impact on social integration, which further impacts on the development of individual and community human capital. three findings from the family literacy project each of these findings is considered in turn and discussed in relation to the two models presented. finding 1: remote indigenous people in central australia read for pleasure and are interested in the current events of the day my diary notes taken throughout this research project show a clear and consistent record of the indigenous people in community b reading for pleasure and discussing what they are reading. sometimes this was gossip from magazines, at other times this included political discussions that were national as well as local in nature. in the light of the reaction of the store k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a b a t 51 manager, i felt that it was important to note this in order to have data to counteract any generalization about the literacy interests of the community. figure 2: capitals and capabilities as returns to learning in reference to figure 2, the people in this community had a selfconcept that included themselves as readers and as part of the wider world. there was evidence of enjoyment in reading; their connections as a family were strong; they had developed attitudes and values around reading. what was impacting on the development of the human capital in the community in respect to literacy, was the development of skills, knowledge and qualifications. following on with the second model mapped in figure 3, it is the provision of services that are impacting on capability, which then creates social exclusion. social capital human capital selfconcept plans/goals enjoyment motivation to learn skills knowledge qualifications family health attitudes & values friends / networks civic participation identity capital k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a 52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s figure 2: process of social exclusion or integration finding 2: even though the only books were written in english which was not a first language for them, the children still developed emergent literacy behaviours while it may seem obvious that the children will develop emergent literacy behaviours simply by being given books, there has been limited research to date in bilingual situations where the home language is not a written language. such is the situation here. this means that, whilst it is preferable for the children to have literacy material in their home language, the lack of such materials will not inhibit the development of emergent literacy. it has beenn shown that those books made at playgroup, recounting real experiences and using photographs of family, were valued most in the home. thus, when the service is provided, the children will begin their literacy life journey. they are beginning to develop capability which can translate into capital and therefore a stronger community. provision of services education social services housing transport health process of social exclusion or integration c a p a b i l i t y material factors family poverty geographical location family factors parents’ education parental interest and support social class individual aptitudes/motivation gender access to or obstacles for participation and progression occupation income family life housing health community k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a b a t 53 finding 3: family literacy in this community is effectively being controlled through the bureaucratic power structures that are in place the only observed literacy materials available in this community are owned and controlled by government-run agencies. forms are filled out in the council office; you can read books in the waiting room at the health centre, and fill in more forms; the children are learning to read and write at school. individual and family access to, and interaction with literacy, is controlled by those agencies and the individuals who are in the positions of management or control. the nurse at the health centre puts books in the waiting room for people to read – she controls the books. writing is something that is done only for official business. the school controls the learning. even the books given out or made during this research project came from a school-run project. the obstacle created by the withholding of education services in the community will engender social exclusion that impacts much more broadly than a lower literacy rate. while this is perhaps a self-evident truth, it is worthwhile to have it mapped in this way to facilitate the discussion and emphasise the wider implications of the development of literacy by the children. what the authors of this model exhort us to remember is that this is a complex interplay and it is not enough to consider early intervention strategies in isolation from whole community responses. poor early educational achievement, reflecting a depleted base for human capital has a strongly cumulative effect. major efforts should be made to redress initial inequalities, but these are bound to be limited in impact if they are only applied to the initial phase of the lifecourse. this is one of the fundamental weaknesses of educational policy, which focuses too narrowly on initial achievement. (schuller, bynner and feinstein 2004:21) implications and conclusion it’s not enough to say ‘we’ll catch them up when they start school’ because this interventionist approach is an isolated approach that will have little impact on the broader issue at hand, that of community development. initiatives planned for early literacy intervention must include a broader community approach that ensures there is access to services for everyone. more than this, the control of these services needs to be shifted out of the hands of the bureaucracy and into the hands of the family. even with good literacy programs running in the schools, there will be limited social and community development without whole community control of literacy. k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a 54 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in this paper i have told just one story from the desert. there are many more that can be told, if we are prepared to listen. other possibilities for further research include identifying the capacity and capability within the community surrounding power structures. just why didn’t the community management committee that oversees the store intervene with the employed manager of the store and ensure that there were books, newspapers and magazines for sale? i have written this paper in order to tell this one story. in this paper, there has been talk of princesses and tarps. in some ways it’s all a bit exotic – and as long as you don’t live in this reality, there is always the risk that the telling of stories like this one will be just that, an exotic tale from a far-off place. i ask you to take a moment to think of the implications of this story and, if you should ever be in a position to bring about the kind of change required, to remember this story and give the literacy back to the community – princesses and all. references barratt-pugh, kaylene and rohl, mary (2000) literacy learning in the early years, allen & unwin, crows nest, nsw. bat, melodie (2003) a tarp, a troopie and a teddy bear: fostering early literacy practices in targeted remote aboriginal communities in central australia, unpublished thesis, charles darwin university. christie, michael (1989) literacy, genocide and the media, the aboriginal child at school, vol 17, no 9, pp 44-47. dunn, myra (1997) learning to be literate, unpublished thesis, university of new england. dunn, myra (1999) tracking literacy development in an aboriginal community: summary of a research project, the australian journal of language and literacy, vol 22, no 2, pp 103-119. durre, a (1985) what to do before the formal teaching of reading begins, the aboriginal child at school, vol 13, no 1, pp 18-30. hill, susan, comber, barbara, louden, william, rivalland, judith and reid, joanne (1998) 100 children go to school – connections and disconnections in literacy development in the year prior to school and the first year of school, three volumes, department of employment, education, training and youth affairs, canberra. institute for aboriginal development (1997) english and vernacular literacy in central australia, a discussion paper presented by the curriculum development unit, institute for aboriginal development, october. mcnaughton, stuart (2002) meeting of minds, learning media, new zealand. k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a b a t 55 nicholls, christine and harris, stephen (1996) learning to read using the lap method, education australia, no 33, pp 31-33. northern territory department of education (1999) learning lessons: an independent review of indigenous education in the northern territory, northern territory government, darwin. northern territory department of employment, education and training (2006) indigenous languages and culture in northern territory schools 2004 – 2005, northern territory government, darwin. reid, lyon (1997) statement before the committee on education and the workforce, united states house of representatives, child development and behaviour branch, national institute of child health and human development, thursday july 10. schuller tom, bynner, john and feinstein, leon (2004) capitals and capabilities, centre for research on the wider benefits of learning, retrieved on 17 august 2007 from www.learningbenefits.net walton, christine (1987) learning to write: a case study, the aboriginal child at school, vol 15, no 5, pp 3-32. wiersma, william (1995) research methods in education, 6th edition, allyn & bacon, boston. k e e p i n g u p w i t h p r i n c e s s d i a n a 56 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word 0712lns152taylor.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 2 2 0 0 7 57 understanding collaborative teaching and learning in adult literacy: practices in canada and the united kingdom maurice taylor, karen evans and ali abasi abstract the purpose of this study was to investigate how adult students learn collaboratively with other peers in both formal and non-formal adult literacy programs and what teaching styles best support this learning. a multi-site case study research design was used involving several different literacy organizations in eastern ontario, canada, and in central london, united kingdom. findings suggest that collaborative learning is the cement that bonds the various building blocks in a community of literacy practice across small, large and tutorial types of programs. central in this framework is the component called the instructor’s philosophy and teaching perspective which helps explain the teaching and learning transactions. introduction increased demands for information-based economies and societies in developed countries have put the spotlight on those adults who are lacking literacy skills. although adult literacy statistics vary from country to country, it is quite clear that there are more people living today with low literacy skills than there were a decade ago (statistics canada 2005). both canada and the united kingdom share similar literacy challenges, policy initiatives and program delivery systems. as well, at the national government policy level, adult literacy is presently occupying public interest in both countries. it was this background that fueled the need to investigate the major components of the teaching and learning transaction across diverse types of adult literacy programs in selected regions of ontario and in central london, united kingdom. the key questions for the study were: 1) how do adult students use collaborative learning with other peers in a wide range of adult literacy provisions? and 2) what teaching styles best support collaborative learning practices among adult students? the theoretical framework for the study is grounded in two literatures. the first part of the framework is nested in a socio-cultural approach which posits that learning is shaped by the context, culture and tools in the learning situation (o’connor 1998, vygotsky 1999, barton, hamilton and ivanic 2000, hurby 2001, maloch 2002). this work on c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g 58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s human cognition attributes all human higher mental functioning, including literacy, to semiotically mediated social interactions of the individual with more knowledgeable peers. in a literacy context, such a process of learning foregrounds collaboration among learners with different literacy skills. although these socio-cultural frameworks have been widely used in framing school-based pedagogy, only recently have they helped explain adult education practices and in particular adult literacy learning. for example, taylor, king, pinsent-johnson and lothian (2003) found that adult literacy students act as scaffold builders with other peers in formal literacy programs. they found that social learning behaviours, negotiation and feedback behaviours, central to the notion of collaborative learning among adult peers, were important literacy practices. the authors go on to suggest that with such empirical evidence, it seems likely that learning concepts like cognitive apprenticeships, communities of practice and social literacy may further explain adult literacy learning in different types of programs (rogoff 1995, taylor and blunt 2001, wenger, mcdermott and snyder 2002). the second part of the framework for this paper draws from the literature on teaching styles and is grounded in the domain of teaching philosophy and the roles of instructors in adult education. galbraith (2004) states that becoming an effective teacher of adults depends on acquiring a balance between an appropriate philosophical vision of teaching and the understanding and implementation of that vision into a practical instructional process. in a similar vein, zinn (2004) maintains that every teacher, when working with adults, has a philosophical orientation and a preferred teaching style, although at times it may be difficult to identify. pratt (2002) has added a further dimension with respect to why teachers work as they do. he says that teachers come to their practice with a set of values, a perspective, interrelated beliefs and intentions which give meaning and justification to their actions. pratt identifies five distinct teaching perspectives: transmission, which focuses on delivering content; apprenticeship, which models ways of working; developmental agendas, which cultivate ways of thinking; nurturing, which facilitates personal agency, and social reform, which seeks to create a better society. some early evidence now exists in adult basic education where researchers found that teachers who support a collaborative learning style in literacy environments had specific assumptions concerning the makeup of knowledge, the purpose of curriculum, the role of the teacher and the role of the learner (taylor, abasi, pinsent-johnson and evans 2007). methodology the methodology for this investigation used a mixed research design employing both qualitative and quantitative strategies with a range of data collection methods and data analysis techniques. eight different types of c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g t a y l o r , e v a n s a n d a b a s i 59 adult literacy programs were chosen. five programs were chosen in eastern ontario, canada and three workplace basic skills programs in public sector organizations were chosen in central london, united kingdom. program sites and delivery models included multi-level literacy classrooms, same level literacy classrooms, small literacy group with volunteers, tutorial with volunteers and multi-level classroom with prescribed curriculum. data was collected in two four-month periods over two years. five data sources in both countries were used to answer the first research question: how do adult students use collaborative learning with other peers in a wide range of adult literacy provisions? these sources included participant observations, semi-structured interviews with learners and instructors, focus groups with learners, and documents from each program site. for the canadian data collection, a video recording was made during the participant observations for each site. this recording included approximately one hour of collaborative learning interactions among students and teachers. during the interview process, the video clips were used to probe deeper into the dynamics of the learning process. three data sources were used to answer the second research question: what teaching styles best support collaborative learning among adult students? the sources included the administration of the teaching perspectives inventory, semi-structured interviews with instructors and documents. for the qualitative strategies, the data sources were transformed into research narratives, member checked and subjected to analysis using techniques such as constant comparative (merriam 2002). for quantitative strategies, teaching perspectives inventory (tpi) profile scores and biographical variables were subjected to various statistical techniques such as one-way analysis of variance, discriminant analysis and multiple regression. based on the data sets from both countries, an integrated collaborative model was constructed, presented in diagrammatic form as figure 1 below. interpretation of model this collaborative teaching and learning model, as presented in figure 1, reflects a number of literacy practices that are embedded in a specific cultural context and mediated by the personal circumstances of both the learners and the instructors. in other words, each learning situation is unique but has certain common elements that are fluid and are in constant motion. these common elements, identified in the model, will be discussed individually. c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s figure 1: collaborative teaching and learning model in adult literacy instructor’s philosophy and teaching perspective a central component in the model that helps explain the collaborative teaching and learning transaction is called the instructor’s philosophy and teaching perspective. it encompasses the instructor’s philosophical orientation towards adult education and the values, intentions and actions of the instructor. instructors have certain conceptions of their roles, the nature of learning and ideas about how student learning can be supported. to understand what teaching philosophies (pratt 2002, zinn 2004) provide the best environment for a collaborative community of learners, there was a need to explore the participating instructors’ philosophies of teaching to see if their beliefs, intentions, and practices have any bearing on their approach to teaching. for this purpose, a collaborativity index with three levels of high, medium and low was developed (see taylor, evans and abasi 2006). developing learning independence & autonomy phases of cognitive apprenticeship teaching & learning strategies that favour collaboration awareness of group support social learning behaviours collaborative learning set-up instructor’s philosophy and teaching perspective d ev el op m en ta l n ur tu rin g/ a pp re nt ic es hi p c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g t a y l o r , e v a n s a n d a b a s i 61 subsequently, anovas were conducted with the three levels of the collaborativity index, the five teaching perspectives (tpi), and other variables such as instructors’ gender and type of literacy delivery context (formal or non-formal), to capture the interactions among all of the variables. results indicated, for example, that differences in tpi scores suggest differences in collaborativity: most so in terms of developmental (f = 10.380, df 2,56, p. 000) but also in terms of nurturing (f = 4.248, df 2,56, p. 019) and apprenticeship (f = 3,510, df 2,56, p. 037). this suggests that those literacy instructors who had high collaborativity indices also scored higher on the developmental perspective. what this means is that those instructors whose dominant approach to teaching was developmental, and to a lesser extent nurturing, tended to follow a collaborative approach. in other words, those instructors who tended to take into account learners’ experiences and their ways of understanding and who viewed their role as facilitator of learners’ independent meaning-making tended to utilise a collaborative style of teaching. this finding is further supported by the in-depth interviews with the instructors. for example, one instructor with a high score on the developmental perspective of the tpi as well as the collaborativity index, described how she encouraged new ways of thinking through problems in her small group by saying ‘[my teaching] is a process of taking them out, you know, allow them to make mistakes because that’s part of learning.’ furthermore, the developmental perspective appears to be the teaching philosophy that provides the necessary context for learners to work and learn collaboratively. for instance, one key feature of the developmental perspective is the use of the constructivist approach. one instructor who favoured this style described it this way: i feel i’m very student-centred. that’s the way i like to operate my class. i mean of course there's some direct teaching involved. i always leave a lot of flexibility to address anything coming from my students: extra time, a new concept, extra practice, questions, that sort of thing. i take my cues from them. i have lots of group discussions. i always ask for opinions from the students. qualitative observations from the uk data have highlighted some interesting differences in the tp1 profiles that may also merit further investigation. the tutors in the london sample were all work-based instructors supporting literacy learning in workplaces. in such programs, the complexities of scheduling classes around work patterns, different work sites and personal commitments means that breaking down classes into levels of ability is rarely feasible. tutors were well aware of the varying levels of ability of learners in their groups and skilfully used this knowledge to c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g 62 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s facilitate learning to promote a collaborative approach. the london tutors engaged in collaborative practice shared a dominant nurturing profile on the tpi, and a belief in building trust and confidence amongst learners to create a climate conducive to learning. while nurturing was dominant, the profiles were relatively flat, with significant scores in all other categories except social reform. the more mixed profiles may be explained by the effects on practice of workplace cultures and constraints, together with the more structured, mandatory literacy curriculum frameworks in which uk literacy tutors have to work. these combine to influence tutor’s beliefs, intentions and scope for action in complex ways. as one tutor explained: i think that the tutor should be clear about the purpose of both the lesson and the tasks. i try to build up positive experiences in reading, writing and oral skills and create a safe environment to ask questions. i take them through an ordered structured path. based on both canadian and uk data, the instructor’s philosophy and teaching perspective is the cement that bonds the various building blocks in a community of literacy practice across small, large and tutorial types of programs. collaborative learning set-up and social learning practices as an adult student walks into a literacy program, he or she is greeted with a set-up for supportive learning that is often arranged by the instructor. the teacher may decide to pair learners in a one-on-one match or to organise them in small groups. instructors rely on their knowledge of individual learner’s needs, strengths and characteristics to make these decisions. for instance, in one formal literacy program aimed towards employment, the instructor grouped two learners, julia and fatima, based on their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. as the instructor explained: these two ladies … this is their first year as well and they’re very capable, especially julia. she is american-born and english is her first language and she’s very familiar with the recipes. she just stepped into that leadership role right there that we love to see and she’s only been in the program since the middle of september. in another program, the instructors had grouped three students together, jane, paul and mike. the instructor described mike as a new student, and from his intake interview information she had recognised him as a strong reader, while the other two students in the group who had been in the program for three to four months had problems with decoding skills c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g t a y l o r , e v a n s a n d a b a s i 63 which is an integral part of the reading process. she had purposely grouped these three students together, so that mike would be able to coach the other two students when they encountered problems in the reading exercises at the same time, jane and paul could help mike in finding the topic and main idea, and identifying irrelevant sentences from reading passages as he needed practice with these skills deciding who to work with in a supportive environment initiates the social learning behaviour of negotiation, in this small literacy community. negotiation is an important democratic opportunity for adults to accommodate their own interests and goals for participating in such a program. these negotiation practices are often complex and involve evaluation of learners’ own learning needs, their perceptions of the abilities of peers, and decisions about who in the group has common learning goals and common cultural and life experiences. in one formal program, five female learners were working in a small group. as one of the learners pointed out, we are all immigrants and we understand each other; even if you don’t understand the language. immigrants understand themselves. in our group one speaks arabic, one persian, two somalian, one spanish. also we are all moms and have the same problems. we’re all parents with the same needs, same problems, situations you know. given the diversity of learner abilities, these negotiation practices can vary from day to day, and week to week, depending on the group composition and the literacy content. what is important is that these practices help bind individuals together early in the learning process and influence the ongoing nature of the learner-to-teacher interactions and the learner-to-learner interactions. awareness of group support the next component in the model is awareness of group support. literacy learners often bring with them certain beliefs about how they should be taught as well as how they should learn. they frequently see learning as an individual academic activity where the teacher is perceived to be the source of all knowledge. when learners witness the difference between the transmission mode of teaching and a more collaborative class, they initially experience frustration and often resist participating in such learning activities. as one instructor pointed out: students who come to us from very traditional academic environments [expect] there should be a specific exercise and a book that can be evaluated c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g 64 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s and they can understand that and they can relate to it …. they get upset and say they are wasting their time. however, as learners start to experience a sense of community in the group, they gradually get accustomed to this new mode of learning with and through peers. this results in an awareness that this type of learning ‘fits and feels good’. they begin to realize that collaboration with a more knowledgeable peer such as a tutor provides them with continuous individual attention and a common focus. this is especially true for the less capable learners. one learner in a tutorial program compared his previous learning experience with his current one in this way: the teacher concentrates on me and i am able to listen to her. i have never had this back at school. here it’s one-on-one and both are looking at the same paper … [here] i concentrate a lot; i feel very comfortable talking with my tutor. in tandem with this heightened awareness of group support, the students' beliefs about learning begin to shift. they come to realize that collaborative learning environments require a willingness to create positive interpersonal relationships with their peers by sharing their unique reservoir of knowledge. as the community continues to develop into a respectful environment, there is a high tolerance for mistakes where less capable peers feel more comfortable taking risks. one learner summarized his experience in this way: i have learned that i learn a lot better in groups than just doing it individually. if i know the answer is wrong and someone else says, ‘no, it’s the right answer!’, then we kinda work back and forth on it. but i find it … i learn better in groups than individually. it also seems that, with the continuous intake of students across all types of literacy programs, the community of practice notion of newcomers together with old-timers has some fit with collaborative learning. as newcomers enter this novel type of learning environment, ‘old-timers’ take them under their wing and create a safety zone so that they can express the changes they feel about group support. teaching and learning strategies that favour collaboration the next major component in the model consists of the teaching strategies that the instructor draws upon. one key strategy that is often used is the creation of a problem situation in order to raise learners' interests and c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g t a y l o r , e v a n s a n d a b a s i 65 encourage participation and motivation. for example, in another formal literacy program, two instructors brought their large groups together for a problem-solving activity. using a recent government proposal to cut funding for literacy programs, the teaching strategy put the learners in control by having them prioritize solutions in response to the proposal. as one of the instructors remarked: we don't necessarily know what the solution would be. it could be an oral solution, it could be a meeting, or it could be a written solution with petitions. the solution is to be determined by what the students arrived at in collaboration. in both formal and non-formal programs, a common teaching and learning technique was the use of functional literacy content. this consists of identifying real-life activities of direct relevance to a learner or small group. the tutor or instructor then prepares materials based on the level of the learners that focuses on the specific literacy skills that are necessary to learn and practice the new content. teaching in a non-formal program, the tutor explained it this way: while you are doing activities that are practical, within these activities there is a lot of skill development going on. sometimes you have to isolate a skill in order to work on that activity. so for example, in writing a cheque, you need to: understand the form or layout of cheques and why that format is used; to be able to write the date, months of the year, days of the week, number words; write or copy correctly the name of the recipient and be able to write one’s signature. another teaching and learning strategy was the use of computer technology which helped foster motivation. in another tutorial program the tutor and the learner had previously read an article from an online student newspaper about how a designer shoe factory mistreated its workers in an asian country. they had also read a first person account by one of the factory workers about how it was hard to make a living in that country. roger, the learner, had been surprised by the mistreatment and decided to write and type out his response to the story, scaffolded by the tutor. phases of cognitive apprenticeship when working with dyads and small groups, the instructor may utilise a number of teaching phases commonly referred to as cognitive apprenticeship. for example, he or she might model a behaviour or skill for the more capable learners who then coach other peers to perform that same particular literacy skill. the phases of modelling and coaching were quite c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s evident across different types of small group interactions. in one teaching and learning transaction, two female learners, edith and danielle, were working on a newspaper article to answer who, what, where, when and why questions set by the instructor. in her role as the more capable learner, edith was aware of the main goals of the activity, which were to demonstrate to danielle how to analyze the article based on the five questions. edith was careful not to provide the answers for danielle but to model the task and then help danielle do a similar task. she allowed her to problem solve on her own but under her guidance. in edith’s words, ‘i have a good idea of her not copying mine, but doing something in her pages similar to what i have done.’ during the modelling phase, less capable learners primarily watch, listen and closely imitate what the more skilled peers do. in another example, two learners, julia and fatima, were busy making muffins after reading a large print recipe which was hanging from the wall. julia, a more capable learner, was providing assistance to fatima. julia explained what fatima was doing when she was helping her: she was watching. she was paying attention to my instructions and she was listening to what i was saying and then she would follow the steps. in the approximating phase, which is another step in the cognitive apprenticeship model, the less capable peer begins to ask for more information and for clarification in performing the steps of the task. during this phase, the more capable learners encourage and relieve tension when progress is slow. developing learning independence and autonomy in a collaborative learning environment, the roles of both instructor and student gradually change. this change occurs as a student moves from a position of being guided in the learning, to one where he or she experiences some sense of independence and autonomy. during this passage, the instructor moves from transmitting information to facilitating the learning process. when independent learning occurs, engagement in the task is highly concentrated. as students move into this learning mode, they begin to take responsibility for self-monitoring, adjusting plans, selfquestioning and questioning others in the group. this sense of autonomy often leads to a student managing their own learning, reflecting on how they have learned and tapping into a wider range of resources to help achieve a goal. as a result of the collaborative learning environment, adult learners begin to see the connections between the practice of learning new skills in the classroom or group and the practice and use of literacy skills in the c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g t a y l o r , e v a n s a n d a b a s i 67 world outside. when this happens, some students experience an important personal transformation. this transformation results in a changed positive outlook about themselves, an increase in their confidence and improved selfesteem. these shifts in identity also impact how they view others and their success in other life roles. this shift was captured by the statement of one of the learners when she was talking about the changes she experienced through being part of a small group of learners: it helps me learn how to communicate with people… how to be more confident in what i’m doing because if i see that i’m helping someone else then that shows that i’m gonna be able to go into a job situation and i’m not gonna just sit back and be all nervous and scared. additionally, the uk research found that workplace peers can play an important role in helping those who are under-confident, negative, worried or have low self-esteem. also, learners can adapt their behaviour to work collaboratively. peers can play an important role in working with learners who are negative, worried or suffer from low self esteem as in the case of bill. bill was the newest member of the group. he originally came to the computer class and was referred by the tutor because of his dyslexia. he made the least contributions to activities and discussions. when he spoke negatively about collaborative learning, the rest of the group tried to change his mind. david was the most vocal. no, it’s different here. it’s not like school. i left school with nothing, i didn’t even know the alphabet and i’ve learnt everything as an adult. it was frightening at work and i bluffed for years and years. i hated writing when i first came but now it’s ok. the tutor is aware of bill’s abilities and his low confidence and includes him by prefacing some questions with his name. she encourages learning independence by getting the capable peers to answer bill’s questions and then builds on their answers. during one lesson, the tutor gave the learners chopped up words in bundles and they worked together to make compound words. she says ‘i feel that experimenting with different combinations takes the pressure off as they don’t have to actually spell the words themselves’. a learner from another workplace program, pat, thinks that collaborative learning is about being co-operative, working with others, and being open-minded to their suggestions. asked why she thought the tutor encouraged it, she said ‘it’s the right way forward, getting other peoples’ ideas. it builds trust and teamwork and it allows the tutor to get on with other c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s things’. pat said she liked it because she got to know the other members of the class. she felt it built trust and she got other peoples’ ideas and views. she said that it helped her to see there were different ways to do things and that when she said something out loud, it ‘sunk in’. pat felt that if her answer was different from her partner’s, she could step back and have a look at it. the supportive environment of the class enabled pat to build her confidence, reflect on her contributions and work towards becoming an independent learner. implications for adult education practice and theory results of the study provide some new evidence on how adult teaching perspectives and adult learning strategies can form an integrated collaborative framework for improving literacy provisions. for example, findings from both countries have confirmed that collaborative learning practices can help change the viewpoint of learners who have failed or under-achieved in formal education. results indicate that the sense of being able to influence the learning process by their own inputs and actions (‘agency’) through collaborative learning promotes positive experiences that further facilitate their learning. collaborative learning and developmental, nurturing teaching styles appear to build the confidence and the self-esteem needed to enable successful adult learning in community-based and workplace programs. as evans, hodkinson, rainbird and unwin (2006) point out, communities of learners operate within social frameworks. outer frameworks are the external constraints or regulatory frameworks that influence learning, for example, the mandatory curriculum frameworks for literacy in both ontario and the uk. in the workplace context, these outer frameworks involve hierarchies and norms that govern access to learning and participation in particular social practices involving literacy (lankshear 2000). inner social frameworks are the cultures operating in the immediate environment of the program and it is these cultures that are more open to influence and change by the actors involved, and impact on how adults learn collaboratively. a further finding concerns differences between types of adult literacy program milieus – workplaceand community-based. when teaching in the workplace, instructors need to be particularly sensitive to the roles that learners have outside the classroom and appreciate the impact this may have inside the classroom. when a learner has a supervisory or managerial role, it may be difficult for them to have their level of literacy exposed and this may be compounded by asking learners to work collaboratively. where the whole team attended the same class together, learners appeared to be defined by their work role, the class talk revolved around their work outside and, as they were in working hours, the classroom seemed to be an extension of the workplace even though it was held off site. contrastingly, c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g t a y l o r , e v a n s a n d a b a s i 69 classes held on work premises but made up of learners from all areas of the business, seemed to enable people to be less affected by their work roles. as their peers were largely unknown to them, so their behaviour was more akin to that of a regular literacy class. one further implication of this study concerns the theoretical work on teaching philosophies. currently the literature on teaching philosophies and perspectives is silent on the position of a collaborative approach to teaching in adult basic education. we believe this study opens up a discussion on the status of collaborative learning as a strong and viable teaching approach supported by a rigorous research base. the question raised for further exploration in the field is whether this approach to teaching cuts across, for example, pratt’s (2002) five teaching perspectives or whether it can best be conceived of as a distinct philosophy on its own. our findings indicate that while the collaborative approach to teaching shares some of the features of other perspectives such as developmental and nuturing, it can be argued that a collaborative teaching style constitutes a unique philosophy unrecognized as such and that it derives from a broader philosophy of teaching with its unique sets of beliefs, actions, and intensions for instructors. for instance, at the level of beliefs, a collaborative philosophy views learning as inherently social and context specific. at the level of actions, teachers need to identify and match learners with differential abilities in pairs or groups. at the level of intentions, drawing on a sociocultural theory of learning (gee 2000), all knowledge is relational, therefore students need to engage in activities that require them to interact with others. it is through such interaction with others initially more skilled than themselves that they will eventually themselves become knowledgeable peers. acknowledgements the authors would like to acknowledge the valuing literacy in canada funding program through sshrc/nls; the ottawa-carleton catholic school board and trudy lothian; the ottawa-carleton district school board and christine pinsent johnson; the university of ottawa research assistants; the learners and instructors who took time to participate in the study; professor john collins from the university of british columbia who conducted the quantitative analysis; and sue southwood, practitioner fellow from the united kingdom. references barton, d, hamilton, m and ivanic, r (2000) situated literacies, routledge press, london. evans, k, hodkinson, p, rainbird, h and unwin, l (2006) improving workplace learning, routledge press, london. c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g 70 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s galbraith, m, ed (2004) adult learning methods: a guide for effective instruction, kreiger publishing company, malabar, fl. gee, j (2000) the new literacy studies: from socially situated to the work of the social, in barton, d, hamilton, m and ivanic, r, eds, situated literacies, routledge press, london, uk, pp hurby, g (2001) sociological postmodern, and new realism perspectives in social constructionism: implications for literacy research, reading research quarterly, vol 36, no 1, pp 48-62. lankshear, c (2000) getting smart around literacy, in gerber, r and lankshear, c, eds, training for a smart workforce, routledge press, london, uk, pp maloch, b (2002) scaffolding student talk: one teacher’s role in literature discussion groups, reading research quarterly, vol 37, no 1, pp 94-112. merriam, s (2002) qualitative research in practice, jossey-bass, san francisco, ca. o’connor, m (1998) can we trace the efficacy of social constructivism?, review of research in education, vol 23, pp 25-71. pratt, d and associates (2002) five perspectives on teaching in adult and higher education, kreiger publishing company, malabar, fl. rogoff, b (1995) observing sociocultural activity in three planes: participatory appropriation, guided participation and apprenticeship, in wertsch, j, del rio, p and alvarez, a, eds, sociocultural studies of the mind, cambridge university press, cambridge, england. statistics canada (2005) adult literacy and life skills survey: learning and living, statistics canada, ottawa, canada, (catalogue no 89 603 xwe). taylor, m, abasi, a, pinsent-johnson, c and evans, k (2007) collaborative learning as the catalyst in communities of literacy practice, adult basic education and literacy journal, vol 1, no1, pp 4-11. taylor, m, evans, k and abasi, a (2006) towards a learning and teaching model in adult literacy, in english, l and kroen, j, eds, proceedings of the 25th annual conference of the canadian association for the study of adult education, york university, toronto, canada, pp 227232. taylor, m and blunt, a (2001) a situated cognition perspective on literacy discourses: seeing more clearly through a new lens, the canadian journal for the study of adult education, vol 15, no 2, pp 79-103. taylor, m, king, j, pinsent-johnson, c and lothian, t (2003) collaborative practices in adult literacy programs, adult basic education: an interdisciplinary journal for literacy educators, vol 13, no 2, pp 81-99. vygotsky, l (1999) thought and language, the massachussets institute of technology press, cambridge, ma. c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g t a y l o r , e v a n s a n d a b a s i 71 wenger, e, mcdermott, r and snyder, w (2002) cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge, harvard business school press, boston, ma. zinn, l (2004) exploring your philosophical orientation, in galbraith, m, ed, adult learning methods: a guide for effective instruction, kreiger publishing company, malabar, fl, pp 133-160. c o l l a b o r a t i v e t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g 72 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word 0712lns152lobianco.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 5 n o 2 2 0 0 7 19 discourses in interaction: the intersection of literacy and health research internationally julie green, joseph lo bianco and johanna wyn abstract literacy and health are deeply influential in social participation, utilisation of social resources and quality of life. this paper discusses interacting discourses and common conceptual points shared by the adult literacy and public health fields and situates how the sub-field at the intersection of these two domains, known as ‘health literacy’, is constructed and enacted. emerging approaches that recognise the convergence of education and health within international policy, research and in practice are articulated. the paper argues a case for re-thinking the literacy-health connection from a cross-sectoral perspective and for more effective approaches furthering the interests of both life-long learning and wellbeing. introduction scholarship in recent years has exposed both the autonomy of conceptualisation and the parallel developments that have characterised recent thinking in the literacy and health fields. both have been subjected to dynamic scrutiny in which tenets of thinking previously held to be immutable have been challenged as new domains of application in people’s lives have opened richer and more complex understanding of the literacy and health constructs that influence multiple aspects of people’s lives. in academic writing, ‘literacy’ is seen to be a social practice, inflected in specific settings to meet the meaning-making needs of diverse individuals and groups, and fundamental to effective participation and contribution to a changing society (lo bianco and freebody 2001, snyder, jones and lo bianco 2005). similarly, ‘health’ is conceptualised as a positive concept, a resource needed to lead a productive life at individual, social and economical levels (nutbeam 1999). contemporary understandings of these fields emphasise the deeply influential effects of literacy and health in the extent of social participation they afford, the extent of utilisation of social resources they make possible and the quality of life that individuals and groups can attain. these new and more extensive understandings of both constructs differ markedly from standard notions of health and literacy as tied irrevocably to institutions of formal education. literacy is now seen as a socially situated practice and even the institutions of its formal delivery, assessment and cultivation, schools particularly, are analysed in relation to d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n 20 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the chain of literacies of which formal education is only one link. similarly for health, the role and relation of formal education in relation to health is no longer regarded as the key resource that determines good health (world health organisation 1986, turrell, stanley, de looper and oldenburg 2006), with a positive correlation between high levels of literacy and good health wellbeing (parsons and byner 1998, institute of medecine 2004). today the connections between literacy and health are becoming more elaborated and better understood as research progressively uncovers the mutually interacting relation between health and active literacy. this paper discusses common discourses and conceptual points shared by the adult literacy and public health fields, and issues arising from the mismatch between institutional and population literacies. the paper also considers the absence of innovative policy in the overall landscape of public action at the intersection of the literacy and health fields, and argues a case for re-thinking the literacy-health connection from a cross-sectoral perspective. part of a wider project of re-thinking the paradigm of healthand-literacy, the aim is to pursue a line of questioning about the possible implications of a more coherent connection between health and literacy, and ultimately for more effective practices furthering the interests of both life-long learning and wellbeing. linking literacy and health poor literacy is likely to have detrimental consequences for people’s health, usually within a context of social disadvantage or poverty, compromising the broader potential to take up practices to keep healthy (us department of health 2001, nutbeam 2000). low literacy is associated with difficulty in engaging in preventive health care practices when compared to people with more advanced literacy skills (rudd, moeykens and colter 1999), in detecting disease early (davis, crouch, wills, and miller 1991, lindau, tomori, lyons, langseth, bennett and garcia 2002) and in accessing primary health care such as visiting a doctor (rudd et al, 1999). there is a greater likelihood of missing important information on how to use valuable community-based resources (dreger and tremback 2002) and how to manage many aspects related to living with chronic illness (silverstein, iverson l and lozano 2002, williams, baker, honig, lee, nowlan 1998, baker, parker, williams, pitkin, parikh, coates and imara 1996) and, because of the association between socio-economic disadvantage, relatively unskilled jobs and low literacy, people with low literacy are at a higher risk of disease, injury and death (australian institute of health and welfare (aihw) 2004). however, there is a wider, and shared, similarity between health and literacy constructs. both function as an index of the success of societies in general, and measures of literacy and health stand indexically for social, d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n g r e e n , l o b i a n c o a n d w y n 21 political and civic accomplishments. one of the first indicators mentioned about a society will be a health or literacy score, seen to rise above contextual specificity and rank unproblematically as a cross-cultural marker. health, particularly, functions as a kind of core signature theme of modern societies in general and is perceived to be a measure of the degree to which a society delivers a good life to its citizens (marmot 2004). the capacity of health systems to promote health, however, relies to a considerable extent on people having good to high levels of literacy. in post-industrial societies, taking personal responsibility for one’s health and wellbeing has also become a core practice, where selfmanagement is referred to as ‘individualisation’ (beck and beck-gernsheim 2002). these authors argue that as traditional systems and structures become fragmented and less effective, individuals are forced to take responsibility for managing their own biographies. a key element in this is the acceptance that health and wellbeing are the responsibility of individuals. having the capacity to manage health and wellbeing, and demonstrating that self-efficacy and capacity, have become central components of citizenship in post-industrial societies. this means that individuals need to be reflexively literate in order to ‘read’ health messages, to make choices about the usefulness of these messages for their own lives and to act on them. the stress on individuals acting relatively autonomously in personal health management is an analogue of the practice of individuation that characterises official interpretations of literacy, and which distinguishes these from much of academic research and writing in literacy that typically embeds literacy within social situations as practices of collectivity. both literacy and health, therefore, are part of social discourses in which different interests stress either a social or skills based selfmanagement on the one hand, or socially contextualised and embedded practices of culture and interpersonal relations on the other. both fields oscillate in how they are represented according to diverse interests and their conceptualisations of health and literacy. both have been deeply impacted by systemic social change, including migration and the emergence everywhere of multicultural and therefore multilingual populations. at the same time, many previously stable social institutions, including family and ordered relations among ages, gender groups, and other identities, have been challenged, some dissolving, others resisting, the fragmentation pressures of contemporary post-industrial life. as modernist and individualist understandings of society itself fragment (provoking responses of defence and protection), personal management is substituted in place of predictability of systemic provision. the more personally selfmanaging mode of being in the social world, which might be called ‘autonomist’, in which people call on others to ‘take charge’ or to ‘be responsible’, is aligned with a new way of thinking about citizenship, best d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s known as ‘substantive’ citizenship. this mode of being is at one with the contemporary spirit of the times, stressing individualism, autonomous operation in the world and involving declining levels of institutional responsibility.in this context, recognition of the impact of adult literacy on public health is growing within both the literacy and health fields. positioning public health within the broad health field, the notion of ‘public health’ is distinguished from the remediation of illness and focuses on the prevention of illness of populations through organised efforts of society (who 1998). public health involves addressing social, environmental and cultural factors that support healthy living and positive environments and seeks to influence the factors which condition health outcomes, or which put people’s good health at risk. as a result, public health substitutes the social for the individual and the proactive for the reactive. within this broad realm of public health, one of the cornerstones is heath promotion, a ‘process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health’ (who 1986:1), where health is conceptualised as a resource for living. this all-embracing understanding of the context of health and wellbeing disposes health promotion towards public policy and specifically towards policies that foster supportive environments for health in community and organisational settings as well as well as developing personal skills for individuals (nutbeam and harris 1998). health promotion, then, is characterised by the creation of the essential conditions that enable communities to achieve their full health potential. the campaign is an established form of health promotion. examples include public education campaigns promoting safe sexual practices or physical activity; anti-smoking campaigns; ways to prevent skin cancer; and cautions about the effects of drinking and driving. however campaigns around single issue health concerns are only the most visible sign of a wider educative process that has traditionally been a vehicle of health promotion activity. health education methods, involving an information, education and communication approach to targeted population groups, or to the entire community, aim, to improve knowledge, encourage the development of personal skills and influence choices and behaviour within people’s everyday lives (nutbeam 2005). some public health education activities are seasonal, others are population specific, some are age, generation or gender targeted, while others again encompass the entire population. a recurring element is the aim to close gaps in disparities in health status and address factors that determine ‘risk’ across social groups. almost inevitably health promotion activity, evident in all of the examples cited, raises questions of personal and group identity and responsibility. health promotion interacts, therefore, with the social d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n g r e e n , l o b i a n c o a n d w y n 23 practices of the community: how practices are judged according to immediate, as well as researched longer-term health effects; how social groups interact with other social groups; and the standing of individuals within the particular social groups to which they belong. as we can see, identity consequences inhere in both the behaviours of individuals and of relations among social groups. ‘risk’ categories are, of course, an outsider definition structured around specialist health knowledge, and when minimisation of the risk to particular groups shapes public health promotions, obligations of dutiful citizenship are invoked and issues of differential literacy are raised. individuals who fail to make the right ‘choices’, or those who make the right choices but are unable to sustain or implement them, not only fail to improve their health but risk becoming undeserving of citizenship. in these contexts ‘literacy’ is seen as an individual capability that either enhances or impedes the absorption by individuals of messages aimed at producing healthier living. there is a growing level of attention to adult literacy within health promotion thinking, and of health questions within adult literacy research. the most obvious indicators of this are initiatives connecting adult literacy and public health, in policy, advocacy and practice as well as in academic settings, which we subsequently discuss. literacy has come to be considered central to the effective delivery of health promotion activity, and more widely to the empowerment of people and communities in self-managing health practices (kickbusch 2001, rootman and ronson 2005, rudd, kirsh and yamamoto 2004). while literacy is sometimes, and increasingly, considered as part of the infrastructure used to promote health (hohn 1998, nutbeam 2005), it is fair to say that the role accorded to literacy and communication practices, together with the conceptualisation of the communicative diversity of our society, is relatively understudied, and narrowly understood in many public health contexts. perhaps the best way to formulate this is to note that the bulk of knowledge about health is coded, produced and disseminated in technical literate prose. it is expressed in standard english and embellished with statistical and graphic representations of probabilities, relations and effects between life styles, behaviours and predicted health consequences. such literacy implies individual consumers of literate messages and involves a prestigious selection from the vast array of the literate practices of the wider society, with its various levels of literacy skill, multilingualism, and social practices in which texts are negotiated via cultural contexts that might include spoken communication, diverse kinds of authority and belief systems and histories of relations or rules of engagement between institutions and clients. issues of culture, identity, convergence of expectations, social complexity and empowerment feature increasingly in policy debates and d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s research that will shape health promotion work in the future (iom 2004). whilst commonly informed by health and social research, health messages are seldom informed by current educational research or understandings of literacies and their impact on diverse populations. even less consideration at the practice level is given to the productive use of the literacies and literacy practices of minority communities in increasing their engagement with health promotion messages and practices. a logical step, therefore, is to look to the field of literacy to explore what constitutes literacy in a broader sense, accounting for the ways in which populations live their daily lives and how this may benefit the practice of public health and influence the promotion of health. literacy discourses there is a significant disjunction between researchers’ accounts of literacy as variable and socially situated (heath 1983, baynham 1995, prinsloo and breir 1996, barton and hamilton 1998, barton, hamilton and ivanič 2000) and more general accounts that stress an unvarying, skillsbased and endlessly portable notion of literacy. research accounts of literacy produced from richly contextualised ethnographic studies in many parts of the world, typical of what have been called new literacy studies (street 2001, street 2003, baynham 2003), have little traction in much contemporary public policy or popular use. street (1995) has offered the terms ‘ideological’ and ‘autonomous’ to distinguish between these two perspectives in terms of origins. they can also be differentiated in terms of their purposes and intended effects. new literacy studies has aimed to explain the real world presence of literate behaviour, while policymakers and bureaucrats managing education systems have been addressing the management, accountability and resource distribution operations of public programs. the distinction has direct bearing on our purposes in this paper, since the core aims of health promotion should make it sensitive to how individuals and various social groups relate to institutions in which communication activity, especially literacy, constitutes the dominant mode of interaction. some researchers find that the way literate behaviour operates requires us to understand literacy as a cultural practice (kalman 1999, collins 1999), relevant in discussing cultural barriers to knowledge, information, skills and behaviours. others have emphasised accessing that language and literacy are always embedded in other meaning-making practices and prefer the term ‘multi-literacies’ to describe how people ordinarily engage with the coding and de-coding of information in diverse but often integrated semiotic systems (cope and kalantzis 2000). such writers frequently argue for policy and teaching to reduce barriers between d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n g r e e n , l o b i a n c o a n d w y n 25 formal and institutionalised literacy practices of education and those typically found in ‘ordinary life’ (hamilton 2001). literacy overall has been the subject of debate and development, resulting in multiple, often contested, definitions. ethnographic accounts of literacy invariably stress how literacy is a practice embedded in social activity, one of whose main consequences is to stress that everyday communication contexts of class, ethnicity, gender and generation (freebody and frieberg 1997) shape not only how literacy actually operates but how information and social behaviours are fashioned. we can see this sense of situatedness reflected in contemporary definitions of literacy as ‘a complex set of abilities to understand and use the dominant symbol systems of a culture for personal and community development’ (centre for literacy quebec 2000). although the disparity between researcher and popular-official accounts of literacy is real, there is also evidence that ethnographies of literacy are shaping some official understandings as well. this is increasingly evident from the work of the organisation for economic cooperation and development (oecd). in its advocacy of ‘life-long learning’, the oecd (1996) estimates that only one-third of all adults in the majority of ‘oecd countries’ have achieved ‘minimum’ rates of literacy and numeracy. they connect this generalisation with trends about social activity, and economic production, towards greater knowledge intensiveness and towards deepening general links between economies and education, and more widely diffused information and communications technologies. from these connections emerge notions of the ‘learning society’ (oecd 1996:37), a basic tenet of life-long learning. although falling short of characterising literacy as a socially situated practice with personal and cultural meanings, the oecd nevertheless stretches the classical restricted notion of literacy as simply a psychological and motor skill, in saying that ‘the very notion of literacy has evolved; in addition to reading, writing and numeracy skills, people also require technological and computer literacy, environmental literacy and social competence’ (oecd 1996:39). for the oecd, signs of articulation among, or blurring of distinctions between, formal education and training, and learning in non-formal settings, and the related contraction of age boundaries between secondary and higher education, motivate what is ultimately a strong tie between ‘culture’ and literacy, viz, ‘raising a country’s literacy profile requires a change in its culture’ (oecd 1997:85). australian adult literacy research and practice has both shaped and been influenced by these wider international perspectives and has long been attuned to ideological as well as practical parameters of action as it identifies the influences of contexts, new settings and technologies (wickert 2001, snyder, jones and lo bianco 2005). d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s australian practice has long rejected the dichotomisation of individuals or populations into categories of ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’, proposing instead the more accurate depiction of a continuum of literacy in which individuals have variable capabilities (wickert 2001). this better accounts for a range of skills activated in a variety of situations as well as the practical effects of this variation: ‘the fact that what ultimately matters is the ability to grasp the meaning(s) … and develop critical judgement’ (united nations educational, scientific and cultural organistation (unesco) 2005:127). in this context the link with health promotion is apparent. originally perhaps focused overly on the idea of low literacy attracting social stigma, and negative effects of stigma in turn impacting on the possibility of achieving health promotion values (rootman and ronson 2005) what is emerging now is a more productive intersection labelled ‘health literacy’. understanding health literacy the term ‘health literacy’ has emerged in recent years to account for the intersection of interests and activities around the fields of both literacy and health (freebody and freiberg 1999, nutbeam 2000, freiberg nutbeam and kickbusch 2000). a number of definitions of health literacy have been offered from each of the health and the adult literacy sectors. these share a central concern with locating, understanding and using information for making health-related decisions and generating information for the promotion of health (who 1998, ratzan and parker 2000, iom 2004). health literacy was stimulated initially by awareness among public health officials of correlations between low levels of income, education and poor health (pamuk, makuc, heck, reuben and lochner 1998 cited in rudd et al 1999, baker, parker, williams and clark 1998, gazmararian, baker, williams, parker, scott, green, fehrenback, ren and koplan 1999) and by a long-standing practice of adult literacy educators of integrating health topics into their programs to facilitate adult students’ management of their wellbeing in the wider society (national institutes for literacy (nih) 1994). as a response to these observed relations between disease or illness and low literacy, the orientation of health literacy research has been with studies establishing the relationship between literacy skills and health-related knowledge (perrin 1989, weiss, hart and pust 1991); with assessing the reading levels required to comprehend text-based health materials or assessing the readability of those materials (davis, crouch, wills, miller and abdehou 1990, rudd et al 1999, nih 2000); and with attempts to measure the health literacy of populations at greater risk of ill-health due to social inequalities and experiences of social and economic hardship (davis, d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n g r e e n , l o b i a n c o a n d w y n 27 crouch, wills and miller 1991, parker, baker, williams and nurss 1995, williams, parker, baker, parikh, coates and nurss 1995). more recently, understandings of health have become more nuanced, seeking to account for the many complex inter-connections between health and literacy (nutbeam 1999, iom 2004, rootman and ronson 2005). some writers have explored the multifarious ways in which health, wellbeing and health care connect with diverse aspects of language and communication practices (freebody and freiberg 1999). following the traditional orientation of health promotion, perhaps still the dominant mode in which health literacy operates, the identified subgroup then becomes subjected to a process of individuation. it invariably becomes the object of information and attempts to elevate capability for selfmanagement (friedsam and kindig 2004, cuban 2006), of alternate modes of communication such as the use of pictorial information (houtts, bachrach, witmer, tringali, bucher and localio 1998, houtts, witmer, egeth, loscalzo and zabora 2001), adult literacy skills development (hohn 2004, national centre for the study of adult learning and literacy (ncsall) 2005) or health literacy skills-based interventions either before or after disease has developed (national institute for health 2000, schillinger, grumbach, piet, wang, osmond, daher, palacios, sullivan and bindman 2002). by implication, such strategies attribute the responsibility for developing health-related literacy skills to the sub-group. in more extreme cases the ‘risky behaviour’ of the target population is identified with a wider social risk and social demarcation in which ‘blame’, risk and protection for the wider population are invoked. understood in this way, health literacy, as a component of health promotion, becomes an extension of citizenship duties. improving health professional communication skills has also been in the purview of health literacy (weiss 2003), a factor that is within the control of health professions, whilst effecting improvement in population literacy skills is not. at the prevention end of the continuum of health literacy activity are some instructive innovations within adult education. in adult education programs where locally meaningful social and cultural practices are incorporated into teaching and learning, inspired by freirean principles of ‘conscientisation’ (freire 1985), health promotion and health information are integrated into the lived practices of everyday routines in adults’ lives. these initiatives appear to provide a psychologically safe environment for learning for adults with little or no experience of concepts such as early detection, disease prevention or regular monitoring by using diverse health topics as a catalyst for literacy instruction in speaking and listening, reading, writing, maths and critical thinking (rudd and comings 1994, hohn 1998, hohn 2004). d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s within the health literacy field there has been a similar movement to the shift within literacy discourses. there has been a move away from reductive understandings of literacy as a kind of fixed quantum of skills that determine how the targets of health promotion obtain, understand and use basic information towards a recognition of complexity. the landmark report by the us institute of medicine (iom 2004) acknowledges that health literacy ‘arises from a convergence of education, health services and social and cultural factors’ (iom 2004:2). this recognition of the multi-faceted relations between culture, education, social complexity and empowerment resonates strongly with the participatory empowerment philosophy of the adult literacy field (hohn 1998, nutbeam 1999, shohet 2002). it also implicates a shared responsibility and significant, new opportunities for the adult education and health sectors to come together to respond to challenges in how to effectively enhance health literacy (tassi 2004). policy discourse of adult literacy and health fields internationally, u.s. public policy, is increasingly recognising health literacy as an access and equity issue. at the federal level ‘health literacy’ improvements at a population level are included in its national health policy, healthy people 2010 (us department of health 2001). similarly, in the uk, national health policy discourse now explicitly stresses achievement of social justice objectives to bridge social inequalities (department of health 2004) and calls for much more substantial ’joined-up‘ thinking, referring specifically to greater integration of the efforts of various public agencies. a key illustration is the program ‘skilled for health’, a national initiative between the department of health and the department for education and skills (department for education and skills 2006), that focuses on improving literacy, language and numeracy skills of adults by embedding health improvement with adult education activities in designated socially disadvantaged areas. in canada, literacy and health policy connections can be traced back to 1988, with the collaboration between the peak public health and literacy bodies and the subsequent establishment of the national literacy and health program that includes a program of research, resources and plain language services (rootman and ronson 2005). in europe, where health literacy is acknowledged as a ‘a right of citizenship’ (kickbusch, wait and maag 2006:20) and considered a critical aspect of social capital, there are calls to make health literacy integral to achieving the overall goals for a healthy european citizenship (kickbusch, wait and maag 2006). the us iom report (2004), previously cited, has been a very influential study bringing together stakeholders from different sectors and highlights explicit connections between culture, education and health literacy. the report identifies multiple stakeholders with an interest in d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n g r e e n , l o b i a n c o a n d w y n 29 pursuing the connection between literacy and health, particularly emphasising three sectors that should take on collective responsibility for health literacy and that have the capacity to build health literacy skills: culture and society, which is inclusive of broad social and cultural factors in everyday community life; the health system with its many components and settings; and the education system, including post-school, adult education programs (iom 2004). this is a radical departure from institutional practices typified by concern for narrowly defined remits, budget management and accountability. importantly, the iom report, and the international initiatives cited above reflect the insight that literacy is most productively understood as a socially situated practice varying according to cultural and situational variables, behaviours and practices and issues of identity. these international precedents raise the question of the status of health literacy in australia. the internationally comparative statistical collections, exemplified by the international adult literacy survey of 1996, undertaken by the oecd in collaboration with statistics canada, and involving the participation of 20 countries (australian bureau of statistics 1996, oecd 1997, wickert 2001, hagston 2002) show considerable and persisting adult literacy difficulties among adult australians. by some measures, some contemporary literacy requirements are challenging for almost half the population. whilst australia is not without innovation, health-and-literacy connections have received only marginal attention by comparison with canada, the uk and the us. the kind of literacy policy that would include an appropriately widely-imagined health literacy suggests an imaginative agenda for communication competency which is a much more broad-ranging notion than current reductionist policy favours (lo bianco and freebody 2001). multiple literacies, and the integration of these literacies, both programmatically with non-education fields, such as health, and conceptually with each other would ideally inform an invigorated attention to the communication basis of social life in general. however, in public health there appears to be a particular mismatch between contemporary literacy skills and the demands and expectations of conventional public health operations, with pressing implications not only for health policy in general (lonsdale and mccurry 2004) but beyond, involving questions of social capital and current social and citizenship inequalities (hagston 2002, hartley and horne 2005). despite this generalised weakness across australia, there have been several single, albeit ephemeral, research and practice initiatives that provide evidence of collaboration between adult literacy education and the health sector (schwab and sutherland 2004, hartley and horne 2005). state governments are beginning to invest in health literacy research to generate and use scientific knowledge to improve the health of vulnerable d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s communities (department of human services, 2006). we predict that each sector’s interest in the other will expand, as health officials and researchers come to evaluate the effects of public health activity in ways that increasingly expose the critical mediation of language, culture and literacy, as literacy educators sharpen their awareness of the health repercussions of low literacy and as broader measures of wellbeing become accepted (nussbaum and sen 1993). it is a very attractive idea that professionals across both areas could productively mount a demand for a systematic policy framework in the light of the international conviction that integrated policy initiatives in health and literacy could produce strong social benefits. however, australia is currently without any formal alliances, shared agenda, unifying framework or national approach to take forward such a metapolicy initiative, combining two already vast, but largely noncommunicating domains of public activity. conclusions education and health are key state jurisdictions with much to say to one another. policiy in both areas is currently framed substantially within monetarist policies and neo-liberal discourses which define citizenship through the individualisation of risk and responsibility and an emphasis on individual choice (mizen 2004, kelly 2006). nevertheless, we argue that despite these limitations, new approaches and practices are emerging that recognise the convergence of education and health within policy and in practice. we have drawn attention to one element in this convergence – the potential for health literacy to provide a more effective framework for the development of health promotion. the concept of health literacy involves the recognition of the diverse and complex ways in which individuals construct health and wellbeing knowledge and practices within their own context – and the extent to which this is a social practice. the recognition of the socially constructed nature of health literacy has significant implications for health promotion, pushing against the policy frameworks that seek to individualise responsibility and risk. driven by ever-increasing costs of health care delivery, especially the provision of hospital services, there is growing attention to emerging and chronic ‘health challenges’, such as population ageing, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and the need for greater recognition of mental health issues. these are part of a public policy concern to achieve social and structural changes that will enable people to care more autonomously for their own health (victorian health promotion foundation (vhpf) 2005). there is a convergence of interest between public health, and specifically health promotion, with education processes. these interests converge particularly around the literacy capabilities of the population. this intersection of interest between health and literacy education is identified as d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n g r e e n , l o b i a n c o a n d w y n 31 a key challenge, requiring a breaking down of traditional disciplinary boundaries between the health and education institutions (vhpf 2005). the potential for collaboration across the boundaries marked by health and education, and the permeability of these boundaries, has at times been promoted by neo-liberal ideologies of governments of the major political parties through the deployment of the notion of ‘capacity building’ and ‘community development’. these have been the main policy strategies currently invoked for addressing the effects of poverty and inequality, and they have had the added benefit of combating the rising cost of service delivery (botsman and latham 2001). inter-agency collaboration, partnership and the idea of an ‘enabling state’ formed the basis of the ‘third way’ policies of new labour in the uk (riddell and tett 2001). in australia too, state level policy frameworks, such as creating a fairer victoria (victorian government 2006), are premised on the promise that work to increase social inclusion, foster equity and build capabilities in communities through cross-sectoral collaboration will result in social capital ties that strengthen community cohesion and lessen effects of poverty and alienation. working across departmental, service and sectoral boundaries presents considerable challenges, including ambiguity about responsibilities and accountabilities, different approaches to measuring outcomes, different uses of language and different approaches to problems and their solution (wierenga, wyn, glover and meade 2003:28). however, the ways in which inter-sectoral collaborations can recognise and value the significance of practitioner knowledge and provide a framework within which bureaucratic and often outmoded practices can be superseded are also in evidence (victorian government 2006). independently, within both health and adult literacy, there has been a convergence of interest and preoccupation around how personal selfmanagement, the project of autonomous personhood imagined in the neoliberal ideologies of public action today, involves competent literate behaviour in which the management of the body, and therefore of health, is a central element. both theoretical and practical policy consequences are implicated in the independent discovery of the mutual relevance of health and literacy. a central organising principle for future elaboration of the fields will be how social and cultural identities are centrally linked to learning and health outcomes. our discussion highlights a perspective on social and cultural identities that recognises the embeddedness of these identities in relationships and practices that go well beyond individuals, to populations. health literacy is constructed and enacted within communities – it is important that policies also recognise the need to look beyond the unit of the individual for health promotion, to recognising the way in which health literacy is practised in families, amongst friends and in communities of d i s c o u r s e s i n i n t e r a c t i o n 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s interest or proximity. neo-liberal policies have tended to focus on ensuring that individuals bear responsibility for their own health. the health challenges faced today are more likely to be adequately addressed through significant policy and resource provision reflecting state and national responsibility for enhancing the social determinants of good health and wellbeing. acknowledgement julie green is supported by the national health and medical research council (australia) postgraduate scholarship (public health). references australian bureau of statistics (abs) (1996) aspects of literacy, australia cat no. 4228.0, australian bureau of statistics, canberra. australian institute of health and welfare (aihw) (2004) health inequalities in australia: mortality, september 2004, health inequalities monitoring series no 1, catalogue number phe 55 qut and aihw, canberra. baker dw, parker rm, williams mv, pitkin, k, parikh, ns, coates, w and imara, m (1996) the health care experience of patients with low literacy, archives of family medicine, vol 5, pp 329-34. baker, dw, parker, rm, 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unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy & numeracy studies, 24(1): 4897, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4897 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 1 2 0 1 6 1 editorial keiko yasukawa this issue of literacy and numeracy studies features contributions in areas of literacy and workforce development, vocational literacy and health literacy. each of these areas has had significant attention in many english speaking countries in the oecd, and they also highlight the crossdisciplinary nature of adult literacy research. in ‘workforce development rhetoric and the realities of 21st century capitalism’, erik jacobson challenges the prevailing rhetoric about adult education as a panacea for problems in the economy. he argues that there is a fundamental contradiction between this rhetoric and the nature of capitalism itself that limits the power of education to solve issues of economic inequalities. however, jacobson goes beyond critique to point to adult education not as a site to feed fodder to the capitalist marketplace, but as a site for critical education about the economy and mobilisation for structural change. the contradictions presented by neo-liberalism are further illustrated in the second contribution in this issue by oleg popov and alzira manuel: ‘vocational literacy in mozambique: historical development, current challenges and contradiction’. the authors analyse the development of vocational programs in mozambique using cultural-historical activity theory (chat) as their analytical lens. vocational literacy is treated as an ‘activity’ leading to the development of job-related skills and knowledge. their analysis uncovers the historical and cultural influences on the shape of vocational literacy education in mozambique, and how this is currently challenged by a range of factors including economic inequalities and inadequate infrastructures and quality assurance systems, each of which demands closer examination as dynamic elements within a larger and complex cultural and historical activity system. the third research article by holly jacobson, lauren hund and francisco soto mas: ‘predictors of english health literacy among us hispanic immigrants’ raises questions about how english language proficiency and socio-linguistic environment affect the health literacy of adults in language minority groups. while several health literacy assessment instruments have been developed and used in the us, the language of assessment is english, and does not take into account that this may not be the first language of many of the participants, or the language they primarily use in their communities. in addition to calling for health literacy research that takes on board the reality of bilingualism in many communities, for example by examining not only english language proficiency but also the https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4897 e d i t o r i a l 2 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s participants’ first language, the authors identify the need for more placebased research to uncover the complex sociolinguistic environmental factors that may be affecting the health literacy, care and outcomes of the population. the final contribution, in the refractions section, is an opinion piece from stephen black. black puts forward a criticism of the australian health sector’s creation of crisis discourse about health literacy. he traces the source of this crisis to a definition of what constitutes ‘minimum literacy’ used in the reporting from an oecd international literacy survey, and argues that not only is this criterion of literacy unsubstantiated, but that it results in a victim-blaming exercise. 16 july conference paper acal literacy and numeracy studies 2014. © 2014 ana pinto. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2014, 22, 4177, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v22i1.4177 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 2 n o 1 2 0 1 4 21 networked learning: designing for adult literacy learners ana pinto abstract this paper reports on analysis of an online learning network catering for adult basic education. it introduces some key concepts from research on networked learning, as well as two complementary approaches that are useful to support and inform analysis and design of technology-enhanced environments. one approach is informed by ideas about the design of learning environments in which pedagogies are combined with complex technological arrangements. the other approach shows how ideas from urban and architectural design, particularly the work by christopher alexander on design patterns and pattern languages, can be used to support design for learning. part of the argument for combining these two perspectives is that, in trying to manage the complex possibilities of new network technologies, pedagogical and humanistic ideals are easily damaged, forgotten or lost. the analytic work involves some methodological innovation, partly because of the data sources involved. it uses interviews as well as screenshots of web pages, other online artefacts and data logs; these sources allow the researcher to look ‘beyond the screen’ to reconstruct the deeper architecture of what has been created for, and by, the participants in the network. the preliminary outcomes show how connections can be drawn between some of the key qualities of what has been designed alongside the various configurations of things, places, tasks, activities, and people influencing learning. eventually, what is learned from a case study is discussed with the aim of informing design of similar learning networks. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s introduction networked learning is defined as ‘learning in which information and communication technology is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners, between learners and tutors, between a learning community and its learning resources’ (goodyear, banks, hodgson and mcconnell 2004:1). it can occur within formal educational contexts, but very often it transcends formal arrangements and/or involves informal and self-organised learning of various kinds. the ontology of networked learning is rooted in democratic ideals of inclusive education and its pedagogy, based heavily on collaborative dialogues, aligns well with the humanistic perspectives of paulo freire and others (mcconnell, hodgson and dirckink-holmfeld 2011). however, despite the fact that adult literacy learners are interested in and can benefit from using new information and communication technologies, networked learning opportunities within the domain of adult basic education (abe) are still very few and far between. of course, there are a number of complex reasons for the slow take up of networked learning within abe, including issues of access, skills for participation, funding, teacher training, lack of research and evaluation of computer use, and so on. notwithstanding the complexities behind all these issues, and as a way to contribute to research developments, this study explores the use of a design approach to promote and facilitate the creation of networked learning opportunities within the domain of adult basic education. designing such networked learning settings involves the complex intertwining of pedagogical, physical, digital and social aspects across many different layers and scales (goodyear 2005, goodyear and retalis 2010). research for design takes two main paths: understanding how people design for learning and helping them improve what they do, and analysing existing examples of networks to extract useful, reusable design ideas. the study presented in this paper is mainly concerned with the second of these two. this idea of reusing design knowledge originated in the field of architecture with alexander’s pattern languages theory (alexander, ishikawa and silverstein 1977, alexander 1979, 2006). design patterns can be written to capture the design essence of very small things, as well as very large (from chairs and ornaments, through houses and cafes to city squares and neighbourhoods). patterns can be n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g pinto 23 combined into pattern languages, to express complex, multi-level or multi-layered designs. alexander’s writings also include subtle philosophical principles that help us understand why it is that designs which disregard human beings’ deepest values and needs end up as failures (goodyear, thompson, ashe, pinto, carvalho, parisio, parker, schwendimann, wardak and yeoman, forthcoming). thus, pattern languages theory offers powerful methodological and conceptual tools for analysing learning networks with the aim of capturing and sharing good design solutions to support the creation of productive technology enhanced learning environments. literature review literacy as a social practice is seen as part of everyday culturally and historically situated activities (street 1984, barton, hamilton and ivanic 1999). in contemporary society, new information and communication technologies have significantly changed the materiality of literacy, and multimodality largely shapes the possibilities and affordances of literacy practices (barton and hamilton 2005). therefore, literacy practices, including networked learning, are part of a broader ecology where learning activity and technologies are inseparable and can only be understood in relation to one another. only by restoring a ‘thing status’ to literacy can one account for the ability of literacy to ‘travel, integrate and endure’ beyond locales where social practices take place (brandt and clinton 2002: 337-338). as new information and communication technologies are integrated into everyday practices, potential learning opportunities become increasingly available through online networks. not surprisingly, researchers have found that regardless of their literacy levels, most adults seem to be interested in using computers to engage in social networks to connect with friends and family (chovanec and meckelborg 2011, smythe 2012). further, research studies have indicated that online technologies can aid adult education even for those with the most limited skills and language proficiencies. regrettably, in many cases, the lack of appropriate design represents a major barrier for adult literacy learners to be able to participate independently in online activities (silver-pacuilla 2008, warschauer and liaw 2010, smythe 2012). a lack of research and evaluation of computer use within adult basic education that could provide guidance on content development and layout, as well as n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s appropriate scaffolding to serve these users’ needs are inhibiting the creation of such opportunities. learning networks involve both digital and material tools and artefacts, and activity is both online and in the ‘physical’ or ‘offline’ world. researchers have been looking for ways to connect the social, physical, cultural, biological, and technical processes that influence and situate learning (sorensen 2009, fenwick 2012). the diffuse anywhere, anytime, anyhow character of networked learning adds a great deal of complexity to the creation of infrastructure, that is, ‘the ways in which networked learning environments present themselves to potential users’ (jones and dirckinck-holmfeld 2009:14). this concept of infrastructure is a good metaphor to emphasise the interplay between human and non-human aspects in the constant dialectical processes involved in networked learning. networked learning settings consist of the totality of resources made available for learning, and these include both what has been put in place by a teacher or designer, as well as knowledge objects produced by the learners. tracing how designed features relate to one another within the overall architecture help understand their influence on learning. in this context, the notion of reification ‘the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into “thingness”’ (wenger 1998: 58) can be very useful for understanding how meanings are negotiated around abstract representations in these highly mediated settings. reified products that result from participants’ agency constitute essential features that make the activities within the networks less ephemeral. therefore, infrastructure for networked learning needs to be seen as a relational concept, as something that shapes and is shaped by the dynamic and always evolving relations between users and other non-human agents. as innovative online networks catering for adult literacy learners start being created, good design solutions can be captured and shared through design patterns and pattern languages. analysing a learning network in the abe field: the study and research design in this qualitative study, explanations of the design of a productive networked learning environment are provided through a case study. case studies involve methods for collecting empirical materials and analysis processes in ways to promote the construction of consistent interpretations. data sources included screenshots of n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g pinto 25 web pages, and other online artefacts, data logs, and a semi-structured interview with one of the network’s designers. a diagrammatic representation of the overall design of the network was produced along with the narrative case study account based on the analytical framework, the interview, and analysis of digital artefacts. the study drew on an analytical framework (goodyear and carvalho 2013, carvalho and goodyear 2014) that integrates ideas and methods from pedagogy, design and architecture. the analytical framework focuses on the designed elements and their relationships to context, approaches to knowledge and knowing, and emergent activities. according to the framework, the architecture of networked learning involves three designable dimensions: a) physical architecture (set design) involves the digital and material spaces, both local and remote, as well as digital and physical resources that may constitute online networks; b) epistemic architecture (epistemic design) involves the design of tasks that need to be considered in relation to nested structures of sub-tasks and supra-tasks, as well as broader conceptualisations of knowledge and ways of knowing; c) social architecture (social design) involves interpersonal relationships and divisions of labour. additionally, this framework draws attention to the importance of co-creation and co-configuration, that is, how participants’ activities re-shape and re-organise the environment. by exploring all these dimensions key architectural qualities of online learning networks can be identified and abstracted (pinto, thompson, jones and clow 2014). two research questions drove the analytical investigation: a) what are some of the key architectural qualities of the learning network? b) how can analysis, coupled with different forms of representation, be effective in abstracting and communicating design solutions in ways to support the design activity of other people? the case study: nala the national adult literacy agency (nala) is an irish independent member-based organisation committed to adult literacy education. nala has been supporting adult learners, tutors and literacy providers, and developing policy and research for over thirty years. since 2000 it has been using a range of technologies in its n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s distance learning service: free-phone tutoring, mailing printed material, radio and television programs, and more recently, using the internet. the nala website has been designed to cater for adult learners with a wide range of needs and interests, as well as their tutors. for this paper, two analytic perspectives on the nala learning network have been taken. one of these is quite conventional – at least it will be recognisable to researchers who are familiar with screen design, graphic design, layout etc., whether for websites or as part of the older tradition of page design for print materials. this perspective looks squarely at what is ‘on the screen’, analysing some key features from the specific perspective of learner needs in abe. the second analytic perspective is more novel. it goes ‘behind the screen’ to excavate the deeper architecture of the learning network. as will be explained in more detail shortly, this deeper architecture can be thought of as involving epistemic, social and physical/digital components, and (especially) their integration. it is also important to say that what is seen on the screen cannot be divorced from the deeper architecture. in good designs, the two are intimately connected. summary and discussion of outcomes from the analysis figure 1 shows the homepage of the nala website. the main part of the homepage is divided into three sections: header, intermediary, and bottom section. the header provides basic contact details (the name of the organisation, free-phone and msn numbers, irish map for the location of courses, and a search function) and the main navigation bar (need help, literacy in ireland, what we do, support us, and resources) provides access to all major additional pages. n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g pinto 27 figure 1: nala’s homepage as simple as it may appear, the partial screenshot of nala’s homepage reflects the outcomes of careful design. the page layout is clean and functional in order to facilitate navigation by adult literacy learners. written text is kept to a minimum and images and blank spaces help to give a clean yet friendly touch. one of the main functions of this page is to ensure learners realise that whatever their difficulties and interests may be, nala is there to help them. in this context, the types of knowledge valued (epistemic design) and roles and division of labour (social design) can be inferred upfront from the elements shown in this page. for instance, the prominent headline ‘everyone has the right to read’ (inclusiveness) and ‘help my kid learn’ (family literacy) point to an approach to literacy that goes beyond the individual mechanics of reading and writing. meanwhile, ‘need help?, ‘featured story’ and ‘support our work’ signal a collective and collaborative enterprise. scrolling down the page, there are links to secondary features such as a tutor’s corner and student’s corner, and an information box for learning about the ‘latest news’, ‘upcoming events’, recent facebook posts, and e-zine subscriptions. additionally, at the bottom of the page, there are links to nala’s social media sites (facebook, twitter, and youtube), and, again, links to all major pages but with prominence given to the distance learning service. facebook and n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s twitter are used to support and/or extend the activities hosted within the main site, while the dedicated youtube site functions as an archive. by using free digital platforms, software, and popular social media, nala extends both its digital and physical spaces. for instance, television programs broadcast across ireland become available for an international audience via nala’s dedicated youtube page. in actuality, nala offers learning opportunities for people everywhere. although originally designed for irish learners, the website can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. once new online environments are deployed, their reach is extended to the world. the main difference is that within ireland, learners can get extra support (e.g. freephone tutoring and learning material via postal services). but, again, non-irish learners may be taking advantage of physical spaces and resources (including human) wherever they live. looking behind the screen at the deeper architecture the features, tools and resources compose the infrastructure of the network, that is, its set design. regarding epistemic design, knowledge in the learning network is of two kinds: (i) specialist knowledge involving multiple literacies, and (ii) tacit, everyday knowledge. knowledge resources made available to the abe community include health literacy, workplace literacy, financial literacy, and so on. in many cases set, social, and epistemic designs are very much entangled. for instance, nala’s set design relies on videos recorded by adult learners (social design) to portray literacy as everyday life-enhancing experiences (epistemic design). such video recordings along with other resources produced by learners (e.g. ‘a story with me in it’) co-create and co-configure the existing design as they become accessible to all learners and tutors through the website. reconstructing the deeper architecture of the network takes time and care. by studying screens, following links and so on, one can begin to map the network infrastructure. one productive way i have found to do this is to sketch the emerging network architecture on a large ‘writable wall’ – see figure 2. the diagram in figure 2 depicts the complexities of the various elements in the network, helping part of my reflections on how n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g pinto 29 features relate to one another within the overall architecture. for instance, looking at ‘other digital spaces/distance educational service’ (in the centre of the diagram) there is an element, write on, which has connections spreading in many directions. in relation to nala, write on is a set design feature (e.g. a piece of software); an epistemic design feature (e.g. bringing together learning tasks associated with traditional and new literacies); and a social design feature (e.g. promoting independent learning). interestingly, all these design dimensions (as well as co-creation and co-configuration) recur again within write on. figure 2: nala’s overall architecture following, three screen shots from write on are presented. the first two are used just as a way of offering an insight into the overall design and to provide contextual background. the last one presents a more detailed analysis with the aim of illustrating some points discussed in the introductory part of this paper. the first screenshot, figure 3, shows the ‘write on’ welcome page. the design elements on the welcome page, a combination of video, audio, text, and image, are mainly concerned with ensuring learners feel stimulated to log in and participate. the header on the top of the page establishes the main purpose of the learning network ‘helping you improve your reading, writing and number skills’. the central part is concerned with ensuring learners understand the log in process. the section to the left, offers an introductory video that graphically illustrates the features and functions of the site, including how to log in. meanwhile, the section on the right hand side is all about numbers: members currently online, total number of registered learners, and qualifications achieved so far. the bottom section of the page shows a number of logos. these design elements together convey an image of a successful and supportive network. many adult learners lack the confidence to engage in learning due to frustrated educational experiences in the past. in this context, the elements n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s showing the high number of members and of qualifications achieved by level 2 learners, may act as encouraging features. further, by being able to see that there are other people online, learners who usually juggle jobs and family duties may feel more encouraged to persist. the logos may be seen as evocative of official endorsement for the learning network. everything, represented in the various elements in the set design, is combined together with the aim of enabling and supporting learners to log in and learn. figure 3: write on welcome page figure 4 shows a screenshot of another ‘write on’ page, which is presented to learners once they have logged in. this page uses text and audio support to help learners decide which level they find appropriate to start at. apart from the image in the central part of the screen, all the other four sections of the page are the same as in the previous screen. interestingly, all analytical designable dimensions (set, epistemic, social) can be identified within the design of this single central image. some of the (set) elements we could analyse in the composition of this image would be: the speech bubbles with written and audio texts, the adult people, and the background with windows that create a connection to nature. in relation to epistemic design, within the speech bubbles, texts indicate knowledge and ways of knowing valued in the network (writing full sentences, reading with fluency, lifelong learning, etc.). on the social design level, the adults depicted in the image send a ‘message’ that this is a site for adults, and these are ‘friendly people like you and me’. n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g pinto 31 figure 4: write on second page after choosing a level and completing a pre-assessment, learners are directed to a lesson page that presents them with a personalised learning path. this learning path represents a very interesting design feature. the screenshot in figure 5 shows the learning path for level 2. the learning path is shown as a sophisticated interactive graphic, supported by audio, which helps learners to keep track of their progress. it allows learners to see at a glance which lessons have been completed, the unfinished ones (stripped squares), and those still to be started. it also shows how far learners are from completing minor (end of each path line) and major (30 points) awards. additionally, it allows learners to return directly to the lesson or assessment screen they left after a break. thus, the learning path’s primary purpose is to provide learners with an easy way to navigate through the learning materials. the graphical representation makes this process simpler and more effective. this learning path represents an elaborated solution from a design perspective. such a representation is an example of an important technique used to reify activities in a way that turns them into ‘concrete’ objects visible to learners (pinto 2014). every time a learner chooses a lesson, their activities are continuously reified and the elements in set design are re-arranged accordingly. in this sense, the learner’s unfolding activity recreates the set design; the reified forms allow learners to communicate with the system in ways to cocreate and co-configure their learning place. by keeping track of their activities, learners are better positioned to reflect on their progress and make decisions on how to proceed. the spatial representation influences both subsequent activity and the setting through interwoven processes of reification and learners’ construction of meaning. strategies such as this may be particularly useful in webbased learning when, at least in theory, learners rely exclusively on the setting to learn. unlike the traditional classroom where a teacher n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s and classmates may enrich the learning experience, independent online learners mainly interact with digital and physical resources. interestingly, according to the designer interviewed for this study, the learning path plays additional useful roles in blended learning contexts. when write on is used within schools or community centres, the learning path often seems to generate extra motivation through ‘friendly rivalries’ between learners. analysis of interview data with learners and tutors, collected by nala, revealed that some learners kept on doing activities to ‘beat’ classmates, that is, to make their figures in each path reach the end of the line before someone else’s did. furthermore, the learning path sometimes forged collaboration among students and/or between these and their children. for instance, interview data also revealed that some adult learners could count on getting effective help from their children, who seem to love the ‘game feel’ of the learning path. these examples are illustrative of the value of designers considering the social-materiality of learning, as discussed earlier in this paper. the learning path was designed after results of usability tests conducted by nala indicated that the original long list with the sequencing of activities proved too hard for most learners to read and understand. as can be seen, the designed solution goes far beyond simply helping learners selfadministrate their lessons. thus, a designed solution such as the learning path constitutes a good candidate for abstraction and will be captured and shared through design patterns to inform and facilitate design of similar enterprises. figure 5: learning path implications in domains other than adult basic education, designers and teachers have been re-using good design ideas that have been captured and shared using pattern languages. educational design n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g pinto 33 research has been instrumental in supporting these collaborative practices (laurillard 2012). as online networks catering for abe start being created, good design practices can be captured in ways to start building a knowledge base to support, promote and facilitate designing processes in this field as well. even though it may be too early to know which patterns are worth writing to create complete pattern languages for designing effective learning networks within the domain of adult basic education, new designs need not be developed from scratch. in all cases, pattern language theory points to the relevance of a holistic approach to analysis and design. in addition to its ideas about the advantages of sharing good design, pattern language theory is also very useful for its emphasis on the importance of paying attention to human values and emotions. in both formal and informal situations, it is not uncommon to find settings using technologies in ways that are neither conducive to learning nor pleasant. these usually are overwhelmingly flashing, busy and noisy spaces. therefore, pattern language theory also serves as a good reminder that technologies must be seen as tools rather than the drivers of design for learning. thus, understanding the interactions between the learners, the infrastructure and the wider environment requires considering, amongst other things, the role of design and mediating artefacts in affording or constraining learning experiences. the analytical work presented in this paper has illustrated how a systematic analysis coupled with different forms of representation and a common language can help in identifying and communicating good design solutions. conclusion it was not the purpose of this study to elaborate on any specific approach to literacy teaching and learning. instead, using a design perspective, the aim was to identify good design solutions that can be adopted and adapted for the creation of productive networked learning opportunities within both formal and informal adult basic education contexts. an important role of literacy education is to facilitate connections between members of the community so they can support each other in their daily lives. appropriately designed environments can give adult literacy learners a chance to take part in online sessions that can help improve not only their reading and writing skills but also their lives. in this sense, networked learning may play a role in a more democratic distribution of social capital and n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in enabling people to critically evaluate, challenge and change social injustices. n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g pinto 35 references alexander, c, ishikawa, s, and silverstein, m with 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architecture of productive learning networks, routledge, new york. chovanec, m and meckelborg, a (2011) social networking sites and adult literacy: raising the issues, retrieved 1 december 2012 from http://alphaplus.ca/en/web-tools/tech-podcastsgroup1/tech-podcasts.html jones, c and dirckinck-holmfeld, l (2009) analysing networked learning practices, in dirckinck-holmfeld, l, jones, c, lindstrom, b, eds, analysing networked learning practices in higher education and continuing professional development, sense, rotterdam, pp 1-27. fenwick, t (2012) matterings of knowing and doing: sociomaterial approaches to understanding practice, practice, learning and change, springer, netherlands, pp 67-83. goodyear, p, banks, s, hodgson, v and mcconnell, d (2004) research on network learning: an overview, in goodyear, p, banks, s, hodgson, v and mcdonnell, d, eds, advances in research on networked learning, kluwer academic http://alphaplus.ca/en/web-tools/tech-podcasts-group1/tech-podcasts.html 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art and science of learning design, sense, rotterdam. laurillard, d (2012) teaching as a design science: building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology, routledge, abingdon. mcconnell, d, hodgson, v and dirckinck-holmfeld, l (2011) networked learning: a brief history and new trends, in dirckinck-holmfeld, l, hodgson, v and mcconnell, d, eds, exploring the theory, pedagogy and practice of networked learning, springer, new york, pp 3-24. national adult literacy agency (nala): http://www.nala.ie pinto, a, thompson, k, jones, c and clow, d (2014), ispot: your place to share nature, in carvalho, l and goodyear, p, eds, the architecture of productive learning networks, routledge, new york, pp 225-238. pinto, a (2014) design and the functioning of a productive learning network, in bayne, s, jones, c, de laat, m, ryberg, t and sinclair, c, eds, 9th international conference on networked learning, edinburgh, 7-9 april, pp 220-227. silver-pacuilla, h (2008) investigating the language and literacy skills required for independent online learning, national institute for literacy, washington dc. smithe, s (2012) incorporating digital technologies in adult basic education: concepts, practices and recommendations, alphaplus, toronto, on. http://www.nala.ie/ n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g pinto 37 sørensen, e (2009) the materiality of learning: technology and knowledge in educational practice, cambridge university press, cambridge. street, b (1984) literacy in theory and practice, cambridge university press, cambridge. warschauer, m and liaw, m l (2010) emerging technologies in adult literacy and language education, national institute for literacy, washington dc. wenger, e (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, cambridge university press, cambridge. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511803932 write on www.writeon.ie http://www.writeon.ie/ n e t w o r k e d l e a r n i n g 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s abstract introduction literature review analysing a learning network in the abe field: the study and research design the case study: nala summary and discussion of outcomes from the analysis looking behind the screen at the deeper architecture implications conclusion references microsoft word notes on contributors.docx notes on contributors theres bellander is a senior lecturer in the department of swedish language and multilingualism at stockholm university in sweden. theres.bellander@su.se julie choi is a lecturer in education (additional languages) in the melbourne graduate school of education. she is co-editor of the book language and culture: reflective narratives and the emergence of identity, author of creating a multivocal self: autoethnography as method, and co-editor of plurilingualism in teaching and learning: complexities across contexts. julie.choi@unimelb.edu.au ulrike najar is a lecturer in education (additional languages) at the melbourne graduate school of education. she is author of several journal articles on intercultural language education, such as the intercultural field: interrogating context in intercultural education and weaving a method: mobility, multilocality and the senses as foci of research on intercultural language learning. ulrike.najar@unimelb.edu.au zoe nikolaidou is a senior lecturer in the department of culture and learning at södertörn university in sweden. zoe.nikolaidou@sh.se 16 july conference paper acal literacy and numeracy studies 2014. © 2014 lesley farrell. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2014, 22, 4179, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v22i1.4179 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 2 n o 1 2 0 1 4 59 refractions what research has been/is being undertaken in adult literacy and numeracy and by whom and why: internationally and locally? lesley farrell editor’s note in september 2013, the australian council for adult literacy held a forum in sydney on the topic of promoting research in adult literacy and numeracy. the keynote speakers were asked to offer material to generate discussion later in the day. the following is the thought-provoking contribution from professor lesley farrell, one of the founding editors of open letter, the precursor to literacy and numeracy studies. talk delivered at australian council for adult literacy forum on promoting research in adult literacy and numeracy, sydney, 30 september 2013. i want to address this question by focusing on three recent research reports. i have selected them, not because they represent the best of literacy and numeracy research, or because they represent the worst. i have selected them because each in their own way raises interesting important questions about what research is being undertaken, by whom and why. of the three reports, only one is, strictly speaking, directly concerned with literacy and numeracy research as we would usually understand it, and that was undertaken in australia. the other two projects originated in the uk. they are, however, critically relevant to the australian context, and to australian research about adult literacy and numeracy. their centrality to research on literacy and https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s numeracy illustrates just how global policy travels and how research contributes to the way ideas move across national boundaries. r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? farrell 61 what research is being undertaken in adult literacy and numeracy? the australian research i want to discuss is the report when words fail (australian industry group 2012). the research was undertaken by the australian industry group (aig) and funded by the (then) australian government department of education, employment and workplace relations through vocational education and training (vet) national programs. many in australia will be familiar with this report. its focus is on the importance of literacy and numeracy skills in workforce development. one of the key findings was that 75% of respondents reported that that their businesses were affected by the low levels of literacy and numeracy of all or some of their employees. another key finding was the importance of linking workplace literacy and numeracy training to productivity through rio return on investment measures. return on investment figures are calculated by dividing the return on an investment by the cost of the investment and the sum expressed as a ratio. recommendations of the report were largely designed to influence very specific local policy development. specifically, three (of nine) recommendations are: – 1. position employers at the centre of the national foundation skills strategy given the views expressed by employers about workplace literacy and numeracy it is important to view them as a key agent for change and enable them to be prominent in the implementation and the biennial review of the national foundation skills strategy. 2. re-focus the strategic direction of workplace lln the decision to create the national workforce and productivity agency is a significant policy orientation which will enable industry to drive workforce development. given the focus of this new agency it is appropriate that workforce lln also be included within its scope. it is recommended that the responsibility for workplace lln programs, including well (workplace english language and literacy program)i, be transferred to the agency. r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? 62 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 3. incorporate return on investment measures into lln workplace training the use of return on investment indicators provided a key focus for employer involvement and trainer planning and preparation in the project. return on investment measures could be incorporated into all workplace lln programs. as an initial step it is proposed that a set of measures be developed which include but are not restricted to: productivity; quality;
 safety; communication; compliance;
further training; and promotion (aig 2012:vi-vii). in this report literacy and numeracy are viewed as workrelated skills that provide the foundation for the development of an appropriately skilled workforce – it is essentially the human capital argument. the second research program is described in the book the global auction: the broken promises of education, jobs and incomes, first published in 2010 by phil brown, hugh lauder and david ashton. the economic and social research council, the major research funding body of the uk, funded this research. the authors are senior academics at major uk universities. the book reports on an ambitious project: our purpose is …to understand the future of the american dream, a task that can no longer be restricted to studying what lies within national borders. the world has become more integrated and networked, especially in economic activities. the market value of american workers is no longer judged solely in comparison to their neighbors. it is judged in a global auction for jobs. to capture these changes and what they mean for american and european workers and families. (2010:2) in pursuit of these aims, the authors set out on a journey that included seven countries – america, britain, china, germany, india, singapore, and south korea, visiting 18 cities, including the asian economic powerhouses of bangalore, beijing, guangzhou, hong kong, mumbai, new delhi, seoul, shanghai, and singapore. although this is a book by uk academics, you will notice that they orient themselves to the usa, and that their empirical work covers the us, europe and asia. r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? farrell 63 we wanted to test the official account of how middle-class prosperity could be delivered in the future. is it true that a knowledge driven economy accelerates the demand for employees with a college education? will it be enough for individuals to invest in their talents and abilities as they had done in the past to secure a well-paid job via educational achievement? could america succeed in attracting a large share of the global supply of high-skill, high-wage jobs? (2010:2) the authors make a complex argument. i want to draw your attention to only two aspects of it. the first is the globalisation of high skills associated with higher education. global higher education enrolments have doubled from 1995-2005 – from 33.4 to 62.9 million. china had (in 2006) 27 million students enrolled in higher education – more than the us. as access to higher education has become more widespread it has outstripped the demand for high-skilled workers, and this has placed downward pressure on wages everywhere. the australian industry group’s interest in literacy and numeracy education may, at least in part, be traced to this finding – there is a global auction for jobs and australian employers are increasingly competing with global firms who have access to a highly trained, probably contingent, workforce which may be local or may be remote but is literate and numerate enough to work locally. globally oriented companies have access to a skilled workforce that is relatively inexpensive and very willing. the prominence of the return on investment metric in the research report reflects the urgency with which aig views global competition. from many potential employees’ perspective the payoff for successful completion of higher education is likely to be disappointing. we have generally expected education to lead to jobs that lead to financial and lifestyle rewards. now, in many industries and in many parts of the world, education just gets you into the category of ‘under consideration’. it doesn’t guarantee you a job, and it doesn’t guarantee you a good income. the second aspect of brown et al’s argument that i want to touch on is digital taylorism. r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? 64 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s taylorism, according to wikipedia (2014), ‘was a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows. its main objective was improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. it was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management.’ digital taylorism involves ‘translating the knowledge work of individuals into working knowledge −through the extraction, codification and digitalisation of knowledge into software prescripts that can be transmitted and manipulated by others, regardless of location’(brown & lauder 2012). this process routinizes work that would otherwise be creative or manual work, reliant on individual human effort, skill and thought. control of work routines can be remote because it is built into the software. both intellectual and manual work have been digitised, with robots playing an increasingly important role in manufacturing and software programs codifying and routinizing professional decisionmaking and problem solving. in both cases reading and writing are currently required in order to use the software and to complete quality assurance and other documentation. without a literate and numerate workforce aig’s members cannot exploit the new modes of work their global competitors can access. australia does not yet have the vast numbers of highly educated under-employed young people who are available in india and china and elsewhere to do this kind of work. many companies are, however, employing people at a distance and paying them less. it can be difficult to control employees remotely, but not impossible. what i am suggesting here is that the specific literacy and numeracy research program conducted by aig in relation to local workforces can only be properly understood in the light of the research conducted by brown, lauder and ashton. the plight of low paid, low skilled workers in australia can only be understood if we attend to the global labour market as a whole and the impact of the global auction for jobs. the third research project is reported in an avalanche is coming (2013). this report was commissioned by the institute of public policy research (ippr). ippr is an independent progressive think tank in the uk. the ippr commissioned pearson research to undertake the research. the research question, summarized from the executive summary is this: r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? farrell 65 is a university education a good preparation for working life and citizenship in the 21st century? or, more precisely will it continue be seen as good value given the remorseless rise in the cost of university education over the decades? this report, too, covers a great deal of ground and i will foreground only one aspect of its findings. it takes up and extends the arguments of the global auction for jobs in relation to higher education. it focuses on the consequences of the radical expansion of higher education sector globally, not so much for employment but for education as an endeavour but also as an industry sector, itself. it points out that national governments are no longer in control of higher education – education is a global industry with global participation and global standards. it identifies the high debt levels that governments and individuals incur in achieving increased higher education participation and argues that national governments cannot sustain traditional models of higher education. it points out that there are now many non-university providers of higher education globally, and that universities are increasingly competing with each other through developments like moocs and other forms of digital delivery. it raises the question: how does a government ensure the quality of a degree, or accredit a degree when it is from an institution in another country – or situated over a number of countries. the higher education sector is increasingly diversified and issues of accreditation are fundamental and increasingly complex. the authors don’t raise this matter directly but their very own employer – pearson – has elements of its higher education activities accredited by the uk government – and questions of conflict of interest have been raised in relation to some of these activities. this increasingly diversified higher education sector will lead – indeed, is already leading – to the bundling and unbundling of awards, and of higher education generally. what this means is that students from around the world will increasingly be able to study one or two subjects from different institutions, complete various forms of assessment, potentially building distinctive portfolios that employers r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s will value for specific niche jobs over a long or a short period of time. people are likely to keep their cvs and work profiles current by studying and gaining credit for the most up to date subjects in their professional fields. universities or private providers all over the world may provide these opportunities. this development has direct implications for literacy and numeracy education and for other forms of foundational skills development. in relation to foundational skills, especially dispositional skills like ‘employability’ or ‘work readiness’ this is already happening. the new private torrens university is offering online courses in workplace etiquette and similar subjects for commencement in 2014. bill and melinda gates have commissioned research on the usefulness of moocs and other forms of digital delivery to provide access education for students who would otherwise not qualify for a college education. in this short presentation i have not done justice to any of these research projects – i have merely touched on some aspects which i believe to be salient to any consideration of adult literacy and numeracy research. my argument is that each of these research reports has important implications for literacy and numeracy research, for understanding how foundational skills fit into the global higher education sector and the global labour market, and for understanding how global forces play out in local sites, like australia. who is undertaking the research? for what purpose? we have also been asked to address the question of who is undertaking this research, and for what purpose. i’m sketching the argument here that, like the higher education sector generally, the research landscape has expanded and diversified dramatically. there are new players in the field and their research has as much, or in some circumstances more, authority than traditional academic research in policy debates. this new diversity can potentially provoke productive debates and discussions in arenas that may impact on policy. in my view there is no realistic possibility of our research influencing policy unless we take account of the whole research/policy environment of which we want to be a part. in taking account we need to consider where the research is coming from, who is paying for it, and in whose interests it is conducted. i chose these three research projects because, taken together, they r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? farrell 67 provide an illuminating picture of the rich tapestry of research of which we are a part. in the case of the global auction, the research is undertaken by academic researchers with excellent traditional research track records employed by distinguished universities. their work is publically funded through the uk economic and social research council. in that sense it is very traditional. the authors have not, however, confined themselves to their familiar audiences – academics in similar disciplines in the uk around the globe. their book is explicitly directed to a us audience (they recognise the importance of global reach) and it is written in a style that is likely to appeal to interested readers well beyond academia. they have made targeted approaches to policymakers, and industry, in the uk, europe and globally and their presentations to the world bank are on the web. there is a clear aim to influence public debate and public policy. in contrast, an avalanche is coming was written by commercial researchers employed by a large multinational company. this is by no means uncommon. governments increasingly commission professional service companies (pwc, mckinsey) to provide research rather than do it in-house or commission a university. in this case, the choice of pearson is an interesting one. pearson is the largest publishing house in the world. while its print marker is declining, its digital market is increasing exponentially – 9% according to its mid year report, with a 19% increase in digital registrations. to quote the the blog (entitled african outcomes) of the ceo, john fallon :‘the world is nibbling at the edges of intractable learning problems, now is the time for scale.’ (http://blog.pearson.com/african-outcomes/september 24 2013). pearson has refashioned itself from a publisher to a leading education company ‘providing educational materials, technologies, assessments and related services to teachers and students of all ages. ‘though we generate approximately 60% of our sales in north america, we operate in more than 70 countries. we publish across the curriculum under a range of respected imprints including scott foresman, prentice hall, addison-wesley, allyn and bacon, benjamin cummings and longman.’ http://blog.pearson.com/african-outcomes/september r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s we are also a leading provider of electronic learning programmes and of test development, processing and scoring services to educational institutions, corporations and professional bodies around the world’ (http://www.pearson.com/about-us/education.html may 5 2014). much of that new work is with higher education, particularly moocs. pearson is invigilating examinations and undertaking other forms of accreditation, which is shifting the higher education landscape. they are ‘a player’ in higher education globally, and they are an increasingly significant player. when they conduct this research they do so as an interested party (and some would argue that the same applies to university-employed academics researching higher education). in making these comments i am not reflecting negatively on this research. the research, analysis and conclusions are, in my view, defensible, and the researchers are in many respects well placed to do the work. it is nevertheless the case that they have an interest in promoting the developments they seek to describe. in australia, for instance, this and related work informs the views of andrew robb, who investigated the role of moocs and digital delivery generally in reshaping the australian higher education industry (http://www.andrewrobb.com.au/media/speeches/tabid/73/articletyp e/articleview/articleid/1440/speech--online-education-in-theasian-century--the-australian-opportunity.aspx) the financial viability of pearson relies on the expansion and diversification of higher education globally and the promotion of digital education. with this context in mind it is easier to understand why aig was awarded a significant sum by government to conduct a study on employers’ perspectives of literacy and numeracy at work. while the explicit recommendation of the study was to influence public policy it is also the case that the very conduct of the study situated employers differently in relation to literacy and numeracy education. we know that participating in research can change the views and understandings of participants. my reading of the report is that a significant aim of the project was to raise awareness of global competition in relation to a literate and numerate workforce and to create a sense of urgency around the issue. in other words, if literacy and numeracy are the answer, what is the question? and the question is: ‘how can we be more competitive in a hyper competitive global market with a cheap labour force globally available?’ http://www.pearson.com/about-us/education.html http://www.andrewrobb.com.au/media/speeches/tabid/73/articletype/articleview/articleid/1440/speech--online-education-in-the-asian-century--the-australian-opportunity.aspx http://www.andrewrobb.com.au/media/speeches/tabid/73/articletype/articleview/articleid/1440/speech--online-education-in-the-asian-century--the-australian-opportunity.aspx http://www.andrewrobb.com.au/media/speeches/tabid/73/articletype/articleview/articleid/1440/speech--online-education-in-the-asian-century--the-australian-opportunity.aspx r e f r a c t i o n s : w h a t r e s e a r c h ? farrell 69 in this sense the research was not only designed to influence policy, it was also designed to implement government policy around global competitiveness. this raises many questions for me about the future direction of literacy and numeracy research – nationally and internationally. most immediately, for our purposes here, how do we frame a research agenda that speaks into broader policy debates without being confined to them? references australian industry group (2012) when words fail. national workforce literacy project final project report, education and training, the australian industry group, melbourne barber, m, donnelly, k and rizvi, s (2013) an avalanche is coming: higher education and the revolution ahead, institute for public policy research, london. brown, p, lauder, h and ashton, d (2010) the global auction: the broken promises of education, jobs and income, oxford university press, new york. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199731688.001.0001 brown, p, and lauder, h (2012) the great transformation in the global labour market, www.eurozine.com/pdf/2012-09-05brown-en.pdf robb, a http://www.andrewrobb.com.au/media/speeches/tabid/73/articl etype/articleview/articleid/1440/speech--online-educationin-the-asian-century--the-australian-opportunity.aspx) accessed may5 2014 wikipedia (2012) scientific management retrieved may 5 2014 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scientific_management. ___________________________ 1 the workplace english language and literacy program (well) is a program, commencing in 1991 and funded by the australian federal government, that assists businesses to train employees in need of improving their english language, literacy and numeracy needs. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199731688.001.0001 http://www.andrewrobb.com.au/media/speeches/tabid/73/articletype/articleview/articleid/1440/speech--online-education-in-the-asian-century--the-australian-opportunity.aspx http://www.andrewrobb.com.au/media/speeches/tabid/73/articletype/articleview/articleid/1440/speech--online-education-in-the-asian-century--the-australian-opportunity.aspx http://www.andrewrobb.com.au/media/speeches/tabid/73/articletype/articleview/articleid/1440/speech--online-education-in-the-asian-century--the-australian-opportunity.aspx editor’s note talk delivered at australian council for adult literacy forum on promoting research in adult literacy and numeracy, sydney, 30 september 2013. what research is being undertaken in adult literacy and numeracy? who is undertaking the research? for what purpose? references microsoft word huang_formatted_proofed (171212).doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 2 2 0 1 2 3 health numeracy confidence among racial/ethnic minorities in hints 2007: sociodemographic, attitudinal, and knowledge correlates hong huang, yiu ming chan, and dong feng abstract health numeracy skills help people interpret health risks, and make effective medical decisions. lower health numeracy confidence was observed for blacks and hispanic groups than whites. little is known about the important factors that explain racial differences in health numeracy confidence. for this study, we used a nationally representative, crosssectional data sample of 4,610 u.s. adults from the national cancer institute’s 2007 health information national trends survey. bivariate (chisquares) and multiple logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify the contribution factors that predict health numeracy confidence. nonlinear fairlie decompositions were used to quantify the factor contributions to racial differences in health numeracy confidence. the priority rankings of the important factors to explain the health numeracy confidence racial and ethnic disparities are different depending on the particular racial and ethnic group. diverse, culturally appropriate approaches are needed to improve numeracy confidence for specific racial and ethnic groups. introduction there is a growing interest in understanding the associations between health numeracy and disparities in healthcare (schapira, fletcher, gilligan, king, laud, matthews, neuner and hayes 2008). health numeracy, a part of health literacy, is defined as ‘the degree to which individuals have the capacity to access, process, interpret, communicate, and act on numerical, quantitative, graphical, biostatistical, and probabilistic health information needed to make effective health decisions’ (golbeck, ahlers-schmidt, paschal and dismuke 2005:375). health numeracy is critical since it can impact how patients process information. it allows patients to interpret information related to the probability of health outcomes, including risk, severity, and outcomes of disease (golbeck et al 2005), and it helps patients make decisions regarding the risks and benefits of a given medical treatment. for example, a patient’s health numeracy level can be used to indicate the patient’s capability of understanding the numbers when referring to health or disease states, the efficacy of an intervention, or other expected health h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s outcomes (golbeck et al 2005). an individual’s health numeracy is influenced by language, culture, and social capital; additionally, the healthcare system demands adequate health numeracy (zarcadoolas, pleasant and greer 2006, nutbeam 2008). there is an increased focus on measuring how confident and comfortable people feel about their numeracy ability to impact their medical decision making (reyna, nelson, han and dieckmann 2008). this research demonstrates that elderly people, nonwhite ethnic minorities, or people with low education levels lack numeracy confidence (nelson, reyna, fagerlin, lipkus and peters 2008, osborn, cavanaugh, wallston, white and rothman 2009, smith, wolf and wagner 2010). low numeracy has also been associated with poor health knowledge and attitudes, limited access or use of the internet, self-reported poor health, undesirable health outcomes, and health disparities (baker, parker, williams, clark and nurss 1997, williams, baker, parker and nurss1998, berkman, dewalt and pignone 2004, dewalt, berkman, sheridan, lohr and pignone 2004, jensen, king, davis and guntzviller 2010). studies also found that minority patients might be more likely to be hospitalized and less likely to use clinical preventive services than those with adequate health numeracy (nelson et al 2008). despite the population growth of minorities, there is a gap in the current literature addressing issues related to health numeracy confidence for nonwhite racial groups. surveys of ethnic minorities related to health numeracy have been performed in specific clinics serving minority communities (osborn, paasche-orlow, davis and wolf 2007, osborn et al 2009), yet racial and ethnic disparity related to health numeracy have not yet been investigated in a nationally representative sample. little is known about the most important factors that explain these racial/ethnic differences in health numeracy confidence. this study examines the association between ethnicity and health numeracy confidence. a deeper understanding of the multiple factors, including social economics, health behaviors, attitudes and education that contribute to the racial differences in health numeracy confidence could improve health numeracy in general as well as within minority groups. additionally, this understanding could be used to create more targeted health interventions to reduce the numeracy gaps for minority groups, thereby enhancing their medical decisions and reducing risk of disease. in this research, we studied the following research questions using the us national survey sample: 1) are there any differences among racial and ethnic groups for numeracy confidence? 2) what are the factors correlated with racial/ethnic numeracy confidence differences? h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e h u a n g , c h a n a n d f e n g 5 methods sample the 2007 national cancer institute’s hints (http://hints.cancer.gov/) cross-sectional survey data of 7,674 american adults were collected either by telephone or postal mail. the survey asked hundreds of questions about cancer related knowledge, health services, attitudes and behavior. for this study, we focused on the questions pertaining to subjective statistical confidence (‘in general, how easy or hard do you find it to understand medical statistics?’) on a four-point likert scale. the answers were dichotomized into ‘very easy/easy’ or ‘hard/very hard’ for further analysis. all of the ‘don’t know’ and ‘refused’ responses for the studying variables were counted as missing. there were 7,173 respondents providing information about their ethnicity in hints data. in hints, it groups people ethnically into ‘non-hispanic white’, ‘hispanic or latino’, and ‘non-hispanic black’ and others. to make it simple in the rest of paper, we used the term of ‘white’, ‘hispanic’, and ‘black’ to represent these social ethnic groups. the final sample used for the study, excluding all missing data, came to 4,610, of which 3,810 were white, 389 were hispanic, and 441 were black. the discussion of the study focuses on these three racial groups (white, hispanic, and black). several independent variables were incorporated in the analysis to reflect demographic status, attitudes, health behaviors, and knowledge. we considered variables related to sociodemographics, healthcare attitudes, and health behaviors that might explain the gaps between whites and minorities in health numeracy confidence. the sociodemographic variables included in our analysis were race, ethnicity, gender, age, education, income, marital status, and insurance status. attitude-related variables were trust of online information, self-efficacy, and confidence in one’s ability to find health information, and healthcare quality rating. some variables were knowledge related, such as whether the participant had heard of the center for disease control and prevention (cdc) or were aware of genetic testing. we also included variables related to cancer information seeking, online access, and information overload, for the analysis. statistical analysis all statistical analyses in this study were conducted using stata 10.1 software (college station, texas, usa). the percentage distribution of all the variables across racial and ethnic groups was examined and their bivariate statistics (chi-square) were calculated. multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to examine the relationships between race/ethnicity and the dichotomous outcome confidence/lack of confidence h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s regarding health numeracy by considering independent variables related to sociodemographic, attitudinal, and knowledge variables by race/ethnicity. the fairlie decomposition technique identifies the individual contribution of independent variables to explain the differences across racial/ethnic groups by computing the change in the average predicted probability (fairlie 1999, fairlie 2005). coefficient estimates from a logistic regression based on the sample of the two groups are used to obtain predicted probabilities (fairlie 1999, fairlie 2005). since the sample size of whites was extremely high compared to the sample size of blacks, and because the non-linear decomposition required one-to-one matching of cases between the two groups, we used a random drawing of whites to create a sample size equal to the full sample of blacks (fairlie 2005, pagán, su, li, armstrong and asch 2009). the contributions to the white-black gap for each single variable in the regression were calculated. this process was repeated 500 times to generate the mean results to the white-black gap and the white-hispanics gap in health numeracy confidence. results almost 44% of hispanics reported that they lacked confidence in their ability to understand medical statistics, followed by about 38% blacks, and 34% of non-hispanic whites (table 1). the three racial and ethnic groups differed significantly between high numeracy confidence and low confidence respondents (p <0.001) grouped by educational levels (table 1). both black and hispanic respondents tended to have lower educational attainment, income, and insurance plan enrolment rates than whites. whites with health numeracy confidence were more likely to have online access and exhibit cancer information seeking behavior. they were also most likely to be aware of the center for disease control and prevention (cdc) and of genetic testing than blacks and hispanics. about half of the low health numeracy confident hispanic respondents had not heard about the cdc. in terms of their attitudes towards getting health information, hispanics with low numeracy confidence showed a lower rate of health information seeking confidence than blacks and whites. multivariate linear logistic regression models were estimated by using health numeracy confidence as the dependent variable. the unadjusted odds ratio indicated that being hispanic was a significant predictor while being black was not. after adjusting with socioeconomic and other factors, the racial difference was no longer significant. this indicated that the predictors in the logistic model can well explain the racial difference between hispanics and whites for numeracy confidence. results from table 2 also showed that health numeracy confidence correlated strongly with younger respondents who had higher education levels. in addition, h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e h u a n g , c h a n a n d f e n g 7 respondents with health numeracy confidence showed stronger trust for health information found online, higher ratings for the quality of healthcare, and higher self-efficacy. they were also active information seekers with more online access than was typical for other cohorts. in order to understand the numeracy confidence gaps among the hispanics-whites racial groups, using the fairlie decomposition analysis, we found that about 81% of the 9.81% difference in health numeracy confidence between whites and hispanics (table 3) could be explained using the variables included in the logistic regression models. the most important factors affecting the white-hispanic gap were education (24.9%), online access (17.1%), confidence in their ability to get health information if needed (16.4%), and awareness of the cdc (14.8%). discussion this study has contributed several new findings. first, the results show that health numeracy confidence is considerably lower among the u.s. hispanic population than the white population. second, the results reveal that education, online access, self-perceived ability to get health information, and the high quality healthcare rating are among the influential factors underlying these majority-minority gaps. third, about 80% of the white– hispanic gap in health numeracy confidence could be explained by racial differences. this indicates that uniform policy remedies may not have the same effects for minority groups, and that optional strategies might be proposed to improve health numeracy among different racial and ethnic groups. education and online access are the most important factors that contribute to the white-hispanic gap in health numeracy confidence. this finding is consistent with that of fagerlin, zikmund-fisher, ubel, jankovic, derry and smith (2007), who found that disparities in information seeking behaviors were observed among hispanics, and further, that hispanics are more likely to have unequal access to health information or have sufficient skills to find and use health information . similarly, jensen et al (2010) contends that minorities with less online access have a correlating low numeracy confidence. although many researchers have considered the racial and ethnic differences in educational attainment and online access, this study indicates that addressing these factors may correct the observed racial gaps. lack of awareness of both the cdc and genetic testing could explain many of the white-minority gaps in health numeracy confidence (portnoy, roter and erby 2010). the cdc sponsors a number of ongoing health literacy awareness campaigns and the development of health literacy material which target minority populations and which may increase h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s numeracy confidence for these groups. however, new approaches to cancer risk assessment, such as genetic testing, require that patients have a high level of numeracy skills in order to interpret the results so they may also require awareness campaigns. the results of this study are consistent with those of (peters, dieckmann, västfjäll, mertz, slovic and hibbard 2009) which indicated that minorities show lower comprehension of numerical presentations of risk compared to whites, and further, that low numeracy confidence affects ability to interpret the quality of health service people received as well as a greater susceptibility to extraneous factors or distortions of information overload (reyna et al 2008). in other words, poor numeracy skills affect people’s ability to process information. as a result, they might face the challenge of too much information and find it difficult to interpret the numerical meanings from multiple reports. our data support that of reyna et al (2008) and peters et al (2009) who argue that reducing information overload burdens by organizing and representing the information more effectively could help minorities process relevant information more thoroughly, thereby reducing the burden of information overload. previous studies reported that self-efficacy has associations with health numeracy skills for specific patient groups (osborn, cavanaugh, wallston and rothman 2010). self-efficacy indicates a person’s confidence in performing goal-directed behaviors (wallston, rothman and cherrington 2007). self-efficacy includes several skills, such as obtaining information and self-caring (osborn et al 2010). interestingly, this study found that higher self-efficacy in health information retrieval skills reduced racial gaps for both hispanic and blacks in health numeracy confidence. numeracy is the ability to obtain, access, and interpret numeric information. efficacy in finding health information may correlate to proficiency in numeracy. the study findings suggest that any initiative to promote health numeracy could vary in its effect on different racial and ethnic groups. customized strategies targeted to the individual or social group based on these findings could result in more effective interventions (noar, benac and harris 2007). previous findings have documented the importance of health numeracy for cancer risk prevention (baker et al 1997, dewalt et al 2004, nelson et al 2008, smith, wolf and wagner 2010). despite these findings, it should be noted that improving health numeracy for racial and ethnic minorities is perhaps only the initial step to reducing racial and ethnic disparities. wide disparities exist across racial and ethnic groups in education, knowledge, and information seeking behaviors and these inevitably have a large impact on capacity to transform health numeracy confidence to actual utilization when needed. h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e h u a n g , c h a n a n d f e n g 9 this study had several limitations. while the study found socioeconomic and demographic factors that relate to health numeracy confidence, there are certainly other related factors that were not included due to data constraints (e.g., decision making with health provider recommendations). in addition, this research assesses respondents’ subjective numerical confidence without investigating objective numerical capability. only one variable: numeracy confidence was provided to be assessed in hints. future research will extend to investigating objective numeracy since individuals may over or underestimate their numeracy skills. objective numeracy may differ greatly from subjective numeracy when it comes to health interventions and outcomes. despite these limitations, the findings from this study highlight the differences between racial groups and identify the relatively important factors that explain racial differences in health numeracy confidence and suggest directions for potential policy interventions. conclusion the results show that health statistical confidence is considerably lower among hispanics minority u.s. populations in comparison to whites. numeracy confidence in blacks is not statistically different from that of whites. education levels, online access, healthcare quality rating, and confidence of finding health information are among the most influential factors underlying the whites-hispanics gaps. these findings could help identify policy remedies to address the gaps in health numeracy confidence, such as tailored campaigns that focus on cultural, attitudinal, knowledge, and socioeconomic factors. to achieve these objectives, we must continue to study how to measure health literacy, which interventions can improve health literacy levels, and the relationships between health literacy and health outcomes. acknowledgements this study was funded by the usf cas faculty research and development grant. references: baker, david, parker, ruth, williams, mark, clark, scott, and nurss, joanne (1997) the relationship of patient reading ability to selfreported health and use of health services, american journal public health, vol 87, pp 1027–1030. berkman, nancy, dewalt, darren, and pignone, michael (2004) literacy and health outcomes. summary, evidence report/technology assessment no. 87. rockville: ahrq; (prepared by rti international, university of north carolina evidence-based practice center under contract no. h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 290-02-0016) ahrq publication no. 04-e007-1: agency for healthcare research and quality. dewalt, darren, berkman, nancy, sheridan, stacey, lohr, kathleen, and pignone, michael (2004) literacy and health outcomes: a systematic review of the literature, journal of general internal medicine, vol 19, pp 1228–1239. fagerlin, angela, zikmund-fisher, brian, ubel, peter, jankovic, aleksandra, derry, holly, and smith, dylan m (2007) measuring numeracy without a math test: development of the subjective numeracy scale, medical decision making, vol 27, no 5, pp 672–680. fairlie, robert (1999) the absence of the african-american owned business: an analysis of the dynamics of self-employment, journal of labor economics, vol 17, pp 80 –108. fairlie, robert (2005) an extension of the blinder-oaxaca decomposition technique to logit and probit models, journal of economic and social measurement, vol 30, pp 305–316. golbeck, amanda, ahlers-schmidt, carolyn, paschal, angelia, dismuke, edwards (2005) a definition and operational framework for health numeracy, american journal of preventive medicine, vol 29, pp 375-376. jensen, jakob, king, andy, davis, lashara, and guntzviller, lisa (2010) utilization of internet technology by low-income adults: the role of health literacy, health numeracy, and computer assistance, journal of aging and health, vol 22, no 6, pp 804-826. nelson, wendy, reyna, valerie, fagerlin, angela, lipkus, isaac, and peters, ellen (2008) clinical implications of numeracy: theory and practice annals of behavioral medicine, vol 35, no 3, pp 261–274. noar, seth, benac, christina, and harris, melissa (2007) does tailoring matter? meta-analytic review of tailored print health behavior change interventions, psychological bulletin, vol 133, pp 673–693. nutbeam, don (2008) the evolving concept of health literacy, social science and medicine, vol 67, pp 2072-2078. osborn, chandra, cavanaugh, kerri, wallston, kenneth, white, richard, and rothman, russell (2009) diabetes numeracy: an overlooked factor in understanding racial disparities in glycemic control, diabetes care, vol 32, no 9, pp 1614-1619. osborn, chandra, cavanaugh, kerri, wallston, kenneth, and rothman, russell (2010) self-efficacy links 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genetic counseling, patient education counseling vol 81, pp 131-6. reyna, valerie, nelson, wendy, han, paul, and dieckmann, nathan (2008). how numeracy influences risk comprehension and medical decision making, psychological bulletin, vol 135, no 6, pp 943-973. schapira, marilyn, fletcher, kathlyn, gilligan, mary ann, king, toni, laud, purushottam, matthews, alexendra, neuner, joan, and hayes, elisabeth (2008) a framework for health numeracy: how patients use quantitative skills in health care, journal of health communication, vol 13, pp 501–517. smith, samuel, wolf, michael, and von wagner, christian (2010) socioeconomic status, statistical confidence, and patient-provider communication: an analysis of the health information national trends survey (hints 2007), journal of health communication vol 15, pp 169-185. wallston, kenneth, rothman, russell, and cherrington, andrea (2007) psychometric properties of the perceived diabetes self-management scale (pdsms). journal of behavioral medicine, vol 30, no 5, pp 395401. williams, mark, baker, david, parker, ruth, and nurss, joanne (1998) relationship of functional health literacy to patients’ knowledge of their chronic disease, archives of internal medicine, vol 158, pp 166–172. zarcadoolas, christina, pleasant, andrew, and greer, david (2006) advancing health literacy: a framework for understanding and action, josseybass, san francisco, ca. h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s table 1. respondents with health numeracy confidence (no or yes) grouped by race/ethnicity white (%) black (%) hispanic (%) no yes p value no yes p value no yes p value age <0.001 0.292 0.009 18-34 15 9 20 15 33 25 35-49 25 24 25 30 34 29 50-64 36 36 41 38 24 31 65-74 16 17 11 11 6 8 75+ 9 13 3 7 2 8 born in usa 0.188 0.726 0.146 yes 96 97 94 93 58 51 no 4 3 6 7 42 49 education <0.001 <0.001 <0.001 below high school 3 6 7 14 16 32 high school 18 29 23 33 21 29 some college 31 30 33 37 38 23 college graduate 49 35 36 17 26 16 gender 0.036 0.471 0.066 male 41 37 28 31 33 42 female 59 63 72 69 67 58 income <0.001 0.007 0.084 < $20,000 8 13 23 37 22 32 $20,000<$35,000 12 16 19 16 16 22 $35,000<$50,000 13 14 14 17 13 13 $50,000<$75,000 21 20 15 12 18 13 $75,000 or more 42 32 24 12 28 19 others (refused) 4 5 5 5 2 1 insurance 0.898 0.418 0.768 yes 94 94 82 85 79 80 no 6 6 18 15 21 20 marital status 0.492 0.157 0.15 married 34 35 58 64 34 42 other 66 65 42 36 66 58 cancer info overload <0.001 <0.001 0.004 strongly agree 68 82 65 80 67 80 somewhat agree 32 18 35 20 33 20 h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e h u a n g , c h a n a n d f e n g 13 white (%) black (%) hispanic (%) no yes p value no yes p value no yes p value confident to get health info <0.001 <0.001 <0.001 full confident 71 52 71 49 56 44 very confident 24 38 23 33 33 30 some confident 5 10 6 18 11 26 confident to self caring <0.001 <0.001 0.134 full confident 23 15 28 18 23 21 very confident 55 48 50 43 39 43 some confident 21 37 21 39 31 40 heard of cdc <0.001 0.002 0.001 yes 92 85 86 75 67 50 no 8 15 14 25 33 50 heard of genetic test <0.001 0.62 0.08 yes 40 32 28 25 34 26 no 60 69 72 75 66 74 looking for cancer information <0.001 0.165 <0.001 yes 56 49 42 35 49 27 no 44 51 58 65 51 73 online access <0.001 <0.001 <0.001 yes 85 71 70 52 72 47 no 15 29 30 48 28 53 rating quality healthcare <0.001 0.147 0.807 excellent 41 29 33 26 29 27 very good 41 43 40 38 34 35 good 15 21 17 22 25 23 fair 4 8 10 14 11 14 trust health info on internet <0.001 <0.001 <0.001 a lot 23 16 26 11 33 18 some 56 53 50 47 43 37 a little 15 18 16 24 16 17 not at all 7 14 8 17 9 29 h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s table 2. ors of respondents who reported health numeracy confidence from hints 2007 survey unadjusted or (95% ci) adjusted or (95% ci) race white 1 1 hispanic 0.66*** (0.53-0.81) 0.88 (0.69,1.13) black 0.83 (0.68-1.02) 0.98 (0.78,1.22) age 18-34 1 35-49 0.64*** (0.52,0.80) 50-64 0.68*** (0.55,0.84) 65-74 0.72** (0.56,0.93) 75+ 0.61*** (0.45,0.82) education less than high school 1 high school graduate 1.07 (0.79,1.43) some college 1.41** (1.05,1.89) college graduate 1,61*** (1.18,2.19) gender male (reference) 1 female 0.88* (0.77,1.00) income < $20,000 1 $20,000 to < $35,000 0.94 (0.77,1.14) $35,000 to < $50,000 1 (0.81,1.13) $50,000 to < $75,000 0.96 (0.80,1.12) $75,000 or more 0.88 (0.66,1.21) others (refused) 1.01 (0.7,1.45) cancer info overload strongly agree 1 somewhat agree 1.8*** (1.54,2.10) h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e h u a n g , c h a n a n d f e n g 15 unadjusted or (95% ci) adjusted or (95% ci) confidence to get health information full confident 1 very confident 0.64*** (0.55,0.74) some confident 0.62*** (0.49,0.80) confidence for self-caring full confident 1 very confident 0.83* (0.70,1.00) some confident 0.57*** (0.46,0.70) heard of cdc yes 1 no 0.75*** (0.62,0.91) heard of genetic test yes 1 no 0.86** (0.75,0.99) looking for cancer information yes 1 no 0.88* (0.76,1.00) online access yes 1 no 0.67*** (0.56,0.81) rating quality healthcare excellent 1 very good 0.81** (0.69,0.95) good 0.76** (0.63,0.93) fair 0.67** (0.50,0.89) trust health info on internet a lot 1 some 0.81** (0.67,0.95) a little 0.76** (0.61,0.95) not at all 0.67*** (0.43,0.76) *p< 0.05; **p< 0.01; ***p< 0.001 h e a l t h n u m e r a c y c o n f i d e n c e 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s table 3. decomposition of the differences between hispanics and whites in percentage reflecting the health statistical confidence gaps. decomposition analysis a. hispanic coefficient (se) % whites percentage of health numeracy confidence 0.6585 hispanics percentage of health numeracy confidence 0.5604 difference 0.0981 age -0.014*** (0.004) -14.3 female 0.0006*** (0.00005) 0.6 education 0.0244*** (0.006) 24.9 income -0.0001 -0.1 cancer info overload -0.0017*** (0.0005) -1.7 confident to get info 0.0161*** (0.003) 16.4 confident for self-caring 0.0037*** (0.001) 3.8 looking for cancer info 0.0042* (0.005) 4.3 heard of cdc 0.0145** (0.007) 14.8 heard of genetic testing 0.0024* (0.001) 2.5 online access 0.0168*** (0.004) 17.1 rating quality of healthcare 0.0093*** (0.003) 9.5 trust on internet 0.0031*** (0.001) 3.2 observations 4,119 all included variables 0.0794 81 a. negative percentages reflect how a factor contributes to narrowing the gap; positive values imply a widening of the gap between whites and the specific minority group. *p< 0.05; **p< 0.01; ***p< 0.001. microsoft word 05_5305_book review_atkinson & jackson_24.2_final © 2016 tannis atkinson and nancy jackson. this is an open access article distributed under the  terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the  material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any  purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.  citation: literacy and numeracy studies 2016, 24(2): 5305,  http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i2.5305   l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 2 2 0 1 6 64 review beyond economic interests a review by tannis atkinson and nancy s. jackson beyond economic interests: critical perspectives on adult literacy and numeracy in a globalised world edited by keiko yasukawa and stephen black sense, 2016, rotterdam isbn paperback: 9789463004428 ($ 43.00) isbn hardcover: 9789463004435 ($ 99.00) isbn e-book: 9789463004442 this volume reflects the many faces of the adult literacy and numeracy (aln) field since the introduction, more than two decades ago, of oecd surveys that define and measure aln as a contribution to economic productivity, efficiency and growth. the book highlights the transition to statistical tools as the only legitimate form of knowledge about literacy and explores a range of alternative visions and creative practices that focus on ‘the meaning of literacy and numeracy in people's lives’ (yasukawa and black 2016: 21). the core of the book is a glimpse into the state of aln practice in diverse contexts in australia and aotearoa/new zealand reflecting the fact that the collection grew out of the 2013 national conference of the australian council for adult literacy. many of the authors are aln practitioners who describe instances of steadfastly clinging to visions of their work as serving a broader social good than the narrow economic interests to which it has been increasingly tied. in this, they join a chorus of similar voices from other parts of the industrialised world, including our own (atkinson 2013, jackson 2005), describing aln work that persists despite policy efforts to reshape it. b e y o n d e c o n o m i c i n t e r e s t s a t k i n s o n a n d j a c k s o n 65 the introduction to the three-part volume provides a strong unifying vision for this quite diverse collection of chapters which, as the editors note, aims to provide ‘resources that help participants in the field to develop a critical perspective about the dominant discourses and to imagine alternative futures.’ part one lays out the context in which aln practitioners work. the first chapter discusses the rise of international surveys as the source of official knowledge about literacy; hamilton argues that abstract discourses assemble literacies that are ‘materialised through everyday, educational testing and policy practices.’ in the second chapter yasukawa and black unpack the roots of their own sense of alienation from contemporary policies, analysing the evolution of the aln strategy to argue that such policies are engineered in a social world far removed from that of most aln learners and practitioners. chapter three introduces tools for critically assessing statistical accounts of aln: evans outlines the conceptual bases and methodological choices of the oecd surveys, offers examples of how the interpretation of survey statistics can be questioned but also argues for ‘alternative research programmes’ that could push back against the current tendency to reduce aln to a set of ‘narrow competencies.’ the title of part two is ‘resistance and agency in local literacies and numeracies’ and the contributions here focus on illustrating some of the alternative visions that persist in spite of the narrowing effects of current policies and discourses. in this section aln practitioners tell their stories about diverse local meanings of literacy/numeracy, including the variety of practices in aln programs and community settings, and efforts to support and sustain such diversity. two chapters discuss the complexities of aln programming in the widely divergent contexts of two remote indigenous communities (kral), and in a major urban setting of classes for adult migrant english learners (ollerhead). other chapters discuss institutional challenges, such as how uneven allocation of resources to aln students and staff can further marginalize these adults (strauss), or how data-driven accountability mechanisms serve to monitor compliance rather than support educational outcomes (coben and mccartney). holland discusses how cognitive, skills-focused learning has gained ascendance in workplace learning at the expense of developing social, emotional and relational capacities. yasukawa and widin shift the focus from individual to institutional practices, exploring how ‘museum literacies’ have the effect of constructing inclusions or exclusions of different b e y o n d e c o n o m i c i n t e r e s t s 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s visitor groups. boughton argues that the oecd’s human capital approach attempts to silence more radical understandings of how aln work can support social equality. the final section (part three) offers four examples of how the unquestioned acceptance of the transnational agenda for aln might be contested. duckworth and hamilton offer the rapal network in the uk as illustrating how to assert the value of practitioner knowledge. mccormack documents the four literacies framework developed in the state of victoria in the 1980s, proposing its broad understanding of what aln learners need as an antidote to current framings. evans and simpson describe the history of the radical statistics group, outlining some of its more and less successful efforts to promote the use of critical approaches to statistics to support progressive social change. in the final chapter hunter argues that training for aln practitioners can provide a rare opportunity to cultivate critical thinking about how their work is constrained and curtailed by current policies. overall the collection foregrounds the fact that policies based on economic logics and survey statistics have silenced practitioner wisdom and done little to address the barriers faced by those marginalised adults who struggle with literacy and numeracy. it does offer inspiration for alternative, more learner-centered ways of doing aln work. yet we are left with the feeling that many of these examples are a little nostalgic, celebrating the ways that familiar critical ideas from the past are still relevant and possible today. this falls somewhat short of the implied promise of the book title to offer a visionary breakthrough that carries the field ‘beyond’ the constraints of the economic logic of our times. at the same time, given how quickly policy framings and dominant discourses make other views ‘impossible to think’ (fendler 1998), there is definitely value in documenting the rich diversity in ways of thinking, being and doing that have characterized aln work. as reviewers we also had another expectation for this volume that mostly was not realized, one that perhaps reflects our own longings for future directions in the field. we hope to see more work that contributes to a detailed interrogation of aln policy as an active social process. work that asks, for example, what are the mechanisms through which oecd statistical data has systematically extinguished practitioner knowledge and repositioned practitioners as functionaries rather than as educators? we continue to wonder who is responding to the challenge by brandt and clinton (2002) that literacy studies b e y o n d e c o n o m i c i n t e r e s t s a t k i n s o n a n d j a c k s o n 67 find ways to better analyse connections between the global and the local. we eagerly await more research, like that of pinsent-johnson (2015), documenting the mechanisms through which aln policy and practice are aligned, locally and globally, but also studies that investigate what enables, and limits, educators’ attempts to prioritise the human needs of aln students over the documentary demands of current policies. while it is important to honour and celebrate the ‘experience, aspirations and hopes of practitioners and students,’ as mccormack says in this volume, what remains under-examined is how these visions have become increasingly difficult to realize, and what role statistics have played in smothering those dreams. references atkinson, t (2013) negotiating responsibilization: power at the threshold of capable literate conduct in ontario, phd, leadership, higher and adult education, oise, university of toronto. brandt, d and clinton, k (2002) limits of the local: expanding perspectives on literacy as a social practice, journal of literacy research 34, pp 337-356. doi: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15548430jlr3403_4 fendler, l (1998) what is it impossible to think? a genealogy of the educated subject, in popkewitz, s and brennan, m, eds, foucault's challenge: discourse, knowledge, and power in education, teachers college press, new york and london, pp 39-63. jackson, n s (2005) adult literacy policy: mind the gap, in bascia, n, cumming, a, datnow, a, leithwood, k, and livingstone, d, eds, international handbook of educational policy, springer, dordrecht,the netherlands, pp 763-778. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3201-3_40 pinsent-johnson, c (2015) from an international adult literacy assessment to the classroom: how test development methods are transposed into curriculum, in hamilton, m, maddox, b and addey, c, eds, literacy as numbers: researching the politics and practices of international literacy assessment regimes, cambridge university press, cambridge, pp 187-206. microsoft word 06_5306_24.2 contributors_final © 2016 keiko yasukawa. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative  commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the  material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any  purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.  citation: literacy and numeracy studies 2016, 24(2): 5306,  http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i2.5306   l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 1 2 0 1 6 68 notes on contributors tannis atkinson tannis atkinson is a 2013 graduate of the university of toronto (oise) and a 2014-16 sshrc postdoctoral fellow in the department of sociology and legal studies, university of waterloo. she has chapters in recent refereed books through cambridge university press (uk), ubc press (canada), niace (uk) and sensepublishers (netherlands). t.atkinson@mail.utoronto.ca elaine chapman elaine chapman is associate dean of research at the graduate school of education at university of western australia. elaine has extensive experience supervising post-graduate research in the area of reading difficulties. elaine.chapman@uwa.edu.au nancy jackson nancy jackson is professor emerita, adult education and community development program, oise, university of toronto. her areas of specialization are critical analyses in adult literacy, workplace learning and the discourse of skill. she has refereed publications in canada, the us, uk and australia. nancy.jackson@utoronto.ca janna klostermann janna klostermann is a phd student in carleton university's department of sociology and anthropology (ottawa, ontario, canada). janna.payne@carleton.ca janet mchardy janet mchardy is a doctoral candidate at the graduate school of education, university of western australia. she has extensive experience working as an adult literacy teacher and has a particular interest in the teaching of reading to less-skilled adult readers. janetmchardy@gmail.com notes for contributors l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 69 pamela osmond pamela osmond has worked in the field of adult basic education in australia since the 1970s in a wide range of roles, and is the author of a wide range of teaching / learning resources, including so you want to tech an adult to read…? and literacy face to face. she is currently researching a history of the adult basic education field in nsw. posmond8@bigpond.com microsoft word lns 17 3pp6-26 tusting_21dec09.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 7 n o 3 2 0 0 9 6 ‘i am not a “good” teacher; i don’t do all their paperwork’: teacher resistance to accountability demands in the english skills for life strategy karin tusting a b s t r a c t in 2000, skills for life, a new strategy for literacy, numeracy and language education was introduced in england. it included new core curricula, tough new targets for learner achievement, and significantly increased accountability requirements for teachers and colleges. many teachers found aspects of this new system difficult. this paper analyses interviews carried out with teachers in 2002 to identify the reasons underlying their resistance. in the interviews, teachers consistently drew on a welldefined discourse which defined ‘good’ teaching as teaching that is responsive to the learner, negotiating teaching in response to learners’ goals and characteristics, and flexible in the teaching moment. resistance arose when aspects of the centralised strategy were perceived to constrain teachers’ ability to respond to learners in this way, being driven more by external demands and advance planning than by responsiveness to learners. teachers attempted to develop strategies to maintain responsiveness while working within the new strategy. i n t r o d u c t i o n increasing accountability demands in education – often referred to in shorthand as ‘the paperwork’ – have been identified as being among the significant factors contributing to teacher stress and perceived to be drawing teachers away from tasks which really matter to themselves and to their students. this paper explores this issue in relation to the introduction of the skills for life language, literacy and numeracy strategy in england in 2000. interviews with teachers carried out shortly after the strategy was introduced show that teachers drew on a very specific model of ‘good’ teaching, central to which is responsiveness to learners. analysis of these interviews will demonstrate that resistance to the new system arose when it was perceived to constrain specific aspects of teachers’ ability to respond to learners. t e x t u a l i s a t i o n i n e d u c a t i o n in ethnographic studies of workplace stress in education, ‘paperwork’ has been identified as a particularly significant factor contributing to the pressures of work intensification (troman 2000, jeffrey and troman 2004). this is part of a broader social trend, in which increased ‘textualisation’ (iedema and scheeres 2003) has changed the nature of work for many. i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t i n g 7 workplace literacy studies have revealed that workers are increasingly expected to engage in complex literacy practices, even in previously nontextual jobs (brandt 2001, hull 1997, belfiore et al. 2004). this requires the re-negotiation of workers’ existing knowledges, practices and identities, often in conflictual and stressful ways (farrell 2000, farrell et al 2000, farrell 2001, jackson 2000). heightened levels of accountability are demanded, in an ‘audit culture’ (strathern 2000) or ‘audit society’ (power 1997) in which workers are required to record their practices in great detail. this textualisation of education has brought difficulties. in a literature review of the introduction of performance culture in further education, avis (2005) identifies common themes of intensification of labour, loss of control and a perceived marginalisation of ‘what matters to teachers’. in higher education, shore and wright (2000) argue that such changes in language and practices produce new types of professional identities, transforming teachers into individuals who, in a climate of ‘unease and hyperactivity’, conduct themselves in terms of the norms by which they are governed. following power (1994), they demonstrate that anxiety and insecurity destroy commitment and loyalty to organizations, and may undermine performance. power notes that the spread of audit ‘actually creates the very distrust it is meant to address’ (1994:10). as douglas (1992, quoted in strathern 2000:4) observes, checking only becomes necessary in situations of mistrust. in adult education, darville (2002:63) observes that ‘in interviews with practitioners, talk often turns to "the burden of paperwork," even when no questions have directed attention to it,’ as a reflection of the time and attention that such practices take up. he recounts the tensions described by teachers in ontario when training plans were introduced, who struggled to reconcile the demands of the new documentation with their assessment of what students wanted. similarly, hamilton (2007) identifies the highly contentious nature of the particular textualised task of completing individual learning plans (ilps) to structure student learning in adult literacy, numeracy and esol (alne) education. she describes conflicts between the supposedly individualising but actually globalising nature of the ilp and the primarily student-centred orientation of teachers; difficulties around the time taken to fill them in and around managing ilps with esol learners; and problems with the role teachers take up as mediator between student aspirations and system requirements. in hamilton’s analysis, tutors’ attempts to improve the ilp experience for themselves and their students end up coopting them into the very system they are sceptical about. jackson (2005) describes a growing feeling that literacy workers have been enrolled in a project not their own, in which ‘what counts’ becomes shaped by the routine work of record keeping and reporting to funders. she describes how, in a range of international settings, the introduction of i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s centralised systems has led to a focus on ‘what counts’ within the system, rather than on what matters to students and teachers. t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n o f s k i l l s f o r l i f e this paper will address similar issues which emerged with the introduction of the skills for life adult literacy, numeracy and esol strategy in england in 2000). this major strategy aimed to transform adult literacy, numeracy and esol education, in response to a review of the english field reported in a fresh start (moser 1999). the so-called ‘moser report’ proposed a completely new strategy and a major increase in national funding. alne teachers welcomed increased investment in what had previously been a fragmented and low-priority area, described as a ‘cinderella’ field within adult education (hamilton and hillier 2006). skills for life suddenly raised the profile of alne in hitherto undreamt-of fashion. but with increased investment came increased accountability requirements. the centralised system included new core curricula for literacy, numeracy and language, new testing and accreditation systems, new requirements and tough new targets for colleges and local learning and skills councils who administrated funding. many teachers experienced difficulties with this new system. while welcoming the investment made in the field, most experienced alne teachers found that aspects of the new strategy contradicted elements of their teaching philosophies and backgrounds. in earlier periods in the uk, much of the work in this field was driven by a social justice agenda, and responding to learners’ needs was the paramount concern (hamilton and hillier 2006). the centralised curriculum and testing regime was perceived by many teachers as a challenge to this learner-centred approach, and there was concern that the government drive to upskill people for a competitive new economy was taking priority over the social inclusion concerns of the field. this paper asks why this new system was experienced as being problematic. what made the introduction of such changes, ostensibly aimed at improving the system, difficult for many teachers to cope with? and what coping strategies did teachers develop in dealing with this? these questions will be addressed through an analysis of teachers’ responses to these changes, as expressed by a group of alne staff involved with a research project which took place shortly after the strategy had been introduced. in previous work (ivanic et al. 2006) we have described teachers’ experiences at this time as having to negotiate tensions between two different models of professionalism. the first, a commitment to respond to learners as individuals, was often informed by a commitment to social justice. the second, a requirement to meet the demands of the skills for life strategy, included delivering the curriculum, achieving recruitment, retention and achievement targets, and administering assessment. this paper will explore i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t i n g 9 in more depth the implicit model of good teaching expressed in these interviews, and draw out the reasons for the tensions teachers described at the time. this offers a snapshot of the challenges teachers faced with the introduction of the new system, and the strategies they developed to deal with these challenges. more importantly, perhaps, it articulates an explanation for the reasons such changes were often described as problematic, in terms of conflicting discourses about what it is to be a ‘good’ teacher. t e a c h e r i n t e r v i e w s ; d a t a a n d a n a l y s i s in 2002, a team at the literacy research centre, lancaster university began the 'adult learners' lives' research (barton et al. 2007). this project explored the relationship between what was going on in the classroom and learners’ lives beyond the classroom, and was part of the research programme of the national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy, funded by the department for education and skills as part of the skills for life strategy. we engaged in ethnographic research in a range of college and community sites in the north west of england. the three university-based researchers (yvon appleby, rachel hodge and karin tusting) spent extensive periods of time in classes with learners and teachers, carrying out formal and informal interviews recorded in fieldnotes and audiorecorded, and spending time with learners outside the classrooms to come to understand more about the realities of their lives. at the same time, practitioner researchers carried out focused projects to explore particular issues in learners’ lives. this research came at a point when new skills for life core curricula had been rolled out to colleges, along with associated training sessions, but these were still considered to be relatively ‘new’. teachers were getting used to a new system. they were required to ‘map’ their teaching to the curriculum. this was the necessity that each learning aim or achievement recorded in ilps, lesson plans and other related paperwork be ‘mapped’ to the core curriculum by labelling it with the letter and number of the appropriate section and subsection. teachers were also expected to encourage their learners to work towards taking national tests. every local learning and skills council had targets to work towards of numbers of students achieving success in national literacy and numeracy tests. these targets were then fed down to colleges, with associated impacts on the funding colleges would receive. while the impact of the changes associated with skills for life was not the prime focus of our study, by spending so much time with learners and teachers it quickly became clear that their experiences were being changed by the introduction of this system in some very powerful ways. we therefore decided to include exploration of these issues to inform the broader thrust of the project. open-ended qualitative interviews were i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s carried out with teachers involved with the project between april and june 2003. the interviews covered a range of areas: teachers’ backgrounds and routes into literacy, numeracy and language teaching; training; planning methods; descriptions of practice; responses to the recent changes; role as a teacher, and relationship between research and practice. (see appendix for interview schedule and details of teachers interviewed.) this article reports on an in depth reanalysis of this interviews, which explores what they have to tell us about these teachers’ experiences of the introduction of new national accountability systems. the analysis was carried out using the atlas-ti computer-aided qualitative data analysis package. the interviews were systematically coded for anything referring to changes in the system, accountability requirements and the impact that this had on people’s teaching. these codes were then refined by repeatedly revisiting the data to draw out the detail of what people were talking about, recurrent patterns and themes, and significant relationships between these. this analysis revealed broad thematic areas in the data relating to what it meant to be a ‘good’ teacher, the issues teachers had with the new system, and the different strategies teachers drew on to manage these issues. the discussion below is structured around these main areas, with the subheadings relating to the principal codings which emerged from the analysis. w h a t d o e s i t m e a n t o b e a g o o d t e a c h e r ? r e s p o n s i v e n e s s t o l e a r n e r s in these interviews, teachers drew on a discourse in which the central characteristic of a ‘good teacher’ was to be responsive to the learner. teachers spoke about trying to construct respectful relationships with their learners, and trying to minimise the hierarchical teacher-student relationship. kay approached her teaching by trying to find out ‘what would be useful to the person and how it would be useful to them, and to make it available to them in as equal a way as possible.’ similarly, debbie stressed the need to have a basic respect for students. central to this responsiveness is a respect for learners’ own goals, and for the reasons why they come to classes. as wynne put it, ‘if you’re not taking into account individuals’ needs in terms of their progress and what not, then you’re not doing it right.’ these goals were often different from the targets that the colleges were being expected to meet. margaret, discussing the students she worked with in family learning, pointed out that students’ reasons for being there were often very different from the reasons the government wanted to encourage their participation: in family learning, they often come because they want to help their child. and that’s the government excuse for putting in this basic skills through family learning, you see, to improve their i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t i n g 11 skills. but they’ve got to take a while to get to that realisation that maybe, there’s something in it for them. this responsiveness to learners was reflected in the way teachers talked about planning their classes in response primarily to the goals learners brought with them. hermione’s class planning process was entirely driven by learners’ goals, beginning by discussing the issues students wanted to work on, and only after the first few weeks relating these to core curriculum levels and assessment targets. the process she described was student-led, rather than curriculum-led. student were not pressurised to stick with their original plan, and plans were changed flexibly: ‘although they have got their two or three points on a list, we may deviate, depending on how i perceive their progress, how they perceive their progress.’ students’ goals were rarely described simply in terms of language, literacy and numeracy, but were normally spoken of in broader terms. wynne, asked to talk about the most important principles in teaching and learning, underlined the fact that there is ‘more to learning’ than what she calls ‘the official end’. the students are growing in lots of ways that are not just to do with whether they’ve learnt the past simple. learning about themselves and the way that they learn. learning about each other and learning to get on with things and get on with other people and growing in confidence. gail described these broader goals in terms of empowerment, enfranchisement, confidence and happiness. she told us that when she saw students making progress in their language, she felt they had more power in their lives generally. they changed how they felt about themselves, they had more control and more opportunities, they felt they had a role to play in life, and they were more confident in dealing with practical matters. responsiveness to individual learners also meant appreciating their achievements and progress in their own terms, rather than measuring them against external yardsticks. for some, this progress might happen in small steps. for example, for the students in margaret’s family learning class, regular attendance might be an important achievement that would be missed if the focus was purely on academic progression. hermione pointed out that for a student with mental health difficulties, initial progress might consist not in academic development but in being able to come into class without their carer. it might take weeks to get to that significant point. as she said, ‘progression has to be seen, not only in academic levels, but also in personal levels.’ an awareness of students’ capacities as individuals was important, which meant both appreciating their achievements in their own terms, and not under-estimating their capacities. margaret cautioned, ‘never presume … i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s even if you think they are only at one level, they may know how to spell words that are for level two.’ some of wynne’s beginner-level esol learners had enough previous experience of learning language to be asking for irregular verb tables before they started any work on past tenses. teachers were therefore wary of simply categorising students against curriculum levels, which could mask such subtleties. o n g o i n g n e g o t i a t i o n a n d d i s c u s s i o n this level of responsiveness to learners could not be achieved without negotiation and communication with them, discussing their goals in an atmosphere of mutual respect. grace felt that planning, without this negotiation, was meaningless. you can plan a whole term’s work, in minute detail, but because your students haven't planned it with you, because they haven't read the books, it can be just sort of null and void after week one or two. this negotiation and discussion required teachers to take the time to build up a good, trusting relationship with students and to discuss their goals and capacities with them. this happens in a gradual fashion. initial assessment can only go so far. as hermione told us, difficult personal issues could affect students’ responses in the classroom, but these might only be revealed to the teacher gradually, once a trusting relationship had been built up. these negotiations could be particularly time-consuming with esol students at beginner level, where the lack of a shared language complicated the issue, and made target-setting a challenging process in itself. f l e x i b i l i t y responsiveness to learners required an attitude of flexibility, a willingness to change plans ‘in the moment’. the word ‘flexible’ was used many times in these interviews. margaret had found flexibility to be crucial after introducing group work in her literacy classes, saying that you have to be prepared to ‘change tack quite quickly’ if the prepared task did not work as expected. hermione’s teaching at a social services day centre for people with physical or mental health needs depended on flexibility, as students’ capacities to engage with learning fluctuated from day to day. in all of her work with adults she was prepared to change plans to respond to students’ needs, which she described as being very different from her previous experiences of teaching timetabled lessons in school. this need for flexibility required teachers to have the confidence in their own abilities and professionalism to be able to change plans off the cuff. teachers told us that this was something that came with experience, as grace describes: i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t i n g 13 i'll look at their work, and i know exactly what i've got in mind for them, i know exactly what i'm going to try, and if it’s pitched too low a level, i can move it up immediately. that only comes with experience. t e a c h e r s ’ i s s u e s w i t h t h e n e w s y s t e m at the time this research took place, the accountability frameworks and structures associated with skills for life were relatively new. the teachers we were working with expressed a range of criticisms of the new system, all of which can be related to the characteristics of their model of ‘good’ teaching described above. it was when the new strategy was felt to be constraining their ability to be a responsive, open, flexible ‘good’ teacher that criticisms emerged. c o n s t r a i n i n g r e s p o n s i v e n e s s a particularly significant criticism was that the new system damaged the good relationship between teachers and learners. the amount of paperwork students were now expected to engage with in class was described as alienating and demeaning. for example, the ‘work done sheet’ was a written record of what had happened in each lesson, which had been introduced in this college as part of the new accountability structures. grace said, ‘when they see some of the work, they say i don't want to do that "work done sheet". […] i also feel these are adults and we are treating them like children, you will do this, and you will do that.’ debbie found it uncomfortable to have to ask students to borrow their files to accredit their work when she felt students’ reasons for being there were not adequately reflected by the accreditation process. targets related to assessment were particularly problematic when assessment requirements did not reflect students’ goals, achievements or capacities. teachers felt that a lot of these requirements were measuring the ‘wrong thing’. margaret felt the structure of the curriculum was inappropriate: ‘some of those segments are too big, and students only want to do tiny little bits of it. but then they can’t be accredited.’ gail was concerned that where she had missed elements of the curriculum out because they were not relevant to her students, she could not then accredit that section on their college certificate of achievement, an alternative way to record and recognise achievement to the national test. the college certificate, awarded at the end of term, recorded what each particular student had made progress in, and was felt to be part of a more responsive approach to assessment for many students. kay was worried that students were not ‘doing the accreditation’ for their own reasons: i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s i think you still can’t help feeling that mostly a lot of people are doing the accreditation to please you and really it’s not really what it is about for them. for esol teachers, a requirement to complete individual learning plans for each student at the start of the course, to map their goals to the curriculum and to use these to plan teaching, raised particular problems. students’ goals tended to be global ones, such as wanting to achieve fluency, gaining vocabulary or improving their pronunciation. such global skills were difficult to reflect in a system that required targets to be related to specific curriculum areas. beginner students in particular did not have the language or the metalingual knowledge to break their general goals down into specific targets. for gail, this was part of the tutor’s role and it required their specific expertise to break these global aims down into teaching and learning experiences. she felt strongly that students could not be expected to articulate the means to achieve their broader goals in advance. the requirement to specify students’ specific goals at the start of the course was in fact damaging her capacity to respond to their needs. she suggested that this led to a focus on the wrong sorts of changes, feeling that ‘the paperwork’ as it was constructed did not always adequately reflect learners’ positive experiences and the progress they were making in relation to their broader goals of confidence and empowerment. similarly, margaret pointed out that measuring progress in relation to one class did not reflect the longer-term nature of the progress shown by people she worked with. she felt that the most important changes were being overlooked by curriculum-focused assessment, such as transformations in people’s desire to learn: of course it’s difficult to track that. it’s more about attitudes, i think. and that’s mostly not measurable. the requirement to assess students’ capacities at the beginning of their engagement with the college had the potential to affect relationships with tutors from an early stage. margaret felt initial assessment was particularly damaging to relationships in the family learning course. parents joined this course to help their children to learn. but at the start of the course, she was expected to assess parents’ own literacy and numeracy skills. she felt this was threatening, inappropriate, and did not reflect the amount of time it took for people to be ready to engage in learning themselves. many of the parents she worked with needed to go through several stages before they could start to engage in more structured learning activities: first turning up to one or two events for their child, then learning to attend on a regular basis, perhaps doing some writing for a few weeks, and only then beginning to articulate their own needs. i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t i n g 15 c o n s t r a i n i n g o n g o i n g n e g o t i a t i o n in all of these colleges, the amount of paperwork teachers and students were doing had increased substantially. this paperwork was regarded as onerous by both teachers and students. it took up time that could otherwise have been spent on discussions with learners, constraining possibilities both for negotiating students’ learning goals and for building up good relationships more generally. for many students, the paperwork was a challenging task in itself. in an adult community college, students completed individual learning plans (ilps) at the start of each term, and ‘work done sheets’ at the end of each session. while these could offer valuable opportunities for negotiating learning goals and reviewing progress, for many students these were difficult pieces of paper to deal with, and filling them in could take up a great deal of the time they were in college. as grace explained, a perceived requirement to have the ilp completed at the start of term was an extra pressure for her students: this great rush to get it done in the first one or two weeks, well, until they've been here two or three weeks, they don't know what they want to do. you've really got to push, well, do you want to learn to write letters? oh yes, but they'll agree to anything because you're the teacher. i just think all this paperwork is utterly meaningless to them. while the responsive discourse of good teaching recognises that it may take some time to draw out from the student what their learning goals really are, grace found herself having to ‘push’ the students to articulate goals too early. ironically, the format and timing prescribed here, which had the aim of encouraging negotiation with learners, was instead constraining the possibilities for teachers to engage in meaningful discussion. paperwork was particularly problematic when it was felt to be meaningless. it was often described as being repetitious, recording the same thing in many different ways, as with gail’s description of curriculum mapping: on the one hand, we've got all this paperwork demanded of us. […] all these session plans are supposed to be curriculum targeted as well. i mean, go away! it’s fine if you're teaching 2 sessions, but you’re teaching 7 sessions a week and you've got other stuff to do as well, and you’re sort of leafing through the curriculum. i think they need to get something manageable going on here. i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s this paperwork seemed particularly purposeless to her because so much was being generated that nobody had the time to check that it had been done. the increasingly onerous nature of these requirements was very tiring for teachers, as their experience of teaching became more and more about completing these tasks, and less and less about engaging with their students. gail distinguished between the ‘teaching’ and the ‘writing up’: it’s not manageable. […] we’re all jumping through very boring but difficult hoops. and i find that very tiring, i find that the most tiring aspect. the teaching i really, really enjoy. but i've got seven courses to write up now. spending time in preparation or recording was not a problem in itself. it was the perceived wasting of time on tasks not directly responsive to students’ needs that was at issue here. as grace said, i'm not saying i'm resistant to paperwork, but it is paperwork for paperwork’s sake that i'm resistant to. c o n s t r a i n i n g f l e x i b i l i t y the new system included more emphasis on pre-planning, more paper-based scrutiny of teachers’ work and increased training requirements. one of the principal effects of this was to constrain teachers’ capacity to be flexible in the moment. gail’s description of the curriculum captures the sense of threat many teachers were experiencing at this point: the paperwork has all changed, as well. i feel that some of our flexibility is gone. […] now that everything has got to be curriculum referenced, i mean the whole thing has tightened up, really. so that the curriculum, it’s kind of there all the time, kind of hovering in the background. grace felt the paperwork constrained flexibility, and that being ‘good at the paperwork’ could actually mitigate against being a good teacher. i've seen beautiful paperwork, beautifully planned lessons, and i've seen this in more than one situation, where yes, somebody is red hot on paperwork, [but] they’re absolutely useless as a practitioner because their focus is on the paperwork and not on the student. and i like this greater flexibility of being able to change your paperwork as your student demands it, and unfortunately, the system being as it is, it doesn't allow for that. it’s paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. the new requirements were perceived to be catering for the ‘lowest common denominator’, with negative assumptions about teachers’ levels of i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t i n g 17 professionalism and competence underlying them. grace equated the increased paperwork with a lack of trust: i did four years at [this college, several years ago], and i really enjoyed it. i loved it. and it was a lot different then to what it is now, a lot different. […] the paperwork was minimal. they trusted you to get on with the job, and you did. she suggested that the new system was geared to people with no experience, for whom doing the job became about filling in the right forms and following the right books, while experienced tutors were more likely to be pushed away by the level of non-student-centred work required. most of the teachers interviewed had found the introduction of the new system damaging to their self-confidence. this was partly to do with the speed with which the changes had been introduced. when asked what training she felt she needed, hermione distinguished between the teaching work, which she felt confident with, and what she calls the ‘husbandry’ work, dealing with all the new accreditation and assessment schemes, which she had found difficult to get on top of – to the extent that she ‘panicked’ and came to believe she might be ‘slow’ at picking things up. as gail described it: there is a lot of angst, i think, on lots of tutors’ minds. you know, constant self doubt about whether we're doing it right. even though we can see our students are learning, and growing in confidence, we're still wondering, are we doing it right? we’re not just wondering, we're worrying are we doing it right. and that's such a general feeling that, you know, that can't be right. that can't be positive. all that energy could be being put into much more productive processes. p o s i t i v e r e s p o n s e s t o t h e n e w s y s t e m this research was carried out at a moment of change, where it is natural for people to express worries and concerns. however, i would not wish to suggest that teachers were unremittingly critical of the new system. i have argued that those things which they were negative about were all related to limiting people’s ability to be the kind of responsive teacher they wanted to be. similarly, the aspects of the new system that were perceived as positive were those that contributed to teachers’ capacities to respond to learners’ needs. the first of these was the introduction of more structure through the curriculum. for some, the curriculum was seen as a positive resource, providing a framework within which learners’ goals could be more closely negotiated. for instance, hermione used the core curriculum as a way of demonstrating to students how far they had progressed, while maintaining the flexibility to deviate from planned routes and curriculum frameworks as she i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s felt it necessary. similarly, gail found it useful to have a structure with the curriculum to track students’ progress. both of these teachers had previously worked in schools at the time of the introduction of the national curriculum. they drew on this experience to recognise that the restrictions associated with the new system were likely to slacken off over time. this helped them to use the curriculum as a resource, rather than feel it to be a constraint. similarly, wynne, who saw the esol curriculum as a non-prescriptive resource, spoke of it very positively. i think it’s brilliant. i think it’s really really good, the new esol curriculum’s wonderful, we’ve needed it for ages. and i don’t think it’s prescriptive, so therefore you can’t say what you would do differently, because you can do anything with it. wynne had used the curriculum to draw up a syllabus for her college that she felt was right for them. as a manager as well as a teacher, she had to ensure that evidence was produced of responsive systems running consistently through her department. the new curriculum offered her a framework within which to do this, though she acknowledged that this led to difficulties when trying to impose a single way of approaching planning and target setting on a whole department. so these teachers were not simply complaining about the introduction of a new system. where they saw aspects of the system supporting their responsive teaching, it was praised. however, at this point in time, the issues at the forefront in our discussions were the problems they were having, and the strategies they were using to mediate these pressures. m e d i a t i n g t h e p r e s s u r e s this was a relatively new system, and teachers were still in the early stages of developing strategies to deal with the things they found difficult. nevertheless, they had already developed different ways to deal with the conflict between their model of good teaching and the new practices they were expected to engage with. r e s i s t a n c e a n d s e l e c t i v e i g n o r i n g resistance was an important one of these. teachers with experience and confidence were willing to simply resist aspects of the new system when they felt this was an appropriate response. as gail said: i won't allow myself to be restricted by it, and i do do things that aren’t on the curriculum. another example was kay, who had been encouraged in the curriculum training to adopt group work in her classes, but felt that this was not right for her own students. she therefore developed a strategy of ‘selective[ly] ignoring’ this aspect of the strategy. i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t i n g 19 as margaret explained, being a ‘good’ teacher means different things to her and to the college administration, and her own understanding of it took priority: i am not a good teacher, in terms of the college, and i don’t do all their paper work, and i don’t take on board every last thing they tell me to do. she went on to explain that while she felt learning plans were fine in theory, they simply did not work for her students in the way she was expected to use them. she managed this situation by selectively resisting some of the paperwork she was asked to do, where she did not feel this was appropriate for her students. however, simple resistance was not possible or desirable in most cases. instead, all of these teachers in different ways found means to mediate external pressures for their students, in order to pursue their responsive model of teaching within the new regime. s t a r t i n g f r o m l e a r n e r s ’ g o a l s teachers still found ways to take the learners’ goals as a starting point and only thereafter relate them to the curriculum and accreditation targets. one way of doing this was, as hermione described, to focus on what the student had achieved first, checking what the student had done against the curriculum after the fact, rather than to plan their work in advance. the curriculum then played the role of validating the learners’ achievement rather than constraining their progress. of course this did not address the requirement to produce an ilp in advance. hermione did do this, but she maintained a great deal of flexibility in her approach to learning plans produced early on in the term. debbie’s strategy of putting learners before the curriculum was central to her teaching approach. in her interview, she developed this notion in some depth: you present the core curriculum in terms of people. you work around their hobbies and interests and what they want to learn […] provided you can relate what you are doing to the core curriculum, you can map it to the core curriculum. she went on to describe how she turned a spontaneously-generated class discussion into fulfilment of the speaking and listening criteria of the curriculum. this enabled her to move from simply teaching skills to developing her teaching in response to learners’ broader goals. m i n i m i s i n g t a r g e t p r e s s u r e s in order to mediate pressures from external requirements, teachers looked for ways to minimise these for students. for example, when faced with i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r 20 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s a requirement that students should work towards an assessment, hermione began by facilitating students’ access to an in-college certificate that recognised their achievements, where appropriate, rather than to push them to do the national literacy tests. similarly, kay managed the pressure to get learners through accreditation by minimising the concerns that testing might generate. she focused on getting people through it without upsetting people, by making it appear ‘small and insignificant’. again this depended on the students’ goals and capacities. kay and hermione were both talking at this point about students who found ‘tests’ threatening. for others, taking and passing the level one and two tests was something they looked forward to as a challenge and an achievement. the key, as ever, was appropriateness for the students concerned. d o i n g t h e m i n i m u m other strategies for minimising negative impacts of the new system included ‘doing the minimum’, as gail described it, to try and protect learners from paperwork overload: all this reviewing and self-evaluation. i sometimes think let’s just get on with it, you know, using the session to the absolute maximum exposure and practice in using english in a meaningful way, that's going to support the student's development and build up their confidence, rather than dealing with all these pieces of paper. by minimising the amount of paperwork gail engaged in with her learners, she was able to maximise the time she was spending responding directly to their language needs. d i s c u s s i o n : t h e r o o t s o f t e a c h e r s ’ c o n c e r n s far from simple resistance to change, or even resistance to an overload of paperwork per se, this analysis has demonstrated that teachers’ mixed feelings about the new strategy were related to a conflict of discourses. teachers expressed a distinctive model of what a ‘good’ teacher did, rooted in responsiveness to learners’ needs and capacities, with specific characteristics which were remarkably consistent across the interviews: building egalitarian relationships, responding to learners’ goals, and appreciating learners’ achievements in their own terms. however, many of the practices introduced by the new strategy were perceived to be based on a different model, in which a ‘good’ teacher was one who controlled activities in class, planned lessons and courses carefully in advance and mapped them to the new curriculum, and assessed learners against tests and levels constructed by external authorities. achieving responsiveness required negotiation, investment of time, and flexibility. teachers felt that all these were made more difficult within the new i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t i n g 21 system. new paperwork requirements were felt to alienate students and damage relationships. external targets were set which were not based around students’ own goals, achievements or capacities. time available for negotiation was eaten into by paperwork demands. flexibility in the teaching moment was constrained by pre-planning of curriculum-referenced lessons and schemes of work. teachers’ confidence in their own abilities was shaken by feelings of being ‘under surveillance’, and the feeling that new requirements were catering for ‘lowest common denominator’ teachers rather than supporting experienced staff. where the system supported responsive teaching, changes were welcomed. where it did not, teachers developed strategies for mediating between the requirements of the system and learners’ needs. these strategies included simple resistance; starting with learners’ own goals; minimising pressures from external targets; and ‘doing the minimum’ where paperwork was concerned. c o n c l u s i o n s a n d i m p l i c a t i o n s f o r p r a c t i c e these interviews represent a clash of discourses at one particular historic moment. in the time since they were carried out, the system has matured and teachers’ strategies with it. new teachers have come into the field, trained in teaching to the curriculum, with a different discourse of what ‘good’ teaching involves. funding structures have changed, and colleges’ requirements have changed with them. but this data still has important lessons to teach us. it is well established that changes in accountability requirements in education create stress for teachers. this article has looked in depth at the reasons why teachers find changes difficult, by examining in detail the responses of a group of teachers at the time of the introduction of skills for life in england. it has demonstrated that these teachers’ resistance to increased accountability demands is not simply a question of increased workload or resistance to surveillance. rather, the problem could be described in relation to conflicting models of ‘good’ teaching. teachers experienced difficulties when specific practices they associated with ‘good’ teaching were made increasingly difficult by requirements of the new system they were working within. the implications of this for practice more broadly are that teacher resistance to accountability (and other) systems should be understood not simply as resistance to change, but as a principled response of resistance to aspects of systems which challenge their teaching philosophies. when changes are introduced to a teaching situation, whether at policy level or at the level of the individual college, they are not simply imposed on a (compliant or resistant) population. rather, changes in accountability systems enter into a relationship of dialogue with existing practices, beliefs, discourses i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s and philosophies, which have shaped and continue to shape teachers’ approaches to their work. whenever changes are being contemplated, an understanding of the specific models of ‘good’ teaching in circulation in the field and the implications of such models for practice in the classroom needs to be developed. only then can the impact of proposed changes be adequately assessed. teachers’ responses to changes will to a large extent be shaped by their existing commitments to models of being a ‘good’ teacher. where these models are threatened by changes in accountability systems, these will not be welcomed, and teachers are likely to engage in various strategies of resistance. it is far more fruitful to work with teachers when changes are contemplated to ensure, as gail put it above, that ‘all that energy could be put into much more productive processes’. a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s i should like to express my gratitude firstly to the teachers who participated in this research, and secondly to ralf st clair and alisa belzer, editors of this special issue; david barton, rachel hodge, ann wilson, lesley buckley, and members of the lancaster literacy research discussion group; and anonymous reviewers, for helpful comments and support in developing this article. errors and infelicities remain of course my own responsibility. i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t 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(2004) time for ethnography. british educational research journal 30(4), 535-548. moser, c, ed, (1999) a fresh start: improving literacy and numeracy. london: department for education and employment. power, m (1994) the audit explosion. london: demos. power, m (1997). the audit society: rituals of verification. oxford: oxford university press. shore, c and wright, s (2000) ‘coercive accountability: the rise of audit culture in higher education’, in m. strathern (ed.) audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy. london: routledge. strathern, m. (2000) audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy, london and new york: routledge. troman, g (2000) teacher stress in the low-trust society. british journal of sociology of education 21(3): 331-353. i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r t u s t i n g 25 a p p e n d i x : i n t e r v i e w s c h e d u l e how did you get into this sort of teaching? how does this compare to other sorts of teaching you do / you've done? what sort of training have you had? how has your training helped you? do you feel there are any gaps you would like filled in your training? how do you go about planning: a term's work? a class? describe what you do in a classroom during a lesson individual work group work how does the volunteer thing work? how have things changed in the past few years? what do you think of the core curriculum in relation to these learners? if you produced a curriculum yourself, how different would it be? how is the individual learning plan / termly review / work done sheet structure helpful / not helpful? what do you see as being your role as a teacher? are there things you do which go outside this role as a teacher? do you have any views on the relationship between research and practice? what sorts of research would you find helpful? i a m n o t a “ g o o d ” t e a c h e r 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s t e a c h e r s i n t e r v i e w e d the teachers interviewed represented a range of specialisms. all were experienced teachers, most from within the alne field, some from other fields of education and training. they included (all names are pseudonyms): margaret: an experienced literacy teacher at an adult community college, who had been working for eighteen years teaching literacy both in the college and out in the community. at the time of interviewing, she was engaged in a lot of family learning work. grace: another experienced literacy teacher at the same adult community college, who had previously worked in schools and in prisons, mainly with beginner readers. hermione: had worked as a primary school teacher for over twenty years, before coming into adult literacy work relatively recently. she had been working at an adult community college for three years, initially as a volunteer, then in learning support and only recently as a tutor. gail: an experienced esl teacher who had worked teaching english abroad and as a support teacher for bilingual children in schools, before working as a mainstream english teacher in schools for a while. she had returned to work with adults in a community college a few years earlier. nigel: a numeracy teacher with a background in engineering. he had started working in an adult community college as a volunteer support tutor and then moved into teaching numeracy part-time when he took early retirement. wynne: a very experienced esol teacher who had been working in an fe college for many years. she had in the past worked mainly with members of the local asian community but had recently been teaching a fasttrack esol course which catered mainly for a new population of refugees and people seeking asylum. she was also managing the esol team at the college. kay: a numeracy teacher in a large metropolitan community college, who had been teaching literacy and numeracy since 1975, working in college and in the community. debbie: a relatively new literacy teacher in the large metropolitan community college, who had been working there for a couple of years at the time of the research. she had previously worked in the advertisement section of a local newspaper before moving into mentoring work with teenagers and then first voluntary then paid teaching work. microsoft word keating.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 1 2 0 1 2 5 developing social capital in ʻlearning borderlandsʼ: has the federal governmentʼs budget delivered for low-paid australian workers? maree keating abstract the 2011 australian federal budget confirmed generous funding for language, literacy and numeracy programs as well as skills recognition and training for older workers as part of a strategy to upgrade workforce skills. in considering possible responses to the announcement, many australian adult education theorists and practitioners weighed up the contexts in which such programs could build the resources and increase the options of vulnerable workers. one such group of workers, retrenched factory workers, have benefitted from participation in union-run, integrated post-retrenchment programs, which have incorporated access to language, literacy and numeracy as well as vocational education and training programs. such programs can build on the existing social capital amongst close-knit groups of workers as they develop the confidence to transform their work identities. this article draws on results from a study with a group of retrenched textile workers who accessed broad-based post-retrenchment support and subsequently participated in a high number of vocational education and training (vet) courses before finding ongoing employment. the study suggests that vet participation plays a limited role in broadening the employment opportunities for retrenched factory workers who move into low-paid occupations. whilst vet participation alongside other factors supported entry into some occupations, it played no role in supporting most workers in their transitions into non-manufacturing jobs. introduction the announcement of the federal australian budget in june 2011 affirmed government commitment to ‘language and literacy’ and ‘skill development’ for vulnerable and marginal workers through the allocation of $30 million for the ‘more help for mature age workers initiative’. in addition to this vet funding, a further $143 million was promised for 30,000 additional commencements in the language, literacy and numeracy program (llnp) alongside a further $20 million to continue the workplace english language and literacy program (well). these programs are linked through policy rhetoric to the larger strategy of upgrading skills for the australian workforce, ‘to boost productivity, increase d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s workforce participation and ensure [the government’s] social compact with australians to deliver the dignity of work’ (evans 2011). whilst funding for literacy and vocational education initiatives are to be applauded, questions have been raised regarding their capacity to reduce vulnerability and social exclusion amongst australian low-paid workers. previously identified problems impeding the success of such programs include barriers to access (cully et al 2000, watson 2003, gringart et al 2005), conceptions of skill and pedagogical approaches to skill development (buchanan et al 2001, karmel and woods 2004), poor articulation of the literacy skills involved in work practices (billett and somerville 2004) and lack of engagement with social partnership models (harris et al 2009, young 2002, balatti et al 2009). the positioning of vocational education programs within current international discourses surrounding workforce skills warrants critical analysis, as does the design of such programs. this is especially so as governments have sought to engage low-paid workers in vet with the promise that it can reduce the levels of worker vulnerability which have accompanied global restructuring processes (lakes and carter 2004, billet et al 2006, fenwick and hall 2006, farrell and fenwick 2007). martin and knudsen (2010) point out that as globalised manufacturing processes force more manufacturing workers in oecd countries into the lower end of the services sector, national vet systems and labour market approaches produce particular worker choices and industry skill patterns. vet is often positioned as a policy cornerstone in the management of social changes taking place in developed nations. the increased marginalisation of those who occupy unskilled jobs has negative implications for retrenched manufacturing workers as a group and, as some suggest, creates disharmony between social classes (martin and knudsen 2010:347). in australia, vet programs have been promoted to employers and workers alike, as a means of generating both increased workforce skill and individual opportunity in low-paid industries and occupations (department of education, employment and workplace relations [deewr] 2008). the funding of such programs is invariably announced with emphasis on government commitment to both national business productivity and social inclusion, although the problems inherent in this dual focus have been enumerated by vet researchers over the past decade (equity research centre 2006). most recently, pocock et al (2011) have shown that vet participation does not necessarily lead to increased opportunities for australian low-paid workers. despite the fact that low-paid workers comprise a sizeable segment of the population, consisting predominantly of women and young people, and are concentrated in particular industries, pocock (2009) points out that d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l k e a t i n g 7 existing research does not explore what ‘enables or inhibits’ their work transitions, or how vet can facilitate their movement out of low paid work. according to the national centre for vocational education research (ncver), the increased national participation which is taking place in vet is not necessarily resulting in increased employment outcomes, with a recent report stating that: the proportion of graduates who improved their employment circumstances after training has decreased by 4.4 percentage points from 2006 to 2010 and by 3.8 percentage points for students from most disadvantaged backgrounds from 2007 to 2010 (hargreaves 2011: 1). very little has been written about the experiences of retrenched australian manufacturing workers who do participate in vet as they make the transition into low-paid service sector jobs. given the policy rhetoric surrounding government funding commitment to vet and the very real impact of global restructuring on these workers in australia and other oecd countries, it is important to develop an understanding of the conditions under which vet might contribute to their employment opportunities. there are two lines of argument made in this article. firstly, the article outlines the ways in which the social capital belonging to a group of recently retrenched textile workers was utilised to maintain resilience and increase vet participation. participants in a union-based postretrenchment program were able to build new strategies towards occupational transitions alongside their participation in vet courses. the broad support program utilised adult literacy principles involving partnerships, policy advocacy and pedagogical best practice (balatti et al 2009) to maintain existing social capital amongst this vulnerable group of workers. analysis of the program results offers some insight into the importance of ‘learning borderlands’ in increasing workers’ participation in vet courses and in making transitions into new kinds of work. i suggest that ‘learning borderlands’ created through programs like these allow workers to maximise existing social capital as they undertake training, apply for new jobs and navigate unfamiliar processes in the labour market. secondly, the article draws from qualitative research conducted with the retrenched textile workers from the above program, focusing on a group who successfully entered and maintained ongoing employment afterwards. whilst significant numbers of participants in the program undertook vet courses in 2005 and 2006, this research found that vet qualifications were rarely associated with increased job opportunities amongst this group. d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s participation in vet was considered by many to have had strategic importance in maintaining post-retrenchment optimism. however, for those without the requisite dispositions or social capital, vet qualifications did not increase their options or their chances of entering and maintaining jobs outside of manufacturing. the analysis of worker experiences suggests that, within this group post retrenchment programs lead to increased vet participation and optimism. however, such vet participation confirms the existing match between worker attributes and the occupations they aspire to, without supporting the critical learning involved in entering or maintaining new employment. further, vet is often of low relevance in the career trajectories of retrenched manufacturing workers, either because the match between their worker attributes and the occupations they enter is already strong enough to secure them a job without training, or because regardless of the training, the match is too weak to result in success. in discussing these factors, the conceptual framework of the ‘habitus’, the ‘disposition’ and ‘capital’ provided by bourdieu (1986), proves useful. i conclude that under current conditions, most retrenched manufacturing workers in australia will not benefit from increased government funding to vet unless they are accompanied by opportunities for workers to develop social capital for new industries and occupations. spaces within which workers can learn, socialise and exchange with mentors and fellow workers are vital for the development of valuable social capital. such spaces, or ‘learning borderlands’ within occupations, may not only allow able and qualified workers to access jobs, but also to broaden their ongoing employment options and skill development. the role of learning borderlands in generating social capital in considering the value of funding for vet and language, literacy and numeracy (lln) programs for retrenched manufacturing workers, we must first identify how movement into and then progress within new occupations takes place for this group. whilst vet is promoted to retrenched workers, the specific benefits of a qualification arise from the ability of a worker to utilise them, which is in part determined by that worker’s networks and in part by the relative value of the qualification and the worker in the eyes of the employer. we know that ‘embodied learning’ for each occupation is distinct, producing different ways of thinking and learning across worker groups (billett and somerville 2004). we also know that general skills are of most use in career transitions amongst workers at the lower-paid end of the australian economy (karmel et al 2008). vet qualifications promoted to d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l k e a t i n g 9 retrenched manufacturing workers usually provide licences, certificates and occupational health and safety requirements for entry-level employment in retail, hospitality, construction, driving, administration, cleaning, security and caring jobs. experienced, retrenched manufacturing workers often have a range of general skills. despite the combination of experience, new work aspirations and vet qualifications, many find that they are unable to make the transitions into desirable jobs. others may be able to do so regardless of their vet qualification. this phenomenon poses a conundrum for vet policy makers who argue that vet participation increases opportunities for retrenched manufacturing workers. the ‘dispositions’ of workers and their accumulated ‘social capital’ often prove to be more significant in overcoming labour market disadvantages. one of the challenges that low-paid australian workers face is the struggle to access the necessary employment information, advice and support to maintain their often precarious employment (pocock 2009). theorists such as granovetter (1973) and coleman (1988) suggest that social networks, ties and bonds are crucial for workers undergoing a process of transformation, because relationships generate various kinds of ‘social capital’ which can be drawn upon to either enter into or maintain power and influence in new fields. in their current form, australian vet courses are neither generic enough to assist participants to build networks and strategies for maintaining employment, nor are they usually specific enough to give participants work experience with potential employers. within this context, in considering how vet participation may benefit retrenched manufacturing workers, it is important to identify the ways in which these workers prepare for, enter and maintain new jobs and occupations, and the way ‘social capital’ is utilised in those processes. bourdieu (1986:241) defines social capital as ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’. his concept of social capital is particularly useful when considered alongside those of ‘individual disposition’, the ‘habitus’ and the ‘field’, as it assists adult education theorists to think about learning within the fluid and multi-layered process of social and individual change. bourdieu’s concepts have been used by several adult education theorists in discussing the interactions between individual life trajectories, occupational constructions and models of learning (sawchuck 2003, warren and webb 2007, wojecki 2007). they have not previously been applied to consider the benefits of vet in the transitions of manufacturing workers in developed countries. according to bourdieu (1980), one’s individual ‘disposition’ arises out of the accumulation of life experience and education, social position, networks, and identity background which gives one person a strategic d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s advantage in playing the ‘game’ relevant to that ‘field’. importantly, as has been noted by others, ‘dispositions’ of workers are inherently open to change, dependent upon the fields in which individuals engage and also the life experiences one acquires (warren and webb 2007, huppatz 2010). major life disruptions such as retrenchment can provide workers with opportunities to acquire ‘dispositions’ for new kinds of work arising under changed social conditions. access to relevant social capital will largely determine their success in this process, and ultimately, as workers in a new field. using bourdieu’s conceptual framework, workers’ ability to gain a strategic advantage within a new occupational ‘habitus’ or ‘system of dispositions’ is partly contingent on the material, social and cultural capital they can draw upon. adult education theorists have elsewhere utilised the notion of a ‘vocational habitus’ to analyse the interplay between individuals, learning processes and entry into particular fields of work (see for example colley et al 2003). some workers will bring a dispositional advantage with them into the new occupational ‘game’, because of identity factors and networks of influence and support. an individual’s ‘social capital’ for work is generated through meaningful participation in networks of durable relationships, which provide a sense of familiarity with the particular ‘field’ of work. short-term training courses, on their own, can rarely foster the sorts of durable networks that support and sustain major life transitions. cuban (2009:5) has referred to spaces around formally funded programs as ‘learning borderlands’. within the changing work habitus, peripheral culture, marked by resistance and ‘borderland discourses’ thrive amongst marginalised workers (billett and somerville 2004, o'connor 2004). for retrenched textile workers moving into less organised and more peripheral work within developed economies (lambert and webster 2010), the term ‘borderland’ is particularly apt. it describes the states that these retrenched workers enter as they disinvest from aspects of their previous work dispositions and become workers in a field marked by different rules and requiring different kinds of ‘capital’. for the purposes of this article, bourdieu’s broad conception of ‘social capital’ sufficiently suggests the full range of resources and benefits that may accrue to an individual through their network associations. background to the study in the 20-year period from 1985 to 2005, full-time employment in the australian textile, clothing and footwear (tcf) industries fell dramatically from 104,800 to 42,800 workers (weller 2007). the impact of job losses on textile workers and their communities has been documented at different times during that period, and the literature consistently demonstrates that d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l k e a t i n g 11 such workers are highly vulnerable to long term unemployment, increased stress and reduced well-being (webber and weller 2001, lipsig-mumme and neilsen 2003). the textile clothing and footwear union of australia (tcfua) calculated around 2,000 tcf workers had lost their jobs due to closures and downsizing operations in metropolitan and rural centres in victoria between 2004 and 2006 (tcfua 2006). in response to the findings of the productivity commission (2003), in 2005 the australian federal government announced the introduction of the tcf structural adjustment package (sap). the package was to make $50 million available over ten years to ameliorate the negative impacts of industry restructuring on workers and their communities (deewr 2005). in principle, the sap made retrenched tcf workers eligible for immediate job search support through a government job agency. it also provided access to free vocational education courses as long as these were determined by their case managers to be relevant to their job seeking process. the federal government’s training support package sat alongside a similar victorian state government re-training program, which provided retrenched textile workers with access to vet courses, to be utilised up to six months after retrenchment (skill up program). the tcfua played a considerable role in making both packages accessible to retrenched workers between 20052008, whilst advocating to both state and federal governments for more effective program design and implementation (tcfua 2006). the case for an integrated (i.e. ‘built in’) literacy model of training and support for retrenched tcf workers was made during that time. this work drew upon previous longitudinal studies which had been conducted with this particular retrenched worker group (webber and weller 2001, lipsig mumme 2003). these studies noted the confluence of factors working against retrenched workers in re-entering the workforce, and recognised the broad social benefits to workers of holistic support and integrated learning programs. in 2005 the tcfua piloted an integrated literacy model for delivery of support and training to retrenched tcf workers. the pilot was funded under a grant from the australian national training authority (anta) and utilised the australian council for adult literacy (acal) definition of literacy which, aside from integrating listening, speaking, reading, writing, critical thinking and numeracy, also included ‘the cultural knowledge that enables a speaker, writer or reader to recognise and use language appropriate to different social situations’ (acal 1998). within the integrated literacy model, the ‘cultural knowledge’ and the language of work practices within the new work ‘habitus’ were central. this strategy emphasised the importance of ‘developing networks, discourses and opportunities for exchange amongst retrenched worker communities, rather than focusing narrowly on the skills for surviving and competing as casual d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s labour in individualised work environments’ (tcfua 2005:3). it was considered that the existing ‘social capital’ amongst groups of retrenched workers might assist them to develop their resilience and job seeking strategies and maintain optimism as they encountered and engaged with the new field of work. ultimately, it was anticipated that participation in the post-retrenchment support program would increase vet uptake and thereby improve employment outcomes amongst the retrenched group. the ‘social capital paradigm’ laid out by balatti et al (2009) enumerates a range of benefits in incorporating a ‘social capital’ focus into vocational training. they conclude that a national and collaborative adult literacy and numeracy policy that embraces social capital ‘is an appropriate response in a political and social climate in which social exclusion is considered unacceptable’ (balatti et al 2009:9). the pedagogical strategies central to their ‘social capital teaching paradigm’ in literacy and numeracy education encourage students to build bonding, bridging and linking ties within and outside of the learning environment, focus on strong teacher student relationships, build peer learning and collaborative teaching partnerships and embed literacy and numeracy learning into other activities. the tcfua model of post-retrenchment support incorporated advice and support to access free vet courses as part of its broad program of support. in this way, a ‘learning borderland’ was consciously constructed, in which recently retrenched workers could engage in broad processes of learning to accompany their engagement with more narrowly-focused vet courses. in this borderland, retrenched workers could critically engage with change processes alongside a trusted group of familiars. the feltex retrenchment whilst many retrenched tcf workers underwent vet courses through the tcfua post-retrenchment programs in 2005 and 2006, it remained unclear whether or how vet participation had assisted them to enter, maintain or progress within jobs in the changing field of low-paid work. during that period the union conducted a number of telephone surveys to determine retrenched tcf workers’ participation in vet and employment outcomes six months after retrenchment (tcfua 2006), and it is clear that union programs played a significant role in increasing the overall uptake of vet amongst this group. however, there has been little analysis of how vet participation or other post-retrenchment support interacted with processes of personal change, learning and work transitions within the lives of retrenched tcf workers. questions remained as to what role vet qualifications played in advancing their employment opportunities, reducing their vulnerability to unemployment or supporting their work transformations. d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l k e a t i n g 13 of the many companies that closed their doors or downsized during that period, one particularly large retrenchment involved 165 textile workers losing their machine operator jobs at feltex carpets in the western suburbs of melbourne in october, 2005. a large proportion of these workers underwent vocational education and training as part of their participation in a union-run post retrenchment support project. one factor that made this retrenchment particularly interesting to document was that the company agreed to fund a tcfua-run, postretrenchment project which would link the 165 retrenched workers to vocational education courses, provide advocacy support around job search and funding access, and run tailored literacy, computer and certificate of general education for adults (cgea) courses over a 12 month period (october 2005-october 2006). this program was particularly well utilised by retrenched feltex workers over the period, as they had received their full retrenchment entitlements, resulting from staunch industrial bargaining processes and healthy company liquidity. retrenched workers were therefore able to come together as a group in numerous ways over 12 months, with many receiving group and individual support and advice, taking part in arts, general education and social events and accessing multiple, free vet courses of their choice. the following part of this article presents aspects of the research conducted with members of the retrenched feltex group after the support program finished. research activities took place between january 2007 and late 2008. findings from this research confirm the benefits to workers in participating in integrated post-retrenchment support, but it became clear that vet qualifications, whilst sometimes facilitating retrenched manufacturing workers’ entry into particular occupations, did not tend to increase work opportunities. research methodology as a tcfua researcher who had previously been involved in the implementation of the post-retrenchment support program throughout the period from october 2005 until october 2006, i had the opportunity to observe the retrenched workers over a prolonged period. the tcfua then agreed to make the project material available for the purposes of finding research participants after the program finished. all project participants had signed an agreement authorising the tcfua to do so. at the end of the 12 month project with retrenched feltex workers, the tcfua recorded that 64 out of 123 re-contacted retrenched workers were re-employed, 62% of whom (40 workers) were working in non-factory environments outside the manufacturing sector (keating 2010). a further 15 of those contacted were actively looking for work. the remaining 44 workers were either retired (27), studying (five) or on workcover (12). d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in january 2007, using tcfua project data, i conducted a telephone survey with 43 of the workers who were either working or looking for work at the end of the project. twenty men and 23 women took part. i introduced myself saying that i was not calling on behalf of the tcfua but as an independent researcher. after i explained the nature of the research, all consented to take part in the 30 minute phone survey and agreed to be contacted again in the future as required. the telephone survey was designed to ascertain the work and training experiences amongst those in the group who had successfully re-entered employment in the 12 months after retrenchment. i asked both qualitative and quantitative questions about their job-seeking experiences, the amount of training undertaken, the perceived usefulness of training, the number and length of jobs held, sources of support and views on new workplaces and work conditions in the first 15 months after retrenchment. discussions were transcribed using a computer and a hands-free speaker-phone. the results from this survey helped to shape questions for more in-depth face-to-face interviews the following year. in the middle of 2008, i approached the previously surveyed retrenched workers by phone, asking if i could meet them for a one-hour to 90-minute face-to-face interview. seventeen interviews resulted with retrenched workers (eight men and nine women) of mixed ages (27 to 62 years), all of whom had retained employment with one employer for at least 18 months since retrenchment from feltex. the interviews would provide more detailed narrative data about retrenched workers’ experiences and perceptions of change over the three years since retrenchment, in order to shed light on what learning had been involved in the process of change and what had supported that learning. data comprised three areas: the changing role of work in participants’ lives, their changing sense of belonging, and their changing views on knowledge and learning. interviewees signed consent forms prior to interviews saying that they understood what the project was about, that they did not have to answer questions and indicating they were happy to have their words quoted and their names published. two of the women had recently left the jobs they had held for 18 months, but were looking for work again. the rest were all still working in jobs they believed were ongoing and which they had held for 18 months. according to bourdieu (1990:42), ‘a full and complete sociology should clearly include a history of the structures that are the product at a given moment of the whole historical process’. changes are taking place in the individual lives of one group of australian workers and this research suggests that a relationship exists between this set of changes and a new system of dispositions, or ‘habitus’ at the low-paid end of the australian d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l k e a t i n g 15 workforce. the learning requirements which accompany worker transformations in low-paid jobs therefore have a much broader nature than simply acquiring the technical skills of driving, cleaning or serving customers. the social capital workers were able to acquire as they entered and then navigated the new field of low-paid work would heavily influence their opportunities and their resilience in that field. in most cases, participation in vet would not. findings from the research prior to this research, i had assumed that engagement with vet would contribute to improved employment outcomes for the feltex workers. employment opportunities at the lower end of the economy are increasingly mediated by combined recruitment and training services. the current training-for-work agenda emerges out of highly contested shifts in the field of education, particularly in relation to its role in producing skilled workers for industry and simultaneously increasing employment access for those disadvantaged in the labour market. findings from this research suggest, however, that despite new policy alignments between industry and education, highly motivated, determined and skilful individuals exiting the manufacturing sector are often unable to use vet as a resource in their transformations as workers. the initial telephone survey of 43 feltex workers provided some information about the circumstances under which vet qualifications were useful. fourteen of the men and 19 of the women surveyed had participated in vet courses during the post-retrenchment program period. whilst half of the men who undertook training completed one course, the other half had completed multiple courses. the overwhelming majority of the courses were in transport-related certificates and licences. whilst seven women had completed one course, 12 had completed multiple courses in the 12-month period. in 2006 there were 20 enrolments in general education courses amongst the 23 women surveyed. these included lln courses, the cgea and computer skills courses. importantly, most of the women who had undertaken one of these had later undertaken other vocational courses. comments from survey respondents indicated that general education courses boosted their self-confidence, addressed gaps in their basic education, and provided an opportunity to maintain social contact and support with others. apart from the general education courses, 18 additional vocational courses were ultimately undertaken by women. these were in aged care, food handling, librarianship, medical secretarial training, retail, security, asset maintenance (cleaning), hospitality, and forklift driving. fourteen workers had directly utilised vet certificates and licences to enter casual jobs. eleven of these were men who reported that the training d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s had allowed them entry into forklift and truck driving, taxi driving and security jobs. by contrast, only three women found that vet qualifications assisted them in finding a job. they were all employed on part-time contracts in the aged care industry. the remaining 29 survey respondents reported that the vet training they undertook in 2006 did not play any role in helping them acquire new jobs. only three men reported indirect benefits of vet participation, commenting that ‘the training got me back into the swing of things’, ‘it kept the options open’ and ‘it gave me some new skills’. by contrast, ‘indirect benefits’ of training were commonly reported by women. one woman reported, for example, that getting her driver’s licence directly impacted on her life in many positive ways, although finding a job was not one of them. another reported that learning about using computers had directly changed her life as she now used them all the time for practical daily activities such as paying bills and emailing people. ten other women reported that although they had not found work as a result of vet participation, their participation in the post-retrenchment program and training increased their general confidence in life, gave them an experience of learning which was valuable in itself, opened up a new social world, or provided them with ‘future options’ to consider. this response, revealing that most participants did not directly use vet qualifications to enter new jobs, was not necessarily surprising. a survey of student outcomes by karmel and others (2008) found that the relevance of australian vet qualifications to job outcomes in the relevant industry or job are highly nuanced and that ‘soft skills’ were often the elements of vet courses which added value to graduate outcomes in occupations other than those for which they trained. it remained unclear in my study, however, how vet participation had interacted together with other factors for those who found and maintained employment in new jobs and occupations. in order to investigate this, in-depth interviews were examined to identify the contexts in which vet was of benefit to retrenched workers. it is not possible here to provide an in-depth discussion of the rich worker narratives emerging through the 17 interviews with those who maintained employment. a number of themes did, however, emerge, which shed light on the process of transformation itself. participants talked about the ways in which their worker identities and their sense of belonging to various communities had changed in the years since retrenchment. for most, customer focus, entrepreneurship and dispersed social networks, as well as acceptance of change and openness to learning, had become central to their approach to work and also to life more generally. in this sense, ‘dispositions’ had changed considerably amongst all of the respondents. in d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l k e a t i n g 17 all cases there was a level of ambivalence about this change, although for three of the workers in particular, life was felt to be significantly better as a result. each of these three workers had found stable, ongoing work for which they were well suited and qualified. one was a long distance truck driver, one an aged care worker in two different organisations and one a team leader in a manufacturing setting. the two men had trade qualifications and were born in australia. the woman had completed 12 years of education in an english-speaking environment. for all of those interviewed, success in entering and then maintaining employment in new jobs depended first upon their capacity to network with trusted friends and colleagues, and then later, they were dependent upon sourcing advice and information through other workers, employers, customers and clients in their industry. the two women who had chosen to enter the aged care industry found that they were easily able to secure and maintain ongoing part-time jobs, firstly because their vet courses offered work placements, and then because they quickly developed new networks of other workers and employers who could refer them to potential workplaces. the women interviewed were all from non english-speaking backgrounds and had participated in general education and english language courses. they had all relied on vocational training courses to open job opportunities. women with higher educational qualifications and previous senior work experience in their countries of origin had been particularly keen to undertake vet qualifications, as well as those with gaps in their basic education and no experience outside manufacturing. all had initially believed vet participation would increase their employment opportunities. however, whilst two of the women used their qualifications to enter jobs in aged care, three other women had hoped to use vet qualifications to move into administrative, office-based or customer service-based employment, for which they had previously qualified and in which they had experience. none had been unable to forge the necessary social connections to access or maintain employment in their desired jobs. these three women, who had participated in librarianship, administration training and hospitality courses, had eventually all returned to unqualified and insecure jobs in manufacturing, warehousing and home care. these jobs were not reliant on vet qualifications but rather, their previous life and work histories. another woman who had undertaken numerous certificates with the hope of entering into work in the security or hospitality industries, had found unqualified cleaning work, having been unable to find adequate mentoring support to enter jobs for which she had qualified. one woman had used her previous experience in industry and her recently acquired diploma in retail to enter a shop management job, but had then been unable to secure another retail job after she lost that position. they each talked d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s about the lack of networks through which they might draw the relevant information, support and advice to enter a new occupation. the men interviewed had generally relied less than women on ‘social capital’ they might build from training participation. the two australianborn men with team leader experience (mentioned above), had undertaken vet courses, but then used their existing social networks to find secure jobs in manufacturing and long distance truck driving. another young australian-born man undertook a vet course to acquire a red card for the construction industry but secured an ongoing job in steel manufacturing without undergoing the apprenticeship his new employer eagerly offered him. for two of the men from non english-speaking backgrounds, training had performed a perfunctory role in providing them with driving licences, but they had been able to enter and maintain truck driving and taxi driving jobs through the support and advice of their brothers, who were established in these industries. since starting their new jobs, neither had been able to source advice through new networks, as they worked in isolation. two older, non english-speaking background men did not participate in vet courses, but found ongoing work in manufacturing and warehousing jobs on the basis of their work histories. discussion and conclusions australia has long been regarded as having one of the highest rates of casualisation in the workforce and the disparity between the highest and lowest-paid workers has continued to grow (hanrahan 1999). the australian government recognises that vet has a critical role to play in addressing the disadvantages faced by retrenched tcf workers (productivity commission 2003). it is therefore important to consider how vet is perceived and experienced by those workers. changes in outlook and expectations brought about by work experiences are in themselves learning processes, which affect identity and ideas of class-belonging (crossan et al 2003, sawchuck 2003). however, the ways in which learning re-shapes individual lives are neither uniform nor inevitable, but result from the interplay between social and individual factors and often reflect the structures of industries and jobs (webb and warren 2009). adult education theorists have argued that skilful practices amongst workers emerge out of collectively agreed and reinforced values and social processes that are particular to the group of workers or the workplace (gerber 2000, engestrom 2001). for many australian low-paid workers, work practices are increasingly acquired in the absence of work groups or workplaces. individual workers draw on the information and advice they can glean through new, loose networks. however, their loose ‘belonging’ in d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l k e a t i n g 19 these groups does not tend to create social capital with which they can improve their overall opportunities or conditions within the new field of lowpaid work. numerous examples of this emerged in the interviews. ahmed, the taxi driver in this study, was able to recount the ways in which he had refined his communication skills to access extra tips and job opportunities with customers, although he felt that without the support of other taxi drivers, he could not address issues of safety and threats of violence inherent in his working conditions. zaim reflected that, whilst he was friendly with other truck-driving contractors, the only information he could access about how to negotiate payments from customers, find legal support and manage his workload came from his brother, an experienced private contractor. florica, working as a casual night-shift cleaner, was dissatisfied and bored with her job and wanted to work as a security officer. however, like levy, a qualified receptionist who could only find work as a carer in the home of a private family, she felt could not utilise her recently acquired vet qualifications, experience and skills to find a job she preferred. both identified lack of mentoring, networks, contacts and advice as real barriers to them in finding more stimulating and secure work in areas for which they were qualified. for these workers, vet qualifications had been of little practical use in reducing their marginal status as casual and isolated workers. with declining unionism and increasing job fragmentation amongst low-paid workers there is great value in creating learning environments around vet programs in which participants can use their existing social capital to maintain confidence and plan their transitions. increased vet funding which fails to support such approaches is unlikely to result in significant vet participation amongst retrenched manufacturing workers. it is clear that this group, and in particular women, undertake vet when it is part of a broader, supported process in which confidence and new aspirations are generated. despite the policy rhetoric, however, it appears that retrenched workers’ job opportunities are rarely broadened through their participation in vet courses. women’s low-paid work options outside of aged care lie predominantly in occupations where high rates of casualisation and fragmented work roles make it difficult for them to forge crucial networks and relationships through which to source information and advice vital to their advancement. their entry into administrative and office based jobs and their ongoing employment in the retail sector require them to forge networks and contacts as part of their broad learning for work transitions. men, often able to access initial driving and labouring jobs through their existing networks, can remain unable to broaden their opportunities once they are employed, for similar reasons. d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l 20 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s although a significant number of vet courses were completed by members of this group, the impact of vet qualifications on the employment outcomes for those who had successfully retained employment in a new occupation was very uneven. most of these feltex workers had been able to acquire stable jobs in new occupations as a result of factors other than a vet qualification. many remained unable to convert vet qualifications into employment outcomes due to factors related to disposition and networks. worker ‘dispositions’ (including age, gender, class and language background) needed to be favoured in the occupations to which they aspired. networks were critical for feltex workers in entering employment but also in maintaining resilience and employability within new occupations. participation in vet can be a valued experience for retrenched factory workers for a range of reasons. such participation can have a particularly positive impact on women, who are often less likely than their male counterparts to have the confidence or networks to find ongoing jobs in new occupations. participation in vet may also qualify workers to gain entry-level employment into new occupations. however, under current conditions in low-paid occupations, vet funding does not contribute to improved employment opportunities for retrenched manufacturing workers outside of a limited number of low-paid occupations, such as aged care, where learning borderlands support workers to develop social capital. government funding for vocational training currently promises to provide retrenched, vulnerable factory workers with a platform for change, although in the australian context vet, to be a resource for this group, needs to be accompanied by integrated post-retrenchment support programs and longer-term workforce education and industry development strategies which create the social environments in which vulnerable workers can build networks and learn. this discussion has reinforced findings elsewhere that mature aged workers undergoing high-risk transformations at the most vulnerable end of the ‘new work order’ can often fail to benefit significantly from the training courses they undergo, despite targeted policy attention to re-skilling (armstrong-stassen and templer 2005, keating 2010). effective learning spaces must be created alongside the lln, well and vet programs announced in the 2011 budget, if they are to reduce low-paid worker vulnerabilities. in the borderlands around working life, vet participants need opportunities to make enduring friendships and connections that can become sources of social capital as they traverse the unknown terrain of their new occupations. unless this funding is conceptualised as part of a broader social policy project, in which industries develop the social conditions for broader learning, the feltex study indicates d e v e l o p i n g s o c i a l c a p i t a l k e a t i n g 21 that social inequalities between workers in australia will continue to be further entrenched under new work conditions and training may fail to deliver for australia’s most vulnerable workers. references australian council for adult literacy (acal) (1998) surveys and beyond: the case for adult literacy, acal, canberra. armstrong-stassen, i and templer, a (2005) adapting training for older employees: the canadian response to an aging workforce, the 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the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: quinn, m. 2018. plurilingualism in teaching and learning: complexities across contexts. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 26:1, 43-45. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6263 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/lnj book review (non-refereed) plurilingualism in teaching and learning: complexities across contexts edited by julie choi and sue ollerhead routledge, new york, 2018, 244 pages ibsn 978-1-138-22849-8 marie quinn school of education, university of technology sydney, po box 123 broadway nsw 2007 australia. marie.quinn@uts.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6263 article history: received 22/08/2018; accepted 01/09/2018; published 24/01/2019 this new edited volume brings together a range of chapters reflecting on teaching and learning experiences across australian and international contexts where multiple languages are used for learning and language and content. the editors point out in the preface that ‘trendy and new terms’ proliferate the language education space (p. xiv) and so the term ‘plurilingualism’ may cause some confusion in the first instance with the more common ‘multilingualism’. the issue the editors identify with multilingualism is the tendency to merely describe what languages people have (see makoni and pennycook 2007). in the australian context, the casual use of ‘multilingualism’ – and its twin ‘multiculturalism’ – is often shorthand for assimilationist mindset and policy implementation (eisenchlas, schalley and guillemin 2015). this leads to what blackledge and creese (2010) called ‘separate bilingualism’, as the state benevolently gives ‘permission’ for communities to use their languages, but ‘over there’, not in places where it counts. plurilingualism, then, is a term whose time has come as a way to think about the lived experience of those working with more than one language. the book draws upon the distinction between multilingualism and the newer term ‘plurilingualism’ (moore 2006; piccardo 2013) to recognise the ways in which individuals use an integrated repertoire of languages in particular contexts. rather than languages operating in strict diglossic relationships, heteroglossia means that all languages may provide the linguistic resources needed in any one situation. various situations are explored throughout this volume. all contributors have attended to the framework for taking a plurilingual stance, set out in the introduction, defining what a teacher might believe about learners and do in the classroom. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 43 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6263 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6263 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj mailto:marie.quinn@uts.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6263 of these, one belief – ‘all of a student’s language knowledge is part of their single plurilingual repertoire, and languages are not siloed in their mind’ (p. 5) – is at the heart of all the classroom examples from the contributors, as each writer illustrates how students and teachers move in and out of languages, translanguaging, to realise educative, communicative, social and personal goals. the book is divided into four parts, generally to cater for a number of audiences or interests in language. the first part concerns reflections on language policy, opening with the preeminent writer in this field, joseph lo bianco. this chapter reviews the state of language policy in australia which contextualises the other australian studies throughout the book. the second section is concerned with how students use their plurilingual resources, both in and out of school, before part three takes up studies of teachers’ perspectives. the final section looks at higher education contexts. the studies take the reader through australian and international experiences, into languages being used with english and – in the case of timor leste – without english. particularly interesting was the chapter by rebecca hetherington, charting the policies around indigenous languages for schooling in australia and the words of those who have lived through these changes: it is easy to think that issues of dominant/majority language in instruction is in someone else’s country rather than in australia’s own backyard. the audience for this book is wide. i have already set the reading of chapter ‘translingual innovation within contact zones: lessons from australia and south african schools’ (ollerhead, prinsloo and krause) for my university students within a tesol master program to examine possible strategies for language-learning classrooms and will use examples of classroom translanguaging practice in ‘mother-tongue-based multilingual education in the philippines: perceptions, problems and possibilities’ (cruz and mahboob) for the same group as excellent models for similar classroom interpretation required in an assessment task. many of the pedagogical examples throughout the book will be used with my largely-monolingual pre-service teaching students to illustrate how they might provide space for plurilingual practice in their future classrooms, in the hope of developing, as the final chapter suggests, ‘a translingual mindset’ (andrews, fay and white). practitioners in various contexts – school, tertiary and language – will find examples of practices that could be translated into their own classroom use, as the editors have made good on their aim to ‘propose strategies that can be adopted by teachers’ (p. 10). a real strength of the book is that these practices are grounded in the articulation of a theoretical framework of what it means to live with languages, and to help all who work in this area ‘to think more deeply, rigorously and critically’ (p. 10) about what they do and the effect it might have on learners. this makes this volume a valuable addition to work in the area of language education and how we might view ourselves as a plurilingual society. references blackledge, a and creese, a (2010) multilingualism: a critical perspective. continuum, london. https:// doi.org/10.5040/9781474212281 eisenchlas, s, schalley, a and guillemin, d (2015) multilingualism and literacy: attitudes and policies, international journal of multilingualism, vol 12, no 2, pp 151 – 161. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.20 15.1009371 makoni, s and pennycook, a (2007) disinventing and reconstituting languages, multilingual matters, clevedon, uk. plurilingualism in teaching and learning: complexities across contexts literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 44 https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474212281 https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474212281 https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2015.1009371 https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2015.1009371 moore, d (2006) plurilinguismes at êcole in collection lal (langues et apprentissage de langues). postface de daniel coste. didier, paris. piccardo, e (2013) plurilingualism and curriculum design: towards a synergic vision, tesol quarterly, vol 47, no 3, pp 600 – 614. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.110 quinn literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 45 https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.110 literacy and numeracy studies 2014. © 2014 michael atkinson. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2014, 22, 4176, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v22i1.4176 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 2 n o 1 2 0 1 4 3 reframing literacy in adult esl programs: making the case for the inclusion of identity michael atkinson abstract adult esl programs in the australian context are heavily influenced by neo-liberal notions of functional literacy and numeracy. this paper argues that such notions, designed to enable the learner to function within the workplace or community can fail to acknowledge the complexity of esl program participation for adult learners. this may be considered especially so for pre-literate learners from refugee backgrounds who have low or minimal levels of literacy in their own language and are hence negotiating a new skill set, a new culture and arguably a new sense of identity. this paper is based on research which points to the need to position the learning of literacy and numeracy in the esl context as a social and educational journey made meaningful by a learner's sense of (emerging) identity. in this context a holistic, socially orientated understanding of their learning and their progress is preferable to an approach which views and evaluates learners against preconceived functional literacy skills. the participants in this study were people of refugee background from africa with minimal literacy skills. introduction institutional perspectives on delivering literacy instruction in the adult esl context are highly diverse. such perspectives are impacted by differing epistemological assumptions concerning the nature, purpose and meaning of literacy which can range from those with a narrow economic and functionalist focus to ones which are more social and critical in nature (papen 2005). evidence suggests however that many teachers are unaware that their literacy beliefs form part of a wider discourse which has ideological implications https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s (benesch 1993, fairclough 1992). nor are they necessarily aware of the impact such beliefs can have on student learning and the educational climate within an institution. as smith (2004) has recently argued teachers can take for granted the correctness of the predominant literacy paradigm and be unaware that other understandings may exist. in the australian context, government funded adult esl programs follow the worldwide trend towards functionalist notions of literacy (hamilton & pitt 2011). such notions are based upon the perspective that literacy is a functional skill framed by the need to assist learners to acquire the skills necessary to function within the workplace or the broader community. as the 2008 review of the adult migrant english program (amep) for example notes: the amep aims to help recently arrived migrants and humanitarian entrants to develop the english language skills they need to access services in the general community, provide a pathway to employment, training or further study and participate in other government programs offered. (diac 2008:8) the quote above alludes to the impact of federal policy in influencing the manner in which esl is taught in the adult context. according to hamilton and pitt (2011) the international trend towards a neo-liberal discourse has reduced social inequality to a simplistic lack of vocational literacy. as a consequence esl teaching has been redefined by directly linking low literacy with economic marginality pursued through tightly controlled funding criteria. the pursuit of ‘accountability in the core business of producing literacy outcomes’ as evidenced by cross (2009:514) is a ready example of such neoliberal policy in the australian context. this 'reductionist’, government induced model of literacy has, however, come under theoretical and practical criticism in the teaching of esl to adult refugee learners who frequently have acquired at best only minimal school based literacy skills. such functional orientations, it has been argued, are too economically focused allowing little recognition of the social context for the learning, the use, and even the construction of literacy (auerbach 1992, black 2002). additionally, in pursuing a version of literacy that may be easily ‘managed, measured and monitored’ (cross 2009: 514), r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y atkinson 5 it lays the blame at the level of the individual in terms of failure to achieve culturally determined literacy outcomes. by way of theoretical and practical contrast, new literacy studies (nls) (barton 2001, street 2003), centred on the social practices and bodies of knowledge with which one’s world and culture are interpreted, has been viewed as offering important insights into literacy and literacy acquisition (hamilton & pitt 2011). nls views literacy not so much as a functional skill, but a social practice derived from the social context in which it is used. such an approach shuns idealized versions of literacy to foreground and validate the learner's current use of literacy in terms of their contemporary social situation rather than possible future economic roles. a debate on the merits of the functional versus the social is beyond the scope of this paper, suffice to show the divide and contestability that exists in terms of understandings of literacy and the impact of ideology upon the delivery of literacy instruction to preliterate refugee learners. ultimately different perspectives as robinson-pant (2000) notes, can exist side by side in the one classroom. the important point in the context of this paper is that a reliance on a functionalist understanding of literacy is always going to be partial in terms of recognising the literate identity, whether imagined or real, of adult esl learners of refugee backgrounds. this latter statement follows the lead of gomez (2004) and others (kanno 2003, warriner 2008) who argue that one might profitably view literacy as a vehicle for facilitating the construction of one's identity and as a social and educational journey made meaningful by a learner’s sense of (emerging) identity. as gomez notes, ‘literacy must start from the premise that we are multidimensional beings and that our nature is complex’ (gomez 2004:156). this challenge is seen as being particularly pertinent for pre-literate adult learners from refugee backgrounds. such people frequently have low or minimal levels of literacy in their own language and are hence negotiating a new skill set, a new culture and arguably a new sense of self. esl literacy learning, from the view of such learners, dramatically encapsulates a complexity of social issues including an individual’s sense of integration and belonging within the broader society, the negotiation of gender roles within a community and an ongoing expression of cultural and religious based identity within a multicultural australia. as warriner (2008) notes, issues of language, ethnicity, class, gender, and culture are salient and r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s consequential for pre-literate adult refugee learners who find themselves in a dynamic and vulnerable position with regards to their role within a multicultural society. such broader concerns however are seldom addressed or even acknowledged from a functional perspective of literacy. aligned with the foregoing perspective the approach taken in this research is one of valuing the meaningfulness of people's participation with literacy as identified by learners themselves. the research framework is based on a perspective that investigates the meaningfulness for learners of their engagement with their literacy learning in an adult esl program inclusive of their sense of sociocultural identity. in the context of this research project the term ‘meaningful participation’ draws inspiration from amartya sen’s concept of ‘meaningful development’ (manyozo 1999:31). the ‘meaningfulness’ i am discussing concerns the recognition of what people value in their lives and the freedom people have to actively engage with these values. it carries with it a sense of connection with others, with ourselves, and a sense of broadening one’s world. it is a concept aligned with the perspective of barton et al (2007:138) who highlight how learners’ ‘histories, their current identities and life circumstances, and the shifting goals and purposes they have for their future—interact to shape their engagement in and experience of learning’. utilising an identity focused theoretical framework which draws on the social learning theories of wenger (1999) and freire (1993), the project reported here foregrounds the learners’ aspirations, needs and their sense of cultural identity. such a framework seeks to understand a learner’s own sense of progress and motivation in an adult esl course from within a broader more ‘human-centered’ framework beyond ideological perspectives of literacy delimited by functional literacy skills. a framework of 'meaningful participation' for teaching adult preliterate learners wenger (1999) elaborates upon three main premises that are particularly useful in the context of this research paper. firstly, our ability to experience the world and our engagement with it as meaningful is held to comprise the key purpose of learning. secondly, the creation of knowledge is a socially situated practice which is dependent upon our active engagement with the world. thirdly, r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y atkinson 7 ‘meaningful participation’ evolves from people’s aspirations to be part of, develop and negotiate their own sense of identity within learning communities. according to this framework personal and social meaningfulness lies at the heart of learning and involves an extension of people’s feelings of identity and the power to participate in, negotiate and construct meanings of significance in a personally constructed world. kanno and norton (2003) build upon wenger's understanding through introducing the concept of imagined communities. these authors note that while wenger contextualises his understanding of a learning community primarily (although not exclusively) through learners ‘immediate, accessible communities’ (p. 242), a further important factor are learners' imagined communities and future identifications. as norton (2001:166) has argued, ‘a learner’s imagined community invite[s] an imagined identity, and a learner’s investment in the target language must be understood within this context’ (p. 166). miller (2007) also notes the importance of learner investment in literacy acquisition in her study on linguistic minority students in canada. according to miller investment and meaningfulness is often missing in common literacy based tasks where a prime focus on vocabulary, grammar and structure can ignore the essentiality of enabling learners to value their voices and be heard. meaningfulness, in this context involves the provision of space for learners to negotiate their identities, explore their relationships with others and to display agency. in line with this portrayal freire and macedo (1987), have coined the term, ‘reading the word and the world’ to explicitly connect literacy learning with a deeper understanding of the world based on personal liberation for the learner. literacy learning in this context is seen as a journey of empowerment where individuals recognise and can act on the impediments, both internal and external, which restrict their lives. in this project the concept of 'meaningful participation' refers to a framework designed to encompass people’s sense of connection with the society they live in, their own community and their own emerging sense of self with literacy. while it foregrounds the emerging sense of identity of learners themselves it recognises that in the adult esl class, meaningfulness is influenced by multiple factors. these factors may include the acquisition of functional literacy and the structures and practices from which esl programs are positioned. however the notion of ‘meaningful participation’ acknowledges that r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s literacy itself cannot and should not be defined according to the views of any particular group or be framed by one or the other paradigm. rather the use and the learning of literacy within the adult esl context should be seen within a broader frame of reference based upon multiple perspectives of both literacy and the lived reality of learners themselves. such a framework differs markedly from the present adult esl field contextualised as it is by neoliberal values. the stated goals of an adult english language program in terms of developing workplace skills potentially creates an environment where certain kinds and levels of ‘participation’ that are demanded by the increasingly ‘neoliberal economy’, are favoured over others. the aspiration of learners, and the unique social world which contextualises their learning, can be easily devalued to the demands for a low skilled labour market whose requirements are simplified to transactional skills in reading, writing listening and speaking. this is not to deny that such skills are of importance. it does however point to broad social (and potential pedagogical) limitations of such an approach. introducing the study context the study took place in an adult educational setting in a nonmetropolitan region of victoria, australia. the participants of the project were people of refugee backgrounds from togo and the sudan who were enrolled in a single class in an english literacy and oracy course. of these ten participants eight were women reflecting the gender disparity within the class itself. these ten participants at best had minimal literacy skills in the official language of their country of origin, alongside a history of minimal and disrupted schooling. all the participants were enrolled in a certificate in spoken and written english (cswe) at an intermediate, post beginner level having previously been enrolled at preliminary or beginning level classes. the cswe is an adult english language course delivered through the australian federal government’s adult migrant english program (amep). the cswe is designed to guide teachers to create and deliver a syllabus that enables students to achieve specified competency outcomes against which a student’s progress is measured. the course is not only designed to standardise english language instruction for new migrants; it also aims to ensure a level of accountability to funding authorities and a responsiveness to labour markets. r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y atkinson 9 the curriculum that the participants of this study were enrolled in was delivered over the course of a year and focused specifically on writing, reading, listening and speaking skills. these skills were further demarcated into sub skills designed to reflect the english language demands that learners may encounter both in the community and in the more formalised environment of work or further study. research design the research was part of a masters project based on the question: what contributes to the ‘meaningful participation’ of learners of an adult second language literacy program? the research design followed a case study within a phenomenological perspective where the case is clearly bounded by the experiences of a group of humanitarian entrants participating in an amep program delivered in a tertiary educational campus in australia. the study was undertaken within research ethics requirements approved by the university of new england’s ethics board. the collection of data, which took place over the course of a semester aimed to uncover the deeper meanings of the subjective experience(s) of the individuals and their own perceptions of their life and world around them the length of time of the study was influenced by the time taken for students to develop the practical and the social confidence to express themselves both orally and in writing. the researcher was ideally placed to collect observational material through his own position as one of the class teachers. data was collected through focused classroom discussion, participatory observation and written expression and included contributions to a classroom newsletter, the writing of personal narrative as well as reflections over key events. this latter activity was a significant feature of the research. enabling learners to express their concerns and reflect upon the action taken is an important aspect of adult education and provided useful data for the research. on one occasion, for example a forum was developed between learners and invited members of the community resulting from expressions of concern in the broader life of learners. invited members included representatives of the police force, a principal of a local high school and a representative from a settlement service organisation. the forum not only explored key issues but also developed further in r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s class comments as students reflected upon their own lives and what they had learnt in the forum. personal narrative was a further important factor of the research where participants voluntarily wrote about their contemporary educational and life experiences in australia, the meaningfulness of their literacy learning and how their learning impacted upon their life and their aspirations. these written stories were shared and thus provided space for participants to clarify their own meanings and to discuss further meanings of significance. asking students to write stories was compatible with the expressed needs of students to build upon their writing and reading skills, and therefore comprised a research data collection tactic ‘sanctioned’ by the existing curriculum. data analysis was grounded in the identification of the recurring topics that emerged from the data. these initial topics were further analysed to identify sub-topics which, once identified, informed further data analysis (muthukrishna, 2006). the next stage involved developing patterns of relationships between the categories identified through the coding leading to an understanding of the complex links between the beliefs, experiences, and perspectives of the participants. from the written stories and frequent reflective discussions over the course of the study a picture emerged revealing how the participants negotiated the meanings within their educational experiences and the broader society contextualised by their own socio-cultural needs and understandings. the findings what emerged in the research were multiple understandings of what constituted meaningful participation. far from being mutually exclusive the social and the functional aspects of the manner in which learners viewed their literacy frequently impacted on each other. alongside these constructions of literacy was an identification of literacy acquisition as an individual journey, tempered by cultural and social factors which often travelled in parallel with the learner’s own sense of adjustment to australian society and their emerging sense of self. functional english language skills at an initial level a particularly strong sense of meaning emerges in relation to the english language skills students strive to acquire, and in particular their confidence and ability to read and r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y atkinson 11 write. the three statements below typically express the understanding which many students held that english language and literacy skills are essential in order for them to have access to the opportunities afforded to members of australian society within the context of employment, further study and social discourse. english is necessary for speaking to neighbours, for reading things like letters, letters from centrelink, bills many things, getting a job, talking with my child’s teacher. these things we need english for. if we want to do another course, like me i want to do a childcare course. we need english for this. we need to learn how to write. without english, without writing english you cannot get a good job in australia. this is the difficulty i am facing. similar statements made by other students supported educational rhetoric concerning the importance of reading, writing, listening, speaking and grammar skills indicative of the functional approach of the amep program. this partial reproduction of the institutional discourse focused predominantly on the value placed on english literacy as a means to acquire a job or pursue further study. as the following quotes reveal however such statements reveal only a partial truth. in reality students’ lives and their motivations and investment in learning is far more complex than the aforementioned linear arrangement between functional literacy acquisition and social integration suggests. the following statements indicate some of the challenges concerning this group of learners in the context of what they identify as their literacy practices outside of the school environment. when i get home my bag i leave by the door and pick up the next day. i do not open. writing it is hard but i do not practice, i don’t know why. writing, maybe in one year i will write (i.e., one year from the time the statement was made-author) we do not read like you (westerners) do for pleasure. the paper we do not read, it is not part of our culture. r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the statements above reveal a common pattern amongst many who are learning literacy for the first time in terms of their express lack of english literacy use in their broader social and out of class activities. this is not uncommon for people of low educational backgrounds. as alluded by the nls framework of literacy, reading and writing may be viewed as socially constructed literacy events. to conclude, however, that these statements signify a lack of effort or conscientiousness on the part of these participants as implied by the functional approach paints a too simplistic an understanding of the complexity of cultural change being experienced by learners. in order to understand the divide between what may be referred to as the broader engagement of class based literacy in the lives of students and their everyday literacy practices it is important to view literacy as both a skill and a social practice tied to constructs of meaning and identity. learning, literacy and journey within the context of a transforming cultural identity and the social vulnerability of students, the following statements are especially salient. they present specific examples of the wider meaningfulness of a literacy program in terms of developing a sense of identity applicable to the cultural world of the learner. the first statement emerged during conversation with one of the participants; i had expressed the concern that i was not teaching to their understanding in reference to the difficulties students experienced when learning to write. the second and third statement emerged during a reflective writing exercise. don’t worry about what you teach. we know we have a long way to go. a very long way to go. it is our dream to write english and get a good job. but that is very far in the future. you just teach us what we need to learn. someday we will get there. i came through to b. and the people i know are all in melbourne and i am living in b. i don’t know what can i do, it was too hard in my life… i couldn’t speak english … now i keep myself busy learning more to get there very quickly to speak and write competently. it is very difficult to get there. r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y atkinson 13 sometimes i get to class a little bit late. but the english is our future. from the other language english is the best. but it is very difficult to get there. the statements reveal something of the acknowledged importance of functional english. they also reveal insight into the language aspirations of learners and their imagined futures. such futures, expressed in terms of metaphorical journeys, reveal also a sense of ownership and responsibility. it is a journey not only in terms of acquiring skills but also in terms of acquiring a sense of place in the wider society. the insights gleaned from the statements above may be contrasted with those statements concerning the out of school literacy practices reported earlier. what is collectively significant about these out of school literacy practice statements is not just what is being said but also what is not said. my observations made through informally conversing with students indicate that the use of literacy out of school, although not extensive, does occur. learners for example, frequently cited the practices of reading religious texts such as the bible, reading books to and with their young children and texting each other or members of their own community in english. put differently. learners utilise their learning of english literacy in their social lives but do not view these uses as significant literacy practices. this was found to be a common theme in the responses of the participants of this research project. there was a frequent mismatch between institutional priorities based on the acquisition of functional skills and the cultural lives of the students based on negotiating and navigating a cultural landscape very different from that espoused in class based literacy. in other words, by constructing literacy purely in ideological terms we are in danger of missing the relevancy of literacy skills acquisition for our learners in the context of their everyday activities and their participation in a literacy class. rather than contextualising the acquisition of workplace skills only as the end goal of a literacy program (thereby denying ownership of the literacy journey which learners themselves aspire to travel along) such a learning process may be profitably viewed by those involved in the teaching of literacy to pre-literate adult refugee learners in terms of one aspect of a broader cultural journey. the cultural journeys of learners’ lives r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s viewing participation in a literacy course as a part of a broader cultural journey reveals learners' lives as a complexity of ongoing negotiated cultural meanings, of which one aspect is literacy, both in its social and its functional variant. the following statements, of which variations were frequently produced and reproduced by the participants, show something of this negotiated complexity and the broad cultural challenges that learners face. you know we have our ways of disciplining our children. but in this country our children learn new ways. at school they learn new things. they learn australian ways. they do not listen to adults. what do we do with our children? how do we discipline our children in this culture? i saw a lady take something from the bag of another lady on the station. the train person asked if anyone had seen anything. i said nothing. my husband said to be quiet. in my country where i come from, the police will take me away if i talk to them. i need to be quiet. i don’t understand this country. if i do something i might do the wrong thing. first we must understand this country. this is why i don’t say very much. i want to understand. then we can know if we do the right thing. the statements above bring to focus aspects of intense significance for learners both in terms of their understanding and feelings of cultural difference and concurrently their role in a very new cultural environment. each of the statements above highlight aspects of cultural learning. what is notable about the comments generally is the diversity of topics participants expressed in terms of the cultural challenges they experienced. these challenges include the use of money, relationships between married couples and the importance of handing down a sense of cultural identity to their children. what connects these experiences is a strong focus on reflection of the cultural challenges in life and even a sense of cultural change through engaging in a wider cultural landscape. in the lives of the participants of this study the literacy program potentially enabled learners to discuss the cultural landscape they found themselves in and reflect upon their own lives and identity. it provided a safe environment to explore the meanings that mattered to them, inclusive of, but not confined to those associated with literacy. the statements below locate this wider significance of the adult esl r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y atkinson 15 class for this group of learners. they serve to showcase this direct interface between identity and engagement with an esl class. when that woman from human rights came and asked us about our experiences i felt very good because i know someone can help us. i pray someone can help us. you know, with that man when he taught us, i learn so much about centrelink and money and about payments. i learn about forms. this was good. i need this information. indeed it appears to be this juxtaposition between a student's transforming sense of identity and their participation in the program which enhances the meaningfulness of their participation. this is not to advocate for a widespread adoption of socially orientated workshops for learners. rather it points to the need of tailoring classes to the emerging identities of students inclusive, but not reduced to their emerging literate identities. it points to the value of enabling students to claim ownership over their learning as part of a wider cultural journey of social belonging in mainstream society. this sense of literacy program participation as an aspect of a broader cultural journey is an incredibly powerful one as the following two statements indicate. when i first learn i feel very small. like i cannot do anything, i have no confidence so i cannot learn. but now, now i think better of myself. i can learn because i think myself better now. i have a place in this society. i need to be told that i can do things that people believe in me. being told that my writing is no good. this does not help me. we know this already. we need more than this. we need to have confidence in ourselves. these latter statements reveal that a literacy program can have a huge bearing, both in a positive and a negative sense, on the lives of learners. although as teachers and teacher administrators we may think of our roles solely as one of providing literacy instruction within an english speaking context as defined by the curriculum our learners may view it as far more than that. unless we recognise this we may not only deprive learners of ownership over their own learning but fail to recognise the broader gains they make in the r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s context of their cultural journey arguably at a time when they are at their most vulnerable. discussion in this paper literacy is contextualised through learners’ emerging and transforming selves. such a positioning offers a unique and different perspective to literacy teaching and learning in the adult esl classroom aligned with the position of gomez (2004) that human beings are diverse and multidimensional rather than linear and simplistic. aligned with the theoretical framework of meaningful participation, and the social practice approach to literacy learning it was contended that the manner in which literacy is presented can act as a space for learners to examine their realities through foregrounding their sense of identity and giving voice to their meanings. likewise it can also potentially impact negatively on learners’ emerging sense of self through reproducing the dominant social discourse and denying difference (cooke, 2008). it is contended that it is acknowledging and understanding this process of emerging identity, and reconciling this process with the multiple meanings of esl literacy programs, which creates the space for participation to be made more engaging for learners. the orientation of the amep program towards the acquisition of functional skills does not expressly acknowledge difference. nor does it acknowledge the importance of connecting literacy with learners’ lives (kral & schwab, 2003). arguably the lack of recognition of the cultural challenges in the acquisition of literacy does little to enable learners to understand themselves, their experiences and their roles within a very different cultural landscape from their own homeland. not including identity concepts within literacy programs is both a pedagogical and social silence which ignores the importance for learners to rethink and reflect upon their own sense of self within a safe and secure environment. this is not to deny that many teachers are inclusive of the identity of their learners in their delivery of class based esl instruction. after all it has been a basic practice in communicative and transformative pedagogies for a very long time (cummins 2000). neither is it to deny the importance of functional english skills. the push towards greater accountability in the classroom however fails to acknowledge the emerging sense of identity of learners and the r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y atkinson 17 potentially fragile nature of their own sense of self. it is thus a serious omission within the context that literacy programs are often a key gateway for students to understand the cultural landscape and the challenges they face. reducing literacy to the acquisition of skills, such as in the amep english language curriculum, limits the participants’ own sense of emerging literate identity to values concomitant with the institutional discourse itself rather than values in their own lives. implications for the delivery of literacy programs in the preliterate classroom. given the powerful and pervasive neo-liberal discourse which frames literacy delivery to preliterate refugee learners it may be asked however, what, if anything, can and should be done about this situation. after all the global trend towards greater economic transnationalism is likely to put greater pressure on governments to frame teaching in terms of measurable economic outcomes. for answer i return to the point made above. this concerns the potential lack of awareness of the ideology(ies) to which teachers as well as administrators and curriculum designers deliver, frame and design programs in the adult esl context (benesch 1993, fairclough 1992). through understanding the prevailing ideology which we, as teachers and administrators work under, it becomes possible to understand its limitations and thereby create a shared space of multiple ideologies and alternative viewpoints. through focusing on constructions of identity, as well as constructions of workplace skills, we can begin to ask much more informed questions regarding the effectiveness of the programs we deliver, design or administer from the perspective of our students rather than government departments in the present complex society it may be time to reframe literacy programs, particularly the amep english language program, in terms of multiple ideologies, including the social, the functional and the ideological, to acknowledge emerging identities and enable those on the margins to develop their own understanding of themselves in their new society. acknowledgements i am very grateful to the reviewers for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. r e f r a m i n g l i t e r a c y 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s references auerbach, e (1992) making meaning, making change: participatory curriculum development for esl literacy, national clearinghouse on literacy education, centre for 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‘american’, anthropology and education quarterly, vol 8, no 4, pp 343359. warriner, d (2010) competent performances of situated identities: adult learners of english accessing engaged participation teaching and teacher education, vol 26, no 1, pp 22–30. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2009.06.003 wenger, e (1999) communities of practice. learning, meaning and identity, cambridge university press, cambridge, uk. http://www.crll.org.uk/media/crll/content/publications/otherreports/jsmiththesis.pdf http://www.crll.org.uk/media/crll/content/publications/otherreports/jsmiththesis.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2009.06.003 abstract introduction a framework of 'meaningful participation' for teaching adult preliterate learners introducing the study context research design the findings functional english language skills learning, literacy and journey the cultural journeys of learners’ lives discussion implications for the delivery of literacy programs in the pre-literate classroom. acknowledgements references lns template l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 9 n o 1 2 0 1 1 50 refractions spiders are mammals: direct instruction in cape york louise dow in 2010, sra direct instructioni was introduced across the curriculum in two remote cape york schools, as a key aspect of social and welfare reform. there is national political interest in these reforms, which link welfare policy to state primary school education conceived as basic skills training. reflecting the political interest, national newspapers ran the story that direct instruction had provided almost miraculous results after 17 weeks (devine 2010a). alternative approaches to literacy development in indigenous education did not get the same sort of media attention. noel pearson provides the intellectual basis for cape york social reforms, through his writing, political advocacy and leadership of organisations involved in the reforms. his ultimate goal is successful mainstream education leading to economic integration, where young people are „completely fluent in their own culture and the wider culture‟ (pearson 2009:57). the question posed by this vision is „what kind of education can produce these flexible, bicultural, working people who keep their traditions alive?‟ critical theory offers a way to explore this question, as it views the classroom as a mirror of broader social relations, and encourages teachers to reflect on their own experience (brookfield 2005:366). the multilit ii direct instruction literacy program provided the template for replacing the state curriculum with sra direct instruction in two cape york communities, coen and aurukun (cape york partnerships [cyp] 2009:9-10; crean 2011:13). i taught this program at coen primary school for two terms in 2009, and was living in coen when the school converted to a direct instruction aboriginal australian academy in 2010. tony abbott, current federal opposition leader, writes about his own short term experience working as a teacher‟s aide in coen and aurukun: of course, this kind of experience doesn‟t make someone an expert on indigenous australia. it should, though, provide a more direct „feel‟ for indigenous issues than reading official documents and media reports, however insightful they might be (abbott 2009). my experience teaching the program led to misgivings about the method, particularly for long periods, rather than intensive remedial bursts. i s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s d o w 51 did not go to cape york to undertake research, so ethically, legally and for privacy reasons, i cannot provide specific details about classroom activities. within these limitations, i use my personal experience to explore the literacy aspects of the educational changes in cape york. background welfare and school reform in cape york education is a central plank of the reforms, which ultimately aim to move aboriginal citizens from welfare dependence to participation in the „real economy‟ (pearson 2000:141-142). this requires comprehensive social change through school reform, alcohol bans, health improvement, economic development, training programs and income management. the reform has national significance, as they align with a new federal approach of „involving aborigines in remote communities in the real economy‟ (brennan 2007). centrelinkiii policies tying welfare payments to school attendance have been extended beyond cape york‟s indigenous communities to other disadvantaged areas (gibson 2011). school reform has not yet been extended beyond cape york, but pearson‟s views are influential: governments are supporting such a reform program in cape york which, in the absence of an alternative coherent program, should be replicated elsewhere. the program includes … the introduction of direct instruction, a method that has been proven to get disadvantaged students up to parity in literacy and numeracy, and longer school days. federal mp alan tudge, september 2010 (tudge 2010) despite the national significance, there has been little public analysis of these changes. information is available from the organisations with a stake in the reforms, led by noel pearson (cape york institute for policy and leadership, cape york partnerships, jawun indigenous corporate partnerships). pearson promotes welfare reform through his regular column in the australian. other columnists have used the cape york experience to support a particular ideological position on education, within the national back-to-basics discourse: „give good teachers a gold star and put the bad ones out to pasture’ (devine 2010b), „protecting bad teachers produces chronic failure’ (hughes and hughes 2011). there is little public information available from education queensland on the school changes. s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s 52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s literacy is a key focus of the educational reforms we believe literacy is the most significant and urgent of the education problems facing cape york‟s indigenous communities. it is the foundation skill that underpins all others (cape york institute for policy and leadership [cyipl] 2007:1). pearson‟s view of literacy is grounded in a context where social norms have broken down, and where previous education efforts have failed. the literacy gap between indigenous and mainstream students measured by naplan iv is a primary driver of school reform (cyp 2009:13). while acknowledging that literacy problems are caused by complex social factors, pearson argues that effective instruction can close this gap, based on the multilit program in coen state primary school (pearson 2007). he consciously positions a skills-based view of literacy against critical pedagogies, arguing that indigenous children lack „implicit literacy‟ absorbed by people growing up in an educated family, and that the ability to read is fundamental to critique. pearson is scathing about „progressive educational currents‟, and leftist agendas that „(re)produce only lumpen, illiterate underclasses‟ instead of critical thinkers (pearson 2009:81). literacy plus books are what spawn critique. more revolution was fomented in the reading room of the british museum…than any attempt to nurture juvenile critical capacities (pearson 2009:81). in 2010, in a bid to improve education outcomes, two state schools, aurukun and coen, began a three-year trial as aboriginal australian academies. these communities are quite different from each other; coen is a small, relatively functional community in comparison with aurukun, which made national headlines in 2008 for a complete breakdown of social standards (australian broadcasting corporation [abc] 2011). for comparison, the family responsibilities commission (frc) reports provide a snapshot of the communities in the welfare reform trial. aurukun accounts for around 60 percent of agency notifications (school attendance, child safety, magistrates appearance) compared to coen‟s 5 percent (frc 2010:19). language is another difference. in coen most children speak aboriginal english. in isolated aurukun, most children speak wik munkun, with aboriginal english as their second or even third language. coen school is much smaller (46 students in 2009 compared to 290 plus at aurukun) with a high attendance rate (96.8 percent in term 2, 2008, compared to 37.9 percent in aurukun) (frc 2010:27). in 2009, coen school staff was s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s d o w 53 relatively stable, compared to aurukun where there was a revolving door of teachers (shaw 2009). the 2009 academy business case was a key document in gaining queensland and federal government support for the trial (jawun 2011:2). it built an argument for fundamental school reform across the cape on development work at coen school, which is credited with coen school‟s better outcomes on several measures. these include the 2008 naplan results (table 1), high attendance, community support, and literacy improvements which saw students reading more words correctly per minute (fluency) due to the multilit program in coen, hope vale and mossman schools (cyp 2009:9-10). v naplan results 2008 percentages of students at or above the national minimum standard (nms) reading writing spelling grammar numeracy year 3 coen 20 60 40 20 60 aurukun 14 15 10 0 25 year 5 coen 29 86 83 50 50 71 aurukun 0 0 0 0 year 7 coen 50 100 100 0 100 aurukun 33 13 33 22 38 table 1. national assessment program – literacy and numeracy (naplan) results 2008. sources: qld studies authority (2008:21) and coen state school annual report (2008:4). the business case argues that basic literacy and numeracy skills should be the focus of primary school education, with welfare reform taking care of non-school impacts on achievement. further, it argues that all cape york primary school children‟s needs are met by direct instruction: in cape york, most students have multiple disadvantages needing explicit instruction from the beginning, rather than remedial programs later. grouping by ability rather than age allows higher aptitude students to progress faster (cyp 2009: 12-18). a supply and demand model of education focuses on instruction as the central organising principle (figure 1). social factors (learning demand) and s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s 54 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s school factors (teaching supply) both feed into instruction, which is the only learning factor over which schools have full control. in the academy model, welfare reform takes care of any social factors impacting achievement. school reform fixes the teaching side, focused on „scientifically established methods of effective instruction‟. taken together this provides „the ultimate „no excuses‟ approach to education…based on teacher and school accountability for learning outcomes‟ (cyp 2009:13:28). figure 1. from cape york aboriginal australian academy business case (cyp 2009:12) the academy model also utilises the sociological concept of cultural capital, arguing that the cultural gap which creates the middle-class learning advantage is „as important to close as the literacy gap‟ (cyp 2009:101). three learning domains provide a complete education: basic skills (class), „cultural capital‟ (club) and traditional culture and language (culture). the class educational philosophy centres on developing basic skills, leading to higher learning. an extended school day (8.30am – 4.45pm) provides basic skills instruction during normal school hours, and compulsory extracurricular activities after school. the compulsory club domain aims to replicate the middle-class learning advantage, through „concerted cultivation‟ in higher-order thinking skills, creativity, and extracurricular activities. other needs are met through onsite health care and meals. within this holistic model, the community is actively involved in education, and the school essentially becomes an instruction delivery agency: s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s d o w 55 ‘supply side (school)  teacher delivers requisite instruction  school leader ensures teachers deliver requisite instruction  school governance enables and holds school leader to account for delivering the requisite instruction.‟ (cyp 2009:15). the term „direct instruction‟ (lower case „di‟) refers to a spectrum of teaching from generic procedures of scaffolding, modelling and working in small steps, through to the scripted “direct instruction” (di) curriculum package developed by engelmann and carnine, also known as distar (rosenshine 2008). the features of distar instruction are: scripted presentations, small groups (5-10 students), unison responding by students, signals to cue student responding, and scripted correction procedures for each predicted type of mistake (binder and watkins 1990:10). while using the same terminology, these two forms of „direct instruction‟ have contrasting expectations of teacher skills and autonomy. vi generic „direct instruction‟ procedures need high teacher autonomy and context-based flexibility (rosenshine 2008). distar programs expect little teacher autonomy in terms of content, but rather focus on teacher fidelity in delivering the program. the teacher is trained to precisely deliver the script, hand gestures, corrections and behavioural modification techniques. we don‟t give a damn what the teacher thinks, what the teacher feels … they can hate it. we don‟t care, as long as they do it.” (engelmann in radosh 2004). pearson argues that, because remote communities can expect inexperienced teachers, with a low retention rate, cape york schools must rely on instruction as the defining factor of quality teaching, ie „committed teacher + effective instruction = quality teaching‟ (pearson 2009:39). a prescriptive model provides continuity, so a continually changing set of teachers can simply slot in and take over where the last one left off. the requisite instruction chosen for the academy, sra direct instruction, is a scripted commercial curriculum distar package with behaviourist roots in the „mind-as-computer‟ model from 1960s cognitive science (binder and watkins 1990:10). it is described as a scientific method of „faultless communication‟, which „leads learners precisely to a single interpretation of the instruction‟, and ideally works for all learners (grant 2007). the direct instruction mantra is „if the student has not learned, the teacher has not taught‟ (pearson 2009:89). the literacy model is skills-based, focusing on five major print literacy components: phonemic awareness, phonics skills, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. progress is measured by the dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills (dibels) fluency tests of s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s 56 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the number of letters, sounds and words identified per minute (cyp 2009:33). critique spiders are mammals – faulty communication in the classroom in a critical theory approach, the teacher‟s classroom experience is considered a research fundamental (appadurai 2006). multilit materials describe it as a „remedial reading program‟, using an approach „effective for all reading instruction‟ (multilit website faqs 2011). the coen program used the scripted direct instruction teaching method for some of its elements. students in the classes i taught were low-progress readers who spent most of their school day in the program, learning alphabetic decoding. they went through a sequence of levelled materials and internal tests, „graduating‟ after reaching the highest level and passing benchmark tests. some students had been in the program for a long time, unable to progress quickly and return to their mainstream classes. sra direct instruction materials were also used as an add-on to the phonics-based program, including thinking basics and spelling mastery. my experience teaching this program raised questions about sra direct instruction as a solo curriculum option. vii these questions include the assumptions inherent in the methodology, and whether its view of the teacher and model of literacy can meet the demands made of it as a central plank of welfare reform. the direct instruction method assumes that the instructional design creates sequences „for which there is only one logical interpretation‟ (hempenstall 1996:5). this means the programs: … are non-categorical so can be used across student variations … the programs can be adapted to australian examples and standards where required (cyp 2009:31). the following exchange occurred in my sra direct instruction thinking basics class in 2009.viii teacher: the rule is „all mammals have hair.‟ everybody say that – „all mammals have hair‟. students (chanting): „all mammals have hair‟ teacher: everybody what is the rule? students (chanting): „all mammals have hair‟ teacher: who can name an animal with hair? student x – „cow‟ student y – „wallaby‟ s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s d o w 57 teacher: great thinking x and y! student z – „spider‟ (beaming proudly). teacher (seeing a big logic hole looming, with a hairy huntsman spider in it): do spiders have hair? students: yess!! z: (being helpfully specific). yes, the x (local language name) spider has hair on his feet and on his back! the scripted correction procedure didn‟t cover explaining to 8 yearold, on-edge, at-risk, indigenous low-progress readers, whose first language is not english, that the rule does not exclude other types of animals from having hair, and is not a definitive rule about mammals by itself. and further, that spider hair isn‟t real hair because it‟s part of the exoskeleton. if you haven‟t taught scripted di, it is hard to appreciate how difficult it is if the „predicted‟ mistakes are not within the ambit of the program designers. lessons are rapid, and teachers are trained to get through lessons on time and stick to the script, or „implement explicit instruction with fidelity‟ (cyp 2009:59). the „corrections‟ are part of the rapid-fire script, and intended to quickly convey to the student why their example doesn‟t fit with the teacher‟s. if students really don‟t understand, earlier lessons are repeated. in this case that would mean more confusing examples using rules, like „all mammals have hair – whales are mammals‟. my class often struggled with meaning in this way. another sra direct instruction lesson sequence focused on analogies as relational pairs, in the form „a is to b as c is to d‟. „a hat is to head as a tie is to?‟ aside from the urban-oriented vocabulary, this is a difficult and contrived language construction, especially for a student whose first language is not standard australian english. some students also struggled with antonyms many english speakers take for granted, like long/short, hot/cold, wide/narrow or slowly/quickly. if this was an esl issue to do with relational syntax in the local languages, as a di teacher i did not have any leeway to find out by exploring it in class. these examples show that the scripted materials assumed not only a given set of language and conceptual categorisations, but also a deeper level understanding of logical analysis principles. the confusion this led to in the cape york classroom cannot be addressed by simply replacing words or numbers with australian vocabulary or standards. in the di classroom there were many missed learning opportunities. a discussion on how the children classified animals or seasons (wet is the opposite of hot!), or hunting (dugong has warm blood, turtle has cold blood) may have been effective when the script failed. as resnick (resnick 2010:184) argues, guided classroom discussion of core disciplinary ideas can s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s 58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s give long-term retention and transfer to other disciplines. sometimes the children enjoyed and learnt from the chanted scripts, and complied with behavioural prompts, but often they didn‟t. a preordained script cannot deal with classroom moments, like a child who has climbed into a large cardboard box, throwing its contents out for attention, while attempting to staple his lips. this boy almost always resisted the scripted lessons, but one day he got up and wrote „gebap‟ on the board, beaming. this was „give up‟ (from the i spy game we sometimes played) – phonetically correct in aboriginal english. he had registered the sound/letter relationship from his minimal participation in the scripted di lessons (sometimes from the box, sans stapler), and applied the knowledge. according to di orthodoxy, that moment was 'off script‟ and wayward needing behavioural correction (for both student and teacher), but at that point what he actually needed was a teacher responsive to the moment. as luke writes: specific knowledges and skills „named' in the official curriculum … are remade through the lenses and practices of teachers' substantive world, field and disciplinary knowledge, then brought to life in classrooms in relation to teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and students' cultural scripts and background schemata (luke forthcoming:1-2). my students‟ lives came with them into the classroom every day. they were the children of a generation lost to substance abuse (abc 2011), whose grandparents and great-grandparents had been cajoled, deceived or removed at gunpoint from their homelands, as late as 1963. the students were dealing with the legacy of this history in their everyday lives, something that cannot be quickly overcome through welfare reform. we had children who could not learn because they witnessed violence, they were sick, they had no mental health support, or they had no consistent place to sleep. but as well as having problems, they had access to indigenous cultural capital; traditional culture and languages. they all told stories very well. they were bilingual or multilingual, visually sophisticated and highly social. both direct instruction tutors (myself and an education queensland trained school teacher) were mature age, with academic, vocational, life, parenting and other teaching and training experience to draw on. di does not allow a teacher to draw on their own or their students‟ knowledge, specific interests and backgrounds. research supports a balanced approach much of the research cited in the academy business case supporting explicit instruction dates from a period when the debates between constructivist and „evidence-based‟ approaches to reading were polarised. ix most contemporary educators consider this a false dichotomy, and accept s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s d o w 59 that a form of direct instruction can be effective for developing structured skills, like decoding in reading (department of education, science and training [dest] 2005:11). however, some argue that it has limited ability to develop unstructured „skills‟ such as comprehension, critical thinking and interpersonal skills (luke forthcoming:3; johnston and hayes 2008:110). it is also not the only way to develop basic literacy skills. purdie and ellis‟ comprehensive literature review for the australian council for educational research found strategy instruction was as effective as direct instruction for children with learning difficulties. strategy instruction focuses on generic strategies rather than specific skills. they concluded that teachers should not reject constructivism in favour of purely teacher-directed methods, and „avoid either/or positions‟ (purdie and ellis 2005:29-34). the national inquiry into the teaching of literacy also recommended that teachers should have an understanding of a range of effective strategies, and know when and how to apply them (dest 2005:14). to sustain achievement gains amongst at-risk students requires basics skills instruction, but also a curriculum of intellectual demand (luke forthcoming:3-4). experienced educators with indigenous students support some explicit teacher-directed learning, but not sra direct instruction (nicholls 2009:100; sarra 2011). according to johnston and hayes, what happens in high performing schools is not a consequence of the instruction, but of „social capital‟. while the academy model incorporates this concept, it hives off its cultivation into after-hours activities. the school curriculum fits the characteristics of high poverty, high diversity classrooms discussed by johnston and hayes: a linear curriculum, tightly controlled by the teacher, ability groupings that „harden into permanent tracks at an early age‟; reteaching and more skills practice for children who don‟t thrive. this curriculum contrasts with the kind of „interactive learning paradigm‟, which „people with power and resources choose for their own learning‟ (johnston and hayes 2008:110-123). others agree: no middle class suburban parent would ever permit this kind of cognitive decapitation of their children … poor kids get behaviorism and rich kids get social constructionism … or skills for the poor, knowledge for the rich (cummins 2007). what are basic skills? new literacies for an uncertain future the vision for cape york is aimed at future social and economic participation in the „real economy‟. what is the real economy? governments predict a future of uncertainties and discontinuities, and some economists say nobody knows what the future economy will look like (us national intelligence council 2008). knowledge today is multiple-source, public, s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s explosive and emergent, needing argument, discussion, interpretation, selfmanagement and social skills (resnick 2010:184-186). capacities needed for the new economy: „creativity, intercultural communication, community service, collaborative work, problem solving and digital multiliteracies‟ are „beyond the reach of traditional testing‟ (luke 2008:13). a question for „new literacy‟ educators is how to prepare students for an unknowable, digital future. discourses and texts are forms of capital for exchange in these economies. who gets access to them, who can manipulate and construct them, who can critique, refute, second guess them are the key educational issues of the next century (luke 2000:2). despite dismissing „progressive approaches‟ to education, pearson‟s thinking comes close to „new literacy‟ concepts, as he situates literacy within the political economy. pearson also rejects a reductive approach to identity, proposing „layered identities‟ where a person has multiple identifications with cultural and linguistic groups, religions, places of birth, and geographic communities (pearson 2009:62). this view allies him to scholars who argue new technologies and globalisation structure identity in new ways, which compete with traditional ideas of language, race, culture and place. today, people interact electronically, cutting across traditional boundaries of identity and educational practice. knobel and lankshear use the example of rikku-chan, a „failing‟ (by standardised tests) african american in an urban public high school, who writes „fanfic‟ (fan fiction), drawing on greek and roman myths. online peers help her with spelling, grammar and plot construction (knobel and lankshear 2006:80). indigenous youth in remote communities are also engaged in „new multimodal practices‟ (kral 2009:44-45). one cape york indigenous community „leapfrogged‟ to the most up-to-date technology when mobile broadband was introduced in 2008 (dyson and brady 2009:13). as well as their new and rapidly expanding digital literacies, cape york children have vernacular literacies, which may be closer to multimodal „new technology‟ literacies than those required for print culture (cope and kalantzis 2006:29). for contemporary literacy researchers, achieving pearson‟s flexible, bicultural future involves recognising such multiliteracies. if pearson‟s quote is slightly changed to ‘literacy plus books texts spawns critique’, children need to learn to negotiate more than print-based literacies, from an early age. the library is now largely online, the reading room is multiple chat rooms. if the focus is only on basic skills, what curriculum will teach to the convergent, multidiscipline, multi-identity needed for the future? primary schools do unmeasurable things, which prepare students for high school, and life beyond school. in 2009, in a classroom in cape york, a (mainstream) s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s d o w 61 teacher‟s class downed pens during a lesson to have an animated discussion, which started with a discussion of the planets, and went on to the universe, aboriginal culture and the meaning of life. into a gap in the animated discussion was heard v‟s indignant voice; „how come yufla x know all this stuff??‟ „v‟ had finally managed to „graduate‟ from the remedial „direct instruction‟ class and was now in his grade class. he had finally, finally got to the end of a list of words he‟d seen many times before, through test after test, before his adhd distracted him, or he threw down his pen or swore at the teacher because it made him feel „stupid‟. had he been sitting in that class all the time, with mental health support and targeted „direct instruction‟ skills focus as one (but only one) aspect of his day, he may not have felt he‟d missed out on so much. lack of reading ability in english would not have stopped a kid who could „talk the hind leg off an iron pot‟ learning from and contributing to discussions. from my experience, this free-ranging discussion could not occur in a sra direct instruction classroom. the holistic academy model caters for his needs in most ways, but limits his opportunities through its current interpretation of „requisite instruction‟. references abbott, t (2009) modern politics hooked on the quick fix, the telegraph, 27 august, retrieved 30 nov 2011 from 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queensland outcomes report, retrieved 30 nov 2011 from http://education.qld.gov.au/naplan/ . radosh, d (2004) the pet goat approach, the new yorker, july 26. resnick, l (2010) nested learning systems for the thinking curriculum, educational researcher, vol 39, no 3, pp 183 – 197. rosenshine, b (2008) five meanings of direct instruction, center on innovation & improvement, lincoln. sarra, c (2011) not the only way to teach aboriginal youngsters, the australian, may 14. shaw, p (2009) seven seasons in aurukun, allen and unwin, sydney. tudge, a (2010) lessons in closing the education gap, the australian, 20 september. us national intelligence council (2008) global trends 2025, a transformed world, retrieved 30 nov 2011 from www.dni.gov/nic/nic_2025_project.htm . wheldall k and beaman, r (1999) an evaluation of multilit, ‘making up lost time in literacy’, executive summary, macquarie university special education centre, macquarie university. endnotes i sra direct instruction is a commercial curriculum package originally developed in the 1960s as the direct instruction system for teaching arithmetic and reading (distar), by engelmann and colleagues (us department of education 2007:1). it is distributed by mcgraw hill education (mcgraw hill 2011). iimaking up lost time in literacy (wheldall & beaman 1999). iii centrelink is the australian government service provider that delivers welfare payments and services. iv national assessment program – literacy and numeracy (naplan). v development work at the school prior to 2008 included school community partnerships, the multilit program, digital culture initiatives for cultural transmission, case management aimed at school attendance, and policy initiatives. welfare reform began in 2008, including case management targeting school attendance, further implementation of the multilit program, student education trusts and the family responsibilities commission (cyp 2009:9). vi the terminology can be confusing. see rosenshine 2008 and hempenstall 1996 for an overview. http://education.qld.gov.au/naplan/ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ http://www.dni.gov/nic/nic_2025_project.htm s p i d e r s a r e m a m m a l s d o w 65 vii although multilit uses direct instruction elements, it is a different program from sra direct instruction, with different aims. it focuses on intensive phonics based literacy instruction, aiming for rapid return to mainstream classes. although i had some misgivings about the direct instruction elements, multilit has proven to be effective in various contexts, including coen state school (multilit website 2011, wheldall and beaman 1999). my concern related to children who did not progress quickly, and their need to receive the balanced learning provided by the mainstream curriculum. viii the lesson sequence is from a public sra direct instruction sample (mcgraw hill). ix hempenstall (1996), wheldall and beaman (1999) in cyp 2009. x “you all”, cape york kriol. lns template l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 9 n o 1 2 0 1 1 3 the use of activity theory in literacy research: working and developing a vocational portfolio and the interaction of the two activities zoe nikolaidou abstract in this paper, i show the relevance of using activity theory in the study of situated literacy. in order to do that, i draw on ethnographic data collected during a six-month period that focuses on the literacy practices of a warehouse administrator who studies on a work-basis for the completion of a national vocational qualification in the uk. the employee’s work context and the process of studying for a qualification are examined here as two distinct activity systems, within which various literacy events are enacted and literacy practices are developed. the result is a detailed study of the interaction of these two activity systems, and it becomes clear that work practices and qualification practices are connected in many ways. one of the most important connecting factors is the vocational portfolio, which acts as a boundary object between the two distinct yet highly recontextualising activity systems. introduction in this paper, it is suggested that the study of literacy as a social skill can be better understood with the help of activity theory (at) as a heuristic framework. because of its socially constructed nature, literacy is often witnessed in multi-contextual environments, where people engage with more than one parallel activity. in such cases, it is often difficult to understand and describe the multiple reading and writing processes that take place and the purposes of the texts being produced. an example of such a case is vocational education, where people are often working and studying at the same time. by examining work and vocational studies as two distinct activity systems and by performing an activity system analysis we can examine, in a more systematic way, what is going on when these practitioners/students read and write. literacy is understood in this paper as a contextualised activity and is examined within the framework of the new literacy studies (nls). the field of nls is central to any study of context ‘since almost all contexts are in some way textually mediated’ (satchwell and ivaniç 2007:305). in a similar fashion, at places context at the heart of every human action. human actions are interpreted when taking into account the elements that constitute the context of an activity system. for at contexts are neither perceived as ‘containers of behaviour’, which human agency has not affected t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in the least, nor as purely linguistic and symbolic entities that can be created independently of the deeper socio-economic structures (engeström1990). on the contrary, at perceives context as a situation under the complete control of individuals and therefore engeström argues that contexts are ‘constructed by humans, not by superhuman agents’ (1990:78). an activity system consists of one or more subjects, the aim (object) the subjects wish to accomplish and the mediating means they use in order to achieve this aim. equally important elements are the community that surrounds and takes part (directly or not) in the activity, the division of labour between the subjects and the rules that underpin the whole system. the study of literacy practices under the prism of at is given a new light. at a methodological level, at gives the researcher tools with which to analyse and interpret ethnographic data. by viewing literacy events within the framework of an activity system, it is possible to gain a clearer understanding of the actors involved in the literacy events and the aim they wish to accomplish. the concept of the community helps interpret the role of other actors that are, directly or indirectly, involved in the activity. brandt’s (1995) sponsors of literacy, for example, can be analysed as part of an activity’s community and therefore provide a clearer picture of the role they play in creating and shaping literacy practices. finally, the mediating factors of rules and division of labor have a major role to play in developing the practices of both the system as a whole and the actions of the individual. embedding at therefore in the study of literacy results in a more accurate contextualisation of literacy events and in a more valid interpretation of the meaning of literacy practices. it can be even argued that at provides the researcher with the necessary tools to move from the identification of literacy events to that of literacy practices, exactly because events are not examined as isolated activities but as the part of a bigger whole. an additional aspect of literacy research that is given new light under the use of at is the changing nature of literacy practices. an activity system is a situation of human actions that involves multiple and ongoing contradictions and consequent expansions. one of the major principles of an activity system is historicity, the fact that every activity system has a past and possibly a future and that during its lifetime the activity has taken various forms and meanings. studying literacy events and practices within an activity system, the researcher is given the possibility to follow the trajectory of literacy practices and, maybe more importantly, to interpret the reasons for change. the introduction of a new working system in a workplace, for example, can result in a dramatic alteration of the literacy practices drawn upon by the employees. the same can happen in the case of the introduction of new work roles or new working rules, of staff changes or even more minor changes like venue, schedule, etc. all these factors influence the development of literacy practices within an activity and therefore explain their ongoing t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y n i k o l a i d o u 5 changing nature. by examining therefore the use of literacy within an activity system it is possible to contextualise it not only in place but also in time and, if so wished, to trace the historic changes that literacy practices have undergone. earlier studies have already made a combined use of literacy research and at. sylvia scribner (1997:231) argued that: ‘we may conceptualize literacy as a set of activities satisfying distinctive motives related to the written language: creating distinctive genres of communication, for example, or transmitting information over time and space’. more recently, russel (2005) found that common in the two theories are the central role of textual mediation, the situated character of local events and practices, the range of studies beyond formal schooling (e.g. in workplaces, homes, neighbourhoods, etc) and the focus on multimodal texts. in a study of the literacy practices involved in a house-building project in south africa (kell 2006) at is used as the basic unit of analysis. kell problematizes the size of an activity system and asks the question of where such a system begins and ends. in a study of the literacy practices of students in further education, ivanič (2006) uses the framework of at in order to discuss the formation and transformation of the students’ identities. in a different study, keating (2005:115) argues that identities ‘are being forged in the tension between the subjectivities that emerge from the way the activity is being performed at a particular time, space and social configuration’. the above studies have made use of at and literacy research and have brought the two together in various ways. what could be missing, however, is a detailed description of the way situated literacy practices can be analysed within the at framework. this is, therefore, my aim in this paper, that is, to suggest an empirical way of using these two theories of context under one common framework. the study the case study discussed here originates from a six-month long ethnographic study, in which i set out to examine the literacy practices drawn upon by national vocational qualification (nvq) candidates when developing a competence-based vocational portfolio. what i was mainly interested in finding out was whether the literacy practices existing at the candidates’ workplace had an impact upon the practices drawn upon when developing the portfolio and vice versa. the research involved an ethnographic study of two work-based nvq candidates, who were observed and interviewed while at work and while developing their portfolios. here i will discuss the case of derry, a warehouse employee who was also a candidate for an nvq on business and administration. during this study, derry had a twofold role: he was a warehouse employee and at the same time an nvq candidate. i therefore consider derry as the main subject t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in two distinct activities, the ‘workplace activity system’ and ‘the qualification activity system’. such a distinction enables me to examine the two activities in depth and to reach results concerning the interaction and interdependence of the two activities. what is important to note is that derry’s work tasks and his work on the qualification are studied here as two activities because he perceived them this way. he considered his job as a completely different process from the work he did on his nvq portfolio, and he tried to keep the two activities separate from each other. the workplace activity system the activity system described here takes place in the administrative department of the warehouse and focuses on derry, the actions he performs in order to complete his work tasks and the mediating tools he uses in order to reach this goal. derry was a man in his early forties working in the administration department of a warehouse. his work role involved a variety of tasks, but his main role was to receive faulty products returned to the warehouse by retailers or individual customers, and to assess their faults. he had been in this post for seventeen years and so far he had not obtained any other qualifications or degrees. the object of an activity has been described by leontiev (1978) as the key to understanding the activity and he has argued that the object is driven by people’s needs. the object in this specific activity is to process the administrative tasks in an effective way and to ensure the good functioning of the department. derry, as part of a larger work community, has a certain role in the activity and that is to assess the faulty products. he contributes to the common goal by performing a variety of tasks, e.g. communicating with clients, logging products in the software, assessing products, etc. at the same time, derry has an individual object which is to complete his own tasks as effectively as possible and to respond to the demands placed on his work role. a question that could be asked here is why derry and everyone else in the activity is interested in the good functioning of their department. this can be answered by kaptelinin’s (2005) distinction between the object and the motive of an activity. an individual motive can be identified easier than a collective one and in derry’s case it has to do with his need to keep his job and possibly advance further in it. the semiotic and symbolic tools within an activity system mediate between the subjects and their object. when examining the mediating tools of the administrative department, a rich inventory of literacy practices drawn upon by the community members emerges. for example, a major part of derry’s work tasks involved correspondence as he exchanged letters and emails both with clients and retailers. additionally, he worked with specialized computer software in order to document his decisions. software t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y n i k o l a i d o u 7 was also used when processing the stock that was returned to the warehouse and also in order to communicate internally with other branches or with the central offices of the company. the tools in an activity system are not restricted to signs but equally refer to the material objects present in any activity. in the administrative department, the list of material artifacts is a long one and here i take into consideration only those that derry mentioned during our discussions. the actual products that he assessed play an important role in his everyday material encounters. the whole process of returning the products from and to the warehouse is also highly materially mediated. apart from the correspondence, derry used envelopes, prepaid bags and parcels, in order to complete the transfers. other objects such as barcode scanning devices, file cabinets, shelves and boxes complete the picture of a modern and materially mediated workplace. the community of the warehouse at a workplace is a rather extended one. derry is just a member of a large number of staff in the administrative section of the warehouse. some of the people who form his immediate community are his line manager, his colleagues in the administration and the retailers. all these members have different roles in the activity (division of labour), but all contribute to how it functions effectively. the community plays an important role also in shaping the literacy practices present in the activity, as a lot of the members participate in the literacy events together with derry and therefore have an impact upon their shape and meaning. finally, the administrative department’s activity system is penetrated by rules, which influence derry’s and the other members’ work practices, including literacy practices. according to derry, new rules are introduced in the department regularly, as for example new communication systems. in the following section, i show how such new rules create contradictions and subsequent expansion in the activity and how they influence the community’s literacy practices. contradictions and expansion in the workplace activity the identification of contradictions within an activity system is an important analytical step. contradictions are described by engeström (2001:137) as: ‘historically accumulating structural tensions within and between activity systems’. contradictions are seen as having a positive impact on activity systems as they are often the cause for transformation and progress. a basic contradiction in this workplace activity system took place every time new software was introduced for internal and external communications. in this case, all staff in the administrative department had to learn how to work on the new system and the fact that this had happened t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s rather often in the last couple of years had created some frustration. when i discussed the new software with derry, he gave me the following answer: i wasn’t fully in to it to start with and you’re just learning a lot of things when you’ve done them a few times you start to remember and you pick it up and you get into … and then once you get into it you get more speed up and you get more quicker and more confident in yourself […] experience means a lot really. (interview extract) the process of learning was a tiresome one and derry was initially frustrated because he did not agree with these changes. he thought the old system was more effective and therefore found it even more difficult to learn the new one. at the end, when derry and the other members of the activity came to grips with the new system, what was previously a contradiction led to the activity’s expansion. the activity was not the same anymore as a new mediating tool was introduced, which had an impact upon the division of labour, that is, on the old work structures. new social practices had developed and within them new literacy practices, as the new system required more written and less oral communication. the qualification activity system in this section, i discuss derry’s attempts to obtain an nvq as a separate activity system. even though derry works for his qualification on a work-basis (as opposed to being a student in a vocational college), the activity is discussed as a different one from his workplace activity. this is mainly because the objects of the two activities are different and there are new members involved and new rules penetrating the qualification process. the similarities of the two activities are the focus on derry as a member of the activity (even though new members are involved), the space where the activity is taking place and some of the mediating tools, which however have a different function in this new activity. in this activity system, derry is again the primary subject since he is an employee studying towards completing an nvq in business and administration. a tutor visited him at the warehouse every fortnight and helped him build his vocational portfolio, which was an absolute requirement in order to obtain the qualification. the object of this activity therefore is the development of derry’s portfolio and the possible outcome would be the certification. derry’s individual motivation for entering this activity is described here vividly: my nvq, i can apply for positions that before i couldn’t apply for. you see, quite often you see jobs advertisements in the t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y n i k o l a i d o u 9 newspapers, it’s all about themselves, what the work involves and then at the end of it perhaps it might say must have nvq level 2. so obviously if you don’t have an nvq then you can’t apply for that job because it’s put in a direct straight way. whereas i’ll get my nvq and i’ll see an advert that says ‘must have an nvq level 2’ well i’ll have one, therefore i can apply for the job and go along and have an interview and perhaps i might be fortunate and get the position, whereas if i didn’t have the nvq i wouldn’t even go that far. so it’s another string in my bone so to speak. (interview extract) as the main drivers of the activity, objects tend to remain stable within activity systems. however, a shift in the object of activity is not rare and derry’s case demonstrates that within an activity new objects can be created that can co-exist together with the initial ones. the new object will be further discussed under the expansion of the activity. the vocational portfolio that is required for an nvq should demonstrate prior professional knowledge and experience. the texts added in the portfolio are analysed as mediating artifacts. for the portfolio, derry had to complete two mandatory units and three optional ones. each one of the units had a set of performance indicators and knowledge criteria for which derry had to provide evidence. this meant a large number of texts, which derry had to arrange in a folder. the evidence could be anything from work emails up to his descriptions of his work tasks and tutor observations. in the following extract, he describes some of the texts he had to produce as evidence for his portfolio: he [the tutor] asked me to do various documents and printouts and screen dumps of my daily working tasks, inspections, response system, demand system so i had an illustration and then do a little write-up about it, a little caption of what both diagrams, meetings, saying that this is what i’ve processed, functions, defective goods, etc. and then do a brief statement about it and then after i did all these captions … then i did storyboards of my job, [...] step by step guide really, putting into texture that somebody can read, get the gist of what i actually do on a day basis. (interview extract) in this extract, it can be seen that the role of literacy as a mediator for the portfolio creation is central. derry got involved in numerous literacy events in order to produce texts that he would use as evidence for his portfolio. even the act of putting the portfolio together was a literacy event and indeed a rather complex one. t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s oral interaction was also frequent within literacy events. before working on each unit, derry had a meeting with his tutor, discussed the criteria with him and clarified uncertainties. one reason for the increased role of oral communication is probably the fact that the performance indicators were not followed by any written guidelines. therefore, interaction with the tutor was the only way that derry could make sense of what was required of him in order to successfully complete the portfolio. in the following extract, he comments upon the written statements he was asked to create: yes, it was a new style of writing for me and … it wasn’t so difficult, because explaining something that i’ve done and i know so well […] i’m fully aware of what i’m doing, inspections and other things, so when i come to actually writing down what i do, this is what i do. yeah, you just flow it, i was ok at doing that i was quite … quite good. i did make several notes first of all … i did little notes of what i did and then read through it all and then altered one or two little sentences around, so that it sounded better when actually reading it. (interview extract) the community involved in the qualification activity system is indeed a learning community. more workers in the warehouse were working their way towards a similar qualification and the workplace could be described as a learning environment. the hr department encouraged the employees to register for qualifications and welcomed research projects, similar to mine. derry’s line manager was particularly helpful with the creation of the portfolio and gave the nvq candidates the opportunity to work on it during work hours when necessary. in this way, even the rules of the activity were helpful mediating elements, as they enabled derry to work on the portfolio in a more effective way. the community of this activity is extended even outside the workplace and reaches the college where derry was registered as a work-based student. the warehouse worked closely with the college and the college tutor was familiar with the majority of the workers. in the following section, i will show how this learning community resulted in influencing the whole activity and making learning the main mediating tool and eventually the object of the activity. contradictions and expansion in the qualification activity system the strongest contradiction in the qualification activity system lies between the nvq candidates and the portfolio as a mediating tool. even though derry found it easy to write descriptions of his work tasks, the situation changed when he was asked to write about situations outside his familiar job routines. for the last unit of the portfolio, he had to provide t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y n i k o l a i d o u 11 evidence for performance indicators that were relevant to mutual respect, diversity and effective communication practices. in this case, derry was not sure how to approach the evidence collection: i would say things like team working and communication is relevant to my work, we should write about, but the other aspects, especially diversity and stuff, it’s not … in the job tasks, i’m doing story boards about something not being fully aware of it. (interview extract) in this case, derry was asked to get involved in new literacy events. his texts would not be about situations that were familiar to him, but about new concepts and this meant that he had to do some additional work. another way of thinking is that these concepts cannot have been new to an experienced administrator, but they were presented in a new discourse, that of performance indicators. derry found it difficult to decipher the discourse and translate it to a language and to situations that were familiar to him. in order to meet the demands of this unit, derry decided to look for help outside the workplace: on the last couple of units i have done a bit of revising and looked for a bit of help from library books […] yes i decided to, because i thought struggling all on my own i wasn’t putting it probably in any good context, you know, professionally it’s not good, so i did a little bit of studying and looked and made a few notes. (interview extract) derry had started working at the library early in the process when he realised that he could not concentrate at work. he thought that his two activities (working and creating a portfolio) were separate from each other and did not like it when one took time and space from the other. the library was a good place for him because he did not have a computer at home. later on, his eagerness to ‘work professionally’ on his nvq led him to the decision to buy a computer and a printer at home: and then i decided to get my own pc, i’ve got my own pc now so the going to town stopped and now i can do it in my own luxury, you know, i’m home, get a cup of tea, come home from work and i do it on the pc now. i type it at home and i found i’m doing more work now because i’ve got more access to it, i give a little bit more time. (interview extract) t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s despite having a computer at home, derry continued going to the library in order to get some help with his writing. this resulted in the development of new literacy practices, since derry had now learned how to use the library in an effective way. according to engeström (2001:137), expansion within an activity system is accomplished when ‘the object and the motive of the activity are reconceptualised to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the previous mode of the activity’. in this activity, derry is dealing with new horizons as learning takes over and becomes a mediating means in itself. it is through engaging in new communicative and literacy practices that he is finally able to complete the final unit of the portfolio. within the activity system one can distinguish new mediating means, new members in the learning community, new rules and new roles. as an inevitable result, the object is no longer just the certification. now it has to do more with being professional and learning: because i’ve studied things and looked up and revised things a little bit, it’s given me more knowledge, you see, it improved me as a person and then i’ve done a storyboard on why communication is important and diversity and stuff like that, so each single subject has given me some knowledge of it. (interview extract) in an adaptation of the activity system triangle made by ivanič, the concept of ‘learning’ is placed at the very heart of the triangle. learning is described as an activity ‘always embedded in the word ‘doing’’ (ivanič 2006:9) and the model is schematically represented in the following figure: activity system as adapted by ivanič 2006 in derry’s case, learning constitutes the major expansion in the activity system in which he was participating. by collecting the evidence for his portfolio, or else by ‘doing’, he reached new levels of knowledge and new t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y n i k o l a i d o u 13 meanings for his work practices. as a subject in the activity, derry used literacy related mediating means in order to achieve his object, the completion of the nvq and to reach his wider purpose that is, the possibility to apply for a better job. learning was not one of his initial goals in this system, but was nevertheless achieved in the process. learning can also be explained here by derry’s participation in simultaneous activities. a different analysis would be to argue that derry was acting within different communities of practices (wenger 1998). boundary crossing between multiple communities of practice, as opposed to constantly acting within one and the same community, can result in more possibilities for learning (fuller and unwin 2004). the final expansion within this system took place when derry overcame his fears about his knowledge and decided to apply for a different job: and i made a phone call last night to jobs advertisement and it’s about credit control, but i don’t know what that fully involves, but it says full training it doesn’t say anything about nvqs, but i have got the knowledge of pc work and i’ve got the knowledge of the administrational things, whereas previously i didn’t have that in my job role. so therefore it’s given me more confidence, so i rung up last night and someone will be ringing me back this evening. (interview extract) the fact that derry found the confidence to apply for a better post shows that the learning that took place in the qualification activity system had a strong influence upon the workplace activity. the interaction and interrelationship of the two activities is an issue explored in the following section. network relations between the two activity systems i have examined so far two activity systems with different objects and outcomes, but with a common subject acting within them. the two activities seem to share more than derry as an actor. they share texts as mediating means and some of the community members. however, we are indeed dealing with two separate activities, as their objects are very different: in the first case the object is work related, whereas in the second case the object is related to education and learning. the question i ask here is if and how these two activities interact. going back to my literacy interest, i wish to know if the new literacy practices developed in each activity remain within the boundaries of the activity or if they move out of them, enter new activities and possibly change form and meaning in the process. t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the concept of polycontextuality is discussed by engeström, engeström, and kärkkäinen (1995:320) as a situation where participants of activity systems engage ‘not only in multiple simultaneous tasks and taskspecific participation frameworks within one and the same activity. they are also increasingly involved in multiple communities of practice’. in this way, polycontextuality refers not only to actions but also to entire activity systems in which subjects participate simultaneously. in fact, some close connections have been found between at and wenger’s (1998) communities of practice and an activity system has been described as ‘a complex and relatively enduring ‘community of practice’ that often takes the shape of an institution’ (engeström, engeström, and kärkkäinen 1995). derry was a member of the community of practice of his workplace and more specifically of his department, since he had the same work routines and goals as the rest of his colleagues. at the same time, he was a member of the nvq community of practice, collaborating with his tutor and colleagues towards the completion of the portfolio. derry moved from his familiar workplace community towards the new and complex activity of vocational qualifications. ‘crossing boundaries involves encountering difference, entering onto territory in which we are unfamiliar and, to some extent therefore, unqualified’ (suchman 1994:25). for at, boundary crossing is a consequence of contradictions and expansion inherent in the activity system. for example, there was a strong contradiction in the workplace activity, since the warehouse was soon going to close down. consequently, derry decided to register for an nvq in order to more easily get a new job. the expansion of the workplace activity system led derry to be involved in a new system, that of the qualification, where he encountered difference and was initially unqualified. boundary crossing takes place when subjects move across multiple activity systems and transfer tools, ideas and discourses. in derry’s case, the element most frequently transferred from one system to another is texts. the process of recontextualisation is described by barton and hamilton (2005:23) as texts that ‘move across context, often changing their meanings and functions but nevertheless providing a fixed reference point in different events’. in the two activity systems under discussion, recontextualisation takes place with a direction from the workplace to the qualification system, as derry uses familiar work related texts and uses them with a different meaning as evidence for his portfolio. these texts take the role of a ‘boundary object’. boundary objects have been defined by star (1989) as: ‘objects that are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites’. as the texts are transferred from the workplace to the portfolio, they lose their initial function texts used at work and acquire a new role, that of evidence for t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y n i k o l a i d o u 15 the performance criteria for derry’s portfolio. therefore these texts are plastic enough since their function changes, but they are also robust enough as their format remains the same. at the same time, the whole portfolio is also a boundary object, moving between the workplace and the learning activity. it starts as a collection of evidence of derry’s knowledge and experience but at the end it expands into something more substantive. derry started reflecting on the textual artefacts produced at work and the practices that these communicate. the workplace texts had taken a new meaning and through the creation of the portfolio they became part of new and more meaningful literacy practices. polycontextuality and boundary crossing between activities often result in ‘hybrid’ systems. the multivoicedness and the final expansion of the two activity systems attribute them with the status of hybridity. the qualification activity system is penetrated, to a large extent, by the workplace activity system and vice versa. derry’s job role defined the nvq he registered for and he often had to go back to his work tasks to draw evidence for his portfolio. additionally, he later used his nvq when applying for a job. the hybridity of the two activities is also evident in the mediating tools that constitute them. the portfolio is a hybrid creation as it contains texts coming from a variety of sources and used for a variety of purposes. even though derry created certain texts only for the purposes of the portfolio, e.g. screen dumps and written statements, the portfolio would not serve its purpose if evidence from the actual work practices was not included. at the same time, the portfolio cannot stand on its own in any of the two activities. it is created within the qualification activity, but it only acquires meaning once it has been transferred to the workplace activity, as it is only there that derry can use it as proof of prior knowledge. therefore, hybridity penetrates most elements of both activities and defines their shape and their function. having as a starting point both activity systems and continuously moving across them, derry creates a third space between qualification and workplace: ‘from the perspective of activity theory, the third space might be considered an expanded activity in which the object of activity and the activity itself is reorganized, resulting in new opportunities for learning’ (gutierrez, baquedano-lopez and tejeda 1999:287). the creation of a third space here takes the form of learning. derry drew resources from both activities and became skilful in new communicative and literacy practices. these practices are likely to exit the boundaries of the two activities and accompany derry in his involvement in new activity systems. concluding comments in this paper, i have shown an example of analysing literacy practices within the analytical framework of at. by focusing on a case study of a t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s warehouse employee who creates a portfolio in order to obtain an nvq, i have been able to discuss the uses of literacy within two activity systems and their interaction. more specifically, i have argued that literacy practices are a primary mediating tool in most activity systems, as literacy is present and plays a significant role in most expressions of current social practices. at is useful in that is helps place literacy in a wider context, enabling the researcher to take into account factors that influence the development of literacy practices, such as the object of the activity, the rules that penetrate it, the roles that define it, and the contradictions that underpin it. in this case study, literacy learning plays a dominant role as it takes place in the interaction between two activities. derry developed new modes of communication brought about by his need to recontextualise some of the work texts with which he was very familiar. by entering a new activity and engaging in a learning community, he was forced to approach the same texts from a different perspective and find new uses and meanings for them. the portfolio became a boundary object and obtained a hybrid meaning, shaped by the two activities which influenced its creation. the importance of at in understanding the nature of the portfolio and the portfolio texts is significant. these texts were created in the interaction of two activities and this would be a difficult result to reach without the parallel analysis of the activity systems. an at analysis provided me with the tools to analyse the same texts as mediating means in one case (the workplace activity) and as activity objects in the other case (the qualification activity). this parallel examination led me to the question of what changed the use of these texts from mediating tools (workplace texts) to activity objects (portfolio texts). the concept of recontextualisation becomes clearer with an activity system analysis, as it makes it easier to understand not only why the use and the meaning of texts change but also what happens to them once they have changed. in this way, it becomes possible to study not only the trajectory of certain texts, but most importantly the historic development of literacy practices as they move from one activity system to the other. we follow literacy practices as they become robust boundary objects that can even penetrate new activities, they can change them and get changed by them and start, in this way, a new circle of recontextualisations. references barton, d and hamilton, m (2005) literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction, in barton, d and tusting, k, eds, beyond communities of practice: language, power, and social context, cambridge university press, cambridge. brandt, d (1995) sponsors of literacy, college composition and communication, vol 49, pp 165-185. t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y n i k o l a i d o u 17 engeström, y (1990) learning, working and imagining: twelve studies in activity theory, orienta-konsultit oy, helsinki. engeström, y (2001) expansive learning at work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization, journal of education and work, vol 14, no 1, pp 133-156. engeström, y, engeström, r and kärkkäinen, m (1995) polycontextuality and boundary crossing in expert cognition: learning and problem solving in complex work activities, learning and instruction, vol 5, no 4, pp 319-336. fuller, a and unwin, l (2004) expansive learning environments: integrating organizational and personal development, in fuller, a, munro, a and rainbird, h, eds, workplace learning in context, routledge, london. gutierrez, k, baquedano-lopez, p and tejeda, c (1999) rethinking diversity: hybridity and hybrid language practices in the third space, mind, culture, and activity, vol 6, no 4, pp 286-303. ivanič, r (2006) language, learning and identification, in kiely, r, readickins, p, woodfield, h and clibbon, g, eds, language, culture and identity in applied linguistics, baal & equinox publishing ltd, london, pp 7-29. kaptelinin, v (2005) the object of activity: making sense of the sensemaker, mind, culture, and activity, vol 12, no 1, pp 4-18. keating, m (2005) the person in the doing: negotiating the experience of self, in barton, d and tusting, k, eds, beyond communities of practice: language, power and social context, cambridge university press, cambridge. kell, c (2006) crossing the margins: literacy, semiotics and the recontextualisation of meanings, in pahl, k and rowsell, j, eds, travel notes from the new literacy studies: instances of practice, multilingual matters, clevedon, pp 147-169. leontiev, a (1978) activity, consciousness and personality, prentice hall, englewood cliffs, nj. russell, d (2005) texts in contexts: theorizing learning by looking at literacies, paper presented at seminar two in the esrc teaching and learning research programme (tlrp) thematic seminar series, contexts, communities, networks: mobilising learners' resources and relationships in different domains, lancaster university. satchwell, c and ivaniç, r (2007) the textuality of learning contexts in uk colleges, pedagogy, culture and society, vol 15, no 3, pp 303316. scribner, s (1997) studying literacy at work: bringing the laboratory to the field, in tobach, e, joffe-falmagne, r, parlee, m, martin, l and scribner-kapelman, a, eds, mind and social practice: selected writings of sylvia scribner, cambridge university press, cambridge. t h e u s e o f a c t i v i t y t h e o r y 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s star, s (1989) the structure of ill-structured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving, in gasser, l and huhns, m, eds, distributed artificial intelligence, vol 2, pitman, london, pp 37-54 suchman, l (1994) working relations of technology production and use, computer supported cooperative work, vol 2, pp 21-39. wenger, e (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity, cambridge university press, cambridge. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults vol. 27, no. 1 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: yasukawa, k. 2019. editorial. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 27:1, 1-2. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6980 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/lnj editorial editorial keiko yasukawa school of education, university of technology sydney, po box 123 broadway nsw 2007 australia. keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6980 article history: published 12/20/2019 this issue’s opening article reports on research on a workplace literacy and numeracy programme for mauri and pacific workers in new zealand. the researchers anne alkema, cain kerehoma, nicky murray and laloifi ripley show how this programme created an empowering environment for the workers to develop their literacy and numeracy. they describe the culturally responsive pedagogy, the contextualisation of the programme to the workplace and the attention the programme gave to the employees’ wellbeing to argue that these approaches constituted a situated and expansive model of workplace learning with benefits that extended into the workers’ families. the second paper is an invited paper written by ralf st clair, based on his keynote address at the 2019 australian council for adult literacy conference. while acknowledging the increasingly narrow skills focus of literacy programs in many countries and the potential dangers for adult educators who work against this trend, st clair urges literacy educators to work with the learners to help them use language and literacy to express and shape their lives and experiences, rather than limit the learning to what is dictated by policy. like the authors of the first paper, st clair believes in the empowering potential of literacy and offers basil bernstein’s ideas of restricted and elaborated codes as a resource for literacy educators to reflect on their practice. in the third paper, russell daylight and john o’carroll share the initiative they undertook to respond to a recent australian government directive that requires student teachers to pass a standardised literacy and numeracy test before they can be allowed to obtain their teaching degree. the introduction of the test has been the source of headaches in many teacher education programs as student teachers are faced with the added pressure of passing this test. daylight and o’carroll decided to respond by designing and introducing two new literacy subjects in the teacher education course in their university. they take us through their reflections and research that led to the subjects that they describe. the final article is a book review prepared by jeff evans on numeracy as social practice: global and local perspectives, a collection of research on numeracy practices edited by keiko declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6980 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6980 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj mailto:keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6980 yasukawa, alan rogers, kara jackson and the late brian street. in his review, evans highlights connections with the social practice perspectives that have featured strongly in many papers published in this journal, and emerging issues in adult numeracy research. yasukawa literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 2 microsoft word contributors.docx notes on contributors anne alkema is a social science researcher and evaluator. her main focus is in tertiary education, particularly foundation level learning and adult literacy and numeracy. for this project she worked as the researcher for the skills highway programme at the industry training federation. anne.alkema3@gmail.com russell daylight teaches english literature at charles sturt university, with a particular interest in building the foundational skills for critical writing. he writes about language, democracy and meaning-making, with particular interests in structuralism and semiotics. rdaylight@csu.edu.au jeff evans is an adult numeracy researcher and emeritus professor in the school of science and technology at middlesex university in london. he is the co-editor (with sally ruane and humphrey southall) of the 2019 publication data in society: challenging statistics in an age of globalisation (policy press). j.evans@mdx.ac.uk cain kerehoma runs kia ora consulting, a business specialising in culturally grounded, innovative solutions to indignenous collective wellbeing. he undertakes research projects and also supports community development through the growth of social enterprise across aotearoa new zealand. cain@kiaoraconsulting.co.nz nicky murray works across health and disability, tertiary education and research sectors in the areas of workforce development, workplace learning and adult literacy and numeracy. for this project she worked as the manager for the skills highway programme at the industry training federation. nicky@ontask.co.nz john o’carroll teaches literature and communication at charles sturt university, and his research interests are in areas of australian and pacific literature. jocarroll@csu.edu.au lalofi ripley is the learning and engagment advisor for careerforce, the industry training organisation for the health and wellbeing sectors. as an adult educator she specialises in adult literacy and numeracy and also provides assessment and moderation support to workplaces in the health sector. ifi.ripley@careerforce.org.nz ralf st clair is professor and dean of education at the university of victoria in canada. he has been an active researcher for several decades, having studied adult education and literacy, educational aspirations, and indigenous education. currently, ralf is completing a project on the educational aspirations of indigenous communities and youth. his most recent book was creating courses for adults: design for learning (wiley). rstclair@uvic.ca microsoft word yasukawa et al _formatted 230613.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 1 n o 1 2 0 1 3 85   examining museum visits as literacy events: the role of mediators   keiko yasukawa, jacquie widin, vic smith, karen rivera, michael van tiel, peter aubusson, and helen whitty         abstract museum exhibitions are literacy rich environments. visitors may engage with a range of texts including texts that constitute the exhibition objects themselves, those that convey information about the objects and those that instruct visitors about how the visitors are expected by the museum to navigate through the exhibition. the ways in which visitors engage with these diverse texts are important defining factors of the visitors’ museum experience. for museums, understanding how texts in their exhibitions are influencing the museum experience, and the possibility of a museum experience for the broad public community is important in the fulfilment of their public mission as cultural and education institutions. in this paper, we adopt a view of literacy as a social practice, the perspective of new literacy studies (nls), that offers a fruitful way for museums to consider the interactions between exhibition texts and their audiences. such considerations, we argue, can inform museums’ approaches to broadening their visitor demographics to more strongly fulfill their public mission. we show that the goals of nls resonate with some of the goals of the new museology movement in museum studies, a movement that aims to democratize what museums represent and how. from nls, we employ the concept of a literacy event to describe an exhibition visit through a literacy lens, and the concept of a literacy mediator to examine the literacy event not exclusively as an individual event, but a collectively produced event. the paper draws on data on how the literacy events of two groups of ‘nontraditional’ visitor groups were mediated in an exhibition, and show how they reveal the range of different literacies that visitors need to negotiate in a museum exhibition.   e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s       86 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   introduction we will – • be an 'open' museum – open to rich engagement, to new conversations about the collection and transparent in how we work and make decisions • offer visitors diverse ways to interact with the museum • present programs and exhibitions that reflect the spirit of the times and explore new ways to engage with audiences that may challenge, involve experimentation or generate controversy • support new kinds of learning and knowledge creation inside and outside the museum • develop a comprehensive customer service ethos throughout the museum • promote an internal culture of dialogue, experimentation, transparency and individual accountability the above ‘values’ statement from a public museum in sydney, australia is not atypical of that which can be found on websites of other public museums. public museums have a mission to be relevant and connected to the public, and aspire to engage a wide and diverse audience. the museum as an institution overtly embracing social and cultural diversity is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon, . this paper examines museum exhibition visits through the lens of literacy to gain insights into how literacy practices interact with visitors’ experiences in a museum exhibition. in particular, we focus on how such a lens can inform exhibition teams on ways of designing their exhibitions for a more socially and culturally diverse audience. for the purposes of this paper, we use the term ‘traditional’ visitor groups to refer to those groups of visitors who are strongly represented in the visitor demographics, and ‘nontraditional’ visitor groups to refer to those groups who are underrepresented, recognising that such characterisations are not unproblematic. in the next section, we provide a brief background to the emergence of the new museology movement in museum studies which questions and attempts to redress the exclusive and elitist views about who should constitute the museum audience. we then show how the democratic goals of new museology resonate with similar goals of the perspective on literacy that we take in this paper, namely new literacy studies (nls). in the section that follows that, we introduce the research on which the paper is based: a pilot study in an exhibition targeting families with young children. we first explain the background to the research, and the range of data that e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s     yasukawa, widin, smith, rivera, van tiel, aubusson and whitty 87   was collected and the methods used, before focusing on the subset of data and findings for two groups of ‘non-traditional’ visitors who were recruited to participate in this research: a group of mothers and their young children from culturally and linguistically diverse supported playgroups, and a group of adult literacy learners. in the study of the museum experiences of these two groups, we describe how the literacy practices of the adult members were mediated by those who accompanied their visits. in the final section, we discuss what the observations of the literacy practices of the ‘nontraditional’ groups of visitors can tell us about the ways in which literacy interacts with visitors’ experiences in an exhibition, and their implications for museums in their pursuit of a broader audience bpase. museums and their relationships to the public the history of museums as cultural institutions is a story of cultural elitism and exclusion. fleming (2002), writing from a british perspective, describes this as ‘the great museum conspiracy’ where, over time, many museums became publicly funded, however remaining: private and exclusive clubs, annexed by self-seeking interests because of the museum’s cultural authority and power. contrary to at least some of the principles according to which most museums were created, museums have not been democratic, inclusive organisations, but agents of social exclusion, and not by accident but by design. (p. 213) fleming argues that in order to understand this ‘conspiracy’, one has to examine: who has run museums and how this leads museum staff to conceive their audience in their own image; what they contain, because ‘what we collected cannot be dissociated from who did the collecting’ (2002: 215); the way museums have been run, that is the politics within the museum as a workplace and the complacency of the dominant role taken by the curator in comparison to the roles of other staff such as the educational and marketing staff; and for whom museums have been run, and the ease with which the aim of running the museum for the ‘public good’ shifts to doing ‘what’s good for the public’(p. 218). however, increasing political and economic pressures since the late decades of the twentieth century have led to some questioning of the older ethos (macdonald 2006, witcomb 2003). from an economic perspective, questions started to be asked about the size of the actual audience base relative to the potential audience base. studies of the demographics of museum visitors became common, and what was found in many english   e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s       88 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   speaking countries was that museum visitors were predominantly the welleducated and economically privileged sections of the community (australian bureau of statistics [abs] 2009-10, bennett 1994). this stands in contrast to the extract from the ‘values’ statement at the beginning of this paper. for example abs (2010) statistics show that only about 20% of museum visitors in australia were born in countries where english was not the main language; this compares with 25.5% of that same group in the total australian population. examining the statistics of highest educational attainment, of the population aged 15 years and over, those museum visitors who completed year 10 or below comprised approximately 15% of the population aged 15 years and over who visited museums; this compares with 25.5% of that same group in the total australian population. clearly a significant proportion of the australian population is not visiting museums. although statistics can only tell part of the story, and can only point to some of the factors that may explain non-participation, the disparities in participation rates related to factors such as language backgrounds and educational attainment levels as well as income levels and labour market status (abs 2010) suggest that at least a closer examination is needed to understand if the non-participation is a conscious choice of resistance or a response to perceived or actual barriers. in particular, the museums themselves and the assumptions they make about who their visitors are, and what they assume visitors do in exhibitions can be interrogated and examined in relation to what are the actual practices of visitors in the exhibitions. politically, at least in the scholarly communities, questions about representation and cultural hegemony have arisen, especially in relation to historical and anthropological museums (boast 2011, clifford 1997) and to some extent in science museums (macdonald 1996). whose histories and cultures are being represented in museums, and through whose eyes? what is valued as knowledge and what is not; who decides? these are some of the central questions being raised in what has become known as the new museology movement in museum studies. the issue of privileging elite audiences is internationally recognised. fleming (2002) and o’neill (2002) describe initiatives in scotland and england to create exhibitions that aimed to remove the exclusionary elements of museums. o’neill (2002) discusses an exhibition on the history of impressionism that cast this history in broader socio-historical contexts, including using mannequins of museum visitors in period costume to recreate how visitors in the late nineteenth century might have experienced the novel impressionist art, and a reconstruction of the boat from which monet had painted many scenes. he says that although the exhibition received a larger and wider audience, it angered critics who implied that e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s     yasukawa, widin, smith, rivera, van tiel, aubusson and whitty 89   ‘anyone who enjoyed this exhibition is somehow not a “good enough” person to be in an art gallery’ (o’neill 2002: 32). he and others (fleming 2002, grek 2006) have noted that many critics see the fundamental rethinking that is needed to engage critically with issues of social inclusion/exclusion as a form of ‘dumbing down’. furthermore, grek (2006) draws attention to the different discourses that exist around the agenda for social inclusion, some of which simply adopt ‘a deficit view of museum nongoers’ rather than critically engaging ‘in a public debate on the root causes of marginalisation and non-participation in museums and further afield’ (p. 262). both grek (2006) and ross (2004) also point to the need to understand the museums’ interest and approach to social inclusion taking into account the political economy of museum work; in particular, there is a tension resulting from the pressures of funding that are trying to reshape the museum visitor from a citizen to a consumer. thus there are complex social, cultural and economic agendas at play in the efforts of museums to widen their audience participation base. it is not the purpose of this paper to review the literature of the evolution of new museology, but rather to point to its parallel emergence and concerns with new literacy studies (nls) that have challenged orthodox notions of what constitutes literacy and being literate, and like new museology, continue to evolve as a highly contested theoretical position (munson 1997, brandt and clinton 2002, witcomb 2003, reder and davila 2005, street 2012). new literacy studies and new museology nls and new museology (vergo 1989) question hegemonies: in the first case, the nature of institutional definitions of what literacy is, and in the second, what museums should represent; over the ways in which individuals value and enact literacy in their everyday lives, and what the people whose stories are being told in museums value in their histories and lives, respectively. nls encourages ethnographic approaches to learn about the literacy or indeed literacies, of people in their everyday contexts, and similarly new museology values listening to people from and in the communities, the stories that are unfolding and told and retold by the exhibition ‘subjects’ themselves. nls and new museology challenge the power traditionally held by educational policy makers and institutions − in the first case, to define what constitutes acceptable standards of literacy and what needs to be taught and learnt to achieve them, and in the second, to decide what constitutes valuable collections and how they should be interpreted for the audience. vergo’s (1989) edited collection new museology is considered one of the key texts that argued the need for a shift from the ‘old’ museology to the   e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s       90 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   new museology. macdonald (2006) identifies from vergo’s volume three main points of departure from the ‘old’ museology: the first is a call to understand the meanings of museum objects as situated and contextual rather than inherent. … … the second area to which the new museology drew attention [is] namely: matters that might earlier have been seen as outside the remit of museology proper, such as commercialism and entertainment. … linked with the first and the second is the third: how the museum and its exhibitions may be variously perceived, especially by those who visit. (2) new museology’s resistance to separating the meaning of objects from how they are situated in their contexts, the questioning of what ‘counts’ as legitimate objects or exhibitions in a museum, and contemplation of the possibilities of a plurality of visitor experiences all resonate strongly with the ways in which nls conceptualises literacy and numeracy as situated practices. nls also emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century as ethnographic studies of people’s everyday practices started to challenge orthodox understandings of literacy as individual, cognitive acquisitions of skills (heath 1983, street 1984, baynham 1995, barton and hamilton 1998, barton 2007). rather than assuming that there is any universally meaningful definition of what constitutes literacy, nls scholars advocate a perspective of literacy as social practices: as concrete activity, involving not just the objective facts of what people do with literacy, but also what they make of what they do, how they construct its value, the ideologies that surround it. (baynham 1995: 53) thus, reading the different kinds of texts in a museum exhibition may be practices that are very unfamiliar and unvalued practices for people who, rightly or wrongly, assume that they would not be considered part of the intended visitor community of museums. nls, in its focus on what people actually do, rather than on abstract notions of what they should be able to do, uncovers multiple literacies, rather than a single literacy within people’s lives as they engage in different kinds of activities, but also different literacies around the ‘same’ everyday activity − such as reading letters and keeping track of the household finances, in their different communities. here, with e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s     yasukawa, widin, smith, rivera, van tiel, aubusson and whitty 91   some reservation, we include numeracy and numeracies − that is the ways people use mathematical thinking and artefacts to make meaning, within our use of the terms literacy and literacies. while in some situations, naming an activity as a numeracy practice may be more appropriate, in everyday contexts, there is often a blurring of what constitutes literacy and what constitutes numeracy because language and mathematics as well as material artefacts are often all embedded in everyday activities. in nls the term literacy events is used to describe ‘instances or occasions where uses of literacy plays a role’ (baynham 1995: 54). a literacy event can involve reading or writing or both, of many different kinds of texts, including visuals such as images. critical to examining a literacy event, however, is not simply to describe the text that is being used and/or constructed, but to examine the social, cultural and political dynamics surrounding the event. moreover, the often collective nature of the literacy event is an important focus. baynham shows in his studies that a literacy mediator is often crucial to the accomplishment of a literacy task, that is ‘a person who makes his or her literacy skills available to others, on a formal or informal basis, for them to accomplish specific literacy purposes’ (1995: 5960). thus, he cites an example from his own study where he acted as a literacy mediator in london for an immigrant woman from morocco who needed the assistance of baynham’s english literacy skills to read and produce a response to a letter that she had received from a government department. from a nls perspective, visits to a museum exhibition can be viewed as a literacy event. from the point of entry into the museum and then to a specific exhibition space, visitors typically encounter texts and diagrams intended to guide their navigation through the exhibition. they would encounter labels on the exhibited objects providing information and interpretations of the significance of the objects and they may also encounter signage about what they can/ cannot do or touch. where there are interactive objects, there may be written instructions about what to do. in some exhibitions, the objects themselves are texts – historical manuscripts, letters, posters, and so on. veteran museum visitors know that successfully negotiating an exhibition visit, however, does not entail intensive viewing of all the exhibition objects and reading and comprehending all of the texts in the exhibition; they know that they can pick and choose what to read, and that they can decide how they would make their selections. those who are less experienced visitors and who may not relate in predictable ways to the normative notions of literacy, may not naturally assume this kind of agency were they to arrive at an exhibition on their own. what occurs for an individual in a particular literacy event, and what they make of it and its   e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s       92 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   value is influenced by how they relate the event to the broader social context of the event, how they themselves value the event as a literacy activity, and how they perceive others would value it (baynham 1995). a central concept in nls is that of literacy as social practice, that is, as an activity that cannot be understood in isolation of the political, socio-cultural and historical context in which it occurs. the literacy practices of experienced museum visitors are acquired and learnt, even if informally rather than formally. there may be an important role for literacy mediators that can assist novice visitors to learn these practices. another insight from a nls perspective on literacy practices in exhibitions is provided by hackett (2012) in her study of children’s meaning making and movement in family oriented exhibitions. she examines how the experience of the exhibition is a multi-modal communicative practice that is shaped by the spatial configurations of the objects in the exhibition, but as well as that, the children’s movements within the space – ‘zigging and zooming’ (p. 14), as one of her young research participants described her actions in the exhibition. thus for family groups that visit exhibitions, the adults’ literacy practices in the exhibitions may be strongly influenced by their children’s movements within the exhibition space. hackett notes, the trajectory is traversed sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, and in some cases, the trajectory loops back to the same object multiple times. thus capturing the literacy practices in museums ideally would involve capturing in some way, their spatial and temporal influences. we acknowledge that nls researchers such as pahl and rowsell (2010) have made connections between objects of exhibitions and literacy and developed a notion of artifactual critical literacies. while their work is not unrelated to this current study, it is more concerned with developing frameworks for literacy education where the everyday artefacts of learners can be seen as resources for literacy learning. this differs from our interest in the literacy practices of visitors to museum exhibitions and the expected or intended practices engendered by the museum. finally, although the museum studies literature is limited in studies focusing explicitly and specifically on literacy in museums as social practice, bennett (2006) writes about a related concern: the respects in which the functioning of museums as civic institutions has operated through specific regimes of vision which, informing both the manner in which things are arranged to be seen and the broader visual environment conditioning practices of looking give rise to particular forms of ‘civic seeing’ in which the civic lessons embodied in those arrangements are to be seen, understood, and performed by e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s     yasukawa, widin, smith, rivera, van tiel, aubusson and whitty 93   the museum’s visitors. or at least those visitors who are included in the museum’s civic address. (285) he (bennett 2006) shows in his study that these ‘regimes of vision’ have changed from early modernity to the present. from a nls perspective, this suggests that the literacy practices expected of visitors, and those practices that visitors demonstrate, both need to be understood as historically contingent. extending the museum family: the study and research method the study on which this paper is based originated at a conference for adult literacy and numeracy practitioners in sydney, australia. an educational consultant at a public museum and a member of our research team presented her work on a numeracy exhibition for children. the adult literacy and numeracy practitioners attending her session asked what type of learning resources the museum provided for adult numeracy and literacy learners – a question that triggered our thinking and led to the current study to explore how museums as cultural institutions understand how (or if) museums consider literacy as a factor in exhibition design for engaging visitors, particularly ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups. a public museum in a capital city in australia expressed an interest in partnering with the university in which four of the authors work, to pursue a study about the museum’s conception of the relationship between literacy and visitor engagement. the museum had recently opened an exhibition targeting families with young children (aged two to five years) which presented the story of a popular internationally known children’s entertainment group, the whirly gigs (pseudonym). this exhibition was chosen as the site for this study because of the long exhibition duration and the museum’s interest in expanding their family audience and fulfilling their values statement, particularly in relation to expanding the diversity of their audience base. while the study did observe both family groups and unaccompanied adults, its focus was primarily on the literacy practices of the adults of these visitor groups in the exhibition. we discuss the complexity of the visitor experience below. it is particularly complex given the multimodal exhibition environment, a space we need to take account of in our conceptualisation of literacy in the museum context (dicks, soyinka and coffee 2006). the exhibition contained multiple forms of modality within its exhibitions. the various modes, for example, the video projections, physical interactives such as cutting up wooden blocks, posters, written texts and the layout of the   e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s       94 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   exhibition, allow certain meanings to be made and communicated in the exhibition. hence, as researchers we wanted to embrace the complexities of the visitor experience and adopt an approach, informed by dicks et al (2006) and similar to allen et al (2007 cited in barrett 2012: 128), which recognises the multiple realities of this experience. we collected a number of different types of data in order to examine the issue of literacy and visitor engagement from a range of perspectives, and to explore the museum’s intended ‘regimes of vision’ in relation to the actual literacy practices of different groups of visitors. we were aware of the lack of studies which provide detail of what visitors actually do in museums and we were keen to capture the behaviours of ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ visitors to our research site. hence, there were six sets of data, collected using different methods. 1. the first set of data consisted of more than 12 hours of researchers’ observations of what adult visitors who came of their own volition – that is, visitors not specifically recruited to participate in the study – did in the exhibition. each researcher followed and observed one visitor at a time, from the point of entry into the exhibition through to the point of exit. field notes consisted of observational data recorded on paper or into a digital recorder as they followed the visitor. 2. a second set of data consisted of 30 intercept exit interviews with adult visitors who like in the first data set, came to the exhibition of their own volition. these interviews were conducted in an area close to the exit point of the exhibition. visitors were asked a structured set of questions including what they did in the exhibition and if and how they had engaged with print based, audio and interactive objects. 3. the third set of data consisted of responses to an online survey. an online survey was developed with similar questions to the intercept interviews, and the link to the survey was sent out to a group of online enthusiasts of the children’s entertainment group and exhibition; 154 people responded. 4. the fourth set of data was provided by the museum. the researchers were given access to a summary of the 1,113 responses to a visitor exit survey conducted by the museum, which were completed on paper by visitors to this exhibition. 5. individual interviews that were conducted with the design team of the exhibition, constituted the fifth data set. this included interviews with the curator, the exhibition editor, the specialist in interactive technology and the designer. the main purpose of these interviews was to understand the role of the design team in the development of the exhibition and the ways in which they gave consideration to literacy as part of their design. e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s     yasukawa, widin, smith, rivera, van tiel, aubusson and whitty 95   6. a sixth set of data was generated from observations and focus groups of two groups of visitors who were specifically recruited for this study, and for whom arrangements were made to visit the exhibition at an agreed time. in this paper, we refer to these visitor groups as ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups for reasons that will be explained. in the focus groups, the visitors were asked about their expectations of the exhibitions, their prior experiences of museums, what they ‘read’ in the exhibition, and broadly how they found the exhibition. the above sets of data provide a multileveled picture of the experiences of and reflections on visits to the exhibition as well as the thinking behind the exhibition design. the first five sets of data suggest much about museums and literacy, and the sociocultural role the institution plays in conceptualising the visitors for whom the museum traditionally caters; we also learn much about visitor behaviour and expectations in regards to this particular exhibition. however, in this paper we focus primarily on what the sixth data set can tell us: the experiences of the recruited research participants as this tells a particular story about a literacy event for groups of people that statistics (abs 2010) suggest would not necessarily visit a museum; these are the ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups. based on the demographic data of museum visitors (abs 2010) that suggests language backgrounds and educational attainment are negatively correlated with museum attendance, two groups who would fall into the ‘non-traditional’ museum visitor groups were identified for research purposes: parents (and their young children) from culturally and linguistically diverse communities participating in supported playgroups which are designed for families who had difficulties accessing mainstream playgroups, and a group of adult literacy learners from an adult basic education program. separate arrangements were made for those interested from each of these groups to visit the exhibition, and to participate in a focus group interview after spending approximately 45 minutes in the exhibition. eight mothers from the playgroup arrived with their young children (ten children in total), while nineteen adult literacy learners arrived with three of their teachers. both groups were briefed on the aims of the research and what their involvement would entail prior to their museum visit. in the case of the parents in the playgroup, two of the researchers visited the playgroup centres and talked to the mothers, and in the case of the adult literacy learners, two of the researchers briefed the head teacher and a classroom teacher, who then briefed and prepared the students and two other teachers. a one-page information sheet about the project was provided, and a consent form was explained and signed by all the adult focus group participants. ethics approval was obtained from the university in which the authors work.   e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s       96 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   this paper focuses on the literacy events of these two ‘non-traditional’ groups of visitors: the mothers from the supported playgroup and the adult literacy learners. observations of their literacy practices in the exhibition are examined in relation to the findings from the other data sources. mediating literacy events in a popular culture exhibition children as mediators the first of our ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups consisted of eight mothers who were members of supported playgroups accompanied by their young children. the majority of participants were recruited from a group consisting mainly of indonesian mothers and children that met once a week at a supported playgroup. one mother and her two children were recruited from another playgroup that met at a different centre where there was a greater diversity of language and culture groups. when two of the researchers visited the two playgroups to explain what the project was about, and to invite them to be part of the project, all of the mothers in the indonesian group were familiar with the whirly gigs and their iconic position in australian popular culture. they immediately expressed interest, and one of the mothers offered to organise the group for the excursion to the museum. in the second more culturally and linguistically diverse playgroup, several of the mothers indicated that they would have to check with their husbands first, or that they could only come on weekends when their husbands could come as well. ultimately, only one mother and her children were able to take part from this second group. observing the mothers and children in the exhibition, the behaviour of the mothers was strongly influenced by how their children wanted to engage with the exhibition. although coming as a group meant that some of the mothers helped each other to keep an eye on where the children were and what they were doing, the mothers’ visual gaze and engagement with the objects of the exhibition appeared to be determined by what the children were engaged with or what they needed assistance in negotiating, along with a focus on managing children’s behaviour. similar to what hackett (2012) observed, there was much ‘zigging and zooming’ in the children’s trajectories in the exhibition space. mothers engaged in helping children to prepare a ‘postcard’ for one of the characters of the entertainment group by using stamps on blank postcards, or by making flowers using crepe paper and wire for another character of the group. the latter activity did require reading a set of instructions with visual cues of the steps involved. however, there appeared to be little adult engagement with the large information based displays including historical artefacts such as newspaper coverage of the group’s international tours and text based information about the group’s charity work. the exhibition included labels e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s     yasukawa, widin, smith, rivera, van tiel, aubusson and whitty 97   that the exhibition editor explained were intended for adults in the family group to read to the child, and these labels were intended to be identified by their coloured borders. however, the significance of these coloured borders was elusive to this visitor group, and there was no noticeable engagement with these labels among this visitor group. the level of engagement of these family groups with the exhibition texts was not dissimilar with what we had noticed among the family groups who came of their own volition. however, with this ‘non-traditional’ visitor group, there was a high level of interaction between the mothers because of the group nature of their visit. a common activity of all family visitors in this exhibition was the photographing of the children engaging with the different objects and activities. one noticeable difference between the mothers of this group, and the adults accompanying children in the groups who came of their own volition, was that in the latter group, the majority of the adults we observed were spending the time not occupied with their children texting on their mobile phones. the use of the mobile phone in the exhibition, except for taking photographs of their children, was not observed among the mothers from the supported playgroup. it is possible, however, that this behaviour was due to the researchers’ presence in the exhibition area and our role in facilitating the visit. during the focus group discussion with the mothers immediately after the exhibition visit, many of the mothers were very vocal in their criticisms of the exhibition design. while they all said that the exhibition was highly enjoyable for the children, they raised a number of concerns. a comment they made in response to our first question about their expectation of activities in the exhibition was that they had expected a photo-booth where the children could have their photos taken, preferably for free, with a life size picture of the members of the entertainment group in the background – several said that another museum they had visited had such a set-up. a second concern they raised was the lack of explicit directions about how the visitors were to navigate through the exhibition – they wanted to have a map, which one of the mothers had managed to find and pick up but which others had missed. a third unanimous, and adamantly made comment was that they had expected there to be more computer interactives in the exhibition. a fourth comment was that they had wanted stronger moral messages for the children in the exhibition, such as messages about eating well and good behaviour. the songs and activities that this entertainment group created, and which were part of the exhibition, have educative messages; for example, there is an activity and song ‘yummy and healthy’ (pseudonym) to promote colourful fruit in the children’s diet, and a song about ‘our bright yellow bus’ about road safety. however, the mothers felt   e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s       98 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   there should have been more and stronger messages conveyed through the objects in the exhibition. the mothers in this ‘non-traditional’ visitor group came with clear expectations, some of which were not adequately met. they came to the visit to provide an experience for their children with strong beliefs about what the nature of that experience should be, at least partly shaped by their prior knowledge of the whirly gigs. their visit as a literacy event was strongly mediated by both what the children wanted to see and do, and what they wanted their children to see and do. from observing their behaviour, it is possible to identify their children and their interests and movements in the exhibition space as ‘barriers’ to the mothers’ own engagement with the written texts in the exhibition – those labels that were intended to facilitate a conversation between the adult and the child, archival texts and other information intended for the adult audience. however, it is also possible that for the adults in this group, and possibly for some of the adults in the group of visitors who visited of their own volition, the exhibition simply did not appeal to their interests. adult literacy teachers as mediators the second ‘non-traditional’ visitor group consisted of 19 adult literacy learners from an adult basic education program in a local college. the head teacher of the section explained that several of the adult literacy classes were focussing on australian social history at the time that we wanted to organise their visit to the exhibition and it was agreed that the exhibition could form a relevant experience for this curriculum focus. the three men and sixteen women visited the museum with three teachers who had been working with them. the adult literacy learners were a diverse group from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and while some were recent migrants to australia, others were long term residents with varying lengths of time since arriving in australia and one or two were born in australia. there was a range of different kinds of engagement with the exhibition by members of this group. most of the learners moved through the exhibition in small groups with a teacher who would point to different objects or texts, and engage in conversations around them. two of the learners – one australian born, and another a recent migrant from africa moved freely through and spent time at the holographic performance space where visitors would watch three dimensional images of the group members singing and performing. the two learners got involved without any mediation from the teachers, as young children did, in dancing to the songs. other learners got involved with the teachers in making flowers, as did the e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s     yasukawa, widin, smith, rivera, van tiel, aubusson and whitty 99   mothers and young children in the previous ‘non-traditional’ visitor group. a number of students showed a high level of curiosity in a ‘garden’ just outside the exhibition space. the garden is created through digital lighting effects on the floor where visitors could see fish swimming in a flowing stream, and walk around the garden path. several of the students watched the creation of different effects such as shimmering water, but it was only after one of the teachers walked in and stepped through the garden path and encouraged the students to also walk across, that any of the learners ventured to walk into the garden. in the focus group immediately following a visit of just under an hour in the exhibition, the learners were asked about their prior museum experiences and their reaction to the exhibition they had just visited. some of the learners needed encouragement from the teachers to express their views. only one of the learners had visited this particular museum previously and had not visited the exhibition she had just seen. a few of the learners said that they had been to one of the other public museums in the city with their children or grandchildren, a museum that primarily focuses on natural history. when asked what they had expected to experience in the exhibition they had just visited, one of the learners said that she had expected something similar to what she had experienced in the natural history museum: ‘like dinosaurs and pictures … but come here, it’s different’. prompted to elaborate on the difference, one learner said that there was ‘lots for children, so you could just do what children normally do … dancing’, and another noticed ‘powerful colours’ and said ‘i feel good’. one of the more recently arrived migrant learners compared the exhibition to museum exhibitions in her home country and said that ‘this one, different to museums in my own country – everything old, traditional, old paintings ... everything that’s old – old equipment, yeah paintings … this big difference’. only the australian born students and other learners with young children had known about the whirly gigs prior to coming to this exhibition. one of the australian born students said that he had collected vinyl records of a previous group featuring these particular musicians, and was interested to see some of these record covers displayed in the exhibition. the learners showed some interest in knowing more about the focus and history of the museum, and why it was so different to the ‘other’ natural history museum. the teachers and the researchers shared what they knew about the industrial history of the building in which the museum is housed, and the contemporary focus on science, technology and social history that this museum had, which was different to the historical focus of the other museum.   e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s       100 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   there were varied responses about what was available to read in the exhibition. two of the learners said that some of the labels were ‘difficult’ and there were ‘some i can’t understand’, while another said that it was ‘interesting to read [the labels], and know about the things’. one of their teachers said that he had explained the meaning of the word ‘board shorts’ to one of the students for whom english was an additional language. the student did not know that ‘board shorts’ was a common australian term derived from combining the words ‘surf boards’ and ‘shorts’. this word had a special significance in the exhibition because the members of the whirly gigs wore colourful board shorts in their early performances. several of the students acknowledged the value of having their teachers with them to help them with the meaning and purposes of the texts as well as unfamiliar words. the learners were given free passes for another visit, and several of the students enthusiastically said they would definitely come back to this exhibition, some with their children. discussion and conclusion the participation of the family group from the supported playgroups, and the adult literacy classes allowed us to observe and examine the role of mediators in the visit to the museum. however, the literacy experiences of each of the ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups in the exhibition were very differently mediated. for the groups of mothers who came with their children of their own volition, and the ‘non-traditional’ families from the playgroup, their visit – the literacy event – was shaped largely by what their children wanted to do and what they expected the exhibition and the museum to provide for the visitors to enhance the value of the visit for their children. observations of their behaviour suggest that what most of the mothers read in the exhibition was mediated by their children, based on what the children needed or wanted to know, for example, instructions of how to make the flowers. several of the mothers from the ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups had come with expectations of what to see in the exhibition, such as a map of the exhibition space, and signage for a photo-booth; these were expectations formed from their earlier visits to other museums where they had been provided with a map, and had access to a photo-booth. several of the same group of mothers were also seeking stronger ‘moral’ messages or lessons to be conveyed to the children, and were disappointed. the expectations and behaviours of the families from the playgroup were very similar to those exhibited in observations and interviews of other family visitor groups, except for the playgroup mothers’ expectations of a stronger moral message, a photo-booth and more interactives. most of the visitors who were not recruited as ‘non-traditional’ visitors also said they e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s     yasukawa, widin, smith, rivera, van tiel, aubusson and whitty 101   were there for their children’s entertainment and that they did not do a lot of reading for themselves because this was not the purpose of the visit and their responsibilities for their children would not have allowed that. for many of the adults of all of the family groups who were observed, the children had a significant role in defining the spatial boundaries of adults’ engagement in the exhibition, and consequently their literacy practices. what we observed in the adult literacy learners’ visit to the exhibition was different in many ways to the visit of the families from the playgroup. but what many, though not all of the learners, saw in the exhibition was also mediated – in this case, by their literacy teachers who pointed out different objects and texts to the students. unlike the mothers in the playgroup, the role of the mediator involved encouraging and helping the adult learners’ reading and sense-making of what they were reading, including decoding words like ‘board shorts’, as well as the history and significance of the whirly gigs. some of the learners waited to see the teachers interacting with an object and receiving signals and encouragement such as ‘yes, it’s ok, you are meant to walk across the garden’ before they did so themselves. the focus group discussion revealed that several of the students had come with a preconception of museums as places where visitors look at objects and perhaps read texts behind glass cases; they were less familiar with exhibitions where they could play an active part, but said they liked the new kind of museum experience. also, unlike the first group, the literacy learners showed an interest in knowing more about the museum itself, the significance of its name and history, and the reason why it felt so different to the more traditional natural history museums that some of the group had visited. for these learners, the visit was not only learning about the entertainment group that was the focus of the exhibition, but also about the different museums in the city – the social history of their city. it is also important to note the experience of the mothers and children from the supported playgroup who were not able to participate. the mothers in this group had said either that they had to discuss the invitation with their husbands first, or that they could only come on a sunday when their husbands could also come. thus a museum visit for these mothers was assumed to have some level of mediation from their husband, and because the visit could not be scheduled on days when their husbands were free, we did not have the opportunity to observe how they might have negotiated the visit. this study was undertaken as a pilot to begin to investigate how literacy practices influence visitor experience in a museum exhibition. the observations and interviews with the two ‘non-traditional’ visitor groups   e x a m i n i n g m u s e u m v i s i t s a s l i t e r a c y e v e n t s       102 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   revealed several kinds of literacies that influence the kind of engagement visitors might have in a museum exhibition. they include: • reading the intended purpose of the exhibition, for example, is it aimed to tell a history of some aspect of popular culture; is it to educate children on good behaviour, right and wrong; is it a place of amusement and entertainment? • reading the intended audience, for example, is it for children, for adults, or both; are different parts of the exhibition intended for different audiences? • decoding the labels, for example, what does this word mean; does this word have a special meaning in this exhibition context or is it part of the general vocabulary? • reading the ‘regime of vision’, for example, is the exhibition designed for the visitor to look at everything in any particular order; are visitors encouraged to read the labels to absorb authoritative information or to see it as a trigger for a conversation with a fellow visitor; can i touch this object? • reading the museum as a cultural institution, for example, why is this museum exhibiting these kinds of objects rather than something else; why does this museum feel so different to the other museum in town? not all visitors would need or want to have a mediator to help them negotiate all of these literacies. however, for museums that are trying to extend their audience base, analysing the literacies that are involved for visitors in any exhibition may usefully inform how they design and market their exhibitions because in the very design and marketing of the exhibition, they are producing or reproducing particular literacy practices. the museum experience can be exclusive. there is a need to further explore literacies and perceptions of what literacies are important and valued by museum-goers, museum non-goes, exhibition designers and developers. thinking of a museum visit in terms of literacy events may enable us to imagine museum experiences in new ways that enable dialogue with, challenge and provoke a more extensive and inclusive audience. references australian bureau of statistics (2010) attendance at selected cultural venues and events, australia, 2009-10 (cat. no. 4114.0), australian bureau of 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inequality, routledge, london & new york, 24-40. pahl, k and rowsell, j (2010) artifactual literacies: every object tells a story, teachers college press, new york. reder, s and davila, e (2005) ‘context and literacy practices’, in annual review of applied linguistics, 25, pp 170-187. ross, m (2004) ‘interpreting the new museology’, museum and society, vol 2, no 2, pp 84-103. street, b (1984) literacy in theory and practice, cambridge university press, cambridge, uk & new york. street, b (2012) ‘new literacy studies’, in grenfell, m, bloome, d, hardy, c, pahl, k, rowsell, j and street, b (eds), language, ethnography, and education: bridging new literacy studies and bourdieu, routledge, new york & london, pp 27-49. vergo, p (ed) (1989) the new museology, reaktion books, london. witcomb, a (2003) re-imaging the museum: beyond the mausoleum, routledge, london & new york. 16 july conference paper acal literacy and numeracy studies 2014. © 2014 robert prince and arlene archer. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2014, 22, 4178, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v22i1.4178 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 2 n o 1 2 0 1 4 39 exploring academic voice in multimodal quantitative texts robert prince and arlene archer abstract research on students’ academic literacies practices has tended to focus on the written mode in order to understand the academic conventions necessary to access higher education. however, the representation of quantitative information can be a challenge to many students. quantitative information can be represented through a range of modes (such as writing, visuals and numbers) and different information graphics (such as tables, charts, graphs). this paper focuses on the semiotic aspects of graphic representation in academic work, using student and published data from the health science, and an information graphic from the social domain as a counterpoint to explore aspects about agency and choice in academic voice in multimodal texts. it explores voice in terms of three aspects which work across modes, namely authorial engagement, citation and modality. the work of different modes and their inter-relations in quantitative texts is established, as is the use of sources in citation. we also look at the ways in which credibility and validity are established through modality. this exploration reveals that there is a complex interplay of modes in the construction of academic voice, which are largely tacit. this has implications for the way we think about and teach writing and text-making in quantitative disciplines in higher education. exploring academic voice in multimodal quantitative texts texts in quantitative disciplines are constructed using language, images such as information graphics (charts, maps or diagrams), and mathematical notation which together form the repertoire of https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e 40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s quantitative semiotic resources. halliday (1978) argues that mathematical language typically draws on a variety of ‘language’ types, redefines existing words rather than coining new ones, and uses a high degree of nominalisation. he refers to this as a ‘mathematical register’. the notion of a mathematical register is useful as it enables a ‘critical interrogation of assumptions of the purity or semantic distinctiveness of mathematical language’ (chapman and lee 1990:282). it is useful to analyze how mathematical notation, written language and visuals such as information graphics work together, especially in terms of fulfilling specific functions in academic argument in particular contexts (o’halloran 1999, 2009). these functions – working across and between modes include drawing inferences, perceiving logical relationships, evaluating cause and effect, ordering and sequencing, and constructing hypotheses. we argue that there is a need to develop a pedagogy that takes into account these functions of academic argument. in this paper, our investigation focuses on meaning-making across writing and information graphics in quantitative texts. we use the term ‘information graphics’ to encompass charts, graphs, maps, diagrams and tables. their primary function is ‘to consolidate and display information graphically in an organized way so a viewer can readily retrieve the information and make specific and/ or overall observations from it’ (harris 1999:198). engineering and architectural drawings are not included under the classification of information graphics. we focus our exploration specifically on multimodal texts that employ information graphics to identify and discuss academic voice. ‘voice’ is an elusive concept, difficult to define, yet definitions abound. it has come to be associated with ‘authorial identity’ (ivanič 1998) and ‘authorial presence’ (hyland 2001). voice is about identity and presentation of the self in texts. although voice is a concept usually associated with the mode of writing, we use it to refer to the way an author establishes presence in a multimodal text through the choice and use of semiotic resources, as well as positioning in relation to sources and audience. blommaert (2005:68) refers to voice as ‘the capacity to create favourable conditions for a desired uptake’ using the appropriate semiotic resources to do so. what is useful about this view is that it emphasizes voice as subject to contextual conditions which are necessarily located within larger patterns of inequality and e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e prince and archer 41 power relations. this is clearly the case with academic discursive conventions which have often been seen as ‘gatekeepers’ in terms of student access (archer, frith and prince 2002, lea and street 1998, lillis 2001, street and baker 2006). exploring the ways in which academic voice operates in different contexts and disciplines is important in terms of making these conventions explicit in order to ‘master’ them, or at least engage with them on a conscious level. a social semiotic approach to voice in quantitative texts our approach to exploring voice is multimodal social semiotics where meaning is seen to be context-dependant and meaning-making is seen as a social practice (martinec and van leeuwen 2008, van leeuwen and jewitt 2001, kress 2010, jewitt 2009). the assumption underpinning this approach is that meaning-making is embedded in context. also, meaning is understood to be made through the selection and configuration of modes in texts and through the interests of the sign-maker in a particular context (jewitt 2009:15). according to halliday (1978), every sign performs three kinds of function. the ideational function represents the world, concepts and processes. the interpersonal function indexes the stance that the meaning-maker is taking towards audiences and the represented context. the textual function refers to the capacity to form coherent complexes of signs or texts. so, for instance, an information graphic represents a state of affairs, a relationship between abstract ‘participants’, and it also indicates a particular relationship with an audience. these ideational and the interpersonal aspects are realized through the textual organization or composition of the graphic. a social semiotic approach can help us to understand the ways in which writing and information graphics work together in meaningmaking. each mode in a multimodal text can realize a range of different functions or communicative work. so, different aspects of meaning can be carried in different ways by each of the modes. the information graphic could, for instance, serve as elaboration on the writing. it could be used as evidence in an argument, it could be a part of an argument (the proposition, for instance), or it could constitute ‘restatement’ in a different mode. sometimes, the communicative work of different modes in a text can complement each other, but they can also contradict each other. where different modes realize different aspects in a complementary way, textual coherence may be achieved. however, where there is a disjuncture between the e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e 42 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s messages of the modes in a text, coherence could be compromised (archer 2010). recognizing the communicative work that different modes are performing in a text is important for the teaching of academic voice and argument in quantitative disciplines. some modes are better than others for certain kinds of representational work (kress and van leeuwen 2006). it can be difficult to multiply quantities in words, for example. writing is perhaps less precise at giving descriptions of natural phenomena in which matters of degree or quantitative variation are important (lemke 1998). it is difficult, for example, to describe movement through space in words, to indicate the changing speed and the shape of the movement at the same time. lemke (2002:8) calls this ‘meaning-by-degree’, like size, shape, distance, proportion, intensity, speed, pressure, density, rates of change, and he argues that these kinds of meaning are often best represented by mathematical notation rather than language. in this paper, we are interested in the notion of ‘voice’ which falls in the realm of the interpersonal metafunction in texts. we examine the integration of information graphics and writing in terms of authorial engagement, and look at the ways in which citation is used to construct voice. authorial engagement and citation signal authorial positioning in relation to a particular research community or readership. we also look at the produced shared credibility of a representation.this is an adaption of the broad framework developed in archer (2013) and used to explore the realization of voice across images and writing in students’ texts in first year history and theory of architecture. we argue that the way three aspects come together relates to academic voice, namely authorial engagement, citation and modality. to illuminate the ways in which the above three aspects function to establish academic voice, we firstly look at an extract from a phd thesis in medical virology in the health sciences. the aim of the study was to investigate the therapeutic role of two vaccinations (the ‘humanized recombinant vaccinia virus complement control protein’ (hrvcp) and the ‘vaccinia infected mammalian cell derived authentic vcp’) in ischemia/reperfusion (i/r) injury of the kidney in rats. the three groups are the treated rats, untreated rats and the ‘sham’ group which comprises rats which have not been injured or treated. an extract from the thesis appears in figure 1 below. e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e prince and archer 43 serum creatinine and bun as shown in figure 4 below, there was considerable difference (1.2-fold ± 0.127) in the serum creatinine levels between the untreated injured (pbs) group and the vcp/hrvcp treatment group, suggesting that the vcp improved renal function and enabled the renal system to excrete the metabolic waste better than the equally injured animals in the untreated group. the sham group displayed the lowest serum creatinine levels as expected. however, there was no statistically significant difference in the serum urea and creatinine levels among any of the groups. figure-4: mean serum creatinine concentration after 24hrs i/r injury. bars represent standard errors of sample mean (mean ± sem). interestingly, one additional, bilaterally clamped, animal showed a 2.9-fold rise in serum creatinine and a 25.3-fold rise in serum bun levels after 24 hours of i/r injury compared to its baseline concentrations suggesting that acute renal failure (arf) was induced in this animal. figure 1: extract from a phd thesis in medical virology in the health sciences having presented the data and the framework for analysis, we now investigate academic voice in the above text in more detail focusing on authorial engagement, the use of citation and the construction of modality. 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 vcp/hrv cp pbs sham s er u m c re at in in e co n c. (m g /d lt ) groups comparison of serum creatinine conc. following i/r injury e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e 44 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s authorial engagement, agency and choice one aspect of academic voice is authorial engagement, namely an author’s degree of intimacy or remoteness, and the ways they represent themselves in the discourse’ (hyland 1999:101). authorial engagement concerns the extent to which authors choose to engage with their audiences and subject matter. authorial engagement is actualized in writing and information graphics through different mode-specific conventions. in writing, authorial engagement can be revealed through attitude markers and use of modifiers, such as ‘there was considerable difference …’ interestingly, this is standard expression of a quantitative idea. it can also be established through the choice of pronouns, active or passive voice, rhetorical questions and even through the visual design of the writing such as typographical choices, use of punctuation, layout and use of white space (archer 2013). in graphic representation authorial engagement is expressed through choice such as the type of representation, the composition of the representation and the relation between the information graphic and the writing. the type of information graphic chosen for a particular purpose is important as there are a number of ways of presenting summative numeric information, numeric ranges and percentages. broadly speaking, bar charts are able to compare quantities, pie charts are useful to show proportions of the whole, line graphs can show quantities over time, scatter plots are useful in exploring meaningful relationships between variables, venn diagrams are able to represent relationships where circles are used to show groups and how they overlap. in figure 1, the student has chosen a bar chart with confidence intervals to represent his data graphically. the bulky size and shape of the bar certainly gives more visual weight to the argument than a single point does. here the blue bars represent the mean serum creatin concentration which is a single value, and the confidence interval is represented by the interval (mean – sem, mean + sem) which is set on a grey background. in the written text, there is a specific use of values (1.2-fold ± 0.127), but the graphical representation does not allow for the verification of this value. in the information graphic, one has to estimate the value due to the lack of lines and the fact that the value is not indicated on the point. tufte’s e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e prince and archer 45 (2001) argument for keeping the data –ink ratio high would have encouraged the use of a single point to represent each of the means rather than using bars to represent this. the ink required to draw a bar is more than what is required to draw a dot. the data-ink ratio argument would also favour the removal of the grey background colour of the chart. the student could have chosen to represent the information in a table format, rather than a bar chart. according to tufte (2001:178), tables are a good way to show exact numerical values and are preferable to graphics for small data sets. if the student chose to represent the information in a table, this would impact on the type of information possible to display. for instance, displaying the sample size would have been more likely in a table; its absence in the bar chart is not so obvious. a table display would also have allowed verification of the claims about the difference between the serum creatine levels of the untreated injured group and the treatment group. however, increasingly in both popular texts and academic discourse, graphic representations tend to be regarded as more weighty and scientific, and to have more rhetorical import than tables, which are sometimes considered to be a simplified representational form. in thinking about academic voice and the teaching of multimodal textual construction, awareness about the importance of choice of information graphic for a particular purpose and audience is important, as are the conventions and functions of the graphic in a particular context. in quantitative texts, authorial engagement is also realized through layout and the composition of the information graphic. the chart in figure 1 comprises blue bars on a grey background which is the default design in excel. there are a host of other design choices that the student could have made around this particular chart, such as using different colours for different bars for ease of comparison. the wide spacing in the chart in figure 1 creates a clear distinction between the different groups that are being compared. however, the choice of wide spacing tends to compromise the clarity of argument of this chart because it is more difficult to compare between the groups at a glance. perhaps using the default design in excel, to produce this chart, rather than changing the spacing, and also not including horizontal lines to facilitate ease of reading, signals low authorial engagement. these representational choices weaken academic voice and authorial agency to an extent in the text. they e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e 46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s may, however, also signal larger patterns of inequality and power relations, such as, not having the resources or the sense of agency to exert changes on a dominant form. we have argued that authorial engagement is expressed through choice, namely the type of representation and the composition of the representation. in creating information graphics, we need to be aware of the full range of representational resources in order to make appropriate selections for the particular domain in which we are operating, both in terms of content and argument or voice. as a counterpoint to the representational choices discussed above, it is worth looking at information graphics which are composed very differently, such as those produced by mccandless (2009) or showcased in cooke (2013). of course, representational choices depend on context – aptness for purpose and audience. however, looking at different kinds of information graphics produced for different contexts may raise questions that enable us to reflect on authorial voice in academic contexts. as thesen describes it, “voice, like language, is never neutral; it is always in tension between pulls towards convention (centripetal forces) and pushes away from the centre towards more hybrid, experimental and open forms” (thesen 2014: 6). this may be the case in an information graphic such as figure 2. e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e prince and archer 47 figure 2: the billion-dollar-o-gram (mccandless 2009:10) figure 2 is a variation of a mosaic plot. mccandless (2009:10) calls it the ‘billion-dollar-o-gram’ a title that signals the tongue-incheek social commentary of the graphic. here colour is used to perform the ideational function of the text in order to contrast what the chart names american spending, earning, potential giving, fighting and losing. from the diagram it is clear that three quarters of the annual defence budget is spent on the iraq war. mccandless compares the us defence budget to a large company’s earnings and to other countries’ budgets (the us defence budget can include china’s and russia’s defence budget, for instance). because this information graphic is spatially rather than linearly organized, one can tell many stories from the information, not necessarily in any particular order. however, by placing the us defence budget in the upper left hand corner, a valorized space where many left-to-right readers would focus their attention first, a particular relationship of this category to the other categories is encouraged. the choice of items to compare reflects the arguments the author wishes to make. his is a social agenda: to contrast the expenses of war with the expenses of developmental issues. these kinds of information e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s graphics are prevalent in our era of big data. as information moves fast, they are able to offer us quick bursts of information on the environment, politics, social issues, health, arts and culture. whilst recognizing that these kinds of information graphics are embedded in socio-political discourses and realized in journalistic genres, they are useful in demonstrating a different kind of authorial engagement and power-differential than the student-produced graphic. by calling his book information is beautiful, mccandless (2009) draws attention to the ‘aesthetic’ aspect of the production of information graphics. there are design choices to be made here in terms of size, shape, colour and composition in order to represent a particular argument to a particular audience in the most apt way. these choices are always expressions of ideology and power – what choices were made and for what purposes? the representational choices made here may not be appropriate in an academic environment, and may, in fact, weaken academic voice, whereas they function well in popular journalistic genres. this highlights a tension between aesthetics and functionality in information graphics which may have implications for academic voice. understanding the relation between agency and constraints is crucial for exploring how we construct authorial voice in the texts we produce in particular contexts. use of citation and sources in constructing academic voice the use of citation is crucial to the construction of academic voice. citation in both writing and information graphics involves appropriating a source into the argument and using the voices of others to negotiate a position in a particular discourse community (swales 2004). choices about the integration of sources include the selection of material from the source and the form of the citation, as well as critical evaluation or some kind of framing. in writing, citation can take the form of quoting, paraphrasing or generalizing from several sources. how the source is foregrounded or backgrounded is of importance for academic voice. the two statements below illustrate this point: • vygotsky (1967) indicates that language is the most important tool for mastering mental processes. e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e prince and archer 49 • language is the most important tool for mastering mental processes (vygotsky 1967). in the first statement, the source is prioritized and, in the second, the argument is foregrounded. although these citation conventions are based in the written mode, it could be interesting to explore whether there is an equivalent in information graphics. perhaps it is the question itself that is more interesting than the answer, in that it opens up a new way of thinking around the use of sources in constructing voice. we would argue that the placing of the in-text reference in the information graphic is of importance. the source could be more foregrounded if placed in the label than the caption, for instance. the way in which the source is introduced is also of importance. for instance, the words ‘taken from ...’ indicate the graphic is a reproduction or a ‘quote’ from the original source with all the deferment of authority that this entails. if the source is introduced as ‘adapted from ...’ it indicates paraphrasing and possibly increased authorial engagement. there are three options for citation in information graphics. the data could be empirical and thus no reference is necessary as is the case with the student chart in figure 1. the chart is based on his own data set that is not represented here. a second possibility is the integration of a researcher’s own data with cited data. and, thirdly, data can be compiled from multiple sources within one information graphic, in which case the citations are placed beneath each bar in a bar graph. it is when students battle with the conventions around referencing that we realize how invisible and normative they are. for instance, in the caption of a different information graphic in the thesis, the student ends with the following: ‘the analysis was performed by dr x, department of zoology, uct using the “r” software package’. this is a kind of citation in that it acknowledges the work of a data analyst, other than himself, as well as the software package used. however, it is a hybrid form, somewhere between citation and acknowledgements. we suggest that the placement of the citation in an information graphic may have implications for academic voice, as well as the degree of adaptation in terms of ‘paraphrasing’ or re-working the graphic to best suit the particular argument. it is worth noting that ‘multimodal text-production through copy-and-paste is an affordance of the digital medium that has profound consequences in the ways e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e 50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s texts are composed’ (adami 2012:131). copy-and-paste makes direct quoting easier than paraphrasing, in all modes. in sum, the choice of source, the re-working of the source in terms of paraphrasing, and the integration of the source, all have implications for academic voice. the last aspect of academic voice we would like to look at is the way in which credibility is established through the use of modality markers. modality: the representation of degrees of certainty modality refers to the author’s expressed commitment to producing truth effects, in other words, the produced shared credibility of a representation. in academic writing, tentative modality is often the norm and this is realized through discourse markers such as hedging and emphatics (hyland 1999:104). hedges indicate the writer’s decision to withhold complete commitment as in ‘suggesting that the vcp improved renal function’ (see figure 1), whereas emphatics construct certainty: ‘the sham group displayed the lowest serum creatinine levels as expected’ (see figure 1). prince and archer (2008) argue that information graphics tend to carry a lot of credibility in academic texts as the assumptions underlying the numbers are generally hidden and numerical representations are often regarded as more factual and objective than other kinds of evidence. what does modality look like in information graphics and multimodal quantitative texts? the type of information graphic chosen can lend more authority to the numbers. for instance, the use of a table in a text may lower modality where an information graphic may heighten modality in a particular scientific domain. modality, in a social semiotic approach to information graphics, is primarily concerned with representations of degrees of uncertainty and the validity claims associated with the graphic. an important aspect of modality in quantitative texts is the representation of uncertainty. in statistics, uncertainty is often dealt with by interpreting the confidence intervals. in the written text in figure 1, the author uses the configuration 1.2-fold ± 0.127 to hedge the size of the difference. in other words, the size of the difference is somewhere between 1.073 and 1.327. in information graphics, uncertainty about and confidence in a ‘point statistic’ are often provided through the determination and use of an ‘interval statistic’ alongside it. in this case, the mean and the standard error of the mean e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e prince and archer 51 (sem) are used to create a confidence interval (mean – sem, mean + sem). in the information graphic in figure 1, the bars in the chart are used to represent the means and the confidence intervals are used to convey both the uncertainty about and the confidence in the means, perhaps akin to hedging in writing. confidence intervals represent the range of values possible and allow us to present our findings in a more tentative way which can be likened to tentative modality in writing in academic discourse. results from studies such as the one represented in figure 1 one often vary through chance alone. the aim was to investigate the therapeutic role of two vaccinations in the healing of ischemia/reperfusion (i/r) injury in the kidney of rats. these kinds of studies differ in terms of the subjects who are included, and the ways in which these specific subjects react to therapeutic interventions. even when everything possible is held constant, there will still be some random variations. for this reason, tools are needed to assess whether the differences between treated and untreated groups of subjects are significant, or just due to chance. historically, p-values were used to represent statistical significance, but increasingly confidence intervals are serving this purpose. a p-value is calculated to assess whether trial results are likely to have occurred simply through chance. a confidence interval is calculated to provide a measure of treatment effect and shows the range within which the treatment effect, subject to a range of assumptions, is likely to lie. p-values provide a cut-off point, beyond which it can be asserted that the findings are ‘statistically significant’. statistical significance, however, does not necessarily mean that the effect is ‘real’, since by chance alone, about one in 20 significant findings will be spurious. confidence intervals tell us the range of possible values. as such, they aid with the interpretation of clinical trial data by putting upper and lower bounds on the likely size of any effect. a confidence interval that embraces the value of no difference between treatment groups indicates that the treatment under investigation is not significantly different from the control group. standard error bars indicate the error or uncertainty in a reported measurement. for sufficiently large numbers the standard error bars can be doubled to get, approximately, the 95% confidence intervals and the standard error bars give approximately a 68% confidence interval, so that in about two thirds of cases standard error bars capture the mean. e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e 52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in the example mentioned earlier, the student uses standard error bars rather than confidence intervals. the statistical analysis to be used is described by the student as ‘mean ± sem of n independent experiments’. in many disciplines, including medicine and psychology, there continues to be debate about the choice of these statistical tools to represent uncertainty (fidler et al 2004). in particular, confidence intervals are preferred to both p-values and se bars (cumming and finch 2005). cumming and finch (2005:170) argue that many researchers ‘have important misconceptions about confidence intervals’ and that ‘there are few accepted guidelines as to how confidence intervals should be presented or discussed’. the challenges in determining, reporting and discussing the p-values and standard error bars which the student experienced during this stage of his study exemplified cumming and finch’s views. in some cases in information graphics, colour can be used to represent degrees of certainty. in many visuals, use of colour is often seen as indexical of modality, enabling a representation such as a photograph to be more or less ‘true to life’ in a particular domain through the choice of colour and colour saturation. in information graphics, however, colour is more conceptual than interpersonal, often fulfilling the ideational metafunction. in the ‘billion-dollar-ogram’ in figure 2, colour is used to differentiate between different categories in order to compare them. here the conventions around colour usage are specific to this particular graphic. however, there are some conventions around colour that work across particular types of graphics. for instance, in mosaic plots over the last 15 years, colour and colour saturation have come to represent size. a mosaic plot is an area-proportional visualization of typically observed frequencies. it is composed of tiles corresponding to the cells, which are created by vertical and horizontal splits of a square. the area of each tile is proportional to the corresponding cell entry given the dimensions of previous splits (see figure 3 below). e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e prince and archer 53 figure 3: mosaic plot for the arthritis data (meyer et al 2005:3) here, blue represents a larger than expected number whereas red represents a less than expected number with the associated statistical significance indicated on the scale. in a sense, there is an evaluative element here where blue is positively valued and red more negatively valued. while the area of each tile provides information about the proportion, the colour saturation of the tile provides an indication of the statistical significance of this proportion using ‘pearson residuals’. the pearson residual is a measure of the difference between the actual proportion in each cell and the proportion expected purely by chance. the grey is used to show that the difference is not statistically significant. so, here ‘colour’ and colour saturation are used to represent degrees of certainty. we have shown some of the ways in which modality is constructed and negotiated in quantitative texts through confidence intervals and through the use of colour. the link between modality and academic voice is a complex one to negotiate and usually forms part of the ‘unconscious’ practices of a particular discipline. it seems important to explore modality and voice with students in more overt ways. this can be done through highlighting the ways of expressing e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e 54 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s degrees of uncertainty or ‘hedging’ conventions in both information graphics and the written text. final comments we have presented an analysis of multimodal texts in an attempt to show how academic voice is constructed through an interplay of multiple semiotic resources. through a discussion of authorial engagement, citation and modality our focus has been on the interpersonal, looking at the ways in which authors insert their presence into a quantitative text. written language, visual representation, mathematical notation and the representational choices we make (like using a bar rather than a point on a graph) all contribute to academic voice. in composing quantitative academic texts, students need to persuade readers about the relevance and validity of the argument. this involves encoding ideational material and establishing relationships within the discourse community, both through citation and the use of modality conventions (such as using confidence intervals, standard error bars and p-values for representing degrees of certainty). our exploration reveals that there is a complex interplay of modes in the construction of academic voice, which are largely tacit. this has implications for the way we think about and teach writing and text-making in quantitative disciplines in higher education. in teaching text construction, the notion of drafting and redrafting in writing has much currency. we would like to argue that information graphics could also go through a process of production and reproduction, so that, for instance, the default design in excel is not the automatic representational choice. we have argued for exploring the full range of available resources in producing information graphics in higher education (including those from popular culture) in order to interrogate and strengthen our own design practices. a way of looking at academic voice such as the one explored here could be useful to facilitate awareness and analysis of multimodal texts in order to enable student access to the invisible norms and conventions of quantitative disciplines. it could also facilitate recognition of the social provenance of texts, namely that information graphics are often seen as objective and neutral, rather than ideological. e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e prince and archer 55 references adami, e (2012) the rhetoric of the implicit and the politics of representation in the age of copy-and-paste, learning, media and technology, vol 37, no 2, pp 131–144. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2011.641567 archer, a (2013) voice as design: exploring academic voice in multimodal texts in higher education, in m bock and n pachler, eds, multimodality and social semiosis. communication, meaning-making, and learning in the work of gunther kress, routledge, new york and london, pp150 – 161. archer, a (2010) multimodal texts in higher education and the implications for writing pedagogy, english in education, vol 44, no 3, pp 201 – 213. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.17548845.2010.01073.x archer, a (2006) a multimodal approach to academic 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r veel, eds, reading science, routledge, london. lemke, jl (2002) mathematics in the middle: measure, picture, gesture, sign, and work, retrieved 17 september 2012 from http://www.jaylemke.com/storage/math-in-the-middle2002.pdf. lillis, t (2001) student writing: access, regulation, desire, routledge, london. martinec, r and van leeuwen, t (2008) the language of new media design. theory and practice, routledge, london and new york. mccandless, d (2009) information is beautiful, collins, london. meyer, d, zeileis, a and hornik, k (2005) the strucplot framework: visualizing multi-way contingency tables with vcd, retrieved 11 may 2010 from http://statmath.wu-wien.ac.at/. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0889-4906%2800%2900012-0 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0889-4906%2800%2900012-0 http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/swll.5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 http://www.jaylemke.com/storage/math-in-the-middle-2002.pdf http://www.jaylemke.com/storage/math-in-the-middle-2002.pdf http://statmath.wu-wien.ac.at/ e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e prince and archer 57 o’halloran, k (1999) towards a systemic functional analysis of multisemiotic mathematics texts, semiotica, vol 124 (1/2), pp 1–29. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/semi.1999.124.1-2.1 o’halloran, k (2009) historical changes in the semiotic landscape. from calculation to computation, in jewitt, carey, ed, routledge handbook of multimodal analysis, routledge, oxon and new york, pp 98–113. prince, r and archer, a (2008) a new literacies approach to academic numeracy practices in higher education in south africa, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 16, no 1, pp 63 – 75. street, b and baker, d (2006) so, what about multimodal numeracies? in roswell, jennifer and pahl, kate, eds, travel notes from the new literacy studies, multilingual matters ltd, cleveden, buffalo, toronto, pp 219–233. swales, j (2004) research genres. explorations and applications, cambridge university press, cambridge. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139524827 thesen, l (2014) risk as productive: working with dilemmas in the writing of research in thesen, lucia and cooper, linda, eds, risk in academic writing. postgraduate students, their teachers and the making of knowledge, multilingual matters, bristol, buffalo, toronto, pp 1 – 26. tufte, er (2001) second edition. the visual display of quantitative information, graphics press, cheshire, conn. van leeuwen, t and jewitt, c, eds, (2001) handbook of visual analysis, sage publications, london, thousand oaks, new dehli. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/semi.1999.124.1-2.1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139524827 e x p l o r i n g a c a d e m i c v o i c e 58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s abstract exploring academic voice in multimodal quantitative texts a social semiotic approach to voice in quantitative texts authorial engagement, agency and choice use of citation and sources in constructing academic voice modality: the representation of degrees of certainty final comments references literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults vol. 25, no. 1 2017 © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: yasukawa, k. 2017. editorial. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 25:1, 1-3. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns. v25i1.5857 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | epress.lib.uts. edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj editorial editorial keiko yasukawa school of education, university of technology sydney, po box 123, broadway nsw 2007 corresponding author: keiko yasukawa, school of education, university of technology sydney, po box 123, broadway nsw 2007; keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5857 article history: published 27/12//2017 in this issue of literacy and numeracy studies, theres bellander and zoe nikolaidou examine the online health literacy practices of parents whose child or unborn foetus has been diagnosed with a heart defect, and julie choi and ulrike najar report on their study of the authors’ english language teaching of immigrant and refugee women in australia. literacy and numeracy studies has published several articles over the years on the issue of health literacy (e.g. green, lo bianco and wyn 2007, papen 2008, hunter and franken 2012, black, ndaba, kerr and doyle 2012, jacobson, hund and soto mas 2016, nutbeam 1999). bellander and nikoaidou, like many of those who write for this journal, bring a social practice perspective on literacy, and in their article in this issue, they show how this perspective enables them to uncover the multimodal, political and affective dimensions of health literacy. the participants of the study (parents of a child/ unborn foetus with a heart disease) engage in health literacy practices to search and try to make-meaning of information about the illness that their child or foetus has; they go to online information sites, the medical staff in the hospitals and online communities of parents of children with heart defects. the authors analyse the reasons for and methods used by the participants in their information searches, and examine the affordances and restrictions of online blogs, forums and social media in fulfilling their information needs. these needs, however, interact with the kinds of information provided by the medical staff, and the opportunity parents have (or not) to discuss and make sense of this information with the medial staff. the diverse sources of information, none of them fully satisfying what the parents want to know, demand judgment about whose knowledge is trustworthy and reliable, and parents exercise this judgement in the face of a situation that is deeply emotional and troubling for them. the authors show that in the process of becoming ‘experts’ on their child’s heart disease, parents also become ‘experts’ in doing digital health literacy. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5857 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5857 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5857 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj choi and najer contribute a study of their own english language class of immigrant and refugee women in melbourne, australia. rather than focus on narrowly defined notions of language learning needs and outcomes that position language learners within a deficit frame, the authors focus on the emergent plurilingualism that they argue can be an important learning resource for their participants. the article provides thick descriptions from their audio recorded data and field notes of the ways in which the learners use diverse semiotic resources to communicate with each other and the teachers in class. these include the use of their own language in exchanges with learners who share the same language, writing down responses in their own language and script and using a digital translator, but also gestures and different tones of laughter students use to negotiate different situations such as greetings, confusion, resistance and understanding. writing from the position as both teachers and researchers the selection of the classroom data and the authors’ insights illustrate critical praxis in a powerful and profound way. both contributions to this issue challenge the simplistic notions of literacy as cognitive skills that do not help us to understand the multi-dimensional goals of literacy learners, not to mention the multimodal and multi-semiotic resources that they bring to their literacy development. the authors instead view language and literacy learning as dynamic, multimodal and socio-cultural practices, thereby bringing to light the much deeper significance of literacy development for the participants in their lives than what a narrower skills-based view of literacy might have. the approaches taken by the authors in their research reflect the view of literacy as a social practice advanced over more than three decades by brian street, starting with his book literacy in theory and practice (1984), and which has influenced so many literacy researchers around the world. this journal, in particular, has featured many authors whose work has been touched directly and indirectly by brian street’s work. brian street deserves a much greater acknowledgement for his contributions to literacy research and pedagogy and to this journal than this editorial can do justice to, however, it is difficult to conclude this editorial without expressing the feeling of a deep loss to the field as a result of his death in june this year. references black, s, ndaba, a, kerr, c and doyle, d (2012) methadone, counselling and literacy: a health literacy partnership for aboriginal clients, health literacy as a complex practice, literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol 20, no 1, pp 45-62. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v20i1.2619. green, j, lo bianco, j and wyn, j (2007), discourses in interaction: the intersection of literacy and health research internationally, literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol 15, no 2, pp 19-38. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v15i2.2205. jacobson, h e, hund, l and soto mas, f (2016) predictors of english health literacy among u.s. hispanic immigrants: the importance of language, bilingualism and sociolinguistic environment, literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol 24, no 1, pp 4365. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4900. nutbeam, d (1999) literacies across the lifespan, literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol 9, no 2, pp 47-55. yasukawa literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 20172 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v20i1.2619 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v20i1.2619 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v15i2.2205 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4900 papen, u (2008), literacy, learning and health – a social practices view of health literacy, literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol 16/17, no 2/1, pp 1934. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v0i0.1275. hunter, j and franken, m (2012) health literacy as a complex practice, literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol 20, no 1, pp 25-44. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v20i1.2618. street, b v (1984) literacy as theory and practice, cambridge university press, new york. editorial literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 20173 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v0i0.1275 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v20i1.2618 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v20i1.2618 literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults vol. 26, no. 1 2018 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: yasukawa, k. 2018. editorial. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 26:1, 1-2. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6424 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/lnj editorial editorial keiko yasukawa school of education, university of technology sydney, po box 123 broadway nsw 2007 australia. keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6424 article history: published 24/01/2019 financial literacy has increasingly been highlighted as an inadequately developed competency among many adults as well as younger people (see for example oecd 2012, 2016); areas commonly focussed upon include budgeting, saving, financial planning and use of services and financial instruments. the first article in this issue of literacy and numeracy studies by jana kubascikova, jeff evans and hafiz t.a. khan is on the topic of financial literacy/ numeracy practices; however these authors focus on how people develop numeracy practices to negotiate currency conversion when the currency in their country (slovak republic) changes to the euro. their study makes an interesting contribution to numeracy practice research by examining situations when demand is placed on people to adapt and change their numeracy practices as a consequence of changes in their context: in this case, their country joining the eu and adopting the euro. what the study also shows is how the slovak republic created what evans, yasukawa, mallows and creese (2017) calls a ‘numerate environment’ – an environment that develops and provides support for people’s numeracy development as they encounter new demands. the second article in this issue is a contribution from debbie j. severinsen, lori k. kennedy and salwa h. mohamud, three adult literacy practitioners who were interested in understanding teaching strategies that would help to increase investment and motivation in adult literacy learners. in their view, this is an area not adequately covered in the literature to inform and guide practitioners. after undertaking a literature review, they distilled six teaching strategies that they believed were critical for increasing learner motivation and investment: providing relevance, addressing settlement needs, incorporating life experiences, encouraging learner autonomy, promoting collaborative learning and building self-efficacy. they then used their findings as a lens to examine and reflect on their own teaching. in light of the authors’ claim that there is a need for more research-informed guidance for teachers. the book review by marie quinn on plurilingualism in teaching and learning: complexities across contexts edited by julie choi and sue ollerhead is timely. quinn’s review may suggest that another strategy that might be added to the six strategies of severinsen et al. is the declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6424 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6424 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj mailto:keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6424 acknowledgement of the plurilingual repertoire of their learners. together, the article by severinsen et al. and the review by quinn provide adult literacy practitioners with resources for reflection on their teaching. references choi, j and ollerhead, s (eds) (2017) plurilingualism in teaching and learning: complexities across contexts, routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315392462 evans, j, yasukawa, k, mallows, d and creese, b (2017) numeracy skills and the numerate environment: affordances and demands, adults learning mathematics: an international journal, vol 12, no 1, pp 17-26, retrieved 17 december 2018 from http://www.alm-online.net/wp-content/ uploads/2017/10/almij_121_october2017.pdf oecd (2016) oecd financial literacy study finds many adults struggle with money matters, retrieved 20 december 2018 from http://www.oecd.org/finance/oecd-financial-literacy-study-findsmany-adults-struggle-with-money-matters.htm oecd (2012) financial literacy in schools, retrieved 20 december 2018 from https://www.oecd.org/ finance/financial-education/finedschool_web.pdf yasukawa literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 2 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315392462 http://www.alm-online.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/almij_121_october2017.pdf%20%20 http://www.alm-online.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/almij_121_october2017.pdf%20%20 http://www.oecd.org/finance/oecd-financial-literacy-study-finds-many-adults-struggle-with-money-matters.htm http://www.oecd.org/finance/oecd-financial-literacy-study-finds-many-adults-struggle-with-money-matters.htm https://www.oecd.org/finance/financial-education/finedschool_web.pdf https://www.oecd.org/finance/financial-education/finedschool_web.pdf © 2016 stephen black. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy & numeracy studies 2016, 24(1): 4901, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4901 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 1 2 0 1 6 66 refractions challenging a statistic: why should we accept that 60 percent of adult australians have low health literacy? stephen black abstract this paper briefly considers australia’s only national health survey published by the australian bureau of statistics (abs) in 2008 which has been widely referenced within the health sector. the main issue discussed is the use of a criterion level (level 3) to determine the point below which nearly 60 percent of australian adults can be considered to have inadequate health literacy. the argument is made that this criterion level is arbitrary and statistically unjustified, yet it serves the purpose of presenting health literacy as a ‘crisis’ demanding action, which in turn represents the interests of dominant groups in this globalised, neo-liberal era. introduction – a critical dimension to the health literacy, australia 2006 survey when health literacy is discussed in australian health forums it is commonplace for leading health researchers and organisations to cite the statistic that 60 percent of adult australians have low or inadequate health literacy (e.g. nutbeam 2009, australian commission on safety and quality in health care [acsqhc] 2014a). to do so serves to answer an obvious question – what is the extent of low health literacy in australia? and, moreover, it serves to indicate the severity of the problem, indicating that health literacy represents in some way a ‘crisis’ in australia. the 60 percent statistic derives from the publication health literacy, australia, 2006, to date https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4901 r e f r a c t i o n s b l a c k 67 the only national survey of health literacy in australia, undertaken and published by the australian bureau of statistics (abs 2008), the leading authority on national statistics. and possibly in view of such authority, the health research and professional community appear to accept this statistic uncritically. the point of this paper however, is to be critical – to question the 60 percent statistic; where does it come from, how is it determined and defined, and whose interests are served by it? in so doing the paper argues that despite its common and expedient use within the australian health sector in recent years, this statistic is unjustified, and at the very least, requires qualification. the research and policy take-up of the survey the literature on health literacy in australia since the release of the abs survey in 2008 features a wide range of references to the survey statistics, including articles: promoting health literacy and its general application (nutbeam 2009, adams, stocks, wilson & hill 2009), conceptualising health literacy (pearson & saunders 2009), and indicating its significance to primary health care (harris et al 2010) and specific population sub groups (ethnic communities council of victoria 2012, lambert et al. 2014, lê, terry & woodroffe 2013, velardo & drummond 2013). a prime example of the unqualified acceptance of the 60 percent statistic is provided in the recent national statement on health literacy which states: ‘only about 40 per cent of adults have the level of individual health literacy needed to meet the complex demands of everyday life’ (acsqhc 2014a:2). the fact that 60 percent of adult australian do not have this level appears to comprise the rationale for the need to take action on health literacy. the report accompanying the national statement is replete with the term ‘adequate’ and its implied corollary ‘inadequate’, to describe those who fall either side of this 40/60 percent divide, and how these percentages vary according to demographic factors such as educational levels, culture, language or gender (acsqhc 2014b). to explain how the abs arrived at the 60 percent statistic and why it should be challenged, it is necessary firstly to outline some details about the survey. the alls and the level 3 criterion the publication health literacy, australia, 2006 uses information obtained from the adult literacy and life skills survey (alls) conducted in australia in 2006 (abs 2006) which measured the knowledge and skills of 15 to 74 year olds in the following four r e f r a c t i o n s 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s domains: prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy and problem solving. the fifth domain was health literacy, produced ‘as a byproduct’ of the other four domains, and published by the abs as a separate report two years later. the alls followed on from a number of international adult literacy surveys coordinated by the oecd and statistics canada since the mid-1990s which have enabled comparisons to be made of the literacy levels of adult populations across a range of western nations. the simulated health literacy items for the alls were drawn from a comparable canadian health literacy scale (canadian council on learning 2007) which covered five health-related activities health promotion, health protection, disease prevention, health care maintenance and systems navigation. using item response theory, skills in health literacy in the alls were measured according to scores for individuals across five levels, with level one being the lowest and level five the highest. while the survey methodology is internationally well established and has featured in several previous international surveys coordinated by the oecd and statistics canada, the critique in this paper relates to the decision by the abs to present their findings using level 3 (of the five skill levels) as the criterion to determine those who have adequate health literacy and those who do not. the abs health literacy survey (p 7) defines skill level 3 as the: minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy (statistics canada 2005). necessarily, any measurement tool which determines a cut-off point indicating those who do or do not have a particular level of skills for effective functioning in society is likely to be problematic, and the case of health literacy is no exception (see barber et al 2009). but the argument in this paper is that the level 3 criterion represents a particularly misleading example. the above ‘minimum required’ quotation is the key to the abs survey because primarily the survey’s findings relate to it. the abs (2008:9) states in consequence that ‘approximately 59% of australians aged 15 to 74 years achieved scores below level 3 for the health domain’. thus, based solely on the above abs quotation regarding level 3 as the ‘minimum required for individuals ...’, extensive references have been made in the australian health literacy literature to the rounded up 60 percent of adult australians who have low or inadequate health literacy. level 3 in the survey has become for many researchers the accepted r e f r a c t i o n s b l a c k 69 benchmark for determining the percentage of those who have or do not have adequate health literacy in australia. critiquing the level 3 criterion to date the 60 percent health literacy statistic based on level 3 has not been examined in the health literature. however, in the related adult literacy sector, a study by the author of this current paper asks some key questions about the level 3 criterion in the alls, including: where did it come from, and on what basis was it determined, and by whom? (black & yasukawa 2014a). it was found for example, that the ‘minimum required’ quotation about level 3 that the abs (2006) attributed in their report to ‘statistics canada, 2005’ did not in fact feature verbatim in that publication (though two references were similarly worded, see statistics canada & oecd 2005). further, the history of the significance of level 3 in international adult literacy survey reports was found to be both minimal and obscure. tracing back the reference links to the earliest mention of level 3, it was found that oecd/statistics canada publications referenced it to ‘focus groups and experts’ responsible for a 1992 literacy survey in the united states that actually preceded the first of the oecd/statistics canada coordinated international adult literacy surveys (black & yasukawa 2014a). the canadian health literacy survey published a year before the abs health literacy survey makes very similar claims to the abs publication regarding the health literacy levels of canadian adults, that is, the same overall 60 percent of adults are found to be lacking health literacy based on level 3 (canadian council on learning 2007). however, unlike the abs survey, the authors of the canadian survey attempt to justify their use of the level 3 criterion with references to three organisational sources the us national governor’s association, the oecd and a canadian skills organisation, all which deemed it to be the level required for labour market success. but judgements about literacy levels for labour market success are highly problematic and are not necessarily related to health literacy, and further, there was no explanation of how these organisations justified the level 3 criterion. thus the key argument in this paper is that the use of level 3 as a criterion or cut-off point that determines those who have adequate health literacy and those who do not, is unjustified due to the absence of evidence to support it, a view shared recently by other commentators on oecd international surveys (st. clair 2012). it is primarily with reference to this criterion level that claims about a r e f r a c t i o n s 70 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s particular percentage of adult australians lacking health literacy can be made. compounding the issue is the irony of the oecd/statistics canada and the abs using level 3 as a minimum for functioning in modern society, whilst also promoting a concept of literacy that runs counter to it. from their earliest international adult literacy surveys the oecd/statistics canada and the abs (1997) have seen literacy as a ‘complex and multidimensional set of traits, dispositions and competencies’, and that thinking in terms of a single literacy cut off ‘is neither appropriate nor conducive to formulating sound policy strategies’ (oecd & statistics canada 1995:24). more recently their publications claim that skills are defined along a continuum of proficiency and ‘there is no arbitrary standard distinguishing adults who have or do not have these skills’ (statistics canada & oecd 2005:15, 2011:14). and yet, the level 3 criterion adopted by the abs does precisely this – it provides such a cut-off point, an arbitrary standard. promoting a health literacy ‘crisis’ to be clear, the abs health literacy survey provides some much needed population data for the health sector, especially on the relationship between health literacy scores and a wide range of demographic variables, including age, gender, educational attainment, parental education, labour force status, income and migrant characteristics. the critique in this paper, however, relates primarily to the use of level 3 as a criterion level for functioning in society, and the implications this has for health literacy in australia. the 60 percent statistic for low or inadequate health literacy in australia is powerful, as reflected in the recent national statement on health literacy. more than any other statistic, it promotes health literacy as a ‘crisis’ that must be addressed because a large percentage of australia’s adult population, the majority in fact, is found to be lacking. had the abs instead reported their findings in terms of the percentage of the population (59 percent) falling below level 3 on the oecd’s 5 levels of health literacy proficiency without any reference to level 3 as the ‘minimum required’ for functioning in society, then the main critique element in this paper would be invalidated. the decision by the abs to report its survey findings using this criterion level can be viewed as a deliberate strategy designed to elevate the survey findings into national prominence as a ‘crisis’, a strategy which so far seems to have been successful as the abs survey findings underpin both the health sector’s national statement on r e f r a c t i o n s b l a c k 71 health literacy, and the adult literacy sector’s national foundations skills strategy for adults (standing council on tertiary education, skills and employment 2012 – see critiques in black & yasukawa 2014a, 2014b) the oecd and the neo-liberal agenda the level 3 criterion level adopted by the abs in its health literacy survey (and the alls), while largely unexplained in the oecd’s own literature, needs to be seen as part of the apparatus of the oecd’s international literacy surveys. these surveys are not politically neutral they necessarily reflect the values and the worldview of the oecd, the leading international economic thinktank committed to the promotion of human capital in its current neoliberal form. the oecd, in major part through its educational efforts, and in particular through its international literacy surveys, promotes a neo-liberal version of worthy citizenry – individual consumers who are knowledgeable and autonomous (sellar & lingard 2013, walker 2009). in relation to health, it is the ideal of people acting as selfmanaging individuals assuming personal responsibility for their health (brown & baker 2012). in an editorial on health literacy in the australia & new zealand journal of public health several years ago, jamrozik (2010) made reference to the ‘upswing of individualism’ and a wider neoliberal climate in which identifying gaps in health literacy may encourage victim blaming. similar arguments have been promoted by critical researchers in literacy education who view the oecdcoordinated international adult literacy surveys, and the level 3 criterion in particular, as ‘technologies of neo-liberal governance’ which deem people either ‘fit’ or ‘unfit’ to participate in society (atkinson 2012). as explained in this paper, the use of level 3 to identify 60 percent of the australian adult population as lacking in health literacy effectively helps to create a health crisis that marginalises many and demands a public policy response, finding form, for example, in the recent national statement on health literacy. but we need to recognise and make explicit the politics behind the 60 percent statistic; that it results from the application of an arbitrary level 3 criterion which the abs adopted from the world’s leading neo-liberal think tank, the oecd, whose values and interests it necessarily reflects and promotes. r e f r a c t i o n s 72 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s references adams, r, stocks, n, wilson, d and hill, c (2009) health literacy: a new concept for general practice, australian family physician, vol 38, pp 144-147. atkinson, t (2012) beyond disempowering counts: mapping a fruitful future for adult literacies, in tett, l, hamilton, m and crowther, j, eds, more powerful literacies, niace, leicester, pp 75-87. australian bureau of statistics (1997) aspects of literacy: assessed skill levels, australia, abs, canberra. australian bureau of statistics (2006) adult literacy and life skills survey: summary results, abs, canberra. australian bureau of statistics (2008) health literacy, australia, 2006, abs, canberra. australian commission on 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680930802669276 abstract introduction – a critical dimension to the health literacy, australia 2006 survey the research and policy take-up of the survey the alls and the level 3 criterion critiquing the level 3 criterion promoting a health literacy ‘crisis’ the oecd and the neo-liberal agenda references microsoft word black ndaba kerr & doyle .docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 1 2 0 1 2 45 methadone, counselling and literacy: a health literacy partnership for aboriginal clients stephen black, anne ndaba, christine kerr and brian doyle abstract this paper describes a literacy program delivered at the kirketon road centre (krc), a primary health centre located in kings cross, sydney. krc was established to meet the health needs of ‘at risk’ young people, sex workers, and people who inject drugs. the literacy program was initiated from within an aboriginal health group at krc, following a request from clients in the group. a teacher from tranby aboriginal college delivered the literacy program one afternoon every fortnight over a period of approximately one year. this paper is based on recorded and transcribed ‘reflection’ discussions undertaken over several months between the literacy teacher, a krc counsellor and the researcher immediately following the literacy sessions. of particular interest is the nature of the literacy program and its pedagogical approach which is based largely on the delivery of popularly themed worksheet exercises. these activities represent in some ways an approach to adult literacy education that we term ‘autonomous’, that is, as a single set of skills generalisable to other life contexts. this pedagogical approach, however, needs to be understood in relation to the social capital outcomes of the course which take into account the complex and varying relationships and networks of the client group. the real value of the course can be seen largely in terms of the social capital outcomes for individual participants. introduction this paper describes a literacy program delivered during 2007 at the kirketon road centre (krc), a primary health care facility established in 1987 to meet the health needs of ‘at risk’ young people, sex workers, and people who inject drugs in the kings cross area of sydney (kirketon road centre 2007). from the time of its establishment krc adopted the primary health care philosophy (stott 1983) encompassing concepts of acceptability, accessibility, affordability and equity of health service provision, under the world health organisation’s (1978) banner of ‘health for all’ (see van beek 2007: 330). m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y 46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s within krc, an aboriginal ‘health and healing’ group known as itha mari (a barkindji word meaning ‘this way: in the right direction’) meets weekly. clients from this group requested a literacy program to help them 'fill in forms', and the aboriginal health project officer and counsellor initiated the literacy program in early 2007. the literacy program was delivered fortnightly at krc for a 90 minute afternoon session with a literacy teacher employed by tranby aboriginal college in glebe, sydney. this literacy program was originally documented and analysed as a case study featuring as a minor component of a larger national research project on social capital and adult literacy partnerships (see balatti, black and falk 2009a).the larger research project examined ‘integrated’ literacy and numeracy in partnerships in several sectors, one of which was health, and the project made recommendations for how adult literacy programs could move beyond educational institutions to be integrated with a range of public policy sectors. in the case study outlined in this paper we provide a more comprehensive account of the krc program. the organisational partners involved an informal arrangement between krc and tranby aboriginal college, with funding from a commonwealth source, the indigenous coordination centre (icc). literacy was ‘integrated’ in the sense that for some aboriginal clients of the centre, the program was an element of a ‘one-stop shop’. that is, clients attended the centre for medical and/or counselling support, to participate in the methadone access program, and/or for the literacy program as part of the activities of itha mari. this was integration in the physical sense that all activities were undertaken in the same building, but in a pedagogical and literacy content sense, the literacy class was ‘stand–alone’. in other words, what was taught and discussed in the literacy class may have had little to do with the health functions of the centre, beyond that it may have assisted the general well-being of the participants. thus the course differed from many ‘health literacy’ programs which usually focus on clients learning to manage health related written material. the key aim of the research in the larger study and this krc case study, was to examine the role of social capital, firstly at an organisational level in the form of partnerships, and secondly in terms of pedagogy, analysing the strategies of adult literacy teachers in drawing on and building social capital. in focusing on the pedagogy, this case study in an inner city health centre provides an example of the use of fairly traditional classroom activities mainly involving worksheet exercises based on popular interest themes. these activities can be viewed as an approach which largely represents an ‘autonomous’ concept of literacy. drawing on the work of street (1984, 1993), an autonomous concept sees literacy primarily in the singular, as a set of discrete skills that can be m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y b l a c k , n d a b a , k e r r a n d d o y l e 47 applied universally to a wide range of life contexts, and which usually represents in a formal schooling sense what it means to be literate. often in the research literature a distinction is drawn between an autonomous concept of literacy and ‘ideological’ or socio-cultural understandings in which literacy is seen as a social practice, and given the wide range of literacy practices people encounter and use in their daily lives, leads to use of the term literacies (e.g. baynham 1995, barton and hamilton 1998). providing worksheet activities for itha mari clients was seen by the literacy teacher to be appropriate for meeting their literacy learning needs. however, while in a technical sense this pedagogy would appear to fit within an ‘autonomous’ approach to literacy, there are other elements of the pedagogy which accord with a social practice approach. as we will discuss later in the paper, improving literacy skills per se was not the prime object of the program. rather, the literacy program aimed to provide the means for the achievement of broader social objectives by the client group, which we see largely in terms of social capital, and this aspect of the pedagogy can be associated with a social practice approach to literacy. literature review the organisational site for this research, the krc, is innovative in its approach to community health, controversial at times in its history, and specific to the particular situation in the kings cross area of sydney (krc 2007). the factors at play in the literacy program under discussion in this paper were both complex and unique. these factors included the related but often distinct client groups – ‘at risk’ young people, sex workers, and people who inject drugs in the inner city of sydney, together with their health needs, aboriginality, cultural activities and literacy needs. in some urban western countries, and in particular the united states, canada and britain, there are many examples of health literacy partnerships involving health and adult literacy teachers working together (e.g. hohn 1998, rudd 2002, nielsen-bohlman, panzar and kindig 2004, shohet 2004, rootman and gordon-el-bihbety 2008, the tavistock institute 2009, diehl 2011) though usually in contexts quite different to the one we focus on at krc. there are also some examples of health literacy partnerships in australia involving adult literacy teachers in health contexts, including programs in rehabilitation centres for recovering drug and alcohol addicts, but they are rarely documented (see balatti, black and falk 2009b). ideally in health literacy programs, the teaching of literacy is ‘embedded’ or ‘integrated’ in the health context. thus various literacy elements may be made explicit in the process of participants learning about health, that is, literacy is taught as ‘an interrelated element of the same process’ (courtenay m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s and mawer 1995: 2) of learning about health, much in the way that integrated literacy approaches have been used in workplaces (mckenna and fitzpatrick 2005) and other vocational education contexts (black and yasukawa 2011). in the study in this paper, the literacy program can be seen to be integrated with health not so directly in terms of its pedagogy, but in its role as part of an integrated health service provided to clients of the krc. as has been described, the key aim of the research was to examine social capital in adult literacy partnerships at both the organisational and pedagogical levels. social capital is defined in this paper according to the australian bureau of statistics [abs] (2004:5) as: ‘networks, together with shared norms, values and understandings which facilitate cooperation within and amongst groups’. this definition suggests social capital is very much about relationships within groups, which portes (1998:7) makes clear: ‘whereas economic capital is in people's bank accounts and human capital is inside their heads, social capital inheres in the structure of their relationships’. the wide range of research literature on social capital indicates the contestability of the concept. there are issues, for example, relating to whether social capital applies to groups of people or whether it can be a resource held by an individual. some researchers such a bourdieu (1986) view social capital, along with other forms of capital (such as cultural or economic) as a resource used to reproduce the unequal distribution of power and goods within society. others such as putnam (2000) understand social capital to relate to cohesiveness in society, with increased memberships of social groups signifying greater social cohesion and healthier societies. this latter understanding is the one that more closely resembles the approach to social capital adopted in this study. usually social capital is considered to be beneficial (though not always, group memberships can have negative consequences). commonly (e.g. putnam 1990) social capital is viewed in terms of the nature of the connections or ties between people, including bonding ties – the strong ties that build cohesion and common purpose within a group; bridging ties which are weaker ties that are concerned with people accessing new networks with groups of people who are different from them; and linking ties which facilitate connections between individuals and various institutions and systems. trust is often a key element of social capital (fukuyama 1995). in previous related research (balatti, black and falk 2006, 2009), social capital was understood in relation to the abs’s (2004) conceptualisation, and the abs social capital framework was adapted to indicate changes in social capital experienced by individuals in adult literacy programs. these can be seen in the right hand column of the framework in table 1: m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y b l a c k , n d a b a , k e r r a n d d o y l e 49 table 1 indicators of social capital outcomes groupings elements indicators for the study does participation in adult literacy and numeracy courses result in 1 network qualities (including norms and common purpose) trust and trustworthiness 1a changes in trust levels? sense of efficacy 1b changes in beliefs about personal influence on the student’s own life and that of others? acceptance of diversity and inclusiveness 1c action to solve problems in the student’s own life or in that of others? 1d changed beliefs and interaction with people who are different from the student? 2 network structure (including norms and common purpose) size 2a change in the number and nature of attachments to existing and new networks? communication mode 2b change in the number or nature of the ways that the student keeps in touch with others in their networks? power relationships 2c change in the nature of memberships? 3 network transactions (including norms and common purpose) sharing support 3a change in the support sought, received or given in the networks to which the student is attached? sharing knowledge, information and introductions 3b change in the ways the student shares information and skills and can negotiate? 4 network types (including norms and common purpose) bonding 4a changes in the activities undertaken with the main groups with which they interact? bridging 4b changes in the activities with groups that are different from the student? linking 4c changes in the links that the student has to institutions? (from balatti, black & falk 2006: 17). m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y 50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in a study by balatti, black and falk (2006) it was found that adult literacy courses resulted in social capital outcomes using the indicators in table 1, and these outcomes in turn could be related to indicators of socio-economic wellbeing, including health. an increasing number of other studies also indicate the interrelationships between education and social capital, and adult literacy in particular (e.g. schuller and field 1998, falk, golding and balatti 2000, balatti and falk 2002, tett and maclachlan 2007, st.clair 2008, balatti and black 2011, taylor et al 2011). the follow-up study by balatti, black and falk (2009a), which incorporated the literacy program described in this paper, focused on cross-sectoral partnerships and the pedagogical strategies that build on and develop social capital. research methods the research approach in this krc study was qualitative, based on semistructured interviews primarily between the researcher and the literacy teacher, and also at times involving two other participants in the literacy sessions – a krc counsellor and the krc aboriginal health project officer. the interviews were essentially ‘reflection’ sessions undertaken immediately following the literacy class. they provided the opportunity to discuss and reflect on aspects of the preceding literacy session the pedagogy – what worked, what did not work, along with the many other interpersonal and broader aspects of the sessions. interviews usually took between 45 minutes and an hour, and they were tape recorded and later transcribed in full. in total ten recorded interviews were undertaken between late may and december 2007, predominantly at krc, though one interview was at tranby aboriginal college. the literacy course itself began in february 2007 and concluded one year later. the researcher was not present during the delivery of the sessions, only in the post session interviews with the teacher and krc staff. there were reasons for this. the presence of an older, anglo background male in the classroom where there may be few participants, all aboriginal and often young female sex workers, undoubtedly would have influenced classroom dynamics. interviews involving the researcher and participants outside of the classroom would have been similarly problematic. there was the possibility of the teacher or krc staff undertaking interviews with clients, but this had the potential to compromise their existing professional roles as teachers and counsellors in a health centre where trust with clients was paramount. university research ethics procedures involving informed, written consent, and the use of tape recording m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y b l a c k , n d a b a , k e r r a n d d o y l e 51 devices added to the problematic nature of documenting the views of the clients, and the decision not to do so. as stated previously, the larger research study of which this study was a part, was concerned primarily to document the experiences of adult literacy teachers involved in health literacy partnerships, and to identify teaching strategies seen to draw on and develop the social capital of the participants. the perspectives of the clients were not the main focus of the larger research study, and besides, as indicated above, in this krc study it was not considered appropriate to interview the literacy program clients. (the health term ‘clients’ is used to describe participants in this paper, reflecting the health context). the itha mari group aimed to be as welcoming and encouraging as possible for its aboriginal clients, and the whole ethos of the group was based on trust. interviewing or even observing clients in relation to the literacy class had the potential, however minor, to disrupt that trust. findings and discussion the literacy program context the itha mari literacy classes at krc did not conform to the regular structures and practices of formal adult learning. the sessions took place in a largish room within the centre, with one central table and chairs around it. there were no supporting facilities such as whiteboards. a ‘regular’ literacy class at the centre included between four and eight clients, but sometimes deciding just who was a participant in the class on a particular day was problematic, given the comings and goings of clients. the main room led to an outside balcony which was used by a number of clients, some involved in the literacy program, others not. thus there could be people walking through the main room, and on being asked if they wish to join the class they might state, ‘no, no i’m just going to have a smoke’. one of the clients brought along her dog, which added to the informal and relaxed atmosphere, and provided a good conversation topic. disruptions to the flow of the sessions were frequent, and the ‘integrated’ nature of the literacy class within the overall role of the centre was demonstrated by the teacher stating that sometimes in the course of a session a doctor seeking a client would ‘pop their head in and say “i’m ready for you now’’’. unlike more formal education contexts, there was no enrolment process or even a formalised course as such, and the teacher would bring along with her all the resources she thought she would need, trying to cater for the interests and levels of those who might attend that afternoon. this provided part of her m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y 52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s rationale for her pedagogical approach using worksheets – to meet the varying needs and educational levels of clients. in all the literacy sessions, in addition to the teacher and clients, also present was a krc counsellor and the aboriginal health project officer. both of these krc staff members knew the clients well and were well trusted and respected by members of the itha mari group. their presence in the literacy class was to support the literacy teacher in her role, to refer clients to clinicians as required and to address any issues external to the literacy class which might arise. the two staff members engaged fully in the classroom exercises with the participants in the class. the participants all participants in the itha mari group are aboriginal, and identification as ‘koori’, a term used by south-eastern australian aboriginal people to define their collective aboriginality, was confirmed through a chat with the aboriginal project officer. not surprisingly, given the life circumstances of clients of the centre, some had issues in their lives that affected their learning and their classroom dispositions in the literacy class. for example, the teacher provided a description of one client struggling with substance abuse: ‘she can’t concentrate ... she might listen and then throw in something, a contribution, and then she goes off into her own little world, and fix her mobile or whatever ...’ on some occasions a client would arrive intoxicated which necessitated the counsellor’s intervention. on other occasions, clients who were distressed were ‘fast-tracked’ into seeing a counsellor. some clients were homeless, or without stable accommodation. the aboriginal project officer described clients of the centre as ‘very marginalised and discriminated against quite often in kings cross and elsewhere... nobody else wants to know you, except, you know, when they want to access the sex industry or drugs’. the itha mari, and the literacy class within it, comprised a non-judgemental welcoming space, described by the aboriginal project officer as ‘a chance to be treated like a normal human being in kings cross, for a bit of time out’. the learning activities clearly, in light of the life circumstances of many of the clients, the learning activities in the literacy class were unlikely to follow the norms of formal adult learning in vocational education and training (vet) or other adult learning organisations. yet, ironically, a formal learning context was what clients wanted and demanded. they wanted ‘exercises’ to complete that were to be handed in and marked by the teacher, ‘and they want me to use a red pen’ m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y b l a c k , n d a b a , k e r r a n d d o y l e 53 (teacher’s comment). these demands seemed to represent the desire to return to the formal learning that the clients associated with their own schooling experiences, which in many cases may not have been successful or enduring. the literacy classes at krc could be seen to be an opportunity for clients to make up for their past educational experiences, or at least a reminder of those days. as the teacher commented, the classes were largely about recognition ‘that i’ve got these skills i haven’t had to use for 20 years, and i’ve still got them’. to the teacher this was empowerment for the clients. while ‘filling in forms’ was cited as a rationale for the literacy program, few classroom exercises focused on this element. mostly the learning ‘exercises’ comprised short written stories based on themes of topical interest and amusement, followed by discussion and comprehension-type writing exercises including spelling and vocabulary. newspaper articles such as ‘the dog attacking the shark’ were popular as ‘animal stories are great’ (teacher’s comments). the exercises were generally quite short, and the teacher prepared several different ones to accommodate the varying educational levels that the clients were comfortable with. the key aim was to generate discussion, interest, engagement and enjoyment and newspapers were used as a deliberate tool to facilitate the process. for the teacher this seemed a pragmatic pedagogical approach which met participant needs. it was what the clients asked for largely because, on the surface at least, it was perceived to accord with formal learning, ‘and they enjoy it because it’s something the rest of the world participates in’ (teacher’s comment). the teacher acknowledged that this approach to learning was different to what she practiced in her own educational institution (at tranby aboriginal college), but the circumstances here were different. she needed to have at the ready resources to meet the interest and educational levels of anyone who turned up that afternoon, and because of the transitory nature of the clients and just a 90 minute class every fortnight, it was unrealistic to expect anything more than a ‘taste’ of learning. the teacher explained, for example, that she did not focus on specific grammatical features because: ‘i don’t think the attention span is there, and i see it as very much an introduction to literacy classes, just have a taste of it, and it’s up to them to take it where they want to go’. as such, the teacher acknowledged there was ‘no literacy logic’ to what she did beyond encouraging dialogue, interest and engagement amongst clients, and possibly in one sense, providing the opportunities of a formal learning environment. she had little expectation that the literacy skills of the clients could improve markedly in the context of her limited literacy program intervention. as she stated: m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y 54 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s you can’t sort of say, ‘oh look, now they can fill out forms ...’ you should never be expecting that from these types of sessions. it’s more about, well, they engaged in the learning process and it opened up options for them. whether they want to take up those options or not is up to them ... the predominant use of worksheet exercises, even though they were based on themes of topical interest, can be seen as a generic or ‘autonomous’ approach to literacy which does not accord generally with a ‘social practices’ pedagogy in which learning activities are usually focused on the students’ everyday lives and the role of literacy and numeracy practices within them (see appleby and barton 2006). in this literacy program context, however, it was their everyday lives that the clients were keen to escape from (‘for a bit of time out’). nevertheless, it would be wrong to suggest that the everyday lives of participants played no role in the literacy program. opinions freely expressed by the participants and sought by the teacher were a reflection of their everyday lives and valued in classroom discussions. further, as we outline in the next section, there were strong ‘social capital’ outcomes for participants, and a focus on these outcomes fit within a social practice approach to literacy. thus, the classification of the literacy program as either ‘autonomous’ or ‘ideological’ is problematic. it had features of both. before focusing on the other program aims and outcomes, mention needs to be made of one additional element to the literacy classes which we refer to later in this paper, the occasional excursions during the session times. the teacher took some students to the local museum to see an aboriginal exhibition, and to tranby aboriginal college. as discussed later in this paper, there were both positive and negative implications to these excursions. the broader social aims of the literacy program when asked directly what the literacy program achieves, the literacy teacher stated: hopefully it’s social, in terms of working in a group and you can see relationships forming. i can see bonding with each other, forming and strengthening relationships in a distrustful world. m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y b l a c k , n d a b a , k e r r a n d d o y l e 55 while acknowledging she knew little of their personal lives, the teacher speculated that there was little trust and much tension in the lives of the clients, and that the literacy program played a role in dissipating tensions. she stated: i’m assuming they live in a cut-throat world out there ... battling substance abuse, everything else that goes with that, rejection by society, harassment by police. and even amongst each other there’s not much trust, you know, when you bring drugs into play ... those feelings go out of the window ... i mean, you can see there’s that tension there, and that tension appears to be dissipating. trust and networks despite the absence of trust in the lives of the clients outside of krc, and the occasional absence of it in the literacy sessions, trust nevertheless permeated many aspects of the literacy program. the counsellor who worked with the aboriginal health project officer to establish and maintain itha mari, and who invited the literacy teacher to start a program, had a long background working with aboriginal people on social justice issues. she used to teach at tranby aboriginal college where, years previously, she had known the literacy teacher, and hence she had complete trust in the teacher she was inviting to deliver the literacy program. the literacy teacher in turn was accepted straight away by the clients because she was a known and trusted friend of the counsellor. the teacher also had her own trusted networks. a visit to the museum for example, resulted in part because the teacher knew the aboriginal education officer at the museum, a previous student at tranby who had gone on to study fine arts at university and then into museum work. the behaviour and attitude of the literacy teacher also had to reinforce the trust placed in her by the clients, and this could happen in small ways. for example, on one occasion the teacher was late to class, and she was very apologetic to the clients. the counsellor later recounted: ‘clients really appreciated the fact you were sorry for being late’, especially because a number of previously invited guest speakers to itha mari had cancelled their visits with little or no advance notice, which the clients perceived as lack of respect shown towards them. tranby aboriginal college was also trusted as an institution, reinforced by the connections of both the teacher and the counsellor: ‘they’ve just heard about it for so long even if they’ve never been there, and they know people who have been to tranby’ (literacy teacher’s comment). m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y 56 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s bonding, bridging and linking ties as indicated previously, the teacher said she could see friendship bonds developing between clients in her class. in one class she described how a dominant female client who said she could not read, heaped praise on another female client with much less confidence, but who could read well, ‘and you could see straight away a bond was developing’. on other occasions clients would provide support to each other while working on written exercises (‘i’ll show you what to do sis’ being a typical response). the teacher spoke of the cooperation amongst the client group: they’re very cooperative in the way they learn ... if they’re engaging, they really are engaging and across the room to each other, so they help each other out. so if someone asks the question of the teacher, often the answer will come from another student, ‘no, no you got it wrong there, it’s like this, you know, and this happened to me’ ... and it can end up a discussion amongst the students. the teacher described her classroom context as ‘like a social setting around learning, rather than a classroom setting where it’s the teacher instructing’. based on her long term experiences of teaching aboriginal students, the teacher regarded the level of cooperation in the classroom, involving group work and the sharing of knowledge, together with respect for elders, as particular characteristics of an aboriginal learning style. there were, however, interpersonal tensions too, which was hardly surprising given the diverse client group, with occasional instances of clients dominating the teacher’s attention in the classroom. there were also gender issues as a couple of male clients at times objected to one dominant (and incessantly talking) female client who stated she wanted the class to be a women’s group. these types of issues, together with the transitory nature of participation in the literacy class made bonding ties over the longer term problematic. the aboriginal health worker noted one additional factor that worked against bonding in the group, stating that over a period of about six months at itha mari a number of their ‘core’ members were now in prison. cycles of incarceration were not uncommon within the client group. bridging ties which enable people to access new networks with different types of people were encouraged largely through the occasional excursions. as we have mentioned, excursions were made to the museum and to tranby m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y b l a c k , n d a b a , k e r r a n d d o y l e 57 aboriginal college. these visits were important in enabling the clients to feel part of the broader society. as the teacher stated: i want them to think ‘i’m not that marginalised by society, i can do this ...’ it’s like, ‘i can pass it off here. no one’s looking at me’. for this group of clients, however, establishing these new linking networks was problematic partly because some of them felt very uncomfortable anywhere outside of their familiar kings cross area. the aboriginal health worker explained that he once took a group of clients on a visit to a park just a 20 minute journey from kings cross, and the clients were immediately concerned about when they would be getting back. he stated: ‘i couldn’t believe it, we were just going for two hours ... severe anxiety being out of kings cross for two hours’. the teacher was in two minds about excursions. on the one hand she saw the benefits for clients of connecting with the broader society in ways that were culturally safe and respectful, broadening their life experiences. on the other hand, potentially the excursions caused divisions in the group because only some of the clients attended and others preferred to attend their regular literacy class at krc. the third type of ties, linking ties, relates to connections with institutions. the best example of linking ties as an outcome of the literacy program was attempts by the teacher to engage the clients with learning programs at tranby aboriginal college where the teacher was employed. the teacher spoke of establishing a literacy class at tranby for one day a week that the clients could attend, in addition to the itha mari class. the difficulties, however, seemed to relate to the issue referred to above, the reluctance of the clients to move beyond the kings cross area. one initial trip to tranby (several kilometres away) was planned, but only one student attended, accompanied by the aboriginal project officer. the teacher commented, ‘they said “we’ll be there, oh yes”, but to actually get people out of kings cross seems to be a big deal. i didn’t think it would be’. on an individual basis, however, the teacher persisted, and she did take a client to tranby, showed her the facilities, including the computers, and introduced her to the coordinator of the aboriginal studies course. the plan was for the client to continue attending the literacy class at itha mari ‘until she’s comfortable to move across’ (to tranby). m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y 58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s conclusions literacy programs conducted in a health context for ‘at risk’ young people, sex workers and people who inject drugs are undocumented in the research literature. in the program outlined in this paper, there were clearly several layers of complexity, making the program unique, and thus we need to be wary of drawing implications from it for other health literacy programs. while the partnership was certainly innovative, the program was discontinued after a little more than a year due in part to lack of sustainable funding. as an ‘aboriginal’ education program it is difficult to draw significant implications from the program, due partly to the many layers of complexity associated with the life circumstances of the clients. the role of social networks and the development of social capital generally feature strongly in this paper, and these aspects are seen to be key elements for the success of educational programs for aboriginal people (e.g. kral and falk 2004). the teacher, very experienced in teaching aboriginal students, commented on the ‘aboriginal learning style’ of the clients – their level of cooperation for example, and sharing of knowledge. as a ‘health literacy’ program this study is an example of health and literacy professionals working together in an integrated way both at an organisational and pedagogical level. but to reinforce a point made earlier, this literacy program was never designed to focus on health-related issues in the way that many health literacy programs do, such as assisting clients to better navigate the health system or understand health/medical literature. the link between health and literacy in this case study was more the physical location of a literacy class in the premises of a health organisation, an innovative approach which has implications for literacy programs in other health organisations, and indeed in sectors beyond health. a literacy program such as this can cause educators to question measures of success for literacy programs. currently in the australian vet system, course success is measured by outcomes such as qualifications achieved and accredited course completions. in government sponsored jobseeker literacy programs, pre and post assessments are undertaken to measure the individual student’s improvement in literacy and numeracy skills over the period of a course. all of these criteria however, have no place in the literacy program described in this paper. not one of the clients of krc was officially enrolled in a course, and the literacy program was not ‘accredited’ in any way. further, from the comments of the teacher, taking into account the nature of the program and the circumstances of the client group, there was little expectation or aim that the m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y b l a c k , n d a b a , k e r r a n d d o y l e 59 literacy skills of the clients would change to any marked extent as a result of the program. the activities in the literacy class, in particular the focus on worksheet activities, were a pedagogical response to trying to meet the diverse educational needs of the clients. the activities, while not intrinsically very educational, were meant primarily to engage and interest the clients in learning. from the point of view of improving literacy ‘skills’, it was recognised that the program was always very limited in developing these human capital outcomes. moreover, as the teacher indicated, there were important social capital outcomes trust and bonding in the group, and clients connecting with other agencies. in this respect the program constructed clients as members of networks (balatti and black 2011). as we have indicated in this paper, it is difficult to classify the pedagogical approach to literacy in this program within the street’s (1984, 1993) theoretical dichotomy of ‘autonomous’ or ‘ideological’. the focus on worksheets exercises fits a traditional ‘autonomous’ approach – teaching the one literacy which is expected to extend to other forms of literacy. but these workshop exercises were really more of a prompt to engage the interest of participants in learning, and often led to open-ended discussions, and as we have seen, social capital outcomes. such an approach, engaging with the perspectives and lives of participants, is more in tune with a social practice approach to literacy. this serves to indicate some of the complexities in theoretically labelling and reducing literacy programs to one particular approach to literacy. a weakness in this study has been the absence of the clients’ own voices. we acknowledge that this undermines to some extent our findings, but by the same token, the process of documenting the voices of participants in interviews, as we indicated in the methods section, would have been problematic and had the potential to disrupt the trust which formed the basis of the literacy programs. those involved in the delivery of the literacy program, the literacy teacher,the krc counsellor and the aboriginal project officer had little doubt they were providing a program of value to the clients, though gains were often not immediately apparent and a longer term perspective was necessary. it may be at a future point in time, possibly years later, that a client of the literacy class may decide to undertake formal learning at the educational institution to which, during the literacy program, they had previously been introduced. there were some encouraging signs that this might happen. self empowerment may also take longer to develop. for the facilitators, the delivery of the literacy program was largely a matter of social justice, of providing support and direction, m e t h a d o n e , c o u n s e l l i n g a n d l i t e r a c y 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s confidence and acceptance to the clients seeking to find 'their way', which of course was what itha mari was, 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numeracy, social capital, learner identities and self confidence, studies in the education of adults, vol 39, no 2, pp 150-167. the tavistock institute (2009).evaluation of the second phase of the skilled for health programme: final evaluation report, the tavistock institute, london. van beek, i (2007) case study: accessible primary health care a foundation to improve health outcomes for people who inject drugs, international journal of drug policy, vol 18, pp 329–332. world health organisation (1978) declaration of alma-ata, international conference on primary health care, alma-ata, ussr, 6-12 september 1978. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults vol. 27, no. 1 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: evans, j. 2019. numeracy as social practice: global and local perspectives. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 27:1, 1-2. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns. v27i1.6962 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/lnj book review (non-refereed) numeracy as social practice: global and local perspectives edited by keiko yasukawa, alan rogers, kara jackson and brian street routledge, london and new york, 2018, 260 pages isbn 9781138284449 jeff evans middlesex university, london, uk j.evans@mdx.ac.uk doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6962 article history: received 3/25/2019; accepted 3/25/2019; published 12/20/2019 this book aims to deepen understandings of numeracy as social practice. to this end, it draws on a number of conceptual strands developed over recent years in mathematics education and adult educational research, but so far applied unevenly across areas of adult mathematics education. the strands considered are: a situated perspective (drawing on the well-known work of lave 1998; nunes, schliemann & carraher 1993; and others); chat (cultural, historical activity theory), drawing on engeström 2001; fitzsimons 2005; triantafillou and potari 2010); literacy as social practice (e.g. street, baker and tomlin 2005); and ethnomathematics (e.g. knijnik 2002). the book brings these strands together to focus on numerate activity ranging across more than a dozen richly described contexts (selected from every continent) with special attention to the distinctive tools used in different activities, as well as to the role of ideologies in legitimatising different versions of mathematics. throughout, the book explores the relationship between formal mathematics education and everyday numeracy practices that is, practices where numerate, spatial, probabilistic, and/ or quantitative signifiers are prominent. it is divided into three parts. the chapters in part i describe a number of numeracy practices, with special attention to ‘what “surrounds” the numeracy practices, what it is that gives them meaning’ (p. 19). the chapters here highlight the importance of measurement, and of spatial awareness, topics that are of crucial interest in mathematics education generally. part ii provides a useful survey of the resources that declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6962 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6962 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj mailto:j.evans@mdx.ac.uk may be utilised to study the interactions (or lack of them) between traditional mathematical classrooms and what learners bring from their own life experience. part iii gives insights into the role played by power, in making sense of what numeracy is learned or can be learned, by whom, and for what purposes. i found the alternatives to the status quo that the book offers especially hopeful; for example, its focus on curricula embodying perspectives harmonious with this book’s message, in indian primary schools and in botswana’s national literacy programme; and also on opportunities for developing ‘critical numeracy practices’ in workplaces where changing activity systems resulted in new numeracy practices. the final chapter by the editors pulls out emergent themes, a number of them rather novel. the book usefully foregrounds ongoing discussions in adult mathematics education about the need to ‘make visible’ the mathematics in everyday numeracy practices. this discussion articulates the concept and practices of invisibilisation, the making invisible for ideological reasons of non-school numeracies by those from ‘outside’ the practices concerned. sometimes workers themselves may not notice that their work is mathematical, or may discount the degree of mathematical skill or knowledge involved, for example in the skilled estimation of quantities, illustrated in part i. numeracy practices are clearly shown here to be fluid and unstable over time. thus, as the world, so highly regulated by laws and policies, changes, so must actors and their practices change, including their numeracies. and to say that numeracy practices are political is to acknowledge more than their bases in power relations. as one of keiko yasukawa’s chapters shows, in order to effectively ‘uncover and act’ against oppressive salary structures, casual university academics needed to pair numerate insights with ‘negotiating knowledge’. with such a range of ethnographic studies reported within its covers, the book is able to document that ‘when local practices were examined ethnographically, those who used them drew no distinction between literacy and numeracy practices’ (p. 251). this book provides much food for thought, for those researching or teaching in the often institutionally separated areas of ‘literacy’ and ‘numeracy’, and indeed for readers of this journal. references engeström y (2001) expansive learning at work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization, journal of education and work, vol 14, no 1, pp 133-156. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080123238 fitzsimons, ge (2005) numeracy and australian workplaces: findings and implications, australian senior mathematics journal, vol 19, no 2, pp 27–40. knijnik, g (1999) curriculum, culture and ethnomathematics: the practices of ‘cubagem of wood’ in the brazilian landless movement, journal of intercultural studies, vol 23, no 2, pp 149–165. https://doi. org/10.1080/07256860220151050 lave j (1988) cognition in practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life, cambridge university press, cambridge, uk. nunes t, schliemann, ad & carraher, d (1993) street mathematics and school, mathematics, cambridge university press, cambridge, uk. street, bv, baker, d & tomlin, a (2005) navigating numeracies: home/school numeracy practices, springer science & business media. triantafillou, c & potari, d (2010) mathematical practices in a technological workplace: the role of tools, educational studies in mathematics, vol 74, no 3, pp 275–294. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-0109237-6 evans literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 2 https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080123238 https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860220151050 https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860220151050 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-010-9237-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-010-9237-6 microsoft word lns 17.2 7-dec.doc l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 1 7 n o 2 2 0 0 9 5 multilateral cooperation for literacy promotion under stress: governance and management issues leslie j. limage * *the views expressed in this paper are solely the author’s responsibility no face which we give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. this alone wears well. for the most part we are not where we are, but in a false position…. say what you have to say…. any truth is better than make-believe…. i do not say that john or jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. the light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. only that day dawns to which we are awake. there is more day to dawn. the sun is but a morning star. henry david thoreau, (1854),walden a b s t r a c t this paper analyses recent organisational change and governance in the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco). the organization has given priority to the promotion of universal literacy since its inception in 1946. it has persisted in its dual approach to universal literacy through both universal primary education and literacy learning opportunities through formal provision and non-formal learning opportunities for adults and out-of-school youth. a major policy shift in 2006 to abandon systematic and programatic concern for literacy at unesco headquarters drastically changed priorities. that decision is analysed in the broader united nations (un) system setting, united states’ policies since its return to unesco, and the recent internal governing dynamics of the agency. i n t r o d u c t i o n universal literacy promotion has been on unesco’s priority agenda for sixty years. over time, the strategies promoted to reach literacy for all have varied with political will, financial resources and various development or economic growth models. essentially, whether unesco saw itself as an intellectual cooperation agency with a holistic sector-wide approach to education or, on occasion, as an operational development partner conducting projects, programs or providing technical advice, literacy was promoted as human right and public responsibility (limage 1987, limage 1993, limage m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 2005a, jones 1988; 2005). this approach has taken into account the historical development of literacy (graff 1987, limage 2005a, vincent 2000). after 1990 united nations international literacy year, literacy, particularly for adults, received little international attention, notably, as i and others have argued, because of the push for universal primary education at the world conference on education for all (wcefa). priority for primary education by the wcefa partners, especially the world bank and the united nations international children’s emergency fund (unicef), led to unesco decreasing its own commitments to adult literacy (rausch 1995, limage 1999, jones 2005). the dakar forum on education for all (2000) provided the possibility to reinvigorate multilateral and bilateral attention to both universal primary education and adult literacy with the six education for all (efa) goals. unesco was declared the lead coordinating agency for dakar follow-up. the creation of the independent efa global monitoring report (due to funding primarily by the british department for international development) to monitor agency and country commitment and progress towards those goals also promised to re-focus attention on literacy. indeed, the efa global monitoring report: literacy for life 2006 came out with a three-pronged approach summing up the best available research and policies to achieve this dakar goal. it built on the classic unesco two-pronged approach with a third dimension, the creation and maintenance of literate environments. those recommendations echo the criteria for sustained attention to literacy and recommendations i put forward in the ‘background and issues paper on literacy for empowerment’ for the working group on efa in july 2005 (limage 2005b) however, in june 2006, in the latest re-organisation of the unesco education sector, substantive system-wide attention to literacy was to be practically eliminated from the unesco headquarters program. for the first time in sixty years, the only international specialised un agency with a consistent commitment to literacy was planning to re-configure that priority, decentralising its substance to an institute with varying commitment in regional offices and re-focusing unld coordination on follow-up conferences after the first lady of the united states event of 18 september 2006 in new york. in the 175th executive board in october 2006, many major developing countries expressed their disagreement with this change. the board adopted consensus decisions: (a) calling for an external auditor investigation of the financial arrangements for the consultant-led process; (b) requesting that the director-general refrain from taking major structural and senior management decisions without first consulting them as required by the unesco constitution; and (c) asking for a more credible efa global action plan (unesco 2006c) in the 176th executive board, the member m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 7 states received and discussed the external auditor’s report which had been made public. the assistant director-general for education had already given his resignation, publishing his letter in california press (smith 2007) and departed immediately after its submission on 12 march 2007 at the request of the director-general. this paper, as with my earlier article (limage 2007), provides a preliminary analysis of events and the impact on literacy promotion through multilateral cooperation. it is immodest for an actor in unesco’s recent organisational and substantive history to consider herself dispassionate. however, this paper may contribute to a more clear-eyed look at how to advance the best of multilateral action in the field in which i have been involved at all levels throughout my adult life: children’s and adults’ literacy worldwide. i continue to argue that ill-conceived ‘reforms’ take place in un institutions such as unesco because of lack of commitment to the basic systemic management mechanisms forcefully explained in the independent inquiry committee report on un management of the iraq oil for food programme (iic-offp) report in 2005 with respect to un agencies’ management of the iraq oil for food programme. while that programme’s management within un agencies provided the greatest example of systemwide lack of transparency and accountability, it is by no means only relevant to these agencies’ actions in humanitarian, conflict or reconstruction settings. indeed, as early as 1988 jones refers, in his first book on unesco and literacy, to the neglect of professionalism in staffing matters in its education sector as a major reason for the decline of serious attention to literacy. while he did not foreshadow the grave current issues, he did see the early stages of a trend. r e c e n t i n s t i t u t i o n a l h i s t o r y o f a t t e n t i o n t o l i t e r a c y : u n i t e d n a t i o n s l i t e r a c y d e c a d e the united nations literacy decade (unld) went largely unnoticed worldwide after its 2003 launch. while unesco had set up an independent united nations international literacy year secretariat staffed by international literacy experts in 1989 in preparation for the year-long mobilisation, it did nothing of the sort for the decade. as a result, unesco was in no position to take advantage of accumulated knowledge and expertise within the organization or in the international community. it did not develop a vision and strategy commensurate with the level of sophisticated literacy advocacy or promotion expected of an agency with sixty years’ experience of literacy provision in schools and adult learning opportunities. when the education m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s sector reported to the executive board on progress with the unld plan of action, it was found to be seriously in need of reinforcement. the 172nd executive board called on the sector to make greater effort: ... requests the director-general to strengthen the organizationwide commitment to literacy for all age groups, and ensure concerted, sustainable action with its field offices and specialized institutes, as well as unesco partners to successfully achieve the united nations literacy decade goals... (unesco 21 november 2005c). the unesco secretariat document for which it is the decision stated: … it is evident that there is a strong need for a clearer sense of direction and purpose with a sustained program of intervention as is vital to a decade-long effort. ... in order for unesco to fulfill its mandate with respect to the ambitious goals of the unld, it requires a sustained commitment in terms of human and financial resources. unesco has had some 50 years’ experience in bringing literacy for all age groups onto the international agenda. it needs to better harness that experience and the lessons learned to give the unld the foundation, infrastructure and flexibility to provide the sustained and quality services expected by member states... (unesco 2005a). this was an intentionally crafted plea (by this author) that unesco build on its own experience at the time. when i drafted the second unld progress report to the un general assembly for the period 2005-2006 in the spring 2006, the situation remained challenging. the report reflects that lack of mobilisation within unesco and in member states. firstly, unesco requested member states to reply to a questionnaire regarding their action to promote literacy during the 2005-2006 period. unfortunately, the questionnaire lacked clarity in conception and only referred to non-formal education, policy change and research to solve ‘problems’. it was not a systematic source of information. however, i wrote on behalf of unesco in the report to the un general assembly: ‘ there is a strong case for reviews of the history of literacy policies and legislation for individual countries and international organizations so that ‘change’ is based on evidence-based experience and that sustainable policies lead to concrete identifiable results’ (unesco 2006a). the rest of the unld progress report recalled the challenges to the effective promotion of m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 9 a fully literate world, the level and range of resources required and major recent recommendations. immediately after i submitted this report to un headquarters in new york through bureaucratic channels, a major re-structuring or ‘reform’ of the education sector took place that abruptly ended my own work and that of many of my colleagues. in order to understand these changes concerning structure and substance (literacy in particular), it is essential to have some background about unesco’s political context. p o l i t i c a l s t r e s s f o r u n e s c o : u n i t e d s t a t e s w i t h d r a w a l a n d r e t u r n the united states withdrew from unesco in 1984 and returned in october 2003. the nature of that withdrawal and return are particularly relevant to this discussion. just as the united states withdrew from unesco in 1984, the organization was beginning to give attention to literacy issues inindustrialised countries as well as developing ones. as i joined the international literacy year secretariat in 1989, literacy in industrialised countries was made part of that un year. although all un years and decades are intended to cover all countries, that is sometimes forgotten. in this instance, although the united states had officially withdrawn from unesco, the united states observer at the time funded a bilingual literacy expert to the international literacy year (ily) secretariat. there was also intensive governmental, research community and practitioner participation in ily activities. throughout the period of official united states absence, there was continuous cooperation with american partners in unesco activities, particularly with respect to literacy. over the years, there had been a strong professional and political movement within the country to promote its return. that return seemed imminent in 2002. however, the announcement by president bush of the actual return on 12 september 2002 in a speech at the un general assembly, primarily devoted to concerns about the war on terrorism, was unexpected (bush 2002). apparently, the united states observer mission to unesco was not informed ahead of time, nor was most of the united states state department. it appeared that the decision was made in the white house and in the context of his war on terrorism. when president bush announced united states return, he did not immediately mention literacy. however, the return arrangements reached between the president and unesco included the designation of the first lady, mrs. laura bush, as honorary ambassador for the unld. the first m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s lady had a longstanding commitment to education, to promotion of the reading habit among young children and mothers. she shared that concern with the former first lady, mrs. barbara bush. so, the white house, the state department and unesco formed a special relationship early on with respect to literacy. since the unld was officially launched in 2003 and the united states returned officially in the last quarter of that year, there was a unique opportunity to have a formative effect on the decade. as un agencies actively seek the advocacy provided by well-known personalities, the designation of the first lady as honorary ambassador, was met with considerable satisfaction. early on and quite understandably, the white house was concerned that the first lady play an active role in literacy advocacy worldwide, particularly in concrete situations. the director-general responded by calling on the education sector to develop three major initiatives, one of which became the literacy for empowerment initiative (life), so that highly visible literacy promotion would be seen to be taking place. the united states ambassador to unesco was conveying proposals from the white house for such activities and their management location. the division of basic education’s adult literacy and non formal education section maintained nominal responsibility for both the unld and the emerging life initiative until july 2006. an early concern of the united states administration was definitely to encourage literacy through the first lady’s advocacy as unld honorary ambassador. however, there was no overall policy strategy for the united states return to unesco. its financial contribution to unesco for the period october-december 2003 (15 million dollars) was designated at that country’s request for education and rehabilitation of cultural heritage in post-conflict settings. furthermore, the united states took a strong position against the proposed convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expression (adopted october 2005). throughout 2004 and up until the unesco general conference of 2005, the major united states priority seemed to be to prevent unesco from adopting such a normative instrument, seeing it as outside unesco’s mandate as primarily a trade issue, and highly politically-charged. during the 2005 general conference, the united states called for a vote on its adoption as a convention. it proceeded, for the first time in unesco history, to call for a vote on the 2005-2006 program and budget. however, on the whole, the initial united states return to unesco was taken based on a close dialogue with the director-general and on the official position that he had successfully addressed most of unesco’s systemic management problems that had led m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 11 to the united states withdrawal eighteen years earlier (white house statement 2002). m a n a g e m e n t s t r e s s : t h e i n d e p e n d e n t i n q u i r y c o m m i t t e e r e p o r t o n u n m a n a g e m e n t o f t h e i r a q o i l f o r f o o d p r o g r a m m e neither the united states government nor the un had been faced with the independent inquiry committee report on un agency management of the iraq oil for food programme at this stage (iic-offp 2005). none of the nine specialised agencies of the un, including unesco, had been reminded of systemic management shortcomings. the united nations headquarters in baghdad had not yet been bombed as it was on 19 august 2003, bringing an end to illusions that it was viewed as neutral in the implementation of sanctions. the iraq oil for food programme was conceived to allow the un to supervise the sanctions imposed on iraq after the first gulf war and invasion of kuwait in 1991. it was intended that iraq use oil revenue to purchase humanitarian aid so that the iraqi people not suffer from the effect of those sanctions. the un agencies’ role was to monitor the purchase and distribution of that aid. in other words, it was essentially a procurement program and fully outside the mandate and core functions of agencies like unesco. the entire programme was thus flawed from the outset in terms of the capability of specialised agencies to carry it out and especially, in terms of the lack of agency internal safeguards for accountability, transparency, professionalism and timely action. the iic published its volume iv on un agencies’ management of the programme and its follow-up through 2003 on 7 september 2005. the report recalls that ‘the tone starts at the top’. it lays out the systemic mismanagement by un agencies and points out the directions in which the agencies would need to go to conduct full-scale internal investigations and inquiries. the iic explains that they were not able to conduct all those investigations themselves for a number of reasons that include: (a) lack of full cooperation by the agencies’ staff; (b) conditions in iraq following the united states invasion and (c) the scale and complexity of the mismanagement due to lack of basic good governance and accountability mechanisms in each of the agencies. the report clearly states that, where they illustrate specific aspects of mismanagement and the nature of un agency work in corruption-prone environments, they are only indicative of the kinds of situations which arose m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s rather than the full picture of ‘wrongdoing’ by any of the un agencies. for example, in the section of the report on the problems that occurred when an agency worked outside its core mandate in an area for which it had no competence, the illustrative example for unesco is a ‘chalk factory’. (iicoffp 2005,vol iv: 122). the systemic management recommendations include: (a) recruitment of senior management with transparency, ethics investigations and professional criteria; (b) accountability of senior management; (c) obligatory conflict of interest and financial disclosure for all staff members at all levels; (d) effective whistleblower policies and protection; (e) ethics in management training and protection against cronyism in recruitment and staffing, among others. these recommendations also figured in the world summit outcomes document in september 2005 and have been implemented progressively by un headquarters. however, although unesco member states called for the organisation to lay out an action plan for their implementation, that had not taken place by spring 2008. this was not due to lack of effort by the internal oversight office. it appears rather to be due to a lack of commitment at the highest policy level of unesco to accept these systemic management safeguards for all of its work, financed from both regular and extra budgetary sources. u n w i d e r e f o r m a n d u n e s c o ’ s r o l e i n e d u c a t i o n over the past ten years, especially since the iraq oil for food scandal, the un is attempting to develop system-wide coherence and effectiveness based on a rigorous review of mandates, duplication, and coordination problems. the harassment, corruption and gender-based violence of certain un peacekeepers have also contributed to this conscience searching. it has been suggested that the un focus on the environment, development and humanitarian assistance. it is not clear how unesco will position itself with respect to its current mandate in education, natural sciences, social sciences, culture and communication. the un has been reviewing its mandate in all its sectors since 2006: natural and social sciences, culture and the independence of the world heritage committee, communication, as well as education. this paper focuses primarily on the third ‘reform’ of its education sector in a six-year period and aftermath. since 2000, the director-general has presided over three re-structurings of the education sector that are called ‘reforms’. i m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 13 o r g a n i s a t i o n a l s t r e s s : t h e f a t e o f l i t e r a c y a t u n e s c o the recent assistant director-general for education, mr. peter smith (june 2005), arrived with a mandate to improve management and effectiveness to promote education for all. he engaged an american consultant company to carry out a diagnosis of the education sector with contracts, over 2005-2006, of 2.2 million dollars. he announced a restructuring of the sector on 21 june 2006, which came as a surprise to most staff members. the details of the re-structuring were laid out in a directorgeneral ‘blue note’ (12 july 2006) and the senior management staffing decisions in another ‘blue note’ (27 july 2006), followed by others. in a thorough re-conceptualisation of unesco’s education priorities under a ‘matrix’ approach, substantive attention to education was confined to two of the six divisions at headquarters. the others became essentially administrative. the former division of basic education had included early childhood education, inclusive education, primary education and adult literacy/non formal education. it was reduced to cover certain general themes of formal education such as ‘quality’ and ‘values’. it excluded adult and continuing education as well as adult literacy. indeed, literacy was no longer the purview of unesco headquarters. the substantive and policy work for literacy was to be handled by the unesco institute for lifelong learning (former unesco institute for education (uie) in hamburg). the united nations literacy decade was transferred to a division for united nations priorities. the unld was staffed by two junior professionals. it was also to include the management of the unesco literacy prizes as well as international literacy day celebrations, two major unesco literacy advocacy tools over more than thirty years. the unld programs were refocused as support or follow-up to the first lady conference held in new york on 18 september 2006 (united states state department 2006). indeed, the unld coordination at unesco was re-focused to carry out four regional follow-up conferences to this event. other programmed activities were cancelled. the adult literacy and non formal education section was disbanded. the various staff were informed that they were to be re-located for unspecified functions in field offices around the world. it may have been argued that the re-organisation of the education sector as a ‘matrix’ organisation would in time provide a more flexible approach to changing unesco and member state priorities. on the other hand, if literacy (meaning basic reading, writing and numeracy skills and competencies) is no longer handled visibly, systematically and holistically at headquarters-level, it is unlikely that specific institutes or field offices would be able to provide agency policy and coordination in its stead. already, as i wrote in 1999 (limage 1999), when adult and continuing education was m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s removed from unesco headquarters some nine years earlier to the uie hamburg, adult literacy was weakened conceptually. i argued that adult literacy was treated outside the most marginalised form of education, mainstream adult and continuing education, and that it would be reduced to non-formal provision. that indeed became the case for the next six years at unesco headquarters. the section within the division of basic education saw its purview to be primarily non-formal adult education. it has led to what may prove to be the further marginalisation of attention to adult literacy as well. the assistant director-general for education called an information session for permanent delegates on 25 july 2006 because of widespread concern about the re-structuring. ambassadors representing the africa group, the european union, algeria, pakistan and venezuela, questioned the transparency, respect for procedures and advisability of the substantive change. several expressed reservations about the fate of literacy, especially e9 countries (countries with the largest populations and largest literacy needs). the 175th executive board in october 2006 addressed the financial, organisational and substantive changes with concern. in addition to the request for an external auditor investigation, one of the largest and most inclusive debates about literacy took place in an item on the cuban literacy approach ‘yo si puedo’. some thirty countries asked for re-assurance that the re-focusing of the unld around follow-up to the us first lady event not lead to elimination of diversity in unesco’s promotion of literacy learning approaches. (observer records 25 june 2006) o r g a n i s a t i o n a l s t r e s s a n d p o l i t i c a l s t r e s s : 1 7 5 t h a n d 1 7 6 t h e x e c u t i v e b o a r d s since unesco is an intergovernmental organisation comprising 192 member states, any serious analysis of how it addresses its problems must take into account its political dimension. the complex history of unesco is thus about individuals and their own decision-making or professional knowledge. it is even more about the governmental ‘elites’ of member states who are moving forward various agendas and reaching a formal consensus that shifts over time. it is also about the larger context of the international aid architecture, its dominance by bilateral arrangements, as well as the credibility crisis of the entire un system. unesco is governed by its member states meeting every two years in a general conference and twice a year by 58 member states meeting in its executive board. the secretariat, led by the director-general, implements the agreed program and budget. both governing bodies have been lax in m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 15 setting clear, well-defined priorities and in exerting strict management and fiduciary accountability. the case study in this paper illustrates the mixed messages that thus emerge, which in turn, allow the secretariat to do nothing, or to make mere cosmetic changes, or to continue previous practice. further, decisions on specific matters tend to be taken by ‘consensus’, rather than by vote. thus, all contentious issues tend to be negotiated outside the formal board meeting room and reduced to a text that appears to have unanimous support. the ‘consensus’ decision-making is intended to show agreement on the way forward and generally calls for further reporting at a future session. countries express reservations on occasion by requesting a statement to appear in the summary record. during unesco’s 175th executive board (october 2006), many developing country representatives questioned the financing and the process of the re-structuring as well as the fate of literacy and education for all international coordination. however, the united states and key european countries did their best to contain dissatisfaction. in spite of these containment efforts by ‘developed countries’, leadership by algeria, benin, india, south africa and certain latin american countries led to a consensus decision requesting investigation by unesco’s external auditor of the processes by which the assistant director-general for education had hired an american consultant company for the education sector reform. the staff associations were also calling for respect for existing staff and finance rules. they were trying to ensure due process for staff members who had been removed from their functions or were the object of arbitrary sanction. for example, the indian ambassador stated in her intervention to the 175th executive board: the ongoing reforms in the education sector are of great significance to us…. the reform process did not follow wellestablished unesco traditions of wide-based consultations…. the mandate for reform of the education sector as given out by this body at its 171st session was tied to the better delivery of efa goals by unesco. some of the reforms cannot be justified from the perspective of increasing unesco’s commitment to efa. on the contrary, ... unesco’s continued focus on literacy and related issues is of paramount importance. the proposal to move literacy from within the education sector and make uil, hamburg responsible for this activity has serious implications. such a fundamental change should not have been m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s implemented without consulting the board…. this reform should be rolled back. (mukherjee 3 october 2006) professor brian figaji, the south african representative stated: unesco, as the lead specialized agency for efa, should vigorously reassert that lead role and ensure close co-ordination to avoid duplication of activities and marshal all available resources, human, financial, and technical, no matter how scarce they may be, in pursuit of this one shining objective. however, we are somewhat disturbed by the huge expenditure on consultants employed for the reform process. this cost has been incurred at the expense of the regular program… the way the decision was made and the money allocated leaves us with some serious concerns… (figaji 3 october 2006) during autumn 2006 and early winter 2007, the auditors carried out their investigation. they provided their findings to the director-general in january 2007. senior management and certain countries tried to prevent the report from figuring in the executive board’s 176th session or, failing that, to prevent its findings from being discussed in open session. nonetheless, the auditor’s report became a public document more than one month prior to the session. the principal finding was that unesco possessed perfectly adequate rules and regulations concerning the procurement of services. however, these rules were intentionally circumvented by the assistant director-general for education. furthermore, the director-general did not have the authority to waive these rules. the auditor reported that: the power to grant waivers is a discretionary power, in that it is a question of the director-general’s appraisal of the matter, but i t i s n o t a n a r b i t r a r y p o w e r (emphasis in the original) beyond the scope of any rule…. the case under consideration here falls within the scope of the administrative manual’s provisions… (unesco 16 march 2007: 28) the auditor also found that the education sector administrative officer who tried to enforce respect for procedures was removed from his responsibilities for his efforts. the personal assistant of the assistant director-general for education and the deputy assistant director-general for education took over those fiduciary responsibilities (unesco 16 march 2007: 13). the legal affairs officer who tried to advise on proper m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 17 procedures was also circumvented. (thanks to his courageous testimony to the 175th executive board, member states could ask for the investigation). (unesco 16 march 2007: 1) the public nature of the external auditor’s report meant that the nonrespect of procedures was well known. however, since the director-general had ultimate responsibility for approving both the consultant contracts and the re-structuring and personnel decisions taken as a consequence, the response was more complex. during the first follow-up conference to the first lady of the united states event of september 2006 in qatar on 12 march 2007, the matter came to a head between the director-general and the assistant director-general for education. the latter had published a letter of resignation dated 12 march 2007 in a california press website on 14 march stating that, due to ‘death threats’ and lack of support as well as ‘demonization of the united states’, he was offering his resignation to take place in june 2007 (smith 2007). the director-general announced on 15 march 2007 that in fact the resignation would take place immediately. he personally took over the education sector management. thus, at the time of the 176th executive board in april 2007, the former assistant director-general for education was gone. since he had provided his own letter to the press, the issue was covered widely in major newspapers. the literacy event in qatar at a follow-up conference did not have any international repercussions under the circumstances. during the session, members spoke to these issues in the manner that characterised their handling of management and substance. the directorgeneral committed to follow recommendations to strengthen unesco procedures. however, he asked members to help advance his reforms, as any backsliding at this stage would jeopardise the momentum already gained: the ed sector reform has enabled the sector to realign its work in accordance with the priorities and needs identified through the gap [global action plan] and uness [unesco national education support strategy] processes…. the recent resignation by peter smith, the assistant director-general for education, will in no way affect the basic direction taken by the education sector reform, whose implementation will proceed. (unesco 16 april 2007) m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the united states ambassador, mrs. louise oliver, took the same position: …the process of reform is not an easy one, particularly in an intergovernmental organization…recent reforms made in the (education) sector should strengthen its ability to carry out its responsibilities…even though there are concerns relating to the external auditors’ report, the sector must continue to focus on its important initiatives, and maintain the reforms that are starting to show results… (oliver 18 april 2007). mr. einar steinsnaes, the norwegian representative, supported her position (as they had also supported the ‘reform’): – the director-general bears the responsibility and must make every effort in revising rules and regulations according to the recommendations from the external auditor and ensure that they are practiced;….the reform of the education sector must continue in order not to lose the momentum gained….the audit report and other related evaluations must not be used as an argument for delaying the efa progress and the reform process (steinsnaes 17 april 2007). the u.k. ambassador peter landymore followed suit: ...we are at a critical juncture….we should all welcome the swift and comprehensive response that the dg has given. the process of reform and restructuring has been, inevitably, difficult. the last thing we should do now is falter, or – least of all – reverse its progress. the best interests of the poorest countries, especially in africa….are best served by pressing forward the change process… (landymore 18 april 2007) however, the indian representative, dr. kapila vatasyayan, took a critical stance: since the last meeting of the board, there have been several important developments of far-reaching implication to the organization… it is disturbing to learn that there has been a lack of transparency and accountability in respect of what has been termed as the whole process of ‘reforms in the education sector’… i have been told that those who had the courage to m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 19 point this out at that time were removed from their positions and sent to perceived punishment postings…those who questioned the process at that time were told that they were ‘against reform’. i hope that you will not accuse me of the same when i say that the time has come to take a pause…. taking stock and changing course is not a sign of cowardice. it is only the strong, who acknowledge the need to change course when required (vatasayan 18 april 2007). prof. brian figaji, the south african representative, who had also called for the investigation in the previous session, stated: in respect of the external auditors’ report on the procurement of services in the education sector….the south african delegation found that the audit had not gone far enough... however…. we need to look ahead… and strengthen the hand of the dg so that he can put the structures and processes in place to heal this ugly wound…. i cannot leave this matter without making a very special appeal to the dg about the unfair treatment meted out to those who chose to blow the whistle or who would not cooperate with the implementation of the irregularities…. your response to this matter dg should send a strong message to this organization that whistle blowing will not result in punishment. this is your responsibility as the dg and i trust that you will do what is right and just. (figaji 18 april 2007) the ecuador representative, mr. juan cuevas, was equally incisive: regarding the education sector reform, my delegation wishes to state how much it deplores non-respect of the organization’s rules concerning procedures for recruitment of consultants….there can be no tolerance for such actions which can seriously endanger the legal security and transparency of the organization. impunity in this matter carries the seed of the destruction of our organization. the responsible parties should be severely punished and the mis-used funds should be returned to unesco. (cuevas 18 april 2007) the portugal representative, mr. ramalho ortigao, speaking on behalf of the european union, provided the inevitable mixed message conveyed in such consensus statements. he states: m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 20 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the reform of the education sector remains of vital importance for the organization. the regrettable facts the audit report has outlined must not be allowed to compromise the reform…. . but later he contradicts himself the information provided about this reform has been scarce. we would have welcomed a more informative, well-documented report to the executive board by the director-general on the state of the reform and unesco’s educational policy. (ortigao 18 april 2007) these positions summarise member states’ responses to the auditors’ investigation. the auditors regularly verify unesco’s accounts for each biennium. they are not normally called upon by the governing bodies in this manner (although that is not to say that they should not have been called upon earlier). ii the united states, japan and european countries took the position that the unfortunate situation should be forgotten and not jeopardise the pace of the education sector reform. the united states and the united kingdom representatives warned that any vulnerability in this respect would serve forces in their respective countries that might call for withdrawal from unesco again. they brought other spectres to bear on individual country representatives who had spoken up, or who might influence those who were likely to do so (observer interviews). mr. philippe séguin, the external auditor, presented his report to the 176th board. he summarised his conclusions: iii … i insist on the fact that at no place in our report do we affirm that the non-respect of regulations regarding the education sector contracts was the result of weak procedures. that would be the opposite of the truth to interpret the report in such a manner. the simple truth…is the assistant director-general for education, who took the initiative and therefore the responsibility to pass contracts with a firm without respecting the organization’s rules, did so in full knowledge of what he was doing…. the advisability of taking the education sector forward on the basis of existing diagnostic studies and the internal expertise already available was not even considered …. it is up to the director-general to hear our message and act consequently. in this respect, i think that it would be inadmissible that people who pointed out irregularities should suffer or be sanctioned in their professional advancement (séguin 23 april 2007). m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 21 t h e e x e c u t i v e b o a r d r e s p o n s e unesco governing bodies take positions about events, reports, and issues presented to them or raised by themselves on the basis of ‘draft decisions’ that are usually prepared in advance by the secretariat. however, many country delegations propose amendments to these ‘draft decisions’ or propose entirely new ones. these decisions are almost always adopted by ‘consensus’. in this instance, several developing countries (algeria, benin and india) proposed a ‘draft decision’ including a call for disciplinary action against those involved in the financial or managerial wrongdoing. they also asked that staff who had been sanctioned or adversely affected by the irregular re-structuring and financial processes be re-instated (unesco 17 april 2007). however, the united states, japan and certain european countries prepared another ‘draft decision,’ which only called upon the director-general to strengthen and enforce regulations. they worked to ensure that there would be no accountability for wrongdoing concerning the education sector ‘reform’. they were successful. an article by colum lynch in the 6 may 2007 issue of the washington post, sums this up journalistically: ‘us fights off bid to punish unesco official’. nonetheless, the education sector reform was not the only major issue that came before the 176th executive board. members did not accept any of the director-general’s proposals regarding the next biennial budget, nor was any recommendation approved concerning the re-organisation of the other sectors. unesco thus needed to address its most pressing long-term problems at future sessions. as a result of the polarisation of political positions, special interests, confusion about the outcomes expected by the board from the directorgeneral, lack of a clear message concerning the kinds of behaviour expected of regular staff members and senior management, a climate of continuing uncertainty prevails in unesco. this uncertainty began for staff on the 21st june 2006 when many education sector staff had their professional responsibilities taken away without others foreseen. some ten senior professionals were particularly targeted for elimination in one way or another. a new assistant-director general named in september 2007, the former director of the efa global monitoring report, was charged with revitalizing the sector. the changes he had made by march 2008 included bringing the efa coordination under his direct supervision and recruiting two norwegianfunded directors to take charge under him. he effectively prolonged the ambiguity of financial and human resource controls in the education sector (dg/note/08/08, 4 march 2008). m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the potential operation of the unesco education sector outside the overall organization-wide financial and management controls was not lost on the external auditor or certain board members at its 179th session in april 2008. the latter were not convinced by the director-general’s presentation of the matter as one of ‘experimental decentralization’. mr. séguin reported on the follow-up to his earlier recommendations: the new position and necessary independence of administrative officers is not yet a reality. and that is totally regrettable. the daily functioning of the teams responsible for internal control in the sectors, institutes, and field offices has not changed significantly either…. we consider it necessary to end the current procrastination because it is urgent to do so... failing this, the organization will not be safeguarded against further accidents along the lines of the one we previously examined in depth. (séguin 11 april 2008) professor brian figaji, south african board member, referred to the lack of ‘consequence management’. he later remarked: this audit was brought about by the problems in education and i would imagine that the repair should be focused on education but unfortunately the education sector just cannot undo the errors of the past and correct the staff structure to represent the administrative officer as required by the auditors… so, mr. dg you have accepted the external auditor’s report which requires a particular reporting line for the administrative officer and you support the education structure which contradicts the external auditor’s requirements… the argument that there is sufficient segregation of duties for a decentralized organization is not good enough… (figaji 7 april 2008: 3-4). similar positions were taken by algeria, cuba, india, sri lanka and tanzania. on the other hand, the united states, like the other european members, made no reference to the critical state of the education sector management and its relation to effective program conception and delivery. instead, oliver pointed to vague ‘progress’ in the area of literacy promotion: unfortunately, instead of fulfilling its role as the un’s lead voice in education, unesco increasingly focuses on issues already being dealt with by other specialized un agencies….when unesco does focus on one of its priorities, progress can be made, such as has occurred in the area of literacy, thanks to m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 23 unesco’s life initiative and its regional literacy meetings. we hope that literacy will continue to be a priority for unesco after the last two regional meetings are held in azerbaijan and mexico… (oliver 8 april 2008). the unesco external auditor continued to report on the fact that the education sector remained outside his recommendations for independent financial controls as recently as the 181st unesco executive board in march 2009 (unesco 24 march 2009). no explanation was provided by the director-general or the assistant director-general for education as to why that should be the case. at the same time, however, an effort was made to bring part of the literacy program back to headquarters, that is, the life initiative. the case was made that international coordination and technical services worldwide were best provided from headquarters rather than from the small uil in hamburg. political pressure from germany and certain other countries opposed the move. as unesco prepares to elect a new director-general in autumn 2009, and the assistant director-general for education resigned in july, the fate of literacy, indeed of the growing recognition that unesco should treat the entire education system as a whole once again, remain on the unfinished agenda. the emphasis on the donor-driven efa coordination to the detriment of higher education and secondary education is beginning to be recognised. this was clearly the case at the july 2009 world conference on higher education (unesco 8 july 2009). s t r e s s f o r m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y a t t h i s t i m e i again raised the intertwined issues of substance, politics and management. it has long been my professional experience that no sustainable progress can be made outside a highly ethical management context. this is even more critical for a un agency composed of 192 governments with divergent special interests and political agendas. the entire un system has been under pressure. unesco’s broad mandate lends itself to being more susceptible to those pressures. on occasion, it has risen to the challenge due to a fortuitous mix of outstanding intellectual and moral leadership alongside a modesty of claims. on other occasions, when its leadership has acted more on the basis of short-term political expediency, its professional staff struggles to provide continuity of service to unesco’s goals. however, without an independent, neutral and highly qualified professional international civil service, free from such pressures, unesco will continue to founder. my concerns for literacy are crystallising. the 177th executive board document on the progress of the unld coordination was a clear indicator (unesco 3 august 2007). as the unesco staff author of the earlier two m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s executive board reports as well as the report to the un general assembly presented in september 2006, i am probably more sensitive to what does or does not go into such documents, as well as to bureaucratic understatement and caution. the progress report for 2006-2007 stated that it presents ‘highlights’ of the document submitted to the un general assembly. in fact, it does something quite different. it ‘highlights’ the white house conference on global literacy held for a half-day in new york by first lady mrs. laura bush on 18 september 2006. it then re-focuses the rest of the unld as follow-up to this event through reference to the next conferences. the other critical considerations in the un general assembly report or in earlier reports to unesco’s own executive board are absent. indeed, one has the impression that unesco suffers from severe amnesia and that nothing has taken place previously upon which to build other than the white house conference: given the relative neglect of literacy needs by the international community, the white house conference demonstrated the major impact that the commitment of one large country can have on improving the visibility of the global literacy challenge (unesco 3 august 2007). other initiatives created around the time of the united states return have not fared better. the life program has barely begun and yet is immodestly presented as ‘the united nations’ main multilateral response to the challenge of the decade’ (p.5). it states ‘during 2006, responsibility for life was transferred to the unesco institute for lifelong learning (uil), where the necessary networks with the countries involved are being built’ (p.5). the literacy assessment and monitoring program (lamp) that was intended to provide a robust although very costly means to assess literacy competencies suffered setbacks including the loss of its charismatic proponent, dr. scott murray. further, while the document and the publicity about the first lady global literacy conference refer to ‘success stories’, ‘replicable’ programs and ‘what works’, they do a serious disservice to the cause of quality education for all. for sixty years unesco advocated for national governments and the international community to build the institutions needed for sustainable educational services. it has rarely had the resources or the commitment to conduct independent evaluations of such services. nonetheless, it has not until now engaged solely in ‘advocacy’ that assumes any project or program can or should be replicated without an evaluation of its outcomes in its own cultural context. m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 25 this superficial advocacy has not been lost on longstanding unesco partners with strong reading and writing pedagogy expertise. for example, the international reading association (ira) circulated a set of concrete recommendations to encourage unesco to return to ‘explicitly and directly focus on ensuring learners of all ages achieve high levels of competency in reading and writing [within] informed local policies, structures, institutions and the capacity-development of experts to design, deliver, and monitor high quality education.’ (ira april 2007). in 2009, the ira also withdrew the funding for the international literacy prize it offered through unesco for many years, usually presented on 8 september, international literacy day. finally, the secretariat’s ‘draft decision’ regarding its own progress in coordinating and implementing global and regional action for the unld states that the executive board is ‘expressing its satisfaction with the activities undertaken, in particular the unesco regional conference in support of global literacy which build on the white house conference on global literacy….’ . if the unesco secretariat no longer values minimal self-criticism in its own documents and does not recognise excessive politicisation rather than quality advocacy of the most legitimate of its education mandates access by all to basic literacy then i am deeply concerned that the millions of young people and adults the agency is intended to serve will indeed need to look elsewhere. w h a t i s n e e d e d t o g o f o r w a r d ? a n o t h e r c o n c e p t o f ‘ r e f o r m ’ the following suggestions are not mine only. however, i consider them critical to re-establishing quality multilateral cooperation in unesco’s fields of competence. f o r t h e s t a f f o f u n e s c o : unesco needs the i n d e p e n d e n t e t h i c s o f f i c e recommended by the iic-offp established at un headquarters in new york in january 2006. that office would have to be rigorously independent to ensure that the entire secretariat be bound by the same code of conduct and professionalism. it would protect staff members from pressure by senior managers that leads to complicity in wrongdoing or fear of reprisal. training in regulations is no alternative to such protection. as of april 2008, unesco only plans an ethics unit headed by a short-term individual to be m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s recruited outside transparent procedures (appointments of limited duration (ald) contract). the director-general surprisingly chose to discuss this matter in private session at the 179th executive board (unesco 1 april 2008). thus, he circumvented a possible well-informed board debate on the merits of the existing ethics office in new york or the other models in un bodies and the private sector. he neglected to inform the board members that, if such an office were not in place at unesco by january 2008, all staff would have had the right to take questions and concerns to new york (un 30 november 2007). even the creation of a voluntary disclosure program, a pillar of all ethical public and private sector management, would still be at risk. unesco needs an i n d e p e n d e n t g r i e v a n c e h a n d l i n g s y s t e m . it has an appeals board that only provides an advisory opinion to the directorgeneral on a staff member’s attempt at recourse for an administrative decision deemed unjust. further, the board is poorly staffed (one chairperson and one full-time secretary) and its rotating members lack expertise in the complex regulations on which they need give an opinion. the board only meets twice a year and is unable to give timely recommendations to the director-general. his final decision is not bound by a time limit. the recruitment, career development and re-deployment of all categories of personnel need to be handled by unesco’s regulations. the irregular use of temporary contracts or ald to carry out core unesco functions needs to be addressed urgently. while the latter experimental contracts were introduced to provide professional staff for short-term extra budgetary funded projects, they have been used abusively to replace regular professional staff members. considerable confusion exists at this time as to who is actually responsible for what. f o r t h e g o v e r n i n g b o d i e s : the executive board was initially a group of intellectual leaders in unesco’s fields of competence. in recent years it has become largely a smaller scale general conference where members represent their countries’ political positions. some outstanding board members combine vision, integrity and intellectual excellence. others primarily represent official views of their country or regional grouping. it is difficult for bodies to reform themselves, but some members are looking at how to do just that. two critical areas for scrutiny are: (a) the actual consequences of ‘consensus’ decision-making; and (b) the possibility of external evaluation of the board’s effectiveness in carrying out its governance function. considerable backroom negotiation takes place in order to arrive at ‘consensus decisions’, frequently founded in political divergence. the secretariat also works to orient m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 27 decisions. conflicting interests thus go under the carpet but are not really resolved. thus, implementation of a consensus decision is not really facilitated. it might prove more constructive to allow voting to take place. for voting to be effective, however, the quality of the board’s governance function would also have to be tangibly improved. unesco’s current external auditors are probably the most independent in the organization’s history. they, along with the un joint inspection unit, might be tasked with such an evaluation, especially in light of the un-wide reforms underway. member states have long given the secretariat contradictory messages about what they expect. the latest education sector ‘reform’ was said to have been conceived at least in part to accelerate the ‘decentralization’ called for by certain countries. however, it is not clear that ‘decentralization’ is necessarily appropriate for an organisation whose structure is based on intergovernmental decision-making and whose mandate is intellectual cooperation. unesco has never been a field-based organisation like unicef or the undp (united nations development programme). so, a critical look at its governing bodies would have to include scrutiny of its mandate. f o r t h e f u t u r e o f u n e s c o i n t h e u n s y s t e m : unesco needs a more clearly defined mandate within the un system. it was created for intellectual cooperation to promote peace and international understanding in the world through education, science and culture sixty years ago. there is now such a multiplicity of international actors in all these areas that only a highly professional complementary role can ensure its relevance today. i modestly suggest that in the field of education, basic and sustainable reading and writing skills for all be that priority mandate. a f i n a l s u g g e s t i o n t o a l l e v i a t e s t r e s s at this critical juncture for multilateralism, un agencies need to be seen as relevant and useful. they have to demonstrate their ‘comparative advantage’ to all their members. generally, international aid and assistance are provided through bilateral mechanisms. the only future for multilateral intellectual cooperation agencies, such as unesco, seems to me to reside in clearly defining the fields within which they have a recognised history of consistent experience on which to draw, a proven willingness to evaluate critically that experience and the intellectual and ethical capacity to build on it. i have made this case in previous papers and i believe that i am in good company if i make it again. i consider that it is my responsibility to continue to do so in all the professional settings in which i find myself. m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s this paper opened with a quotation from henry david thoreau, a 19th century american philosopher whose thoughts accompanied me as a girl growing up in california and as an adult in unesco during the period of my country’s absence and its return. thoreau embodies the america that formed my values and which constitutes the best of what i sought to bring to multilateral cooperation. and i have hope for the future as a result. i a former unesco director-general is said to have given the following advice to an incoming one when asked how to deal with the state of unesco on arrival. the advice was: (a) first blame your predecessor; (b) restructure the staff organigramme and if that fails, (c) resign. ii there is a lack of clarity concerning responsibility for internal control. the internal oversight service claims that it is the responsibility of senior management. iii a single e-mail exchange between myself and the former assistant director-general for education sums up my own experience: on 22 september 2006 after a silent and puzzling summer for colleagues following the 21 june reform announcement, mr. smith sent the following message to staff: ‘each of you should have now been informed about the workshops being held for each of the headquarters’ divisions as part of the education sector reform. i would like to stress the importance of these workshops to each and every one of you, and i request that you do attend your division’s session….’. i wrote back to him: ‘dear mr. smith, what about staff, such as myself, who are no longer considered members of any division according to your reform?’. mr. smith replied: ‘dear ms. limage, this is a workshop on implementing the reform for the future. as you are retiring within 5 weeks or so, i think it appropriate that you not attend.’ m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 29 r e f e r e n c e s bush, george (2002) speech to the united nations general assembly on 12 september2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov.news/releses/2002/09/2020912-1.html cuevas, juan (18 april 2007) ecuador intervention to plenary session, 176th unesco executive board, summary records in 176 ex/sr, 1-10, p.73 at: http://www.unesco.org figaji, brian (3 october 2006) intervention by south africa, in plenary session, 175th unesco executive board, summary records of 175th unesco executive board. http://www.unesco.org figaji, brian (18 april 2007) intervention by south africa, in plenary session, 176th unesco executive board, summary records in 176 ex/sr, 110, p.91. http://www.unesco.org figaji, brian (7 april 2008) statement on behalf of africa group members of the executive board, and south africa’s statement: executive board, april 2008, pp 3-4, to be included in summary records 179th unesco executive board. graff, harvey j. (1987), the legacies of literacy. continuities and contradictions in western culture and society, indiana university press, bloomington. independent inquiry committee into the united nations oil-for-food programme. under the chairmanship of volcker, paul a. (september 2005) the management of the united nations oil-for-food programme, volume iv. report of investigation, united nations administration, part ii. http://www.iic-offp.org international reading association (april 2007) reading and writing and education for all: strategy recommendations. available from: http://www.reading.org jones, phillip (1988) international policies for third world education: unesco, literacy and development, routledge, london. jones, phillip with coleman, michael (2005) the united nations and education. multilateralism, development and globalization, routledge, london. m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s landymore, peter (18 april 2007) united kingdom intervention to plenary session, 176th unesco executive board summary records 176 ex/sr. 1-10, p.70. http://www.unesco.org limage, leslie (1987) the right to literacy, in tarrow, norma bernstein (ed) human rights and education, pergamon press, oxford, pp 81100. limage, leslie (1993) a view from the international literacy year secretariat, in freebody, peter and welch, anthony r (eds) knowledge, culture and power: international perspectives on literacy as policy and practice, the falmer press, london, pp 23-34. limage, leslie (1999). literacy practices and literacy policies: where has unesco been and where might it be going? in international journal of educational development, vol 19, pp 75-89. limage, leslie (2005a) the growth of literacy in historic perspective: clarifying the role of formal school and adult learning opportunities, background paper for the efa global monitoring report: literacy for life, 2006, available on efa web-site and cd-rom: http://www.unesco.org limage, leslie (2005b) literacy and empowerment: background and issues paper for the working group on education for all session on literacy, july 2005. http://www.unesco.org limage, leslie (2007) organizational challenges to international cooperation for literacy in unesco, in special issue entitled ‘global governance, social policy and multilateral education’ of comparative education, (guest ed) phillip jones, vol 43, no 3, pp 451-468. lynch, colum (2007) us fights off bid to punish unesco official, washington post, 6 may. http://www.washingtonpost.com mukherjee, bhaswati (3 october 2006) intervention by india to the plenary session of the 175th unesco executive board, summary records of the 175th session, http://www.unesco.org. oliver, louise (18 april 2007) intervention of the united states to the plenary session of the 176th unesco executive board, available in the summary record of the 176th unesco executive board at 176 ex/sr.1-10, p 96. http://www.unesco.org m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 31 oliver, louise (8 april 2008) executive board intervention-united states to the plenary session of the 179th unesco executive board, u.s. permanent delegation to unesco web-site, http://www.unesco.usmission.gov ortigao, ramalho (17 april 2007) intervention on behalf of the european union to the plenary of the 176th unesco executive board, summary record of the 176th unesco executive board in 176 ex/sr.1-10, p 14 – sr.2), http://www.unesco.org rausch, susan (1995) the quest for universal literacy: and who got what from international literacy year, why and how?, unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of massachusetts at amherst, available from umi dissertation services, ann arbor, michigan. séguin, phillipe (23 april 2007) proposition d’intervention devant la commission financière et administrative, (in french), limited distribution, reported in summary form in summary records of 176th executive board 176 ex/sr. 1-10 in sr 9, paragraph 1.68, p 142. http://www.unesco.org séguin, philippe (11april 2008) intervention devant la commission financière et administrative et la commission du programme et des relations extérieures, (intervention to present 179 ex/31, parts, i, ii, iii, 7 march 2008. http://www.unesco.org) smith, peter (12 march 2007) letter of resignation to director-general of unesco. published on 14 march 2007 in article entitled former csumb chief quits unesco post on website of the ksbw channel.com. http://www.theksbwchannel.com/news/11254042/detail.html steensnaes, einar (17 april 2007) intervention of norway to the plenary session of the 176th unesco executive board, summary record of the 176th executive board. http://www.unesco.org thoreau, henry david, (1854),walden ticknor & fields, boston. m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s unesco internal administrative communications: dg/note/00/11, 10 april 2000, (internal memo) dg/note/06/37, 12 july 2006 (internal memo) dg/note/06/38, 27 july 2006 (internal memo) dg/note/08/08, 4 march 2008 (internal memo) unesco (29 july 2005a) 172 ex/10, united nations literacy decade: progress report, 2004-2005, http://www.unesco.org unesco (2005b) efa global monitoring report: literacy for life, 2006, unesco, paris. unesco (21 november 2005c) 172 ex/decisions, decisions adopted by the executive board at its 172nd session, http://www.unesco.org. unesco (june 2006a) united nations literacy decade: second progress report to the united nations general assembly for the period 20052006, (prepared by leslie limage on behalf of unesco), final document available on unga web-site, http://www.un.org unesco (10 july 2006b) education for all global action plan: improving support to countries in achieving the efa goals. a basis for enhancing collective effort among the efa convening agencies, http://www.unesco.org unesco (october 2006c) 175 ex/54 and addendum, draft decisions recommended by the programme and external relations commissions, and 175 ex/55, draft decisions recommended by the finance and administration commission, unesco, executive board; 175th, 2006, http://www.unesco.org unesco (2006d) efa global monitoring report 2007. strong foundations. early childhood care and education, unesco, paris. unesco (16 march 2007) 176 ex/39 report by the external auditor on the procedures used to hire consultants for the restructuring of the education sector, paris, unesco, http://www.unesco.org unesco (16 april 2007) director-general’s written introduction to the general debate of the executive board, 176 ex/inf.17 rev, http://www.unesco.org m u l t i l a t e r a l c o o p e r a t i o n f o r l i t e r a c y l i m a g e 33 unesco (17 april 2007) draft decision submitted by algeria, benin and india concerning item 39: report by the external auditor on the procedures used to hire consultants for the restructuring of the education sector, 176 ex/fa/px/dr.4, limited distribution. unesco (27 july 2007) summary records (of the 176th unesco executive board, 10-27 april 2007)’ sr 1-10, http://www.unesco.org unesco (3 august 2007) united nations literacy decade (2003-2012): progress report 2006-2007, 177 ex/8, paris, http://www.unesco.org unesco (1 april 2008) director-general’s written introduction to the general debate of the executive board, 179 ex/inf.8, http://www.unesco.org unesco (24 march 2009) progress made in the implementation of the recommendations of the external auditor on audits already undertaken, 181 ex/34, part ii, paris, http://www.unesco.org unesco (8 july 2009) final communiqué. world conference on higher education, ed.2009/conf.402/2 paris, available at http://www.unesco.org united nations secretariat (30 november 2007) united nations system-wide application of ethics: separately administered organs and programmes, secretary-general’s bulletin, st/sgb/2007/11, http://www.un.org united states state department (24 april 2006) press release, ‘laura bush announces global literacy conference’, http://www.state.gov. vatasayan, kapila. (18 april 2007) intervention of india to the plenary session of the 176th unesco executive board, summary record of the 176th executive board in 176 ex/ssr 1-10, page 46,http://www.unesco.org vincent, david (2000) the rise of mass literacy: reading and writing modern europe, polity press, london. white house fact sheet (2002): united states rejoins unesco, the white house web-site http://wwww.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09 microsoft word ollerhead.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 1 2 0 1 2 63 ʻpassivityʼ or ʻpotentialʼ? teacher responses to learner identity in the low-level adult esl literacy classroom sue ollerhead abstract this paper explores some initial findings from a multi-site, classroombased case study research project into english as a second language (esl) literacy provision to very low-literate adult learners within australia’s language, literacy and numeracy program (llnp). the aim of the research is to report on the researcher’s observations of teachers’ pedagogical practices and to investigate the extent to which they are responsive to learners’ developing and multiple identities. introduction this report discusses data gathered through in-depth interviews with llnp head teachers and classroom teachers, which revealed their use of deficit labelling in relation to low-literate learners within their program. four of the six teachers interviewed referred to their learners as ‘passive’ and ‘lacking’ in terms of their linguistic ability. the investigation is situated within a research tradition that views the identities of learners as being multiple, varying and contingent on the way learners are positioned in society, acting as a form of ‘potential’. researchers such as norton (2000, 2001, 2010) and toohey (2000) advocate the need for teachers to engage in pedagogical practices that enhance, rather than limit the identity positions available to learners, thereby allowing them the best prospects for language learning and participating meaningfully in a range of social contexts. as well as drawing on teacher interviews, the study reports on observations of classroom teaching with the aim of investigating which pedagogical practices appeared to offer learners a broader variety of identity positions from which they could speak, read, write or listen in english. it also seeks to explore those teaching practices that appeared to limit or constrain learners’ identity positions, effectively silencing them and constraining their classroom participation. literature review contemporary educational research into the compelling relationship between identity and language learning has gathered increasing momentum over the past two decades (goldstein 2003, harklau 2000, hornberger & ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 64 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s skilton-sylvester 2000, hornberger, 2003, norton, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2010, norton pierce 1995, norton and toohey 2004, toohey 2000). within such scholarship, identity is conceptualised as multiple, varying and a site of struggle, in terms of who has better access to the target language in a society constituted by unequal relations of power (norton and toohey 2011). in language teaching contexts, this research highlights the dynamic ways in which teachers allocate certain identity positions to learners through their pedagogical practices. it also explores how learners either accept or resist these positions, and in some cases, lay claim to more powerful identities. while identity work in language education is gaining currency within an australian research tradition and within the field of adult literacy research in particular (wallace 2008, miller 2011), little empirical research has been conducted with very low-literate learners in australia. given the growing numbers of these learners in australian english language and literacy classes (mckenna and fitzpatrick 2005, wigglesworth 2003) and the linguistic and cultural challenges they present to teachers, there appears to be a pressing need to identify and document current and effective practices. this study aims to shed light on situated australian classroom practices with very low-literate adult literacy learners within the specific context of the language, literacy and numeracy program (llnp), a government-funded course with the broad aim of ‘equipping learners for the workplace’ (see department of education, employment and workplace relations site http://llnp.deewr.gov.au ). according to norton and toohey (2011) identity research, with its related theoretical constructs of ‘investment’, referring to learners’ desire and commitment to learn a language vis-à-vis prevailing classroom language practices, and ‘imagined identities’, denoting learners’ aspirations to occupy more socially powerful identities, is a useful vehicle through which to analyse language learning. this is because learners’ hopes for the future are integral to their language learner identity. for many learners, the target language community is not only a reconstruction of past communities and historically constituted relationships, but also a community of the imagination, a desired community that offers possibilities for an enhanced range of identity options in the future. (norton and toohey 2011: 415) while ‘hopes for the future’ are relevant to the personal aims of all learners embarking on the complex task of learning a new language, they are particularly salient in the case of very low-literate adult learners in australia, who are frequently newly arrived migrants, many of whom have ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? o l l e r h e a d 65 refugee backgrounds. they are thus actively engaged in navigating new and unfamiliar social, cultural and economic networks, where ‘language learner’ is but one of several new identities assigned to them. theoretical framework the shift away from predominantly structuralist studies into linguistic competence, where language was viewed as a system of idealised, syntactic rules, can be traced back to russian philosopher mikhail bakhtin (1986), who proffered a post-structuralist perspective on language. bakhtin viewed language as a dynamic, dialogic process of communication, where speakers respond to what has been said before and in anticipation of a response to come. his work focused on the social positioning of speakers and how this affected their right to speak. in a similar vein, sociologist pierre bourdieu (1977) investigated the political impact of language, in particular how the right to speak was closely linked to the ability to access power in society. furthermore, he acknowledged that access to societal power was variable and context-dependent. language could therefore be viewed in economic terms as a symbolic commodity, whose value fluctuated according to the ‘market’ or context in which it was offered. feminist post-structuralist christine weedon (1997) highlights the link between identity and language learning through her assertion that language is the medium through which individuals negotiate a sense of self identity. she also describes language as the vehicle through which individuals are granted or denied access to social networks that allow them to be heard. weedon advances the notion of ‘subjectivity’ to account for the relational aspect of identity. in her view, one is either the subject of a set of relationships, in a position of power, or subject to a set of relationships, in a position of diminished power. weedon therefore sees the way in which individuals identify themselves as being inextricably linked to their social relationships, which are constructed through the medium of language. far from being static, these relationships are fluctuating, dynamic, developing over time, building both through discourse practices and heavily influenced by social and historical factors. such a conceptualisation of identity conflicts with research into psychological traits such as motivation, explored in dornyei’s earlier work (1994), where the learner is perceived as having a unitary, fixed, ahistorical personality. norton (2010) believes that this kind of framework leads researchers and teachers to label learners with fixed and often binary characteristics, such as ‘motivated or unmotivated’, ‘passive or engaged’. a sociological view of language contradicts this by saying that learners have multiple identities that come to the fore as a result of the social relationships around them. ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the construct of ‘investment’ norton’s ethnographic study of immigrant women in canada (2000) found that motivation by itself was not necessarily a precursor to successful language learning. instead, it revealed the pivotal role that inequitable power relations played in determining her participants’ ability to access the second language. this led to norton’s conceptualisation of the term ‘investment’ (norton pierce 1995, norton 2000, 2010). investment is a construct that views learners as having complex and changing identities, which manifest differently in varied social situations. it connects a learner’s aspiration and dedication to learning a language, to their changing identity. as norton and toohey (2004) argue, even if learners are highly motivated, they may nevertheless have little investment in the language practices of a classroom that are, for example, racist or culturally inaccessible. erstwhile motivated learners could feel excluded from the language practices of such a classroom, and over time may come to be positioned by teachers as ‘disinterested’ or ‘unmotivated’. norton (2010) therefore stresses that it is important for teachers to reflect on the extent to which learners are invested in the target language practices of their low-level adult literacy classroom. more importantly, teachers should consider how they respond or adapt to those learners who appear to not to be invested in the literacy practices of their own particular classroom. reeves’ (2009) examination of an english teacher who negotiated his teacher identity in relation to english language learners (ells), offers useful insights into the way teachers position learners. she argues that teachers bring their own attitudes, convictions and discourses to bear when attributing identity positions to learners. these may include their understanding of how learners acquire a second language, their attitudes towards low-literate learners or the extent to which they are influenced by the institutional discourse surrounding low-literate learners. furthermore, such factors do not always act in learners’ favour: to the extent that teachers hold misconceptions regarding second language learning, assimilative impulses towards ells (english language learners), or biases against immigrant students or particular immigrant groups, the likelihood of teachers positioning ells in unhelpful or even damaging ways increases. (reeves 2009:39) moreover, reeves’ study also suggests that teachers may invest in specific identity positions for language learners as a way of establishing their own identities, implying teachers’ ‘self-interest’ in defining their learners (2009:37). for example, teachers who feel overwhelmed by the linguistic challenges posed by low-literate learners, may position their learners as ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? o l l e r h e a d 67 ‘lacking in ability’ to deflect their responsibility for learners making little or slow progress in acquiring the target language. human agency one of the central tenets of identity research in language teaching is that of human agency. norton and toohey (2011) note that although language learners may be deeply affected by structural conditions, such as a lack of resources, their social relationships or historical backgrounds, they also have the ability to calibrate or realign their relationships with fellow speakers. in so doing, they can assume different and possibly even more powerful identities from which to interact in the target language. this in turn enhances their potential to acquire the target language. it follows, therefore, that the extent to which teachers engage in pedagogical practices that encourage learners to exercise this agency, can be a determining factor in learners’ ultimate acquisition of the target language. human agency is also highly relevant to language teachers, in the sense that they have the ability to resist highly limiting policy environments, or situations where resources are limited or forcefully prescribed. hornberger (2003) views the power relations present in literacy teaching environments as being flexible and ‘open to transformation’ through what teachers do in their classroom practices. pippa stein’s (2008) examination of transformative teaching practices in south african township schools illustrates the ways in which both teacher and learner agency can work together to enhance identity positions and language learning opportunities for learners. stein describes the innovative ways in which teachers rediscovered culturally relevant texts and objects which had previously been suppressed under apartheid. they also used multiple modes of learning, such as linguistic, physical and sensory methods, to engage learners’ diverse and developing identities. human agency is also a factor in considering ways in which learners express resistance to being positioned in undesirable ways. these can include covert literacy activities in the classroom, such as discussing classroom matters in the mother tongue, to compensate for social losses (canagarajah 2004), or subversive learner behaviours such as failing to complete homework or neglecting to bring materials to class (talmy 2008). chief amongst these, however, is the use of silence in the classroom. duff (2002) reports on a classroom study in a multilingual canadian classroom, where english language learners avoided speaking in an attempt to protect themselves from the ‘humiliation’ of having their poor command of english compared with their native learner counterparts. in such a case, notes duff, learners’ silence was not necessarily reflective of their lack of initiative or interest, but rather an act of agency to communicate that they were more invested in the written practices of the classroom than the spoken ones. ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s similarly, white (2011:250) reports on the need for teachers to be aware of personal and cultural issues in multilingual classrooms when initiating classroom discussions as a teaching tool. he cautions that cultural and linguistic differences in learner groups can mean that not all learners are familiar or comfortable with the conventions of classroom participation. norton (2010) asserts that human agency can have a transformational impact when applied to language teaching practices that acknowledge the multiple and changing identities of learners, highlighting the learning and social benefits of such an approach. she argues the need for teachers to be critically self-reflective, in examining how relations of power in the classroom promote or limit the conditions under which learners speak, and also the extent to which learners are valued when they speak or remain silent in the classroom. when teachers offer narrow identity opportunities to learners, they often represent them in deficit terms of how they are ‘lacking’ in certain knowledge or skills, or according to what they cannot do. deficit models of literacy research carried out by tett, hamilton and hillier (2006) into the impact of the use of deficit discourse or labelling practices by teachers, reports that many learners who were labelled as ‘deficient’’ in terms of formal school literacies, struggled to shake this epithet in later years. this in turn led them to develop negative perceptions of themselves as learners in most learning situations. similarly, black and yasukawa (2011) claim that deficit labelling practices can have negative consequences for both teachers and learners alike. they suggest that the deficit approach can lower teachers’ expectation of individual learners’ literacy potential, and can also lead them to limit their efforts at providing meaningful learning support. another possible consequence of a deficit approach is what villenas (2001:4 ) terms ‘benevolent racism’, where learners are generally perceived as having a language ‘problem’, and are attending literacy class to ‘fit better into society and to learn the australian way of life’. such an attitude places very little store on the life experience and cultural capital that adult learners bring to a classroom learning situation. black and yasukawa (2011) support tett and others’ (2007) finding that deficit labelling can negatively affect learners’ concept of themselves. as taylor argues (1992:25), recognition, or the absence thereof, frequently manifested in misrecognition by others, can play a large role in shaping our identities. it is taylor’s view that individuals or social groups can suffer real damage or distortion, if the society in which they are placed reflects a debasing or derisive image of themselves back to them. ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? o l l e r h e a d 69 this would seem to suggest that ascribing deficit labels to learners can have a very real effect on teachers’ pedagogical practices, and the ways in which they are received by learners. deficit discourses are most frequently located within learning environments that ascribe to an ‘autonomous’ view of literacy (street 1984, 2001). in such settings, literacy is viewed as a body of discrete, cognitive skills that are independent of the context in which they are used and can be assessed in a uniform, systematic way. hamilton, hillier and tett (2006) liken the route by which these skills are obtained to a ladder that has to be climbed, where people are ranked from top to bottom with the emphasis on the skills they cannot perform rather than those that they are able to demonstrate. this leads to a deficit model where those on the bottom rungs are positioned as being deficient in the skills that those with more authority or societal power think they need. the australian language literacy and numeracy program (llnp) claims to provide ‘high quality, flexible training’ to its clients, to meet a growing need for vocationally oriented literacy and numeracy training (http://www.llnp.deewr.gov.au). its clients, who are mostly referred by the government’s social security agency centrelink, attend training for a maximum of 19 hours a week, in blocks of up to 160 hours, after which they are assessed using the national reporting system (nrs)1. learners are expected to make two nrs ‘improvements’ in two separate learning outcomes in each 160-hour block of tuition. it could be argued that such an approach to language assessment, in which learners have to achieve narrowly prescribed outcomes within decidedly regulated time periods, appears to lean towards an autonomous literacy framework. this review of the literature serves as a framework within which to analyse the selected research data. it also generates the core key research questions to be addressed in this study, namely : • how did teachers conceptualise the identities of their learners? • which of the teachers’ observed pedagogical practices appeared to enhance the variety of identity positions available to learners, enabling their classroom participation? • which pedagogical practices appeared to limit the identity positions available to learners, thereby constraining their classroom participation? methodology the interview data and classroom practices analysed in this paper were taken from a larger multi-site case study research project, which involved two head teachers, four teachers and 53 learners in four different classrooms located at two large vocational training colleges. ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 70 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the teachers and learners knew the researcher as a south africanaustralian english speaking former literacy and esl teacher, who was conducting the research as part of a doctoral thesis. over a period of three months, the researcher observed each classroom on six different occasions for two hours, providing a total of approximately 48 hours of classroom observation data. to complement this data, the researcher interviewed head teachers and classroom teachers and conducted learner focus group interviews, with the assistance of interpreters from the core language groups. challenges the key challenges faced by researchers using qualitative methods are well documented. schachter and gass (1996:ix) advocate having a flexible agenda when undertaking classroom-based research, because the initial goals of the project often need to be modified according to ‘exigencies of time, place and individuals’. leung, harris and rampton (2004) report on the difficulty qualitative researchers experience in presenting the sheer volume of often ambiguous data that does not conform to neat categories. duff and early (1996) group the difficulties posed by classroom-based language teaching research into institutional, ethical and methodological challenges. the researchers’ experiences of each of these challenges during the course of this study are briefly outlined below: issues of access duff and early emphasise how classroom-based education research often involves multiple stakeholders with conflicting agendas, which can make access to research sites difficult. the researcher had initially planned to conduct her field research within a major national migrant english language program. on application, she was advised that gaining access to low-literate learners within this program would be nigh impossible, as research with this learner population was the domain of a government funded research body based at a large australian university. the researcher canvassed support from nine private and public providers of literacy tuition to very low-literate learners. it took five months to gain a positive response, after several rejections citing teachers’ heavy workloads which reduced their capacity to participate in voluntary research activities. as well as institutional access, however, the researcher needed to obtain ‘buy-in’ from the classroom teachers. teachers were, after all, under no obligation to participate in the research and their co-operation in the project would place demands on their personal time with no material compensation. shachter and gass (1996) point to the necessity of establishing relationships and feelings of trust with the teachers whose classes are being observed. it took several weeks of phone and email communication and two informal visits with the teachers before they ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? o l l e r h e a d 71 reached the view that co-operation in the project could be beneficial if it highlighted the unique challenges that they faced in teaching very lowliterate learners. finally, the researcher needed to obtain the trust of the learner participants themselves. in this sense, the choice of a case study research design worked in the researcher’s favour. the fact that the classroom observations sessions were conducted over a period of three months, allowed the researcher an opportunity to gradually build a relationship of familiarity and rapport with the learners. this included accompanying two of the classes on a numeracy excursion to a fresh produce market, affording the researcher an opportunity to bond with the learners and gauge their oracy, literacy and numeracy levels on an informal level. ethical considerations yet another crucial consideration for classroom-based researchers is that of maintaining ethical research practices. in this regard, the researcher underwent a thorough university ethics approval process, with comprehensive guidelines regarding participants from refugee backgrounds. duff and early (1996) point out, however, that while institutional prescriptions are helpful, they are not always unequivocal, and that researchers are often required to make ‘on the spot’ ethical judgments. such a situation arose during the course of the study when learners began to divulge unsolicited personal details about their historical backgrounds during focus group interviews. in such instances, rather than prescribing to learners what they were allowed to discuss in the interview, the researcher responded to the information informally. she chose not to document the unsolicited data in her research report. an outline of the research design and data analysis approach employed by the researcher are outlined below. research design and methods the larger investigation within which this research report is situated, took the form of a multi-site case study, comprising four classrooms located in two different vocational institutions. the study adopts cresswell’s (1998:36) definition of a case study as ‘the exploration of a bounded system (or systems) over time through detailed, in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information rich in context’. data collection procedures included audio-recording of both classroom lessons and interviews with participant head teachers and teachers, as well as learner focus groups. interpreters from learners’ core first language groups were recruited to assist with concurrent translation. each two hour lesson was observed and scripted retrospectively from the audio recordings. field notes were kept to record informal conversations and salient observations made during each lesson. in addition, texts and ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 72 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s documents related to the program were collected. these included course program outlines, curriculum documents and media articles. this study is located within a sociocultural framework of identity that views language as being inextricably linked to identity. for this reason, interviews, focus group sessions, informal conversations and classroom interactions were analysed in terms of both learners’ and teachers’ construction of identity. field notes and documents were used as artefacts to support the analysis, and also as a means of triangulating the data to strengthen the findings. (duff 2008, nunan,1992, stake 1995). research participants the participants reported on in this study included two head teachers of the program, two classroom teachers and 21 learners. the head teachers rose and marian2 had overall responsibility for the management of the program, curriculum planning and teacher recruitment. in contrast, the two classroom teachers, paula and lucy, were responsible for the ‘on the ground’ delivery of literacy tuition to low-literate learners, as well as assessing and reporting on learners’ progress. the learners were described by their teachers as having mostly refugee backgrounds, coming from strife-torn regions of africa and asia, where their schooling was severely disrupted as a result of violent conflict and displacement. most learners had limited or no literacy skills in their first languages (l1s) and also very little experience of formal learning situations. generally, learners attended class for five hours a day, three days a week. findings and discussion teacher conceptualisations of learners’ identities in an initial interview with head teacher rose, she related the key administrative and policy challenges confronting her classroom teachers within the llnp, including the high administrative load imposed by the reporting mechanism and the unique and complex needs of very low-literate learners. rose felt that the adult literacy teaching sector as a whole was largely ill-equipped to tackle the multiple, intense and complex challenges of teaching learners with distinctly low levels of literacy and highly specific and complex social and settlement needs. she stated: we were caught, the sudanese crept up on us. maybe four years ago, none of us had taught that kind of learner. then suddenly, the sudanese were upon us, and the afghan women were upon us, and so were kind of, we were existing teachers, but even if you had expertise at teaching lower levels, they were ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? o l l e r h e a d 73 educated, they had literacy, so it’s completely different. (interview extract) head teacher marian spoke to the difficulties teachers experienced in responding to the specific linguistic and social needs of distinctly multicultural beginner classes: it’s very hard to know what they (the learners) want to achieve, because they haven’t got enough language, and we don’t speak dinka, or urdu, or farsi. (interview extract) the phrases ‘that kind of learner’ and ‘they haven’t got enough language’ are representative of the deficit discourse used by both head teachers when referring to low-literate learners in their recorded interviews. such data suggests that both head teachers conceptualised the identities of level 1 language learners in fairly fixed and unitary terms. there was little evidenced recognition of the potential for inequitable power relations to exist between highly literate l1 teachers and very low-literate l2 learners. in this way, the data suggests that the head teachers conceptualised identity in terms of reflecting the ‘essence’ of their learners, rather than a process of ‘becoming’ which would allow scope for development and change (hall 1997). level 1 classroom teachers lucy and paula demonstrated slightly different conceptualisations of learner identity in their interview responses. lucy described her teaching as very demanding and at times, ‘depressing’. she felt that her efforts to engage her learners using varied approaches and techniques were meeting with little success. this left her feeling ‘mentally exhausted’. in contrast, paula related how she relished the challenge of teaching beginner learners, viewing it as an opportunity to find out more about ‘how learners learn’. she readily acknowledged that her teaching was a dual process of analysing and presenting language according to specific learner needs, and admitted that she ‘didn’t always get it right’. instead, her teaching was a process of constant learning and self-questioning. it could be argued, therefore, that paula’s conceptualisation of her own identity as an evolving and developing language teacher facilitated her view of learners as being in the process of ‘becoming’. she thus interpreted her role as offering learners as many identity positions as possible from which they could interact in the classroom. one possible reason for the differing ways in which lucy and paula appeared to conceptualise learner identity could lie in jennings’ (1996) ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 74 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s assertion that teachers’ experiences, ideas and beliefs can determine how they work within educational policy contexts and how they exercise agency in translating policy into instructional practices. an earlier study by ollerhead (2010) related paula’s initial teaching experience with learners who had been refugee victims of torture and trauma. her strong commitment to the humanistic and social concerns of her learners led her to recognise their potential in the form of offering them various identity positions through various modes of learning. in contrast, lucy came from a far more authoritarian teaching background, where policy was strictly adhered to and observed, allowing less room for innovation and adaptation. ollerhead (2010) concluded that paula and lucy’s backgrounds played a role in their ability to exercise their human agency to utilise transformative pedagogy in the classroom. the way in which both paula and lucy positioned their learners will now be discussed in terms of their pedagogical practices, as illustrated by observation data gathered during two-hour lessons in each classroom. observed pedagogical practices paula’s lesson paula’s class comprised 13 learners, representing six nationalities. of the 13 learners, 12 were female and one was male. the learners’ median age was 39, and they had a median number of formal schooling years of two. seven of the learners reported having two first languages (i.e. they were equally proficient in both languages.) see table 1. paula’s lesson focused on vocabulary, reading and writing tasks about health-related issues. in the first stage of the lesson, paula played learners a simple recorded dialogue of a doctor-patient interaction. she then asked learners to match selected phrases from the dialogue to form complete sentences. the learners read the sentences in pairs, then together as a class. paula called out the beginning of sentences and asked learners to complete them aloud without looking at their worksheets. she then invited learners to recite the dialogue as a class, inviting them to beat the rhythm with their hands on their desks. eventually, learners were able to recite the entire dialogue without referring to the script. the teacher elicited contributions from all class members, paying careful attention to their pronunciation and intonation. throughout this stage, paula insisted that learners ‘listen, remember and speak’, rather than write. in the second stage of the lesson, paula changed the classroom dynamic by inviting learners to arrange their chairs in a large circle at the front of the room. she initiated a classroom discussion by miming that she had a headache. she elicited the question ‘what do you do when you get a ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? o l l e r h e a d 75 headache?’, to which the learners responded with various remedies, such as ‘i take panadol’, or ‘i drink water’. the teacher then invited learners to repeat the target question aloud and then individually, again paying careful attention to pronunciation and intonation. she substituted the term ‘have a headache’ with alternatives such as ‘have a stomach ache’ or ‘flu’, and elicited various remedies, such as drinking ‘flat’ coca-cola. these remedies were repeated and practised and key phrases such as ‘take panadol’ were written up on the whiteboard. nationality first languages age gender years of schooling vietnamese vietnamese 42 f 4 sri lanka tamil/sinhalese 49 f 0 sudanese denka/arabic 52 f 0 sudanese denka/arabic 46 f 0 sudanese nuba/arabic 34 f 0 sudanese denka/arabic 34 f 4 sudanese arabic 28 f 7 sudanese nuer/arabic 29 f 4 sudanese for/arabic 36 m 0 afghani farsi 48 f 0 afghani dari 44 f 3 pakistani urdu 42 f 0 korean korean 34 f 8 table 1: learner participant backgrounds in paula’s classroom learners seemed highly engaged and stimulated by this topic, frequently alternating between their first language, english and mime actions to offer various remedies to different ailments. at no stage did the teacher insist that learners spoke in english, and provided vocabulary input only where and when it was requested. learners also became distinctly animated during this stage of the lesson, enthusiastically miming traditional remedies such as picking herbs from plants and inhaling them over the smoke of a fire. this stage was also accompanied by a high level of humour, with learners expressing mock horror at culturally unfamiliar remedies, such as acupuncture in the case of the sudanese learners. discussion in this lesson, paula successfully elicited learners’ multiple identities as parents, nurturers, healers and consumers by contextualising the content using subject matter that they found interesting, relevant and engaging. learners were afforded the opportunity to integrate both vernacular and multi-modal forms of presentation into their language use, such as chanting and mime. according to norton (2010), the use of multimodal pedagogy ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s can help learners to develop ownership of the target language when it is used for authentic communication and expression, rather than viewing it as a skill which has to be learned ‘correctly’. paula’s success in appealing to her learners’ multiple and diverse identities allowed them to express their unique and situated knowledge as parents, nurturers, healers, consumers and as survivors of intense hardship. for example, a sudanese class member, with the help of an interpreter, shared with the rest of the class that she had grown up in a nomadic family of pastoralists, who moved constantly through the deserts in search of food for crops. as a result, she had developed unique navigation and environmental skills, such as where to find water, how to handle animals, and the hard work of survival during times of drought. here the teacher used her knowledge of the particular historical and social context of her learners to draw on their unique knowledge basis, which in turn made them feel valued. overall, paula’s lesson was characterised by an energetic, lively atmosphere. interaction amongst learners was generally very high, with the teacher often playing a peripheral, facilitative role, while learners proceeded with communicative tasks such as group surveys and small group discussions. the benefits of such an approach were evident in learners’ obvious enjoyment of the lesson. this was voiced by learner nancy, a young mother with little formal education but who had made significant improvement while attending the class: i love here at [college] the way the teacher teaches. she lets us laugh and enjoy to learn english. to know more, to try, i’m happy with that. (interview extract) lucy’s lesson lucy’s class comprised 8 female learners, representing five nationalities. their median age was 53, and their median number of formal schooling years was 4. five of the learners reported speaking two first languages. lucy’s lesson focused on vocabulary and writing tasks associated with leisure activities. she began the lesson by attempting to elicit a classroom discussion, using key vocabulary associated with visiting the beach and other popular australian customs, such as fishing and holding barbeques. lucy addressed several direct questions to her learners, which met with little or no response. this stage of the lesson was marked by decidedly low levels of learner participation and engagement, as can be witnessed in the following transcript segment recorded during the classroom observation: ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? o l l e r h e a d 77 1 lucy: today we’re going to be talking about ‘going to the beach’ because that’s what australians like to do. 2 lucy: how many of you have been to the beach? (9.8) 3 lucy: how many of you have been to the beach, huh? (7.9) 4 learner 1: i go with school (.) but windy, rainy. (extract from classroom transcript) nationality first languages age gender years of schooling chinese mandarin 47 f 8 kurdish kurdish 49 f 6 samoan samoan 54 f 8 sudanese madi/arabic 64 f 0 sudanese nuba/arabic 46 f 6 sudanese denka/arabic 54 f 0 sudanese denka/arabic 64 f 4 liberian madingu/arabic 47 f 0 table 2: learner participant backgrounds in lucy’s classroom in the second stage of the lesson, learners were given a worksheet, with pictures depicting different beach scenes. learners were asked to fill in the correct vocabulary in the spaces provided next to each picture, by choosing from a list of words written up on the board. there was silence in the classroom as learners attempted the activity, many of them taking a long time to correctly form the letters of each word. lucy focused on the form of the words ‘spade’, and ‘swim’, by inviting learners to repeat the different blends ‘sp’ and ‘sw’. she drew attention to the lengths of different words starting with the same first letter, such as ‘swim’ and ‘sandcastle’. discussion it was evident that lucy had spent a large amount of time and effort in producing teaching materials that presented language in a methodical and structured way. she focused on the form of language by breaking words down into their composite phonemes and syllables and presented them on different coloured bits of paper. she also invested a lot of effort in producing worksheets around lesson topics. however, the materials presented in this lesson were largely de-contextualised, presenting learners with distinctly westernised concepts such as going to a barbeque, the importance of applying sunscreen or the different types of swimwear that one can wear at ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 78 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the beach, which were culturally inaccessible to learners, many of whom were devout muslims who wore the hijab. throughout lesson 2, lucy provided most of the input in the form of protracted, rhetorical ‘teacher talk’ (see ritchie and bhatia 1996, gass 1997, lightbown and spada 2006), which met with little engagement or response from learners. the identity positions on offer to learners during this lesson were arguably narrow, consisting mainly of that of ‘the other’. learners were situated firmly outside the discourse through the teacher’s use of the third person ‘they’, as in ‘they (australians) have a barbeque’. the teacher also offered a fairly one-dimensional cultural perspective of ‘what it means’ to be an australian or ‘ozzie’ in an urban context. the lack of response from learners underscores the vast distance between the teacher’s discourse and that of the learners’ historical and social backgrounds. interviews conducted with lucy revealed her frustration and despondency at the long periods of silence that met her intense, varied efforts to engage learners with english. according to duff (2002: 312) silence may be an indicator of active resistance on the part of learners. she posits that while silence may be a practical response of language learners to protect themselves from being scrutinised or humiliated for demonstrating their lack of literacy skills, it can also be a clear indicator that learners are not ‘invested’ in the practices of the classroom. in the context of this lesson, learners’ unenthusiastic response to the topic of visiting the beach, were verbalised in learner 1’s response that she had in fact been to the beach before, ‘but it had been windy and rainy’, implying that it had not been a pleasant experience. a missed opportunity significantly, field notes recorded while observing informal learner interaction before the lesson commenced identified, in the researcher’s opinion, a missed opportunity for the teacher to capitalise and build on her learner’s rich and diverse literacy practices. minutes before the formal lesson began, a learner from liberia told the teacher that she would not be attending class the next day, as she would be going to the airport to farewell a relative who was attending the hajj in mecca. this comment generated a lot of interest from the other class members, both those who were muslim and understood the significance of the event, as well as those who wanted to know more about the hajj and where mecca was located. at this point, two learners quickly located saudi arabia on a classroom map of the world to point out the location to the rest of the group. this interaction met with little response from the teacher, who ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? o l l e r h e a d 79 allowed learners to talk amongst themselves and then called for their attention once she had finished setting up for her lesson. (field note extract) there are many plausible reasons for lucy’s decision not to act upon learners’ existing literacy practices in this situation. chief amongst these are the pressure that she related being under to teach learners the necessary skills they needed in order to ‘progress’ according to the llnp reporting standards. lucy’s professionally crafted classroom materials also indicated that her lesson was carefully planned and staged, and she was possibly eager to get maximum use from them, knowing that her learners worked at a slow pace. nevertheless, for the researcher, this ‘literacy event’ (street 2001), featuring the hajj, provided the teacher with concrete evidence of what learners were already able to do with regard to their existing literacy practices, and how they were able to draw on each other to mediate concepts that were unclear to them. it could be argued that this learner interaction could have acted as a springboard for a deeply contextualised lesson on the significance of religious ceremonies or special events in learners lives in which they had demonstrated an active interest. conclusion to summarise, the aim of this research is to explore ways in which this particular case study is relevant to existing contemporary theory on language and identity. it also seeks to add to existing debates, discussions and issues in this field of adult literacy pedagogy and language and identity research. this preliminary discussion of the research findings aims to illustrate that, perhaps unwittingly, teachers of low-literate adults can often engage in pedagogical practices that support a deficit model of literacy, which not only offer learners’ inferior identities as learners, but also prevent them from engaging in meaningful learning opportunities and more engaged and fulfilling social identities (lee 2008). it is norton’s view (1997, 2000, 2010) that the onus is on literacy and language teachers to investigate which identity positions offer their learners the best prospects for social engagement and interaction. in addition, the onus is also on teachers to identify, explore and remediate those pedagogical practices that marginalise learners through offering them limited identity positions. this paper seeks to demonstrate that, perhaps not owing to, but rather in spite of, current policy around literacy teaching, innovative teachers are still exercising their agency, in often challenging circumstances, to offer learners varied opportunities to own the target language. they do ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 80 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s this by presenting the language in meaningful and relevant contexts, which not only appeal to learners’ existing diverse identities but also offer potentially more powerful identity positions for the future. this speaks to the concept of transformative pedagogy, a driving force for many committed literacy teachers in this complex, challenging but ultimately rewarding field. references bakhtin, mikhael (1986) speech genres and other late essays, translated by v. mcgee, university of texas press, austin, texas. black, stephen and yasukawa, keiko (2011) adult literacy and numeracy as social practices: what does this mean for pedagogy? plenary presented at australian council for adult literacy (acal) conference 2011, melbourne. bourdieu, pierre (1977) cultural reproduction and social reproduction, in karabel, jerome and halsey, a. h. 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educational experiences, occasional paper, ncver, adelaide. white, john wesley (2011) resistance to classroom participation: minority students, academic discourse, cultural conflicts, and issues of representation in whole class discussions, journal of language, identity and education, vol. 10, pp 250-265. wigglesworth, gillian (2003) (ed) the kaleidoscope of adult second language learning: learner, teacher and researcher perspectives, adult migrant english program (amep), sydney. weedon, christine (1997). feminist practice and poststructuralist theory (2nd edn). blackwell, oxford. ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? o l l e r h e a d 83 endnotes 1 the nrs was australia’s nationally recognised instrument for reporting outcomes of adult english language, literacy and numeracy programs. it was replaced by the australian core skills framework in 2009. 2 pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of head teachers, teachers and learners, in compliance with ethical requirements. ‘ p a s s i v i t y ’ o r ‘ p o t e n t i a l ’ ? 84 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s microsoft word bebko et al formatted_proofed (dec 13).docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 0 n o 2 2 0 1 2 17 automatization and retention of literacy skills in adult learners james m. bebko, thomas rhee, carly mcmorris, and magali segers abstract findings from recent efficacy studies comparing literacy program types suggest that struggling adult readers often make limited to moderate gains across varied types of literacy interventions, with no specific approach consistently surpassing others to date. an alternative to comparing program types is to investigate whether there are specific characteristics or skills that vary by individual that can predict higher gains and skill retention across program type. using an experimental, prospective, longitudinal design, the present study examined the role of automatization (over-learning) of component skills involved in reading during participation in general literacy programs. on average, participants in the study gained the equivalent of one full reading grade-level after participation in programs for six months. the degree of automatization of reading skills was found to be the strongest predictor of gains made during programs; a measure of automatization was also the strongest predictor of subsequent retention of skills, months later at follow-up testing. implications for adult literacy practitioners and directions for future research related to skill retention are discussed. automatization and retention of literacy skills in adult learners it is well acknowledged that poor literacy skills in adulthood are correlated with a number of negative life outcomes. poor literacy skills can negatively impact employment opportunities, health outcomes, and civic engagement (vanderberg, pierce, & disney 2011). additionally, adults who are illiterate often experience low self-worth and symptoms of depression, an outcome that has also been documented in older adults (roman, 2004, weiss, fransic, senf, heist, & hargraves 2006). in the united states, limited reading abilities have been associated with poverty, incarceration, and low voter turnout, highlighting adult literacy as a key social issue (national center for education statistics 1993, kozol 1985). according to the 2003 national assessment of adult literacy (naal), 30 million u.s adults are considered to be at the below basic level in literacy skills, skills that allow one to search and comprehend printed text (kutner, greenberg, jin, & paulsen 2006). in canada there is a similar picture; the 2003 international a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s adult literacy and skills survey found that poor literacy skills were associated with health issues, decreased community engagement, and limited employment opportunities (statistics canada 2003). furthermore, 48% of the adult population performs below level 3 on literacy scales, the level considered reflective of competence in the current knowledge driven economy (statistics canada 2003). generally similar results, with individual variability, have been found in other countries (e.g. new zealand, australia, norway, switzerland) taking part in the international survey (e.g., satherley, lawes, & sok 2008, statistics canada 2003, walker, udy, & pole 1996). simply put, adult literacy is crucial for full engagement in society, impacting, among others, in social, political and economic areas. despite its widespread social impact, adult literacy continues to be a neglected topic in literacy research. in a recent survey of leaders in literacy research, all respondents voted adult literacy as an “extremely cold” research topic area, yet 75% felt that it deserved to be a “hot” topic (cassidy, valadez, garrett, & barrera 2010). in terms of understanding the instructional and learning processes unique to adult literacy, the field is still in its infancy (greenberg, wise, morris, fredrick, rodrigo, nanda & pae 2011, sabatini, shore, holtzman & scarborough 2011). while there is evidence that adults are able to improve their literacy skills (gombert 1994, morais, bertelson, cary, & kolinsky 1988), it is unclear to what extent these skills are maintained over time. there has been interest in determining the types of instructional approaches that would best benefit adult learners and whether these approaches are similar to those used with children. however, it is difficult to evaluate literacy programs due to the diversity of learners (e.g., gender, first language, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, reason for entering the literacy program, etc.), as well as the diversity of the instructional settings and philosophies, including, for example, self-instructional and workplace programs, community colleges, adult high schools or prisons (sticht & armstrong 1997, torgerson, porthouse & brooks 2005). there have been several attempts to evaluate efficacy, but because of the inherent diversity of learners as well as inconsistencies in methodologies, the results are equivocal and difficult to interpret and/or generalize to any given literacy program (torgerson et al 2005). even within studies, there is considerable variation in outcome, depending on which variables are being measured (venezky & sabatini 2002). four key literacy concepts are featured in various forms in the majority of intervention programs: comprehension -understanding both the literal and inferential meaning of text a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y b e b k o , r h e e , m c m o r r i s a n d s e g e r s 19 decoding -understanding the grapheme-phoneme correspondence of letters and sounds fluency -the ability to read quickly and accurately automaticity -a sub-process within fluency in which words are recognized accurately and effortlessly (national research council, 1998). three recent studies have compared the efficacy of approaches using different subsets of these concepts. greenberg and colleagues (2011) designed a randomized control study in which 198 struggling adult readers were assigned to one of 5 types of literacy intervention programs, designed to investigate the effectiveness of two main approaches: explicit teaching (e.g., directly teaching how to decode and comprehend) vs implicit teaching (encouraging selection and reading of text that is of individual interest without explicitly teaching component skills). while participants did make gains in their reading abilities, these gains were small and did not differ significantly across the intervention groups. that is, participants in each group made significant gains in their reading abilities as measured by the reading subtests from the woodcock-johnson psychoeducational battery iii (woodcock & johnson, 1990), although the size of the gains are considered small at best (.03-.18), using cohen’s (1988) standard conventions that effect sizes between .010 and .30 are small, .30 to .50 medium, and .50 and above large. when a 6month follow-up was conducted, neither intervention type nor any other variable (age, attendance, entry skills) predicted change in scores over time, and results were mixed with small gains in some areas and small losses in others (d greenberg, personal communication, november 18, 2011). alamprese, macarthur, price and knight (2011) conducted a randomized control field trial in which the treatment groups received programming that focused on spelling and decoding while comparison groups received existing, non-specialized reading instruction (i.e., varied reading instruction that emphasized spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension rather than encoding). participants in the treatment group made slightly larger gains than the comparison group on one measure of decoding skills, a word attack subtest (effect size = .19); however, there were no differences in gains in word recognition, spelling, fluency, or comprehension. this study also assessed whether participants’ background characteristics (place of birth, education, and attendance) were associated with improvement in literary skills. adult learners who were born outside of the united states (non-native learners) made greater improvements on the majority of reading measures compared to learners born in the country (effect size ranging from .01-.58), regardless of intervention type. finally, sabatini and colleagues (2011) also conducted an intervention efficacy study to determine whether specific kinds of instruction were more a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y 20 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s successful in improving the reading skills of adults. participants were exposed to adapted forms of three intervention programs that have been established for use with children: 1) corrective reading, a program that focuses on strengthening reader’s grapheme-phoneme correspondences and word recognition; 2) retrieval, automaticity, vocabulary elaboration – orthography (rave-o), which supplements phonics instruction with a strong emphasis on fluency training; and 3) guided repeated reading, which relies exclusively on frequent reading to strengthen fluency skills. similar to previous research, while participants in each intervention type made gains in their basic literacy skills, as stated by the authors, “all instructional programs . . . were relatively effective in helping students to improve their basic reading skill scores at posttest in comparison to pretest” (sabatini et al 2011:127). gains in literacy varied depending on specific skills evaluated, such that the largest gains were found in decoding skills (d = .46) and more modest gains for other skills such as word identification, reading comprehension, and sight word efficacy (d = .19-.21). overall, the findings from these recent efficacy studies suggest that struggling adult readers do often make modest to moderate gains in their literacy skills across varied types of reading interventions. however, a specific literacy intervention that seems to surpass other types in overall gains has not been identified to date. an alternative consideration is whether there are specific individual factors versus program variables that predict higher gains and skill retention. demographic variables, such as age, gender, socio-economic status, first language) may directly or indirectly be associated with success in literacy programs (e.g. being a non-native language learner in the alamprese et al [2011] study). however, specific cognitive or linguistic skills contribute importantly to literacy skills, as well as to gains and/or maintenance of new skills. for example, taylor, greenberg, laures-gore, and wise (2011) examined the relations among oral language skills, written language skills and reading comprehension in struggling adult readers. specifically, they assessed how syntactic abilities (e.g. the rules and patterns of grammatical sentences and phrases) relate to reading development, a relationship that has been previously established in children (bentin, deutsch, & liberman 1990, gillon & dodd 1995, mokhtari & thompson 2006, nation & snowling 2000). knowledge of the rules and patterns of grammar did not predict level of reading comprehension; however, other oral language skills (phonology, expressive and receptive vocabulary) did. these findings by taylor et al. (2011) identify existing language skills that are associated with better literacy in adults who are not necessarily involved in a literacy program. a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y b e b k o , r h e e , m c m o r r i s a n d s e g e r s 21 in a study of component skill associated with better literacy, strucker, yamamoto & kirsch (2007) reported that high levels of proficiency in word reading and vocabulary abilities represented “tipping points,” or thresholds that, once reached, can support a reader’s entry into moderate (beyond early high school level, or what ials termed level 3) literacy. the authors acknowledged that this level of literacy could change individuals' lives dramatically, particularly if given a burst of intensive, tightly focused instruction. however, the process or component skills involved in achieving these threshold skills were not explicated. a cognitive process that has been identified as an important mediator of the acquisition of reading skills is ‘automaticity’, or the process by which words are recognized automatically, so that attentional capacity can be directed toward resources required for comprehension (greenberg et al 2011). laberge & samuels (1974) proposed a model demonstrating that any complex skill, such as reading, consists of a variety of component processes, and when executing these skills, each component may require attention or cognitive effort. if this is the case, then such complex tasks would be extremely difficult to execute, as the total demand of content plus processes surpasses the available attentional resources, resulting in the mental effort of the activity being too great. as a result, less content can be processed and understood, and in the case of reading, comprehension abilities would be negatively impacted. however, if some of the component steps became ‘automatized’ or ‘automatic’, then fewer attention resources overall would be required to execute these complex skills. for a skilled reader, less attention is required for each component, by presumably having automatized each of the sub-skills (e.g. labelling, syntax and pronunciation/articulation, verbal reasoning) and even more importantly, having made their integration automatic as well. subsequent researchers have examined the key role of automaticity in the development and acquisition of reading skills, in a variety of populations. for example, rasinski, rikli, and johnston (2009) explored the development of reading fluency in samples of children in the third, fifth, and seventh grades. having previously established that reading rate (word recognition automaticity) is significantly correlated with reading comprehension in ninth graders (rasinski, padak, mckeon, krug-wilfong, friedauer, & heim 2005), rasinski and colleagues (2009) sought to measure the relationship between prosody, another aspect of reading fluency, and comprehension. the results of this study revealed that at all three grade levels students who demonstrated greater prosody (i.e., phrasing, intonation, pace, etc) had higher levels of comprehension. this study demonstrates, along with a growing body of research, that increased reading fluency, whether measured by prosody or automaticity, can lead to improved a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s reading comprehension (griffith & rasinski 2004, martinez, roser, & strecker 1999, biggs, homan, dedrick, rasinski & minick, 2008). similarly, bebko, bell, metcalfe-haggert and mckinnon (1998a) explored the relationship between automaticity and language proficiency in a sample of profoundly deaf children. results showed that automaticity, as measured by a rapid automatized naming (ran) task, predicted a deaf child’s effective use of language-based strategies, such as spontaneous rehearsal (bebko, et al., 1998a). these findings support the assumption that ‘ . . . a child whose language skills are not as yet overlearned or automatized must expend additional processing resources using a language-based strategy compared to a child who has automatized these skills’ (p.64). bebko (1998b) further extended the important role of automatization in explaining the literacy difficulties experienced by deaf adolescents and adults. winn, skinner, oliver, hale, and ziegler (2006) reported on two instructional approaches compared to a control condition. in the listening while reading (lwr) condition, participants silently read a passage while listening to the passage being read aloud; the repeated reading (rr) condition only required the participant to silently read the passage. in a sample of 12 struggling adult readers, greater fluency resulted in both the lwr and rr conditions, as reflected by speed and accuracy gains (i.e. more words correct per minute). this association between quicker and more accurate processing and fluent reading, regardless of the approach used, suggests a need for additional research with adults focused on individual variables, which was the focus of the present project. using an experimental, prospective, longitudinal design, the present study examined the degree to which automatization was related to outcome and subsequent retention of skills following participation in general literacy programs. reading level was operationalized by performance on a standardized measure, and change in that performance between the beginning and end of the program was measured. level of reading ‘automaticity’ was operationalized by performance on a battery of cognitive information processing measures. a one-year follow-up of learners was completed in order to measure retention of reading skills following their involvement in general adult literacy programs. it was hypothesized that the degree of automatization of reading skills at the end of adult literacy program participation would be associated with the most successful levels of achievement, and with subsequent retention of skills, months later at followup testing. method participants a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y b e b k o , r h e e , m c m o r r i s a n d s e g e r s 23 adult participants with at least a grade equivalency of 3 or higher were recruited from programs across the greater toronto area with the assistance of the ontario literacy coalition. researchers went to each classroom, explained the study and invited learners to participate in the initial screening process. one hundred and eight participants were screened, from which a sample of 47 people was chosen to continue on with the study (based on having english as their first/primary language). of the 47 who met these criteria, 6 scored over the grade 11 level during the first testing session. due to this initially advanced level of literacy, their data are excluded from the present analysis due to potential ceiling effects. thus, for session 1 the sample consisted of 41 people, whose tested reading levels were between grade 3 and grade 11 equivalencies on the canadian adult achievement test (caat, psychological corporation 1988). over the next 6 months, substantial attrition occurred due to learners leaving the various programs and losing contact with the research program. at the second testing session, or the third month of their involvement with the program, there were 30 participants, and by the third session, at 6 months, there were 21. the follow-up session consisted of 20 participants and took place several months after they left the program. the attrition did not appear to be systematic, in that it did not affect the overall demographic profile of the sample in serious ways (see table 1 for a summary of the demographics for each testing session). testing 1 testing 2 testing 3 follow-up n 41 30 21 20 mean age in years (range) 37.02 (18-64) 36.85 (18-64) 37.94 (19-64) 38.45 (19-64) gender (female:male) 32:9 23:7 17:4 16:4 mean highest grade level of education 9.58 (3-12) 9.50 (3-12) 9.38 (3-12) 9.25 (3-12) table 1 demographic characteristics for participants at testing sessions 1, 2, 3 and follow-up measures and materials reading achievement measures. the canadian adult achievement test (caat, the psychological corporation 1988, 1995) was used as both a screening measure to establish eligibility for inclusion in the study, as well as an indication of level of mastery of reading. the caat is designed to determine present educational level and includes a battery of norm-referenced, multiple-choice tests, which are separated into a variety of levels. prior to the first testing a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s session, the caat select-a-level screener was administered. this is a multiple choice test with 45 questions to determine an approximate skill level in the areas of literacy and numeracy and to determine which comprehensive caat assessment version (a, b, or c) would be most appropriate. for the purposes of the current study, the 15 numeracy questions on the screener were not scored, so people received a score out of 30. an adjusted cutoff was used to identify the version of the caat to be administered, maintaining the same percent correct used when all 45 questions of the select-a-level are included. therefore, participants who scored 21 or more out of 30 were administered the caat-c (the most difficult version) during the three testing sessions. participants who scored less than 21 were given caat-b for the three testing sessions (16 of the 41 participants). this ensured that the learners were assessed with measures suitable to their skill level, and would complete a test version that was challenging but not frustrating. in each session, reading proficiency was evaluated using the vocabulary and reading comprehension subtests of the caat. the vocabulary subtest consists of 34 multiple-choice questions that assess the knowledge and understanding of common words. the reading comprehension subtest involves reading several short passages and answering a total of 50 multiple choice questions about the content and implications of the passages. participants’ overall reading grade levels were determined by averaging their grade levels on the 2 subtests. the caat has shown to have strong internal consistency and moderate to high content validity (the psychological corporation 1988). a second, less standardized instrument was also used as a measure of more functional reading decoding skills. the realm (rapid estimate of adult literacy in medicine; davis, long, jackson, mayeaux, george, murphy & crouch 1993) uses common medical words or lay terms for common illnesses and parts of the body arranged in three lists of 22 words (full version). participants read the lists as completely as possible and were scored based on accuracy indicated by the dictionary pronunciation. this test taps into underlying reading and decoding skills. in using the realm it is assumed that if basic reading skills such as word recognition and decoding are weak, particularly in a context that is functionally relevant for everyday living, then difficulties with higher-level literacy skills such as comprehension, are likely. therefore, inability to decode simpler words on the realm suggests low comprehension and may be used to identify lowlevel readers. information processing test battery a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y b e b k o , r h e e , m c m o r r i s a n d s e g e r s 25 this battery of three tests was designed to provide multiple measures of automaticity of underlying processes involved in reading. rapid automatized naming task (ran) the rapid automatized naming (ran) task was used to measure the automatization of access to lexical information and word recognition. given that naming speed reflects the degree to which all levels of visual to semantic decoding have been automatized, performance on these types of measures has been found to be one of the primary factors associated with reading skill (e.g. lovett 1987). participants were administered three versions of the ran: 1) five words (watch, umbrella, key, scissors, comb) were listed randomly, in five rows, ten words per row, on a large sheet of paper; 2) five pictures were presented (watch, umbrella, key, scissors, comb) in a similar design as the first ran version; and 3) participants were given five words equivalent to a grade level that was one below their current level of reading. for each task, participants were asked to read as many words as possible as quickly as they could within 30 seconds. order of presentation of the versions was randomized across participants and scores for each version of the ran were calculated based on the number of words named within the time limit. the stroop test the stroop test (1992/1935) was used to provide an indication of automatization of reading and the need to inhibit the automatized response (cox, chee, chase, baumgardner, schuerholz, reader, mohr, & denckla 1997). participants were first presented with names of colours (red, blue, green) printed in 5 columns in black ink on an 8.5 inch by 11 inch sheet of paper. participants were asked to first read down the columns of words as quickly as possible. in the second task, participants were presented with xs that were printed in the colours represented by the words in the first task. lastly, participants completed a third task in which the words from the first task were reprinted in coloured ink that was incongruent with the word. for this last task, participants were required to name the colour of the ink that each word was printed in, and not read the word. participants were given a maximum of 45 seconds to complete each of the three tasks. the stroop task produced two scores: interference scores were calculated for each participant with the following formula: (stroop colour – stroop colour word) / stroop colour. therefore, the larger the score (i.e., the more interference), the more automatized their reading response. in an effort to compare their performance to how they were expected to perform, cognitive flexibility scores were also calculated for each participant by subtracting predicted interference scores from actual interference scores. a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the dual task a common means of determining the degree of automatization of a primary task is to examine its impact on a secondary task that is performed concurrently. in the present study, the impact of the primary task of reading was measured by looking at the rate of decline in the performance of a secondary task, rapid tapping on a finger tapper. the underlying assumption was that the more automatized the reading is, the less effort and attention it requires. interference should then be minimal on one’s ability to perform a concurrent, automatized task such as finger tapping. dual task interference has been noted as one of the most important operational indicators for automatization (heuer 1996). three tapping tasks were administered. participants were instructed to keep their hand flat on the tapper and use only their index finger for tapping. the first task consisted of participants simply tapping as quickly as possible for 15 seconds. for the second task, participants were asked to read aloud a passage selected from the diagnostic reading scales (spache 1981) equivalent to a grade 2 reading level, while simultaneously tapping for 15 seconds. lastly, participants were asked to read aloud a passage from the diagnostic reading scales equivalent to a reading level one below their current grade level (based on caat scores), again while simultaneously tapping for 15 seconds. a reading level of one below their current grade level was chosen to provide some challenge, yet still be within their abilities. the diagnostic reading scales ceiling at grade 7, so those participants requiring material equivalent to a grade 8 level or higher were provided with corresponding passages from the wechsler individual achievement test (wechsler 2005). administration of the latter two tasks was counterbalanced between participants. two finger tapping scores were calculated for each participant: dual task low (grade 2 level) and dual task high (grade level – 1 year). these tapping scores were divided by performance when tapping alone to reflect dual task cost – the decrease in performance when the primary finger-tapping task was performed concurrently with the secondary reading task. lower decrement scores reflect greater automaticity. procedure one hundred and eight participants were initially screened and general demographic data were collected (e.g. gender, first language, most used language at home and at workplace, previous education, reason for enrolling in the program, amount of time spent in the program to date, and the length of time they planned to be in the literacy program). participants who had english as their first language or had been using english as their primary language for at least 5 years were asked to continue in the study. at a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y b e b k o , r h e e , m c m o r r i s a n d s e g e r s 27 this time, the canadian adult achievement test (caat) select-a-level screener was also administered in order to determine which level of the caat each participant should complete for the first testing session. forty-one participants began the first testing session shortly after entry into the program. upon entry into the study, demographics were gathered as part of the first session, such as general socio-economic level, and any identified learning challenges or medical conditions. persons with identified learning disabilities were excluded from data analyses. in order to observe changes in their skills over time, participants were tested periodically with the two measures of reading achievement, along with the information processing test battery designed to determine the degree to which underlying processes involved in reading are automatized. test sessions occurred every 3 months until the participant left the program, or until 9 months passed, whichever occurred first. (because the end point of a program is sometimes only determined by the individual’s continued absence from the program, so is not always predictable, the regular testing provided an estimate of the individual’s level of skill development near the end of their program, even if departure was unanticipated). a follow-up session with the same measures was also conducted after participants had been away from the learning programs for several months (ranging from 2-8 months). results reading level achievement across time is summarized in table 2. at the first testing session, the mean reading grade level for the 41 participants, as determined by the vocabulary and reading comprehension subtests of the caat, was 6.94 (range of 3.50-10.20). for the 30 participants who were still involved in the second testing session, the mean reading grade level was 7.33 (range = 2.80 – 11.50). by the third testing session, there were 21 participants and their reading level was 8.01 (range of 3.50 – 12.60). for participants who were present for both testing sessions, grade level scores are significantly higher from time 1 to time 2 [t(29) = -2.337, p =.027] and from time 2 to time 3 [t(18) = -2.277, p = .035]. note that when comparing times 2 and 3, the n is only 19 because 2 people who participated in the third session had missed the second testing. for the 20 participants tested at the follow-up session after leaving the program, their mean reading level was 7.90 (range 4.70-12.60). for the realm, scores at testing 1 had a mean of 43.95 words (range of 8 64). at testing 2 there was a mean realm scores of 42.83 (range = 4 66), and at testing 3 the mean was 41.43 (range of 6 64). in contrast to the caat scores, these realm scores did not change a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s significantly between time 1 and time 2 [t(29) = .249, p = .805] or time 2 and time 3 [t(18) = -.585, p = .566]. initial reading grade levels of the participants at time 1 were not significantly correlated with any of the demographic variables (age, gender, educational level, amount of time spent previously in the program, or having english as a first language), or the changes in caat scores from testing 1 to 2, or 2 to 3. the initial reading grade level of the participants at time 1 was, however, correlated with initial performance at that time on ran 2, r(40) =.408, p =.008, and ran3, r(40) =.474, p =.002. ran1 was correlated, but less strongly, r(40) =.272, p =.086.. the performance of the participants across the two literacy measures, caat and realm, was strongly and significantly correlated [r(40) = .67, p <.001] at each of the 4 testing sessions. testing 1 testing 2 testing 3 follow-up n 41 30 21 20 mean reading grade level (standard deviation) 6.94 (1.91) 7.33* (2.25) 8.01* (2.42) 7.90 (2.29) reading grade level range 3.50 – 10.20 2.80-11.50 3.50-12.60 4.70-12.60 * significantly greater than previous mean reading grade level (p < .05) table 2 reading grade level for participants at testing sessions 1, 2, 3 and follow-up the 30 people who continued with the study at time 2 were compared to the 11 people who left the study after testing 1 to determine if there were any characteristics that could account for who left and who remained. however, age, gender, educational level, amount of time spent in their literacy programs prior to the start of the study, as well as scores on the caat and realm at time 1 were not significantly different between the groups (age, p = .546; gender, p = .732; educational level, p= .699; prior time in program, p = .11; caat, p = .430; realm, p = .721). correlation analyses were conducted to determine which variables were associated with level of literacy change on the caat from time 1 to time 2. results indicated that the combined score on the three ran variables at time 1 was borderline significantly correlated, p< .07, n = 30. regression analyses showed that none of the demographic variables (age, reading level, length of time spent in the program, etc.) were associated a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y b e b k o , r h e e , m c m o r r i s a n d s e g e r s 29 with literacy improvement. in terms of the information processing measures, there were no significant predictors of level of literacy change from time 2 to time 3. however, level of literacy change from time 1 to time 3 was significantly associated with dual task high (performance on the dual task while reading a passage near grade level) at time 1 (r(21) = -.521, p = .015). retention of gains in literacy skills as measured on the caat was defined by grade level at time 4 minus grade level at previous testing divided by time away (in months). of note, as aforementioned, mean reading level at time 3 (8.01, range 3.50-12.60) was not significantly different from follow up at time 4 (7.90, range 4.70-12.60). the differences were divided by time away in order to give the best estimate of the effects of time decay. regression analyses indicated that the stroop interference variable was the strongest predictor of retention, approaching statistical significance, f(1,18) = 3.177, p = .092 r = .387; the corresponding r2 indicates that stroop interference accounted for 15% of the variance in retention. this indicates that as reading became more automatized (thereby causing greater interference on the stroop task), the greater was the probability of retention. no other variables were strongly associated with retention. discussion a number of studies have compared different approaches to literacy training in struggling adult readers, and these have found the majority of approaches examined to be effective in increasing literacy skills compared to no training, but little difference among different approaches (e.g., greenberg, et al 2011, sabatini, et al 2011, winn, et al 2006). that focus on the relative efficacy of various programs has been complemented by a search for individual factors that are associated with higher gains in programs, and retention of those gains. in the present study, we followed the longitudinal progress of learners, across approximately 6 months of program involvement, plus follow-up approximately a year from the beginning of the study. the prime focus was on the individual factors that may be predictive of retention of gains versus differences among program types. in contrast to a number of efficacy studies (alamprese, et al 2011, friedlander & martinson, 1996, greenberg, et al 2011, mikulecky & lloyd, 1997, sheenan-holt & smith 2000) where small gains were seen among participants, our results were similar to sabatini and colleagues’ (2011) in that participants showed solid and significant gains in their literacy skills during participation in their varying programs. participants in the present study showed a mean gain of one grade level in vocabulary and general reading comprehension in the 6 months of participation, and the gains were maintained at follow-up, for those a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s available for testing. no demographic or other pre-study variables were associated with outcome or with early departure from programs. our specific focus for this study was to determine cognitive information processing characteristics of participants that were associated with outcome and retention of gains. automatization of component skills has been hypothesized to be associated with literacy acquisition in both children and adults. consistent with this hypothesis, the ran tasks, which are measures of automatized and rapid identification of words and pictures, were strong predictors of gains in reading grade level from testing sessions 1 to 2. in addition, regression analyses revealed that the strongest predictor of retention (approximately six months after leaving the programs) of gained literacy skills was participants’ last previous interference score on the stroop task prior to follow-up testing. the assumption in stroop testing is that the greater the interference that is experienced on the stroop task, the more ‘automatic’ the person’s reading was. this automaticity of reading was, in turn, associated with greater retention of the literacy skills learned in the program, with automaticity accounting for 15% of the total variance associated with retention. this is a strong and important finding, particularly given the small number of participants in the follow-up session (n = 20). the results of the current project show that literacy improvements and retention of gains are associated with various reading automaticity measures, and these results may provide literacy practitioners with important information about how to promote the retention of reading skills for adult learners. it appears that simply achieving a grade level or level of improvement is not sufficient. to ensure retention of skills, those skills must become automatized, otherwise the complex act of reading will continue to be too difficult a task and learners will not persist with it. for all cognitive activities, there are limited resources that can be kept activated at the same time for ongoing processing of the environment. prior to achieving automaticity levels, the mental effort required for reading is considerable, as component processes, such as decoding and organizing the decoded sounds into meaningful words, compete with efforts at comprehension of the materials for the available resources. once the component processes have been automatized, more of the available resources can be dedicated towards comprehension, correspondingly increasing the fluency of reading. the role of ‘over learning’ or automaticity on the retention of skills is clearly an avenue for future research. several important implications for programs derive from these findings. if automatization of component reading skills were measured at the outset of a program, then it may be optimal for those with more automatized skills to have the focus of the program on increasing fluency a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y b e b k o , r h e e , m c m o r r i s a n d s e g e r s 31 skills. an example of this approach would be a guided repeated reading approach (shore [2003] cited in sabatini, et al 2011). however, the present findings imply that the target for this approach should be a high degree of speed and automaticity, reflected by measures such as performance on a stroop task. interestingly, more automaticity of reading is reflected by greater interference on the stroop task, indicating that participants cannot suppress the salience of reading the text on the measure, even though the instructions are to ignore the printed words and report the colors in which they are printed. the strength of interference is assumed to result from the degree to which the participants are unable to suppress the reading response. at the same time, a program pretest that identifies participants with poor automatization skills at outset, such as low speed of responding on a rapid automatized naming task or other simple measures, would imply a different focus for instruction. the focus for these participants should likely be more towards a corrective reading approach (engelmann, carnine & johnson 1999) adapted for adults, or similar approach, with a focus on initial grapheme-phoneme associations and on word recognition. some improvement has been found in such a program with adults (sabatini et al 2011), but not differentially compared with other program approaches. for instructors who do not have the resources for preand posttesting of participants, it would be beneficial at least to estimate the degree of automatization of reading skills even informally. some examples might include: having the same passages read aloud privately to the instructor early in a program and again later and comparing the time taken; or having learners compete an informal ran-type task or stroop-type task early and late in a program. simplified and non-standardized versions of the ran and stroop are readily available through internet searches. although these are informal, such within-person comparisons would provide useful information about an individual’s progress in automatizing component reading skills. in terms of resources, this informal monitoring would, nonetheless, require one-to-one evaluation time. it is possible that attempts to compare the relative efficacy of specific programs in the past have been confounded by the presence of struggling readers with both types of needs, those with initial rapid graphemephoneme recognition difficulties, and those with better developed automatization skills, but still in need of further fluency development. random assignment to program types in studies such as those by alamprese et al (2011) and sabatini et al (2011), while advantageous for isolating program variables, may have contributed to this confounding versus assignment based on individual processing characteristics. clearer efficacy studies may result if participants are separated out by the degree of a u t o m a t i z a t i o n a n d r e t e n t i o n o f l i t e r a c y 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s automatization of initial component skills at the outset of their involvement, and the corresponding targeting of type of support to the specific processing skills of the individuals. one limitation of this study, and many other longitudinal studies, is the attrition of participants over time. our final sample was just over 50% of our initial participants (21 of 41). attrition analyses comparing characteristics of those who departed to those who remained indicated that attrition was essentially random, introducing no noticeable biases into the data analyses. monetary incentives were used to encourage continued involvement in the study; however, the incentives were based on participation in the adjunct information processing testing, not ongoing attendance at the literacy programs. although participation in the adjunct testing was based on those continuing in the literacy programs, it is unlikely that the incentives served to motivate program attendance. some wellresourced studies have maintained higher levels of retention across nine months or more of study (e.g. see comings & soricone 2007 for a review), but various factors in the lives of program participants, some predictable, some not, contribute to attrition. the present study was fortunate in that attrition appeared to be random in terms of participant characteristics. nonetheless, the retention of adult literacy participants remains an ongoing challenge, both in terms of instructional effectiveness and to ensure robustness of research findings. acknowledgements this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (strategic research grant). the authors would like to thank our partners from the ontario literacy coalition, including former director susan sussman, susan towes, and colleen d'souza, and the other members of the advisory committee, including john mclaughlin, dalia taylor, alfred jean-baptiste, sue nielson, brenda silver, sarah d'angelo, barb mcfater, and judy cole for assisting with the contacting of various programs for participation in the study. a special thank you also to the program instructors, as well as the participants themselves, and to jonathan weiss, jenny demark, and jessica schroeder for assistance with data collection and early manuscript preparation. references alamprese, judith, macarthur, charles, price, cristofer and knight, deborah (2011) effects of a structured decoding curriculum on adult literacy learners’ reading development, journal of research on educational effectiveness, vol 4, no 2, pp 154-172. bebko, james, bell, 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original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: st. clair, r. 2019. what we do with words, and what they do with us. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 27:1, 1-6. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6959 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/lnj invited paper (non-referreed) what we do with words, and what they do with us ralf st. clair* university of victoria, canada *corresponding author: ralf st. clair rstclair@uvic.ca doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6959 article history: received 10/5/2019; revised 11/26/2019; accepted 11/26/2019; published 12/20/2019 in the thirty years during which i have been involved in literacy work, i have observed a phenomenon that has caused me some concern. there has been an increasing tendency to consider literacy, and therefore the field of literacy education in which we are engaged, in an increasingly restricted form. i do not want to suggest that the late 20th century was a golden age for anything (the haircuts were pretty awful). however, it was the period when paulo freire was arguing convincingly that literacy was one of the most essential and human ways in which we shaped the world, marshall mcluhan was suggesting that the medium is the message and harvey graff was developing incisive historical insights into the effects of reading and writing. there was not just optimism about the potential of literacy education, there was an expansive imagination about what it could all mean. there was a feeling that literacy education really, really mattered. my key message in this presentation is that it still does, perhaps even more. yet the start of the 21st century has been less motivating and less exciting, in some ways. i’ve been thinking about why. my tentative conclusion is that we have accepted limitations on our field that perhaps we did not have to accept. restriction and elaboration as educators, one of the aspects of our work that attracts a fair amount of attention is curriculum, and there are many ways of looking at it. language is a key aspect of many of these approaches. basil bernstein (1977), a professor at the institute of education in london, brought curriculum and language together explicitly in the idea of codes. he suggested that there are restricted and elaborated codes governing language and knowledge. the restricted codes are used locally, like glaswegian dialect, and work efficiently for everyday life. they declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj mailto:rstclair@uvic.ca did not, however, easily permit bridging of contexts and engagement with ‘big’ questions. elaborated codes are more universal and tend to bridge contexts rather than define them. for bernstein access to these codes was related to the class position of the speaker; workingclass people had access to restricted codes, whereas middle-class people also had access to elaborated codes. the example bernstein (1977) used to illustrate these ideas was pictures of food. when shown pictures of several foods, all the children in the study grouped them according to what might be eaten together: fish, peas, chips and chicken, carrots, potatoes. however, middleclass kids could group them in a way the working-class kids were far less likely to do: they recognised that peas, carrots and potatoes were vegetables, and fish and chicken were meats. the elaborated code gave these children access to another level of categorisation. while bernstein’s work has been open to considerable criticism for a sort of language determinism, not to mention the idea that restrictive codes represent an incomplete workingclass semantic system (barbour 1987), i believe that the idea of restricted versus elaborated conceptions of the world is a useful one. restricted literacy if we examine literacy education over the last few years, i believe that there has been a tendency towards a more restricted model. there has been some really excellent work going on around the world, such as the series of practitioner research projects supported by the australian council for adult literacy and university of technology sydney a few years ago (cf. cameron 2010). however, the overall trend, i suggest, has been towards a narrower understanding of what language generally, and literacy in particular, means. part of this has been an increased emphasis on vocational ends for literacy, and the idea that only learning contributing to work has value. in the uk this is especially clear in england, while scotland has retained a broader approach. it would be silly to say that work does not matter, but it would be equally silly to say it’s the only thing that does. one clear indication of this trend is the 2016 incorporation of the national institute for adult and continuing education (with a storied history back to 1946) into the learning and work institute. contemporary approaches to human capital also tend to reflect very simplistic assumptions about the relationship between people’s abilities and productivity. the key assumption, that increased literacy and numeracy skill levels in the population increase gdp, is unproven and problematic. for example, we don’t know if it is better to have a few highly skilled people or lots of medium skilled people (at least in economic terms). yet this simple human capital model underpins many of the initiatives we see. one of the most interesting, in my view, is the programme for the international assessment of adult competencies (piaac). this huge international operation is an evolution of the international adult literacy study of the 1990s. over time definitions have changed, and the study describes itself in more sophisticated ways. but there are two aspects of restricted thinking here. the first is that the piaac allows people to say things like ‘16.4% of adults in england are at level 1’ as if the meaning of that very complex statement were obvious. the second is that the model of literacy at the heart of piaac (and ials) is remarkably unnuanced. basically it boils down to whether the respondent can spot a key piece of information in a distracting text, and higher literacy skill means being able to deal with more distractors, or spot more information. that’s it. no writing, very little comprehension and no critical st. clair literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 2 thinking. not the literacy we would necessarily hope for in a modern democracy (st. clair 2013). it follows from the perspective laid out here that adult literacy education does not make a lot of economic sense. put simply, from a societal level, investing in the education of somebody with 35 potential years in the workforce will be a better investment than putting the same amount of resource into somebody with 15 years of work ahead. following the logic of a restricted view of literacy leads to a restricted view of human potential. one of the reasons literacy education has ended up in this restricted space is our own willingness to make the restricted argument. by accepting the premise that the value of education, especially for adults, lies in the workplace, we have opened the door to an ever narrower conception of value. i must admit that, even in retrospect, it is hard to see how our field could have responded differently to external and global pressures, but i do think we have to acknowledge that our own actions have contributed to the dominance of restricted literacy. elaborated perspectives will not go away in the world beyond adult literacy more restriction around language has not been the norm; in many ways the experience has been diametrically opposite to this, with increasing understanding and acknowledgement of the significance of words—both written and spoken— to the world. there has been an explosion of engagement with language, both spoken and written. one great example of this is the internet. a few years ago, there was a prediction that the internet would kill off literacy in ‘reading at risk’ by the us national endowment for the arts. subsequently this has proven to be unfounded. literacy demands, which pre-figure literacy skills, have grown substantially as people read on the web, write on email, texts, blogs, twitter, and so on, and critically manage information. this could be considered as a golden age of literacy, with vast amounts of text being produced and consumed around the world in many languages and formats. only part of it is vocational; a lot of it is people living text-mediated lives in ways they would not have before. another intriguing phenomenon has been the reclamation of words. one of the most significant examples has been the change in ‘queer’ from a pejorative reference to nonbinary people to the title of a respected and insightful body of research. there are many other examples where people have turned words that were historically markers of oppression into labels signalling positive aspects of their identity. some canadians may find it embarrassing, but jordan peterson lives in toronto. over the last few years he has become a superstar of the alt-right, mainly by criticising ‘politicalcorrectness’ (murphy 2016). his celebrity status began when he refused to use gender-neutral language to address students in class despite canadian human rights law forbidding discrimination by gender expression. in peterson’s case a very simple aspect of language use— the refusal to use ‘they’ in the singular—has led to very significant repercussions and a career as a right-wing you-tube ranter. more positive examples include the reclamation of the original name for one of the most important and famous rocks in the world. the increasing importance given to uluru as a name reflects an increasingly respectful acknowledgement of the importance of the original inhabitants of a place and their culture. we are going through a similar process in canada, with the victorian era names of places (usually based on a white male political figure or ‘explorer’) are being replaced with the original names. this is hugely significant to indigenous what we do with words, and what they do with us literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 3 communities, but more than this, it is hugely significant to all of us. it values the history that made us in a way few other acts can. the point of these examples, and there are many more, is that language and literacy have all sorts of meanings and all sorts of consequences. restricted perspectives on literacy as a single continuum or a single set of skills don’t just miss the point, they don’t know which end of the pencil to find it at. language and text are wildly complex and significant practices that cannot and should not be rendered uni-dimensional. another theoretical model organisational sociologist mary douglas spent many years considering how different forms of human society created and maintained order. her ideas coalesced around two poles. the first she called purity. this refers to activities and artefacts that enhance the social order. purity can be attached to attributes like punctuality, paying bills on time, or ensuring that everything adults learn increases their employability. for douglas the opposite end of the spectrum is danger, the things that chip away at the certainties, the predictability of life, that challenge us to remember that life is not all order or cleanliness or peace. some things do not fit the plan, and we need these aspects of life as much as we need the pure things (douglas 1966). i consider the ascension of restricted views of literacy, despite all the evidence that they are missing out huge chunks of our lives and experience, a victory for purity. it creates a tidy narrative that ties up loose ends, and explains a great deal about our lives and relationships. we don’t need to wonder about the random and troubling aspects of our lives. it tells us that people are poor, or unemployed, or badly housed because they are lacking the literacy skills needed to be productive. not only does it enshrine deficit thinking— the idea that people do badly in our society— it provides a mechanism to explain how it works. from there it is a short step to accepting the situation, and embracing the notion of pure capitalism. the case for danger in september 2019 we saw a lot of protests and other activity around the climate. the young people who were taking part had grasped something profound and fundamental about human society. this was simply that language changes everything. by calling for euphemisms like ‘climate change’ to be replaced with ‘climate emergency’ (thunberg 2019) they were not calling only for a difference in language; they were calling for enormous shifts of perception and power. these young activists have understood something that the rest of us need to remember. words are dangerous. as we think about the future of our field, i would like to invite all of those involved to think about ways in which they can move beyond views of literacy that limit it to a restricted code system. we should be deeply uncomfortable with the claim that literacy is a single set of skills that an individual possesses or does not possess. we should not be accepting the idea that literacy is a capability that can be implanted into marginalised folk to ‘make them successful’ in the labour market. we should be pushing back against the notion that it is up to individuals to compensate for forms of knowledge which systems have denied to them. it is essential to repeat and reinforce the value—and the values—of literacy learning as contributing deeply to the opportunity to critique our collective way of living. this does not represent an aspiration to purity and restriction. instead it is a claim of elaboration and danger. in order to understand why this matters as much as it does it is necessary to return to some work that is getting older now, freire’s (1972) analysis of the st. clair literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 4 importance of literacy to marginalised people around the world. while many aspects of this analysis have been rendered less pressing by the passing of time, the central idea that literacy is part of our development as humans is still important to remember. on the face of it, the centrality of literacy comes from the ability to understand and manipulate symbol systems, but i think we have to be careful about this argument. it can easily lead to the view that non-literate cultures and non-written languages are less significant. i believe that a more profound approach is to recognise that in western society written language is our dominant symbolic system. where some cultures learn through stories, dance or art we have come to use written squiggles. all the values of cultural continuity, critique and challenge that are richly represented in stories, dance or art are vested in literacy in our case. that, i believe, is why literacy is authentically dangerous. language is the way that ideas and perspectives change, and that the world transforms. literacy is an especially powerful form of language, both in terms of the effects it brings about and the social power vested in it. if you want to change social relations you must start by changing linguistic relations. that’s why acknowledging the name uluru has such significance, and such danger. it raises questions about who is in charge and who has the right to name the land, and those are never restricted or pure questions. doing dangerous things it is fair to ask what all of these arguments actually mean. there are three areas which are useful to consider in terms of what might change. the first is perspectives, by which i mean the models and measures we bring to literacy. we know that the piaac approach is highly limited, and that any idea of a simple relation between literacy and productivity is not really supported. it would be incredibly useful to revisit some of the questions raised by the older theories i have referred to here in order to understand what the contemporary version of the problems looks like. language and literacy remain sources of power allotted to some people and denied to others, and one implication of this understanding is that literacy is a social phenomenon and not an individual one. measurement, therefore, becomes a way to examine patterns across society rather than an evaluation of individual worth. there is an opportunity to think about literacy not in terms of a quantity of some thing that people possess different amounts of, but in terms of what can be done, and not done, with the forms to which people have access. the second area to consider is policy, which is inevitably linked to resources. the idea of a meaningful link between literacy education and employment could be abandoned as a rationale without actually losing anything. an alternative approach is to view access to literacy and language capabilities as human rights which any civilised society should be supporting in its citizens as a matter of course. it is not possible to know with any confidence what the outcomes of literacy learning will be, but it is possible to be confident that they will be maximised when there is commitment to inputs that make literacy provision viable and capable of development. policy does not stand by when people in any modern society become ill due to poverty; neither should we permit alienation from literacy due to lack of resources. in terms of practice, it seems to me that the exercise of danger manifests in two ways. the first is ensuring that the attainment of literacy comes through the exercise of the learners’ stories, and the opportunity to exchange the contours of our lives with those of others through language. the second is focusing on the critical potential of literacy, by which i mean the ways it is possible to work within sign systems to understand the privilege they encode. the benefit what we do with words, and what they do with us literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 5 of approaching literacy as an elaborated code is the invitation it provides to understand the levels of benefit and cost to those who enter the system. a new word, a new idea, or a new story are never innocent, because they carry with them a place and a history. practices that acknowledge and question that background are never restricted, but also they can never be pure. conclusion in concluding i’ll return to the title and the implied questions. what do we do with words? we encode our lives and our experiences. what do they do with us? they shape how we understand our lives and experiences. we can think of these in a shallow restricted way or in a deeper and more elaborate way. i hope that literacy educators choose the latter, but as i have suggested, it may carry danger with it. there is danger for programs, which may be seen as too political when they acknowledge the power of language and the language of power. it can be dangerous for us as practitioners, when we stray too far from the beaten path of employability. but it will not add to the danger of the learners’ lives; they already understand the complexity of language and literacy. that’s why they want to learn more, and that’s what they deserve from us as educators. i hope our profession can be as willing to walk with danger as each of our learners is each time they dare to learn. references barbour, s (1987) dialects and the teaching of a standard language: some west german work, language in society vol 16, no 2, pp 227-224. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500012276 bernstein, b (1977) class, codes and control: volume 3 towards a theory of educational transmissions (2nd ed), routledge & kegan-paul, london. cameron, l (2016) the salience of diversity in foundation skills: contexts, pedagogies and research, national centre for vocational education research, adelaide, retrieved 23 nov 2019 from https:// www.ncver.edu.au/research-and-statistics/publications/all-publications/the-salience-of-diversity-infoundation-skills-contexts-pedagogies-and-research douglas, m (1966) purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo, routledge, london. freire, p (1972) pedagogy of the oppressed, penguin, harmondsworth, uk. murphy, j (2016) toronto professor jordan peterson takes on gender-neutral pronouns, bbc news, retrieved 24 nov 2019 from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875695 st.clair, r (2013) the limits of levels: understanding the international adult literacy surveys, international review of education, vol 58, no 6, pp 759-776. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-013-9330-z thunberg, g (2019) no one is too small to make a difference, penguin, london. st. clair literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 6 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500012276 https://www.ncver.edu.au/research-and-statistics/publications/all-publications/the-salience-of-diversity-in-foundation-skills-contexts-pedagogies-and-research https://www.ncver.edu.au/research-and-statistics/publications/all-publications/the-salience-of-diversity-in-foundation-skills-contexts-pedagogies-and-research https://www.ncver.edu.au/research-and-statistics/publications/all-publications/the-salience-of-diversity-in-foundation-skills-contexts-pedagogies-and-research https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875695 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-013-9330-z microsoft word ackland_formatted_230613.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 1 n o 1 2 0 1 3 59 at play in the space: the concept of ʻthe social practice approachʼ in the scottish adult literacies field   aileen ackland   abstract this paper focuses on scotland’s policy response to the international adult literacy survey (1994-1998) and the ‘grand experiment’ (merrifield 2005) to implement a social practices perspective of literacies. this radical perspective, derived from the new literacy studies (nls), has profound implications for pedagogy and is promoted in scotland as ‘the social practice approach’. the paper begins with a discussion of the distinctive developments in scottish policy in the context of the international interest in adult literacy. the rhetorical claims made in scotland are then examined through a study which used a methodology drawn from personal construct theory (pct) to explore how practitioners understand ‘the social practice approach’. this research found little connection between the theoretical concepts of the new literacy studies and practitioners’ interpretations. dissonances in the data highlighted power issues between policy and practice. in the latter part of the paper, bernstein’s (2000) ideas about how theoretical knowledge is translated into pedagogical knowledge are used to explore the dissonances further. the paper concludes that there is an ideological conflict of purpose within the discourses of adult literacies in scotland and that the critical pedagogy implied by the new literacy studies is also necessary within teacher education if practice is to be transformed in response to the radical social theory. introduction – adult literacy and numeracy (aln) in scotland in the international context between 1994 and 1998 an international program of literacy surveys was organised by the organisation for economic cooperation and development (oecd). overall, more than 20 countries participated in the three cycles (1994, 1996, 1998) of the program known as the international adult literacy survey (ials). the aims of the surveys were to provide a comparison of levels of literacy between countries and to contribute to an understanding of the ‘demand and supply of skills in the global, knowledge based economy.’ (oecd 2000: iii). the oecd’s mission is to influence policy in the direction of economic development and the ials was explicitly a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s intended to inform lifelong learning policy in the participating countries. despite critiques of the survey (e.g. street 1996), the results received wide publicity, usually as a set of shock statistics in relation to illiteracy and emphasising the deficits to be addressed in a specific country. in response to the surveys’ ‘…demonstration of the intersection between literacy skills and national economic performance…’ and the oecd’s claim that ‘…strategies to build literacy skills …are pivotal for developing comparative national advantage’ (oecd http://www.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/display.asp?lang=fr&sf1=di&st1=5l mqcr2kbr45) there was a resurgence in governmental interest in adult literacy and numeracy (aln) in many developed countries. consistent with this trend, aln became a policy priority in scotland in the decade 2000-2010. much of the scottish government’s reaction was similar to that of other european countries and in line with statements from the european commission (commission of the european communities 2001, 2006 and 2007): an investment of funding to provide free and varied opportunities for learning, the targeting of particular groups identified as disadvantaged, a call for raised standards of teaching and learning and the formalisation of the aln sector for greater accountability (scottish executive 2001). despite such consensus, scotland has attracted interest from practitioners in other contexts for what has been seen as a less prescriptive government response, and what is now known as ‘the social practice approach’: in 2001 the scottish executive’s adult literacy and numeracy in scotland (alnis) report made 21 recommendations for building a world-class adult literacy and numeracy service for scotland. this strategy has been internationally celebrated for its learner-centred, social practice approach. (scottish government 2010: 6) merrifield’s assertion that england should ‘look north for inspiration’ (2005) met, however, with some concern amongst scottish academics who cautioned that their situation should not be viewed through ‘rose tinted spectacles’ (maclachlan 2006: 32, ackland 2006, parkinson 2006) and drew attention to tensions in the scottish experience. critiques of the scottish situation acknowledged the breadth of the definition of literacy adopted i.e. the ability to read and write and use numeracy, to handle information, to express ideas and opinions, to make decisions a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 61 and solve problems, as family members, workers, citizens and lifelong learners. (scottish executive 2001: 7) each were positive about the congruence of this definition with understandings of literacy derived from the new literacies studies (nls) (see for example street 1984, gee 2008) and elaborated in particular by the lancaster school (see for example: barton 1994, barton and hamilton 1998, barton, hamilton and ivanic 2000). the nls view of literacy as situated, socially constructed and inherently ideological challenges what street refers to as the autonomous model (street 1984), which assumes literacy to be a value and context free individual cognitive competence. a social practices perspective, on the other hand, perceives literacies (plural) as multiple, emergent and situated in particular social contexts (barton et al. 2000). the critiques concentrated on the tensions between these two conflicting models of literacy within scottish policy. whilst it was recognised that the language of scottish policy was distinctive in being informed by nls, and that the proposed ‘…lifelong learning approach…’ was in contrast to a ‘…deficit approach…’ adopted by other countries ‘…where the individual is encouraged to take a test that will demonstrate a failure to meet a set standards…’ (scottish government 2010: 14), critics were wary of the economic drivers behind the rhetoric, and each identified threats to the implementation of the approach in practice. maclachlan concluded that the social practices discourse in scotland was ‘aspirational’ (maclachlan 2006: 34). by 2008 there had been a widespread adoption of the discourse of ‘the social practice approach’, yet hillier (2008) still warned that it was not clear to what extent the social practices perspective of literacies was actually transforming practice. with these doubts in mind, the study presented below aimed to explore how scottish adult learning practitioners’ conceptions of practice relate to the theoretical perspective apparently advocated in policy. the purpose of research with practitioners the purpose of the study was to explore how practitioners understand the concept of ‘the social practice approach’ to adult literacies education. despite the previously noted concerns about conflicting discourses within policy and doubts about change in practice, by 2008 ‘the social practice approach’ had become an established orthodoxy in scotland. talk of ‘doing the social practice approach’ seemed to be everywhere, unquestioned and unquestionable. rarely was the approach explained; the assumption seemed to be that everyone knew what it was. however, hearing ‘the social practice approach’ used as a defence against innovations in practice such as more a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 62 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s group work, greater use of ict, participative activities for numeracy teaching, assessment, i began to wonder whether those adopting the term shared the same understanding of its pedagogic implications. the social practices perspective – primarily a theory of literacies in society – emphasises the inherent power relationships affecting uses of literacies in a social context and illuminates the situated nature of literacies acquisition. though not a theory of education, it has profound significance for adult literacies work. the assertion of nls that constructions of literacy are inevitably ideological brings to literacies development work essential questions about what and whose purposes are served by particular literacies. it requires a critical stance which engages not merely with the how of literacies development but more fundamentally the whys. crowther, hamilton and tett highlight this dimension of aln work in the title of their edited book, powerful literacies (2001). they demonstrate in a variety of practice contexts how work with literacies learners requires practitioners to be aware of power relations and to critically examine with learners sociocultural literacies practices. ‘a critical pedagogy is required which takes account of the power relationships affecting use of literacies in everyday life’ (hillier 2008: 6). gee (2008: 45 49) provides a very clear illustration of such a critical approach in his examination of the ‘aspirin bottle problem’. his analysis of the warning text on an aspirin bottle demonstrates how teaching the ‘reading’ of such a text must go beyond decoding to engage with questions about drug companies, social relations and the structure of society. despite the rhetoric of ‘the social practice approach’ in scotland, evidence of this aspect of aln work was sparse (smith 2005, tett and maclaclan 2008). if practice was not changing to reflect this radical understanding of literacy, how were practitioners who claimed to be ‘doing the social practice approach’ interpreting the meaning of this concept? as a teacher educator involved in the education of aln tutors, i was concerned with how the theory of social practices was currently being construed in practice in order that that i may better appreciate the challenge of how the radical theoretical understandings of the nls could be translated into transformations in practice. the need for professional development of aln practitioners is a consistent theme in the discourses surrounding ials. in this, scotland was no different from other countries and commitments to provide professional development led to the creation of a new teaching qualification designed to raise standards of teaching and learning in the sector. this teacher education program – tqali – was developed and delivered by a consortium of higher and further education institutionsii. a work-based learning program, it brings together practitioners from a range of educational contexts across scotland. an explicit aim of the program is to a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 63 foster a community of practice in which new understandings of practice can be co-constructed (see ackland and wallace 2006). in my role as curriculum and research leader of the scottish tqal consortium, i had both the opportunity and responsibility to explore with program participants, experienced aln workers in current practice, changing understandings of the new theoretical perspective. the research presented here was located in the context of the teacher education program and therefore combined the research aim of enquiring into theories in practice with professional development objectives. research participants all participants (75) in the pilot tqal project of 2008 2009 were aware of the research and involved in some way in the generation of and reflection on data. participants included the program development and teaching team, practice-based student mentors and students on the program. a core group of nine students and two mentors was recruited to contribute to the most intensive dimension of the study, which included structured interviews with individuals. students on the tqal program had a wide variety of backgrounds and practice contexts. their narratives of how they had come to work in aln, elicited by an initial autobiographical activity, revealed that none had proceeded intentionally and by a linear route; rather their narratives were marked by serendipity and entrepreneurial responses to changing circumstances e.g. my choices in the main have been taken for the benefit of my family. secondly, because i was asked if i wanted to do the jobs/volunteering and each time i could not think of a reason to say no to a new adventure. i have never thought i needed to make sense of the journey! (extract from a student autobiography) these were not paths, but crazy paving, in which individuals often sustained multiple roles and identities simultaneously. although most had come to aln ‘by way of the proverbial ‘backdoor’’(benn 1997: 19), some had previous degrees, either in a vocational subject area or in community education. consistent with benn’s (1997) analysis of the characteristics and influences on adult educators, their varied experiences included vocational education, higher education and community education. different forms of adult education emanate from different positions on an ideological continuum which includes traditions such as liberal, radical and functional (benn 1997, papen 2005); given the patchwork of people’s backgrounds it a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 64 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s seemed likely that their philosophies of practice would ‘draw upon many influences and fragments of ideologies’. fragments of ideologies or ideas may be absorbed by the educator to create a mental ‘mosaic’ which may be unsystematic, incoherent and subject to influence. (benn and burton 1995, cited in benn 1997: 21) the core group of 11 interviewees was selected from the wider group to represent the most common contexts for aln in scotland – further education colleges, local authority community learning services, voluntary organisations as well as geographic spread. operating within these contexts it is likely that practitioners’ mental mosaics included the different expectations within these settings; the idiosyncrasy of each his/her story, however, pointed to much greater complexity. methodology personal construct theory (pct) methodology has been used in a range of contexts for research into the constructs underpinning professional practice (e.g. day, pope and denicolo 1990, solas 1992, pope and denicolo 1993, hillier 1998). similar to the notion of mental mosaics, kelly’s (1995) pct asserts that in reaction to their experience of the world, individuals develop implicit theories which then influence their own responses and behaviours. these implicit theories, ways of making sense of the world, are built from a system of constructs. construct systems consist of a set of tacit binaries (e.g. happy/sad) against which an individual evaluates the things they experience. according to kelly, if we can appreciate a person’s ways of construing we can begin to understand the meanings they are attaching to things. pct provides a qualitative methodology and structured techniques to facilitate the exploration of people's interpretations and the ways in which they are constructing, from their experience, models of the world which influence their future behaviours. denicolo and pope (2001) describe a variety of ways of exploiting methods derived from pct to facilitate the transformation of professional practice. most are based on kelly’s repertory grid technique (fransella and bannister 1977) – a method of structured dialogue which aims to elicit the personal construct system underlying a person’s response to a specific domain of experience. these techniques derive from a psychotherapeutic context and thus facilitate a person’s exploration of their own construct system. they are therefore a means of engaging professionals in reflective practice through which the tacit is articulated, can be examined and is thus more amenable to change. a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 65 for this research study, methods derived from pct, and in particular repertory grid technique, were chosen then as a means of surfacing the conceptual constructs tutors held in association with ‘the social practice approach’. i hoped to be able to explore their implicit models of teaching and learning in a context in which ‘the social practice approach’ is the avowed model. unlike standard research methods, the repertory grid claims to elicit people’s ways of construing without influencing them with the researcher’s own preconceptions. this was an important consideration given my own place in the research, as tqal curriculum leader and program tutor. the terminology of kelly’s personal construct theory appears to privilege the individual, yet the theory’s assumption about persons is of people in relationship with others (kalekin-fishman and walker 1996: 13): ‘for kelly, people are both fashioned within and fashioned of the complex interpersonal worlds they inhabit.’ although kelly (1955: 55) asserts that ‘persons differ from each other in their construction of events’, his theory also encompasses ‘commonality’ (1955: 90) in ways of construing. repertory grid technique can be used to explore how people are both similar and different in the way they make meaning of their experiences. in this research i was interested in the extent to which understandings of ‘the social practice approach’ were similar and different across a group of diverse practitioners. a fundamental tenet of kelly’s theory is ‘constructive alternativism’ (1955: 72), that there are always possible alternative interpretations. meaning making is an open ended exploratory process in which there is no one truth but ‘the search for first causes or final explanations is always in abeyance’ (stronach and maclure 1997: 26). carl (1999: 19) explores the intersections between pct and post modern thought and concludes that: postmodernism brings to kelly an understanding that the construal process of people is highly discursive and powerladen, while kelly provides a subject-specific and processoriented framework that facilitates a re-working of the modernist subject. moreover, these shifts in the way kelly’s theory is regarded reflect my own shifts in the research process – from a focus on the individual understandings of a ‘social practice approach’ to aln, to an examination of the similarities and differences in construing amongst a group of practitioners drawn from a variety of professional contexts, to an interest in the discursive and power laden construal process. a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s research method data was gathered by means of a variety of pct inspired techniques, some of which were incorporated into teaching and learning activities within the tqal program. these included: autobiographical writing; a group activity sorting practice-related terminology; an individual writing activity in which students were required to spend 5 minutes writing their own definition of ‘the social practice approach’; reflective discussion in the virtual learning environment (vle). central to the study, however, were in-depth repertory grid dialogues with eleven geographically dispersed and differently experienced practitioners. each repertory grid interview lasted approximately two hours and took place in the work context of the respondent. each respondent was required to articulate the distinctions they make between different instances – or ‘elements’ – of practice. in this case, a range of individually relevant elements was generated by means of a generic set of questions designed to elicit details of everyday aln tutoring practice. the range of elements was therefore unique to each interview. these elements, written onto cards, were then shuffled and presented to the respondent in random triads. in response to each triad, they must explain how they perceive two elements to be similar and the third different. for example, presented with a triad of elements of adult education practice such as: the respondent might group them as below: they would then be prompted to articulate how the use of the internet and dialogue are similar, as adult education practice, and how using worksheets differs. the characteristic shared by two elements becomes one pole of a construct, how the third differs forms the contrasting pole. for example, the construct and its contrast might be decontextualised / relevant to learners’ interests. by eliciting bipolar constructs, this technique goes beyond what a person affirms about practice and explores the delineating alternatives that they tacitly hold. worksheets dialogue use of the internet use of the internet dialogue worksheets a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 67 in the course of an interview, random triads are presented until the dialogue seems to have exhausted the variety of main constructs. this is usually evident through increasing repetition. a matrix is then constructed out of the elements and the bipolar constructs that have emerged. each element is rated from 1-5 on the continuum between the contrasting poles of each construct. these ratings are used to discern the relationships between elements and constructs. in the patterning of elements and constructs, the grid technique attempts to map the personalised meaning each individual is making of concepts of practice. each interview generated a unique repertory grid and a recording of the dialogue in which constructs were elicited from the triadic process. the initial grids were subjected to analysis using online webgrid software (http://tiger.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/), which sorts the grid so that similar elements and similar constructs are clustered together. ‘dendrograms’ show the degree to which components of the grid are related to one another, given as a percentage similarity score. the webgrid software also presents the data as a concept map showing the relationship between both elements and constructs in geometric space. for example, through these instruments, in one instance we were able to begin to see how the practitioner’s practice belief in making use of relevant materials in the classroom is linked to an underlying theory that learning should be relevant to the learner’s interests and connect to their purpose. being non-judgmental was also seen to be closely linked, for this practitioner, to the cluster of elements and constructs which they associate with ‘the social practice approach’. at the conclusion of the repertory grid interviews, a variety of representations of the anonymised grid data were shared with research participants for group reflection. this allowed us to consider how interpretations within the group compared. data contained in the grids was combined with the breadth of data generated through the various other reflective activities mentioned previously. extracts of the recorded dialogues were transcribed and the texts of these and the group activities were subject to both micro-linguistic analysis and transcontextual analysis (rampton 2007); transcontextual analysis looks for traces of official texts – such as curriculum guidelines – in practitioners’ reflections. in the course of the transcription process, as i grappled with the challenge of turning talk into text, i began to experiment with poetic transcription (lapadat and lindsay 1999) as a means of being more overt about the process of construction inherent in transcription or indeed any representation of the data. working with the data in this way foregrounded language and discursive practices. a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s finding dissonances in the data a number of dissonances emerged in my analyses of the data. evidence of sameness/generality/conformity jarred with evidence of difference/distinctiveness/othering. same? terms used frequently in informal discussion in relation to ‘the social practice approach’ – such as ‘learner-centred’ and ‘relevant’ – appeared in some form in each of the grids. utilising learner’s experience client centred connecting to learner’s purposes learner directed relating to learner’s social interaction revolving around learners relevant to the individual in tune with the learner appropriate to context personalised teaching interesting to learner relevant constructs learner centred led by what the learner wants learner’s requirements responding to each individual open to what learner wants person centred responding to the individual relating to unique individual utilising learners’ experience relationship comes first learner takes control figure 1: examples of constructs relating to relevance and learnercentredness the program activity in which each student was asked to spend five minutes writing their definition of a social practice approach also generated data in which these terms predominated. for example: ‘my understanding of the social practice of literacies is that it's directed by the needs of the learner’ 'learner-centred…making the learning process relevant’ a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 69 'creates a relevant link to the learner’s life. it individualises learning' ‘it’s taking the learner’s perspective into account and, if appropriate, adapting my practice to their social norms.’ within this discourse, the learner (singular) tends to be isolated in the learning environment but linked to their individual everyday life, which is unquestioned. the relationship between teacher and learner is generally interpreted as one of service. in the grids, underlying ideas about the need for the tutor to be non-judgemental and non-directive are clustered with notions of relevance and appropriateness. one participant, reflecting on the collection of grids, was ‘unsurprised at the majority of the tables as they fit the current 'preaching’ and definitions regarding the scottish system’. the group’s initial reflections on the data concentrated on the apparent conformity. their reactions to this were mainly negative: ‘they are so uniform that they disappoint! are we being churned out on a conveyor belt of aln tutors?’. different? the grid process elicits bipolar constructs. by paying more attention to the discriminations made by individuals through the contrasts given to the constructs of ‘learner-centred’ and ‘relevant’, differences in understandings of these constructs emerged. for example, ‘relevant’ is contrasted variously with: ‘directive’, ‘treating everybody the same’, ‘ignoring learners’ interests’, ‘decontextualised’. these contrasts imply different understandings and implications for teaching and learning. conversely, then, an analysis of the principal componentiii of each grid presented a wide variety in what mattered most to individuals. principal component harmony revolving around learners more equal footing relating to unique individual empowering knowledgeable relating to learner’s social interaction relationship first energetic reflective broadening figure 2 – variation in principal components a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 70 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s a theory that a ‘social practice approach’ should focus on harmony rather than conflict in the teaching and learning situation and a theory that focuses on empowerment are likely to lead to distinctively different approaches. the group activity in which students were asked to articulate distinctions between a variety of terms which have been applied to aln also provided data in which interpretations were confused and contested on the basis of the personal experience of the speaker. the activity used a similar triadic process to the grid interviews. for example, presented with the three terms and asked to say how two are different and one similar, the arguments not only drew upon personal experience of different regimes of aln work but used reference to the authority statements of policy documents. for example, the quote below makes reference to the strategy text albeit based on a partial understanding of its content. adult literacies and functional skills are similar because the alnis report drew attention to the importance of functional skills. in all this data, the criticality implied by the ideological view of the new literacy studies is not strongly represented. where traces of a more critical pedagogical stance do appear they can be linked to aspects of an individual’s background influences and thus could be part of their personal mental mosaic. for instance, one tutor who spoke of the importance of connecting learning ‘to the bigger picture’ had recently completed a social science degree and qualified as a community education professional. in her autobiography she noted her experience of higher education as having been transformative. general? taken overall, the constructs could be read as representing views of the effective teacher in the particular context of ‘the social practice approach’. however, as snapshots of what constitutes an effective teacher, the repertory grid data is very similar to data from contexts which do not espouse a social practices theory of literacies, such as data from the school sector (hattie 2003) and from other adult learning contexts (battell et al. 2004 (canada); hamilton and hillier 2006 (england), milana and larson 2009 (denmark)). in all of these studies, effective teachers: recognize and respect difference, are sensitive to context, reflective and improvisational. adult basic education adult literacies functional skills a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 71 as bernstein (1990: 169) has asserted, ‘the most outstanding feature of educational principles and practices is their overwhelming and staggering uniformity independent of the dominant ideology of specific nation states’. distinctive? despite the similarity with other sources of data, difference is a recurring theme in the transcript data. the practitioners’ identity is asserted as different from school teachers and different from english practitioners, who are perceived to use what the practitioners refer to as a ‘deficit model’: ‘the social practice approach’ is described as ‘flexible’, ‘not prescriptive…like skills for life’iv. this claim to distinction through ‘othering’ (maclure 2003: 3) is discordant with the pervasive sense of feeling obligated to conform to the distinctive scottish model: you say these things because that’s the message at the moment its almost that y’know the message that’s the party line that’s what you’ve got to do you’ve got to be on message (poetic transcription of an extract from a recorded dialogue with repertory grid interviewee 4.) in the group reflection on the repertory grid data, participants were surprised at the apparent consensus on the characteristics of ‘the social practice approach’, noting that the tensions they experienced in their varied work contexts in putting this into practice were not reflected in the data. one person, who works in a further education college suggested that institutional constraints in her context meant that ‘in reality the social practice approach doesn’t work’. however, she felt it was not permissible to admit this. there was broad agreement with one interviewee’s sentiment that ‘… in this day and age you’d get stoned to death if you’re not doing the social practice model’. the ‘social practice approach’ as discourse in these shifts between generality and difference an opening (maclure 2003: 81) emerged in the data, in which i began to question the discursive practices in the construing of ‘the social practice approach’. initially, i was looking for connections to social practices theory in practitioners’ constructs; from this position different ways of construing a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 72 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s could be perceived as ‘treasonable sentiments’ (maclure 2003: 102), betraying a wrong understanding of social practices theory. my reassurances that in the dialogues with practitioners i was not judging as right and wrong versions of ‘the social practice approach’ were to some extent disingenuous. certainly the expectation was that i would make such judgements: ‘how ultimately are you going to analyse whether a particular person’s view of social practices approach is the right one?’ (dialogue transcript). in a variety of ways, participants betrayed their anxiety that they would be found out. my powerful position, as the apparent arbiter of meanings could not be wished away. instead, i began to attend to the power dynamics; to the way in which, in the construing of this thing ‘the social practice approach’, identity claims (maclure 2003: 10) were asserted through the division of self and other, and legitimated by reference to authoritative texts. in the dissonances in the data, i began to view the term ‘the social practice approach’ as a floating signifier (foucault 1977 cited in hjort 2009, 114) detached from what it appears to signify: ‘a phrase the most important meaning of which is that it does not mean anything’ (hjort 2009: 114). free to mean anything, its function is to signal certain positions within a set of power relations. the practitioners’ constructions of the term ‘the social practice approach’, focusing (as shown above) on the relationship with the individual learner and their immediate social context appeared detached from the social practices theory of nls with its emphasis on criticality. the term was linked to principles of practice which are generalisable across countries and sectors, yet individual interpretations suggested wide variations in the detail of aln practice. despite the apparent distinctiveness of the scottish experience, the practitioners in my study appear similar to the ‘eclectic pragmatists’ of hillier and hamilton’s (2006, 116) research in england. detached from theory, the term was strongly associated with policy and institutional relationships; it was used both to signal conformity to policy expectations e.g. ‘the social practice approach is about ensuring that all learning that goes on in our service is in line with the curriculum framework and embedded in the learner’s vocational interests’ and to assert professional elitism. most puzzling, is the sense that practitioners associate both empowerment – ‘as an aln tutor in scotland i feel i have greater freedom to try new strategies’ – and disempowerment with the adoption of ‘the social practice approach’: ‘there are learnt off rote answers when it comes to a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 73 the social practice approach adult learning the scottish way you’re not allowed to think about whether you necessarily agree with it that’s the framework we work in and you have to because it pays your money’ (poetic transcription of an extract from a recorded dialogue with repertory grid interviewee 10.) whatever was going on here seemed to be about power and discourse in a space between theory and practice. a space in which the concept of ‘the social practice approach’ had become detached from its theoretical roots. to understand this better, i turned, then, to a model for analysing the processes by which theoretical knowledge is translated into pedagogical knowledge – bernstein’s (2000) concept of the pedagogic device and, in particular, the recontextualising principle (p. 33). the recontextualisation of knowledge bernstein’s sociology (2000) is concerned with understanding the reproduction of social inequality through education. initially focussed on language at the micro-level of educational practice, his work ultimately sought to analyse the relationships between micro level discourse and macro level power relations; to explain ‘how power relations are transformed into discourse and discourse into power relations’ (2000: xxv). over many years, in which theory evolved in tandem with research, a comprehensive model emerged of the principles which relay ideological interests through educational discourse and generate stability across different systems. in this model, educational reform is understood as an ideological struggle (bernstein 2000: 66). bernstein’s concept of the pedagogic device provides, then, a framework to examine relationships between theory, policy and practice at a time of educational reform. hamilton (2001) regards it as useful in her exploration of the development of discourses of literacy flowing from ials. chen and derewianka (2009) also draw on bernstein’s models a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 74 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s to explore change in the broad field of literacy education in england, usa and australia. both papers are interested in the power relations within the field of literacy education. drawing particularly on the style of analysis in the latter paper, what follows is an analysis of the scottish context of aln which might help to understand the dissonances in my data. bernstein’s model presents the relationships between theory, policy and practice as those between three distinct fields. theory is produced in the knowledge production field (kpf) but is then filtered through a recontextualising field. the recontextualising field he divides into two: an official recontextualising field (orf) and a pedagogic recontextualising field (prf). this division will be discussed in depth subsequently. the level of practice is termed the knowledge reproduction field (krf). it is here that knowledge becomes pedagogy. of particular interest is the ‘recontextualising principle’ which describes how discourses are delocated from the knowledge production field and relocated, transformed, in the field of reproduction. competing sources of knowledge within the field of knowledge production bernstein makes a distinction between hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures. chen and derewianka (2009: 225) illustrate that knowledge structures are horizontal in the field of literacy which draws upon a variety of disciplines such as psychology, sociology, linguistics; ‘a range of competing theoretical approaches each with its own specialised grammar’. in this horizontal structure, new literacy studies, with research methods drawn from anthropology, is a ‘new language, a fresh perspective, a set of new connections, and a set of new speakers’ (bernstein 1999 in chen and derewianka 2009: 226). its view of literacy as a set of context contingent social practices is in competition, in particular, with perspectives from psychology which sees literacy as a set of cognitive skills internalised in the individual. as chen and derwianka point out (p. 229) the boundaries between literacy education and special needs education are blurred and the strong psychological base of the latter continues to influence adult literacies education. for example, in scotland, concurrent with the rhetoric of ‘the social practice approach’, a medical model of dyslexia prevails; tutors are trained to recognise ‘…symptoms of dyslexia’, which ‘…cannot be cured’; ‘…coping strategies and aids may be more useful than literacy teaching…’ (dyslexia awareness in adult literacies work trainer’s pack, 2008: 24. http://www.aloscotland.com/alo/viewresource.htm?id=822) this knowledge with its foundation in psychological research circulates in the field within a set of institutional relations in which dyslexia a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 75 advocacy organisations and experts have powerful influence. there is little attempt to bring it into relation with the different kind of knowledge produced by the new literacy studies, which might lead to a critical examination of the ideological purposes of diagnosis. with respect to aln in scotland, then, the knowledge production field is horizontal and a mix of conflicting theoretical approaches. nls, as a new perspective, is in competition with knowledge from other dominant disciplines such as psychology. the psychological perspective was evident in my data in some practitioners’ insistence on the uniqueness of the individual and the requirement to appreciate their distinctive learning styles and needs: 'to me, a social practice view of literacies is recognising the uniqueness of fellow human beings; where they are at and where they want to be.’ (response to program activity in which each student was asked to spend five minutes writing their definition of a social practice approach.) hybridity in the recontextualising field as has been previously stated, in bernstein’s framework the knowledge recontextualising field is divided into an official recontextualising field (orf) and a pedagogic recontextualisng field (prf). the first includes the government and departments of education and the latter, teacher education departments, education researchers, development agencies. bernstein suggests that the nature of the relationship between the two fields of recontextualisation is key in times of curriculum change (bernstein, 2000: 115). in scotland this relationship is complex. although policy statements such as the alnis report (scottish executive 2001) clearly emanate from a government position in the orf, and the academics teacher educators and researchers – who have been involved in the scottish initiative operate mainly in the prf, other actors within this field are hybrid policy actors (ball 2008) operating across the orf and prf. learning connections, the ‘development engine’ established by the scottish executive, is an extreme example. created in 2003 within communities scotland – a government quango – in 2007 it moved into the directorate of education and became part of government with responsibility for policy as well as practice development. a review then led to its removal from government to learning and teaching scotland (a non-departmental public body responsible for reviewing curriculum and providing national guidance and advice to the education system) which has since amalgamated with her majesty’s inspectorate of education (hmie) to form a new agency called education scotland. in each of these transformations, learning connections’ relationship to policy and practice has been a confusion of top down policy implementation and grassroots development and advocacy of practice (maclachlan 2006: 33). as a central a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 76 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s actor in the recontextualisation of knowledge its role has been crucial but conflicted. the hybridity in the discourse of scottish policy was noted in the introduction. the broad definition of literacy derived from a social practices perspective clashes with a deficit model in which those in need of upskilling are to be identified by ‘spotters and referrers’ (scottish executive 2001: 2) and remediated. the evidence of ‘need’ is derived from the ials, which as hamilton (2001: 183) points out draws on the psycho-metric measurement tradition of psychology. although common knowledge identifies alnis as the point at which ‘the social practice approach’ took hold in scotland, the term ‘social practice’ never appears in the text. the concern addressed by alnis is consistent with the concerns of other european countries, in the context of a global education field in which international comparators are strong policy drivers in the competition for national economic success. alnis ‘sets a goal to exceed world class levels of literacy and numeracy’ (p. 1) in determining the purpose, the why of literacies education, the knowledge drawn upon by government is primarily economic. in its discussion of pedagogy, the how of literacies education, alnis ( scottish executive 2001: 27) derives the following list of characteristics ‘from consultation with the field [my emphasis]: for almost all of the respondents appropriate learning was equated with • learner-centredness • being aware of the learner’s needs and circumstances • using materials and delivery techniques appropriate to those needs’. as hamilton and hillier demonstrate (2006: 109-124) the notion of learner-centredness has underpinned the rationale of aln practice in the uk since the 1970s. they describe how this principle evolved out of a number of practicalities of aln work and draws on a variety of theoretical traditions which pre-date the radical theory of nls. the ‘learner-centred’ approach advocated in alnis is derived from practice experience. the ‘lifelong learning’ approach, in which learning is ‘relevant to learners lives and goals’ is focussed on getting learners through the ‘learning gateway’ (scottish executive 2001: 25); this being seen as the most effective way of getting to the most people who need it and developing their skills. ‘the social practice approach’ to pedagogy is therefore promoted for its efficacy in meeting policy purposes. it is an approach derived not from the knowledge of literacies produced by nls, rather from the experience of practitioners who are ‘eclectic pragmatists’ (hamilton and hillier 2006: 116). a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 77 in the orf, initially then, there is scant use of the knowledge from nls. traces, such as the definition of literacy, are recontextualised within the more privileged knowledge and the original knowledge is transformed. for example, whilst a social practices perspective sees literacies as ‘…complex capabilities…’ consisting of ‘…knowledge, skills and understanding…’ (national development project 2000), in policy discourse this is reduced to skills and occasionally knowledge, ‘understanding’, which is connected to the more critical aspects of social practices theory is erased. though the term ‘the social practice approach’ does not appear in the initial policy documents, it is prevalent in texts produced by first the literacies development team and then learning connections. the 2000 literacies in the community (lic) pack, written by the literacies development team refers to ‘a social practice perspective’, the curriculum framework (2006) produced by learning connections (crucially in consultation with academics and practitioners), talks of ‘a social practice model’ and by 2010 the term ‘social practice approach’ is evident throughout practice facing texts. within the prf then, knowledge produced by the nls is privileged. bernstein asserts that, ‘it is a matter of some importance to analyse the role of departments of the state in the relations and movements within and between the various contexts and their structuring fields’ (bernstein 1981: 363). my argument is that, oscillating between the orf and prf, the hybrid policy actors of the development team/learning connections take to the government remedial project knowledge of nls. in their developmental role they have worked with key academics, such as tett (for instance, on the curriculum framework, 2006), who are closely associated with the knowledge produced from the nls. their position inside government ties them, however, to the government’s project and its implementation. in alis 2020 (scottish government 2010), the refresh of alnis, the term ‘social practice approach’ does appear but as a technology for the more effective implementation of the economy focussed project: ‘it [literacies] is most successfully taught using a “social practice” approach’ (2010: 7). by alis 2020, the assumption that the purpose of literacies education is for economic growth is unquestioned. ‘the social practice approach’ is linked to the quality of ‘a world-class adult literacy and numeracy service for scotland’ (alis 2020: 6). as milana and larson point out in a report which reviews adult education in the european area, ‘the term ‘quality’ mainly seems to refer to the usefulness of different adult education and training offers for the labour market.' (milana and larson 2010: 3). a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 78 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s cultural diversity in the knowledge reproduction field my research explored discourses circulating in what bernstein delineates as the knowledge reproduction field (krf). although the terminology used in practice appears to signify a direct connection to the knowledge produced by the nls, the conclusion i draw from my research is that the term ‘the social practice approach’ is used with a variety of meanings and as a defence, justification and demarcation within a context in which the purposes of adult education are contested; it is a floating signifier. as noted earlier (and explored at more length in ackland 2011), the reproduction field of adult literacies education is characterised by diversity – in terms of contexts, institutional cultures, traditions and practitioner backgrounds and beliefs. these differences are mainly ideological and are distinctions of purpose. up until very recently an unregulated and fragmented sector, it has been described as ‘antitheoretical’ (shaw and crowther 1995: 206), wary of theory and invested in the pragmatic knowledge of experience. the theorising of literacy within the nls is both radical and complex, circulating in highly academic texts in a domain and language foreign to most practitioners. despite the common usage of the language of social practices, it has been our experience as teacher educators within the tqal project that few practitioners have accessed any of the primary literature of social practices theory. when they do so as part of their studies, they find it difficult to understand and in some cases experience it as deliberately obfuscatory in both language and concept. consistent with bernstein’s framework, then, the knowledge of literacy produced by the nls reaches the reproduction field only through the filter of the recontextualising field and mainly through authoritative texts whose authorship is often opaque. authoritative texts such as the literacies in the community pack, alnis and the curriculum framework were those most often referred to in my data. although these texts might be seen as belonging to either the orf (alnis) or the prf (lic and curriculum framework) they are connected, forming a genre chain (fairclough 2003: 34) in which discourses are recontextualised and transformed. they are intertextual – each makes reference to the others and seeks to derive its authority from this relationship. the effect is overtly cumulative – an effect which obscures the conflicts both between and within texts. the hybridity of actors within the recontextualising field makes it even more difficult to disentangle one from another, to separate the official project from the pedagogic project. in this confusion, the critical knowledge of literacies produced by the nls is emasculated into a technology in the service of a project of neoliberal capitalism. a lifelong learning, learner-centred approach is advocated because it works. as this is recontextualised into ‘the social practice a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 79 approach’ what it works towards remains unquestioned. although the prf texts are more explicitly informed by the knowledge of nls, their intertextuality with the orf texts reframes this knowledge within the official discourse and its ideological purpose. i suggest that the dissonances in my data may be indicative of the tensions experienced by practitioners as they are subjected to this confusion of discourse and it is mediated by their own beliefs and values. this notion is further illustrated through exploring two key constructs – learnercentredness and relevance – which had emerged in the data. ‘a space in which ideology can play’ (bernstein 2000: 30) the constructs of practice that were most prevalent in the research data were learner-centredness and relevance. these echo the directions for ‘effective practice’ listed in alnis. in alnis the evidence for the effectiveness of these practices is attributed to consultation with the field. legitimation is derived from the pragmatic knowledge of practice – not the kpf. although the elaboration of effective pedagogy in subsequent prf texts, such as the curriculum framework, is more closely aligned with nls and more explicit in its use of such theoretical knowledge, the practice advocated in alnis retains its authority perhaps because it affirms practitioner’s own knowledge. as this knowledge of practice is recontextualised in the prf literature in the discourse of social practices, practitioners are further validated by the distinctiveness this accords their practice within a broader field of education in which the new knowledge of nls is not acknowledged. the discourse of ‘the social practice approach’ is recognised internationally as distinctive; the pride (one might even go so far as to say sense of superiority) evident in my data could be put down to the fact that for many scottish practitioners they are merely doing what they have always believed is right. and you don’t really need to have a wonderful theoretical grasp of it it’s just… to me it’s natural (poetic transcription of an extract from a recorded dialogue with repertory grid interviewee 5) however, this alignment between policy and practice is about the how of literacies education. in my data, the sense of enforcement was strong. practitioners seemed to feel obligated to something powerful that a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e 80 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s they distrusted. their anxieties were betrayed in frequent phrases such as ‘churned out’, ‘stoned to death’, ‘on message’, ‘learnt off rote answers’. bernstein (2000: 5-15) identifies different types of classification and framing within the process of recontextualisation: in weak classification, subject boundaries may blur and with weak framing, teachers and learners have more control over what is taught. in the recontextualisation field in aln in scotland, classification could be considered weak as a broader conception of literacies increasingly blurred the distinctions between literacy, numeracy, ict and social skills programs. the aln curriculum framework established some key principles but did not delineate what was to be taught, leaving teachers and learners with a great deal of autonomy. given this apparent flexibility, the sense of coercion in my data is puzzling. perhaps, however, the sense of obligation is to a purpose, an ideological project which is not their own. the control of the project is not weak, it is strong. the varied nuances of practitioners’ constructions of ‘the social practice approach’ within the data confirm perhaps the mental mosaics of practitioners in this field. unexamined, these may be as benn (quoted above – 1997: 21) suggests, ‘subject to influence’. without an articulated ideology of their purpose as educators, they may be co-opted to others’ projects. implications for teacher education and curriculum change gee (undated) warned that the language of radical social theories may be recruited to differing political aims; in his view, the new literacy studies must include the analysis and use of language to negotiate, advocate and resist the projects of diverse interest groups. i have suggested that in scotland the language of social practices theory has been recruited to a political aim incongruent with its radical perspective. a social practices perspective of literacies implies a critical pedagogy. if practice in scotland is genuinely to change in line with this radical theoretical perspective it is imperative that aln practitioners are conscious of the discursive project and aware of the conflicting projections within it. a critical pedagogy of teacher education is called for in which the curriculum is a form of cultural politics (giroux and mclaren 1987: 266). such a curriculum would link ‘radical social theory to a set of…practices through which student teachers are able to dismantle and interrogate preferred educational discourses…which have fallen prey to a hegemonic instrumental rationality’(giroux and mclaren 1987: 278). such an approach to teacher education is, i suggest, very different to the strategy for professional development for aln practitioners advocated by the european union; a set of key competences has been developed a t p l a y i n t h e s p a c e ackland 81 (buiskool 2010) which it is suggested should inform training courses in order to raise the quality of practice. the competences are a list of activities – they are exclusively concerned with the how of aln practice. we were fortunate, in scotland, to be developing a teacher education program prior to the emergence of these competences. the research described here was an attempt to follow gee’s advice within the curriculum. the techniques derived from pct proved to be powerful reflective processes; applied to an analysis of language they facilitated the exploration of the apparently natural in ways which exposed the discursive process of constructions of practice. in illuminating similarities and differences, the research process forced individuals to articulate their own ideologies and encouraged an examination of the ideological nature of aln practice. as practitioners began to reflect openly on the power relationships in aln work they engaged anew with critical understandings of literacy: …we need to keep stretching the boundaries, doing the requirements of the job but always, always broadening this out to include a critical analysis of what we are doing, why and in whose interest – if we don't challenge these and put forward alternative visions then we are not active participants in anything, we are merely deliverers of governmental economic policy and we limit not only what we do but what literacies are! 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teaching qualification: adult literacies ii the scottish tqal consortium consists of the universities of aberdeen, dundee & strathclyde, cardonald and forth valley further education colleges, and two representatives from the field. it is contracted by scottish government to develop and deliver the new tqal qualification. iiithe principal components are arrived at by an iterative statistical analysis of variance ie the extent to which the ratings in each row of the grid are similar to each other. at each iteration, the pattern which accounts for the largest amount of variation is identified and removed until all the variability has been accounted for. the principal component represents a key pattern in the grid. (jancowicz 2004, 127-131) iv skills for life was the name of the national aln strategy and framework in england at this time. microsoft word 03_4809_mchardy chapman_24.2_final © 2016 janet mchardy and elaine chapman. this is an open access article distributed under the  terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the  material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any  purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.  citation: literacy and numeracy studies 2016, 24(2): 4809,  http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i2.4809  l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 2 2 0 1 6 24   adult reading teachers’ beliefs about how lessskilled adult readers can be taught to read janet mchardy and elaine chapman abstract despite large-scale interventions, significant numbers of adults worldwide continue to have problems with basic literacy, in particular in the area of reading. to be effective, adult reading teachers need expert knowledge at practitioner level. however, practices in adult reading education vary widely, often reflecting the individual beliefs of each teacher about how an adult can learn to read. in this study, phenomenographic analysis was used to identify categories of approaches to teaching adult reading, used by a group of 60 teachers in western australia and new zealand. four approaches were identified: reassurance, task-based, theory-based and responsive. it is argued that for teachers to become effective and consistent in responding to learner needs, they must understand their own beliefs and the consequences of these. the identification of different approaches in adult reading education is an important step in this process. introduction full participation in 21st century society and the labour market requires the capacity to accumulate knowledge and to develop and maintain a broad range of skills (australian industry group 2013, satherley and lawes 2007). literacy skills are fundamental in this process. there are numerous social and economic benefits, both for individuals and communities, associated with possessing strong literacy skills (e.g. national research council 2012, perkins 2009, tertiary education commission 2010). low adult literacy levels have been linked to unemployment, social isolation, poverty and broader health issues (chesters, ryan and sinning 2013, miller, mccardle and hernandez 2010, perkins 2009). reading is a key literacy component. difficulties in reading persist through the lifespan, contributing to ongoing low literacy levels (australian bureau of statistics 2013, national research council 2012). the importance of reading has prompted various efforts to address low reading skills across many countries, and various large-scale, organised, and funded national projects have been established (e.g. australian industry group 2013, mcshane 2005, national research council 2012). despite considerable investments in adult reading programs reports of insufficient impact and progress appear consistently within the literature (australian industry group 2013, palameta, myers and conte 2013).   a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s     m c h a r d y a n d c h a p m a n 25   explanations for the limited impact of these adult reading programs are multi-layered and complex. reading is an intricate cognitive skill (binder and borecki 2008). largescale programs rely heavily on teachers who often receive minimal training to enable them to respond to the assortment of reading difficulties which may present (sabatini, sawaki, shore and scarborough 2010). while no theory or model of cognitive processing is complex enough to account for all that is occurring when someone reads, there is agreement that skilled reading involves competent co-ordination of the reading components of decoding, word recognition, vocabulary knowledge, fluency and reading comprehension (national research council 2012, sabatini et al. 2010). given the complexity of the reading process, to be effective, adult reading teachers must be informed about the reading process and be able to respond to specific reading-skill needs in their teaching (condelli, kirshstein, silver-pacuilla, reder and spruck wrigley 2010, national research council 2012). despite this, with generic, minimal training often provided, adult reading teachers’ practices vary substantially (kendall and mcgrath 2014), commonly reflecting their own idiosyncratic beliefs about how adults learn to read (beder, lipnevich and robinson-geller 2007, belzer 2006, greenberg et al. 2011, van kan, ponte and verloop 2013). in the teaching context, and for the purposes of this paper, belief is taken to be ‘an attitude consistently applied to an activity’ (eisenhart, shrum, harding and cuthbert 1988:54). teacher beliefs are generally seen as precursors to teacher action (fives and buehl 2012) and teachers teach, receive, and respond to new ideas about teaching, in ways that relate to their existing beliefs and practices (abernathy-dyer, ortlieb and cheek 2013, bandura1995, gove 1983, kuzborska 2011, pajares 1992). the way something is taught and the beliefs behind why it is taught in that way are fundamental to understanding the impact of the teaching on learners (benseman 2013, bliuc, casey, bachfischer, goodyear and ellis 2012). teachers, unlike other professional groups, have been immersed in the education profession for most of their lives (not just during their time as teachers) and draw on this experience to inform their own opinions and beliefs; they often teach the way they were taught (barnyak and paquette 2010). however, it is likely that teachers of less-skilled readers have had, in the main, learning journeys very different from the learners that they teach. further, teachers respond to new ideas and attempts to change teaching programs, based on their beliefs about how something should be taught (abernathy-dyer et al. 2013). multiple studies, largely with teachers at school level, have demonstrated the crucial role beliefs and values of individual teachers play in determining what happens in the program (fives and buehl 2012). in a recent example of such a study, questionnaires were used to explore literacy-related beliefs of 581 kindergarten and school teachers in the usa (bingham and hall-kenyon 2013). among the beliefs explored were those about the relative importance of key skill components for literacy learning and the instructional strategies necessary to be effective in developing them. the self-reported practices of teachers appeared to endorse an approach to instruction consistent with their belief in a component-based understanding of literacy. the beliefs of these teachers about literacy skills determined a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s       26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   what happened in their programs. similarly, gaitas and martins (2015) explored the beliefs of 255 portuguese primary school teachers on preferred teaching activities in relation to writing instruction and identified a significant association between beliefs and teaching activities. longitudinal studies have also confirmed the role of beliefs in teacher practice. the impact of previously held beliefs was found to be enduring when four school teachers were observed over a two-year period implementing a new and specific method of teaching reading (stephens et al. 2000). despite the teachers receiving special training, new practice was not comprehensively sustained, with one teacher reverting to practice based on prior-held beliefs at the end of the training period. similar reliance on earlier beliefs has been observed in studies of preservice teachers. in a two year study on development of professional belief systems about reading instruction the teachers appeared to create fictive images of themselves as teachers consistent with their prior knowledge of teachers and reading and the experiences they had on teaching practicum (stoube 2009). these factors seemed more important in forming these teachers’ notions about teaching reading, than formal reading courses undertaken as part of teacher training. in a similar fashion, research with preservice teachers at two american universities found that previous, personal experience and beliefs continued to influence content and instructional choices of these participants (barnyak and paquette 2010). comparatively few studies exist on beliefs of adult literacy teachers and the role beliefs of teachers play in determining what happens in adult programs. in the few studies which exist, beliefs tend to be implicit in the issues being studied rather than the focus. for example, beder et al. (2007), using an on-line survey, examined instructional approaches used by 598 teachers of adult literacy in the usa. beliefs about appropriate ways to teach influenced the organisational culture of the workplace and were observable in instructional practices used by teachers. teachers organised their practice and taught in ways consistent with their beliefs. fewer studies still have focused on beliefs about teaching adult reading. in a recent british study involving eight teachers of adult reading, kendall and mcgrath (2014) used semi-structured interviews to explore teachers’ conceptions, including teachers’ ideas about reading and teaching reading. from a critical discourse analysis, the researchers suggested the teachers had fixed views of reading linked back to their own literacy education with notions of what to teach only partially referenced to curriculum. beliefs influenced practice in spite of training. little reflection appeared to occur on the teaching of reading. one participant when asked ‘what we do when we read’ replied ‘that is a very strange question’. despite the fact that adult literacy learners have frequently had limited success in ‘school-learning’, teachers in this study appeared to conform to limited notions of how reading is learned in schools (kendall and mcgrath 2014:69). practice in adult reading programs has insufficient impact. central to our understanding of the impact of teaching, is understanding about how and why teachers teach the way they do (benseman 2013). given the link between practice and beliefs, and the lack of   a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s     m c h a r d y a n d c h a p m a n 27   existing research, more needs to be known about beliefs of the teachers who teach adult reading. a useful starting point in understanding the limited impact of existing adult reading programs is to unpack the approaches teachers currently use and the beliefs that underlie them. the aim of this study is to do this. understanding personal beliefs and the consequences for teaching practice must become a necessary addition in training and professional development in the adult literacy sector. method design phenomenography was used as an analytic framework for this study. it is a relatively new approach to educational research with the first descriptions of the approach appearing in journals in the early 1980s (akerlind 2012). in phenomenography, description and understanding is a focus of the research rather than generation of theory (ireland, tambyah, neofa and harding 2009). the object of phenomenographic research is variation in human meaning, understanding and conceptions, and the research is designed to identify the qualitatively different ways in which people perceive and understand a phenomenon. to do this, phenomenography seeks to distinguish the variations in the ways humans experience reality and build understanding from the participant’s perspective. it is about different ways of understanding. a ‘second order perspective’ is a key difference in the phenomenographic approach. ‘first order’ research involves a researcher making statements about phenomena while ‘second order’ involves the researcher making statements about other people’s experiences of the world, attempting to arrive at a ‘valid and rich understanding of the meaning the phenomenon holds’ for the respondents (ireland et al. 2009:12). that is, it enables an interpretation of the phenomenon (in this case, adult reading) from the participants’ perspectives (adult reading teachers), instead of from the researcher’s position (ireland et al. 2009). there is a focus in this approach on capturing diversity in conceptions across a collective of individuals, rather than a focus on any individual experiences. in other words, the aim is to delve into the range of meanings present within a group, as a group (akerlind 2012). survey a survey was delivered online, with a focus on instructional approaches and practices adopted for a specific learner. the development of the survey consisted of several steps. first, a scenario of a typical less-skilled reader was created based on observations and results from actual less-skilled readers (see figure 1). phenomenography seeks to reveal the variations in which a phenomenon is experienced. getting all participants to focus on a specific learner with specific reading difficulties ensured clear boundaries for the phenomenon being experienced (the specific reading skills of the specific learner). second, questions were developed related to instructional practices which might be employed in a reading program with the learner depicted within the survey. third, the survey went through reviews (both from people experienced in developing surveys, and a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s       28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   from those with expertise in adult literacy), and minor changes were made to the wording in response to this feedback. you are to start working with john, who has joined a year‐long literacy programme with a learning goal  of wanting to “be a better reader and to be able to read about his hobby which is sport, especially  basketball and cricket”. john is 45 years old and speaks english as his only language.  an initial interview has been conducted with john by the programme coordinator and you are given the  following information:  regular word reading 29/40  irregular word reading 22/40  non‐word reading 2/40  phoneme deletion task 5/18  in addition, john has read a piece he chose from the sports section of the newspaper about basketball:  the newspaper states: if the breakers could play cairns at home every week their long shot at the  playoffs would become a sure thing. the defending champions started their unlikely quest for a finals  berth in dominant fashion tonight, taming the taipans 96‐78 at vector arena.  john read (errors shown in capitals): if the breakers could play cairns at home every week their  long shoot at the playoffs would become a sure thing. the defeated champs started their unlike  question for a finals bid in “i don't know that word” fast tonight, telling the taipans 96‐78 at  vector arena.  when questioned, john said that it means that the breakers are doing well and he knows they beat the  taipans because he saw it on t.v.   given the information you already have, what further information might you seek from john?  what would you do with john in the next session and why?  figure 1. details of the scenario and sample of learner information presented in the survey the survey included the following:  basic demographics were gathered including age group, gender, years of experience, and employment status.  teacher beliefs about teaching reading were explored through open-ended questions about approaches to reading instruction (e.g. ‘given this information... what would you do with john in the next session and why?’). respondents were asked to consider the specific learner profiled in the survey. using supplied diagnostic assessment information about the specified learner, respondents were asked to report on the approach they would use with this learner for specific sessions.  beliefs about the reading process were further explored through a rating exercise, in which teachers’ beliefs on the relative importance of teaching different reading components were gathered. teachers indicated the priority they assigned in their own instructional approaches to each of eight factors: building rapport, confidence, specific phonological skills,       a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s     m c h a r d y a n d c h a p m a n 29   decoding, fluency and comprehension (one being the highest priority; eight being the lowest). participants respondents who teach less-skilled adult readers were recruited through the primary author’s networks in western australia and new zealand. to capture a variety of beliefs, the survey was sent to adult reading teachers with varying years of experience, employment status, and teaching contexts ranging from community volunteers to formal tertiary settings. in some cases, the survey was sent directly to the respondents by the primary author, and in other cases, forwarded to the respondents by an adult literacy organisation or tertiary institution. exact numbers of those who received the request to participate are therefore unavailable but the organisations each have networks numbering hundreds of literacy teachers. of the 96 prospective participants who entered and viewed the survey, 60 gave consent and provided responses to all questions. forty-seven of the 60 participants were female and 13 were male. three participants were aged 20-29 years, six were 30-39 years, ten were 40-49 years, 14 were 50-59 years, and 27 were aged over 60 years. thirty-three participants were volunteers, six were casual, 11 worked part-time and ten were fulltime employees. six of the 60 participants had less than one year of experience, 13 had one-two years, another 13 had two-five years, 15 had five-ten years, and 12 participants had over ten years’ experience. one participant did not list their years of experience. data collection a request explaining the topic was sent via email to participants and included a link to the survey through the online survey tool. the survey was made available for six months. the survey began with a contextualising statement designed to explain the study, and to stress that there are no wrong responses: ‘there is no single correct answer to the questions below. i am interested in getting alternative view points and would like you to answer as fully and honestly as you can’. the introductory statement also addressed ethical issues and obtained informed consent. analysis analysis of the survey responses was done as recommended in phenomenographic methodology using several iterations (e.g. parisio 2011). first, all survey responses were read line by line, several times to gain familiarity with the content, to gather ‘pools of meaning’(parisio 2011), and to identify utterances with insights into the phenomenon being investigated. the aim was to go beyond the words and rankings in survey responses to search for meaning and variation in the teachers’ beliefs in regard to approaches each teacher might use with a profiled learner, to teach reading skills. one question framed this step in the analysis: what did respondents believe was the most suitable approach to build the skills of the learner depicted in the survey? each reading and rereading of the responses began with silent questions to provide a focus: ‘what does this teacher believe should occur for this learner to learn to read?’ and ‘how does a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s       30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   this teacher believe this learner can be taught to read?’ this focus on the what and how aspects of reading and reading instruction provided an approach to managing the large amount of data (bliuc et al. 2012). second, as recommended by akerlind (2012) both the similarities and differences of ideas and meanings within these ‘pools’ were brought together into groups of conceptions. these conceptions were considered within the context of the survey scenario. some conceptions were merged as they described similar experiences. third, categories were constructed. categories are a concrete way of describing the abstract experience and give a structured description of the different ways approaches to teaching can be understood. in this case a set of categories which represented the qualitatively different ways of conceiving the phenomenon of adult reading teaching were constructed from the conceptions (ireland et al. 2009). category construction was done by arranging, rearranging and narrowing, and testing against the original data until the ‘system of meanings was stabilised’ (parisio 2011:3). the logical relationships between the categories was considered allowing arrangement in hierarchical order. each category in the hierarchy is distinct, and includes but extends the previous category in the hierarchy. results and discussion four different categories of approach exemplifying the beliefs of these adult reading teachers about how a less-skilled adult reader can be taught to read were revealed: the reassurance approach, the task-based approach, the theory-based approach and the responsive approach (see figure 2). the categories are on a continuum of increasing complexity from reassurance through to responsive. each category includes elements of the previous, less complex category, but provides an increasingly more detailed description of how these teachers believe they can teach reading to a less-skilled adult reader.   a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s     m c h a r d y a n d c h a p m a n 31   figure 2.four categories of description the reassurance approach teachers adopting the reassurance approach believed the adult reader learns if a suitable environment is provided, with many opportunities to read but with limited focus put on what specific reading skills are required and taught. a positive relationship between teacher and learner was a key focus, and content learner-determined, with the teacher acting as a support. encouragement of reading efforts builds confidence, and reading skill develops over time. the learner learns by being given both opportunities and support to read. responses typifying this approach included: allow oneself to get close, one needs to understand or have some feeling as to why he is in this situation. sit down with him when he arrives and have a cuppa with a snack to eat. talk about what we could be doing today from a choice of options to meet with curriculum requirements. my approach is to make the student as comfortable as possible. ensure they realise that they already have skills and knowledge that can be utilised to strengthen their reading abilities. the task-based approach in this approach there was a focus on teacher-directed activities and tasks to instruct the learner who then acquires reading skills and is able to apply them. if knowledge is provided then reading skills will develop. the teacher with a ‘task’ focus may have only partial knowledge of the reading process, depend on their own ideas about what the learner requires, and may rely on a limited selection of tasks. the task-based approach a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s       32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   was typified by comments such as this, in reply to the question: what would you do with john in the next session and why? i'd bring in a short text on a topic of his interest (eg basketball.) i'd discuss the topic with him first, then get him to silently read the text and underline any words he isn't sure of. we'd then discuss these words, break them into syllables, make sure he can hear and repeat each syllable as we say the words. i'd write them out, /sound them out with him etc. then i'd get him to read the text with support. afterwards i'd give several activities using those words, eg cloze of the text, letter cloze of the words, missing out a particular syllable, getting him to write in the missing syllable, look at word families of any of the difficult words. the theory-based approach the theory-based approach to the reading session was informed by, and may be restricted by, a particular understanding of how reading skills develop. the approach may reflect an adherence to an understanding of reading as a set of skills that must be mastered (bottom-up models e.g. gough and tunmer 1986), and planning and teaching conducted accordingly. alternatively, reading may be viewed as a practice where meaning and context are the focus for teaching sessions, and skills instruction may be seen as secondary or unnecessary (top-down models e.g. goodman 1976). the approach chosen draws on aspects of theoretical perspectives and content is taught accordingly. theory-based approach was evident in references such as: ‘go back to basics’, ‘explicitly teach’. specific approaches, such as phonics or whole language, which reflect a particular theoretical perspective were discussed. i'd get john to set his priority list and work with that but i'd stress phonic recognition, essential 'look and say' words he needs for his work/interests so that he sees the benefit of improving his reading. ...maybe get him to read out the sentence again and see which bits make sense with the words he has put in, and if they don't, which words he thinks might go there. reiterate that reading is based a lot on expectation of which words will appear. ...i would ask him to read it and then tell me what he thought of what the journalist had written, if he agreed, and what he thought about the match as a whole, and how the current team performed as a whole. i would be looking for opportunities to make him aware of how much he knows about the subject matter, how that contributes to his ability to read about it, and that that knowledge will support his reading skills development.   a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s     m c h a r d y a n d c h a p m a n 33   the responsive approach this was the most complex and comprehensive category to emerge, and included elements of all other categories. practitioners demonstrating this approach used reassurance, were task-based, were informed about theories, and able to be flexible and respond to each specific learner profile (‘informed by the results begin to...’). practice in this category was typified by discussion of ‘many approaches... [that] may need to be adapted...to suit the needs of the student’ and of working ‘with the most effective options for [the learner’s] particular area of need’. in the responsive approach there are twoway interactions with the learners demonstrated by terms such as ‘discuss’, ‘explain’, and ‘look for opportunities’. i might get him to write a little report on a game if he is comfortable enough to do that, or do some activities, play some games to find out what word attack skills he has. this may help add to the picture of his basic word knowledge, his phonetic knowledge and ability to combine sounds. i would probably give him a piece of "levelled" reading to get a more specific picture about strategies he is using to read. over the next couple of sessions i would be assessing specific phonic knowledge and ability to use, e.g what blends does he know...what high frequency words can he read and write automatically each category of description represents one way of experiencing the phenomenon and within each category are aspects of the phenomenon common to all, yet which vary in some way across each category. the distinction between categories was determined from themes and variations in the ways of experiencing, which emerged from the data. this determination was done in a manner consistent with the phenomenographic methodology described in beutel (2010). this determination aimed at identifying the overarching themes (unifying ideas) with the distinct differences (the variations) in approaches (the categories) to teaching adult reading. themes two key themes of philosophy (individual ideas: ‘i think that ...’) and knowledge (understanding of information: ‘i would investigate ...’) previously identified in other studies of adult literacy teachers (e.g. belzer 2007) unify the variations between the four distinct categories described above. these categories represent adult reading teachers’ approaches based on beliefs about how an adult can learn to read. the categories of reassurance, task-based, theory-based and responsive are characterised to varying degrees by these two themes: (i) philosophy about reading and how we learn to read, and (ii) knowledge of the components of reading and how they can be taught and learned. the adult reading teachers’ stance and competence, and the interaction of these, inform qualitatively different approaches to teaching adult readers. these variations are discussed below. a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s       34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   variation between categories the four categories of description were distinguished from each other through variations that emerged from the data. two distinct themes underpin the four variations. the themes and variations are summarized in table 1. the philosophy theme (individual ideas) encompasses the two variations of ‘understanding of the role of the adult literacy teacher’, and of ‘teacher perceptions about the needs of the less-skilled adult reader’. the later includes teachers’ attention to assessment data when planning and teaching. the knowledge theme (understanding of information) contains the variations of ‘teacher knowledge of the components of reading’, and ‘teacher knowledge and use of instructional best-practices’. the four variations are discussed below.   a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s     m c h a r d y a n d c h a p m a n 35   table 1. distinguishing themes and variations underpinning the categories of description of approaches of adult reading teachers when teaching adult reading. categories of description (increasing complexity) theme variations between categories 1. reassurance approach 2. taskbased approach 3. theorybased approach 4. responsive approach philosophy understanding of the role of the adult reading teacher guide & support, solve problems direct & instruct, provide tasks integrate teaching & learning informed by specific theoretical perspective integrate teaching & learning informed by range of approaches, flexible, holistic philosophy perspectives about the reading needs of the learner needs confidence & encouragement, let learner decide. assessment data not necessary to understanding needs needs directing, one-way teaching. attention to assessment data partial, not a key focus, depend on own ideas needs directing, informed by specific theoretical perspective, attentive to goals. selective attention to assessment data two-way relationship, specific to the individual, informed by context & goals & needs. assessment data strongly informs practice, and is an ongoing process knowledge knowledge of the component s of reading learn to read by reading partial, selective informed, with particular emphasis knowledgeable and targeted to need knowledge knowledge and use of instruction -nal bestpractices depend on own ideas partial, depend on own ideas, rely on limited selection informed, with particular emphasis targeted and varied with focus on learner need adapted from beutel (2010) a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s       36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   understanding the role of the adult reading teacher: noticeably different understandings of the role of the adult reading teacher emerged. this is to be expected as perception of the role is linked to individual philosophy about adult literacy in general, and explanations of what comprises adult literacy are contentious and confused (perkins 2009). in addition, kendall and mcgrath (2014) found adult literacy teachers framing of their work was intertwined with their own learning experiences rather than any training about literacy. in this study, building rapport with the learner and developing supportive relationships was important to the role across all hierarchical categories exemplified in comments such as ‘build a relationship so he feels comfortable’. there was a pattern of strong empathy for less-skilled readers. the desire to help learners build reading skills emerged as intrinsic to the role: ‘develop a safe non-threatening environment and assist the adult to learn’. this emphasis on relationships, encouragement, and praise is reported elsewhere (burton, davey, lewis, ritchie and brooks 2008, mcshane, 2005). adult reading teachers bring high levels of commitment, interest and passion to their roles (belzer 2006, 2007). however, the role of the adult reading teacher requires much more than building rapport and feelings of security. the theory-based approach is distinguished from the two previous categories of reassurance and task-based by a shift to a belief that the adult reading teacher is responsible for teaching and learning, (‘explicitly teach’), not just for creating the environment in which this can happen. understanding of the role is extended in the responsive approach with acknowledgement of the need to remain flexible to be able to respond to individual needs: ‘it would depend on ... [progress]... whether we address these as we go’, ‘always modifying my ideas’. teacher perceptions about the needs of the less-skilled adult reader: previous research found adult literacy teachers’ concepts about their teaching are informed by their own education and experiences rather than by the realities of individual learners’ contexts or practices. in addition, there is evidence of fixed understandings of what constitutes literacy needs (kendall and mcgrath 2014). this approach emerged in this study with assumptions made about learners: i would tell john the word. this is because he will become stressed/frustrated/discouraged if forced to continue. get to know a little more about john. find out more about how his illiteracy is affecting his life. in this current study variations identified in teacher perceptions suggested some teachers tended to focus their understanding of a learner’s needs around meeting practical and emotional needs (‘get him to relax and chat’, ‘…make him comfortable’), and also around what the teacher thought should happen. this is demonstrated in response to the question: (the fictional learner, john, in the survey has a stated learning goal of wanting to “be a better reader and to be able to read about his hobby which is sport, especially basketball and   a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s     m c h a r d y a n d c h a p m a n 37   cricket”). if you only have 6 hour-long sessions to work with john what would be the focus of the sessions (list up to 5 priorities, in order of importance)? 1.literacy required to find work. 2. literacy for enjoyment. 3. informal learning through games and applications both hands on and technology. 4. writing/saying the word similar to that of a spelling test but in a real life context; written in a sentence; saying it in a sentence(conversational). 5. text exploration identify texts that he is interested in that have unfamiliar words that he can explore and put into a real life context the reassurance and task-based approaches pay scant attention to diagnostic assessment results (‘...follow what the student perceives to be the most useful thing to learn’). indeed, limited understanding of how to interpret and use assessment results was directly discussed: i would seek information first from my program coordinator asking for clarification on what the initial interview results mean, as i am not myself familiar with the grading system confusion about how to analyse and use diagnostic assessment results was evident in responses. despite the information already been supplied in the survey teachers indicated they would: begin a basic phonics assessment to see if basic knowledge is there to use "sounding out" strategy. ...test his letter names and sounds level....follow with double letter recognition progressing as quickly and as far as is necessary to get a clearer picture of his ability...ie is it lack of knowledge or confidence or laziness or a combination of some or all of the above. it is only in the theory-based approach that the specific reading needs were linked to the goals of the learner ... ‘i’d get [the learner] to set his priority list and work with that but i'd also introduce...’ the responsive approach meets the specific targeted needs and wants of the learner choosing a program that is informed from the assessment data: ‘informed by the phonemic awareness results begin ...’ knowledge of the components of reading: earlier studies of adult reading teachers found most participants had no working definition of reading (kendall and mcgrath 2014), and a lack of awareness of what they actually knew about the components of reading and the reading process, and what they thought they knew (bell, ziegler and mccallum 2004). adult reading teachers in the present study were influenced by their knowledge about teaching reading. this individual knowledge contributed to individual teachers’ beliefs about how a less-skilled adult reader can be taught to build reading skill. a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s       38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   the reading processes of less-skilled adult readers involve a range of separate reading components (mellard, fall and woods 2010) which can be identified by assessment and be targeted in instruction (national research council 2012). this knowledge was evident in the theory-based category, albeit, with a particular focus. for example: ‘start with his ability to decode...’ reflecting attention to word-level components of reading or a skills based approach (bottom-up models), as opposed to ‘first, encourage him to ... get a general idea of what was written’ reflecting a meaning based approach (top-down models). knowledge of the reading process was limited in the two previous categories of task-based and reassurance, where there is an ad hoc, untargeted approach to reading components (‘choose some big words ... break them up, make little words from big words, start lists of ...’). selected components of reading are drawn on in the first three categories, but the responsive approach reflects knowledge about the reading process and employs a balanced program taking account of all key components (‘needs to stop using context to decode words (to check comprehension yes)...so i would have him use letter-sound knowledge to decode the word’). the responsive approach is informed, flexible and focused on learner needs (‘informed by ... begin to develop these skills. but first of course explain ... and get agreement on the plan’). knowledge and use of instructional best practices: the range of approaches evident in this study supports existing evidence that teachers in the adult literacy sector view bestpractice in different ways (greenberg et al. 2011, mcshane 2005, national research council 2012). there was no shared, clear vision of what is understood by good teaching. the reassurance approach has a focus on practical and emotional concerns that although important are only part of the learning process for the less-skilled adult reader. the task-based approach relies largely on teachers’ own ideas of what works’ (‘i have always found...’). this experience factor is valid but must be balanced with evidencebased practice (biesta 2010). as the categories become more complex so do instructional practices and the range of practices utilised. previous work (belzer 2006) has found that reading teachers may be knowledgeable about a range of strategies to use to build skill but rely on only a limited number of these in their teaching. a characteristic of the responsive approach is that teachers do draw on their knowledge and select appropriate strategies responding to specific learner need. the responsive approach reflects teacher confidence in analysing assessment results, drawing on knowledge of reading and effective adult instruction, and planning and teaching sessions accordingly. conclusion adult reading programs to date have had limited impact in building reading skill (australian industry group 2013, palameta et al. 2013). central to understanding the impact of programs is knowing how and why teachers teach the way they do (benseman 2013). it is established that beliefs about what is being taught and how to teach it affect the learning experience (bliuc et al. 2012) but greater awareness of the beliefs which inform teachers and teaching is required (bingham and hall-kenyon 2013). a useful first step in the process of understanding the impact of programs is to know about the   a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s     m c h a r d y a n d c h a p m a n 39   beliefs of those teaching the programs. this study examined the beliefs of a group of adult reading teachers on how less-skilled adult readers can be taught to read. reading and how it can be taught, can be viewed through different lenses and there is no one way to teach it (greenberg et al. 2011, tracey and morrow 2012) but utterances of adult reading teachers in this study clearly revealed that, at times, teacher practice was largely informed by adherence to an approach or perceived learner need, regardless of the learner who presents, or their goals or diagnostic assessment results. the goals and existing skills of the fictional learner ‘john’ in the survey did not always inform the teaching described. practices of some adult teachers in this group relied on existing personal beliefs about how an adult can learn to read rather than on informed knowledge about the reading process and effective practice. four hierarchical categories were revealed from utterances of the adult reading teachers to give a structured description of different ways the approaches to teaching can be understood. the categories of approaches to teaching adult reading which emerged were: the reassurance approach, the task-based, the theory-based, and the responsive approach. these categories may serve at least three key functions in efforts to enhance the efficacy of adult reading teachers. first, the descriptions provide a common language for extending discussions about teaching adult reading towards achieving shared understanding of what adult reading is, and how to achieve quality teaching and learning. a common language and shared understanding is important; what has been discussed and shared is more likely to be applied. second, the existence of distinct approaches serves to challenge adult reading teachers’ current notions about how they teach and why they teach in this way. among other things, reflection on existing beliefs and practices serves to make teachers more receptive to new practices (kuzborska 2011). self-awareness, being able to reflect on their own beliefs, enables teachers to focus on key aspects of their teaching and teachers are more likely to implement new, more complex approaches. third, the persistence of approaches, despite training, has clear implications for teacher training and on-going professional development. teachers must be led to challenge their initial beliefs and explore alternative views on teaching and learning. for this challenge to explore alternative views to be effective and produce results, and for a teacher to be able to make informed judgements about what and how to teach, personal understanding about individual beliefs and practices must be underpinned by knowledge of recommended practices and why they are effective (fives and buehl 2012). analysis of the categories and the variations which distinguish them, described in this study, suggests that adult reading teachers who employ a responsive approach are more likely to make the most of knowledge and use approaches conducive to effective and meaningful reading skill development, providing learners with experiences of reading enabling them to cope better with the complexity of reading. a good starting point in building more self-aware and responsive adult-reading teachers is for teachers to be encouraged, and led, to take an active role in increasing the connection between their beliefs and practices. understanding their own beliefs and the consequences of these is a key step in the process of teachers becoming consistent in a d u l t r e a d i n g t e a c h e r s ’ b e l i e f s       40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   adopting a responsive approach in their practice. the identification, in this study, of adult reading teachers’ beliefs about how learners can be taught is an important action in building our understanding of how teachers currently approach the teaching of adult reading. until the adult reading teachers become aware of the approaches they adopt and the beliefs which drive these approaches, practices will continue with the variable results currently reported. limitations the information on teacher practices was collected through self-report and although every attempt was made to limit the impact of social desirability by collecting these 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l (2012) lenses on reading. an introduction to theories and models, 2nd ed, new york: guilford press. van kan, c, ponte, p and verloop, n (2013) how do teachers legitimize their classroom interactions in terms of educational values and ideals? teachers and teaching: theory and practice, vol 19, no 6, pp 610-633. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2013.827452 © 2016 erik jacobson. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon th material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and & numeracy studies 2016, 24(1): 4898, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4898 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 1 2 0 1 6 3 workforce development rhetoric and the realities of 21st century capitalism erik jacobson abstract increasingly, the provision of adult education (including literacy and training programs) is influenced by a rhetoric of workforce development that tasks education with closing a supposed ‘skills gap’ between the skills that workers have and what employers are looking for. this deficit model of education blames adult learners for their own condition, as well as for larger problems in the economy. in addition to arguing for broader goals for adult education, those in the field also need to question the economic premises of this rhetoric. a review of current economic conditions points to fundamental aspects of capitalism as the source of instability, which means that education and training programs have a limited ability to move large numbers of people out of poverty. for this reason, students and teachers in adult education should focus on developing structural analyses of the situation and push for substantive changes in the economy. introduction as with education more broadly, adult education has long been contested ideological territory. for example, efforts that stress the need for adult education to support the economy by developing human capital clash with those focused on helping learners realise political liberation. proponents of critical pedagogy believe that the ideological nature of education should itself be part of the curriculum, with students and teachers working together to examine and resist the dynamics of oppression, whether in brazil (freire 1970), the united states (eubanks 2012) or japan (osawa 1990). by contrast, approaches that focus on economic development typically present themselves as a non-ideological response to an evolving labor market. alongside the rise of neoliberal discourse, it is this economic model that has increasingly come to dominate adult education practice and https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4898 w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s policy. the rhetoric of workforce development holds that education should be about meeting the needs of the employers, rather than helping individuals or communities realise a wide variety of goals they set for themselves. programs are given legitimacy when they are perceived as contributing to the greater economic good. furthermore, this rhetoric takes a deficit approach to education, beginning with the assumption that adults (as workers) have problems with skills that need to be addressed. for example, in the united states, federal support for training and adult basic education is now provided under the workforce innovation and opportunity act (wioa). passage of this act in 2014 was accompanied by expected proclamations about the nation’s workforce not being competitive with other workforces around the world (us department of education 2015). this same alarm has been raised repeatedly over the last few decades – the nation is said to be at risk economically because of adults’ limited literacy, numeracy and job-specific skills that industry demands. politicians of the two major political parties in the united states (goldstein 2012) and many adult literacy advocates (e.g., national commission of adult literacy 2008) frame their calls for funding in economic terms. this workforce development rhetoric is not only shaping employmenttraining programs, it is also increasingly influential in adult basic education, as well. for example, under wioa adult literacy and high school equivalency classes are now expected to be part of a ‘career pathway’ leading to employment in particular industries or sectors of the economy. the effectiveness of all federal-funded adult basic education programs is now primarily judged according to economic outcomes (e.g., the number of learners who found work) rather than educational ones. of course, there have been vocal critics of policies that have prioritised the workforce development model (e.g., greene 2015, rivera 2008, among many others). not only have people continued to champion the cause of adult literacy and education for civic participation and social justice (nash 2006, ramdeholl 2011), there have also been analyses that focus on structural issues within capitalism that call into question assumptions about the ability of programs to deliver on the promise of employment or promotion (mayo 2009, nesbitt 2006). in keeping with this tradition, i will focus on specific aspects of the rhetoric of workforce development and how this rhetoric serves to dissemble the realities of 21st century capitalism. i will suggest that confronting this rhetoric not only calls w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 5 for a continued commitment to a liberatory ethos, it also necessitates directly questioning the economic premises that support a workforce development approach that blames the workers for their own conditions. the paper will challenge claims about workers’ supposed lack of skills and will critique discourse that blames workers for economic crises. the paper will also address the limited impact education has had on poverty reduction. although advocates should argue for a robust adult education system, the economy remains the defining location of class struggle. the crisis in the workforce in their white paper reach higher america, the national commission on adult literacy (2008) provides a rigorous critique of the united states’ system of adult basic education and workforce development, suggesting that without a complete transformation the system will not produce desired outcomes. at the root of the problem, they suggest, is that a failure to address ‘america’s adult education and workforce skills needs is putting [our] country in great jeopardy and threatening [our] nation’s standard of living and economic viability’ (p. v). the fact that this report was released in june of 2008, just months before a devastating world-wide economic crisis, means that it would not take long for the focus on workers’ skills to be shown as misplaced. worries about an under-regulated financial sector were abundant before the crash (due to its increasingly risky behavior), but here workers are posited as the vulnerability in the economy. as noted above, the suggestion that the limited skills of the workforce are a threat to the country is not new. in the united states there has been a long history of ‘crises’ founded on the idea that the public school system is not providing students with the skills they need to be successful in the world (e.g., national commission on excellence in education 1983). these warnings about the threat posed by low-skilled workers are not limited to the united states. for example, in the united kingdom, the skills for life initiative was based in part on reports of the damage low-skilled workers were thought to be doing to the economy (department for education and employment 2001). in australia, the national foundational skills strategy for adults was driven by the perception that a ‘crisis’ in workers’ skills was a serious threat to that nation’s economy (black & yasukawa 2011, black, yasukawa & brown 2013). brine’s (2006) w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s review of european commission policy statements on lifelong learning suggests that, ‘low knowledge-skilled workers are not only those at risk, they are increasingly constructed as the risk’ (p. 649). rather than addressing how larger economic and sociopolitical structures create instability and vulnerability for workers, in adult education discourse and policy the workers themselves are blamed for economic volatility and underperformance. this crisis is often framed as a ‘skills-gap’ between what employers want and what workers possess (the white house 2015). this has become such a ‘common sense’ (gramsci 1987) appraisal of the economy that proponents are not often asked to provide evidence that such a gap exists. in fact, there is evidence that the ‘skills gap’ is mostly a rhetorical device. for example, shierholz (2014) explains that if there were a shortage of workers that met industry’s needs, incumbent workers would be asked to work longer hours to make up the difference. there is no evidence that is happening. additionally, if there were a limited supply of workers, companies would have to raise wages in order to compete for the staff they need. shierlholz suggests that at the present time there is no evidence of this, either. instead, shierholz suggests that finding work is difficult for many people due to a decrease in the aggregate demand – businesses do not need more workers – not because they lack skills. shierholz concludes that, ‘more education and training to help workers make job transitions could help some individuals, but it’s not going to generate demand.’ carnevale (cited by goldstein 2012:79) reminds us that, ‘jobs create training, not the other way around. and people get that backwards all the time. in the real world, down at the ground level, if there’s no demand for magic, there’s no demand for magicians.’ not only does there not seem to be a generalised lack of skills, there are studies that point to larger numbers of workers who have higher levels of skills than their job requires (goldstein 2012, pellizzari & fichen 2013). for example, levine’s (2013) study of the labor market in the state of wisconsin in the united states concludes that the skills gap is the inverse of what is typically promoted – ‘it is a mismatch of too many highly educated workers chasing too few “good jobs”’ (p. 5). additionally, it may be company actions that are keeping positions unfilled, not a lack of potential employees. for example, cappelli (2012, cited by popp 2013:41) notes, ‘when i hear stories about the difficulties in finding applicants, i always ask employers if they have tried raising wages, which have not gone up in w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 7 years. the response is virtually always that they believe their wages are high enough.’ even when there is an abundance of skilled workers (thus driving wages down), if a company is not willing to pay qualified workers a reasonable wage that position may remain unfilled. in one case, a company expressed frustration over not being able to find workers while offering a wage that was nearly 33% lower than the average wage for that position (popp 2013:41). along these same lines, gilpin (2014:17) reports that, ‘when pressed, one manufacturing ceo acknowledged that for him, the ‘skills gap’ meant an inability to find enough highly qualified applicants, with no ‘union-type experience’ willing to start at $10 an hour.’ this is very different than the way the ‘skills-gap’ is typically presented and lays bare capital’s desire to maximise profit and find workers who will not organise and advocate for better working conditions. by placing the blame on workers’ skills, workforce development rhetoric keeps the conversation at the individual level rather the socioeconomic. larger structural problems in the economy are thus rendered invisible, in particular how the capitalist economic system itself creates crises. indeed, crises would appear to be endemic to capitalism (brenner 2006, harvey 1999). for example, kunkel (2014) notes several consistent elements of economic crisis within capitalist economies– an overproduction of commodities (that cannot find a market), an over-accumulation of capital (that cannot realise its expected return on investment), and the vulnerability of the system to speculation (leading to cycles of collapse and stagnation). it is these structural problems, rather than a lack of skill in the workforce, that lead to periodic crises. in fact, when skilled workers in a given area develop the necessary leverage to negotiate for higher salaries, companies will often move to locations where they can keep labor costs low. when those new workers eventually request higher wages, the company will move yet again. harvey (1999) suggests that this ‘spatial fix’ is necessarily temporary and is thus bound to produce instability when companies lay people off or close up shops when they move their operations. this cycle arises from the nature of profit in capitalism, rather than any deficit on the part of a worker or workforce. the national commission on adult literacy (in the us) seems to take the wrong lesson from this situation. they write, ‘states must invest in the skills of their workers so that increased productivity helps offset the effect of low-cost labor furnished by developing countries. business must be an active partner in this effort’ (2008:viii). w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s to begin with, the wages paid to those workers in other countries should be called out as exploitative. but more directly to their point, the suggested answer to deal with the movement of capital looking for more profitability (through lower labor costs) is for workers in the united states to do better work. however, productivity is not an issue. in fact, between 1973 and 2011, productivity was up by 80%, while the real hourly wages grew less than 4% (mishel & gordon 2012). this is a gap of a different kind – workers are not being fairly compensated for the profits their increased productivity is creating. despite the fact that the capitalist economic system creates instability in the job market, the rhetoric of workforce development increasingly holds adult basic education and training programs accountable for the state of the workforce and for helping students find jobs and increase their earnings. if they accept the concept of a ‘skills gap’ to explain problems in the economy or as the reason adult education programs should get funded, adult learners and teachers are letting capital define the nature of the crisis. in this formulation, workers are being held accountable for crises in the system, rather than capitalism itself. the trouble ahead while the current situation is defined by a supposed gap in skills, projections about the future tend to be just as dire. the office of vocational and adult education (2013) in the united states analysed the results of the program of international assessment of adult competencies (piaac) and suggested that, ‘adults who have trouble reading, doing math, solving problems, and using technology will find the doors of the 21st-century workforce closed to them.’ the pervasive idea is that breakthroughs in technology and the organisation of work are sparking large-scale changes in the skills needed to be successful. it is common to hear that young people will end up working in jobs that have not even been invented yet and that to negotiate this uncertain future, learners need to develop a higher level of skills. one report concludes that by 2018, 63% of new job openings will require workers with at least some college education (carnevale, smith & strohl 2010:13). the suggestion is that those without credentials will be left out of an evolving workforce. however, to date the 21st century workforce doesn’t appear to be moving in a positive direction. rather than technology leading to growth across the labor force, the economy is being restructured in unequal ways. although it is true that there has been increased w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 9 demand for highly skilled, white collar workers, autor (2010) notes the united states has experienced a disproportionate growth in lowskill, low-wage work that started in the 1990s and has continued to accelerate (p. 3). this is not only the case in the united states, an analysis of 16 european union countries (goos, manning & salomons 2009) found that from 1993-2006 most of the nations studied experienced a growth in low-wage occupations (11 out of 16) and high-wage occupations (13 out of 16), and that all the nations experienced a decrease in middle-wage occupations (cited by autor 2010:4). the simultaneous increase in demand for high-skilled, white-collar workers and low-skilled workers has led to what has been called a polarisation of the workforce. that is, job growth at both ends of the skills and wage spectrum accompanied by a hollowing out of the middle. this polarisation is ignored when leaders trumpet the future of it and technology related-fields. those industries are fast growing, but that rate is calculated by percentage increases in the size of that particular sector of the workforce, not by the raw number of new positions that are now available. for example, in the united states from 2002 to 2006 there was an increase ‘of 4.7 million jobs paying a poverty-level wage’ (roberts & povich nd:2). the fact that this doesn’t represent as dramatic a change in rate of growth as in it industries means that there was already a large amount of povertylevel jobs. in the united states, ‘more than one in five jobs, or 22 percent, is in an occupation paying wages that fall below the federal poverty threshold. in eight states, more than one third of all jobs are in poverty-wage occupations’ (p. 4). these are the conditions for programs that are being judged by how quickly they can get learners into the workforce. the pressure is on to get any job, whether or not it will pay above poverty level wages. indeed, supporters of the workforce development approach do seem to ignore the prevalence of poverty level work. in a briefing designed to promote the effectiveness of investment in workforce training, ridley and kenefick (2011) note increases in wages for those who have gone through training programs as evidence the programs are working. one study they reference (hollenbeck et al. 2005) found that participating in training was associated with an $800 per quarter rise in median income (in 2000 dollars). a closer look at the study reveals that with that raise these workers were now earning roughly $18,000/year. this clears the us governments’ (often criticised) poverty threshold of $8,794 (circa 2000), but comes w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s nowhere close to meeting other calculations of requirements for economic security. for example, the basic economic security tables (best) index developed by wider opportunities for women concludes that a single individual needs nearly 300% of the us government’s target to make ends meet (mcmahon & horning 2014). adding any dependents moves the person further below the real poverty line. a raise of $800 is welcome, but not enough to move out of economic vulnerability. in addition to an increase in jobs that don’t pay enough to move out of poverty, there are other shifts in the economy that negatively impact low-wage workers. competition for jobs may be coming from those who have traditionally held higher wage positions. beaudry, green and sand (2013) suggest that there has been what they refer to as ‘a great reversal in the demand for skill and cognitive tasks.’ their analysis of trends in the workforce suggests that up until 2000, there had been an increase in the demand for skills, or ‘cognitive tasks often associated with high educational skill’ (p. 1), but since that time there has been a steady decline. in part they attribute this to a model of ‘skill-biased technological change…[that] can create a boom-bust cycle in the demand for cognitive tasks along with a continuous decline in the demand for routine tasks’ (p. 6). without jobs that demand and compensate for their abilities, highly skilled workers find themselves forced to take jobs that were traditionally filled by lowskill, low-wage workers. beaudry, green and sand (2013:i) note, ‘this deskilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together’. the approach of ‘upskilling’ learners in adult basic education or training programs into the labor force now runs into the reality that there are fewer jobs that demand mid-level skills and that students will be in competition with individuals who may already have higher levels of skills. thus, training alone cannot overcome a polarised economic structure that is rewarding fewer workers with higher pay and increasing the number of people getting lower wages. after a midtwentieth century in which some gains were made in terms of income distribution, the 21st century is trending back to earlier patterns of wealth concentration and wide-spread economic insecurity. the rhetoric of workforce development speaks of the need for adults to join the labor force and contribute, but it doesn’t address what the prospects actually are for learners and workers. w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 11 education, training and moving individuals out of poverty one reason the rhetoric of workforce development is so persuasive for many is that it is consistent with analyses that point out the connection between literacy skills, education and income. at the demographic level, it is clear that lower levels of skills are associated with economic vulnerability. in their policy briefing about the need to upskill the workforce, the obama administration notes that adults scoring below a 1 on the piaac assessment of literacy earn an average of $20,000, while those at levels 4/5 earn an average of $55,000 a year (the white house, 2015). reder (2010:1) points out that high school dropouts are more than twice as likely to be living in poverty as high school graduates (24% to 11%). the us census reports that in 2014, those with less than a ninth grade education had a mean income of $25,028, those with a high school diploma (or equivalent) earned a mean income of $34,099, while those with a bachelor’s degree earned a mean of $62,466 (us census nd). the clear advantage gained by graduating from college is one reason adult basic education systems in the united states are developing transition programs for adults moving onto post-secondary education (see the work of the national transition network at http://www.collegetransition.org/home.html). however, moving from the individual as the unit of analysis to the larger society provides a different picture of the impact of education. for example, marsh (2011) points out that starting in the late 1960s, the united states enacted policies that supported the education of young children (with programs such as head start) and also grew the numbers of people graduating high school and college. in 1972, when federal programs were firmly in place, the poverty rate was 19.2% percent, and in 1980 (when the programs should have been demonstrating long term effects) it was 19.5% (p. 118). he suggests that, ‘the consensus seems to be that these programs, although they may have expanded equality of opportunity, did relatively little to reduce poverty’ (p 118). marsh concludes that we cannot educate our way out of poverty given the types of economic inequality and exploitation built into capitalism. in a similar fashion we can look at poverty during the era of the workforce investment act (the precursor to wioa in the united states). when it was enacted in 1998, 12.7% of the us population lived in poverty, and in 2013, 15.8% of the population did. granted, these have been turbulent times for the us economy, marked by w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s unfunded wars and tax-cuts and a deregulated financial industry, but it would seem clear that the workforce training approach is not enough to overcome these large structural problems and reduce poverty rates. rather, marsh (2011) notes that data from the 1990s indicate that people fell into poverty because of a reduction in paid working hours, the loss of work, changes in personal situations (like divorce or separation) and ill-health. he concludes that more education might reduce the risk of experiencing poverty, but ‘so long as the economy produces jobs that pay povertyand near-poverty level wages, somebody must take those jobs. without a change in wages or job security, those who occupy those jobs will remain at risk of falling into poverty’ (p. 87). we can’t educate or train everybody out of poverty-level wage jobs if poverty-wage jobs are pervasive. this point appears to be lost in some analyses of the role that education can play in addressing economic vulnerability. for example, bruno, jin and norris (2010) suggest that adult basic education and training programs should focus on giving learners the skills they need to get jobs that pay $10.50/hour (the rate they conclude needs to be met to move beyond being working poor). however, since these jobs are in limited supply, not everybody can upskill into such positions. somebody moving into such a job will potentially be displacing somebody else rather than filling a recently created new position. in turn, the dislocated worker may be in the position of having to take a job that pays less than $10.50/hour, joining a large number of people who cycle in and out of poverty. as marsh (2011) suggests, with this approach you may change who is living in poverty, but not the number of people doing so (p. 88). an alternative solution would be to ensure that all jobs pay a living wage, not just selected ones. thus, rather than keeping with the neoliberal model of having workers compete with each other to make ends meet, the focus should be on making sure all workers are compensated at a rate that moves them beyond being working poor. this guarantee of a living wage regardless of the type of employment is essential because workers at the lower end of the skills continuum experience a great deal of job churn, due to rapid changes in industry and markets (eubanks 2012:61). they may indeed train for a job that pays $10.50, but even if they secure employment there is no guarantee how long that job will last. their next job may pay less, and then to regain lost earning power they may be encouraged to enter another training program. adults in this position end up on with what seems like a sysiphean task of never ending training with little w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 13 hope of breaking out of the cycle. the loss of employment can create a downward trajectory that is difficult to stop simply with education. one study of dislocated workers who went to college for training in new fields found that they actually were less likely to be employed and had lower earnings than those who did not go back for training (goldstein 2012). this could have been for a number of reasons (such as those less likely to be rehired in the first place ended up going to training), but it points again to a fundamental truth – if there is no work or jobs that pay well, no amount of education or training will help individuals secure employment with life-sustaining wages. a focus on measures of individual success, in terms of leveraging education for higher wages, serves to divert attention from the class structure of capitalist economics and larger trends in the number of people in living in poverty. rather than addressing the conditions that lead people to fall in and out of poverty, the adult basic education and training system is predicated upon working with individuals as they come through classes and apply for services. referring to racial disparities regarding enrolment in higher education, specifically for african american men, one college student criticised approaches that work with individual students who need support in getting to college. he concluded, ‘you can’t keep putting a band-aid on a big wound. we need to figure out why people keep falling in the river. you don’t just keep jumping in and saving that one individual. you run upstream, and you figure out why they are falling in’ (center for community college student engagement 2014:30). this is also a necessity for adult basic education classes and other efforts to support the poor and working class. we cannot train our way out of poverty one worker at a time. yet despite these built-in limitations, the training continues. the rhetoric of the ‘skills gap’ crisis helps drives money into subsidised programs that train workers, relieving companies of the need to provide on-the-job training. those who work in the provision of services get paid for parceling out money, for setting up accountability regimes, and for engaging in quality assurance activities. even if these programs do not move people into jobs that pay a living wage, the focus remains on the skills of the workers rather than the structure of the system. the rhetoric of workforce development limits the scope of adult basic education and perpetuates competition between workers for scarce resources. some critics have long held that public education efforts work to reinforce social class inequalities rather than counter them (bowles & gintis 1976/2011, w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s graff 1991). when education provided by the state is focused on the needs of capital rather than individuals it is part of the problem, not part of the solution. along these lines, greene (2015) believes that current adult education efforts have a ‘domesticating educational agenda that prepares adults exclusively for the job market and the submissiveness required to insure [sic] their social control’ (pp. 3334). that agenda might not always be realised, as there are students and teachers who work to conduct adult education classes on their own terms, but trends in policy and discourse are not promising. implications to be clear, ending centuries of systemic exploitation and inequity will require a fundamental transformation of the economy rather than small-scale alterations or adjustments. as noted above, education alone is not enough to move a whole class of people out of poverty, nor will it be sufficient to create a break from capitalism. however, generations of adult learners and educators have recognised the ideological nature of literacy and have connected their work to larger struggles for social and economic justice (greene 2015, purcell-gates & waterman 2000). the history of such efforts is not typically part of teacher or tutor training or ongoing professional development. that means that teachers do not necessarily hear about slaves teaching themselves to read at the risk of death, workers organising labor colleges (altenbaugh 1990), or revolutionary literacy campaigns in places like cuba. rather than having opportunities to think through and discuss multiple goals and approaches, those working the field are encouraged to develop what macedo and bartolomè (1999) describe as a ‘methods fetish.’ that is, professional development activities focus almost exclusively on technical answers to improve education (e.g., better teaching methods, better curriculum, better evaluation) rather than addressing the socioeconomic and sociopolitical conditions that education takes place in. the issue is not solely related to teacher training. for example, teachers in japan with a long-standing commitment to adult literacy and social justice work believe that younger teachers coming into the field do not easily make connections between the classrooms they are working in and movements for social justice because they did not enter the field when such activities were common (jacobson 2015). veteran teachers believe that these younger teachers do not know alternate models of pedagogy are even an option. of course, w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 15 this may not just be a function of age, for teachers of any age might enter programs with little experience of social justice work. it is also the case that not all adult basic education students want their classes to focus on or connect to social justice issues and they may embrace the workforce development rhetoric themselves. thus, teachers need to navigate the difficult terrain of inviting critique of current socioeconomic conditions without negating student agency. bowles and gintis (1976/2011) in their own critique forcefully conclude, ‘we cannot move forward through the band-aid remedies of liberal education reform. the people of the united states do not need a doctor for the moribund capitalist order; we need an undertaker’ (p. 288). yet they also suggest that the process will be long and arduous and that ‘socialist educators should take seriously the need to combine a long-range vision with winning victories in the here and now’ (p. 287). to that end, i will suggest two strategies that focus on concrete ways to push back against the dehumanizing effects of the workforce development rhetoric described above. the first is to focus on students’ and teachers’ abilities to think at the structural level and the second is to identify structural reforms to advocate for. afocus on thinking structurally brookfield and holst (2011) suggest that adult education programs aiming to work against oppression need to ask a series of questions about their approach. for example, they believe programs should ask ‘does our work help the dispossessed understand the historic nature of their existence, and does it expose the growing contradictions within existing sociopolitical economic relations?’ (p. 100). with regards to rhetoric of workforce development we can ask do programs help learners understand the nature of the polarised economy, how the prevalence of poverty-wage jobs makes it difficult for large numbers of people to move beyond poverty and how workers themselves are blamed for the crises that capitalism creates? additionally, do programs help students understand the contradictions involved in castigating people for being unemployed in an economic system that depends upon a standing army of the unemployed to suppress wages and maximise profits? for most programs the answer would be ‘no’. for example, over the last few decades many adult education programs have developed ‘financial literacy’ courses for their students. although there are exceptions (see united for a fair economy in the united states at http://www.faireconomy.org/), these courses tend to focus on topics w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s like managing bills, shopping for deals and managing credit rather than the nature of economy and workers’ roles in it. analysing these socioeconomic relations demands what brookfield and holst (2011) term a ‘structuralised’ worldview that interprets ‘individual experiences in terms of broader social and economic forces’ (p. 60). this holds for both teachers and students, and each can model structural thinking for each other. indeed, it is not the case that the teacher is in the position of lecturing learners about the systemic oppression they face. rather, learners and teachers can work together to identify how all of their experiences are shaped by larger socioeconomic forces (purcell-gates & waterman 2000) and how they should respond to inequality and oppression. similarly, freire asserts the need for learners and teachers to work towards political clarity, which he describes as the ability to think through fragmented bits of information to achieve a ‘rigorous understanding of the facts’ (freire & macedo 1987:131). recently an adult educator told me about a training project she was working on. through her program immigrant adults had been placed at a factory that wrapped lettuce for distribution. one of the trainees approached her and said, ‘i was a farmer in vietnam. now i work all week wrapping lettuce and after i get my paycheck i cannot even afford to buy lettuce. what i am doing here?’ it is a good question and one that programs should be encouraging students and teachers to ask. prioritising structural thinking can help teachers question the terms of a workforce education system that continues to blame workers for their own vulnerable economic status and qualifies securing a job with poverty-level wages as a successful outcome of training. in the case just noted, the teacher decided to connect the student to people involved in a community gardening project where he could put his agricultural skills to good use and to help him find other work that paid better than training wages. badvocate for policies that address structural issues greene (2015) suggests that teachers and others involved in adult education should not be afraid to be radical because the solutions to the problems facing society are too large to be fixed with small steps. when budgets for adult basic education and training are cut, advocates rally to restore them, sometimes quite effectively. however, that often results in a return to the status quo of limited opportunities for individual mobility and little change in the overall amount of poverty. since we cannot educate or train our way out of w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 17 systemic economic insecurity, not only do we need to want more from education, we need to demand more on the economic level. those who make a connection between their work in adult education and their commitment to social justice should join efforts that are pushing for the type of radical change that would have a profound effect on their students’ lives. for example, rather than hoping to train some learners to move out of poverty wage jobs, students and teachers should join efforts to raise the pay of all low-wage workers. in the united states this has taken the form of arguing for raising the minimum wage to $15/hour. many different groups of people have taken this up as an issue, particularly unions and advocacy groups, including those in adult basic education. for example, students and teachers at make the road new york (see http://www.maketheroad.org/), a community-based education and advocacy organisation, combine esol classes with planning and carrying out outreach and protests that speak directly to raising the pay of workers in a variety of industries. for adults who currently don’t have work, the demand should be for jobs programs, not training programs. as has been said, employment, not employability. to address the economic meltdown of 2008, the obama administration initiated a stimulus program that has been criticised as being too small, rather than too large (krugman 2010). indeed, it left unaddressed large issues with the united states’ economy and infrastructure that should be addressed with a large and sustained federal jobs program. for example, calculations suggest that a jobs program focused on a concerted effort to deal with the many dangerous bridges, tunnels and roads in the united states would create millions of jobs and pay dividends by making the transportation system more efficient and reliable (brun et. al. 2014). political opposition to anything that calls for federal involvement has stymied efforts in the past, but requests for small increases in funds for jobs training should not serve to obviate the need for a profound effort to address both the economy and the environment. in this area the demands have to be larger, not smaller. finally, as marsh (2011) notes, education efforts did not make as much of a difference in reducing poverty as other government programs that provided direct support. he argues that it was aid in the form of food subsidies (food stamps), medical support (medicare and medicaid) and increases in social security that reduced the number of people living in poverty. however, it is just these kinds of programs that are reduced when governments cut budgets. those w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s concerned with the lives of adult education students and the community as a whole must push back against the type of austerity measures that have wreaked havoc on communities and economies. as with the misleading rhetoric of a skills gap, it is not those who are reliant upon social welfare that are causing economic volatility, and blaming them is a way to move attention away from systemic problems within capitalism. to make progress towards a more just society, those involved in adult basic education should reject the rhetoric of workforce development and the illusory economic premises that it is based upon. we need to stop working on capital’s terms by accepting the notion that workers are the problem, rather than capitalism itself. we cannot be satisfied if education and training move a few people out of poverty when more people continue to join the ranks of the working poor. in the face of calls for austerity we need to ask for more, not accept less. this may seem audacious, but as brookfield and holst (2011) note, an embrace of audacity has sustained many successful social justice movements over the years. references altenbaugh, r (1990) education for struggle, temple university press, philadelphia, pa. autor, d (2010) the polarization of job opportunities in the u.s. labor market: implications for employment and earnings, the center for american progress and the hamilton project, washington, dc. beaudry, p, green, d & sand, b (2013) the great reversal in the demand for skill and cognitive tasks, the national bureau of economic research, cambridge, ma. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w18901 black, s & yasukawa, k (2011) a 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institute commentary, retrieved 4 oct 2015 from http://www.epi.org/publication/shortage-skilled-workers. u.s. census (nd) pinc-04. educational attainment--people 18 years old and over, by total money earnings in 2014, work experience in 2014, age, race, hispanic origin, and sex, u.s. census, washington, dc. u.s. department of education (2015) making skills everyone’s business: a call to transform adult learning in the united states, u.s. department of education, office of career, technical, and adult education, washington, dc. the white house (2015) president obama’s upskill initiative, the white house, washington, dc. http://www.epi.org/publication/shortage-skilled-workers abstract introduction the crisis in the workforce the trouble ahead education, training and moving individuals out of poverty implications afocus on thinking structurally badvocate for policies that address structural issues references literacy and numeracy studies 2015. © 2015 tao bak and pauline o’maley. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2015, 23(1), 4424, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v23i1.4424 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 3 n o 1 2 0 1 5 50 towards professional responsibility for language and literacy: exploring vocational teachers’ emerging language and literacy understandings and identities tao bak and pauline o’maley abstract the role of vocational teachers is complex and evolving (moodie & wheelahan 2012). the imperative to also attend to students’ language literacy and numeracy (lln) skills adds to this complexity. using data from interviews with eight teachers, this paper explores this emergent space in relation to impacts on their sense of capacity and confidence to attend to lln, and ways this is being incorporated into a renewed, but often still fragile sense of professional identity (brookfield 2000). where the focus of discussion is often on lln requirements, we concentrate here on the perceptions and experiences of the teachers themselves, and how these insights may inform our approach as lln specialists. we conclude that vocational teachers appear willing travellers on this journey, but often feel they have a distance to go. we make a case for a collaborative dialogic approach to this shared challenge. introduction vocational teachers and trainers in australia, like their counterparts in the uk, have in recent years increasingly been asked to add addressing the language, literacy and numeracy (lln) skills of their students to their collection of professional responsibilities. in terms of its sheer range of disciplines and specialisations the field of vocational education and training (vet) in australia has been characterised as fragmented and diverse (moodie and wheelahan 2012). in such a context, this requirement can be seen to represent an important new strand of responsibility for an already notably complex https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 51 role and identity for vet teachers. vet teachers are compelled to grapple not only with the implications of the pedagogical and philosophical ‘divide’ between teaching and training (santoro 2003, wheelahan 2009), but with the complexities of the dual ‘industry’ and ‘teacher’ identities at play within their professional roles and work (seddon 2008). in addition to this, in lln provision within vet in australia, and in particular ‘integrated’ lln in vet courses, there has been ‘no uniform model’ across the states and territories (black & yasukawa 2013:46). whilst there is little disagreement regarding the need for a more comprehensive approach to lln development and support within vocational education (ve) in australia, along with the consideration of mechanisms to enable this to occur (industry skills councils 2011, skills australia 2011, australian industry group 2010), there has been minimal focus on how vocational teachers themselves are responding to this new professional imperative. an understanding of the experiences and perceptions of practitioners and an informed sense of the nature of the challenges involved provide possibilities for enabling a smoother transition into this new space. this knowledge is important not least because where there is a lack of connection between higher level aims and on-the ground practicalities, the potential for resistance to perceived ‘top-down’ impositions often undermine the more well-meaning intentions of the broader agendas at play. indeed, as chappell, scheeres and solomon (2007:167) point out, changes at the organisational macro level can often overshadow the micro level processes that ‘simultaneously constitute and are constituted by such macro changes’. in terms of a focus on language and literacy support and development in vocational and further education contexts, there has been an extensive and thorough examination of literacy practices in further education in the uk which broadens the theoretical framing of literacy in the context of improving student learning ( vani , edwards, barton, martin-jones, fowler, hughes, mannion, miller, satchwell & smith 2009). in australia, black and yasukawa (2011, 2013 a & b) have researched the integration of lln in vet courses, examining, amongst other things, various models of integration, the implications of these on the professional relationships between vet teaching and specialist lln staff, and foregrounding the significance of these relationships. this paper builds on this work with a specific focus on the response of vet teachers to the imperative of t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y 52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s themselves becoming a locus for lln, and on what these responses suggest regarding the nature of the challenge that taking up this responsibility represents, particularly in terms of the implications of a movement towards a (more) expert view of language and literacy itself. specifically, this paper reports on an exploratory study examining the views of a small group of teachers from a technical and further education (tafe) program within a dual sector institution in australia. this research, both in response to the support needs of the specific vet teachers represented here, and in keeping with the expertise and practice of the researchers themselves, focuses particularly on the language and literacy, rather than numeracy responsibilities these vet teachers were taking up. the data for this study comes from qualitative interviews with teachers who had all participated in an in-house professional development workshop series focussing on understanding and addressing the language and literacy needs of students, an initiative that coincided with a concerted increase in focus on lln across the whole institution. in reflecting on the insights this examination of teacher perceptions offers in regards to the process of taking up this new professional responsibility, not only will we draw on the perceptions of the teachers themselves, but on our own views and experiences as language specialists with extensive experience of working with vet teachers in this space. a secondary focus of the paper therefore is to reflect on this new ‘sharing of a professional domain’ for language and literacy specialists, and the implications of this for vet teachers’ own professional relationships and understandings. ultimately the paper contends that the adjustment to the vet teachers’ role calls for the uptake of new forms of professional practice and identity (chappell et al 2007), including a newly cast collaborative relationship with language specialists. theoretical literature framing the study n exploring the shifting and emergent ‘professional’ understandings of language and literacy that are evident in the interview data that we will present, we will draw on a number of theoretical concepts. these will include the notions of discourse and identity (gee 1996, vani 1998), and the notions of ‘troublesome knowledge’ (meyer &land 2006) and ‘threshold concepts’ (land, meyer & smith 2008). t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 53 gee’s (1996) work on discourse (which he signifies with a capital d to distinguish it from discourse as a unit of connected speech) illustrates the significance of discursive positioning, and the way in which it is entwined with identity. he suggests discourses … are ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing that are instantiations of particular roles by specific groups of people …discourses are ways of being ‘people like us’. they are ‘ways of being in the world’; they are ‘forms of life’ (gee 1996: viii). this understanding of discourse, not just a way of using language but as a way of being, opens up a way of seeing how the teachers are positioning themselves discursively in this new space, and to what extent this new aspect of their identity is becoming a ‘way of being in the world’ for them. although a more cognitive concept, we suggest that the notion of threshold concepts can also be fruitfully applied in this case to afford an insight into the process of vocational teachers’ movement towards acquiring an ‘expert’ view of language itself. threshold concepts (meyer & land 2006) refer to key concepts to learn that are troublesome but that can transform a novice learner into a discipline expert. more specifically, threshold concepts have been defined as having the characteristics of being transformative, integrative, bounded, troublesome, and perhaps irreversible. they open up ‘new and previously inaccessible ways of thinking about something’ (meyer & land 2003:1). examples of threshold concepts are the concept of ‘signification’ from cultural and literary studies for example, or ‘opportunity cost’ from economics. the process of understanding these concepts represents movement on the continuum from novice to expert. for vocational teachers, the move to integrate at least some responsibility for language and literacy into their list of professional duties, we argue, implies a need to engage with the notions of language and literacy conceptually. these concepts to us, as language and literacy specialists working with tertiary teachers and lecturers, have proven to be useful in providing a lens into the partial, fluid, and at times dissonant conceptual process or journey that these teachers are undertaking. the context for the study t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y 54 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the imperatives for an increased and dispersed responsibility for lln within vocational education in australia are numerous. they include the generally low language literacy numeracy rates within australian society (industry skills councils 2011) as indicated by mass surveys like the international adult literacy survey (ials), and the adult literacy and lifeskills survey (all), and more recently the programme for international assessment of adult competencies (piacc), which consistently indicate the alarming, much quoted statistic that approximately half of australian workers do not have the literacy and numeracy skills necessary to work in the knowledge society. while there is critique of the particular and partial nature of these surveys (hamilton & barton 2000), not to mention the crises narrative that they generate ( vani et al 2009), they have received significant attention and have had a powerful impact, resulting in a focussed imperative for lln to be foregrounded in the vocational education curriculum, as well as the responsibility for lln to be taken up ‘across the board’ within the vocational education landscape. mechanisms to facilitate this uptake include the mapping of ‘foundation skills’ – the new term used in australian vet policy to refer to what has traditionally been referred to as english language, literacy and numeracy, into curricula, as well as the development of a new training package for foundation skills. in the australian vet/further education context, core foundation skills are outlined in the five level, five skills (reading, writing, oral communication, numeracy and learning) national assessment framework known as the australian core skills framework (acsf), which is complemented by the outline of key employability skills in the core skills for work (csfw) framework. together these provide a basis for the foundation skills training package set of units, in accordance with the competency based national training curriculum system for vet/further education in australia. in addition, the previously elective unit ‘address adult language, literacy and numeracy skills’, has been designated a core unit in the entry-level vocational teacher qualification, the certificate iv in training and assessment from 2014 (innovations & business skills australia [ibsa] 2012). within this context, state governments in australia are placing increasing scrutiny on what institutions are doing to identify and then to respond to the lln needs of their students. whilst moves to include responsibility for lln more explicitly within the direct scope of the vocational teacher’s work in australia t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 55 are still at a relatively early stage, pre-training lln assessment has now become mandatory. likewise, strategies and policies to embed lln support and development across courses and programs in a more coherent and systematic fashion are subject to audit also. in short, it is clear that lln is no longer the concern of the lln specialists alone, with the responsibility increasingly falling to the vet teachers themselves. this paper will focus on the perceptions of these vet teachers from one institution in regards to these developments. the study the study included eight participants from a range of disciplines at certificate iv and diploma level, including health administration, information technology, community services, disability and community services, business, and commercial cookery. most participants have more than five years of experience in ve, and all were drawn from attendees of a two-workshop professional development program, the first of which centred on understanding the acsf, and the second on applying the acsf to better meet the language and literacy needs of students. invitations to participate in the study were sent to potential participants within two months of having attended. the interviews were semi-structured, approximately an hour in length, and focused on perceptions of language and literacy in the classroom. in addition to the background and experience of the teacher, topics or themes covered included whether and to what extent language and literacy was an issue in their classroom, the sense of capacity they felt to address these issues, the extent to and ways in which they felt supported by the broader institution in addressing these issues, and whose ultimate responsibility they felt it was to address the language and literacy needs of students. the interviews were audio recorded and transcribed for analysis in regards to key themes and perceptions. the workshops participants had attended were facilitated as part of an institution-wide strategy to facilitate a more strategic and coordinated approach to language and literacy across all sections of the dual-sector institution (curró 2012). the workshops attracted approximately 130 attendees overall. although the workshop series was practically oriented, it was underpinned by a developmental academic literacies model which ‘views the process involved in acquiring appropriate and effective uses of literacy as … complex, dynamic, nuanced, situated, and involving both epistemological t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y 56 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s issues and social processes’ (lea & street 2006:269). the concept of ‘embedding’ language and literacy, reflecting the ‘built in, not bolted on’ (wignall 1998) approach, was emphasised, and whilst there are different interpretations about what embedded means in practice (arkoudis 2013), the different approaches share the notion of bringing together content teaching and lln teaching (casey, cara, eldred, grief, hodge, vani , upp, lope , mcneil 2006, roberts, baynham, shrubshall, brittan, cooper, gidley, windsor, eldred, castillino, & walsh 2005). further, they display specific shared features, some structural and some attitudinal, which include team work; shared understandings, values and beliefs; aspects of teaching and learning that connect lln explicitly with discipline content; enabling policies and organisational features at institutional level (casey et al 2006). the notion that the vocational teachers are the experts on what counts as the appropriate language and literacy within their discipline or industry area, even though this knowledge may be tacit and not always able to be articulated, was also explicitly foregrounded. the facilitators of the workshops, themselves language and literacy specialists, were aware that they approach particular discipline discourses as outsiders, and noted the importance of acknowledging the insider-status of the vocational teachers in this regard, as well as acknowledging the advantages of ‘seeing’ a discipline through the eyes of an outsider (jacobs 2007). whilst the primary aim of the study was to capture the perceptions of vet teachers regarding the challenges relating to language and literacy generally, there was an additional interest in how the teachers were responding to the approach to building capacity and conceptual understanding regarding language and literacy represented by the workshops they had attended. given the limited number of teachers interviewed, the contribution of the study is intended as exploratory, and limited to the possibility of raising themes for potential further study. it is acknowledged that the teachers who responded to the invitation to participate in the study may have been those interested in or favourably disposed towards understanding and acting to address language and literacy issues within their classrooms. an additional limitation of the study is that it included mainly teachers from para-professional disciplines, rather than trades or further studies areas. this is one reason we use the terminology ‘teacher’ throughout, although we acknowledge that the term ‘trainer’ is preferred by some vet teachers (moodie & t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 57 wheelahan 2012). whilst the discussion below acknowledges the language and literacy specialist perspective, primarily through the views of the authors, the study does not attempt to capture the experiences of lln specialists; its focus is specifically on the perceptions of the vocational teachers. overall findings in terms of overall findings almost all of the participants felt that language and literacy was a significant challenge for their students, and the majority reported an increase in language and literacy related issues in recent years. most participants reported the language and literacy needs of their students as having an impact on their teaching, with only one reporting no significant impact. the main factor cited relating to this was the impact on time, which included the need for more time in class to cover set topics, as well as the additional planning time to cater for disparate language levels within a particular group. this is a factor likely exacerbated by the diminishing resources devoted to vet in australia, which have increased the pressure of time for vocational teachers. participants reported mixed levels of confidence in their capacity to meet the language and literacy needs of their students. generally confidence was fairly low, with some feeling under qualified, and others reporting constraints such as the impact of low attendance rates (seen as a related issue) and grappling with the necessities of, or perceived pressure to accept, lower quality work. or, alternatively, of being unclear as to what level of work was acceptable. in regards to this last issue, the five levels offered by the acsf were seen by almost all of the respondents as helpful in facilitating more confidence in their judgments in regards not only to the language and literacy performance of their students, but of the language and literacy requirement of the units or courses they were teaching. indeed, most participants felt the workshops they had attended were valuable, particularly as an opportunity to focus on issues relating to language and literacy in a dedicated way and to improve their understanding of these issues. when asked whose responsibility they felt language and literacy was, almost all of the participants suggested that they needed to be a shared responsibility, although they differed in who this extended to, citing the teacher themselves, the school or department, the lln support team, the students themselves and, in one case, the students’ parents. one teacher with a t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y 58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s dissenting view felt the responsibility was shifting and that it was now primarily the teachers’, adding, that he thought teachers were ‘willing to take that responsibility’. several participants mentioned the need for a collaborative approach, or as one participant put it, ‘it needs to be a team approach... and it needs to be really cohesive’. whilst there was general agreement in regards to the need for shared responsibility, there was less certainty in regards to how this responsibility might be enacted in the classroom or the curriculum. otherwise put, there was a clear willingness to be involved, but, perhaps not surprisingly, less confidence or consistency of view in regards to what this might mean in actual practice. it is some of the intricacies involved in this question that we wish spend the rest of this paper focussing on. a complex journey in looking more closely at the complexities at play for vocational teachers in taking up responsibility for language and literacy, both in terms of developing and shifting their understandings of language and literacy and the processes that this may involve, we begin with a somewhat extended quote from one of the participants. i don’t want him to go away. i want him here. it is something i can improve, and how i can work with these guys? i don’t like the idea of your english is not great so you can’t do the course. because i know in practice, they’re going to be exceptional… i’ve had people in the workplace who are exceptional. you can’t assess passion and you can’t assess commitment. they’re exceptional, but what lets them down? they struggle with the written component. so we modified it, so they get through. ‘cause they’re going to get themselves a job, and they’re going to be beautiful in their job. although at first glance this statement appears a little fragmented, we came back to it in the conviction that it, in fact, works effectively to reflect some of the competing tensions and imperatives with which vocational teachers are increasingly expected to grapple. the quote encapsulates several prominent threads of the teacher discourses around their students’ specific contextualised needs; their own understanding of industry, and the complex factors, some educational and some personal, that they believe make for successful workers; and it also highlights the ways in which these teachers are positively oriented towards their students and their needs. it gives us t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 59 an insight into how this teacher, in a similar way to the others in our study, locates and identifies herself. the teachers in this sample have a wealth of industry experience and their confidence in their industry knowledge shines through. for the most part they position themselves discursively from an industry perspective. this accords with vani ’s (1998) notion that we tend to position ourselves in response to discourses we have access to and those we privilege, and is reinforced by their lack of confidence about their educational identities, for the most part. futhermore, they demonstrate they are unsure of their teacherly identity in relation to language and literacy. in this regard some even position themselves as what brookfield (2000) might call ‘imposters’ in this space. their identity as ‘teachers’, as we can see in the data below, is complex, fluid, and sometimes contradictory. this way of locating and identifying themselves gives us insight into these conflicted ‘ways of being in the world’ (gee 1996). in this context, the challenge for vocational teachers in taking up responsibility for language and literacy is naturally, to gain confidence in positioning themselves discursively in this space; it needs to become part of a way of being in the world for them. the wealth of industry experience serves these vocational teachers well in giving them insights into the imperatives from both sides, industry and the institutional, yet their discomfort in foregrounding their role as educators, perhaps not surprisingly, remains. there’s no requirement for me to have an education background. in fact it’s not needed at all in tafe. but it kind of is, isn’t it? it kind of is! and this is the complex, often contradictory, sometimes uncomfortable, ever changing space the vocational teacher is asked to take up. t is further compounded when students’ language and literacy needs are factored in; yet this is the space that calls to be confidently inhabited in the future work of vocational teachers. their students’ success depends on it. how did the teachers position themselves in regards to the challenge of language and literacy? that there had been an increase in language and literacy needs within student cohorts over time was a fairly consistent observation amongst the participants. some explicitly stated that these changes often bring students for whom english is not their first, or even second or third, language to the classroom and that this is often t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s complicated by these students having disrupted education and often leaving school early, sometimes as early as the end of year nine. as one participant stated, ‘they can do the work. they’ve got the aptitude, they’ve got the passion for it, but it’s hard. it’s a harder gig for them’. in the data a tension was evident in the responses between flexibly responding to these new cohorts as they are, and the rather inflexible need to get the ‘level’ just right to align to the standard, informed in the first instance with an eye on the future workplace they imagine their students to be in. they indicated this has impact not only on the work they can do but also on the pressure of time they feel. accounting for language and literacy adds to this pressure. despite the challenges of changing cohorts, uncertain times and top down strategies, however, our interviews reflected teachers who are open both to the notion that language and literacy needs to be part of their classroom picture and the acknowledgement that they have some responsibility themselves for addressing the language and literacy needs of the students. indeed one participant suggested while it was a massive challenge, it was a challenge she embraced, stating that ‘i guess it’s a massive challenge for me … i embrace a challenge like that, i actually think it’s fantastic to have these students’. this openness to some extent surprised us as researchers, as we were aware of the potential burden this places on vocational teachers and also of the challenges of shifting responsibilities where these have not necessarily existed historically. we felt this openness resulted from their lived experience of working with their richly diverse student cohorts. the teachers appeared particularly well attuned to their students, their capabilities and the barriers they face. as one teacher put it in regards to her course assignment, ‘that is hard for english as your first language, let alone your third’. we saw this as significant in that this genuine empathy for, and appreciation of, the students seemed to underpin a positive alignment with the language and literacy ‘challenge’. despite the general positive alignment however, the teachers in the study expressed clear differences in their sense of capacity in relation to language and literacy. two of the teachers in the sample identified themselves in a positive way in relation to language and literacy. t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 61 i’m very interested in language …i’m a linguaphile of the old style. i suppose i enjoy language, it is a wonderful thing, for me it is very expressive. my background was not in literacy and numeracy but… i was successfully inducted into the language development unit [when i started here] … on the other hand, other teachers articulated distinctly negative conceptions of themselves in relation to literacy and numeracy. to be honest with you i used to be quite intimidated when i didn’t have a writing teacher in the class and it was my job to, you know, to help people with writing. because i actually struggle with writing myself…i’m probably not that bad, but i don’t like it very much. or as another teacher put it, ll&n is something i’m not strong in. i mean, even for my own … i’m not strong in it. it never has been [a strength]… i sit there killing myself laughing. me of all people teaching esl! the data indicated the teachers’ confidence in their literate selves seemed to carry over into the ways in which they conceptualised literacy, ways that are partial and at times contradictory. teachers foregrounded literacy in particular ways, depending on their background, experience and confidence. each of them appeared to conceptualise language and literacy, perhaps not surprisingly, through the filter of their own personal industry and classroom experience. this appeared to lead to understandings of language and literacy often with a focus on particular skills in isolation. for example, one conceived it as primarily about speaking, another talked primarily about it as reading, and another focused particularly on writing. the indications were these conceptualisations were born out of their lived experiences in classrooms and their own level of comfort and confidence, yet these conceptualisations have consequences for their work with students in the classroom. while foregrounding aspects of language and literacy students will need in the workplace is both legitimate and fruitful, and moves beyond the commonly invisible or marginalised treatment reserved for ‘communicative elements’ in discourses of learning (ivani et al 2009:18), an argument could be made that moving to a more professionalised view of language and literacy support and development calls for a broader and more nuanced conception of language than may have been appropriate or adequate for the task of t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y 62 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the vocational teacher historically. this is not to suggest language and literacy are not themselves contested concepts. murray (2010) has suggested in relation to higher education, for example, that there needs to be a clearer distinction between notions of proficiency, academic literacies, and professional communication. similarly within vocational education there is often a lack of distinction between approaches to language and literacy informed by the second language acquisition (sla), english as an additional language (eal) and adult education (ae) fields, each with particular concerns and conceptions. this opaqueness is overlain by the implications for language and literacy of the dominant competency based training (cbt) approach to education and training (wheelahan 2009), which can be seen to favour a view of literacy as characterised by a ‘set of itemised skills which students have to learn and which are then transferable to other contexts’ (lea & street cited in murray 2010:59). in terms of pedagogical attempts to respond to the language and literacy needs of their students, all of the teachers reported adapting their practice to try to ‘pitch’ to where they perceive the students to be at. most commonly this included strategies such as slowing down their speech and taking care when using ‘industry speak’ that students may not be familiar with. other strategies included using a wiki to ensure students engage and as a way to encourage students to develop their own voice. there was an uncertainty, nevertheless, about how to build on these often innovative strategies. embedding language and literacy support – what does it mean? as mentioned above, the teachers in this study embrace the notion that language and literacy is ‘everybody’s business’ and displayed an eagerness to find out how they could develop their skills and work collaboratively with language and literacy staff to enhance the students’ experience. yet despite their openness to, and understanding of, language and literacy as an essential part of the students’ repertoire for the workplace, the teachers, for the most part, tended to talk about content and skills as discrete and literacy support as something that happens elsewhere. … but if i need help i definitely ask for it and refer them on. …there is concurrent assistance or somebody over there that can help you. t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 63 notably the teachers who expressed confidence in their understanding of the deep relationship between their content and the students’ lln developmental needs expressed at the same time firm views about the need to delineate content and skills work. i think the mixing up, the incorporating ll&n activities in the, in an academic skills subject, sometimes in fact, is sort of selfdefeating. …because the deficiencies in fact are so profound that they really have a lot to catch up on. so they’re doing two things at once. and as another stated, i would probably be quite willing to have concurrent assistance or lln assistance to come in as dedicated half hour within the three-hour class. this is a half hour time that is dedicated to improving your communication skills, language skills etc. to have it happen within the context of trying to get across an accounting message i think is too distracting. it is clear to us that the teachers in this study do not tend to conceive of language and literacy as an integral aspect of the curriculum they are delivering. however, this dominant view of lln as something that happens ‘over there’ sits in tension with an evolving sense, in the teachers’ talk, of an emerging developmental approach in which they situate language and literacy as an integral element of the professional discourses students are being apprenticed into. for example one of the teachers who would refer students on suggests … instead of just identifying the ones that are having difficulty, i like to also then put together something that i think would identify all the students and put them together in one space. another says i want to know if people are engaged in this process [of working with the discipline content], which is surrounded by that stuff writing and reading. even the teacher quoted earlier who asserted very clearly that the oil of content and the water of lln don’t mix, suggested a little later: … opportunitiesjust having them for the six months is an opportunity. it’s making sure that all teachers at least embed within their practice understanding of the levels of language and numeracy, and do something about it within the class. [emphasis added] t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y 64 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in our experience, the recognition that for students to develop professional language and literacy capabilities they need language and literacy to be scaffolded inside the curriculum in an explicit way (murray 2010) is often seen as significant by language specialists. nevertheless, this dissonance in the teachers’ conceptualisations, as wallace (2010) identifies, is part of the process of acquiring ‘troublesome knowledge’. t is in these disjunctions that he suggests learning may occur. what we see here is the teachers’ emergent alternative conceptions of what language and literacy could be. we know this can be an uncomfortable and unstable space that is exemplified by teachers ‘oscillating between previous and emerging understandings’ (wallace 2010:12). these emerging understandings appear to be an indicator of the evolution of a new discursive identity, characterised in this case also by the felt imperative to be embedding lln into content and assessment, and a lack of clarity about what embedding actually involves. as one teacher expressed it, ‘one particular thing that i am still not sure is how do you embed that […] in your assessment’. and another posed the question: ‘even if it’s a few subjects how do we utilise the lln component?’. these queries represent fruitful ground in which to develop partnerships with lln staff around inclusive, developmental ways of embedding lln into content. the teachers at the same time appeared clear that this needs to be collaborative work, one suggesting, understandably, that she felt ill-equipped to do it alone. a dialogic approach as suggested above, the process of foregrounding language and literacy within both curriculum and pedagogy cannot be simply linear and one-dimensional. given the complex nature of language and literacy, its interconnectedness with content, and the diversity of student language and literacy needs, embedding and attending more explicitly to language and literacy within vocational teaching will involve a range of approaches, concepts, strategies and practices attenuated to particular cohorts in particular ways. collaborative work with language and literacy specialists will be key in this, as ways forward are explored and developed together. the following section of this paper outlines some of the factors we feel are relevant to a generative approach to an integrated understanding and approach to language and literacy within vocational teaching. t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 65 one of the interviewees, who teaches accounting, made a number of comments that struck us as providing one possible fruitful place to take up the next part of the conversation. what is demonstrated in this account, and we acknowledge that it is only partially reproduced here, is not just a clear picture of where the collaborative work could be taken up, but also the discursive disjunctions that are, in wallace’s (2010) terms, a space where learning, for us all, can occur. we are interested in working in the space this disjuncture opens up. the teacher has a personal interest in language, his eye is on the big, industry focused, picture and his broad-based conceptualisation of accounting is passionately articulated. he suggests … it is not the numbers... but understanding what the thing means, understanding what the figures mean, the story, being able to tell the story is far more important. because the computer will spit out numbers, numbers is not the problem, understanding numbers is the problem. this way of conceiving the ‘story of accounting’ opens up the opportunity for a collaborative conversation about the language and literacy aspects of this accounting story. indeed the teacher readily focuses in on some of these aspects, such as talking on the phone, writing reports, taking and writing up minutes of meetings, and presenting, now to the class, but later ‘to the board of directors’! here is the contextualised work that can be scaffolded. together the content teacher and the language and literacy teacher can discuss and plan how students’ report writing abilities can be supported and developed, to use but one example. students could benefit from explicit conversations about the purpose of report writing, different types of reports, the generic features of reports and the formal and profession-specific language of the reports they will need to read and write in the accounting workplace. they could benefit from such strategies as working with models of reports, taking them apart, putting them back together, critiquing them, rewriting them, identifying aspects of their structure, and many other approaches to working with and creating these texts that will become evident naturally as the specific needs of the particular cohort emerge. so it appears to us that the next part of the journey reveals itself; however, the teacher still sees content and language and literacy as discrete, and this represents a disjunction. he suggests if a teacher were to come to his classroom he could say explicitly to the t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y 66 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s students, ‘righto we’ve finished accounting at the moment, we’re now going to have a real good look at lln stuff’. this is the space in which to start the collaborative work and it signals to us the importance of the first part of the work being at the conversation level outside the classroom. the first task, we believe, is to have a dialogue about the language and literacy implicit within the accounting story. one approach in the scenario sketched above has been for the language and literacy teacher to bring to the conversation some appropriate materials specific to the unit, in this case perhaps models of accounting reports, some annotated to make generic features explicit. this way trust and credibility is built, and the relationship can start to evolve. our experience tells us that as the relationship develops the teachers’ ‘ways of being in the world’ start to shift as they begin to conceptualise language and literacy differently and change their classroom practice, to the extent that this constitutes a shift toward a new way of doing things; it can be seen as a shift towards becoming a part of a new community of practice (wenger 1998). at the same time, as language practitioners we too find our own ‘ways of being in the world’ shift as this new environment and relationship impacts on our practice as we also become part of this new cross-disciplinary community of practice. the learning that takes place then, as mccormack (2014:57) has argued in relation to academic language and learning (all) work, possesses a dimension beyond the subject-object metaphysic of modern knowledge in which learning is simply the acquisition of additional knowledge or skill, an acquisition that does not impact on the identity of the learner. what is called for on the part of these teachers is some shift from a lay conception of language, most likely as a relatively tangible set of items, rules or formulas (rose 2012) to a view of language as more ineluctably bound up with content, and by extension, with ways of being, that cannot be captured by an isolated set of grammatical rules or structures alone. on this view, we suggest, the complex nature of language is itself an essential threshold concept (meyer & land 2006) to be grappled with in this transformative process. this conception extends to an acknowledgement and previously unappreciated awareness that language and literacy represent dynamic, contested and contingent concepts. it moves inevitably beyond a ‘naïve’ single faceted view of language and literacy, and t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 67 towards a view more in line with the multiplicities inherent in a ‘literacies’ view of language ( vani et al 2009). in arguing for an embedded approach to language and literacy support in vocational education, moraitis, carr and dadow (2012) emphasise the importance of collaborative planning and curriculum design processes for developing and sustaining pedagogies and curriculum that acknowledge the inter-relation between language and content. they point out that for many teachers ‘the connection between the conceptual and the linguistic demands [of a unit or discipline] remain an unresolved area’ (moraitis et al 2012:59). in some senses, whilst on a continuum, a difference could be posited here between what vocational teachers see as language and literacy teachers supporting them in their work (more like old knowledge) and a high jump in involvement, understanding and ownership of the forms and complexity of language and literacy embedded within their domain of professional knowledge (more like new knowledge). in relation to this, bak and murphy (2009:198-99) argue similarly for a community of practice based collaborative approach to curriculum development, premised on the recognition that discipline-specific language and learning skills are fundamental to the construction of meaning within particular institutional contexts as well as to the necessary acculturation into the academic discourse of particular disciplines, and that language and academic programs that teach these skills should be embedded in the content being learned. the context and opportunities for collaborative work of the type we are describing however are in flux, as the vocational education sector undergoes significant change. this is so particularly in victoria where until recently the course in applied vocational study skills (cavss) model, which is premised on a literacy teacher being present within the ‘classroom’ to assist with the literacy and study skills dimensions of the learning being undertaken, provided some scope for the provision of collaborative learning spaces. this option has been largely replaced by the foundation skills training package, which is designed for delivery by vet teachers rather than language specialists per se, although not without assistance from language specialists where appropriate (government skills australia [gsa] 2014). as black and yasukawa (2011) point out however, even cavss is premised on an uneven power relationship which limits its effectiveness in terms of enabling genuinely effective collaborative t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y 68 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s relationships, which they stress is important in seeing the relationship between lln and vocational content as dynamic and contestable (2011). even within this uneven context however, there remains the possibility of access to different knowledges, and it is this that lies at the heart of the collaborative process. conclusion within an already complex and shifting environment, the imperative to take up increased responsibility for lln has added a significant new dimension to the existing role and identity of vet teachers in australia. whilst the need for a broader and more effective approach to lln support within vocational education is well documented, there has been little if any examination of the responses of vet teachers to this development. this paper has explored the perceptions and understandings of a small group of vocational teachers in relation to these new professional skills and responsibilities. we have argued that whilst there is a willingness on the part of the vocational teachers in this study to take up at least some of the responsibility for language and literacy, the task is not without contradictions and tensions. what is needed, we suggest, is an acknowledgement firstly that the journey is complex and requires time, and secondly that collaborative work with language and literacy specialists is integral to accessing and developing specialist understandings and conceptions of language and literacy itself. acquiring new specialist knowledge is a potentially dissonant process that involves ‘oscillating between previous and emerging understandings’ (wallace 2010:12), and sometimes continuing to perceive oneself as being an imposter in the new space (brookfield 2000). we have suggested that the notions of discourse (gee 1996), and troublesome knowledge (land et al 2008) offer a helpful lens onto the nature of the challenge faced by vocational teachers as they grapple with developing understandings of how embedded language and literacy may be conceptualised and enacted in their particular disciplines. an appreciation of language as inherently complex and intimately connected with discipline content, has been put forward as a key threshold concept (meyer & land 2006) that vocational teachers are either implicitly or explicitly grappling with. we have t o w a r d s p r o f e s s i o n a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y b a l a n d o ’ m a l e y 69 proposed a dialogic model, based on a collaborative relationship between vocational teachers and language and literacy support specialists, as one that supports the process that vocational teachers are undergoing as they move towards taking up and incorporating these skills into a new professional practice – into new ways of being and understanding. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments on the earlier version of this paper. we would also like to thank john hamilton, jacinta richards, and miguel gil for their generous and helpful feedback on earlier drafts. references arkoudis, s (2013) all at the crossroads 11 th , aall biennial conference, melbourne 14 november, retrieved 13 th nov 2014 from http://www.rmit.edu.au/aall2013. australian industry group (2010) national workforce literacy project: report on employers’ views 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transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2015, 23(1), 4422, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v23i1.4422 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 3 n o 1 2 0 1 5 3 “he was learning to read, but he wasn’t learning to live”: socially inclusive learning in a community setting greg marston and jeffrey johnson-abdelmalik abstract people with mental health problems, learning difficulties and poor literacy and numeracy are at risk of social exclusion, including homelessness. they are often disconnected from the formal education systems, with few opportunities for education and employment. academic research has demonstrated a link between literacy and numeracy and social connectedness, however the pathways to enact this are not well understood. this paper presents insights into how a community based adult literacy program in brisbane, australia provides a successful model of socially inclusive learning. the paper is based on a 12-month action research project conducted by the queensland university of technology in conjunction with anglicare southern queensland 2013-2014. the methodology for the project was qualitative in nature, involving participant observation of lessons, and semi-structured interviews with former and present students, volunteer tutors and the teacher. the central research focus was how literacy education can act as an instrument of social connection to the community. introduction people with mental health problems, learning difficulties and poor literacy and numeracy are at risk of social exclusion, including homelessness. they are often disconnected from the mainstream educational system (kliewer, bicklen & kasa-hendrickson 2006), with few opportunities for employment. the options available for https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s people in australia from disadvantaged backgrounds and living with mental health issues and/or other disabilities who want to improve their literacy are limited. when people engage with mainstream education providers such as the technical and further education (tafe) network, they may be required to follow curricula that are inflexible and not adapted to their needs, or their capacity to handle stress. this article provides supporting evidence for the paradigm that community based literacy programs can improve social connections and engagement. in 2009, balatti, black and falk proposed a model for adult literacy based upon the concept of social capital, focussing on the relationships between literacy skills and engagement in society. they highlight that: a social capital perspective necessitates conceptualizing adult literacy and numeracy education and training as an intervention embedded in wider spheres of activity, including the sociocultural and economic activity of the community in which the training is taking place. it also requires viewing the learner as a member of networks (balatti et al 2009:7). at the same time balatti et al state that ‘to date, there has been no comprehensive “how to” guide on designing adult literacy and numeracy learning experiences within a social capital framework’ (2009: 10). there has also been limited research into the effectiveness of community based literacy programs. in 2013-14 anglicare southern queensland (asq) funded the school of public health and social work in the queensland university of technology (qut), to explore the pedagogy and practice of a small community-based literacy group based in west end, an inner city suburb of brisbane. anecdotally, the program had been noted to have successfully helped people make big improvements in their social engagement. anglicare were interested in finding out what characteristics of the program made it successful. what emerged from the study was the documentation of a model of that co-locates literacy learning with a community-based social service, promoting people’s independence and autonomy 1 . discourses of literacy the understanding that literacy and numeracy provides a background for engagement with the economy and inclusion in the community has underpinned literacy policy in australia in one form s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g m a r s t o n a n d j o h n s o n a b d e l m a l i k 5 or the other since the 1970s, perhaps even since the arrival of displaced persons after world war ii (see for example, brock 2001, lo bianco & wickert 2001, castleton & mcdonald 2002). for this reason, government policy around literacy and numeracy in australia revolves about the policies of education of children, literacy for migrants and adult literacy for employment. however, many people with disabilities and mental health issues are effectively excluded from the employment market and from mainstream education. this then makes them vulnerable to becoming invisible to society. community-based education can work against this risk. there are two overarching directions in literacy theory that influence literacy learning practice. these reflect the dialectic in intellectual life between realist or positivist epistemologies and interpretivism or constructivism (freebody & luke 2003:54-56). the realist position can be described broadly as ‘functional’, and reflects a broad consensus of community views of why people need to be able to read and write. it runs parallel to a neo-liberal view of education as something that prepares you for a working life and a life of ‘selfreliance’. the alternative direction tries to unsettle the assumptions that underlie this discourse, and to open up the discussion to consider the marginalised aspects of literacy itself and of the marginalised people who are affected by a lack of socially valued literacy skills. both functionalist and interpretivist perspectives are relevant to community-based literacy learning, and create a dialectic that can be valuable in determining future directions. both perspectives however, have to be subjected to critique. while the functional approach lays too heavy an emphasis on employability, the alternative interpretivist perspective can disappear into the mists of vagueness and appear nonpragmatic. what is common to both, however, is the view that literacy has a liberating potential in a highly technological society, although the view of what that means may be different: ‘functional literacy…relates more to levels of skills that individuals or populations need in order to complete some specified real-life reading task. for example, in the area of human welfare, reading skills are variously required to realise outcomes with respect to job, transportation, and economic necessities. similarly, these skills are also used to obtain food, shelter, clothing, health care, etc. thus, functional literacy is defined here as reading (comprehending printed materials) to s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s obtain, retain, or maximize an end or goal which has “survival” value’ (kirsch & guthrie 1977-78:490). reading and writing underpins not just the sophisticated task of reading our culture, but of the functional tasks of taking a bus, knowing how much something costs and finding it in the supermarket, getting a driving license, reading a tenancy lease, looking at apartment advertisements and keeping meeting times. it is obvious that exclusion from literacy skills is in itself exclusion from society. however, as early as the 1970s kirsch and guthrie reviewed the measurement tools around functional literacy, and found significant issues with the functional approach. the emphasis on verbal and written skills overlooks the importance of other practical competencies, to the extent that societies change, people who may be classified as literate at one time and in one society may not be so at another time or in another society (kirsch & guthrie 1977-78:492). in this context, a critical approach to functional literacy is required. if people are disadvantaged in finding and keeping work, then people without literacy are doubly disadvantaged. as the number of jobs decline, especially low-skilled work, and the reading and writing requirements of simple jobs increase, people without literacy find themselves increasingly isolated (for discussions on the changing labour market see gorz 1999, deacon 2002, peel 2003:114-140, and for the impact of this on people without good literacy see motakef 2007). it will be important to reframe literacy in a way that respects the positive direction of social inclusiveness while guarding against the further cultural wounding of people who have learning impairments and other disadvantages by over-emphasising the social status of work and self-sufficiency. in short, there are other reasons to be literate than to get a paid job. while functional literacy reflects positive engagement and inclusion in the community, it is ‘outer-directed’ and insensitive to the literacies that people create and require to develop satisfying inner lives. one of the most significant reasons to be literate is to gain a greater degree of autonomy and control over one’s life, and this is especially significant if the events of one’s life, such as mental health crises, have robbed them of self-esteem and robust self-image. it is important to recognise the forms of literacy practice that people develop to help them cope with and relate to the world. in pedagogical terms this means to recognise multi-literacies that incorporate multimodal aspects of communication and the changing s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g m a r s t o n a n d j o h n s o n a b d e l m a l i k 7 context of language use (kress 2003). in the multi-literacy approach, informed by interpretavism and constructivism, people are not merely users of language, but also its creators (kress 2003). this implies that people create ways to express themselves that are unique or certainly individual, and that literacy can be a dialogue, sometimes radical, between the person and that person’s community. true inclusion in this sense requires a two-way understanding, and not simply an individual’s compliance with dominant societal norms. methodology the literacy group that was the focus of the study is known as the reading and writing group (raw). it is a program within the structure of the community agency a place to belong, located in west end, brisbane, which helps people with mental health issues and other disabilities to connect or reconnect to their communities. a place to belong was born out of the de-institutionalisation movement and was a response to the needs of people who were relocated from mental hospitals to the community in the 1990s (barringham & barringham 2002). the methodology for the research project was qualitative, involving participant observation of lessons, and semi-structured interviews with former and present students, volunteer tutors and the lead teacher. the core research practice was a series of observation sessions of lessons in two sites carried out from july to september 2013. in these sessions each week, participant observer researchers sat in on the introduction to the class, one-on-one teaching sessions and the group based learning sessions. the key focus of the observations was on interactions between students, teacher and tutors, and implementation of the learning goals that were articulated at the beginning of each class. in-depth written notes and observer reflections were also recorded. through the months of observation in 2013 (july to september), 15 classes were observed. the total number of students who engaged in classes was 17, however, no students attended all classes. two students attended six classes and two students only one. the median attendance figure was two classes. the largest class had seven students and the smallest only one. the average number of students was four. people had been students for a variety of periods. the longest enrolment period was over three years, and two students enrolled for the first time during the course of observation. s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s alongside the observations, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teacher, with two teaching support staff, a number of tutors and 20 present and past students. these interviews were recorded and transcribed. the researchers conducted a thematic analysis of the text of these conversations drawing out the principal themes, which were then explored using the recorded observational data. reflecting the participant methodology, the researchers recorded their observations and thoughts as they went, and reflected on them as part of the analysis. they then took the preliminary findings back to the teachers, tutors and students to test the validity of the analysis, which is a technique often used in social action research to ensure that the findings are relevant and can be usefully incorporated into practice (selener 1997). each of the students observed have a disability or disadvantage, although there was no consistency in these disabilities; for example, one person had cerebral palsy and travelled in a wheelchair, and also had facility with technology; another person had held down social work positions before succumbing to a mental illness, and technology of any kind caused her anxiety; four people had some kind of intellectual disability. the only common denominator is that they have aspects of literacy and numeracy that they want to work through and they should also be registered with the state department of disability services. to allow the strengths of the person to determine the goals of learning, students in raw are not classified according to diagnostic criteria around mental health or intellectual ability. the strategy adopted is to allow the intended literacies of the person to emerge over a period of time (in the first case, usually over the first four weeks of the class (classes continue for as long as the student wishes to attend), and it may therefore take a number of weeks before a clear program of learning emerges. in the following section a typical class is described. the class is typical because it contained an average number of students, four, with a diversity of needs, and had the regular teacher and tutors present. the description incorporates the stories of four raw students, alvin, gabriel, gavin (an ex-student) and grace, chosen because they clearly illustrate the interrelationships of literacy and social connectedness. in the stories that follow pseudonyms have been adopted unless students have expressed the desire to use their own names. s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g m a r s t o n a n d j o h n s o n a b d e l m a l i k 9 a description of a typical raw class in brisbane the class is held in a community house in west end, brisbane, frequented by a number of community groups and also occupied by the agency a place to belong. the main meeting room is in the centre of the house, and initial meetings of all students, tutors and the principal teacher happen there. the structure of the morning begins with a 45 minute group introduction facilitated by the principal teacher, which is attended by tutors and students. in this introduction the class participates in warm-up exercises and discusses individually what each student will be working on. in this session, students are also paired with tutors. attendance by students and tutors is not mandated, and so can be uncertain, in which case learning pairs sometimes need to be adjusted. wherever possible, tutors and students stay in the same learning pair for the learning semester. after the initial session students then separate out with their tutors and find other places in the building or adjoining garden to meet and continue one-on-one learning sessions, which last also for 45 minutes. these are broken by morning tea, which is held together. students and tutors then return to their second learning session. the first session concentrates on the learning of specific literacy skills. the second is focused on the identified goals and interests of the person, for example in telling and writing their story. the mid-july morning is cold by brisbane standards and there is a slow start to the 9am session with people drifting in and out. the class starts with three students and three tutors who are volunteers. the teacher begins a warm-up exercise that consists of clapping hands together. in this game the first person claps in a certain pattern and the next person has to repeat that and add their own pattern, and so on. it is a memory exercise that the teacher describes as being about working as a large group. he follows this up with an exercise in pairs which he demonstrates using bill; one person makes a motion and the other has to mirror them as they do it. the first try is a bit awkward as bill is clearly embarrassed, but alvin gets the class going with the exercise. it takes only a few minutes and then the teacher debriefs the exercise. he explains that the origin of reading and writing is copying. there is a high level of attention from the class at this stage. at this point john arrives. he is an ex-student who continues to turn up each week. today he is dressed as a punk, and stamps his feet s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s to get attention. he is a big man and it is hard to ignore him but the teacher continues. he tells students and tutors that in this period of learning (this is the second week of the four week class cycle) we should expect to see an improvement even if we cannot expect to be able to read. he goes around the class setting tasks but tells the tutors that they are free to change the goals and tasks as they see fit. before breaking up into learning teams of tutor and student they play another game, which is a simple game of ‘what season do you like?’. john comes in again and starts dancing and saying that he likes the boy group one direction. this gets a chuckle from some of the other students. the paired-up students and tutors find spaces to work, some inside, others outside, to work in the sunshine at tables dotted around the front yard. one learning pair is set an assisted reading task around bodybuilding including different types of lifts. the student, marty, is quite well-built and is keen on bodybuilding, which is why this reading topic is chosen. another two tutors are assigned to bill to do spelling and maybe later some maths. alvin is working in the computer room with a tutor. while this allocation of lessons is going on john keeps dancing through the class and talking to himself. gabriel arrives at this stage, having come from the north side of brisbane by train. he is sometimes delayed by the nurses who give him his injections for his diabetes. gabriel begins a spontaneous conversation with the teacher, as the other students are going off to their groups. ‘what makes a great house?’ he asks and then answers himself: ‘where people don’t treat you like you are handicapped, where you can do what you want. any house should allow you to make choices’. the teacher gives the tutor a new word ‘residential’ to teach to gabriel. his learning team consists of his tutor and a volunteer who acts as gabriel’s ally to help him do various things in the community, such as use public transport. they retire outside under the tree. gabriel lives in a supported accommodation group home. he has been attending raw for two and a half years. he doesn’t like his accommodation. it’s like a prison in your own home, he says. ‘the gates are always locked! you’ve got to ask somebody to open them and then wait for them.’ although he is not physically confined, he feels confined by this process. he also wants to keep a pet bird and do his own cooking and shopping. gabriel has some serious health conditions and has s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g m a r s t o n a n d j o h n s o n a b d e l m a l i k 11 trouble understanding how to care for those conditions. because of this his support workers in the group home have indicated that they do not believe he would be able to live independently. however, it remains his consistently repeated desire. he is now also working with the teacher to express his desire to live independently. the following is a quote from his story, written by himself as part of his learning program: nobody owns people by gabriel nobody owns people. some people have got to be reminded. you can't own a person. we are free. we're free as birds, just no wings and no feathers. there's nothing stopping us from walking. not a thing. that's why we've got legs. we've got to walk somewhere. i walk anywhere. i hope i make it home. gabriel says, ‘they baby you. treat you like you’re handicapped. i want to do my own washing. shopping. don’t talk to me like a baby’. the teacher then explains why he is suggesting that gabriel write letters – it will help him stand up for his rights by expressing his needs clearly and demonstrating that he knows what he is talking about to the accommodation support workers who right now are not listening to him. gabriel’s emerging literacy has a political use, to aid him to take back the power that his writing demonstrates he feels he has lost, or perhaps never had. the teacher s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s gives the tutor a task, to determine a list of things for the student to do himself, and list of words to describe a good place. in another learning group inside the house the teacher and alvin are doing some role-plays, firstly about a ticket inspector telling a passenger to get their feet off the seat. alvin plays the inspector and has to tell the teacher, the passenger, to get his feet off the seat. alvin then suggests a second activity, where he plays a drunken person being approached by a policeman. the policeman asks the drunk person for their address, but the drunken person isn’t able to say it. once the teacher and alvin are out of the role-play they talk about the need for him to have his address handy and to be able to say what it is. alvin has difficulty in framing his spoken words, so he tries singing his address on the teacher’s suggestion, which makes it come more fluently. both role-plays have relevance for the real world, as the first one was used to reflect on a time when the student didn’t have a train ticket and got in trouble. the other objective is for the student to practice forming whole sentences. alvin clearly enjoys role-play. he is very animated and plays his part convincingly. after the role-play alvin and the teacher go to make alvin a laminated id card on the computer, with his address that he can keep in his wallet. ‘free coffee’ and ‘meet good people’ is what alvin says when asked by the researchers why he comes to raw. this certainly reflects things alvin values in life, being an extremely social person, well-known to many in his community. if you dig a little deeper, however, it is clear that alvin is committed to improving his literacy skills. talking to people is definitely one of his strengths, and communication is a priority area alvin has wanted to work on. his speech is dyspraxic (edwards 1973), meaning that things he says regularly (like ‘you’re the best worker’) are very clear, whereas if he wants to communicate something novel he may experience difficulty with forming the words clearly. using hand signals, body movements and role-play has significantly helped to guide and prompt alvin’s speech. this has been a useful way of encouraging him to speak in sentences and participate more fully in communicating with others. for alvin, employment is a goal, but equally importantly, his success at learning to write his own name after a long struggle has contributed to his selfesteem. his pursuit of literacy has been as much about competency in social communication as instrumental goals like employment. s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g m a r s t o n a n d j o h n s o n a b d e l m a l i k 13 grace’s story is quite different. in her daily life she deals with formal thought disorder (radanovic, de sousa valiengo, gattaz & forlenza 2012), which means that her thinking and speech can be tangential or fragmented and difficult to follow. she describes hearing voices and seeing things that other people do not hear or see, and this can be unsettling for people who don’t realise or understand what is happening. grace joined the raw after identifying a personal learning goal of wanting to be able to log on to a computer. her use of the computer resulted in a communication breakthrough because it allowed her to partially structure and communicate her thoughts. after a long process of discovery supported by teacher and tutors she was able to write up her story and express her goals for ‘sustainability’ and ‘well-being’. this story formed the basis of a successful application for funding which has begun a process of her seeking to leave the hostel that she loathes, to live independently with support. so, while her literate practice can be viewed as a form of expression that possibly serves as a form of structuring a disordered universe, a literacy of great significance for her experience of mental health, it has had a functional outcome in attracting funding that may see her gain in independence and power. similarly, another former student with the west end group, gavin, spent most of his early life living in a hostel. when gavin joined the raw he was being bullied at the hostel and controlled by an abusive hostel manager. however, he was under clinical care after a breakdown and his clinical manager was very concerned that any change of living arrangements would lead to serious problems. every time that he experienced a bullying episode, the teacher encouraged him to write about it and to submit it to the clinical manager until she became convinced too that a change in living arrangements was necessary. gavin organised a meeting of a number of stakeholders and conducted a meeting where he presented himself well. they reached a decision to refer him to an independent living program, and through his work with the program demonstrated his ability to support himself. ultimately he was able to move to an independent unit. gavin expressed in interview that he has had a huge jump in his happiness through this move. one of the things that has happened is that he is now seeing much more of his aunt and brother who would not visit him in the hostel. he now has family, a sheltered job that he is happy to stay in, his independence and a network. these things s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s have increased his confidence. the teacher noted that his bodily posture has changed and he is now beginning to provide leadership, by advising friends who want to move out of institutional settings. gavin comes occasionally to classes always sporting a brand new t-shirt earned through his own work, and reflecting up-to-date fashion sense. if literacies are inherent in all forms of manmade objects, then gavin’s use of t-shirts is a literate practice (barthes 1972, barthes 1983, eco 1986). when you speak to him about them it is clear that his t-shirts express a found sense of success and selfrespect. the teacher reports that he has acquired a valued role as a consultant to others who are in the same position. the individual morning sessions, as mentioned above, focus on spelling, comprehension and writing skills, and where it is appropriate, these specific functional skills will be linked to the people’s life goals. as can be seen above, the teacher is trying to enhance gabriel’s written literacy to be able to frame letters that convincingly express his desire to live independently. these can be used to help him advocate for this outcome with his residential support agency, which is resistant to the idea. as in gavin’s case, this strategy aims to turn people’s judgements of gabriel’s capacities around to begin the process of helping him find his own residence. the focus of the literate practice is to empower the individual, but also to change his environment. after the morning break there is a second session, and in this session the focus moves specifically on building literacy for inclusion in the community, and has a broader focus on engaging the literacy practices of the person. so, for example, because alvin spends a lot of time meeting and greeting people but lacks social skills such as understanding propriety, he is vulnerable. a lot of the work that is done with alvin is about survival and understanding how to express himself appropriately through words, but also behaviours and conduct. the teacher completes the morning work by bringing everyone back into a group session and reviewing the progress made, as well as making goals for the next week’s learning. the class is over by about 12:30pm. what does not appear directly in this depiction of the lesson is the work done outside of the class. this has been indicated in some of the background stories about students. because there are volunteer tutors and paid support workers who can engage with students’ projects for the achievement of their goals in community, the learning s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g m a r s t o n a n d j o h n s o n a b d e l m a l i k 15 work can be extended. while people are learning literacy skills they are also applying them: so, for example people’s life-stories may become applications for grants (as in the case of gabriel, grace and gavin), or people learn social skills that assist in helping them connect with others (alvin). some of the problems and issues encountered can be brought back to class where they become material to be worked on and developed. reflections on the raw model the model of raw has a triple perspective: two arms of pedagogy and one of social connectedness. the teacher of raw expressed the view during one of the research interviews that raw attempts a pedagogy that is consciously functionalist but also embraces a multi-literacy approach to learning, allowing flexibility in the literacies learned and in the modality of learning. there is a clear tension in this; on the one hand the learning is designed for students to take on board literacy skills as a technology to help overcome obstacles for their inclusion in society. however, there is also a clear commitment to allowing people to ‘tell their stories’ and express themselves in ways that they relate to, even if this has no obvious measurable outcome. certainly much of this work is about ‘fitting’ people into the community, rather than changing community around the person, but it is clear that the driver of the work is discovery and respect for what the person is identifying through their learning as what they want for a better life. the research conducted at raw revealed a perspective on social inclusiveness for people who are marginalised that is more meaningful than an integrationist discourse that equates inclusion with employment (levitas 2005). the raw version of inclusion and connection engages with amartya sen’s and nussbaum’s extremely influential theory of capabilities (sen 1999, nussbaum 2011). in this version the person’s ability to activate their own agency through resources, knowledge and proximity to useful services is critically important, as is having a broader conception of human capabilities beyond an economic value. observation over three months of classes suggested that on one level, what is happening is not unusual in teaching people to read and s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s write. commonly available textbooks are used, and methods encompass the common pedagogy of literacy classes. neither is it unusual for people to base their literacy learning on their needs. this after all is characteristic of all adult learning. however, what is unusual in this relationship is that once a person’s needs related to their lives in community are determined, there can be a close connection with other workers in the agency who can support them achieve these goals. as an ironic example of this, john, who appears briefly in the description above, was a student of the raw until it was decided that learning to read and write was actually less important than his need to achieve connection with what he values in community. he left the classes and was connected with support workers of the agency, attracted government funding and is now working on his social connectedness goals. it was said about him by the teacher that: ‘he was learning to read, but he wasn’t learning to live’. conclusion these stories and descriptions demonstrate, admittedly with a small group of people, the diverse impacts of literacy learning on the capacity of people to live full, engaged lives and to take back some of the autonomy that they have lost through mental health issues and other disadvantages. what emerges in the connection between literacy and the social world is a definition of social connection that includes: intrinsic motivation; gaining power over one’s life (both big and small changes); gaining power and control over one’s mental health; the acquisition of valued roles, respectful recognition, voice and self-advocacy; and connection with family and friends. the opportunity to develop employment or education pathways is also there and was demonstrated by other students whose goal was to find paid work. however, the selected examples in this article have been chosen to demonstrate the aspects of life in community that get lost in a single-minded focus on productivity and employment. the commitment of this community-based learning group is to adjust to and reflect the students’ needs, rather than to take them through a set curriculum. this does not mean, however, that there is no pedagogy or curriculum to follow. as the description illustrates the teacher uses conventional frameworks of literacy to teach functional skills. where there is innovation, however, is in the creative use of literacies that s o c i a l l y i n c l u s i v e l e a r n i n g m a r s t o n a n d j o h n s o n a b d e l m a l i k 17 are already meaningful to students (teaching from what is already known) to assist the learning. the embedded location of a reading and writing group in an agency that works to facilitate the connection of people with their communities of choice illustrates the point made by balatti et al (2009), cited above, using the language of ‘social capital’ , that there is a disconnect between these two activities in australia that can be usefully avoided by forging strong partnerships. in this case, this partnership was facilitated by co-location of services. the connection between literacy and the processes of social connectedness, is one of the most interesting findings of this research. the co-location of a literacy program with a qualified teacher and volunteer and professionally trained community workers in the one agency enables a seamless series of interventions that can respond to learning and social needs as they arise. looking at literacy through both lenses opens up a creative space of multiple connections and possibilities to promote socially inclusive learning. acknowledgement we would like to acknowledge the creative and active participation and support provided to this research project by the teacher damian le goullon, neil barringham, manager, a place to belong and anglicare southern queensland. we would also like to acknowledge the helpful comments of the reviewers. endnote 1 the full report is published as “he was learning to read, but he wasn’t learning to live”, and is available on open access from the queensland university of technology eprints website, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/79343/1/csc3305_raw_report_-_a_place_to_belong_web.pdf references balatti, j, black, s & falk, i (2009) a new social capital paradigm for adult literacy: partnerships, policy and pedagogy, national centre for vocational education research, adelaide, sa. barringham, n & barringham, p (2002) finding people to be there: rebuilding a sense of belonging, a place to belong and the anglicare mental health network, west end, brisbane. barthes, r (1972) mythologies, hill and wang, ny. barthes, r (1983) empire of signs, hill and wang, new york,. 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0004282x2012005000015 sen, a (1999) development as freedom, oxford university press, oxford. http://dx.doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674061200 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511481581 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0004-282x2012005000015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0004-282x2012005000015 literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults vol. 28, no. 1 dec 2020 © 2020 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: yasukawa, k, and wickert, r. 2020. editorial. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 28:1, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns. v28i1.7529 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | url of journal editorial editorial keiko yasukawa1, rosie wickert2 1 university of technology sydney 2 former editor, literacy and numeracy studies corresponding author: keiko yasukawa, university of technology sydney. keiko.yasukawa@uts.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.7529 article history: received 06/12/2020; accepted 06/12/2020; published 19/12/2020 this issue of the 28th volume of literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults will be the journal’s final issue. while we never planned to, and will not, indulge in an issue by issue reminiscence of the journal, it seemed fitting for rosie wickert, one of the founding editors of the journal, and keiko yasukawa, the last remaining editor of the journal, to jointly write this final and reflective editorial. literacy and numeracy studies was already seven years old when it was born in 1997; it was launched to continue the work of the journal open letter: australian journal for adult literacy research and policy which had been publishing since 1990 as part of the national project of the australian language and literacy policy. open letter was ably edited during that time by ian reid and lesley farrell and was a significant acknowledgement that adult literacy had earned recognition as a field of professional and academic study it was indeed a ‘milestone’ (simpson 1990: 1). when the funding support for open letter ceased, literacy and numeracy educators at the university of technology sydney made a commitment to continue the journal as an internationally refereed journal ‘concerned with the ways that language, literacy and numeracy are implicated in all aspects of adult life’ (wickert 1996: 6). like open letter, literacy and numeracy studies was envisaged to support and publish the work of new writers as well as the work of more established academics and practitioners – a vision which we believe we have fulfilled, and which is reflected in the current issue with the first article from roslyn appleby, a well established researcher in applied linguistics, and the second article by alison abraham, whose article draws from her recent doctoral research. without aiming to systematically review all of the past issues of the journal we begin with a reflection of what this journal set out to achieve, and what we believe it has achieved. one of the most noticeable changes in the breadth of the journal’s scope compared to its predecessor’s declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.7529 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.7529 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.7529 was the inclusion of ‘numeracy’ in the name, and consequently, the number of articles that have been published with that focus. these articles advanced sociocultural or sociomaterial practice theorisations of numeracy, and include conceptual, methodological and pedagogical papers as well as case studies of numeracy practices (baker 1998, baynham & johnston 1998, beelizimmermann 2011, evans 2002, fitzsimons 2003, tomlin 2002). during the life of the journal, an interest in adult literacy and numeracy as contextdependent social practices blossomed in the research field; however, policy interest – internationally as well as nationally – has been increasingly influenced by a human capital perspective treating literacy and numeracy primarily as resources for economic growth and productivity. this policy setting generated a number of articles in the journal critiquing that trend and advocating alternative policy futures (black & yasukawa, 2010, castleton, sanguinetti & falk 2001, limage 2009, lo bianco 1997, osmond 2016, reder 2009). the human capital focused policy has influenced employers’ perspectives on the role of literacy and numeracy in workplaces and in turn workplace literacy and numeracy programs. how literacy ‘works’ in workplaces and critical analysis of, as well as innovations in, workplace programs have been reported in a number of the articles (alkema 2019, jackson 2000, scheeres 2007, searle, 2001). related to these studies are critical studies of literacy and numeracy as the panacea for unemployment (black 2004, bynner 2004, jacobson 2016). the impact of narrowing the scope of policy and increasing the accountabilities attached to adult literacy and numeracy programs has been the subject of some of the articles documenting the changing work and identities of teachers (smith 2009, tusting 2009). however, none of the official policy initiatives that narrow the scope and meaning of adult literacy and numeracy have narrowed the diversity of contexts in which adult literacy and numeracy needs are felt. in addition to featuring continued work in literacy and numeracy for vocational and academic purposes (chapman 1998, hood, rose & de silva joyce 2008, martin, lacroix & fownes 2006), the journal has continued to publish studies undertaken in a range of communitybased and familyfocused programs (boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan & leblanch 2013, chodkiewicz, johnston & yasukawa 2005, choi & najar 2017, furness 2013, smythe & isserlis 2004). health literacy and numeracy is another area that defies a narrow conceptualisation of literacy and numeracy, and an emerging interest in understanding what it means to be health literate and numerate and how people develop these literacies and numeracies has been discussed in a number of articles (archer, frith & prince 2002, green, lo bianco & wyn 2007, hunter & franken 2012, nutbeam 1999, papen 2009). by browsing the issues of literacy and numeracy studies readers can gain a critical perspective on the dominant policy trends both internationally and nationally but also see that no policy effort has been able to suppress researchers’ interest nor practitioners’ commitment to making positive interventions in the lived literacy and numeracy experiences of adults. studies that show the transformative impacts of literacy and numeracy on individuals’ lives and identities and the ways in which literacy and numeracy practices themselves are fluid and changeable in response to changes in people’s lives and their sociopolitical environment attest to the futility of any narrow framing of adult literacy and numeracy (campbell 1998, hamilton 2009, kubascikova, evans & khan 2018, marston & johnsonabdelmalik 2015, swain 2005). as editors we firmly believe that literacy and numeracy studies has contributed in significant ways to opening up and promoting debates, informing practice and supporting research in adult literacy and numeracy. the decision to discontinue the journal has not been easy. since starting to publish as a free, open access journal through uts epress, the journal has been more easily accessible to a wider readership, particularly practitioners not affiliated with a university. we are confident, however, that both the academic research community, practitioners and others interested in adult literacy and numeracy will continue to be wellserved with research in the field through the new open access online journal adult literacy education: the international journal of adult language, literacy and numeracy published by the proliteracy group in yasukawa and wickert literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 2 the usa (https://www.proliteracy.org/alejournal) and the open access online journal adults learning mathematics: an international journal published by the adults learning mathematics group https://alm online.net/almpublications/almjournal/. keeping the journal going for 23 years has not been without its challenges, and we are grateful for the support of many people. we want to acknowledge the work of all of the other past editors mike baynham, alison lee, hermine scheeres, jean searle, stephen black, katherine gordon, diana coben and nicola mccartney; editorial and administrative assistants sue anderson, renata atkin and emma davidson; the team at printing services at the university of technology sydney who printed the journal when it was produced in hardcopy, and the uts epress team who has been publishing our journal in its recent online platform. we also want to thank the faculty of arts and social sciences at the university of technology sydney which has provided a home for the journal over its entire life. finally and importantly, we want to express our sincere thanks to all those who have written for the journal, and all the readers; it is your support that has kept the journal going. we now leave you with the final two articles of this journal. the first article by roslyn appleby introduces us to the ideas of ‘naturedeficit disorders’ and ‘entangled pedagogies’ to help us think about the potential of focusing on humananimal relationships in literacy teaching. the second article by alison abraham is based on an actionresearch study on the impact of drawing on the teacher’s and their students’ shared local sociocultural knowledge in an academic literacy program. we hope you enjoy this last issue. references alkema, a (2019) hīnātore: upskilling māori and pacific workplace learners, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 27, no 1, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6833 archer, a, frith, v & prince, r (2002) a project-based approach to numeracy practices on hiv/ aids at university, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 11, no 2, 123-131. baker, d (1998) numeracy as social practice, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 8, no 1, 37–51. baynham, m & johnston, b (1998) ‘invention within limits’: numeracy practices of young unemployed people, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 8, no 1, 51–65. beeli-zimmermann, s (2011) ‘you have to find a location where you will sell, where you think you will sell most’ – exploring the numeracy skills of female microcredit clients in nicaragua, literacy and numeracy studies vol 19, no 1, 35-49. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v19i1.2417 black, s (2004) whose economic wellbeing? a challenge to dominant discourses on the relationship between literacy/ numeracy skills and (un)employment, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 13, no 1, 7-17. black, s & yasukawa, k (2010) time for national renewal: australian adult literacy and numeracy as ‘foundation skills’ literacy and numeracy studies, vol 18, no 2, 43-57. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v18i2.1897 boughton, b, ah chee, d, beetson, j, durnan, d & leblanch, j c (2013) an aboriginal adult literacy campaign pilot study in australia using ‘yes i can’, literacy and numeracy 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(2004) literacy, numeracy and employability: evidence from the british birth cohort studies, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 13, no 1, 31–48. campbell, b (1998) personal transformation in adult literacy education: the hidden spaces, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 8, no 2, 41-61. yasukawa and wickert literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 3 https://www.proliteracy.org/ale-journal https://alm-online.net/alm-publications/alm-journal/ https://alm-online.net/alm-publications/alm-journal/ https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v21i1.3328 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v21i1.3328 castleton, g, sanguinetti, j & falk, i (2001) wanted: a new national adult literacy policy for australia, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 11, no 1, 3–19. chapman, a (1998) academic numeracy: developing a framework, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 8, no 1, 99–121. chodkiewicz, a, johnston, b, & yasukawa, k (2005) educating parents: the evenstart financial literacy program, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 14, no 1, 23-47. choi, j & najar, u (2017) immigrant and refugee women’s resourcefulness in english language classrooms: emerging possibilities through plurilingualism literacy and numeracy studies vol 25, no 1, 20-37. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5789 evans, j (2002) developing research conceptions of emotion among adult learners of mathematics, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 11, no 2, 79–94. fitzsimons, g e (2003) using engestrom’s expansive learning framework to analyse a case study in adult mathematics, literacy and numeracy studies vol 12, no 2, 47-64. furness, j (2013) principles and practices in four new zealand family focused adult literacy programs: towards wellbeing in diverse communities, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 21, no 1, 133-158. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns. v21i1.3329 green, j, lo bianco, j & wyn, j (2007) discourses in interaction: the intersection of literacy and health research internationally literacy and numeracy studies, vol 15, no 2, 19-37. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v15i2.2205 hamilton, m (2009) relinquishing the practices of a lifetime: observations on ageing, caring and literacies, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 16, no 2 and vol 17, no 1, 63-74. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v0i0.1278 hood, s, rose, d & de silva joyce, h (2008) revisiting reading: exploring an intensive reading pedagogy in adult literacy, literacy and numeracy studies, vol. 16, no 1, 77-94. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v16i1.1949 hunter, j & franken, m (2012) health literacy as complex practice, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 20, no 1, 25-44. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v20i1.2618 jackson, n (2000) writing-up people at work: investigations of workplace literacy, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 10, no 1–2, 5–22. jacobson, e (2016) workforce development rhetoric and the realities of 21st century capitalism, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 24, no 1, 3-22. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4898 kubascikova, j, evans, j & khan, h t a (2018) development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 25, no 1, 3-24. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6301 limage, l j (2009) multilateral cooperation for literacy promotion under stress: governance and management issues, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 17, no 2, 5-33. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v17i2.1361 lo bianco, j (1997) towards an understanding of the policy framework shaping adult literacy in australia, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 7, no 2, 19–34. marston, g & johnson-abdelmalik, j (2015) ‘he was learning to read, but he wasn’t learning to live’: socially inclusive learning in a community setting, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 23, no 1, 3-19. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns. v23i1.4422 martin, l, lacroix, l & fownes, l (2006) flexible mathematical understanding in an ironworking apprenticeship classroom, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 15, no 1, 45-60. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v15i1.2026 nutbeam, d (1999) literacies across the lifespan: health literacy, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 9, no 2, 47–55. yasukawa and wickert literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 4 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5789 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5789 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v21i1.3329 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v21i1.3329 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v23i1.4422 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v23i1.4422 osmond, p (2016) what happened to our community of practice?: the early development of adult basic education in nsw through the lens of professional practice theory, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 24, no 2, 3-23. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v24i2.4821 papen, u (2009) literacy, learning and health: a social practices view of health literacy, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 16, no 2 and vol 17, no 1, 19-34. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v0i0.1275 reder, s (2009) scaling up and moving in: connecting social practices views to policies and programs in adult education literacy and numeracy studies, vol 16, no 2 and vol 17, no 1, 35-50. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v0i0.1276 scheeres, h (2007) talk and texts at work: beyond language and literacy skills, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 15, no 2, 5-18. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v15i2.2202 searle, j (2001) constructing literacies in the new work order, literacy & numeracy studies, vol 11, no 1, 21–40. simpson, n (1990) foreword, open letter, vol 1, no 1, 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1016/0308-0161(90)90086-w smith, c (2009) accountability requirements and professional development in the us adult basic and literacy education system, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 17, no 3, 27-41. https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v17i3.1395 smythe, s & isserlis, j (2004) the good mother: exploring mothering discourses in family literacy texts, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 13, no 2, 23-39. swain, j (2005) changes to adult learners’ identities through learning numeracy, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 14, no 1, 5-16. tomlin, a (2002) literacy approaches in the numeracy classroom, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 11, no 2, 9-24. tusting, k (2009) ‘i am not a “good” teacher; i don’t do all their paperwork’: teacher resistance to accountability demands in the english ‘skills for life’ strategy, literacy and numeracy studies, vol 17, no 3, 6-26. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v17i3.1396 wickert, r (1996) editorial, open letter, vol 6, no 2, 6. yasukawa and wickert literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 5 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i2.4821 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i2.4821 https://doi.org/10.1016/0308-0161(90)90086-w https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v17i3.1396 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v17i3.1396 microsoft word 02_4821_osmond_24.2_final   © 2016 pamela osmond. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative  commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the  material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any  purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.  citation: literacy and numeracy studies 2016, 24(2): 4821,  http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i2.4821    l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 2 2 0 1 6 3   what happened to our community of practice? the early development of adult basic education in nsw through the lens of professional practice theory pamela osmond       abstract the field of adult basic education had its genesis as a named field of education in the english speaking world in the mid-1970s, emerging from humanist discourses of social justice and a sociocultural view of literacy. subsequent decades of its development have involved recurrent and destabilising periods of change with a major and overriding theme being the move away from the humanist philosophy, towards an economically driven, human capital view of literacy, which mirrors the story of a number of other social programs in their trajectory towards the ‘new capitalism’. this paper considers the first fifteen years, or genesis, of the field of adult basic education in the state of new south wales in australia through official documents and archival material and through the stories from practice told by the teachers. analysis of these stories using a theory of professional practice knowledge demonstrates the ways in which the early field of professional practice emerged as a product of its particular socio-political climate, and demonstrates also the strong convergence between the public discourses and the professional discourses surrounding the field in this period; a convergence which was progressively weakened in subsequent decades. introduction the 1970s in much of the english-speaking world witnessed a period of general optimism in a new world order and heightened concern for human rights and social justice. this included a concern for opportunities for educationally disadvantaged adults and gave rise o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       4 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   to the development of adult literacy programs as a recognised and funded sector of many adult education systems (for example, hamilton and hillier 2006, street 1995). in australia, the early development of adult literacy programs took slightly different paths in each of the eight states and territories, since adult literacy policy was initially largely a state responsibility, with the federal australian government setting overall policy priorities. the study that this paper draws on is a study of the field in nsw which has been subject to its own particular influences, producing state-specific responses to national and international pressures (see osmond forthcoming). in australia, as in other similar countries, this concern for social justice and the humanist philosophy of education which drove the early programs, began to decline by the early 1980s. by this time, the narrative of economic decline had taken control of the public discourse with the result that the newly-minted field of adult literacy became co-opted into the task of economic reform (wickert et al. 2007, wickert and zimmerman 1991). this narrative of literacy development as human capital existed along-side the discourse of human rights for another decade or so, but in the view of many, it has come to displace it almost completely (for example, lo bianco 2010). by 2000, as changes in the socio-political climate which drove the field began to accelerate, lee and wickert noted that since there had been no substantial history or systematic analysis of the australian field written, ‘teachers have few places to go to contextualise their own practice’ (2000:143-4) adding that ‘in order to intervene in and assume control of the future of their field, teachers must develop an understanding of the complexities and inconsistencies that constitute the field’ (pp. 140-1). although some state-based histories have been written (campbell 2009, searle 1999), there has previously been no attempt to document a significant history of the adult basic education field in nsw. the study from which this paper draws begins to address the gap in the telling of the history of adult basic education in nsw by investigating how the discourses and practices in nsw have developed and changed. while the history of the field could be traced through a number of different lenses, for example, policy or learner groups, it is the changes in the educational practice of adult basic education that is of interest in this study. such a study is timely in the current context of fluidity and volatility of the vocational education and training (vet) context to which the field of adult basic   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 5   education is currently tied; a context which has driven significant change in the educational practices and discourses of the field. it is timely also in that it is important that the memories of professional practice in the field be documented while the institutional memory is still alive in the minds of those professionals who helped to shape those practices. thus the study examines the genesis of the field in nsw through the lens of a theory of professional practice knowledge that encompasses the socio-political background against which development of adult basic education practice has taken place. the larger study is titled adult basic education in nsw 1975–2015: official stories and stories from practice (osmond forthcoming) the stories from practice and selections of archival and documentary evidence serve to illuminate and illustrate the opportunities and tensions that have characterised this field. an analysis of the development of the field through the lens of the bodies of professional practice knowledge that have characterised it may help to guide present and future practitioners to an understanding of those complexities since it will highlight those aspects of the political and economic background of the practice over which they have no control, and those over which they may be able to exert some agency. although the study that this paper draws on covers the entire 40 year history of the field in nsw, this paper is concerned only with the first fifteen years of that period; the period which covers the genesis and initial growth of the field, before the transformation of the field began to accelerate, from the early 1990s. interview data from the study has indicated that this period is of particular interest as practitioners reflected with enthusiasm on a community of practice which was particularly energetic, productive and vibrant, in stark contrast to the current context of practice (black 2010). the data is analysed using conceptual resources of professional practice theories which provide a means of understanding the development of and changes in the field. in particular, i adopt kemmis’ (2009) concept of an ‘exoskeleton’ of practice to describe features such as the social contexts and discourses which are the background to practice. i will trace the exoskeleton of the adult literacy field in nsw in its first fifteen years, followed by an analysis of the body of professional practice knowledge of that period, with ‘stories from practice’ of practitioners who shared that community of practice. i will briefly discuss the present context of provision and will conclude with a reflection on what this view of the development o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       6 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   of the field suggests to present and future practitioners as they consider what influence they may be able to exert on the future directions of their practice. terminology the professional field which is the subject of this study has been identified by a number of different labels over the past 40 years. unesco first named and defined a field as adult literacy in the 1950s, in relation to developing nations (jones 2006, cited in hamilton 2012:15). this was the label by which it was generally known in the early years in britain and usa, and adopted in australia, although its definition was wider than that originally suggested by unesco. the term adult basic education soon came into general use, especially in nsw. it is the term which i favour, largely because of the priority given to ‘education’ thus connecting it to a wider narrative. it is therefore the term which will be generally used in this study. the term refers to programs which are designed for adults who wish or need to improve their reading, writing and numeracy skills. it is also used to refer to the field in general, its social meanings and implied ideologies and discourses. the acronym lln (language, literacy, numeracy) has come into common use more recently, as the discourse of the field has moved from ‘education’ towards ‘training’. although the term adult basic education is the chosen terminology for this study, other terms will occasionally be used as appropriate to the discussion of particular discourses or contexts of provision. in general, the terms have similar denotative meanings, although they can be interpreted as code for different discourses. the study the study, adult basic education in nsw 1975–2015: official stories and stories from practice is an historical interpretive study utilising the qualitative methodology of narrative inquiry (andrews, squire and tamboukou 2013, connelly and clandinin 1990, riessman 1993). it is considered that this is an appropriate research approach since it most closely reflects the educational philosophies and theories of literacy that have underpinned the subject of the proposed research; in particular, the social context view of literacy (for example, hamilton and hillier 2006). it is ontologically and epistemologically sympathetic to the adult literacy field, valuing, as it   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 7   does, the participant viewpoint. furthermore, the chosen methodology of narrative inquiry validates the place of the researcher as a participant in the inquiry, a position which i value in the case of my relationship to this study, as a long-term practitioner in the field. reflections of adult basic education practices were collected using semi-structured interviews and focus groups with participants selected on the basis of their longevity in the field, evidence of their active engagement in the field and representation across the key periods of change and sites of provision. this paper will draw on interview data from eight of those participants; practitioners who were employed during the early years of the field. all were at the time permanent full-time employees of the department of technical and further education (tafe) since tafe nsw was the main provider of adult basic education programs in the foundation stages of the field. interviewees are not named in this paper, with the exception of kath white, who holds a particularly significant position as the first adult basic education teacher employed by tafe nsw and the foundation coordinator of the adult literacy information office (alio) (johnston, kelly and johnston 2001). a desktop audit was also conducted on archival material (such as teaching resources, conference proceedings, newsletters) to add a further dimension to the data. professional practice knowledge the interview and archival data in the study is analysed against a framework of professional practice knowledge: the professional beliefs and practices that are shared by members of a particular community of practice (lave 1991). nicolini draws our attention to the ‘broad family of theoretical approaches’ (2013:1) which attach themselves to the label of practice theory in an attempt to explain the social world we inhabit. one such approach is schatzki’s (2005) social ontology in which his practice theory is described as consisting of nexuses of practices (or organised human activities) and material arrangements that cohere to form nets of practice-arrangement bundles which in turn can mesh and overlap with other practice-arrangement bundles and form even larger confederation of nets. this understanding of practice resonates well with descriptions of the field of adult basic education and the web of influences brought to bear on its development. stephen kemmis’ theory of professional practice (kemmis 2005a, 2005b, 2009, kemmis et al. 2014) is similar to schatzki’s in o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       8 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   its focus on the extra-individual features such as the social contexts and discourses which are the background to practice. kemmis refers to these as the exo-skeleton of a practice (2009); in schatzki’s terms, the other practice-arrangement bundles in a confederation of nets. kemmis’ framework is particularly appropriate to the field of adult basic education because, importantly, it highlights the central role and inseparability which the ‘exoskeleton’ of a practice plays in understanding the community of practice, an understanding which is crucial for an appreciation of the genesis of the field of adult basic education. he draws on a number of theorists including bourdieu and foucault to show that ‘beyond the individual person of the practitioner, practice is also socially, discursively, culturally and historically formed’ (2005a:23). he refers to these extra-individual spaces as a kind of ‘exoskeleton’ of arrangements which cause the performance to be realised in particular ways characteristic of this or that profession or this or that location … these extraindividual features might better be described as the mediating preconditions of practice, arranged in terms of cultures and discourses, social and political structures and dynamics, and material and economic conditions under which a practice is practised. (2009:33) kemmis’ interpretation of the ways in which members of a community of practice experience these intersubjective spaces through language, in space-time in the material world, and in social relationships will also be drawn on in the examination of the community of practice which is the subject of this paper. secondly, kemmis’ framework acknowledges the position of the client as aspect of an understanding of professional practice knowledge the nature and role of the client being one of the important factors which have characterised the field and its transformation. although the term ‘client’ was not one used by the profession in the early days, the data indicates a central focus on the needs and perspectives of the individual students (lee and wickert 2000, white 1985). it is indicative of the change in the field that the definition of client has shifted in recent years from student to industry or funding body (for example black 2010, yasukawa and black 2016: vii ix). the aspects of professional practice knowledge which are referred to as ‘sayings, doings and relatings’ (kemmis et al. 2014:3) also provide a useful framework for the following discussion and   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 9   analysis. this representation of sayings, doings and relatings is mirrored in higgs et al’s taxonomy of  propositional, theoretical or scientific knowledge;  professional craft knowledge or knowing how to do something;  personal knowledge about oneself as a person and in relationship with others’. (cited in kemmis 2005b:396) in other words, professional practice knowledge involves knowing cognitively, performatively and affectively. the range of features which are represented in kemmis’ framework thus provides a useful lens for interpreting participants’ reflections on their practice and their professional practice knowledge and to illustrate the ways in which the body of professional practice knowledge came to be created and disseminated amongst the members of the communities of practice. in the first years of the development of the field, participants referred to a rich mix of influences brought to bear on these communities of practice. abe’s professional practice knowledge in the early years the body of professional practice knowledge that emerged in these early years of the profession was, predictably, given its sociopolitical context, grounded in a discourse of individual rights and progressive liberalism. lee and wickert (1994:58) report that when teachers were asked about the principles that underpinned their practice, they typically produced lists of principles such as the following: • student-centred and student-directed learning; • curriculum based on student needs; • concern with student as a whole person; • use student experience as a resource for teaching; • negotiate learning with student; • relevant and purposeful learning activities; • no external assessment; • learning which develops student independence; • reflection; • student as active participant these firmly held foundation principles of adult basic education reflected humanistic and liberal adult education (merriam, caffarella and baumgartner 2012) and were more or less consistent across place in western democracies such as australia (hamilton and hillier 2006). these principles arose, however, in spite of the fact that there o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       10 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   was little research and published literature specific to the field (lee and wickert 2000, mccormack 2009, mchugh, nevard and taylor 2001). mccormack (2009) notes that, particularly in the early, formative years, none of the early practitioners were ‘lln natives; we [were] all “lln immigrants’’’ (p.9) having learnt our pedagogies in other fields of education. interview data from my study serves to highlight the ways in which that body of knowledge came into being; how the ‘lln immigrants’ created this robust body of lln professional practice knowledge. whilst this list of principles, or propositional knowledge, was in itself a product of the exo-skeleton of the field, the ways in which teachers became initiated into the community of practice which those principles represent, was also a product of the era. it was an era in which practitioners’ professionalism and agency was respected and opportunities were made available for development and expression of that professionalism. the exoskeleton of the early years: 1975 – 1990 the beginnings of the field of adult literacy (as it was known then) and the body of professional practice knowledge that developed around it cannot be understood without an understanding of the sociopolitical context that gave rise to it and which can be thought of as part of its ‘exoskeleton’. the development of this new field of adult education in the mid-1970s in western, developed nations such as australia had its roots in the vibrant socio-political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s. the sense that ordinary citizens could contribute to a new world order gave rise to worldwide liberation movements such as the gay rights movement, black power movement and the feminist movement, as a discourse of human rights became a rallying cry for many socially conscious citizens. a general concern for the rights of adults who could not read therefore found fertile ground. the post-war years in australia were boom years, with a growth in population from migration, and strong economic growth supported by expansion of industry and commerce. keynesian economic policies, which informed most western economies in the 1940s to early 1970s, argued for strong fiscal government intervention in the effort to bring about optimum macroeconomic outcomes (marginson 1997). australia therefore had the economic ability supported by this economic rationale for a major increase in public spending on   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 11   education and other social programs. ‘no social problem seemed beyond solution. a tremendous confidence in government was developing and education was becoming a primary governmental instrument for solving problems’ (marginson 1997:14). the election of the whitlam labor government in australia in 1972 reflected this optimism with the whitlam reforms placing a new emphasis on social equality and on the ability and responsibility of governments to address social inequality. this was an important part of the platform on which the whitlam government was elected, with whitlam declaring at his policy speech that ‘education should be seen as the great instrument for the promotion of equality’ (marginson 1997:46). a number of watershed government reports from the 1970s provide a further critical aspect of the exoskeleton of the field. the first was the kangan report, titled tafe in australia: report on needs in technical and further education (kangan 1974). the central recommendation of this report was that the brief of the vocational training system be widened to encompass those who had traditionally been excluded from technical training. this was a highly influential report which foregrounded access and equity concerns and life-long liberal education alongside the technical focus of traditional technical colleges, and changed the name of the sector to technical and further education (tafe). the second tafe in australia report however, made specific recommendations related to adult literacy and charged state tafe departments with accepting responsibility for developing provision in the area (richardson 1975:95). the report also made specific recommendations that an effective literacy program will almost certainly have to be conducted outside the formal institutional framework. literacy task forces of special staff are needed to research the problem, including the methodology of teaching, and to develop and provide programs, materials and kits for mobile teaching of small groups. ways of reaching the adult illiterate will need to be explored, by personal contact through community development officers, social workers, and others, and by advertising literacy programs through the medium of tv. adult literacy should be regarded by tafe as a major challenge. the committee urges state tafe authorities to regard literacy programs as a high priority in their use of australian government funds (1975:96). o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       12 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   the nsw department of tafe in particular took up this challenge enthusiastically and within a very short time had appointed a large number of permanent adult basic education teachers. the fact that tafe nsw had become the major provider of adult basic education programs and the major employer of practitioners in the field, facilitated the resultant integration of adult basic education into the vocational education and training (vet) sector. this did not happen to the same extent in all states in australia. zimmerman and norton write that ‘new south wales provision has been the most comprehensive and secure structurally with adult literacy officers and adult basic education teachers in every tafe college funded from state revenue.’ (zimmerman and norton 1990:145) this recommendation to locate adult basic education policy and programs within the vocational education and training policy area however, was to have a range of crucial implications and foreshadowed the tensions which have characterised the field in the decades to follow (mckenna and fitzpatrick 2004). it was one of the ‘mediating preconditions’ (kemmis 2009:33) which positioned adult basic education in nsw for a decline along with the decline of vet in recent years. stories from practice ‘learning stuff together’ the data indicates a rich mix of influences which practitioners brought to the field; from their formal tertiary studies in associated disciplines, professional development workshops, professional journals, and informal influence of colleagues. however, underpinning this, was the sense of agency which the early practitioners felt. kath white, the first adult literacy teacher appointed in the new division of adult basic education in tafe nsw reflected that ‘there was an openness in tafe policy…i had freedom to do whatever i wished with terry’s [assistant director] approval and the director’s knowledge’. several other participants reflected nostalgically on the fact that they had the ability to create the field as they went. ‘i always did what i had to do. and we were learning all the time. we were learning new stuff. working in this common thing, and learning stuff together, feeling part of something that was a good thing to be doing.’ the ‘learning stuff together’ was facilitated in a large way by the establishment of the adult literacy information office (alio) in   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 13   1979. alio was established as a referral and resource agency and professional development centre for the field in nsw, loosely following the model of britain’s adult literacy resource agency. its first coordinator was kath white, who had been a significant figure in the lobbying for government funding for its establishment. alio became a highly valued part of the exoskeleton of the field. one interviewee said that when she started working in the field ‘i didn’t know anyone so i went to alio’. it became a melting pot for ideas. in the early days, when commercial resources were scarce, alio published student-written stories and teacher-developed resources. workshops were held regularly with sessions delivered by local practitioners or visiting academics such as canadian frank smith and australian brian cambourne, both early proponents of the whole language approach to literacy development. when asked about the influences on their practice, many respondents noted the importance of these professional development sessions at alio: ‘especially in the early days when alio was doing all that stuff there was a lot of really good professional development.’ although the professional discourses which practitioners espouse and which are represented by the principles listed above are largely of the propositional knowledge category, the workshops and seminars which alio developed and many of the resources which they published were of the ‘craft knowledge’ category (kemmis 2005b:396). sharing examples of craft knowledge, or practical pedagogy became one of the central functions of alio, particularly in the early, formative years for the field, and was perhaps the aspect which most excited practitioners. the british publications from the bbc campaign of the 1970s were disseminated through alio, as were a number of their own publications. amongst the early publications was the periodical broadsheet and a series of occasional papers, some of which were aimed at introducing practitioners to the new approach of whole language. the periodical good practice in australian literacy and basic education was a national project, published with federal funding. all of these publications, especially in the early years, were very much concerned with pedagogy, and a desk audit of some of these publications demonstrates that the pedagogy reflects very closely the propositional knowledge or discursive aspects of the field referred to above. for example, the first issue of good practice in australian literacy and basic education was devoted to the theme student-centred learning and contained o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       14 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   articles which not only provided a rationale for student-centred learning in adult basic education, but examples of the theory in action. many of the practitioners interviewed reflected on the importance of these publications in informing their practice. as one interviewee said ‘i read omnivorously in the field and of course in those early days we were very influenced, as kath was, by the system that had begun in england a couple of years earlier so i imbibed a lot of that.’ thus the system that had begun in england a couple of years earlier also formed an important part of the early exoskeleton of the emerging field in australia. kath white had visited the uk on a selffunded study tour to document their programs and their use of volunteer tutor programs in particular. in 1978 she wrote that what has happened in britain has been influential in the seminal stages of literacy provision in australia. although there have been comparable developments, including the use of volunteers, in the usa and canada, the literature in which they have been reviewed has not been as accessible to australians as has been the english material. official british reports and other publications have found their way into library collections and the holdings of the british council soon after release [in a way that the usa and canadian materials had not]. (white 1978:17) practitioners’ own moral judgement a number of the interviewees however also spoke of influences on their practice coming from their own moral judgement, or what higgs et al describe as ‘personal knowledge about oneself as a person and in relationship with others’ (cited in kemmis 2005b:396). when asked how she initially knew what to do with a new student or group of students, kath related her experience of setting up the first individual learning centre in tafe in 1975, prior to the development of the adult literacy field. [we] were working on what might be a curriculum; i had planned a mix of phonic and sight word program but as soon as i started to use it with real students i knew it didn’t work, because that was not their intention – they wanted to pass a driver’s license or they wanted to keep a job and they had an immediate need to be able to read the words for their job so that was all very enlightening once you met the real people. another high-school trained teacher related a similar experience from her pre-adult literacy employment, teaching a group of fire   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 15   brigade employees who were being given some extra tuition to help them pass their exams for promotion. and i am stuck in this terrible situation – i don’t actually know what to do, except naively i had some gut feelings so i set it up as … individual programs for each student ….i did stuff that i didn’t even know was part of literacy [teaching]. i’d have them to tell me something and i’d write it down and then i’d get them to read it back. i’d never seen that but it just seemed to be like a sensible thing to do because it would be their words. this is the reflection-in-action which kemmis (2005b) refers to as searching for saliences, the drawing on the life-experience of the practitioner reflexively in order to address particular practical problems. some anomalies: ‘this isn't what i thought adult literacy was about’ the relationship however, between the field’s propositional knowledge (that list of firmly held principles) and the craft knowledge or practical pedagogy in evidence appears to be in some aspects tenuous. the literature questions the extent to which this early discourse was reflected in the pedagogy of the time and suggests that in some respects, it was not (lee and wickert 2000; white 1985). this is particularly evident in respect to the freirean discourse of emancipation which was prominent in the propositional knowledge of the early years. brazilian educator paulo freire had visited melbourne as a speaker at a world council of churches seminar in 1972. his visit there is partly responsible for the commitment of victorian literacy workers to adult education as an agent of social change through their community based programs. it is evident though that ‘freire's teachings took much longer to penetrate the other states [including nsw] and with much less effect’ (wickert and zimmerman 1991:181) although the concepts of emancipation and liberation were prominent in the professional discourse for some decades as part of the propositional knowledge of many practitioners, but with a range of interpretations of what it might mean in affluent australia. i read freire omnivorously in those first years. i said … ‘can we call ourselves freireans when we live in an affluent society?’ we are aiming at emancipation but surely it is a different kind of emancipation. o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       16 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   most of the interviewees who were employed in the field from these early years still related to freire’s philosophies. ‘one of my underpinning [principles] is still ‘liberating, not domesticating’. it is doubtful however, that freire would recognise anything of his emancipation ideology in the pedagogy that was actually practiced along-side this discourse. when asked what a typical adult basic education class might have looked like at the time most mentioned individualised programs. each student had an individual folder in which the teacher would place some pre-prepared, customised materials or worksheets. the student: teacher ratio of the time of 6:1 made this possible. the following response was also very typical: every single lesson was something current from the newspaper, an interesting story and it’s normally something like animals or sharks or those sort of topical things that will get people talking and … a comprehension exercise with questions after and i remember thinking at the time, this isn't what i thought adult literacy was about – this is almost like school teacher stuff – you give them a worksheet, get them all chatting, relax them, make sure everyone says something and then heads down, and then alright, let’s do the real stuff…and i think a lot of people did the same thing. it is likely that the fact that the program had become the responsibility of tafe had rendered it institutionalised and as such, freire’s concept of literacy as a political tool was not likely to become a reality in nsw. in spite of the 1975 recommendation to the australian government of the richardson committee that ‘an effective literacy program will almost certainly have to be conducted outside the formal institutional framework’ (richardson 1975:96), classes were conducted in most instances in an institutional framework (with the exception of the volunteer tutor arm of the program). whilst, in the initial stages, at least, tafe management was willing to accede to requests for flexibility on many issues because ‘our students are different’, most of those students were nevertheless in classes in which the social context was irrelevant to their real lives and with fellow students from usually vastly mixed demographic backgrounds. there were some exceptions to this, for example in the case of classes which were set up for indigenous students. in general however, any discursive suggestions of literacy as a tool for class struggle or even gender based struggle was therefore likely to remain in the realms of rhetoric alone.   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 17   the emergence of a distinct but eclectic abe pedagogy all of the interviewees spoke warmly of the spirit of sharing in those early years. ideas and resources were readily shared around: ‘we had meetings and talked about good ideas that worked and no one seemed to be ‘this is mine’. i think we were very generous and we were accepting as well.’ a number of the interviewees who had worked in the western area of sydney reflected on the fact that the teachers in that region developed an active informal professional development circle, meeting regularly in their own time. ‘we did a lot of sharing in those days. we borrowed from each other. we were very collaborative.’ interviewees agreed on the eclectic nature of the pedagogy in the early days; ‘there was no strong theoretical framework, it was pretty much a hotch potch of worksheets, cloze, filling in gaps, trying to adapt newspaper stuff, workbooks, grammar, cvc worksheets. the theory if any was smith, goodman, cambourne, process writing.’ this concept of an eclectic pedagogy would seem a contradiction to the concept of a body of professional practice knowledge, which suggests a shared orthodoxy. there were however, clearly some regulatory forces involved to determine which aspects of pedagogy would be admitted to the hotch potch of shared activities. theories of adult education, made popular in the early 1970s (for example, knowles 1973) were prominent in the professional discourse of the new field and seem to be the main filter through which the eclectic pedagogy was screened. one of the interviewees recalled that, as a high-school trained, newly recruited adult literacy teacher, she offered to lead one of the professional development workshops and was firmly taken to task for suggesting ageinappropriate activities. many of the respondents mentioned adult learning theory when asked what the drivers of their practice were in those early years: ‘i think the pedagogy was certainly very heavily influenced by adult learning theory.’ the other teaching approach which quickly came to be filtered out from the shared craft knowledge was the teaching of phonics as a stand-alone or decontextualized activity. phonics programs were common in the very early years, before the whole language approach became common but quickly it became clear that this was not part of the shared professional practice knowledge: ‘we didn’t really do any phonics, in fact that was actually quite “mmm, you shouldn’t do that”. whole language was promoted for example, through o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       18 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   professional development programs developed by alio and through professional journals. interview data and archival material highlight the central position which the client (still called the ‘student’ in this era) played in the professional practice knowledge of the early years. genuine attempts were made to turn the rhetoric of participatory education in to practical effect. the early journals of the nsw adult literacy council had a section devoted to student writing, conference programs featured a student stream, with that part of the program organised by students, and the executive committee of the nsw adult literacy council had an ex-officio position for a student member. these may have been tokenistic gestures that touched only a very small proportion of the hundreds of students in programs throughout the state, but they are practical exemplars of the discourse of participatory education which was evident in the education field in general in that era. in terms of pedagogy also, interviewees mentioned consideration of the needs of the student as being a primary driver of their practice: ‘i think it is all about student-centred. that’s what it is really about. student centred was definitely the key because each student came with a different idea of who they were and whether they could do anything.’ it is hard to over-emphasise the impact on the genesis of the field of the exoskeleton which i have outlined. some of it was tangible, but some was ethereal: ‘it was a movement there is no religious in me, but you just had that bit of fervour because you believed in don’t ask me why. it was empowering’. this sense of being part of a movement was mentioned by several interviewees and was particular to this era. ‘i still have a wonderful sense of the energy and camaraderie that was around in, i guess, the 80s and very early 90s as adult literacy just burgeoned as a movement and you had a sense that you were building this fantastic, useful, powerful, (sorry, i’m getting a bit carried away)… it was fantastic.’ the present context by the late 1980s the public discourse had changed and greater government involvement weakened practitioners’ sense of agency to create their field, or even to respond to students’ needs as they saw them. the public discourse became centred around employmentrelated literacy, literacy as human capital. the client ceased to be the   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 19   student and the government or accrediting body was now the demanding client. with this came a regime of public management, compliance measures and an ‘audit culture’ (black 2010, lo bianco 1997). the creative community of practice of the earlier era, with its discourse of student centred learning became colonised by this audit culture. this was a constant theme in the interview data, with consensus amongst interviewees that it is perhaps time to return adult basic education provision to its former ideals as a social justice project. conclusions this article has traced the genesis of the field of adult basic education in nsw through the lens of a theory of professional practice knowledge in order to distinguish those aspects of the field which are amenable to influence for change and those that are likely to be an intractable aspect of the new capitalism. much of what interviewees reflected on as being central to the early field could be seen to fit into what kemmis refers to as the exoskeleton of the field which includes the socio-political context and discourses of the era. the public discourse of liberal humanism of the 1970s and 80s promoted generous government funded opportunities for dissemination of ideas amongst the developing community of practice. it provided the context for provision of formal professional development opportunities, the growth of professional journals and newsletters, and even provided the context for the informal opportunities for exchange of ideas which interviewees refer to. thus a vital body of shared professional practice knowledge was generated in the first fifteen years of the field. kemmis’ theory of professional knowledge also provides a framework against which to discuss the anomalies in practitioners’ reflections, such as that between some aspects of the shared propositional knowledge, and the practical pedagogy or craft knowledge evident at the time. it also accounts for practitioners’ own in-the-head knowledge involving their own moral judgement; an aspect of professional practice knowledge which may not be dependent on the socio-political context or exoskeleton of the field. the challenge of future practitioners may be to use this moral judgement to attempt to regain some of the lost sense of professional agency and to find a new site of practice; a new exoskeleton in which to create a new body of professional practice knowledge which is again responsive to student needs. o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       20 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   the interview data recalled an energetic community of practice, creating a distinct body of professional practice knowledge and adult basic education pedagogy which mirrored the more liberal public discourses of the era. the humanist adult education principle of student-centredness was central to both the public and professional discourse. current practitioners reflect on this wistfully. they regard much of that discourse as potentially relevant still, in this more hostile environment of the ‘new capitalism’ where public discourses centred on human capital assume priority in sites of publically funded adult basic education provision. references 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oleg popov & alzira manuel. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy & numeracy studies 2016, 24(1): 4899, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4899 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 1 2 0 1 6 23 vocational literacy in mozambique: historical development, current challenges and contradictions oleg popov and alzira manuel abstract the study analyses the historical development of vocational literacy in basic education and non-formal vocational education (nfve) in mozambique, as well as current challenges and contradictions. the theoretical lens of cultural-historical activity theory (chat) is employed in the study. methodologically the study was executed through an analysis of oral, printed and e-resources produced by the main stakeholders and also the reflective experiences of the authors in their extensive educational work in the country. the findings reveal poorly developed vocational literacy education in schools and non-formal settings in spite of recurrent political declarations about its importance. there is a strong dependence by formal and particularly nfve sectors on the technical and financial support provided by international organisations. vocational literacy courses are characterized by a lack of adequate equipment and poor practice. as a consequence, theoretical or elementary forms of vocational knowledge are dominant in the courses, resulting in the dissatisfaction of both learners and educators. vocational literacy development proved to be a complex field that faces many challenges and is characterised by diverse internal contradictions. introduction the present, past and future developments of social phenomena are always interconnected. it is of great interest therefore to understand developmental trends in different educational fields. this study attempts to provide a historical analysis of vocational literacy in mozambique. this field is actively developing in the country and is constantly given political attention as it is expected to expand educational and employment opportunities for a broader public https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4899 v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s (ministry of education 2012). we define vocational literacy here as the activity oriented towards the development of job-related and income-generating knowledge and skills including essential elements of functional literacy and numeracy. for example, a vocationally literate person needs to learn to read and follow instructions, carry out, understand and communicate measurements, and to develop the basic knowledge and skills of a trade. this research is justified by a lack of previous academic studies which systematically explore the development of vocational literacy in mozambique. this study does not however embrace formal vocational education and training leading to more advanced professional competence. in mozambique, vocational literacy is provided mainly by formal schooling through labour activities/craft lessons (inde/mined 2003) and by different organizations giving short non-formal education (nfe) courses. this latter approach can be defined as deliberate and systematic transmission of knowledge, attitudes and skills provided outside the limits of the formal school (colletta 1996). nfe can provide opportunities to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to improve citizens’ economic and social wellbeing and was one of the focal points of this research. the major research questions are: • what are the historical trends of vocational literacy development in mozambique? • what factors and influences have shaped this development? • what are the major challenges and tensions in the current development of vocational literacy in the country? the study is situated in the complex historical context of a developing country, which is briefly presented below. mozambique: outline of historical and educational context mozambique gained independence from portugal forty years ago (1975) and as socialist block countries had actively supported the liberation of the country it chose a socialist post-colonial orientation. thus, mozambique became involved in confrontation with capitalist block countries including the apartheid regimes of the neighbouring states of south africa and southern rhodesia, which intervened directly and fuelled military resistance to the socialist transformation in mozambique, resulting in a sixteen-year-long civil war. the war devastated the country. it caused about one million deaths and over five million people were displaced or made refugees in neighbouring v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e p o p o v a n d m a n u e l 25 countries. sixty per cent of all primary schools were destroyed or closed (vieira 2006). following the collapse of the socialist block, the rome general peace accord was signed in october 1992 and the country began the change to a free market economy. this resulted in the rapid expansion of the private sector including private educational institutions in the field of formal, non-formal and higher education. a number of private nfe programs began offering courses in english, tourism, management, business, accounting etc., thus marking a transition towards liberalisation and integration into the world free market economy. in 1995 there were only 4 higher education institutions in the country, all of them public, however currently there are 46 higher education institutions (mined 2013), most of them private. today, after more than twenty years of liberal development characterised by an enormous socio-economic stratification of society, mozambique remains one of the world’s poorest countries in 178th place of 187 in the human development index (undp 2014). child labour remains a broadly accepted practice in society where almost 40% of children are not in school (casey 2014). mozambique’s adult population has an average of just 1.2 years of formal schooling, compared to an average of 3.7 years for the least developed countries (casey 2014). the world bank, the main promoter of the process of liberalisation of the mozambican economy, has demanded cuts in public expenses. this has resulted in education in the country remaining largely dependent on foreign funding, with donor assistance accounting for 35.4% of the total education budget (bertelsmann stiftung 2014). in general, school completion rates are very poor with only 63% of pupils managing to finish grade five. the quality of teaching and poor infrastructure are decisive factors here (mbele 2005). there is a chronic lack of qualified teachers and the teacher/pupil ratio remains high, at 58 pupils per instructor (bertelsmann stiftung 2014). these unfavourable figures concerning the functioning of the public school system help us to understand the importance of non-formal education (nfe) in the country. theoretical framework cultural-historical activity theory (chat) is used as a framework for analysis of the process of vocational literacy development. its key concepts are presented and their meaning is defined within the context of the study. employing a culturalv o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s historical activity theory approach, the study analyses the historical development of vocational literacy in mozambique, as well as current trends and contradictions. activity theory, developed by leontiev (1978), is based on the two main theses of vygotsky. the first thesis is that the sources of personal development are situated in a social environment. vygotsky (1978) and his followers conceptualised mental development as the transformation of socially shared activities into internalised processes. the second thesis is that human actions, both on the social and the individual level, are mediated by tools, both psychological and physical. these tools are the products of socio-cultural evolution which individuals have access to by being actively engaged in the practices of their communities (vygotsky 1981). when talking about tools, the researchers refers to external material artefacts as well as to signs, concepts, spoken and written language, stories, diagrams, maps, drawings, internalised mental models, etc. the mediating artefacts convey a particular culture and history that stretches across activities through time and space. engeström (1990:264) inferred that they ‘insert mankind’s historically accumulated and objectified experience into individual actions.’ an important aspect of mediation pointed out by wertsch (1991) is that mediating tools are viewed as fundamentally shaping and defining the activity. this means that mediating cultural artefacts, such as working tools, instruments, machines, signs, languages and narratives need to be analysed in order to understand any human activity. cole (1988) states an important claim that there is no universal, context-free tool. the use of tools implies context specificity. the context of an activity could be defined in general terms as its ‘physical and conceptual structure as well as the purpose of the activity and the social milieu in which it is embedded’ (rogoff 1984:2). popov (2001) has shown that local traditional artefacts can be effective pedagogical tools in teaching vocational literacy in african cultural context. thus, following chat, it is possible to state that in order to understand an educational activity, it is necessary to pay attention to mediating tools, including narratives, and the context of the activity. the methodological principles of chat v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e p o p o v a n d m a n u e l 27 engeström (1993) presented three basic principles that can be used to analyse and interpret data that record and describe human behaviour from an activity-theoretical viewpoint. first, a collective activity system can be taken as the unit of analysis. second, the activity system and its components can be understood historically. third, inner contradictions of the activity system can be analysed as the source of disruption, innovation, change and development of that system, including its individual participants. 1. the entire activity system as the unit of analysis vygotsky raised objections to reducing the phenomenon of interest into separate elements that are studied in isolation. he proposed that, for the purpose of analysis, the whole should be partitioned into what he called units. in contrast to atomistic elements, units are designated a product of analysis that contains all the basic characteristics of the whole. according to activity theory, the unit of analysis includes both the individuals and their culturally defined environment (cole 1981). rogoff (1995) states, that the use of activity as the unit of analysis, with active and dynamic contributions from individuals, their social partners and historical traditions and materials and their transformations, allows for a reformulation of the relation between the individual and the social and cultural environments in which each is inherently involved in the other’s definition. in this study vocational literacy is taken as a unit of analysis. 2. historicity as the basis of classification and analysis cultural phenomena are necessarily historical and can be understood only through the historical analysis of their development. cole (1995:191) explains that ‘to understand the workings of culturally mediated behaviour, it is necessary to understand processes of change and transformation that, by definition, take place over time.’ such notions as development and progress should be appropriate for this analysis. considering the development of complex human activity systems, engeström (1993:70) suggests that progress in the activity system could be analysed by considering a degree of movement from low complexity and high centralisation towards high complexity and low centralisation. the latter is typical for the case of non-formal vocational education and training development in mozambique. v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 3. inner contradictions as the source of change and development activities never take place in isolation. they are interwoven with other activities that deal with the same or connected objects, or produce the instruments used in the activity in question. an activity is not a stable and harmonious system. external influences may change some elements of activities, causing imbalances between them. chat uses the term contradiction to indicate a misfit within elements, between them, between different activities, or between different developmental phases of a single activity. contradictions manifest themselves as problems, ruptures, breakdowns or clashes. chat sees contradictions as sources of development. activities are virtually always in the process of working through contradictions (kuutti 1996:34). to understand the development of an activity it is necessary to study contradictions existing within the activity system, for example, between the tools currently used and the object created, or the norms that are part of praxis and the division of labour. according to the dialectical philosophy, to develop means to tackle and resolve existing contradictions in the activity system, both intellectually and practically. the study methodology this qualitative study was initially based on desktop document analysis, both printed and electronic. most of the documents were available only in portuguese. document analysis implies constant reading and interpretation of material for the identification of relevant data and its categories. in this process data were organised into categories linked to the research questions (bowen 2009). further, as bowen (2009) suggests, document analysis is logical to combine with other qualitative research methods to ensure triangulation. thus, in this study structured conversations with different educational stakeholders who have experience of the educational system before and after independence were also used as well as our own reflective experiences of studying and working in mozambican formal and nfe for many years. this allowed us to connect time, space and instances of human practice in a story describing the complex development of vocational literacy in mozambique from a holistic perspective. methodologically, our analytical approach is related to narrative inquiry and draws upon the conceptualisation of written and oral narratives and our experiences. this is a rather common methodological approach used in studies of educational experiences. connelly and clandini (1990) suggest that the main strength of v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e p o p o v a n d m a n u e l 29 narrative inquiry is in providing ‘a sense of the whole.’ they explain that the sense of the whole is built from rich data that can be collected in the form of ‘field notes of the shared experience, journal records, interview transcripts, others’ observations, storytelling, letter writing, autobiographical writing, documents such as class plans and newsletters, and writing such as rules, principles, pictures, metaphors, and personal philosophies’ (connelly & clandini 1990:5). in our study many of these techniques were used at different stages of work. the validation of data and resulting inferences was accomplished through the use of independent sources of information. connelly and clandini (1990) suggest using the criteria of adequacy and plausibility for validation of the results in narrative inquiry; meaning that persons well familiar with the field might say ‘i can see that happening’ and we have therefore checked our findings with different educational stakeholders in mozambique. findings the selected subheadings or categories structuring the presentation of the findings in the text below were inspired partly by chat methodological principals and partly from the analysis of the data. dynamic educational field the document analysis shows that there are many different providers of vocational literacy in mozambique. the ministry of education and development and the ministry of labour, employment and social security are major national actors in the field of education and training in general, including adult education and nfe. the ministry of education develops and monitors the entire educational system. for example, through the national office of literacy and adult education it provides the curriculum for literacy programs, the teaching and learning materials, employs literacy educators and promotes vocational skills development in adult education programs. the national institute of employment and professional training (niept) belongs to the ministry of labour, employment and social security and is the main institute responsible for non-formal professional and vocational education and training. the niept organises the training centres and the training programs and provides the certificates and some teaching material. foreign and local ngos, private and religious organisations are other important actors working with different kinds of vocational literacy in the v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s country. the field of vocational literacy development is rapidly evolving and expanding. two driving and partly complimentary forces could be identified behind the recent development trends. on the one hand, political pressure to expand the provision of vocational education opportunities for a broader public and on the other hand, the economic interests of non-formal education providers. private actors can earn good money by offering expensive courses and a market for such courses continues to expand particularly in the cities. a challenging cultural context for promoting vocational literacy educational development inevitably mirrors and at the same time contributes to the development of the local cultural context. mozambique, with a population of about 26 million, has a very complex cultural environment. there are 18 major national languages in the country and many more dialects, but the only official language is portuguese, which is spoken mostly as a second language (ministry of education 2012). the largest religion is christianity, with significant minorities following islam and african traditional religions. this means that mozambican society is multilingual and multicultural. after independence a new native social elite was created and new ‘modern’ values came into conflict with ‘traditional’ values leading to many challenges in educational development. currently in mozambique there are clear tensions between the values of a modern individualistic society that, for example, prioritises the nuclear family and traditional cultural values where the rules and needs of the extended family are in focus. the role and status of traditional culture has changed greatly in mozambican society. before independence the colonial administration marginalised traditional culture. during this period there was a minority of ‘assimilated’ mozambicans, who had adopted the portuguese culture in order to enjoy ‘the constitutional rights and privileges of portuguese citizens’ (ferreira 1974:18), and a majority of ‘non-assimilated’ mozambicans who maintained their traditional culture and were deprived of such rights and privileges. after independence, the national government encouraged the reinvigoration of some traditions, such as folklore, but maintained an orientation towards state-driven cultural unification and a socialist modernization of society. thus, the use of local languages in educational institutions was discouraged, since portuguese was considered the language of national unity. this situation is still fresh in the memory of all educational stakeholders and those who attended v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e p o p o v a n d m a n u e l 31 schools during these times. even service personnel were discouraged from using local languages in school premises. nowadays, it is possible to witness a strengthening of traditional cultural influences in society in general. the use of local languages is encouraged in primary education and adult literacy courses, and vocational literacy courses in mozambican languages are also promoted by some ngos. according to political avowals, all major mozambican languages will be used in formal education to support the development of basic literacy skills. however, this demands significant investment in the development of learning materials and teacher training, which appears to be problematic to achieve without massive donor support, as was recognised by our informants. multiculturalism in mozambique has another subtle social tension – between the official endeavour to achieve national unity and the valorisation of local cultural traditions leading occasionally to regional separatism. this issue is very sensitive and periodically appears to have explosive character resulting in paramilitary actions in the centre of the country. cultural complexity needs to be seen in a historical perspective. thus, in order to understand the development of vocational literacy we need to pay attention to historical changes in the socio-cultural context and tensions caused by them in the educational activity system. this can be clearly seen in the description of the historical evolution of vocational literacy in formal schooling. the historical development of vocational literacy in the school system as was mentioned earlier, after independence in 1975, the country was politically oriented towards socialism. during this period hopes for a better life through education for all were high. the socialist-oriented government made a great effort to promote general education and mass literacy. however there were many hidden obstacles preventing the provision of socially relevant education. as one of the interviewed teachers explained ‘the failure of practical work in basic education could be attributed to two main factors: the lack of teachers with appropriate knowledge and lack of materials for practical activities.’ thus, the formal education system tended to promote only theoretical types of knowledge without giving children functional skills, values and attitudes to contribute to the development of their communities and to enter the labour market. due to the v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s predominance of theoretical knowledge in basic education as children advanced in the educational hierarchy, their alienation from the manual work practised in traditional communities also increased. this phenomenon has complex historical roots as explained below. the process of education as alienation from a traditional community had already started in colonial times (before 1975). in that period, manual work was viewed by society as an activity for ‘black’ people. during the colonial period, the greater part of mozambican primary education for the indigenous population was carried out by the catholic, protestant and evangelic missions. many missionary schools had small workshops, farms and nurseries. school agriculture was considered to be an income generating activity for the schools in rural areas, where children used to spend many hours in the fields. often these were not only school fields but also the private fields of the class teacher and his family (most of the teachers were male). as one retired teacher commented ‘the learners used to work in the cotton fields belonging to the school and after the classes i used to send some of them to work in my own fields’. hard agricultural work caused some pupils to become fatigued and to dropout from school. teachers also included domestic work in their homes as extra-curricular activities. one of the respondents said ‘i used to select some learners to take care of my children and help in cleaning and cooking at my home’. according to him, these kinds of activities were seen as a privilege by the selected learners and their families because the criteria for selection were based on the children’s ‘good behaviour’ in school. the so-called rudimentary indígena education, broadly spread in rural areas before independence, included arts and crafts and an elementary level of technical education for the ‘natives’, in particular for boys. the main objective was to provide education oriented towards manual work. however, in general, apart from the practice of hard agricultural work, many interviewees recognised that during the colonial period elementary schools were giving learners important life skills that are missing in modern times: for example, mending clothes, making tools, cooking, and doing crafts. with independence, a socialist educational model has been adopted. the marxist ideological stance of linking theory to practice was included in the official educational policy. agriculture was made a compulsory extra-curricular activity in every rural school as part of local vocational literacy. in the urban schools vocational literacy was implemented through a subject called trabalhos manuais (manual v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e p o p o v a n d m a n u e l 33 work), in which students could learn different useful practical skills adapted in accordance with the level and age of the pupils. directly after independence, however, it was difficult for the new government to promote physical labour in schools because for the people it was associated with the evil colonial practices prior to independence. this was also the time of the emerging war with rhodesia, consequently many rural schools had to dig trenches to hide from expected ‘ian smith attacks’. additionally, the practice of re-education camps emerged during the post-independence period, where inappropriate pupils’ behaviour was corrected by hard physical work. thus it is easy to understand why school agriculture and manual work did not have a long life after independence. other reasons for the gradual disappearance of these activities in the school curriculum could also be that: • these activities were perceived as being of low social status, • they did not ensure the pupils’ academic success, • many teachers had no competence or motivation to teach such skills. with the creation of the national system of education in 1983, one more attempt was made to introduce labour activities in schools as a compulsory curriculum subject to promote vocational literacy. according to the syllabus developed at that time, the subject comprised a fixed range of manual activities such as metal, wood, paper, clay and agricultural work. however, these prescribed ranges of activities were not related to the conditions and available resources of the school (jasso, januário & popov 1996). as a result many schools could not accomplish the intended curriculum for labour activities (popov 2000). local curriculum initiatives and flexibility was not welcomed in schools at that time. the slogan of ‘national unity’ demanded uniformity and equality in all spheres of social life within national frontiers. more recently (2004), an attempt was made to reinvigorate the subject in the primary school curriculum with the name oficios that suggests the teaching and learning of arts and crafts with relevance for local community life (inde/mined 2003). however, in many public schools, teachers just use the time of ofícios as an extended break and to give their pupils the opportunity to do what they want to do. one of the informants said ‘at these times i usually tell the learners to go out and play with what they want, because i don’t have material for oficios’. obviously, the problem is not only the lack of material, but it is also related to teachers’ skills to work with this v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s subject, as teacher training fails in the development of teacher competences for manual activities. other teachers just use the time intended for manual work classes to help learners who have difficulties in other subjects. one of teachers explained ‘i use the time of oficios to work with learners who have problems in reading and writing activities’. in rural areas, during the lessons of oficios pupils usually work in the school machamba (farm), without any clear instructions or learning tasks. this occurs not only due to the lack of teachers’ competence in the subject and lack of resources (macovela 2014), but also because of the perpetuating perception of the low status of manual work and lack of stimulus for the teachers and schools to exercise initiatives and creativity in promoting vocational literacy. document analysis, observations and interviews confirmed that today, 40 years after independence, labour activities such as agriculture, craft, technology, arts or other practically oriented activities promoting vocational literacy exist only occasionally in the day to day practice of mozambican public primary schools. there is, nevertheless an acute need for this kind of knowledge and skills in mozambican society, as will be discussed below. inner contradictions many contradictions were identified in the development of vocational literacy. we will present just some of them that are particularly relevant in the mozambican context. one of the major contradictions is the inadequate attention paid to the development of agricultural literacy in the formal and non-formal educational sectors at the same time that there is a continuing social demand for it. more than 75% of the people in mozambique depend on agriculture for their livelihood (bertelsmann stiftung 2014). low productivity small holder farmers account for 95% of the country’s agricultural production (bertelsmann stiftung 2014). considerable gains could be made here by improving their knowledge and skills to increase productivity. formal and non-formal education could make a contribution by providing relevant agricultural literacy skills, at least for the 70% of the population that live in rural areas. agriculture is and will continue to be one of the most important sectors of the country’s economy. this issue remains a serious challenge for the national education system. the ministry of education and development is failing in their curriculum policy of promoting agriculture in rural schools. one of the reasons could be the complex v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e p o p o v a n d m a n u e l 35 issue of assuring the provision of the necessary resources and materials (mediating artefacts) for school agricultural activities. related issues are those of accountability and management in the assurance of the purposeful use of the supplies provided. practical activities cost money and demand logistics that are not currently in place within the formal education system. the contribution of the non-formal sector, mainly through foreign ngos, is also rather marginal in the promotion of efficient agricultural practices. it is worth noting that the ministry of agriculture also disregards the promotion of agricultural literacy through non-formal adult education courses (luis 2012). in general, non-formal technical vocational education should include practice and hands-on based courses. however, they are usually characterised by a lack of adequate equipment and poor opportunities to practise skills. thus, another important inner contradiction between the practical nature of technical knowledge and skills and the absence of the necessary conditions for the realisation of practical activities can be identified. this leads to the domination of theoretical or rudimentary forms of vocational knowledge in the technical courses (e.g. car-repairing or refrigeration) resulting in the learners’ and the educators’ dissatisfaction. vocational literacy has a proven impact on employment and self-employment but also on generic life-skills development. nonetheless, in many cases participants have higher expectations concerning program outcomes than are achieved in reality. another contradiction is concerned with learners’ desires and opportunities. for young people becoming literate in modern technology use is more attractive than learning agriculture in schools or training centres. however, lack of the necessary resources in school makes computer studies and other kinds of modern technology literacy unrealistic for the majority of pupils in formal education. however relevant, vocational literacy including learning agricultural activities, is rather undesirable as they have seen it only as hard work in the fields giving a very poor income. non-formal computer courses are too expensive for most young people. private providers with a good reputation charge about 1700 meticais, equivalent to 35 euros per month, for six months (over 200 €), which makes them rather inaccessible for the majority of young people. a similar situation exists also in relation to foreign language studies. english language skills are considered to be important vocational knowledge by many mozambican people. the country is v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s neighbour to a powerful regional economic leader – south africa and actively involved in regional and global collaboration. communication skills in english create new income generating opportunities. formal primary school education provides limited possibilities to learn english; it is not even included in the curriculum for grades 1-5 in public schools. private nfe institutions are therefore active in this area and courses are usually very expensive. poor professional context educators, teachers and literacy workers are the main actors defining how vocational literacy will be shaped and even if it will be implemented at all. educational activities in mozambique are rather teacher-centred. thus, teacher motivation delimits to a great extent the effectiveness of such activities. in the current liberal economy system monetary remuneration is rather decisive for the teachers’ commitment to their work. in the formal education system, the teachers giving practical activities related to vocational literacy do not receive any monetary benefits in comparison with those who choose not to do any practical components. however any practical activity, for example teaching embroidery, demands extra time to organise the logistics of the process, e.g. asking children to bring the necessary materials from their homes, share materials, etc. the situation is aggravated by the fact that teachers receive almost no instruction or training in teaching crafts and ofícios during their teacher education. in nfe the situation is rather similar. the practical component is weak in most of the nfve courses. the poor working conditions are illustrated by the fact that literacy workers in mozambique currently have a salary of about 700 meticais (about 15 euros) per month. contracted by the ministry of education and human development she or he usually has a contract for a maximum of one year. salary payment delays of 3-4 months are rather ‘normal’, according to the collected narratives. low salaries and high work load is what also faces literacy workers and educators in many nfve courses. sometimes literacy workers also teach other courses like sewing or small business management to gain an extra income. however, when such educators have to give classes twice a day (morning and evening) and use the rather expensive transportation system this makes their extra income marginal. additionally, we observed that one of the general weaknesses of nfve is the absence of quality assurance and a support system for v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e p o p o v a n d m a n u e l 37 curriculum implementation. for example, there is no external monitoring of the programs. educators do not have the possibility to improve their professional competence. there is no pedagogical resource centre for nfve teachers or functioning centres supporting vocational literacy development. all this contributes to a poor professional context for educators working with vocational literacy. discussions the development of vocational literacy that enhances learners’ job-related and income-generating knowledge and skills, including essential elements of functional literacy and numeracy, can assure the social wellbeing of citizens. following chat methodological principles we considered vocational illiteracy as a unity transecting the compartmentalising borders of formal and non-formal education. this allowed us to get a more holistic picture concerning the provision of socially and individually relevant education. according to the world education forum (unesco 2000:8), ‘all children, young people and adults have the human right to benefit from an education that will meet their basic learning needs, in the best and fullest sense of the term, an education that includes learning to know, to do, to live together and to be.’ mozambique has experienced rapid economic, social and political changes but unfortunately the current trend of globalisation and its neoliberal policies have increased economic stratification, unemployment, poverty and social exclusion as perceived by the majority of our informants. formal education, which should respond to these challenges, is characterised by high dropout rates, lack of relevance, as well as insufficient provision mainly in the rural areas. as we have found, vocational literacy is almost absent throughout the formal basic education system. pupils in schools do not learn practical skills related to possible income generating activities and the satisfaction of their daily needs, such as agriculture, cooking, sewing, carpentry, etc., even if these activities are included in the curriculum for basic education. therefore, this places extra expectations on nonformal vocational courses that people need to pay for. considering a chat theoretical stance, we need to reflect on contextual factors affecting human development. in the light of the historical perspective it is possible to state that the context was not only unsupportive but also oppressive for the majority of people during the colonial, socialist and liberal phases of societal development in mozambique. poor families in the cities and rural v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s areas have had little support to improve their wellbeing through education. the current dramatic increase in the socio-economic stratification of society makes a professional career through education almost equally as problematic as in colonial times for the majority of poorer citizens. vocational literacy remains the only way for ‘ordinary people’ to become involved in sustainable, income generating activities. mediating artefacts are often needed to create relevant activities. for example, sewing is not possible without a sewing machine. chat affirms that mediating tools fundamentally shape and define the activity. if vocational education courses lack basic equipment they cannot provide the necessary skills and competencies for the participants. this is also what we found in our previous research on many nfve programs in mozambique (manuel, popov & buque 2015). outdated and non-functional equipment is a rather typical phenomenon in nfve programs. the situation is similar in public schools, in particular those which introduce agricultural activities in the curriculum; the ministry of education does not provide the necessary tools or modern seeds and fertilisers to make these activities visibly relevant and appealing for teachers, learners and their parents. the absence of proper practical components and internship opportunities severely impedes vocational competence development. according to general chat postulates, individual development is seen as the transformation of socially shared activities into internalised processes. without active participation in vocational activities it is not possible to develop the desired individual competence. thus, we see an acute need to assure and control the implementation of adequate practical activities in vocational literacy courses. in general, the ministry of education (mined) admits the absence of coordination, quality assurance mechanisms and holistic understanding of the situation with nfe in the country. minimum standards and regulatory instruments to assess and certify the different programs on offer are still lacking. there is still no clearly established connection between mined and other institutions carrying out community (capacity) building activities such as for example, ngos working in non-formal education and other ministries (health, agriculture, women and social action etc.). (ministry of education 2012:73). v o c a t i o n a l l i t e r a c y i n m o z a m b i q u e p o p o v a n d m a n u e l 39 in this context, the ministry of education (2012) recognises a need for greater attention to non-formal vocational education programs transmitting professional skills and competencies as well as developing life skills and socially positive behaviours and attitudes. the imminent exploration of newly discovered natural resources (coal, gas, minerals) in the remote regions of the country with the involvement of large foreign actors, in particular china, opens new demands for vocationally literate people. we can predict the future need for literacy programs that will focus on multilanguage skills and vocational literacy with elements of english and local languages. vocational literacy in mozambique is a complex educational activity that faces many challenges, has many contradictions and needs a more systematic analysis and further research. references bertelsmann stiftung (bti) (2014) mozambique country report. gütersloh, bertelsmann stiftung, retrieved 4 march 2015 from http://www.btiproject.org/uploads/tx_itao_download/bti_2014_mozambique. pdf. bowen, g (2009) document analysis as a qualitative research method, qualitative research journal, vol 9, no 2, pp 27-40. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3316/qrj0902027 casey, j (2014) understanding high dropout rates in primary school education in mozambique, msc pease and development work. linnaeus university. sweden. connelly, f and clandini, d (1990) stories of experience and narrative inquiry. educational research association, vol 19 no 5, pp 2-14. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0013189x019005002 cole, m (1981) preface, in wertsch, j, ed, the concept of activity in soviet psychology, armonk, m. e. sharpe, inc., new york. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-179501-6.50006-5, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-179502-3.50006-6 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-179760-7.50003-6 cole, m (1988) cross-cultural research in the socio-historical tradition, human development, no 31, pp 137-157. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000275803 cole, m. 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soviet psychology, m. e. sharpe, inc., new york, pp 134 – 143. wertsch, jv (1991) voices of the mind. a sociocultural approach to mediated action, harvard university press, cambridge, ma. http://www.unesco.at/bildung/basisdokumente/dakar_aktionsplan.pdf http://www.unesco.at/bildung/basisdokumente/dakar_aktionsplan.pdf abstract introduction mozambique: outline of historical and educational context theoretical framework the methodological principles of chat 1. the entire activity system as the unit of analysis 2. historicity as the basis of classification and analysis 3. inner contradictions as the source of change and development the study methodology findings dynamic educational field a challenging cultural context for promoting vocational literacy the historical development of vocational literacy in the school system inner contradictions poor professional context discussions references © 2016 holly e. jacobson, lauren hund & francisco soto mas. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy & numeracy studies 2016, 24(1): 4900, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4900 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 1 2 0 1 6 43 predictors of english health literacy among u.s. hispanic immigrants: the importance of language, bilingualism and sociolinguistic environment holly e. jacobson, lauren hund and francisco soto mas abstract in the united states, data confirm that spanish-speaking immigrants are particularly affected by the negative health outcomes associated with low health literacy. although the literature points to variables such as age, educational background and language, only a few studies have investigated the factors that may influence health literacy in this group. similarly, the role that bilingualism and/or multilingualism play in health literacy assessment continues to be an issue in need of further research. the purpose of this study was to examine the predictors of english health literacy among adult hispanic immigrants whose self-reported primary language is spanish, but who live and function in a bilingual community. it also explored issues related to the language of the instrument. an analysis of data collected through a randomized controlled study was conducted. results identified english proficiency as the strongest predictor of health literacy (p < 0.001). the results further point to the importance of primary and secondary language in the assessment of heath literacy level. this study raises many questions in need of further investigation to clarify how language proficiency and sociolinguistic environment affect health literacy in language minority adults; proposes language approaches that may be more appropriate for measuring health literacy in these populations; and recommends further place-based research to determine whether the connection between language proficiency and health is generalizable to border communities. background https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4900 p r e d i c t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y 44 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s the 2003 national assessment of adult literacy (naal) found that hispanics in the united states (u.s.) had lower levels of health literacy compared to other population groups (u. s. department of education 2006). however, recent reports and research studies have concluded that there is a need for more recent and reliable data on health literacy among certain groups, including hispanics and spanish-speaking adults (berkman, et al 2011, koskan, friedman & hilfinger messias 2010, soto mas, et al 2015, soto mas, mein, fuentes, thatcher & balcázar 2013, soto mas, ji, fuentes & tinajero 2015, u.s. department of health and human services 2010). the national-level data is more than 10 years old, and there is a scarcity of current information on the health literacy levels of populations with limited english language skills (u.s. department of health and human services 2010). although the 2003 naal embedded most of the health-related questions into the main section of the questionnaire, it may not be an appropriate tool for assessing health literacy among non-english speakers. first, naal measures english oral fluency and “how well americans perform tasks with printed materials similar to those they encounter in their daily lives at work, at home, and in the community,” which may include balancing a checkbook (quantitative literacy), filling out a job application (document literacy), or finding information in a news article (prose literacy) (national center for education statistics [nces] n.d.). under this framework, english proficiency, or the lack thereof, becomes a confounding factor in the assessment of health literacy. similarly, people who are not originally from the u.s. may find scenarios and tasks portrayed by naal foreign to them, which adds an additional threat to the internal validity of the instrument. aside from the data generated by the 2003 naal, only regional u.s. studies have assessed the health literacy level of hispanics, mostly in clinical settings, and with conflicting results. studies in north carolina, new york, and california found high prevalence of low health literacy among male and female patients (brice, et al 2008, garbers, schmitt, rappa & chiasson 2010, sudore, et al 2009). to the contrary, a study with primary care patients on the u.s.-mexico border found that more than 98% had adequate health literacy (penaranda, diaz, noriega & shokar 2012). a more recent study with hispanic college students on the u.s.-mexico border also found higher levels of health literacy in this group than in the general hispanic population, and similar to educated u.s. adults (mas, jacobson & dong 2014). javascript:void(0); javascript:void(0); javascript:void(0); javascript:void(0); http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=brice%20jh%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=19024230 p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 45 there are also inconsistencies across studies in terms of the factors that have been identified as possibly influencing health literacy among hispanics. in the general u.s. population, national data identified gender, age, educational level, and language as relevant variables affecting health literacy level. the 2003 naal found that women had higher average health literacy than men; adults 65 years-of-age and older had lower health literacy compared to younger adults; and average health literacy increased with higher level of educational attainment (kutner, greenberg, jin & paulsen 2006). in the case of hispanics, however, there are conflicting results due in part to the fact that these variables have only been explored in small studies with different demographic groups. one study found that education was a significant predictor of health literacy but that age, gender, income, and citizenship status were not (boyas 2013). two recent studies suggested that education and age may have an effect on health literacy (mas, jacobson & dong 2014, soto mas, ji, fuentes & tinajero 2015). although these discrepancies may be related to the disparate designs, sub-populations and instruments generally used in studies with hispanics (koskan, friedman & hilfinger messias 2010, soto mas, et al 2015), there are also relevant conceptual issues relating to health literacy that must be further explored. for instance, health literacy has no single, standard definition. at times it is defined as simply the ability to read and write, and in other cases it is more comprehensively linked to sociocultural and political change (soto mas, jacobson, balcázar 2015). methodological approaches vary according to the definition used by the study. similarly, the roles that both primary (l1) and secondary (l2) language use and proficiency play in health literacy assessment in bilingual communities has not been researched or discussed in the literature. in the u.s., this is particularly relevant for spanish speakers, as more than 37 million people speak spanish, and approximately half of them speak english “less than very well”, with the rest speaking english at varying levels of proficiency (ryan 2013). in addition, no research to date has explored the interaction within bilinguals of l1 and l2 languages, and impact on health literacy levels. future research should explore the role l1 literacy plays as a predictor variable of l2 health literacy. another issue to consider is the fact that health literacy has generally been defined as the ability to understand english health information (kirsch, jungeblut, jenkins & kolstad 1993, kutner, greenberg, jin & paulsen 2006, nielsen-bohlman, panzer & kindig p r e d i c t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y 46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s 2004), and is a construct that is embedded within the u.s. healthcare system, which is predominately english-speaking. studies have found that even when health literacy assessments are conducted in spanish, participants whose l1 is self-reported as spanish have lower health literacy than l1 english speakers (brice, et al 2008, garbers, schmitt, rappa & chiasson 2010, sentell & braun 2012, williams, parker & baker 1995). researchers have debated whether or not it is appropriate to measure health literacy in other than the l1 of the participant, and recommend that studies with hispanics control for language use (that is, collect data on the languages used by participants for different purposes and contexts) and language proficiency (koskan, friedman & hilfinger messias 2010, mas, jacobson & dong 2014, soto mas, et al 2015, soto mas, ji, fuentes & tinajero 2015). in fact, naal includes a questionnaire with items on language background (nces n.d.). however, these variables are difficult to control without going beyond self-report on language use and conducting proficiency testing in the participants' languages. and even if these variables were controlled, the question still remains as to how the interaction between two languages in a bilingual individual impacts the results, or, just as importantly, the interpretation of the results, of commonly used health literacy assessments, such as the test of functional health literacy in adults (tofhla) and the program for the international assessment of adult competencies (piaac). tofhla measures functional health literacy by assessing numeracy and reading comprehension using actual health-related materials such as prescription bottle labels and appointment slips, and is available in both english and spanish (peppercorn books & press, inc.). piaac assesses literacy by measuring “understanding, evaluating, using, and engaging with written texts to participate in society”. although piaac is part of an international program involving more than 20 countries and is available in multiple languages, it is administered in the “official language” of each of the participating countries (organisation for economic co-operation and development [oecd] 2012). in the hispanic communities that exist throughout the u.s. where the majority of spanish speakers are bilingual to some degree along a continuum, it is not clear which health literacy assessment tool should be used. hispanics in the u.s. cannot be reduced to such simple categories as "limited english proficient" as is currently the practice: language use among hispanic groups throughout the u.s. is complex and dynamic, and requires much deeper exploration in order http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=brice%20jh%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=19024230 p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 47 to better understand health literacy among these groups. it often is not clear which literacy tests, the english test or the spanish test, will provide the most reliable health literacy score in bilinguals. for example, which test will provide the most reliable score for a bilingual who speaks spanish primarily at home, but uses english at work, or for the bilingual who obtained a high school equivalent education in a spanish-speaking country, but has resided in the u.s. for 10 years? there is great complexity involved in measuring health literacy among bilinguals, leading to other unexplored questions: does having low health literacy in spanish constitute low health literacy in english and vice versa? does the score on a test of health literacy in spanish predict how a person will access or process information in english in an english-speaking context? in other words, if a person has high health literacy in spanish, what does this mean when faced with the challenges of accessing information in an english-speaking context? these and a myriad others are questions that have not been addressed in the literature. it is such complexity that justified this study. the purpose was to examine the predictors of health literacy, assessed in english, among adult hispanic immigrants. variables of age, sex, years living in the u.s., education level, whether participants attended english classes and school or college in the u.s., and language history and preferences were included in the analysis. the study involved immigrants whose l1 is spanish but who show varying degrees of proficiency in english. in other words, these immigrants fall along a bilingual continuum, according to the demographic information provided. issues related to the language of the instrument, specifically the significance of the language of the test and the sociolinguistic environment of the community in which the data were collected are also explored. this was part of a larger study conducted in a southern city on the u.s.-mexico border that assessed the effectiveness of a curriculum in improving health literacy and english proficiency among hispanic adults. information on the curriculum and the results of the intervention have been reported previously (soto mas, mein, fuentes, thatcher & balcázar 2013, soto mas, ji, fuentes & tinajero 2015). the study obtained approval by the institutional review board and all participants signed an informed consent. methods p r e d i c t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s this study involved an analysis of baseline data collected for a randomized controlled study and included only self-reported immigrants. participants participants were recruited from the community through local spanish media. the original inclusion criteria for the larger study included adults (21+ years of age) with spanish as their l1, able to read and write spanish, and self-reported as having no previous participation in a formal health/cardiovascular education/prevention program. since the interest of the study was to assess health literacy in english, only people with a low to intermediate level of english proficiency -able to read, write and speak english at a basic level were included in the study. for this analysis, the number of eligible cases was adjusted to include only those who were born outside the u.s. as a means of controlling for immigration status. data collection and measures prior to inclusion, all individuals who met the criteria and indicated interest in participating were screened for english proficiency. the combined english language skills assessment (celsa) (association of classroom teacher testers, ca) was used. celsa is a standard computerized proficiency test that measures grammatical ability and understanding of meaning in a typical reading context, and is generally used as a placement test in foreign language programs. the test is written in english and all instructions are given in english only. it establishes three levels of language proficiency based on the obtained score: 90-102 level 1, 103-107 level 2, and 108-114 level 3 (thompson 1994). health literacy was assessed using the english version of the tofhla, which has proven to be a valid and reliable instrument for testing literacy in a particular domain (healthcare) in which particular domain-specific documents are used, including, for example pharmaceutical labels and patient education materials (parker, baker, williams & nurss 1995). assessment of health-related reading fluency is essential because, as a predictor variable, it is more powerful than a measure of general reading fluency in “detecting associations with health outcomes” (baker, 2006). in addition, it is not possible to simply assume a correlation between general reading mailto:actt@cappassoc.com p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 49 fluency and health literacy. tofhla classifies participants in three categories according to their total score: inadequate functional health literacy, marginal functional health literacy, and adequate functional health literacy. participants were also asked to complete a brief bilingual demographic questionnaire that included questions on: age, sex, years living in the u.s., education level, whether they attended english classes and school or college in the u.s., and language history and preferences (see table 1 below). data analysis data quality included crosschecking 100% of the cases. missing data was minimal. for this study, all analyses were conducted in stata v13 (statacorp, 2013) and using complete cases only. the original study included 181 participants. this analysis was conducted with 144 participants after excluding incomplete cases and those who were born in the u.s. and did not meet the immigrant criterion (10 cases). associations between demographic characteristics, english proficiency, and health literacy were quantified. the continuous outcome measures were total tofhla scores (range 0-100), weighted numeracy scores (range 0-50), and reading comprehension scores (range 0-50). total tofhla scores were categorized into inadequate functional health literacy (score 0-59), marginal functional health literacy (60-74), and adequate functional health literacy (75100). demographic predictors of interest in the study included all demographic variables and english proficiency (celsa score) at baseline. simple linear regression models were used to calculate differences in means across levels of the predictors. for each continuous outcome, changes were estimated as a function of each predictor, along with confidence intervals. for continuous predictors, the linear model was compared to models with higher-order polynomial terms using an f-test. for ordinal categorical variables, the saturated model was compared to a linear trend model using an ftest. regression coefficient f-tests were used to test for differences in the average outcome as a function of each predictor in the univariate analysis. in a multivariate analysis, a multiple linear regression model was used to summarize effects of english proficiency, controlling for the other predictors. non-significant terms were dropped from the p r e d i c t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y 50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s multiple regression model using a backwards stepwise procedure with a p-value threshold of 0.1. differences were examined in the tofhla categories across quartiles of english proficiency scores and testing for an association between the categorical outcome and quartiles using a pearson chisquare test. all hypothesis tests were conducted at the 0.05 level of significance and confidence intervals at the 95% level. it is important to note that although the original study implemented a randomized control, pretest and posttest design, this analysis was conducted only on the baseline data. the aim was to make a prediction, rather than establishing a causal inference. results demographic characteristics of the sample are included in table 1. the majority were 31 to 60 years of age (85%), female (78%), and had been living in the u.s. for eight or more years (74%). more than 80% graduated from high school or had a higher degree, and less than 40% attended school/college in the u.s. regarding language background and preferences, a high majority spoke spanish at home (81%). descriptive statistics for test scores are included in table 2. p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 51 table 1: demographics for categorical variables (n=144) p r e d i c t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y 52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s table 2: descriptive statistics for test outcomes (n=144) tofhla results yielded an overall marginal functional health literacy level (mean score 63.7), with 51 (35.4%) participants at the inadequate level; 52 (36.1%) at the marginal level, and 41 (28.5%) at the adequate level. reading comprehension mean score was higher (33.8) than that for numeracy (29.9). figure 1. tofhla results, percent of respondents at each health literacy level there was no evidence of non-linearities in the relationship between the continuous variables (english language proficiency and age) and any of the outcomes. therefore, the continuous variables were included as linear terms in the regression models. the estimated mean test scores, with 95% confidence intervals, as a function of the predictor variables are shown in table 3. english proficiency was the strongest predictor of health literacy scores. the estimated average 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 adequate marginal inadequate p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 53 tofhla score increased linearly with english proficiency score (p < 0.001). as shown, 1 standard deviation increase in english proficiency resulted in an estimated 10 point increase in tofhla score. there was no evidence of a difference in mean tofhla score and any of the other variables. numeracy and reading comprehension scores also increased with english proficiency score. average reading comprehension score was higher in those with more than 1 year of english language courses. there was no evidence of differences in mean reading or numeracy scores across levels of any of the other variables (though age was almost a statistically significant predictor of numeracy). p r e d i c t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y 54 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s table 3. average total tofhla, reading, and numeracy test scores across different demographic predictor variables. *p-values correspond to a test of no difference in average mean across levels of the predictor from a linear regression model. for continuous variables (age and english proficiency), the estimated mean and confidence intervals are shown when the predictor is set to the average and ±1 standard deviation from the average. p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 55 results from the multiple linear regression models are in table 4. after implementing the stepwise selection procedure, age and english proficiency were the only variables retained in the linear regression models for total tofhla score and numeracy score; and english proficiency was the only variable retained in the model for the reading comprehension score. the relationship between english proficiency and the three continuous outcomes, total tofhla, weighted numeracy, and reading comprehension, remained statistically significant (p < 0.001). after adjusting for english proficiency score, the magnitudes of the age-total tofhla and agenumeracy score associations increase; specifically, the average numeracy score decreases on average with age (p = 0.02), resulting in a trend of a decrease in total tofhla scores with age (p = 0.07). there was no evidence of a difference in reading comprehension score as a function of age. table 4: multiple regression results.* *the results correspond to changes in the average outcome for a 1 standard deviation increase in the predictor. **p-value corresponding to the null hypothesis of no change as a function of the predictor. tofhla category frequencies as a function of quartiles of english language score are shown in table 5. the same pattern of monotonic increase in tofhla performance as a function of english language score is evident. p r e d i c t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y 56 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s table 5. row percents and 95% confidence intervals for categories of total toflha score across quartiles of english language score.* *pearson chi-square p-value for testing the null of no association between quartiles of english score and categories of toflha score <0.0001. discussion to our knowledge, this is one of few studies that have explored predictors of english health literacy specifically among u.s. adult hispanic immigrant bilinguals. there is consensus among experts on the need for further research involving language minorities and exploring the relationship between health literacy and limited english proficiency (mckee & paasche-orlow 2012, sentell & braun 2012). consistent with the literature, the study emphasizes language history and preferences. the demographic data suggest a continuum of bilingualism in this sample, as influenced by number of years living in the u.s.; experience with the u.s. education system; and amount of time in english classes. a strength of the study was the fact that english proficiency was assessed through a standard test, rather than self-reported. in addition, by including only participants born outside of the u.s. it was assumed that participants had a high proficiency in oral spanish, although future studies would benefit from also administering a test in spanish, as suggested by the varying levels of education in this sample. additionally, the study individually explored two key health literacy domains: reading comprehension and numeracy. finally, analyses included absolute tofhla score as well as categorical results or health literacy level. it might appear that p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 57 using an english instrument would compromise the validity of the test when administered to spanish speakers, as is argued in the literature. however, it is essential to consider that the use of a spanish instrument would be equally problematic, unless all of the participants being assessed have no fluency in english (such as being recent arrivals to the u.s.). overall, tofhla results indicated marginal functional health literacy in this sample, when measured in english. this result is consistent with existing national data. the 2003 naal found that 66% of hispanics had “basic” or “below basic” health literacy (kutner, greenberg, jin & paulsen 2006), and that 13.8% of medicare managed-care spanish speaking enrollees had inadequate health literacy (wolf, gazmararian & baker 2007). however, it is important to remember that small regional and clinical studies with hispanics have provided inconsistent results, some finding a high prevalence of limited health literacy (brice, et al 2008, garbers, schmitt, rappa & chiasson 2010, sudore, et al 2009), and others finding a high percentage of people with adequate health literacy (mas, jacobson & dong 2014, penaranda, diaz, noriega & shokar 2012,). as mentioned previously, these discrepancies may be related to a number of theoretical and methodological issues that must be further explored, including geographical and sociolinguistic factors. this study identified english proficiency as the strongest predictor of tofhla scores among participants, including numeracy and reading comprehension scores. results indicate that time attending english language courses may also constitute a relevant factor affecting functional english health literacy. categorical results confirmed the positive effect of english proficiency on health literacy (table 5). these results are consistent with previous literature emphasizing the importance of english language proficiency in health literacy (mckee & paasche-orlow 2012, pippins, alegría & haas 2007, sentell & braun 2012). this study also found evidence that younger participants obtained higher numeracy scores (after adjusting for english proficiency). thus, age may be a relevant demographic factor associated with functional health literacy and numeracy in this population. a previous study with hispanics in arkansas found that age and gender were not significant predictors of health literacy scores (boyas 2013), however it is not clear whether that study controlled for immigrant status or proficiency in english and spanish. as would be expected, completing the test in a language in which the participants were not highly proficient seems to have http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=brice%20jh%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=19024230 p r e d i c t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y 58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s negatively affected the outcome of the test. the typical argument to recommend testing health literacy in english is that english is the dominant language in the healthcare system in the u.s., and that there is therefore a need for the general public to understand english health information (kirsch, jungeblut, jenkins & kolstad 1993, kutner, greenberg, jin & paulsen 2006, nielsen-bohlman, panzer & kindig 2004). in addition to the obvious question of whether similar results would have been obtained if the spanish tohfla had been implemented, it is also important to consider the implications of marginal health literacy within the sociolinguistic context of metroplexes on the border such as the one in which the study was conducted. this context provides an opportunity to call into question the significance of low or marginal health literacy and limited english proficiency (lep) across subpopulations of hispanics. the study was conducted in a u.s.-mexico border community in which the language environment and language needs and preferences vary from other non-border communities. in the city where the study was conducted, more than 80% of the population is hispanic/latino, and more than 71% of the residents speak spanish at home (u.s. census bureau 2014). daily activities in all social domains are negotiated among individuals who lie along a broad continuum of spanish and english bilingualism (teschner 1995). what has not been sufficiently explored in the literature is whether english proficiency and functional health literacy in english, as measured using currently available instruments, are essential to obtaining reliable health information and accessing the health care system in a community in which most people have learned to navigate a bicultural and bilingual environment and are familiar with the established health care systems (on both sides of the border). although studies have found that lep constitutes a barrier to health care and is associated with poorer health status in hispanics (pippins, alegría & haas 2007), whether this is true among the border communities of this study and other border communities is an issue in need of further investigation. it is possible that in communities in which there is not a pressing need for learning and using english to carry out normal daily activities, and in which meaning negotiation among bilinguals is the norm, including within the available health care systems accessed in two countries, the connection between lep, low english health literacy and poorer health outcomes is not as evident. however, it cannot be assumed that health literacy levels have no impact on health outcomes in this context, either. there is an p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 59 urgent need for further research into border bilingual communities, and on how to measure health literacy within such richly layered social and linguistic contexts. in this particular border community, for example, the hospital systems lack professional interpreters and translators, and no research to date has explored how provider-patient interactions take place; how accessible information is in both languages; and how individuals with different levels of literacy and bilingualism navigate the system. in summary, the language of the instrument used to assess health literacy level; the l1 and l2 proficiency of participants; and the geographic and sociolinguistic environment are variables that merit further consideration in health literacy research. concerning the former, we may accept that, for the most part, the language of the healthcare system in the u.s. is english and that l1 spanish speakers have lower english health literacy than native english speakers (sentell & braun 2012, williams, parker & baker 1995). however, researchers have also recommended that future research consider whether differences in health literacy level among u.s. hispanics is determined by language use alone or associated with cultural adaptations such as health beliefs and practices (boyas 2013). we contend here that geography and sociolinguistic environment must also be integrated into research on health literacy. in addition, this research must go beyond implementation of health literacy tests to indepth sociolinguistic and ethnographic analysis of particular geographic areas, including within hospital and clinical settings. these observations may apply globally to other border areas. additionally, there are some other relevant global questions related to language acquisition and proficiency that urgently need to be addressed. first, there is general consensus among language acquisition researchers that l1 language proficiency directly influences second language (l2) acquisition. according to cummins’ language interdependence principle, academic aspects of language proficiency, including literacy (reading and writing) of l1 proficiency, are transferable to l2 (cummins 1991, cummins 2012). this suggests that a bilingual person who has high literacy in l1 is likely to perform better on a test of l2 literacy. future studies in health literacy should test for both l1 and l2 proficiency, and collect explicit data on educational attainment in l1 and l2 in order to explore the complex interdependence of literacies. only through such rigorous, in-depth language research will it be possible to fully understand the significance of the results of literacy tests and the p r e d i c t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y 60 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s challenges faced by lep populations in accessing the healthcare system throughout the u.s. limitations the results and contribution of the present study must be considered within its particular design and the characteristics of the participants, as well as the context in which the study was conducted. for instance, health literacy was assessed in english and participants included only immigrants whose l1 was spanish with a low-tointermediate level of english. however, the majority had a high school or higher degree, had lived in the u.s. for eight or more years, and more than half had taken english classes for more than 1 year. thus, findings cannot be generalized to the general hispanic population: demographic and contextual factors vary according to sociocultural and geographical context. we reemphasize here that a weakness in many health literacy studies in general has been a lack of in-depth description of study populations and settings. without such description, it is difficult to tease apart contributors to low health literacy, and to interpret the impact on healthcare access and outcomes accurately. this was a small exploratory study, and results may only apply to adults with the same characteristics as those of the study population. the study used a health literacy definition that includes only functional health literacy. the tofhla was not administered individually, but rather to an entire group. although the content of the test was not altered, results may not be comparable to one-on-one administration. in addition, spanish proficiency levels were collected through self-report of language used at home. finally, only variables that were the focus of the original study were explored, which were limited. including other independent and dependent variables may have yielded additional significant results. conclusions the results of this study emphasize the importance of considering both language context and language use in heath literacy research, particularly in the interpretation of the results of health literacy assessments. contextual factors must be considered in studies looking at the impact of health literacy on health outcomes, including health access, health quality and health status. this is especially important in the u.s., considering the growth of the spanish speaking population in many communities across the country, particularly p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 61 along the u.s.-mexico border region. globally, language diversity is facilitated by globalization, immigration, and displacement of people. language use is a contextual factor that may influence health care and health outcomes, and assessing l1 and l2 proficiency should become the norm in heath literacy studies with language minorities. health literacy research must further explore the role of bilingualism in health literacy among hispanics, and clarify the factors that must be considered when measuring health literacy in this group this study raises many questions in need of further investigation to clarify how language proficiency and sociolinguistic environment affect health literacy in language minority adults; proposes language approaches that may be more appropriate for measuring health literacy in these populations; and recommends further place-based research to determine whether the connection between language proficiency and health is generalizable to border communities. acknowledgement this study was funded by the national heart, lung, and blood institute, national institutes of health. 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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=coates%20wc%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=7474271 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=nurss%20jr%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=7474271 http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.1995.03530210031026 http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.274.21.1677 p r e d c i t o r s o f e n g l i s h h e a l t h l i t e r a c y j a c o b s o n , h u n d a n d s o t o m a s 65 wolf, m, gazmararian, j & baker, d (2007) health literacy and health risk behaviors among older adults. american journal of preventive medicine, vol 32, no 1, pp 19-24. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2006.08.024 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2006.08.024 abstract background methods participants data collection and measures data analysis results tofhla category frequencies as a function of quartiles of english language score are shown in table 5. the same pattern of monotonic increase in tofhla performance as a function of english language score is evident. discussion limitations conclusions acknowledgement references microsoft word boughton_formatted040613.docx l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 1 n o 1 2 0 1 3 5 an aboriginal adult literacy campaign pilot study in australia using yes i can   bob boughton, donna ah chee, jack beetson, deborah durnan and jose ʻchalaʼ leblanch         abstract in 2012, the remote aboriginal community of wilcannia in western nsw hosted the first australian pilot of a cuban mass adult literacy campaign model known as yes i can. the aim was to investigate the appropriateness of this model in aboriginal australia. building on an intensive community development process of ‘socialisation and mobilisation’, sixteen community members with very low literacy graduated from the basic literacy course, with the majority continuing on into post-literacy activities, further training and/or employment. the pilot was initiated by the national aboriginal adult literacy campaign steering committee (naalcsc) consisting of aboriginal leaders from the education and health sectors, and managed by the university of new england (une), working in partnership with the wilcannia local aboriginal land council as the local lead agency. the pilot was supported by a cuban academic who came to australia for this purpose, and included a participatory action research (par) evaluation led by the une project manager. in this paper, members of the project team and the naalcsc describe the pilot and reflect on its outcomes. introduction in 2012, the remote aboriginal community of wilcannia in western new south wales hosted the first australian pilot of a cuban mass adult literacy campaign model known as yes i can, or more commonly in the international literature, by its spanish title, yo si puedo (unesco 2006). the pilot was initiated and overseen by the national aboriginal adult literacy campaign steering committee (naalcsc), consisting of aboriginal leaders from the education and health sectors, and managed by the university of new england (une), working in partnership with the wilcannia local aboriginal land council as the local lead agency. several members of the project team had previous experience of the yes i can model in other countries, including most recently in timor-leste, where it was used for that country’s national literacy campaign (boughton 2010, 2012). this study used participatory action research to examine the feasibility of upscaling this same model to undertake a mass literacy campaign in   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   aboriginal australia. core funding was provided by the well (workplace english language and literacy) strategic projects program of the commonwealth department of innovation, industry, science and research supplemented with grants and in-kind support from other commonwealth and state agencies and a major corporate sponsor, brookfield multiplex. i while mass literacy campaigns are the subject of an extensive research literature in the field of international and comparative education (e.g. abendroth 2009, arnove and graff 2008, bhola 1984, 1999, freire 1978, miller 1985), they are not a feature of the australian literacy landscape. so, before describing the wilcannia pilot in detail, we begin with some historical background, and a description of the three phase campaign model. this is followed by an account of the pilot’s design and research methodology. next, we review some of the experiences during the pilot, and the main outcomes achieved. we end with our findings and conclusions from the pilot study. as the naalcsc has decided to continue with a further pilot, this paper should be read as a work-in-progress rather than a definitive study of the model and its applicability in australia. background the aboriginal leaders and adult educators involved in this project have been working together over many years to address the low levels of literacy in english in the aboriginal adult population, which we consider to be an important contributing factor to poor health outcomes and a major barrier to people’s capacity to take greater control of their lives and communities. in the 1990s, supported by the co-operative research centre for aboriginal health (crcah), we studied the experience of countries of the global south which had achieved low rates of infant mortality and better health outcomes through the so-called ‘low road to health’ (gray and smith 1995). in many of these countries, mass adult literacy campaigns had played a significant role in health development (boughton 2000, caldwell 1986, sandiford, cassel, montenegro and sanchez 1995). these findings, which resonated with our research on community-controlled adult education (ah chee, beetson and boughton 1997, beetson 1997, durnan and boughton 1999), led us to recommend trialling a popular education literacy campaign in australia (bell, boughton and bartlett 2007). this was in no way an endorsement of a simplistic cause-effect model of literacy and development, which has been thoroughly critiqued by street (2001), robinson-pant (2000) and rogers (2011). rather, our proposal was rooted in the dialectical concept of the relationship between learning and social change articulated by authors such as paulo freire (freire 1972, freire and macedo 1987) and paula allman (2010). a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 7   in 2006, the government of timor-leste invited boughton, beetson and durnan to conduct an in-country evaluation of their national adult literacy campaign which began that year using the cuban yes i can model (boughton 2010). in 2009, we reported our experiences to a workshop convened by the crcah (since renamed the lowitja aboriginal health research institute) and the naalcsc was formed (boughton 2009). with seed-funding from the lowitja institute, the naalcsc spent two more years investigating the model and lobbying for funds before receiving an invitation from the commonwealth to apply for funds to conduct this pilot study. the naalcsc chose wilcannia as the first pilot site, where beetson, an naalsc founding member, was working as the acting ceo of the local aboriginal land council (the ‘lalc’). located in western new south wales on the banks of the darling river, the town is home to the baakintji people ( ‘of the river’). the region has been occupied by aboriginal people for millennia, and includes one of the world’s oldest burial sites. british invasion began in the 1830s as the pastoral frontier moved west, initiating a period of “sustained violence” against the local occupants (goodall 2001, p.20). proclaimed in 1866, by the 1880s the town had become a thriving river port, with a population of several thousand, and two hundred riverboat steamers stopping there to take on “the majority of the wool from north western nsw” (gibson 2006, p.14). aboriginal people were the backbone of the pastoral workforce, but few lived in the town until after world war 2, and most were then confined to ‘shanty town’ camps along the river’s eastern bank (beckett 2005). in the 1970s, a national civil rights and land rights movement saw the rise of local aboriginal organisations, and baakintji leaders played a significant role in the movement across nsw. government housing was eventually built in two areas, an old ‘mission’ block on the eastern side of the river, and ‘the mallee’, on the town’s north western edge. title to this land and the houses was transferred to the lalc in the 1980s. the 1970s struggles, however, could not avert a steady economic decline, resulting from drought, falling pastoral industry profitability, and reduced mining activity in nearby broken hill. today, there is a small hospital, but no resident doctor. the schools, the hospital and the local government are the town’s only significant employers, and most families are reduced to a state of semi-permanent dependency on government income support. this decline has seen a rise in symptoms of personal and social disempowerment, including chronic illness, substance abuse, and community and domestic violence. at the 2011 census, the population was 602, of whom 467 (78 percent) identified as aboriginal (australian bureau of statistics 2011). the aboriginal population aged 15   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   and over, not in school or post-school education, was 280. of this number, 170 (60 percent) had left school at year 9 or earlier. the lalc is the town’s only elected local aboriginal body, with responsibility under the nsw land rights act to represent the community on matters of economic and social development. beetson secured additional support for the campaign from the local nsw department of education central school, and the wilcannia aboriginal community working party (wacwp). project management and evaluation was undertaken by the university of new england (une), whose contract with the commonwealth specified that: the aim of the project is to trial a twelve-month pilot campaign. this must utilise an internationally-recognised mass campaign model, not previously deployed in australia. you must assess whether this model can be applied successfully in an aboriginal community; and to discover what would be involved in up-scaling it from community to regional level, and then to other regions. mass literacy campaigns throughout the world, over 800 million adults are illiterate, of whom the majority are women, and international development agencies and scholarly opinion regularly identify this as a major obstacle to efforts to overcome poverty and marginalisation (archer 2005). while literacy scholars associated with the new literacy studies (e.g. street 2001, 2011) rightly question the simple equation of literacy with development, the extension of literacy continues to be a major goal of international agencies and national governments (wagner 2011). for much of the last half of the twentieth century, international bodies such as unesco and the international council of adult education (icae) believed that literacy campaigns provided an effective means to overcome low literacy in countries of the global south. in a unesco-sponsored study reflecting this view, bhola defined a literacy campaign as: a mass approach that seeks to make all adult men and women in a nation literate within a particular time frame. literacy is seen as a means to a comprehensive set of ends – economic, social, structural and political…(it) suggests urgency and combativeness…it is something of a crusade (bhola 1984, pp 35 and196, authors’ emphasis) a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 9   support for this approach was fuelled by the successes of mass campaigns in several newly-independent countries, of which the best known examples included cuba in 1961, tanzania 1971-1983, mozambique 197879, and nicaragua in 1980. in fact, as a recently re-released collection of country studies reveals, literacy campaigns have a much longer history, going back several centuries, and have occurred under many different types of regimes and in very different historical and political contexts (arnove and graff 2008). many are continuing, including india’s total literacy campaign which began in the state of kerala in 1988 and is still running (saldanha 2010). moreover, their impact has been considerable. literacy rates, defined quite narrowly in terms of people’s ability to read and write a few simple sentences, have risen by more than twenty percentage points in several countries, while many participants, both ‘graduates’ and teachers, have subsequently played a significant role in their country’s development (bhola 1984, lind 2008). our initial review of the literature (boughton 2009) revealed that, while each campaign included characteristics specific to its country context, most had three key elements, or phases. phase one, which we call ‘socialisation and mobilisation’, mobilises as many people as possible to take part, as learners, teachers, organisers and supporters, and seeks to enhance the understanding of society as a whole of the importance of literacy to wider social and economic development goals. it also builds organisation at national, regional and local levels to lead the campaign, widening the responsibility for raising literacy levels beyond the government education authority, enlisting support and commitment from all government agencies, from non-government and civil society organisations and from the community as a whole. this process continues throughout the campaign. the term socialisation is particularly pertinent, since it alerts us to the fact that the campaign model sets out to identify low levels of literacy as a social, not an individual problem. the second element, phase two, consists of a set of basic literacy lessons, run over a short period, usually three months or less, in which non-literate and low literate members of the community are encouraged to enrol and supported to complete. these lessons are usually non-formal, rarely accredited, and taught and organized by nonprofessional local facilitators and leaders in the community, with the assistance of professional advisers and materials provided by the central campaign authority. the classes often end with a local ceremony, honouring the people who have completed and welcoming the next group into the classes. the final element, phase three of the campaign, is for ‘post-literacy’. this consists of activities designed to help the newly-literate participants continue to build their literacy beyond what has been achieved in the basic lessons, and to create a more literate culture in the community. in some   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   countries, this post-literacy phase has led into more structured courses taking people up to a basic education level, or into vocational qualifications. throughout the process, the central authority maintains a close oversight of progress, with a view to ensuring that targets for literacy improvement are met at a sufficiently rapid rate. all three phases continue until virtually everyone in the community or regions has achieved a basic level of literacy, in accordance with the unesco definition used for the literacy targets in the education for all policy, i.e. ‘the capacity of young people and adults aged fifteen and over to read and write, with understanding, a simple sentence about their own life’ (unesco 2005:.29). literacy campaigns thus provide a very different approach to the problem of low literacy levels from the literacy programs we are accustomed to seeing in australia and, indeed, in most western countries. literacy programs are small-scale, discrete, usually-accredited courses of semi-formal study, run through adult learning centres and vocational colleges, or in the workplace, with students who self-select and professional adult literacy teachers who are usually from outside the community. their main focus is on individuals acquiring skills. these programs are usually the responsibility of education departments, though there is also a lot of ngo activity. the approaches are hugely varied, as are the success rates of the students in the different programs. the large-scale mass campaign is quite different. it involves a nationally, or at least regionally-coordinated attack on the problem of illiteracy, usually led by government but involving all sectors of society. it aims to reduce adult illiteracy by a specific amount over a specific period, and thereby help to transform the whole community. international interest in mass campaigns declined in the 1990s, in part because research commissioned by the world bank claimed that their success rate was only 12 percent (abdazi 1994), a view since shown to be incorrect (lind 2008, p.46). there can be little doubt that part of the opposition to wider international sponsorship came from the west, which was concerned about the association of many successful campaigns with socialist regimes and anti-colonial independence movements (jones 1990). nevertheless, many countries in the global south continued to mount successful campaigns, the most recent examples including argentina, bolivia, india, venezuela, grenada and timor-leste. in the last ten years, interest in the mass campaign model has re-surfaced, stimulated in part by the united nations literacy decade, which ended in 2012 (unesco 2005). contemporary literacy scholars, especially those working in universities of the north, remain divided about the value of mass campaigns. it is not possible in the space of this article to review all the arguments, but criticism has been directed at the unreliability of the statistics that measure the apparent gains; the subsequent ‘falling –off’ of literacy levels when a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 11   campaigns are not followed up and supported with comprehensive systems of school and post-school education; the tendency of campaigns to promote a ‘one-size-fits-all’ ‘autonomous’ model of literacy, which devalues local knowledge and local literacy practices; the poor quality of the actual instruction, related to the use of volunteer and untrained tutors and facilitators; and the overly-political intent of some campaigns (abdazi 1994, wagner 2001, street 2001, latin american group of specialists in literacy and written culture [gleace] 2009). on the other hand, mass campaigns still receive considerable support around the world, from governments, especially those with a social reform agenda; from literacy advocates and practitioners working through governments and international agencies (bhola 1999, lind 2008); from scholars and practitioners working in the tradition of popular education (e.g. abendroth 2009, gonzález 2005); and, not least, from the millions of people who choose to participate in them. ultimately, the test of their value will be whether or not they have a positive impact upon the populations, societies and communities involved, something which only empirical research on actual campaigns can reveal. the pilot and the research in the 1990s, the federation of independent aboriginal education providers (fiaep), a national body representing aboriginal communitycontrolled adult education colleges, developed a participatory action research (par) model to help overcome some of the inherent difficulties of doing research in their communities (fiaep 1997). par, a commonly-used approach to the evaluation of education and development interventions in the global south (kapoor and jordan 2009), has been defined as: a form of collective self-reflective inquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social or educational practices, as well as their understanding of these practices and the situations in which these practices are carried out (kemmis and mctaggart 1988:,5, authors’ emphasis). the participants in this study included the une chief investigator, members of the naalcsc, the on-site project team, local community members and representatives of local agencies, and staff from the funding bodies. the research design was approved by une’s human research ethics committee.   this was a pilot, rather than a trial. the assumption was made at the outset that the campaign would need to deliver benefits to the community, but that how to do this, how to run an actual campaign in such a context, could not be known in advance. the campaign model chosen for the pilot   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   was the one we had observed and evaluated in timor-leste, developed by the institute of pedagogy for latin america and the caribbean (iplac) in havana, cuba. the model has been deployed in twenty eight countries since it was first developed in 2000, and has been the subject of an evaluation study by unesco and the recipient of a major unesco literacy prize. in unesco’s words: [t]he ysp [yo, sí puedo] method is in fact more than a method. it would be more appropriate to understand it as a literacy training model that goes beyond processes, materials, strategies etc., as it includes, both explicitly and implicitly, concepts of literacy training, learning, life skills and social mobilization, and involves a wide range of actors with varied roles from the beneficiaries of the literacy training to other stakeholders such as state entities and other concerned institutions. (unesco 2006) ysp follows the general form of the three phases described above, with a specially-designed method of teaching during phase two, using preprepared dvds and workbooks. a pilot in one community is not in itself a campaign. rather, this was an exploratory exercise, undertaken to decide whether a campaign itself is feasible. a pilot can put in place various aspects of the model, including the three phase approach; it can identify some of the strengths and weaknesses of the model and the method; it can reveal aspects of a specific national or regional context which a mass campaign will need to address; and it can therefore help in deciding how, if at all, a large scale campaign could be mounted. however, without the critical mass and momentum which the campaign proper generates, a pilot cannot be expected to have as significant an impact. that said, the pilot was designed to provide as much information as possible on which future decision-making could be based. data were collected from a variety of sources, including previous research on the community, and the 2011 australian bureau of statistics census data; an initial household literacy survey; a purpose-built database of enrolment, participation and outcome data; student files, including examples of work; preand posttesting of participants; in-depth interviews with a selection of participants, facilitators and community stakeholders; participantobservation of campaign activities; written reports from project team members; and other primary source data including media reports, photographs and film of campaign activities, and minutes of meetings and workshops with the project team, the steering committee and the funding agencies. regular reports from the evaluation research were discussed in a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 13   project team meetings and with the naalsc, to seek further response and commentary from project participants. the experience of the campaign phase one: socialisation and mobilisation on tuesday 7th february, 2012, over 200 locals and visitors gathered in baker park, on the banks of the darling river, for the public launch of the campaign, in what the wilcannia news, quoting a local elder, described as ‘one of the best days in wilcannia for many years.’ the mc, local aboriginal health worker belinda king, introduced the crowd to various speakers, including jack beetson, chris hunter representing the local campaign facilitators, jose ‘chala’ leblanch, the cuban adviser who had arrived in town only two weeks earlier, and a visitor from timor-leste, zelia fernandes, who had worked on her country’s literacy campaign. save the childrenii organised activities for the younger children, the students from both schools came, the baakintji dancers performed, a local businessman provided the mobile gas bbq on which he and two other volunteers cooked emu rissoles and kangaroo kebabs, and a band played country music. the nsw regional aboriginal land councillor, des williams, was there, and the central darling shire president, along with a representative of one of the campaign sponsors, brookfield multiplex, members of the naalc, and a delegation from the central australian aboriginal congress in alice springs. this event, the culmination of the initial phase one work, illustrates a key feature of the model, which requires literacy to be seen as the responsibility of the whole community, rather than a problem for individuals. this idea becomes a material reality through establishing and/or engaging local structures to lead the campaign. initially, a small working group was assembled, chaired by the leader of the local aboriginal education consultative group (aecg). a team of employees and volunteers from other organisations then began working together to get the campaign off the ground, supported by beetson and his technical adviser on the project, deborah durnan. over time, the land council increasingly became a hub of activity. campaign workers and volunteers also became engaged in other land council and community working party activities which centred on the land council offices, adding to the sense of community mobilisation, and reinforcing the point that literacy cannot be addressed in isolation from the wider social issues of which it is a part. in december and january, a simple household survey to identify the level of need and interest was undertaken by local community members, eventually reaching 41 households with 119 adult residents.   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   of these, 98 were identified by themselves or a family member as needing assistance with literacy, and 45 registered to join a class. our cuban adviser arrived in australia in mid-january 2012, and almost immediately travelled to wilcannia to begin work. by the end of the week he had met the working group, been oriented briefly to the town and the community, and held an initial orientation session for potential facilitators. the following monday, the two weeks of facilitator training began in earnest, with four volunteers, along with the local radio station dj, who came along to train as a back-up person, and the post-literacy coordinator. the first classes began in midfebruary, with a total of 26 people enrolled. these 26 people came from a cohort within the community with little prior education, a history of disengagement from employment and community development, and many pressing and difficult issues in their lives. for these people, enrolling in such an activity was a major step. the students would not have enrolled if there had not been a strong feeling of community support around them, and if the local facilitators had not encouraged them to do so. nor would the community have been as supportive, if they had not seen that the campaign was something they could play a role in and help direct. however, it is also important to recognise that underlying the support for the campaign, both from the wider community, from the facilitators and staff, and from those who enrolled, was a clear recognition of need. as one of the facilitators recalled: well when it first come to wilcannia, when we got the first lot of students, one of the good things about it was the talk around town. everyone was happy about it. the whole community was talking about this yes i can program. the students that got involved they go back and tell other students and mates or friends. i’m just happy to hear them all talking about it, when you’re sitting around the campfire, making the ‘johnny cake’ and kangaroo stew you know. i was just happy to hear someone talking about it (owen whyman interview, 26/7/2012). the work of phase one was made difficult by a number of community crises, including several deaths in the last three months of 2011, and a serious civil disturbance. in a small community, which already has a history of conflict with various authorities and agencies and disputes between families, such events reverberate for an extended period, and make it difficult for some people to come to work, or to take part in meetings together. funerals and court cases also take people away from other things, and sometimes from the town itself. in short, one of the consequences of a high degree of community engagement and ownership of the campaign is a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 15   that it becomes subject to the same ups and downs as the community itself. moreover, the closer the campaign is to the people who most need it, the more the chaos of life at the margins intrudes on the campaign’s own organisation. ‘socialisation’ is not a word with which english-speaking practitioners and scholars will necessarily be familiar, but it carries an important meaning. we are accustomed to think of literacy in individual terms, even though theory and research, especially in recent decades, has emphasised its social nature. as luke and freebody (1999: 4) write: while literacy is an aspect of an individual's history, capability, and possibilities, it is also a feature of the collective or joint capabilities of a group, community, or society. the socialisation work in a campaign, which does not stop when classes start but continues throughout the campaign, is a practical expression of this theoretical point, because it makes the task of improving literacy a task for the community. in other words, the socialisation is not something done before the ‘real’ work of tuition in the literacy classes. rather, it is an essential ingredient of the work of building community literacy. phase two. the yes i can classes in phase two, two intakes of students, 43 in all, undertook the basic literacy lessons, taught using yes i can resources and method described below. each intake ran for 12 weeks, the first from february until may, and the second from may until august, with a break for the school holidays. in the first intake, there were two classes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, while there was only one group in the second intake. chala brought with him from cuba a boxed set of dvds, on which were recorded 64 lessons which iplac had made for the literacy campaign in grenada in 2007. the other resources were printed work books for each student, containing the exercises to be done during the lessons, and copies of a simple facilitator’s handbook, explaining the method and the facilitator’s role. each yes i can class followed a similar format. students would arrive, having been picked up by a campaign worker or having walked to class from home. they would socialise a little, and then sit down to watch a dvd lesson, each of which ran for approximately twenty five minutes. during this time, the facilitator can turn it on and off, to allow the students to complete activities, including discussing what they have seen and asking questions. on   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   the tv, they watched a literacy class, taught to a group of five people by a lead teacher and an assistant. all the people in the tv class are actors, working to a script. the teacher takes her class through each lesson, using an alphanumeric method in which they first learn to associate letters with numbers, following a ‘guide table’, and then undertake exercises to build words, phrases and, eventually, sentences and texts of different genres.       figure 1. the yes i can guide table   each lesson begins with a ‘positive message’, a type of generative theme, a phrase in which there are words containing the letter or letters which are the focus of that lesson, but which makes a specific point or raises an idea. the first phrase is simply ‘open the gate’, the message being that literacy is opening up a new world and you are on a new journey. on the dvd, discussion around these themes with the actor-students is led by an assistant teacher, with the help of film clips illustrating aspects of grenadian life. later themes include looking after the environment, caring for children, nutrition and the role of women. the student–actors are of varying ages, men and women, and with different levels of confidence and expertise. the lessons all follow a predictable pattern, or ‘algorithm’, and the students in wilcannia quickly learned the sequence. there are also icons used throughout each lesson to identify specific activities of observing, listening, speaking, reading and writing. each lesson includes a brief general knowledge element, related to the initial ‘positive message.’ the lessons are divided into three stages. there are seven basic introductory lessons, 45 reading, writing and revision lessons, and 12 consolidation and extension lessons with assessment activities. lesson 65 is an evaluation activity for the facilitators. lessons 2 – 7 are designed for people with no prior experience of reading and writing, and include exercises to practise holding a pen and forming simple shapes. since every student in wilcannia had at least some minimal primary schooling, the a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 17   facilitators elected, following the first lesson which introduces the method, to skip the next six, going straight to lesson 8, which begins the work on letters of the alphabet, basic words and phrases. after some experimentation, it was decided to show a minimum of five lessons per week, in three sessions of two hours each, on mondays, tuesdays and wednesdays. a ‘catch-up’ session was held on thursdays, for people who had missed lessons or wanted to repeat them. on fridays, though not every week, there was a ‘literacy and culture session’, sometimes followed by a bbq. this was introduced at the facilitator’s suggestion, and was an opportunity for the students and facilitators to tell chala about their country’s history, culture and issues; and for him to talk about cuba and the caribbean. the most important part of the model is that the lessons are ‘taught’ by the local facilitator, who sets up the class, controls the dvd, leads the discussion of the ‘positive messages’ and sets and supervises the learning activities: it's not just locals learning from locals, but family learning from family, so they understood each other, they had an empathy with each other... that you just don't get otherwise. if you bring teachers in from cobar or broken hill or anywhere else, they don't belong in the community, they're not from the community (whereas) these people knew what they'd all gone through, they understood that and i think that was the key factor in it working. (jack beetson, abc radio interview, 10/5/12) while there were often one or two technical advisers present, their role was to provide ongoing monitoring, training and critical reflection. at times, they might move to the front of the class to demonstrate or explain; but in general they stayed back, and worked as assistants to the local facilitators outside the class. the advisers’ role was to help the facilitators prepare each lesson, to discuss what had happened in a previous class and progress of each student, and to assist with ideas on how to contextualise and adapt the materials to the reality of wilcannia. this contextualisation, a key feature of the yes i can model, involves finding local pictures, words and themes to use in lessons, as a substitute for unfamiliar words used on the dvd, or in addition; and preparing additional localised resources to match students’ needs. completion of the basic 64 lessons indicates a minimal level of achievement on some simple tasks, even though the method does allow people to achieve more than this if they are able. the minimum requirement is that they are able to write independently a short letter about   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   their own life. the final evaluation of the students’ learning occurs during the activities in lessons 56 to 63 and each participant’s work is recorded in his/her workbook and exercise book. there is no formal assessment test, but the advisers have to verify with the facilitators that everyone who completes has reached this basic level. however, the course as a whole is designed to achieve much more than this. the ‘positive messages’ express an underlying set of values about human development and the role of each individual within it. the cuban ambassador to australia, who was a brigadista himself in the 1961 cuban literacy campaign, described it thus at the may graduation …the system is very well conceived, since the process starts with the discussion of ideas (before) establishing links between numbers and words. in fact, the program is not  limited  to   teaching reading and writing. it integrates educational, social and cultural components with the learning process of reading and writing, and the framework of the teaching is referred to the cultural and social interest of the local people (monzon, p, personal communication). there is also a significant amount of material which could be called general knowledge, which introduces students to the world of learning and the possibilities of a better future. participation and retention in the first intake, while 25 people actually came to one or more classes, 12 withdrew after only one or two sessions, leaving 13 continuing students. of these, 10 graduated, which is a retention figure of over 75 percent, an unusually high figure for aboriginal post-school education courses. the second intake had a lower retention (55 percent), with 11 continuing students and 6 graduating. the participation and retention across both intakes are set out in table 1, below. this shows that, of the students who attended two or more times, only eight did not successful complete the classes. table 1. participation and retention, intakes 1 and 2, wilcannia 2012 a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 19     participation and retention m f t starters 14 29 43 continuers 8 16 24 completers 5 11 16 retention 62.5% 68.8% 66.7% withdrawals 6 13 19 w % starters 42.9% 44.8% 44.2%   the reasons for withdrawal were often to do with significant personal crises, including one student being jailed half way through the classes, and two more having to leave town to go and look after a critically-ill relation in another town. another withdrawal was a young man whose mother had withdrawn him from school, who returned to school after six weeks, which was an excellent result. some ‘withdrawers’, it should be noted, have actually come back into the campaign to take part in the post-literacy phase, suggesting that they are still building their literacy levels. the retention rate across both intakes for both men and women show that, for the people who were mobilised to join the campaign, and who stayed beyond the first one or two sessions, the model and method is effective in helping them achieve a basic level of improved literacy. independent testing of outcomes because the assessment process is built into the yes i can lessons, completion data is the indicator of the outcomes achieved, since all who complete have achieved the very basic level which is the minimum standard described earlier. however, for the pilot, the naalcsc agreed to the commonwealth’s request for additional data, through mapping the yes i can lesson content against the australian core skills framework (acsf) and using that national standard to assess the literacy levels of participants at the beginning and end of phase two. this work was carried out by an independent consultant, philippa mclean, one of the original architects of the acsf. on her advice, the mapping and assessments were confined to three of the five ‘core skills’, learning, reading, and writing. mclean determined that yes i can allowed students to develop across a fairly broad range, from below level one on the acsf when lessons began to level two and perhaps even higher, at the end:   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       20 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   the early stages of the yes i can course concentrate on single sounds for reading, writing and oral communication. as the learner develops through the course the emphasis is on building knowledge of words (acsf pre level 1), then sentences working from simple to complex sentences (acsf level 1 to level 2). learners then spend time developing skills to write a paragraph and a descriptive informal letter to a friend using a model provided (acsf level 2). it isn’t until near completion of yes, i can that learners are creating paragraphs with support.... ......(but) the pace, modelling and restricted context of the classes and step by step process means that yes i can rarely operates above acsf level 1 (mclean 2012) however, as her report acknowledges, there is a lot more happening, some of which falls outside the acsf, but is nevertheless contributing to the participants’ literacy development: a number of participants commented on how they enjoyed learning about cuba and granada. they showed obvious interest in having their horizons extended ... the methodology of yes, i can is such that the priority is for learners to achieve success and build confidence. risk taking is not as strong a focus, so there is significant support and scaffolding for all activities. this means that the program is rarely able to provide the participants with the opportunity to demonstrate higher than acsf level 2 performance and often performance opportunity is only at level 1. (authors’ emphasis added) in the pre-assessments, the majority of students were in fact at prelevel one (pl1), i.e. not actually on the original acsf scale. the final assessments showed a dramatic change for those who had persevered with improvements in one or more core skills. overall, the consultant’s conclusion was that yes i can had provided an opportunity for significant literacy building: this was demonstrated in ways such as attempting to write more complex sentences without support, speaking up in class and coming to the whiteboard to write, reading aloud to the class from the dvd, supporting class members, working in groups and connecting their classroom work with their broader life. a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 21   in relation to the development of core skills more generally, one of the consultant’s most significant findings was that: the core skill of ‘learning’ is a critical skill that needs to be explicitly addressed by teachers and learners. development in this skill often underpins progress in the other core skills (mclean 2012). from the qualitative data, it is clear that a whole set of other factors underpin the development of the ‘skill’ of learning, of which the most important is the belief which individuals and the group as a whole develop through the course, a belief in their own ability to learn and to improve the situation in which they find themselves and their families. many people saw the literacy campaign as a chance to turn their lives around, build their confidence, and play a more positive role in their community. one participant put it this way: i heard from friends and i wanted to get involved, to build my confidence up again, because i was into drugs and alcohol. and i came along, got involved with it and i just enjoyed it. (on the first day) i felt shy. i was so shy, i hardly spoke. i knew the people in the class but i hardly spoke to ‘em. i was shy in the class and even out on the street. (participant interview, 27/6/12). the diversity of motivations is reflected in the following extract from the senior technical adviser’s report. the phrases in quote marks are the participants’ words: some of the older women simply wanted to have a better quality of life for both themselves and their kids and grandkids. it was not unusual for the women to comment that ‘they loved coming to class because it was boring at home all day everyday with nothing different to do.’ one older person said she hopes the young ones see her and want to do it also, to ‘make something of themselves. not sitting all day at home watching videos’. one younger women said ‘class made me feel better inside’ because it helped her deal with her sadness of losing her two young children in an accident only two years before. two women specifically came to yes i can so they could ‘stay clean’, ‘off the grog and drugs’. a young man with a newly   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   born daughter and young son spoke of becoming ‘a role model for family maybe work at shire’; an older man had decided yes i can would help him ‘get fit and play footy again so he can stay strong and off grog and get work’. another grandmother wanted ‘the rest of my family to do course, show them if i can do it they can too’; a woman said she really wanted to ‘look out for grand kids’; a younger woman said she ‘just wanted to feel happier’; and another ‘my kids be proud of me, they shamed when i don’t read’. two women were desperately trying to turn their life around in order to stay out of gaol as they had run out of chances being on a suspended sentence (durnan 2012). the graduations the culmination of phase two for both intakes came with the graduations, which took place on may 9th and august 31st. these significant community events were a continuation of phase one, because they contributed to the socialisation and mobilisation, building more understanding within the community of the importance of literacy and the need to honour and support the people in the community who join the classes. in recognition not only of the graduates, but of the community as a whole for their efforts in mounting the campaign, the second and final graduation was attended by the commonwealth parliamentary secretary, ms sharon bird, responsible for the foundation skills area, and by john williams, the local national party member for the region in the nsw parliament. the cuban ambassador, his excellency pedro monzon, attended both graduations, possibly the first time such a high-level international guest had visited the community. both graduations received extensive positive coverage in local, regional and national media, adding to the pride felt by the participants, their families and friends, and the campaign’s many supporters. jack beetson captured this in his speech to the august graduation: i am proud of this campaign for many reasons but one reason is because over 40 adults were courageous enough to step through the classroom door to take a look; … today we are honouring the 16 who finished the course. in a community like wilcannia this is no small achievement. let us not forget that for a person who doesn’t read and write even taking that first step to come into the room is a giant step. so i say to you all… be proud of what you have done for yourself and for your kids and for your community. i know you have discovered learning and it is so exciting. it fills me with immense pride when i see a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 23   you all now doing your post literacy classes, using the computers, cooking healthy food and soon some of you’ll be doing the certificate ii course in catering (jack beetson, 31/8/12). the graduations provided further evidence of the extent to which the community had taken ownership of the campaign and were providing much of the energy driving it. the hall was decorated by a team of volunteers and the cooking was done by two local community members, with assistance from the school staff and a local businessman. the young baakintji dancers performed, accompanied on the didgeridoo by owen whyman, one of the facilitators. community elders attended and spoke, and representatives of the facilitators and students also made speeches. each graduate received a special certificate, which included the design from the youth centre literacy campaign banner. the final graduation, which was also a farewell for chala, ended in the evening with a community dance, attended by several hundred people. according to one of the yes i can participants, ‘it was the best day of my life.’ phase three: post-literacy the aim of phase three in a mass literacy campaign is to consolidate the learning that has occurred in the introductory classes by encouraging people to become part of the ‘culture of literacy’, and to engage in ongoing activities in which literacy and the learning which utilises and builds it are central. for some people, this may ultimately become a path back into more formal, accredited learning, while for others, it may remain at the level of informal and incidental activities, such as more literate practices at work, in the home and in community. as with the other phases, the underlying theory is based on the idea of literacy as a ‘social practice’, done with other people in social situations, not an autonomous skill, even though skill is part of it. the key task was to develop a coordinated strategy to strengthen the graduates’ newly acquired basic literacy over a minimum three month timeframe. the model aims to involve as many community organisations as possible in providing this post-literacy support, thus emphasising that the responsibility for overcoming illiteracy and supporting people who are trying to improve lies with the whole community. it is also about embedding into ongoing community life the development of the capacity of the low literate to become active agents in the development of themselves, their families and their community, through a gradual process of social inclusion. post literacy activities following the first intake included non-formal computer classes at the land council offices, and a cooking class at the women’s safe house. the timetable was deliberately kept to a minimum so   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   it could be managed locally and required few resources, whilst maintaining the same daily routine (2 hours 3 to 4 times per week) from the yes i can classes. as with all the campaign activities, there were major challenges. as the project leader wrote in his final report: the positive outcomes are even more remarkable because they were achieved against a local back drop of community crises and dislocation (beetson, 2012) despite this, there was a 70 percent take-up of post literacy activities after the first graduation, with seven of the ten graduates involved in either classes, or work experience or both, while two of the three who did not join had left town for personal/family reasons. two students were engaged to work as assistant instructors on post literacy activities and one of them was, at the end of this phase, engaged by lalc as a trainee facilitator for intake 2 yes i can students. four local agencies (lalc, safe house, shire council and save the children) directly supported the phase three activities; and three others contributed resources. following the second intake graduation, a similar program was developed, of computing, cooking classes, and supplementary literacy tutoring, this time provided by the local tafe (technical and further education), with whom the lalc had negotiated a partnership. in addition to these learning activities, work experience placements continued, at cdep and the safe house. attendance and participation grew, because the first intake graduate employed by the lalc worked on the program, and some first intake graduates returned to join in the post-literacy activities. in the last week, western tafe opened a new course, a certificate ii in catering, based on the new partnership that had been developed by the lalc, who continued to pay an assistant teacher (a yes i can graduate) to work with the tafe staff. this course was a direct response to needs expressed by graduates of yes i can, who want to start a small catering business in town as an income generating project. it is particularly noteworthy that six people have now enrolled in an entry level vocational qualification, and two people have obtained employment, one with the shire and another with the land council. for this cohort, which had previously had very little interest or opportunity to work or do further study, this was a major breakthrough. overall findings the aim of the pilot was to discover first, whether the mass adult literacy campaign model, utilising the yes i can method, could be successfully applied in an aboriginal community; and second, what would a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 25   be involved in up-scaling it from community to regional level, and then to other regions. as the account given above has shown, it can be applied in an aboriginal community and was, in fact, welcomed by that community. in terms of success, the enthusiastic participation of so many individuals and agencies, and the outcomes achieved by the graduates and others, are an indication that, for those who joined the campaign, it was indeed a success. however, it is important not to overstate what the evidence from this pilot demonstrates. the aim of a literacy campaign is to raise significantly the level of literacy in a region or a nation within a specific period of time. from this perspective, the important data are population level data, rather than individual outcome data. while this was a pilot, confined to one community, and not a full-developed campaign, it is still important to ask to what extent was there was significant change in the literacy rate at a population level, i.e. in the wilcannia aboriginal adult community. table 2, below, summarises the evidence.   table 2. overall summary of community outcome male femal e total 2011 census 120 159 279 est. target @40% 48 64 112 surveyed 56 87 143 identified need 40 58 98 starters 14 29 43 completions 5 11 16   the estimated target was based on the conservative assumption, that 40 percent (i.e. 112 people) of the adult population (at the 2011 census) had minimal literacy levels. in fact, 98 people self-identified or were identified by a family member through the initial survey and registration process, as interested in joining the campaign i.e. approximately 87 percent of our estimated potential target group. of the 98 who were identified, 43 actually started class, that is, attended one or more sessions. if the initial estimates are correct, then we succeeded in reaching 38 percent of the target population with our two intakes, and 13 percent of this target population actually participated until the classes finished. in the end, if our initial assumptions were correct, this number of completions has reduced the percentage of low-literate people in the community by around 6 percent (from 40 to 34 percent). this is a deliberately conservative estimate, as some   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   of the people who did not complete the 12 weeks of classes were seen to have improved in the time they were in class. it may also be the case that the initial estimate of those with low literacy was too high and/or that the total adult population over 15 was less than the number found in the 2011 census. on those assumptions, the reduction in the overall illiteracy/very low literacy rate might rise to 7 or 8 percent. this outcome falls well short of reductions achieved in full-scale campaigns documented in other countries, such as in nicaragua in 1980, where the reduction was in the order of 15-25 percent (cardenal and miller 1981). therefore, we cannot say on the basis of this pilot that the mass literacy campaign model can be applied in an aboriginal community to the same effect it has had in some other countries. however, on the basis of the lessons learned from the wilcannia experience, it is reasonable to believe that a more dramatic improvement could be achieved by up-scaling the pilot to a regional level. the pilot clearly demonstrated the capacity of the model to mobilise a community around the literacy issue. the central school principal, michelle nicholson, captured this in her interview: there has been a lot of things happen in wilcannia that have been done to the community. this project for me, the differences and the reasons why this has been embraced, is the fact that it is actually for the community, by the community. and, it’s actually the community that is running the program. there’s support there, like a lot of support obviously, but the leadership roles are being held by community members … it’s the care with that that has made it successful. (michelle nicholson, interview, 27/7/12). the active participation of local staff in the campaign provides further evidence of the model’s value in building community capacity. the four local facilitators, two women and two men, received substantial training in the model, beginning with the intensive training before the start of the first intake and continuing on the job for the next seven months. at the end of the first intake, one of the students asked to be trained as a facilitator also, and she received training from then until the end of the second intake and has continued to work in the post-literacy phase. the extent to which they embraced the idea of the model and understood its importance, as much to themselves as to the participants, was expressed by owen whyman in an interview: …when they approached me about this, about being a facilitator, i jumped at the chance, because like i said, i’ve always wanted to do something to help my people ... it’s a good feeling in your heart, because you know you’re a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 27   doing something for your people. and you feel proud on the inside, and there’s no better feeling than that. (owen whyman, interview, 26/7/12). in addition to the facilitators, many other local people developed an understanding of the campaign model, including the post-literacy coordinator, members of the local working group and the community working party, staff in organisations which joined the network of supporters, and, not least, the participants themselves. a collective ‘systemization’ (carrillo 2010) of the evaluation data undertaken by the naalcsc and the project team at a workshop in alice springs in late august identified several factors which had contributed to the model’s success. first, the leadership of the campaign was taken by an aboriginal community-controlled organisation which had legitimacy, authority, and resources, and was already identified as the leading development agency by community members and other important actors, including government. second, the campaign employed local people in key roles, people who the community respected and trusted, and the campaign office became an open space where aboriginal people were talking about and acting on the issue, making literacy ‘everyone’s business’. it was also seen as important that the local staff and working group members came from several family groups, creating links across community divisions and conflicts, with key community leaders and elders over time lending support to the campaign, by participating in its public activities. a further factor was the expertise and experience of the on-site project leader and his team, including the cuban adviser who won the respect and friendship of the facilitators and participants, and of other people in the town, by virtue of his commitment to their struggle and to the principles of solidarity and respect which underpins the cuban model. the grenadian dvd lessons, and chala’s cuban nationality and culture, proved a point of interest and attraction, as people discovered that they were part of a wider adult literacy movement among ‘people of colour’ in countries of the global south, about which they wanted to know more. resources were also crucial, in that there were sufficient funds to hold social events like the launch, the graduations and the regular bbqs, which made the campaign a ‘whole-of-community’ activity in which everyone could get involved, including the families of the participants and staff. finally, and perhaps most importantly, the campaign generated a spirit of respect, compassion and solidarity for everyone involved, so that people felt safe and supported, not judged or ‘put down’, and began to believe in the possibility of a better future. the evaluation workshop concluded that evidence from the pilot was sufficiently compelling to warrant the continued development of the model   a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n       28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   for use in aboriginal communities, since literacy levels had been raised by a significant amount, with significant impacts on the lives of the individuals involved, their families and the whole community. moreover, this had been achieved in a community where many previous efforts had failed. on this basis, the naalsc decided to undertake two more pilots in the same region in western nsw in 2013, both to refine the model further, but also to test whether upscaling it produces a more substantial improvement in overall literacy levels. conclusion the success of the pilot owes most to the extraordinary courage and perseverance of the participants, the facilitators and their families. it is appropriate, then, to end this paper with two local voices. first, one of the students who captured much of what this article has tried to convey in a powerful testimony on the impact of the campaign:   it’s good, because when i was, like, ‘using’ (indicated injecting into forearm), i sort of lost it, you know, i forgot how to read and spell things you know. then i came and done this here. and now i build a little bit up, and refreshing my memory – and i feel good about myself. instead of doing rehab and doing it that way, my family bought me to my other family, and they looked after me and got me onto this. i just feel good about it. i’d do the training to be the facilitator, just to keep it here. to encourage more to come along. ‘cos i know there’s people out there that really need it. and it can make a difference ... even in the community too. it can build self-esteem up.   and, finally, on the question as to whether the campaign should continue, one of the local facilitators put it like this: and this is the best thing that ever could have happened for this little town ... you know, don’t stop at one town. let’s keep going. let’s keep it rolling on.… you’ve got to spread it along, spread the word, take it to other communities, and keep it alive. keep it alive. a n a b o r i g i n a l l i t e r a c y c a m p a i g n   boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan, and leblanch 29   references abadzi, h (1994) what we know 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education, unesco, paris. wagner, da (2011) what happened to literacy? historical and conceptual perspectives on literacy in unesco, international journal of educational development, vol 31, no 3, pp 319-323.                                                                                                                 i an earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference in havana in february 2013, entitled pedagogia 2013. we acknowledge the useful suggestions for revision from our two anonymous reviewers and the journal editors. ii save the children is an australian non-government children services provider literacy and numeracy studies 2015. © 2015 sonja beeli-zimmermann. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and numeracy studies (lns) 2015, 23(1), 4423, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v23i1.4423 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 3 n o 1 2 0 1 5 20 from teaching literacy to teaching numeracy: how numeracy teacher’s previous experiences shape their teaching beliefs sonja beeli-zimmermann abstract beliefs guide teachers’ actions in the classroom and thereby influence what students learn. while this insight has led to numerous studies, particularly in the area of mathematical beliefs, it has been neglected in the growing field of numeracy teaching and learning within adult education. this exploratory study presents five illustrative cases of swiss adult education teachers and traces their experiences, both as students and teachers. based on data mainly collected in semi-structured interviews, the author argues that this study supports existing evidence from mathematical belief research in other sectors of education, pointing to the relevance of practice-based experiences for the change of beliefs. introduction both students’ and teachers’ beliefs play a central role in what happens in the classroom: they are not only relevant for an individual’s learning, but equally influential in the implementation (or lack thereof) of curricular reforms (handal & herrington 2003). it is therefore not surprising that ‘beliefs now constitute “a no longer hidden variable” in research on … teaching and learning’ (goldin, rösken & törner 2009:14). this is particularly true in the field of mathematics education. but while mathematical belief research in the context of school has received considerable attention in the past decades, particularly at the level of primary school (forgasz & leder 2008), it has almost gone unnoticed in the field of adult education: neither the seminal work on mathematical beliefs (leder, pehkonen & https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 21 törner 2002a) nor the most recent discussion on the current state of mathematical belief research (hannula, portaankorva-koivisto, laine & näveri 2012) explicitly discuss its relevance nor implications in adult education. two exceptions are stone (2009) who examined how the institutional context affects numeracy teachers’ beliefs and classroom practice, and henningsen and wedege (2003) who looked at attitudes among mathematics teachers in adult education. furthermore, a number of studies exist which address either general beliefs of adult education teachers (pratt 1992; dirkx & spurgin 1992) or specific beliefs such as teaching principles of numeracy teachers (swain & swan 2009). however, as schlöglmann (2007) has pointed out, the study of adults learning mathematics is a rapidly growing field – a field within which numeracy holds a special place, not least of all because low numeracy skills are associated with a number of negative issues such as low-skilled occupation and therefore also lower earnings (oecd 2013). this article presents five cases from a specific and growing group of teachers in switzerland: teachers of adult education who teach numeracy or address mathematical issues in their literacy classes. more specifically, it looks at select moments in the teachers’ lives and how the experiences in these moments might have influenced their acquisition and change of beliefs. similar approaches, namely looking at teachers’ own experiences and relating them to the individuals’ beliefs have previously been used in a number of cases (kaasila, hannula, laine & pehkonen 2006, millsaps 2000, perkkilä 2003, taylor 2003). mathematical belief research while there is no accepted definition of beliefs, there is agreement that beliefs include both cognitive and affective elements, are structured, function as filters, and impact on an individual’s actions (pajares 1992, grigutsch, raatz & törner 1998, furinghetti & pehkonen 2002, goldin, rösken & törner 2009). teachers’ beliefs are therefore instrumental to their practice and students’ learning. this insight has been reflected in an increased research interest in teacher’s cognition since the 1970s (calderhead 1996). beliefs can be held in relation to a variety of issues, ranging from general beliefs about pedagogy and learning to beliefs about specific subjects or areas within a subject. with respect to beliefs about mathematics, there is broad agreement that there is not one right (and several wrong) t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 22 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s view(s) of mathematics, rather philosophers of mathematics have described several ways of seeing the field (leder, pehkonen & törner 2002b). many studies have been conducted on the basis of what the philosopher of mathematics education ernest (1989) identifies as three views of mathematics, namely: (i) an instrumentalist view that sees mathematics as a useful but unrelated collection of facts, rules and skills; (ii) a problem-solving view which considers mathematics to be a dynamic and continually changing and expanding field of human inquiry; and (iii) a platonist view which describes ‘mathematics as a static but unified body of knowledge, consisting of interconnecting structures and truths’ (p 21). ernest (1989) further postulates that mathematical beliefs impact on the teaching of mathematics, more specifically that different teacher roles, such as that that of an instructor, facilitator or explainer, are likely to correspond to these contrasting views of mathematics. however, many studies examining the relationship between mathematical beliefs and teaching merely differentiate between what is generally called a modern constructivist orientation to teaching and a traditional transmission orientation (raymond 1997, and more recently barkatsas & malone 2005). while there are studies which describe further types, for example askew and his colleagues (askew, rhodes, brown, william & johnson 1997) who identified an additional view of teaching mathematics that they called connectionist, it seems that the distinction ‘between the transmission orientation and the remaining two constructivist orientations’ (swan 2006:61) is more pronounced than the distinction between the two constructivist orientations. one area of belief research which is still considered to be ‘open’ (pehkonen 2008:1) is that of changes in teachers’ beliefs. beliefs are formed and changed through an individual’s social environment; they can therefore be considered to be a product of socialisation. more specifically, it is often argued that future teachers enter teacher education with beliefs which are shaped by their own educational experiences and that the latter are often more influential than what teachers have learned in their teacher training courses (forgasz & leder 2008). it is also worth noting that many studies, particularly those examining beliefs of pre-service or novice teachers, are looking at particularly homogenous groups of people: their participants not only had very ‘accordant experiences of school and t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 23 teaching and therefore enter teacher education with largely similar beliefs’ (blömeke, müller, felbrich & kaiser 2008:323, translation by the author); they have also undergone the same teacher education program which further contributes to their homogeneity. teacher education holds an important place in belief research and many studies (sometimes implicitly) conclude that this phase of a teacher’s life has the potential to play a key role when it comes to changing beliefs. however, beliefs are generally considered to be hard to change, as they have not only been formed over a long period of time (andrews & hatch 1999), but are also part of a larger system of beliefs about the world (pajares 1992). it is therefore not surprising that many authors conclude that ‘teachers, in spite of courses and workshops, are most likely to teach math just as they were taught’ (ball 1988:2, similarly handal 2003). taylor who examined the relationship between the school lives of adult educators and their beliefs about teaching adults found ‘little discrepancy from the participants’ perception of their past school lives and their present beliefs about teaching adults’ (2003:75). studies showing that change does happen often refer to practical experiences – ideally combined with opportunities for reflection which have a positive effect on belief change (van zoest, jones & thornton 1994, ambrose 2004). however, overall empirical results with regard to the change of beliefs are inconclusive, something which might also be due to the absence of long term studies in belief research. from a methodological perspective, belief research covers a wide variety of methods and uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches with interviews and questionnaires as the most prominent instruments for collecting data. however, there are also studies using videotaped classroom sessions, teachers’ diaries, planning instruments and concept maps (calderhead 1996). forgasz and leder (2008) noted that while small scale qualitative studies dominate research on primary teachers and large scale quantitative studies using data collected with questionnaires and surveys tend to remain at the descriptive level. moreover, speer (2005) asserts that the use of specific research methods has an impact on the much debated question of the relationship between teachers’ professed and enacted beliefs, namely that that any ‘perceived discrepancy […] may actually be an artefact of the methods used to collect and analyse relevant data’ (speer 2005:361). t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 24 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s one challenging aspect of belief research is the fact that beliefs entail subconscious elements which are not easily revealed (pehkonen & törner 2004). various methods such as the use of metaphors (berger 1999, oksanen & hannula 2012), drawings (bulmer & rolka 2005, rolka & halverscheid 2011) and photographs (taylor 2002) have been employed in order to overcome this challenge. likewise, data and method triangulation (pehkonen & törner 2004, swan 2006) have been found to be effective approaches to belief research. in short, the basis of this study are the three views of mathematics as they are described by ernest (1989) and refers to views of teaching as being either constructivist or traditionalist oriented. it builds on the assumption that beliefs are shaped by an individual’s previous experiences – both as students and teachers. it furthermore uses both qualitative and quantitative data based on research instruments developed and previously used by rolka and halverscheid (2011) and swan (2006). in line with these research instruments it also adopts these authors’ understanding of beliefs as world views and uses these terms interchangeably. the research project context while numeracy classes for adults are an integral element of adult education in many countries, this is not (yet) the case in switzerland. dedicated numeracy classes for adults are few and far between. however, an increasing need to teach not only literacy to people with low qualifications has led to the development of a targeted training in numeracy teaching in german speaking switzerland. the fourth of these training courses has taken place in the winter of 2013/2014 and some 45 individuals have been trained as numeracy teachers since its inception in 2010. the course which consists of eight full days of training combined with a practical project is spread over six months and is aimed at people with a basic degree in adult education 1 who are planning to teach numeracy or include numerical aspects in their language classes. a majority of the participants are people who are teaching german as a second language and are therefore often working with migrants or individuals with low levels of education. discussing issues with mathematical elements, such as shopping and reading time tables – or more generally managing money and time – t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 25 is an integral part of their classes, as the ultimate aim of their courses is the students’ integration into the swiss workforce. the mathematical content they are teaching is therefore often referred to as ‘everyday mathematics’. complementary to this new training course for adult education teachers, an informal network called ‘network for everyday mathematics’ has been founded (from now on referred to as the network) 2 . it brings together most of the former course participants as well as other individuals interested in this field. through this network regular events are organised and an online platform offers the opportunity to exchange ideas, material and discuss specific questions. all five cases reported in this article reflect this rapidly developing context as all of them have been teaching german as a second language for a while before moving into teaching ‘everyday mathematics’. furthermore, all of the participants have not only undergone the first or second of the new numeracy training programmes, but are also members of the network. in order to reflect the terminology as it is used in the swiss context, the terms ‘everyday mathematics’ and ‘numeracy’ will be used synonymously throughout this article. while acknowledging that this use obliterates some conceptual differences of the terms (see condelli 2006), it seems more important and appropriate to stress their difference from mathematics (o’donoghue 2002), rather than the finer distinctions between numeracy and everyday mathematics. therefore, whenever the former terms are used, they refer to the specific working contexts as experienced by the study participants, whereas the term ‘mathematics’ refers to the more general domain of knowledge. methodology and data the overall approach of this study is an exploratory one and it is based mainly on qualitative methods, but also using data and method triangulation. triangulation is understood – and therefore pursued – not only in the sense of its primary scientific purpose of validating specific findings and identifying “‘three sides’ by which to approach the world’(richardson & st pierre 2005:963); it is also used because different perspectives do offer an opportunity for different insights as there are certain blind spots for each method. data collected include a picture drawn by the participants, an approach based on the work by rolka and halverscheid (2011); two t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 26 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s semi-structured interviews; and a short survey taken from an instrument developed by swan (2006).the task given to the participants that led to their production of the picture was sent to the participants and they created it in advance of the first interview. it was then used as cue for the first interview (see annex 1 for details). the two interviews were based not only on the picture, but involved specific questions related to teaching adults. furthermore, the interviews retraced the participants’ own educational biography and tried to elicit their memories and teaching beliefs by letting them comment on video sequences from select mathematics classes (unterrichtsvideos 2008ff). swan’s questionnaire, which the participants completed on paper at the end of the second interview in the presence of the author, mainly explores teaching beliefs and is based on askew’s and his colleagues’ (1997) tripartite view of teaching (see annex 2 for the part also used in this study). in addition, the author participated in some meetings of the network to inform her understanding of the wider context of the participants’ teaching. both the pictures and the interview transcripts were analysed with the method of qualitative content analysis as described by mayring (2000, 2013). this method allows for a systematic analysis of data as it is based on explicit rules for coding. codes can be derived in a deductive or inductive manner, taking into account previously generated knowledge and theories as well as being open to issues arising from the material. more specifically, the pictures were analysed with a list of criteria developed by rolka and halverscheid (2011). they described visual key characteristics for each of ernest’s views which allow for a rough classification of visual data. for example, according to these criteria, pictures showing an instrumentalist view of mathematics need to display non-coherent sequences and illustrate the usefulness or application of mathematics in everyday life (see annex 3 for a brief presentation of their complete coding scheme and beeli-zimmermann 2014 for a detailed analysis of all pictures created by the participants of this study). most of the data were collected in the summer of 2012. the focus of the data used for this article is on the material generated through the-semi structured interviews, particularly the second interview. a key question in this interview was ‘how did you arrive at the position you are in today?’ where participants were asked to recount their own education with a table summarising the main steps of the educational system in switzerland as aide memoire. 3 t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 27 furthermore any references to their previous experiences, as they were made throughout the interviews, were included in the reconstruction of their educational biography. all statements relating to their personal experiences were either coded with the code called ‘memories as student’ or the one called ‘memories as teacher’. statements which included phrases such as ‘my memory from this time …’, ‘when i was …’ or ‘i know from my students …’ were typically allocated to one of these two codes. both of these codes contain a number of sub-codes, such as ‘positive experience’, ‘negative experience’ or ‘specific areas of mathematics’ which help to analyse the material in more detail. participants all of the participants were recruited through the network and volunteered to participate in the study. while in total eight people took part, only those five individuals who teach german as a second language and participated in the numeracy training are presented in this paper. at the time of the study, they were between 45 and 57 years old; three of them were male, two female. as there is no initial standard training in adult education in switzerland, all of them became adult education teachers only after being trained and working in other fields. as will be shown, teaching numeracy has not been a deliberate choice of career for any of them, but rather something that happened incidentally. more detailed portraits of the participants, including their arrival at teaching numeracy, are presented in the next section. results the results will be described in three parts: first the five cases will be presented in more detail in form of short portraits (all names changed by the author).these portraits are based on the recount of the participants’ educational biography. afterwards two key aspects of their biographies are illustrated with more details, namely their own school experiences and their experiences teaching adults. in the third section, their mathematical and teaching beliefs are presented in more detail including references to the visual and quantitative data in order to arrive at a wholistic picture. all quotes are translated from german by the author and an effort was made to keep the tone of the portraits as close to the participants’ as possible, by keeping the original t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 28 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s vocabulary and phrases whenever possible and retaining the colloquial tone of unfinished sentences. participant portraits lucy’s (57 years old) first educational qualification was as a commercial clerk. after working in this field, she owned her own company dealing with computers before studying french and english to become a translator. she then attended jazz school before moving into adult education where she is now mainly teaching german as a second language for beginners. it is in this context that she also teaches numeracy. lucy considers numeracy to be ‘applied mathematics … it is only about things that one can use’. this fits with what she considers to be her main task when teaching, namely to help them [her students] with their social and occupational integration in switzerland […] and certain things such as managing time or money have to do with mathematics and are part of this. when teaching she thinks it is important for students to understand this usefulness because ‘it needs to generate a motivation for them to learn.’ lucy is very responsive to her students’ needs and uses individualised methods which challenge the students, but are neither too difficult nor too easy. ‘i never, never teach the same way twice … i can’t do it twice, identically, because it has to emerge from the dialogue with the people’. her own school experiences were – as far as she remembers – mainly positive. with regard to mathematics, she says, ‘in high school i started floundering pretty soon … but it didn’t worry me, because i knew i could give up mathematics’. a career consultant once told her parents that her ability for abstract thinking was limited and so she said ‘in the second year i thought, well my abstract thinking is limited … so this is the end of it. without stressing about it’. she enjoys solving puzzles and quizzes with relish, because it [mathematics] is interesting, like a crossword, it is a brainteaser and i enjoy doing it and where it is beyond me, it is no longer stressful, as i don’t have to be able to do it anymore. what lucy likes about mathematics is its regularity and symmetry: ‘mathematics is an exact science, it’s always the same … this regularity and structure, … symmetry is mathematics’. daniel (53 years old) is a trained chemical technician who worked in the industry for more than a decade before he travelled t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 29 around france and spain as a manual worker. after returning to switzerland he trained as a forest engineer and then worked outdoors with various groups of people such as youth or former drug addicts. he is currently employed in the social services department of a large city where he works with unemployed people. because mathematical qualifications are increasingly more relevant for their employability, daniel is also teaching numeracy. while working outdoors he developed the conviction that ‘onsite education can be very efficient. you have the material, you can show it, try it out’. this is also his approach to teaching numeracy. he goes to his students’ workplace and: ‘i like to take something from the shelf, [and ask] how much volume contains this tin, what is in it, … and then they ask and some themes emerge’. for him, the students’ questions and interests are key: ‘the aim is to find out what their questions are, what they are interested in … material is secondary, it is about getting their attention, their interest’. he therefore sees his role to be that of an adviser and a door opener. daniel’s attitude towards mathematics is very ambivalent: he really likes some aspects such as its application in chemical and physical contexts – the way he also experienced it during his apprenticeship – or the beauty of mathematical regularities found in nature. but he strongly dislikes the social filtering aspect that mathematics can have, particularly in school: ‘either you can do it – or not. and you are stupid, if you can’t do it [school is] really oriented towards errors, there is nothing appreciative in it’. he experienced these two positions during his own school time, about which he says: i had good experiences in primary school […] in secondary school it all went downhill rapidly […] and then this apprenticeship, without it i would now probably also be somewhere in a programme for the integration of unemployed, but on the other side, as a participant. kathrin (52 years old) has been educated and worked briefly as a primary school teacher. afterwards she took a year off to ‘do fun things which have nothing to do with maths, well, maybe. as i know today, everything has to do with maths!’. she then trained and worked as a speech therapist before moving into adult education. she currently works as adult education teacher as well as a speech therapist. while working in adult education, numeracy became t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 30 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s increasingly important ‘and then i thought, oh well, why don’t you complete this training [for numeracy teachers].’ for kathrin, both language and mathematics ‘are nothing else but action ... everyday maths, maths in the environment, always related to reality … it’s not about stacking numbers, it’s about finding solutions’. she sees mathematics as being ‘limitless and touching everything … everything is connected and somehow saturated [with maths]’. she thinks mathematics has something playful and at school she liked the comfort and feeling of achievement that routine tasks provided – even though in her secondary school she also experienced the limits of her preferred approach of ‘listening to the teacher and following the recipe’. still, her own school experiences were very positive, she was always a good student and well-liked by both teachers and peers as she often helped them with their homework (for example constructing their geometry tasks in their exercise books in the morning before class). kathrin’s view of mathematics was also shaped by her son’s learning history as well as a colleague who, as a remedial teacher ‘loved maths and could create magic or the paradise with it’. when teaching numeracy to adults, it is of utmost importance to her to listen very carefully and ‘to be very attentive at the beginning, to find out subtle differences [between the students’ abilities] and who can do what’. she wants to know ‘where the shoe pinches’ in order to afterwards set adequate tasks. paul (43 years old) is a self-employed public relations and communication consultant, and also works as an adult education teacher as well as a trainer of adult education teachers. he has started teaching numeracy, because it was ‘a meaningful expansion’ of his other teaching activities in reading and writing. he sees mathematics primarily from an instrumental perspective – doing maths in everyday life has to be quick, one has to have certain automatisms and techniques in order to be able to decide on the spot. it is useless if i don’t know now what this polo shirt costs if it is reduced by 30%. while he is grateful that he can master maths and use it, he would not be sad if as of tomorrow it would no longer exist. as a linguist he feels he has ‘a relatively high affinity for maths’, and through starting to teach numeracy he has also become more interested in mathematical questions again. while language has t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 31 grown and developed naturally, he considers maths to be more artificial, as it is shaped by conventions and specific decisions taken at various points in time i don’t think it [maths] is something amazing. because it didn’t grow organically. there was always, somewhere, something was set down. agreements. and such agreements are relatively rare in language. paul himself was always a very good student, in all subjects, but in high school ‘maths moved further away with every semester and i became worse at it – with two exceptions, probability and sequences and series’. overall, however, his school experiences did not leave him ‘a traumatised type’. in the classroom he sees his role to be ‘a guide, a signpost through the three worlds of situations, concepts and numbers where i can intervene in a supportive manner and provide materials’. he aims at imparting the dramaturgy of problems, where [students should start by] orienting themselves within the situation, the task, separating the important from the unimportant, identify what is asked of them, what they need and then, in the last 10%, they calculate. david (45 years old)originally trained as a commercial clerk in a bank from where he moved on to work with computers. when he realised that working with people was very important to him, he studied for four years to become a social worker. after working in this field for some years, he felt the need for change and moved into adult education. he started teaching numeracy ‘because they needed someone who wanted to teach it.’ david is a reflective and intellectual person who finds mathematics fascinating and interesting. for him, ‘maths is like a language [with which] you can create order in chaos … you can explain certain things or find new dimensions in it and new understanding’. he is aware of his own limitations when it comes to understanding some aspects of mathematics, but also of human’s limitations when creating it. he says that, ‘there are two sides to mathematics: one is mathematics like it is taught at school, the concept and then the hidden application’. when teaching he thinks it is very important to convey that mathematics is fun and to start from where the learners are. mathematics should not stand at the centre, but solving problems should be the aim. david sees his tasks in the classroom to ‘give t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 32 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s inputs and accompany’ students and it is important to him to be present and responsive, ‘to discover it together [with the students], to go on a journey together’. in order to learn mathematics successfully, he thinks students should be ‘open, also in maths where one is really moulded. i mean, the adults already shut down when they only hear the word’. with regard to his own schooling, david’s early years were somewhat problematic: he was sent to a special school (mostly due to behavioural problems), but remembers a moment some years later when ‘it clicked somewhere and i was weeks ahead […] the penny dropped and i changed to the higher level’. during his apprenticeship ‘everything with maths was always easy, it was boring […] i never studied and finished with 5.1 [out of 6]’. from these short portraits a number of common experiences and shared characteristics can be identified:  overall the participants were good students and enjoyed school, including mathematics. however with the exception of david all experienced a time in their school career (usually in secondary school), when mathematics became more abstract and doing it was beyond their capacities.  for all the participants, teaching numeracy was an addition to or extension of their language teaching activities. it was therefore not an intentional career move, but rather an extension of their previous activities – ‘an extension i find that made a lot of sense’ (paul).  with respect to teaching beliefs, all participants highly value individualised approaches to teaching and stress the importance of starting from their students’ needs. they furthermore emphasise problem-solving as an important element of their numeracy classes. in the next section, two specific aspects of the participants’ experiences will be described in more detail. they include the participants’ own experiences in school as well as their previous teaching experiences. both of these aspects relate to the three identified characteristics and are considered to be crucial for the development and change of their beliefs. specific biographical aspects while the participant’s own school experiences did not leave any of them a traumatised person, all of them describe their own t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 33 primary school experiences as what can be called traditional: teachercentred classes, focused on routines, with little activities from the students themselves and somewhat boring. this assessment is also reflected in comments the participants made about one of the video sequences which showed first grade children sitting on the floor and adding up points from a game that was presented as a mathematical activity: ‘my school was completely different’ (lucy) or: ‘unfortunately i do not have such memories’ (daniel). more specifically, paul says: my memory of this time includes basic arithmetic at high speed. it had to be quick for me, time was important, already then […] for six years i was the best student in the class. and kathrin makes a direct link between these experiences and her beliefs: they [routines at school] influenced my belief that practising makes sense. certain routines are not bad […] the sense of achievement, of i know how to do it, i can apply it. for example elementary arithmetic, we practiced that a lot in primary school, with a strict teacher. and also today i’m still good at mental arithmetic. similarly, lucy refers back to her own school experiences in secondary school, when she talks about her teaching: i like doing mathematics and where it is beyond my comprehension, it can be stressful. it is of course no longer stressful, because i don’t have to do it anymore, but it was a bit stressful once […] and i can imagine that my participants, that they are stressed. they arrive at a point and can’t go further […] and that as a course leader it is important that you are aware that every person has his/her individual boundaries. lucy’s statement also points to the second aspect which is relevant for the participants’ beliefs, namely their previous teaching experiences in adult education: when teaching adults, a lot is already set. set by experiences, or bad experiences. there are only some wormholes which are open and provide access. new access. for me it is really about identifying these wormholes […] but the walls are set and breaking them down with a sledgehammer does probably more damage than good. (daniel) or: t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s this is the start where children come in touch with mathematics. and if this goes wrong, then it’s over. then they are conditioned and that’s it […] and that’s what i have today [people with] no interest in mathematics, who couldn’t care less. (david) other phrases such as ‘i know from my target audience that …’ (lucy) or ‘i noticed in previous classes that …’ (daniel) indicate that the participants’ previous experiences in teaching adults have become an integral part of their cognitive system. summing up these aspects, it can be said that the participants themselves experienced a traditional approach to teaching mathematics during their time as learners in primary school. their experiences in secondary school were more mixed with clearly negative aspects such as the abstractness of mathematics and its irrelevance to everyday life becoming more acutely felt. furthermore, their previous experiences of working with adults show how they perceive adult students as individuals who are very much shaped by their own previous school experiences and who therefore constitute a very specific target audience which clearly differs from school children and accordingly need to be taught differently. it is interesting to note that while the participants largely view their own school experiences positively, they seem to stress that most of their students come with negative experiences from their time at school, particularly with respect to mathematics. mathematical and teaching beliefs while the description of the participants’ teaching beliefs is mainly derived from their interview statements, their mathematical beliefs are largely derived from the visual and survey data. all participants were asked to present their views of mathematics in the form of a picture which was also discussed in the interviews. both visual and verbal data indicate that the participants’ dominant mathematical view is that of the problem solving perspective, as they contain evidence for both autonomous mathematical activities and the development of mathematics (two of the characteristics described by rolka and halverscheid 2011). however, the two characteristics for the instrumentalist perspective are also represented to a considerable extent, namely in the form of non-coherent sequences and conceptions of the usefulness and application of mathematics in everyday life. t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 35 kathrin’s picture is presented as example in figure 1 below. it shows the problem solving perspective, for example, in the form of the graphs and maps, and the instrumentalist through specific items such as the receipt and the different formulae which are not connected. as kathrin’s picture shares many characteristics (particularly its collage form and use of artefacts) with the other pictures, it can be considered to be somewhat representative for all the images created by the participants of this study (for a full discussion of all images see beeli-zimmermann 2014). it also needs to be mentioned that when talking about the picture, it became quickly clear that also for these participants mathematics is different from and more than numeracy: [when working on it] my training as numeracy teacher interfered, because it is the most recent, but then i always thought, no, it is not only every day mathematics, she [the author] wants to know something about maths. (kathrin) however, it is equally evident, that at least for some, the two are almost identical: ‘for me mathematics is primarily everyday mathematics’ (paul). figure 1: kathrin’s picture of mathematics t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s more broadly speaking, therefore, a dynamic view of mathematics, which is characterised by process and application (grigutsch and törner 1998) can be identified for all participants. ernest’s (1989) platonist view is almost completely absent. however, the participants’ pictures also express a number of aspects of mathematics which cannot easily be reconciled with ernest’s (1989) perspectives, namely specific characteristics of mathematics, such as its aesthetic, its profoundness (which kathrin chose to represented by the blue colour she used in the background), its relationship with language or the participant’s emotional relationship with mathematics. issues such as these complement the dynamic view descrived by ernest and reflected in the participants’ pictures and statements and indicate that indeed mathematical beliefs go beyond purely cognitive aspects. when looking at the participants’ teaching beliefs, their clear preferences for constructivist approaches are noteworthy. this is for example reflected in how they see their role as teacher, which they consider to be that of ‘a coach, an opener’ (daniel), ‘a listener, i listen to where the shoe pinches’ (kathrin) or ‘a guide or signpost’ (paul). furthermore they are all very supportive of individualised approaches and stress the importance of starting from the students’ perspective: ‘i very much like to work on an individualised basis and that is simply necessary, because otherwise half of them are bored’ (lucy). or: ‘the participants are my clients, and to meet them where they are [is my task]’ (david). other indicators for their constructivist views are the fact that they hardly use textbooks and existing material but generally develop new materials or use materials that are available in the teaching situation. it is also worth noting that most of the participants stress that teaching everyday mathematics is different from teaching mathematics and teaching adults is different from teaching children: it is not a school context, because children all know the same, more or less. in 5 th grade you know what they already had and what is new […] but these people they have different levels of german, they might have had none or nine years of school, maybe even some vocational training […] they have nothing in common except that they are in the same class. (lucy) t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 37 additionally, ‘adults are situated in very different life contexts. when working with adults, money is very quickly an issue, it is a big and very central theme for everyday mathematics’ (kathrin). the participants’ constructivist preferences as identified in the verbal data, are also reflected in their quantitative answers, where they show a clear preference for the discovery approach as it is described by swan (2006). furthermore, the participants differ in significant ways from swan’s original population (teachers from further education colleges in england) in this and one other dimension, namely transmission (see table 1 below). the significance of the differences was established using the mann-whitney u-test (transmission: u=26, p<.001 and discovery: u=285, p<.01; detailed results of the survey will be reported elsewhere, beeli-zimmermann under review). as the two populations can otherwise be considered to be quite alike with respect to their work context and diverse educational backgrounds, these differences are noteworthy. table 1: comparison of swan’s (2006) data and the participants of this study dimension swan (2006) (n = 64) this study (n = 5) mean weighting sd mean weighting sd transmission 40.4 17.3 16 6.62 discovery 30.8 10.0 46.7 8.07 connectionist 28.8 12.1 37.3 10.7 in short, the participants’ beliefs show characteristics of both the instrumental and problem solving view of mathematics and they clearly prefer constructivist approaches to teaching. they furthermore stress that they are teaching everyday mathematics and that this is different from teaching mathematics. these results will now be integrated and discussed in the next section. discussion in line with taylor’s observation that ‘the past shapes the present’ (taylor 2003:75), it is also possible to identify some similarities between the personal experiences and the mathematical t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s beliefs of this group of teachers. more specifically, the following links can be made:  the participants’ dynamic view of mathematics stressing process and application can on one hand be related to their own school time where they often experienced a focus on an instrumental approach to mathematics, namely practising skills and routine. on the other hand, their work context, which is clearly focused on providing students with skills relevant for their everyday life, can explain the importance of applications or more specifically problem solving skills.  the participants’ positive experiences at primary school are reflected in their fundamentally positive attitude towards mathematics (with the exception of daniel who says of himself that he is very ambivalent towards mathematics). many of the participants enjoy problem solving and puzzles and consider it important to also enable their students (who often come with negative experiences to their classes) to have these positive experiences and the associated feeling of success.  when looking at the participants’ more ambivalent experiences they had during secondary school it is interesting to note that to some extent this is also reflected in their mathematical beliefs. the participants see mathematics as being divided into an applied, practical part and an abstract, conceptual part. the former is what they focus on in their classes and what they consider themselves to be good at; the latter is what they consider to be mathematics and largely beyond their skills.  the clear constructivist teaching preferences seem to mainly derive from their previous experiences as adult education teachers where they have experienced the specificities of teaching adult students with previous learning histories. the participants strongly advocate individualised approaches when teaching adults which reflect the heterogeneous classes they work with. many of these findings were to be expected: skott (2009) or beswick (2013) also stress the relevance of context for beliefs and beswick (2012) also observed that teachers hold different views of mathematics as a field and as a school subject. however, there is one t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 39 aspect of the presented data which is noteworthy: in spite of their predominantly traditional own school experiences and an identified relevance of an instrumental belief of mathematics, the participants of this study express typical constructivist teaching beliefs and it seems unlikely that they teach numeracy the way they were taught mathematics (as no classroom observation was undertaken for this study this assessment remains speculative). in this respect the participants of this study also clearly differ from what taylor found, namely that his adult education teacher showed ‘little discrepancy from […] their past school lives and their present beliefs about teaching adults’ (taylor 2003:75). and while the difference between everyday mathematics and school mathematics can be considered one important element accounting for this unexpected constructivist dominance, there are two other possible explaining influences, namely their previous experience as adult education teachers and their training as numeracy teachers. in their role as adult literacy teachers, they have already acquired teaching beliefs with respect to this target audience and it is likely that they transfer this experience to the new content area they also teach, namely everyday mathematics. this factor might also explain that in spite of their otherwise heterogeneous education and experiences, the participants’ mathematical and teaching beliefs are remarkably similar. similarly, they have all undergone the same training as numeracy teachers, which constitutes therefore another possible influence in the formation and change of the participants beliefs about teaching numeracy. as the transfer of their previous teaching experiences constituted a significant part of their numeracy trainings (oral communication by the course leader), these two aspects are difficult to separate in this sample and clearly need further investigation. in spite of the limitations of this study – particularly the small sample, their homogeneity with respect to their current work context and their training as well as the lack of information on how the participants actually act in the classroom due to the absence of observed lessons – its results clearly point towards the relevance of practical experiences for the change of teachers’ beliefs and therefore support similar earlier findings (for example brosnan 1994 and clarke 1994, both cited in nisbet and warren 2000:35). however, in order to better understand the specific processes of belief formation and change, long-term studies focusing on distinct aspects for t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s example the integration of previous experiences in further training, would be needed. approaches such as patterns-of-participation as it is presented by skott (2011) seem promising in this respect, as they move away from simple belief inventories towards more integrated perspectives. skott proposes to ‘disentangle patterns in the teacher’s reengagement in other past and present practices in view of the ones that unfold at this instant’ (skott 2014:24). such a perspective not only takes interactions in the classroom into account, but also exchanges between colleagues or with other key actors of a particular context. this approach could therefore potentially also shed light on possible differences that teachers express with respect to numeracy and mathematics, as they might discuss one field with students and another in the context of some training or a meeting. differentiating beliefs according to specific areas of mathematics such as problem solving or geometry has been done before (pehkonen 2008) and it seems likely that specific aspects such as problem solving might be more important in one of them. either way, researching adult education teachers’ interactions from a more wholistic and long term perspective, particularly under close consideration of their previous teaching and training experiences, seems to be a promising approach for belief research in general and could contribute to learning more about the formation and change of beliefs. ideally it would go beyond identifying similarities between teachers’ previous experiences and their current beliefs – as it was done in this article and many other studies – and be able to describe processes or interactions explaining the (possibly causal) relationship between these similarities. endnotes 1 the field of adult education in switzerland is very heterogeneous, due to the decentralised organisation of the education system on one hand and the strong stance of vocational training on the other hand. the basic degree in adult education (called sveb 1) corresponds to 13.5 credit points (ects) in the european credit system and demands a minimum of 150 hrs of taught classes. it is aimed at people who work part time as teachers and trainers. an english summary of the swiss system for teachers and trainers in further education can be found here: http://www.alice.ch/en/ada/certificatesveb/?tx_damdownloadcenter_pi1%5bfile%5d=4851&chash=e t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 41 760b9c1498dc194f91051431916dd7d (retrieved october 3, 2014). 2 the network currently has some 112 members. more information about it is available in german at: http://www.netzwerkalltagsmathematik.ch/ (last accessed 14 sept 2014). 3 the initial idea of eliciting and identifying critical incidents during their own school time through the use of videos did not work out as intended. when seeing the videos, the participants frequently commented that their own school time was nothing like what was shown, however theywere rarely in a position to identify specific critical memories 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13596740902717424 http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/rie.75.5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02601370304828 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf03217261 t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 47 annex 1: instructions for the creation of the picture ten days before the first interview the participants received a letter asking them to create a picture with the following specifications: “imagine you were an artist and have accepted the following contract work: what is mathematics? a personal view. present your views in a pictorial, creative manner, working with materials and techniques of your choice (coloured pencils, watercolour, collage, etc.).” (translation by the author). together with this task they received an a3-format piece of paper, which they had to use for the creation and presentation of their picture and a post-paid envelope in which they could return their creation. they were asked to return the picture to the author no later than two days before the first meeting, as it was the basis for the first interview. annex 2: survey taken from original questionnaire by swan(2006) instruction for the questionnaire: ‘give each statement a percentage, so that the sum of the three percentages in each section is 100’ (swan 2006:60) compo nent statement mathematics is: mt a given body of knowledge and standard procedures a set of universal truths and rules which need to be conveyed to students md a creative subject in which the teacher should take a facilitating role, allowing students to create their own concepts and methods mc an interconnected body of ideas which the teacher and the student create together through discussion learning is: lt an individual activity based on watching, listening and imitating until fluency is attained ld an individual activity based on practical exploration and reflection lc an interpersonal activity in which students are challenged and arrive at understanding through discussion teaching is: tt structuring a linear curriculum for the students; giving verbal explanations and checking that these have been understood through practice questions; correcting misunderstandings when students fail to ‘grasp’ what is taught td assessing when a student is ready to learn; providing a stimulating environment to facilitate exploration; avoiding misunderstandings by the t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y 48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s compo nent statement careful sequencing of experiences tc a non-linear dialogue between teacher and students in which meanings and connections are explored verbally. misunderstandings are made explicit and worked on the first letter in the first column represents mathematics (m), learning (l) or teaching (t). the second letter refers to transmission (t), discovery (d) or connectionist (c) beliefs. the transmission, discovery and connectionist dimensions are calculated by the mean weightings of mt, lt, tt, respectively f md, ld, td and mc, lc, tc. annex 3: coding scheme for pictures (rolka and halverscheid 2011) view characteristic description in st r u m e n ta li st non-coherent sequences • are there several objects within the work which belong to a particular field of mathematics but do not show any relation with one another? • does the text consist of an enumeration or a classification of items rather than showing the parallels in-between? • essential: the items instead of their characteristics are considered to be important, that is, the items are more important than their meaning in a wider context facile conception of usefulness/application of mathematics in the course of life • is there a slight evidence of the importance of mathematics and its application? • is the attention drawn to the fact that applications are useful rather than in which way? • essential: the central motivation point for practicing mathematics is the convenience one can gain where the character of usefulness always comes to the fore p la to n is t display of mathematical coherence • are there any references drawn between any mathematical items in the work? • does the text show a cohesive character within the implementations? • essential: relations are identified but not necessarily self-drawn theory/history of mathematics • is the development of mathematics referred to as a determined, somewhat stable construct of knowledge? t e a c h i n g n u m e r a c y beeli-zimmermann 49 view characteristic description • are scholars who once made mathematics crucial to the work? • is there an attempt to constitute a part of mathematics as methodical? • essential: mathematics as a static entity predetermined by nature p r o b le m s o lv in g autonomous mathematical activities • does the setting of tasks offer the occasion for using mathematics actively and self-dependently? • do certain actions enclose mathematical items as well and are not mentioned without any reference? • essential: not only meta-mathematical explanations, but something inventive; an extract out of a mathematical process allowing not only to counterfeit, but also permitting independent thinking. the development of mathematics • is the development of mathematics indicated by being a process? • does the description transcend the image of mathematics being a complete and static product? • is there somebody mentioned who actually produces mathematics? • essential: dynamic of mathematics (through the author or somebody else) is described as a process literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults vol. 28, no. 1 dec 2020 © 2020 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: abraham, a. 2020. transforming practice through an understanding of socio – cultural conditions in the classroom. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 28:1, 17–29. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.7017 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | url of journal research article (peer-reviewed) transforming practice through an understanding of socio – cultural conditions in the classroom alison abraham swinburne university of technology. aabraham@swin.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.7017 article history: received 15/01/2020; revised 16/08/2020; accepted 04/10/2020; published 19/12/2020 abstract much of the debate on the teaching and learning of english and academic writing occurs largely from eurocentric or western perspectives on local contexts. this paper explores the role of the local english as a second language (esl) teacher in transforming the way english for academic purposes is taught and learnt, particularly in higher education settings in malaysia. in order to challenge western notions, esl teachers need to know their local contexts and students well enough in order to explain the complexities that arise within an education system that is continually shaped by historical and sociopolitical shifts in the country. the purpose of this paper is to inform esl and academic writing teacherresearchers that it is possible to transform practice by paying close attention to the complexities of sociocultural conditions of their context. using action research methodology, the case study presented here illuminates and exemplifies the recognition and explicit inclusion of sociocultural conditions within academic literacies in a tertiary english in a malaysian university. three narratives are critically selected via the critical incidents technique. green’s typology of operational, cultural and critical dimensions of literacy events is used to analyse how sociocultural conditions within and beyond the classroom can affect the kinds of literacy which are identified by the teacher and used to improve student engagement and performance. findings reveal the need for greater leadership support for grassroot level decisionmaking by the esl teacher and a deeper understanding of the use of mediation as a tool to maximize social interaction. english language learning, so that students can be better prepared to meet global challenges. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 17 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.7017 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.7017 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.7017 introduction much of the debate on english language teaching, particularly in the english as a second language (esl) and english for academic purposes (eap) domains is largely explored by western scholars whose views are often deemed universal (basturkmen 2012; pennycook 2004; graddol 1997). while the generation of new scholarly ideas in the english language teaching world is encouraged, such western contributions do not always resonate with asian esl teachers, who are trying to make sense of their own teaching practices within their own locale, practices have been largely shaped by their own local sociocultural and historical influences. with the onset of globalisation and the rise of the asian century (bajunid 2014; lim 2014), there is a need therefore to add and diversify these western views with locally infused narratives or stories in order to transform practice and problematise theory. i argue in this paper, that it is possible to explore the roles of the esl and eap teacher in transforming practice by paying close attention to the complexities of the sociocultural conditions that are played out in an esl and academic writing classroom within a british malaysian university. the reason why esl and eap are specifically mentioned in this paper is because those were the areas in which i was conducting action research. my students were predominantly esl learners (as it was termed in malaysia at the time because english was regarded as the nation’s second language after bahasa malaysia, the official language) and my teaching environment was within an academic and learning support unit of the university. the paper outlines the rationale for transforming practice, the contextual definition of sociocultural, the methodology employed for this research, the selection of three particular stories and the discussion which ensues based on my research question and my analytical framework. what makes this contribution unique is the idea that western theories, which are infused within a local setting and made sense of by a local malaysian indian teacher, is not something commonly addressed in the wider debates of eap or esl. literature review rationale for transforming practice as a result of globalisation, english is no longer a privileged possession of native speakers situated within the perimeters of the inner circle or normproviding countries (native speaker countries like england, usa, australia and canada). it now encompasses an outer circle (colonised nations like india, malaysia, singapore and africa) and expanding circle nations like china, korea and japan. in fact, the terms ‘inner, outer and expanding circles’ were first coined by kachru (1985:2) to explain what the different types of ‘world englishes’ were. english is now widely spoken and no longer confined to just the three concentric circles as the fluidity of people migrating between countries (graddol 1997) have changed the dynamics of how english has spread (doan 2014). this means that the ‘ownership’ of the language is shared across the globe. the role of english in outer and expanding circle countries have to now be considered from a ‘sociolinguistically realistic’ point of view, where english is being used ‘as they find it and as they will’ (kachru & nelson 2006:34). the concept of ‘native’ has also been challenged to include a more comprehensive view of what native means (kachru 1985, 1986, 2000). this includes the exclusive usage of english or immersion in it since childhood, using the language in all aspects of communication and finally the ability to read and write fluently in english. baker (2009:9) argues that: languages and their relationships to cultures and identities need to be understood as fluid, liminal and emerging in instances of communication, rather than as a priori defined categories. moreover, this raises important issues for english language teaching (elt) in asia, suggesting that elt needs to incorporate a more dynamic and fluid conception of language, culture and identity than the traditional target languagetarget culture correlation. abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 18 what the above quote implies is that the evolving nature of the english language, as a result of cultural and identity influences, forces elt teachers to rethink and reconcile with the fact that the way english or academic writing is learnt or taught over time differs greatly from the traditional textbook approach to a more functional and practical approach of teaching and learning eap. the functional approach builds towards higher forms of literacy, ultimately calling for teaching and learning to be regarded as a social practice (lea & street 1998, 2000). what this means specifically is that teachers need to be aware of complex situations within and beyond their classrooms and how the historical and sociocultural dimensions of the surrounding community affect and shape teaching and learning conditions. the local needs to be understood in relation to other locals as well, including how power relations over time affect the scenario of the whole teaching and learning experience. there is no point in using western theories to understand local settings unless it is clearly explained in relation to the local. as part of my phd study, i conducted this research within an eap and esl setting. although i used a westernbased theory: academic literacies (lea and street 1998), i infused a local understanding of the sociocultural conditions that needed to be understood within this theory so that it would make more sense to the learners and to me. park (2012) reiterates the need for nonnative teacher identities to be considered when planning frameworks for teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol). the nonnative teachers are the ones who will impart new knowledge to their respective culturally diverse student groups in their own communities. i am arguing therefore, that it is imperative for the local esl and eap teachers to add their own voices and reconceptualise their teaching practice with a framework that is culturally sensitive to their own teaching and learning environment. academic writing teachers need to think of how they could develop a wide pedagogical repertoire which takes into account the learners’ perceptions and identities about language learning so that their own teaching practice could improve. it is possible for teachers to transform esl and eap practice by paying close attention to the sociocultural aspects within and beyond the classroom. making sense of the sociocultural for this paper, the focus is on sociocultural conditions within an academic literacies (al) paradigm (lea & street 1998, 2000). the sociocultural is what makes the academic literacies perspective to teaching academic writing stand out as a social practice. without a deep understanding of the sociocultural, the knowledge and power relations will also not be fully appreciated or made sense of by the teacher. in my study i draw on an analytical framework developed by culturalhistorical activity theory (chat) as formulated by engeström (1996). engeström built on vygotsky’s (1978) theorising of social interaction as a necessary component of a child’s development. while vygotsky focused on the learning individual, engeström (1996) focuses on collective learning and proposes a diagrammatic representation of how learning and development occurs (see figure 1). the diagram is based on engeström’s argument that the unit of analysis should be the activity system, compromised of the subject from which perspective the learning is viewed, the tools that mediate the learning, the object of the learning, the rules (formal or informal custom and practice) that guide and constrain possibilities, the community of people involved in the learning and activity and finally the division of labor within the community. popova (2014) has utilised this idea of the activity system as a framework for examining what she calls the praxis of english language teaching (pelt). as i will show, the questions i asked about my own teaching in this study have been informed by popova’s pelt formulation. abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 19 figure 1. engestrom’s human activity system structure (1987, p. 78) the diagram helped me to understand that there were implicit (hidden) and explicit (readily observable) norms of the sociocultural (dalglish, evans and lawson 2011) that were operating in my classroom and i wanted to know how best to relate my knowledge and understanding of the local social conditions to what i was teaching in the classroom the students and i were the subjects. the production of academic texts was the students’ goal and mine was to ensure that they were learning well. i used cultural mediating tools around me to help me accomplish the task. however, i also had to comply within the set rules of the institution and consider the needs of the community and its impact on the learners. i became aware of my role as a teacher in relation to all who were around me and all that was happening around me at the time. analytical framework having understood the historical development of ‘sociocultural’ and what it meant in my context, i wanted an analytical framework that would pay attention to the sociocultural conditions so that i could gain greater insight into my teaching and possibilities for change. for that, i turned to bill green’s (1988) typology of literacy which covers operational, cultural and critical dimensions. green’s literacy dimensions helped me to think about literacy in a broader context, encompassing various mediating social elements that affected my students’ learning, tying in neatly with engestrom’s activity diagram. the three dimensions can be explained as follows: • the operational, referring to the structural, grammatical elements in writing, • the cultural which refers to the culture that the students bring into the classroom and the culture of the institution, and • the critical which refers to the ability of the students to engage in critical discussions and make their own evaluations and judgements about learning. sociocultural conditions within the academic literacies paradigm involves a highly complex activity system that needs to be unpicked in ways that the eap teacher can use to comprehend and make sense of her own journey, and in the process help her learners improve their english and academic writing skills. green’s literacy typology is structured in a way that can help the teacher pay attention to the different dimensions of literacy in conjunction with the sociocultural issues. one such way to do that is to ask pertinent questions that can help the teacher position herself or her role within this complex learning system. these questions are shown below under my main research question to help me understand the working dynamics of the activity system within and beyond the community of teaching and learning i was a part of. the activity system sits within the sociocultural conditions of the al paradigm and understanding the system provides valuable insight to help teachers deal with power abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 20 imbalances within the power structures of the teaching and learning organisation which teachers normally do not pay attention to. research methodology and design i employed action research as a methodology to understand the sociocultural conditions that were played out within and beyond my classroom. hien’s (2009) definition of action research speaks to the suitability of this approach in my investigation: briefly, action research is so suitable to education as it is a process of exploration in which teachers explore such things as themselves as educators, their lives or unique perspectives of their students, the structure and practices of educational systems in order to bring positive change to their schools and communities. (p. 103) in short, it allows for the exploration of complex local social and cultural systems within educational setups in which the teacher and the students are intricately involved. in fact, most action researchers acknowledge that it is through a systematic, reflective and cyclical inquiry that conditions of practice can be improved (noffke & somekh 2005; kemmis & mctaggart 1982; carr & kemmis 1984; kemmis 2006, 2007, 2010). koshy (2005) adds that action research is also based on context and participation in the classroom where emergent practice is analysed, reflected on and evaluated. although the aim of action research is to problem solve, there may not be a final outcome. this is due to action research being cyclically and dynamically fluid and somewhat unpredictable in nature (creswell 2005). each of my six action research cycles involved the following phases as depicted in the diagram below: • problem identified • reconnaissance phase • forming of action research question • action taken • data collection and analysis • further reflection figure 2. my action research cycle adapted from kemmis and mctaggart’s action research model (1982) abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 21 the problem i identified in my context was that my students had serious writing problems which were discovered after their diagnostic tests that were conducted upon entry into the foundation programme at the university i was teaching. i wanted to find out how best i could assist my learners to improve their english and academic writing skills through an understanding of sociocultural perspectives which i gleaned through my literature review within the academic literacies framework. this was the reconnaissance phase. to this end, my main action research question was: to what extent do sociocultural conditions within and beyond the classroom need to be paid attention to and how can they assist the esl teacher in improving the teaching and learning of academic writing? to break down that question further, i looked at some of the questions posed by popova (2014) and was inspired to think of smaller questions i could frame in order to understand the complexities of the socio cultural activities in my classroom. these questions are as follows: • who was the subject? was it me or the learners? or was it my colleagues? • what was the object of my writing tasks? • what tools did i use to accomplish the writing tasks/ did i make use of all that was available? was i aware of the culturally mediated tools that existed? • who made up the teaching and learning community within and beyond the activity system? what sociocultural influences affected the students’ learning and my teaching? in what way was power relations evident in the division of labour and how did it affect the teaching and learning within the activity system in my classroom? my ontological stance and general worldview are interpretive and phenomenological (heidegger 1962; husserl 1970, 1980) in nature as i looked into the lived experiences of my participants and interpreted these experiences through various cycles of critical reflection in order to make sense of this entire journey. i also examine how, through a sound action research study, i can begin to make sense of the professional, personal and political dimensions of myself as the subject within the activity system (noffke 1997). the professional dimension refers to the way in which i was operating at work, including my membership of the english language teaching profession; the political dimension refers to the way power works in an institution and how it affected my learners; and the personal dimension refers to the way in which i was researching and improving my practice and the ways in which students’ lives change through language and learning. once ethical clearance was obtained for this study, i collected my data through diary recordings, student interviews and letters from students about my teaching and their learning. occasionally, there were staff members who wanted to express their views to me voluntarily which i had not planned for but welcomed to gain a broader view of what was happening around me. i did multiple cycles of action research from 2008 2010 and systematically reflected on these cycles. in order to be rigorous about selecting the right data for analysis, i used the critical incident technique to highlight issues pertaining to the sociocultural which needed to be critically examined. this technique was popularised by flanagan (1954) who discussed it in terms of how certain behaviours of pilots that were considered critical and which affected their flying, were recorded. tripp (1993:24) defines it as follows: it refers to some event or situation which marked a significant turningpoint or change in the life of a person or an institution . . . or in some social phenomenon critical incidents are also not planned or controlled and they can highlight a problem or provide a solution to the teacher (woods 1995). in fact, in a school or classroom environment, critical incidents are what the teacher perceives or interprets to be an event that needs to be paid attention to. many small incidents happen at school every day and these events are not special in any way unless we give meaning to justify why they are critical and why they need to be highlighted (angelides 2001). abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 22 recognising the critical elements in each event helps esl teachers to identify and build on the emotional links to each incident which then balances out (tripp 1993) the otherwise mundane and technical boxticking teaching job that most esl teachers are required to do. besides the emotional investments, critical incidents also enables the teacher to examine the self, power relations, the way the institution works and become more confident with his or her findings (brookfield 2017) and develop a desire to lend a local voice to the teaching and learning debates at a wider level and seek ways to further and understand and improve practice. the data i have selected to be included in this paper are three sets of stories. i describe them as stories which are reflected on from the contemporaneous and hindsight analyses in each of the action research cycles i went through. there were many stories to choose from my diaries but from a critical incident perspective and also in view of the scope of this paper, i selected only three stories. the stories were selected bearing in mind that the al theory, green’s literacy typology and the critical incident technique could be linked together. the sociocultural condition in al ties in neatly with the cultural and critical aspects of green’s literacy, making the link between the two frameworks more robust for this action research. the critical incident technique of selecting critical events was based on choosing stories which reflected a social or cultural understanding of teaching and learning circumstances that were presented. the aim was to use these stories to help teachers understand how the sociocultural in the classroom could be used effectively to improve teaching and learning conditions. the analysis of the stories took on a structure based on mccormack’s (2004) fourstage analysis method comprising i) analyses of background information of the story, ii) the language used in the story, iii) the context and the culture of the story, and iv) unexpected elements which arose from the story (mccormack 2004). story one (personal diary entry – may 2008): ‘the poo bucket’ “miss! my aunt in a kampung used to ask her family members to fill a bucket with faeces or piss before throwing it away...since there were no toilets!”. most of the class went… ”eeowww...we just had our lunch!” the background to this story is that the business students that i was teaching were required to write an academic paragraph on water shortage that is affecting the world today. a power point presentation with some information about how water is wasted and how such wastage can contribute to serious water crises was shown. students were asked to think about their own lives and how they used water and that was when the above sentence was uttered by a chinese boy who used to live in the north of malaysia. for the purpose of discussion, i shall call this boy mark. the language used by mark is casual, with a hint of humour and a desire to share his knowledge about water usage during his childhood. he wanted the class to know a little bit about his past and his upbringing because he was comfortable with the class and with me, his teacher. mark opened up the discussions in ways i never imagined possible and therefore paved the way for me to facilitate the discussions into more meaningful expressions of writing. the opening up of discussions not only helped mark but also other esl students who found it difficult to express their thoughts verbally before trying to write them out in an academic manner. the context and culture in which mark described his story was something other students could relate to as ‘kampungs’ or traditional villages. these villages can be found throughout malaysia and the lifestyles in those circumstances are often rural and peaceful, different from the vibe of modern city life that many of the class students were accustomed to. kampung folk also often resort to simple living, conserving energy through environmentally friendly ways which was not taught in schools but rather practised because of handeddown generational customs. most of the students could therefore, try and imagine what he was abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 23 saying especially for those who have had some of their own family beginnings originate from kampong settings and for those who did not, it became fascinating for them to ask more questions about the experience. there was also laughter and easy camaraderie among the students because they were comfortable with each other. it was certainly an unexpected surprise for me to hear mark’s contribution, which was quite embarrassing and personal to share and also because he normally did not speak out as much as the other students. in an interview later with me, mark explained that his reluctance to speak in class was largely because he felt he did not have the confidence to speak well and felt there were other students who had a better command of the language and as a result, he sometimes felt shy to ask questions or share such information. however, on that day, mark felt compelled to share because his experience with using a bucket to poo during his childhood days was something that he still held vivid in his memories. his sharing of the story brought his experience to life because the discussion that ensued was engaging. language was not a barrier for him at the time because the experience was meaningful and he was living in the experience of the moment. in hindsight, the social interactions in the classroom as a result of the powerpoint presentation came alive through mark’s story. the story enabled me to understand how i could position my role to help him and other students understand what was going on and relate the story to the bigger picture of what water conversation and avoidance of water shortage was all about at a global level. the subjects were me and the learners, as a team, coconstructing and trying to find a way, to build on the task of writing up a piece on water shortage in a fun and relaxed manner. the power of how the class was moving and taking shape eventually shifted from me to the learners. the teacher was merely a facilitator and most learning decisions were made by the students. this was possible once they were able to transfer their operational literacy levels to a more critical understanding of what was required from their task (green 1988). within this activity system (engestrom 1987), learning was achieved as part of a community experience. it was about building on knowledge from the past and linking it with the present in ways that helped make sense for the learner, mark. mark and his friends eventually produced good pieces of writing after a few drafts. as an action research teacher, what i learnt from this experience was that the students could take ownership of their work, once they were comfortable with their thought processes and developed the confidence needed to work through their writing issues in a nonthreatening environment. story two (personal diary entry september 2009): my breast lump for today’s lesson, i shared about my breast lump, which was benign, discovered after i first got married. i laughed a little to ease the tension (they looked glum!) and i told them that i felt vulnerable at that time and that during the honeymoon period i wondered if my hubby would still love me if i had once breast chopped off ! they laughed...i also shared about the doctor who treated me...he was very concerned and caring...he asked all the right questions and made me feel comfortable. then they were curious and started asking questions to explain more....one boy asked...what did the breast lump look like? the background to this story was that the students from a bioscience class were required to paraphrase a difficult paragraph on bone deficiency, which was taken from their prescribed textbook. during that period, there was prominence given to the issue of bone deficiency in women by the health ministry. some advertisements on tv encouraged calcium supplements to be taken to strengthen the bones of women, in particular those who have issues during menopause. i wanted to try and help the students understand this rather dry topic and also stay relevant to what was going on in the outside world from a medical point of view and thought perhaps a personal story would help the class make sense of a difficult topic like this. abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 24 the language used was very personal and informal. it was something i felt compelled to share as i was aware that the story had an interesting quality to it that i could use as a teaching tool. it was a simple way of trying to convey the idea that medical issues, while difficult to understand, need to be tackled because for the bioscience students, it was part of their disciplinary knowledge. failure to engage in such topics can often result in students not knowing their fields well enough to produce a good piece of academic writing in their subjects. the context and culture of the classroom was such that most students were quite open to the idea of sharing personal information. what was special was that it opened up the way for a female muslim student to share about her own story about a lump. her story highlighted how she faced problems with a university doctor who appeared rather sexual in his bedside manners. i asked whether she complained about him; she said she did not because she was afraid. she was confused and did not really know what to do at the time. she did however seek a second opinion afterwards, and discovered that her lump was benign. i later found out that the doctor was no longer practising in the university. the girl’s story gave me an opportunity to also stress on the students’ rights to seek protection from any kind of abuse especially within a university setting. however, because of the hierarchical system of the institution, she was afraid to voice her fears and only did that once she felt empowered to do so. this story also made me more aware of my responsibility as a teacher who should know her students well enough in order to help them combat such difficulties because very often, students are afraid of speaking up over such sensitive issues within hierarchical settings. the unexpected sharing from this girl made me realise that social interaction is a powerful mediational tool that esl teachers need to tap into; it helps build cultural and critical levels of literacy in ways that teachers cannot always anticipate. while a teacher may be able to plan a lesson, it may not always go the way he or she anticipates as a result of mediating elements that are beyond the teacher’s control. as an action researcher, i became more aware of these mediating tools around me and resolved to find ways to utilise these tools in my teaching for subsequent cycles. this understanding is significant tor esl and eap teachers to grasp as it means that they need to be paying close attention to dimensions of sociocultural conditions that can be converted into teachable moments. the student, who has been uncritically accepting of authority, also learn that authority could be questioned and that she was entitled to seek ways to address her insecurities and worries by talking and making known her issues to get a wider perspective on what is right or wrong. class discussions paved the way for her to make meaning out of her experience and this also made the other students ask her questions and engage in further discussions which then made it easier for me to introduce the bone deficiency topic and tackle the exercises on paraphrasing before they wrote their final paragraphs. story three (diary entrymay 2010): thomas cup/badminton defeat “we lost miss...malaysia is only good for playing guli, congkak and gasing!” the background to this story was that i was very excited to test the engineering students’ understanding of what i had already taught them about three weeks – which included identifying fragments, coma splices, choppy and stringy sentences in a paragraph. they were going to be tested on these elements for their next academic writing test. as a prelude to the test, i thought i could use the magazines in the library (e.g. the hub, the expat, time, the economist.) and get them to select some good examples of these elements from the magazines but then change or ‘create’ wrong sentences based on these elements and quiz their classmates to see if they can get the correct answers. it was quite tricky but i had the confidence that they could do it as they had completed so many exercises on this topic already. they were divided into groups for this task. the mood of the class however, was sombre and i noticed the students looking bored and restless. the sombre mood was not the norm for this class; they were usually quite responsive and enthusiastic, especially abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 25 when it came to creative tasks or quizzes that challenged them. although they were doing the task, they seemed unhappy. i could not ignore the negative or sad vibe of the class and asked what was wrong. the utterance shown above was one of despondency and resignation. it was one student’s way of saying that what he and the rest had witnessed on tv the night before or read about for the past few days in relation to the national badminton team’s performance at an important badminton event, known as the thomas cup, was disgraceful and upsetting. it was clearly difficult for the students to concentrate in class as a result of the low morale felt after the national badminton team’s crushing defeat. it forced me, as a teacher, to pause from continuing my teaching objectives to concentrate on the students’ needs first which was to talk about this loss. frustrations were expressed at china’s dominance at the games, defeating even great teams like indonesia who were always known to be world badminton champs. more importantly, the students expressed that they had high expectations for the national team, which they felt let the country down. criticism was levelled at the malaysian players, for not displaying the kind of fighting spirit that china‘s players showed, in spite of the fact that malaysia had the advantage of playing on home ground. for many malaysians, winning the thomas cup (which had been done before and which threw the nation into a euphoric state of national celebration of immense proportions) is a visible sign of national pride. it signified a collaborative effort from different ethnic groups playing individually and in pairs, as part of a national sporting team to be recognised as world champions at a global level, something that malaysian sportsmen rarely achieve. during these thomas cup matches, the whole nation comes to a standstill, waiting with abated breath to see if malaysia would deliver the winning gold medal. against this backdrop, i realised the need to step back and listen to the students. i did not expect them to feel disinterested in learning, thinking that it was just sports. i was wrong as it was not just sports, but as though their whole life depended on it. there was no point in going on with my teaching plans until they had their say. it was difficult for me to suddenly change what i had planned for the day but i had to do it once i realised they were not emotionally invested in the work i had prepared for them. i could not proceed with the critical elements of learning until the cultural elements were addressed (green 1988). i had to think of using this situation as a way for them to write about this loss and use that as an exercise instead, to understand all the elements of writing they had learnt. the question i asked then was, “is malaysia able to compete at international sports levels?” that was when the sarcastic comment from the student was heard; malaysia can only play marbles, beads in wooden trays and spin tops literal translation from malay to english, for what was written in the opening line of this story. this comment was then discussed as a class and developed into an academically written paragraph, paying heed to all the elements which they were meant to understand and cover for their upcoming test. the whole experience signifies how important it is for the eap teacher to seize contextual and cultural moments to truly understand their students. in having knowledge of the local culture and contexts, the teacher must be prepared to integrate with the identities and national pastimes of the people of malaysia in order to make any progress with teaching and learning. i had to work through this ‘defeat’ of not being able to teach and their own feeling of hopelessness as a result of the badminton loss before progressing with the magazine exercise which i postponed to the next lesson. the students had to be allowed time to overcome their frustrations and talking it through with them helped them channel their thoughts and emotions in a way that helped them achieve a kind of emotional balance (tripp 1993). this emotional balance helped build towards a new kind of understanding about sociocultural conditions play out in life. in my view, it paved the way for them to think of losses that they could possibly also encounter in the real working world and in other domains of life. lessons in life such as these provide experiential learning to cope with and graciously accept defeat; it is an important additional element to be learnt besides the cognitive or structural elements from the textbook approach in most esl courses. abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 26 discussion and conclusion the three stories highlight to what extent paying attention to sociocultural conditions by teachers within their classrooms can help transform practice. the three stories confirm that social interaction is crucial for the improvement of teaching and learning within the eap domain, although the type and level of interaction varied for each situation. story one enabled the students to grasp concepts about water shortage from an operational level to a more cultural and critical level of literacy (green 1988) as a result of informal discussions between the teacher and the students. this ties in neatly with the understanding within the academic literacies paradigm that teaching and learning is a social practice. by asking the right questions, based on my readings about popova’s pelt research (2014), i was able to help the students make the link between what happened in the past and apply it within a current context. due to the fluidity and sometimes unpredictable nature of action research as explained earlier in my methodology section, i was able to maximise learning opportunities as and when they were presented. the students were able to produce a much more cohesive and structured piece of writing. story two paved the way for students to deal with personal and complex health issues and seek ways to address abuse of power, while also building on their knowledge on paraphrasing. my students were able to relate to the difficult concepts in health which were presented after discussing their personal issues in detail. it boosted their confidence and they proceeded to try difficult tasks in paraphrasing and summary writing, which was part of their bigger task in producing a complete essay. by understanding the learners’ social context, i also paved the way for students to understand power relations (abraham 2014) and how that may affect the students’ learning lives, especially when making important decisions that can affect their confidence and overall sense of wellbeing. the interaction in this situation started on a light note but developed into a more serious discussion because it affected social issues that were treading on human rights which needed to be addressed as part of the entire educational organisational system. this finding is particularly useful in that it confirms the academic literacies perspective that in order for the teaching and learning of academic writing to be effective, there should be a deep understanding of power, knowledge and sociocultural conditions as a whole. none of the conditions cannot operate on its own. the sociocultural condition cannot be understood without being linked to power and knowledge conditions. the implication here is that such an understanding can also assist the esl or eap teacher to find ways to help students move from operational to critical levels of literacy (green 1988). as illustrated in story two, the students could not operate critically until the cultural literacy level was addressed, although they were familiar with the operational elements or the rules of paraphrasing and summarising. story three depicted a scenario where i lost control of what i had planned because of unexpected mediating circumstances which needed to be tapped into in order for the lesson to make meaning to the students. for a teacher who is undertaking action research, this awareness is crucial because it can help them develop a more heightened awareness of unexpected elements that may appear in his or her teaching. the different stages within the cyclical nature of the action research can also help the teacher become more critical of her methods of teaching and find ways to constantly improve on them. for example, engestrom’s (1987) human activity system diagram could possibly assist teachers within the reconnaissance phase of action research, in understanding how the system works and what their roles are. by asking the right questions (popova 2014), teachers become more aware of what is going on around them and can plan according to what they know. the asking of right questions can also assist with the development of literacy levels (green 1988) in students. the fluid nature of culture and its close link with language (baker 2009) needs to be understood by esl or eap teachers to make it possible for them to seize interactional opportunities, available through culturally mediated tools in order to maximise learning outcomes. mediation is indeed an important element in human learning and development which teachers need to abraham literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 27 consider in their pursuit to improve practice. knowing the cultural, social and historical dimensions of the community can aid the teacher to understand his or her students better. however, this experiential knowledge as a result of paying close attention to sociocultural conditions must also be complemented with the teacher’s wide pedagogical repertoire that constantly needs to be strengthened with theoretical input. therefore, the action research i undertook would have been pointless, if it was not complemented with bill green’s literacy levels and engestrom’s human activity system theory. the 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we’re engaged in communication and in translation through other material means. – sharon katz they [art school professors] do give you a little practical material experience, which is awesome, but really what they’re doing is teaching you to be a functioning artist with the written component and the verbal component and the connections with various people in order to further your career. – beth mccubbin taken from interviews with practising visual artists, the above excerpts highlight artists‟ experiences using language to participate in w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t 44 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s canada‟s art world. visual artist sharon katz stresses the importance of engaging in ‘communication and in translation’, while visual artist beth mccubbin underscores the importance of having the ‘written component and the verbal component’. they make clear that, in canada‟s art world, being ‘knowledgeable about the materials’ or having ‘practical material experience’ is only one aspect of their work. they talk about writing artist statements, biographical statements (known as bio statements), curriculum vitaes (known as cvs), grant applications and gallery applications. they talk about how language plays a key part in their work as visual artists, and they describe canada‟s art world as a text-heavy environment. this article returns, in the findings, to look again at these experiences. to begin, let us trace research in literacy studies and institutional ethnography. past scholarship has taken a social approach to the literacy practices of professionals (barton and papen 2010, jackson and slade 2008, papen and tusting 2008), making visible how producing, using and interacting with texts are essential workplace activities. professionals use texts to accomplish organisational processes and to accomplish their organisational worlds. this text-based work is inherently dialogical. as hull (1995) puts it, to be literate is to know „when to speak, when to be quiet, when to write, when to reveal what was written, and when and whether and how to respond to texts already written‟. professionals are tasked with producing particular texts, producing knowledge (hyland 2004, tardy 2005), and producing a place for themselves in the world (dyson 2008). textbased literacy work is critical as contemporary work is becoming increasingly textualised (barton and papen 2010, griffith and smith 2014). attending to texts, recent institutional ethnographies have examined critically how work is coordinated in organisations, and how much of that work is coordinated through the medium of texts. by and large, these studies have investigated work in the public sector; including in health (rankin and campbell 2006, rankin and tate 2014, sinding 2014), education (darville 2014, kerr 2014, mccoy 1998, wright 2014), social services (janz 2014, mccoy 2014, nichols 2014), and international development (campbell 2014, eastwood 2005). starting in particular places where people work and do things together, these studies have kept people and texts in view, while investigating coordinated work that is (sometimes) out of view. these studies have traced how textual technologies (and managerial re-organising initiatives) translate the actualities of people‟s real work w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t k l o s t e r m a n n 45 into standardised, measurable and managerial forms (see griffith and smith 2014). in examining visual artists‟ work, it wasn‟t initially obvious how the art world fits in with studies about medical charts, standardised reports, educational policies and behavioural tracking charts – nor was it obvious how artists‟ experiences are connected to other institutional practices and relations. that said, beth and sharon indeed point to a text-based terrain of inquiry. similar to past research that has examined the artist statement as a work of art itself (nash and garrett-pettz 2007), beth and sharon underscore the social and institutional work that artist statements and bio statements enact. they hint that their work is coordinated through the medium of texts; permeating with and put together by extended, coordinated practices and relations. responding to their experiences, this research extends scholarship in literacy studies and in institutional ethnography by examining visual artists‟ coordinated, text-based work. the research investigates visual artists‟ literacy practices and the ways those practices mediate relations in public galleries and in canada‟s art world. the following questions guide the inquiry: (1) how do visual artists use written texts to participate in public galleries and in canada‟s art world? (2) what social and institutional purposes do written texts – artist statements and bio statements – serve? this article takes up these strands of inquiry through institutional ethnographic research involving qualitative interviews, observational field notes and textual analyses. the aim is to make visible how visual artists participate discursively in public galleries and in the art world. the study makes visible that navigating the art world doesn‟t happen in an abstract way, but through particular written utterances. artists display conceptual seriousness in their artist statements, and professional competence in their bio statements. they use writing to enact organisational processes, funneling their work out of their studios and into public galleries. they use writing to participate in, take part in shaping, play with and poke fun at the discursive conventions of the art world; an art world that is conceptual and reputable, and in which an experiential practice is harder to maintain. this research situates two particular texts – the artist statement and the bio statement – in the extended social and institutional relations of the art world. w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t 46 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s theoretical framework this study is motivated by past research that has taken a social approach to literacy practices (papen and tusting 2008), looking beyond particular texts to examine the practices involved in producing and using them. to investigate the ways visual artists use texts to participate in the art world, this study draws on social theories of literacy (barton and hamilton 1998) and on institutional ethnography (smith 2005). theories of literacy allow the researcher to attend to particular texts and to particular practices and relations, while taking an institutional ethnographic approach allows the researcher to explicate how those literacy practices and relations, which centrally involve texts, are situated within extended social and institutional relations. this article narrows in on particular texts and particular practices and relations, while tracing out the art world. taking a social view of literacy, this paper attends to visual artists‟ literacy practices and literacy relations. the study conceptualises literacy not as decontextualised skills (such as an individual‟s ability to read or write), but as practices and relations involving texts (darville 2001). the study conceptualises literacy practices as social, purposeful, and historically situated (barton and hamilton 1998). literacy practices include ways of engaging with particular texts – reading, writing and interpreting – and „ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts‟ (street 2003:79). literacy practices can be experiential, concerned with telling individual experience, or organisational/institutional, concerned with the world through concepts and categories (darville 1995, 2009). literacy practices are bound up with literacy relations; relations that involve knowing „when to speak, when to be quiet, when to write, when to reveal what was written, and when and whether and how to respond to texts already written‟ (hull 1995:19). further, literacy practices are patterned by power relationships, social structures and institutions (papen and tusting 2008). literacy is not about a final product or final display of knowledge, but about getting things done (paré 2009) and meeting social goals (artemeva and freedman 2006). from this perspective, textual analysis involves explicating how particular texts are in relation to particular others and particular social and institutional worlds. focusing on the particular, the aim of institutional ethnography is to trace how practices and relations are coordinated socially and institutionally (smith 2005). an institutional ethnographer begins by w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t k l o s t e r m a n n 47 working with people – in this case visual artists – to understand their situated experiences and knowledges. from there, the ethnographer traces how people‟s everyday experiences are coordinated with the experiences of others, with institutional texts, and with social and institutional relations that extend beyond them. institutional ethnography explores how „the very organization of the everyday is permeated with connections that extend beyond it‟ (smith 2005:40). in institutional ethnography, the notion of social relations „orients the researcher to viewing people‟s doings in particular local settings as articulated sequences of action that hook them up to what others are or have been doing elsewhere and elsewhen‟ (smith 2005:228). institutional ethnography provides a framework for attending to the ways people are in relation with near and far flung others, and to the ways people shape and are shaped by (extra-local, extended) social and institutional relations. interwoven, the two frameworks allow the researcher to explore visual artists‟ particular literacy practices and relations, while exploring critically how those practices and relations articulate to, and are shaped by, the extended social and institutional relations of canada‟s art world. this study uses the two frameworks to shed light on how visual artists use literacy to position themselves in the art world, and to „make visible to each other what counts as appropriate discursive and literate practices‟ (castanheira, crawford, dixon and green 2000). data and methods the empirical material for this article is drawn from a larger ethnographic study. as a part of the project, the researcher interviewed people situated differently in canada‟s art world. the researcher learned more about artists‟ work (and about the workings of the art world) through 20 open-ended interviews with 16 participants, including practising visual artists, public gallery curators, art critics and art professors. the researcher also drew on observational field notes (from visits to studios and public galleries), and on textual analyses (of artist statements, bio statements and other public/promotional materials). this paper focuses chiefly on interviews with eight participants (see table 1) and on textual analyses of artist statements and bio statements. the textual analysis involved explicating particular texts for traces of social organisation – for how they helped people to get things done (paré 2009) and meet social goals (artemeva and freedman 2006) – not for traces of w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t 48 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s decontextualised skills, learnt phrases or final displays of knowledge. the research was approved by carleton university‟s research ethics board. as per best practices, participants received information about the purpose of the study prior to the interviews. this information included both formal invitation letters and consent forms (that explained their options for remaining anonymous or being identified). all participants included opted both verbally and in writing to be identified by their real names, and to have their responses and data attributed to them. their work and their words are attributed to them accordingly. table 1 includes information about participants‟ cities and work experiences. table 1 study participants name city experience heather anderson ottawa, on a curator at the carleton university art gallery (ottawa, on), a public gallery. sky goodden toronto, on an art critic and founding editor of momus, an international art publication. marika jemma ottawa, on a visual artist for more than 20 years. she works primarily in the mediums of sculptural installation and video. sharon katz ottawa, on a visual artist since 1983. she works in the mediums of drawing and animation/video. fynn leitch peterborou gh, on a curator at the art gallery of peterborough (on), a public gallery. beth mccubbi n gatineau, gc a visual artist and conservator, who has worked in the arts for 25 years. she works primarily with clay, concrete and other mixed materials. mary porter toronto, on a visual artist and an instructor at ocad university. she works in the mediums of painting, drawing and photo-based stopmotion animation. jinny yu ottawa, on a visual artist and a professor at the university of ottawa, who has been showing professionally for over 20 years. she works primarily in experimental painting. w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t k l o s t e r m a n n 49 findings the discussion above explored research on literacy practices and relations, and on the ways particular practices mediate relations in contemporary work worlds. what follows is the application of that discussion to visual artists‟ work. we examine artists‟ coordinated work to enact the art world, to enact public gallery processes, and to enact particular texts. the aim is to examine how visual artists use language to suture themselves into the social and institutional relations of the art world. section one on „enacting the art world‟ starts by giving a brief overview of artists‟ coordinated work in the art world. from there, section two on „enacting public gallery processes‟ zooms in on artists‟ work to participate in public galleries, exploring how their work centrally involves language. zooming in further, section three on „enacting particular texts‟ explores artists‟ work to produce two key institutional texts artist statements and bio statements. exploring visual artists‟ particular literacy practices shines light on the ways professionals use language to enact the social and institutional worlds they are a part of. enacting the art world while there are, of course, countless ways of entering into the art world, this investigation started with the researcher interviewing practising visual artists about their work and about how written and spoken language is a part of it. their interviews made visible how the art world is a domain shaped by people interacting with texts and participating in ordinary, everyday practices and relations. the art world – the terrain where art is produced materially/discursively – involves an array of connections, discourses, practices and relations. it is coordinated through the ordinary work of various people working across sites. to give an overview, the visual artists interviewed as a part of this study described doing a variety of work as a part of canada‟s art world. more particularly, they described working to make art, to sustain their practice and to participate in the art world. when it comes to making art, they described producing art objects, developing their practice, maintaining their studios, and working with ideas and/or intuition. when it comes to participating in the art world, they described producing various written texts, applying for/securing opportunities, selling work, and both following and taking part in the art scene. when it comes to sustaining their practice, they described having material resources, including time, space and money. of w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t 50 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s course what visual artists know and say about their work conveys what they do – their material practices and their practical engagement in the social relations of the art world. and, this practical engagement centrally involves language. just as visual artists talked about the importance of text-based work, they also stressed the importance of showing in public galleries. enacting public gallery processes for visual artists, public art galleries are essential. ottawa artist jinny yu said, public galleries are „recognised by my peers as being a legitimate exhibition venue‟. as she put it, „commercial galleries want to have work that is sellable whereas public art galleries‟ main mandate is to show work that is important‟. showing in a public gallery is not only a way of participating in the art world, it is also an endorsement from the art community, a way of making money, and a way of showing markers of being a professional artist. showing in a public gallery is an achievement that appears on artists‟ cvs, and occasionally comes with the opportunity to have work reviewed. artists typically use language to get in (e.g., exhibition proposals), there is language involved in the exhibition itself (e.g., artist talks, writing on the wall), and there is language to follow as artists‟ work is sometimes taken up, written about or talked about afterwards. public galleries are a hub in the canadian art world where art and language conjoin, commingle and sometimes collide. artists approach public galleries in different ways. for example, mary porter mentioned it is essential for an artist to find ‘ways to articulate projects and the conceptual underpinnings of those projects’. sharon katz described ways that communicating about art is sometimes collaborative in the gallery sphere, while beth mccubbin somewhat distanced herself from the process. while she referred to this collaboration as ‘kind of what happens’, she said, „i don’t like that stuff. unfortunately, the essence of me is about none of that. [i’m] sort of about objects for what they are or people for what they are not about having to prove to somebody that you are something’. irrespective of artists‟ attitudes to their work in public galleries, it is clear that communicating through written and spoken discourse is crucial to participating in public gallery processes. as a part of their work in public galleries, artists connect formally and informally, attending exhibitions and artist talks, introducing themselves, applying for exhibitions, hosting studio visits, planning exhibitions, installing shows, and scheduling events. they also w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t k l o s t e r m a n n 51 participate in public galleries by interacting with and producing particular texts. enacting particular texts when applying formally to a public art gallery, artists typically send in exhibition proposals, which include digitised reproductions of their work and written texts (e.g., artist statements, bio statements, cvs). while artists are free to interpret proposal requirements broadly and to write as they see fit, there are conventional ways for writing both artist statements and bio statements. artists do not write from scratch; they often refer to the work of others to get a sense of how to write their own. they place themselves, their art work and their artist statements and bio statements in conversation with others. as the sub-sections below make visible, the artist statement is typically where artists display their conceptual seriousness, while the bio statement is where artists display their professional standing. artist statements. artists are typically required to include artist statements in their exhibition proposals. in speaking about the social purposes of the artist statement, sky gooden, an art critic who occasionally leads writing workshops for artists, described them as typically written by artists in order to ‘seek out financial patronage or support for your exhibition practice or [artist] residences‟. she mentioned the audience is typically ‘granting bodies, exhibitions, artist residencies – from time to time although very rarely – collectors’. she said, ‘if an artist is applying to a commercial gallery or artist-run gallery for the first time seeking exhibition or representation, that would be a viewing audience as well’. quoting sky again: by and large, it is an internal document. i mean, i’m being somewhat optimistic here, because this is how i would like to see it be used more than anything. in the top sort of registers of the art world, where people are working most professionally, it’s really not meant for public consumption. it’s meant to inform those who will go on to curate and write about the text at a more-polished and removed level, right? it’s meant to give small cues or work as small-change currency, aligning a professional to the artist’s intent. but of course the intent is not the only important factor in knowing the artist’s work. largely, in fact, i think it’s secondary to an experienced eyes’ and minds’ reaction and response and positioning of that work. w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t 52 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s so at times, the artist statement isn‟t meant for the viewing public, but to inform the polished and removed writing of art professionals working internally and professionally. the artist statement „provide[s] us with a context for viewing‟, „both directs the viewer's gaze and indirectly announces or affirms the artist‟s rite of passage‟ (garrett-petts and nash 2009). while most galleries don‟t specify what should or shouldn‟t be included in the artist statement, they tend to take on standardised forms. typically, the artist statement is a space for artists to demonstrate their conceptual seriousness, and to make clear connections between work and words. in reading artists‟ particular written utterances, we can learn about the art world they are a part of. with a view to considering how artists use written utterances take part in the institutional art world, let us attend to the artist statements of mary porter and beth mccubbin. mary porter‟s (n.d.) artist statement reads as follows: the longstanding interests that have shaped my art practice have been an inquiry into the built environment and landscape; an interest in utopian and dystopian imagery and narratives; a fascination with the idea of the sublime, that which we can imagine but never fully represent or understand; and how the history of painting is tied up in all these things. the impetus for my practice has always come out of looking at the built environment to glean some sense of the culture that created it. my understanding of the landscape is formed from my daily experience, from memory, and from the spaces and places that exist in our collective imagination through popular culture. like the cultural geographer denis cosgrove, i believe that “landscape is not merely the world we see, it is a construction, a composition of that world. landscape is a way of seeing the world.” beth mccubbin‟s (n.d.) artist statement reads as follows: i build works of art primarily from clay and from concrete, both alone and in combination with other mixed materials. i create single works or site specific installations comprised of multiple pieces. my installations often require the use of different materials in order to convey a particular meaning, and i very much enjoy the challenge of this. presently my sculptures are concerned with expressing figurative movements. they are carefully crafted to direct the viewer to their forms in order to find meaning. my desire is to create sculptures that not only express a recognizable action, but also instil a particular feeling or thought. w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t k l o s t e r m a n n 53 part of my artistic purpose is to produce works made from environmentally sound materials, recycled or extracted without great impact upon the earth, and using materials that are common, familiar and widely available. it is very important to me that art be approachable and accessible to all people and i feel that perhaps by making it with recognizable materials i am able to assist in this effort. both artist statements do conceptual work; both apparently address the expectation to integrate art and language and to convey a concept. there isn‟t one section devoted to the art and one section devoted to the ideas. instead, the artist statements integrate art and ideas, sharing how the work embodies a particular concept or connects to a particular idea. that said, while both artist statements talk about the work conveying a concept, they don‟t do it identically. mary positions her work as a conceptually ordained, scholarly production. much like an academic researcher, mary refers to her art as ‘an inquiry into the built environment’, discusses the ‘impetus for [her] practice’, talks about the ‘interests that have shaped [her] practice’, and closes with a quotation from a cultural geographer. the way that mary describes her practice connects well with the way public gallery curator fynn leitch described looking for work that is ‘intentional’. speaking to fynn and to the conceptual art world, mary makes explicit that her art is a purposeful inquiry with a scholarly impetus. she brackets her personal decision making process. while beth‟s artist statement does have traces of the conceptual discourse, she also includes features that are part of her own experience. she doesn‟t remove herself from the write up. for example, she highlights the actual process of making the art. she also emphasises her own personal decision making process, saying, ‘i feel that’ and ‘it is very important to me’. she connects her work to herself; to her own intentions and purpose. when asked about writing in the art world, beth shared that, ‘explaining who you are and why you’re creating the works… isn’t normally done. … it’s almost too female of a way to do things. … male [writing] is not really as much like that. their purpose is more separated. this is a commentary on the way that it is’. beth is well aware of the standardised ways of writing (yourself out of) artist statements. her choice to include her personal decisionmaking process was very much an effort to brush against the system and to resist the institutional pressures to provide an objective commentary on the so-called „way that it is’. w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t 54 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in his work on literacy, darville (1995, 2009) draws a distinction between experiential literacy that is concerned with telling individual experience, and organisational or institutional literacy that organises the world through concepts and categories. we can see experiential literacy practices used in the way that beth describes her own individual preferences, and organisational literacy practices in the way that mary conceptualises her work. interestingly, however, for an artist‟s work to be funnelled out of her studio and into the art world, it needs to eventually take on an organisational form in exhibition promotional materials. it needs to enact organisational processes. it needs to do social and institutional work to hook up with public gallery processes. for example, sky goodden pointed out, artwork eventually needs to be written about in a more polished and removed way by art professionals. similarly, heather anderson, a public gallery curator, remarked, ‘writing is valuable to an organisation, because it means that their exhibition does have a life beyond the space of the presentation‟. writing connects the artwork beyond the particular space, hooking it into other organisational processes. for artists, the artist statement is a first move in creating an organisational account of their work, entering into the institutional art world, and getting their work ‘validated by other professionals; other people who are engaged in the conversation’ (as mary porter put it). bio statements. similar to the artist statement examined above, artists are sometimes required to include bio statements in their exhibition proposals. this written document is produced by artists when they are applying for funding, applying to galleries and applying for residencies. while some opportunities ask for a cv (in lieu of the bio statement), bio statements are often included in public gallery texts, including brochures, websites and catalogues. some artists also include them on their own personal websites. while artists are, again, welcome to write as they see fit, bio statements are conventionally a space for artists to demonstrate their professional standing, and their certification/recognition by universities, art galleries, funding bodies and publications. with a view to considering how artists‟ written utterances operate in the institutional art world, let us attend to the bio statements of jinny yu and marika jemma. jinny yu‟s („general hardware,‟ n.d.) bio statement reads as follows: born in korea and based in canada, jinny yu has shown widely, including exhibitions at the iscp gallery (brooklyn), pulse new york (ny), scope new york (ny), bevilacqua la masa foundation (venice), the kyoto municipal museum of w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t k l o s t e r m a n n 55 art (kyoto), the conduit street gallery, sotheby‟s (london, uk), carleton university art gallery (ottawa), the taehwa eco art festival (ulsan city, republic of korea), the confederation centre art gallery (charlottetown), and mcmaster museum of art (hamilton). yu, who is associate professor of painting at the university of ottawa, was awarded laura ciruls painting award from ontario arts foundation in 2012 and was a finalist for the pulse prize new york 2011. in 2012 jinny‟s work was featured in the main space at the canadian painting survey exhibition 60p. she has received grants from the canada council for the arts, ontario arts council, and le conseil des arts et des lettres du quebec. jinny yu has recently returned from her solo exhibitions in seoul korea at kunstdoc art gallery and nanji art gallery of seoul museum of art. in 2012 yu‟s work was included in the ambitious 60 painters exhibition and catalogue, an overview of contemporary canadian painting. marika jemma‟s („enriched bread artists,‟ n.d.) bio statement reads as follows: born 1963 in west toronto, enduring a non-descript catholic childhood and surviving the banality of a whitewashed suburban existence in the pursuit of modest personal debt, marika left home at 17 to experience the joys of minimum wage, public transportation and a series of rooming houses in various dissociated communities in southern ontario. an independent learner, marika has explored the public libraries of most of the major cities in canada and on a rainy day in 1982, a greyhound bus deposited her in the city of vancouver. due to the works of jane rule and jack hodgkins, marika moved to vancouver island where she spent the next 11 years pursuing a series of odd-jobs, training as a carpenter and finally graduating from art school in 1991. her first vehicle was a 1969 gmc step-side, short box pick up, painted matte black with a cracked windshield. her first girlfriend drove a motorcycle. her first solo show was called “journey to the temple” at xchanges gallery, victoria, b.c. 1991. in 1993, marika drove back across the country in a 1973 toyota corolla, dropped the muffler on a raised railway bed in southern saskatchewan and ran out of gas in ottawa and has been here ever since. marika joined the enriched bread artists in 1998. w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t 56 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s in examining the bio statements of jinny and marika above we can learn more about the discursive terrain of the art world that those written utterances are embedded in. both artists use their statements to position themselves in or in relation to the art world. jinny positions herself at the centre of the organisational art world, while marika plants herself on the outskirts. jinny‟s bio statement makes her professional standing and recognition discursively explicit. while jinny‟s bio statement closes by mentioning the medium she works in, the rest of the bio is devoted to her institutional affiliations. the statement details her numerous gallery showings, her work as a professor, her grants, her awards and her publications. in contrast, marika‟s tongue-in-cheek account hardly mentions her institutional affiliations. instead of an institutional, polished account, she talks about life on the ground. she starts outside of the art world, underscoring minimum wage work, rooming houses, odd-jobs, and even a cracked window in her 1969 gmc step-side. when i asked about writing her bio statement, marika said: it’s a bit flippant, and it is because i don’t have academic credentials that i wish to – that would serve me in terms of people who would be assessing me based on my academic credentials – so assigning credibility or not assigning credibility based on, you know, where i went to school, whatever that means. so what i’m trying to say is that learning happens, and education happens, everywhere all the time. so, whether or not you actually have a degree that you paid for is not necessarily an indicator of how well-educated you are or how intelligent you are or any of those things. her „flippant‟ bio statement is a way of thumbing her nose at institutional requirements and at the demand to „have a degree that is paid for‟. she goes on to say, „i think i was a little bit reactive to [mocking] “so and so studied with so and so and the humphhh and did this and that and the other thing”‟. as opposed to jinny‟s institutional account, offering a cluster of „recognitions‟ in awards and gallery showings, marika offers an experiential, chronological account of her „haphazard path‟. in referring to her own statement as „flippant‟ and „reactive‟, marika points to (by poking fun at) standardised ways of using language and of navigating the institutional art world. again, these texts display the workings of the art world; an art world that is increasingly conceptual and in which an expressivist practice is harder to sustain. w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t k l o s t e r m a n n 57 when asked about whether or not an artist‟s identity should be communicated in her writing, sky gooden pointed out how, in her view, it can be a problem to have parts of a person‟s biography included in writing about artwork. she said: biography plays its part. ... i think that can be a problem though. it can make for lazy art. it can make for lazy viewing, and sympathies become manipulated such that we’re linking admission of, you know, difference to the production of good work, which is not a given by any stretch of the imagination, so i’m hesitant about it. … we have to let art exist in a space where the product is not necessarily linked to its author as demonstrative of that author’s experience. the work, in essence, should be allowed to sort of be positioned at a remove from that biography and be performative of any number of other truths that that author wanted to pen, so to speak. here sky asserts that including biographical information and admitting difference can make for lazy art, and can interfere with the production, presentation and uptake of good work. for art to be taken seriously, and for an artist to participate in public gallery processes, the work needs to be ‘positioned at a remove from [their] biography’. the work needs to enact organisational processes. it needs to do social and institutional work. the juxtaposition with jinny and marika‟s bio statements, then, is between experiential literacy that is „anchored in lived experience‟ and an organisational literacy that is „anchored in organizational or professional processes‟ (darville, 1995:250). offering an organisational account is both a way of conveying professional standing and a way of participating in the art world. to participate in the art world, artists, like other professionals, „employ textual realities to mediate the details of their daily practice‟ (de montigny, 1995:209). through their writing, artists „perform discursive work and produce a continuous series of presentations of self which demonstrate the proper professional and organizational motivation‟ (de montigny, 1995:216). they show their own institutional standing, while also bolstering the standing of the institutions they are a part of. their textual practices, along with producing their own legitimacy, produce the legitimacy of the institutions they work in (rusted, 2006:121). using theories of literacy and institutional ethnography this study has drawn on theories of literacy and institutional ethnography to investigate the coordinated, text-based work of visual w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t 58 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s artists. the paper examined artists‟ particular literacy practices and relations, while also exploring critically how those practices and relations articulate to, and are shaped by, particular social and institutional contexts. we started with experience, narrowed in on particular practices and relations, and traced out the regime from there. while this study is a modest effort to trace visual artists‟ textbased work, it speaks to research in critical literacy studies and institutional ethnography. past critical literacy studies have found professionals are tasked with „composing a text and composing a place for oneself in the world‟ (dyson 2008:229). similarly, this article has explored how using writing can be a way for visual artists to participate in public galleries and in the art world. similar to other workplace literacy practices, visual artists use written texts to produce themselves as „disciplined, competitive and self-governing subjects with certain levels of commitment and responsibility‟ (thomas-long 2010:41). visual artists write, not only to represent themselves and their work, but to navigate the art world. navigating the art world involves figuring out how others tend to correspond with one another and participating in communities that are shaped by practices and relations of power. and, power, as this paper has explored, is locally achieved and enacted through particular utterances (see kostouli 2009) and in relation to particular others. this study also speaks to research in institutional ethnography. past studies have found that textual technologies translate the actualities of people‟s work into standardised, measurable and managerial forms (see griffith and smith 2014). past studies have also highlighted how people‟s actual work is being slotted into, subsumed by, and subjected to extra-local institutional work processes. like many contemporary organisations, the modern art world is increasingly textually and institutionally coordinated. that said, while the art world is indeed institutional, it is only in part conventionally bureaucratic. it is important to underscore that there isn‟t some single elite that makes up objectifying categories, and then issues diagnoses or administrative decisions. working artists are not only subject to judgment with regard to their particular written utterances, they contribute to bringing them about. they respond to and bring about organisational work processes, slotting their work into organisational forms and positioning their work at a remove from their biographies and experiences. they produce artist statements that display conceptual seriousness, and bio statements that display their w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t k l o s t e r m a n n 59 professional standing. they enact the art world through their everyday work – sculpting themselves, sculpting their work/words, and sculpting the social and institutional art world. conclusion with a view to learning more about the social organisation of canada‟s art world, this article traced how visual artists navigate public galleries and navigate the art world. writing plays an important role in visual artists‟ navigational work. through their interaction with and production of particular written texts, artists represent themselves, while navigating particular public gallery processes. just as people use writing to reinforce and recontextualise links between themselves and particular settings (tusting 2015:249), visual artists use writing to reinforce and recontextualise links between themselves and the art world. this, again, happens through particular written utterances. artists display conceptual seriousness in their artist statements, and professional competence in their bio statements. displaying conceptual seriousness and professional competence, however, are not about stand-alone skills, learnt phrases or final displays of knowledge; they are ways of getting things done, responding to organisational goals, and stitching oneself and one‟s work into particular social or institutional relations. through their engagement with written texts, artists work to funnel their work out of their studios and into public galleries. they participate in, take part in shaping, play with and poke fun at the discursive conventions of the art world. that said, while writing can come with many professional advantages and can be a way to enact organisational processes and position oneself in the art world, some of the visual artists interviewed expressed reservations about their ability to position themselves in the art world. these concerns were less about their word choice, about their own professional abilities, or about the quality of their art. their concerns were less about „a relatively tangible set of items, rules or formulas (rose 2012)‟ and more „bound up with content, and by extension, with ways of being, that cannot be captured by an isolated set of grammatical rules or structures alone‟ (bak and o‟maley 2015:66). their concerns were about how they could best manifest as thinkers while navigating the art world. and, again, it is important to underscore that the art world often decentres people who do not frame (their) art in institutional terms. within this increasingly conceptual, reputable and organisational art world, an experiential practice is harder to frame, legitimate or squeeze into w r i t e l i k e a v i s u a l a r t i s t 60 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s public galleries and into the art world. by bringing attention to this, and to differences between artists‟ experiential and organisational literacy practices, this study shines an ethnographic light on artists‟ work and on canada‟s social and institutional art world. acknowledgements i would like to express my gratitude to richard darville and graham smart for their invaluable guidance and support with 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creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: severinsen, d. j., kennedy, l. k., and mohamud, s. h. 2018. teaching strategies that motivate english language adult literacy learners to invest in their education: a literature review. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 26:1, 25-42. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6260 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/lnj article (peer-reviewed) teaching strategies that motivate english language adult literacy learners to invest in their education: a literature review debbie j. severinsen1, lori k. kennedy2*, and salwa h. mohamud3 1 norquest college. st. albert, alberta, t8n 3m6, canada. debbie.severinsen@norquest.ca 2 university of calgary. calgary, alberta, t3b 0h5, canada. lori.kennedy1@ucalgary.ca 3 university of calgary. edmonton, alberta, t6v 1w8, canada. salwa.mohamud@ucalgary.ca *corresponding author: lori k. kennedy. lori.kennedy1@ucalgary.ca doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6260 article history: received 20/08/2018; revised 24/10/2018; accepted 18/12/2018; published 24/01/2019 abstract canadian english language programs have seen a recent increase in enrolment by english as a second language adult literacy learners. minimal research has been conducted specifically on teaching strategies that motivate english language adult literacy learners, leaving literacy teachers with little research-based guidance on how best to motivate these learners to invest in their education. our literature review found that, because these learners often lose motivation due to their lack of or limited education, building motivation and investment must be at the heart of lesson design. thus, we adopted a transformative, post-structuralist framework to extend existing psychological and sociocultural theories to the teaching of english as a second language adult literacy learners. we reviewed past literature and incorporated the autobiographical narratives of experienced literacy teachers. we outlined six teaching strategies for increasing investment and motivation in adult literacy learners: providing relevance, addressing settlement needs, incorporating life experiences, encouraging learner autonomy, promoting collaborative learning and building self-efficacy. our aim is to demonstrate that investment and motivation in english as a second language adult literacy learners can be achieved through implementing these six teaching strategies. areas for future research are also identified. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 25 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6260 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6260 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj keywords motivation, investment, post-structuralist and transformative framework, teaching strategies, esl adult literacy learners, limited formal education, english language learner, literature review. introduction over 50% of newcomers to canada had less than ten years of education according to a 2016–2017 report (immigration, refugee, citizenship canada 2018). the majority of these newcomers attend classes through language instruction for newcomers to canada (linc). linc is a nationally funded program addressing the settlement and integration needs of new immigrants, such as permanent residents, refugees and protected persons (immigration, refugees and citizenship canada 2018). those enrolled may also receive social assistance. linc teachers are struggling under the influx of low-literate refugees from the middle east and east africa in particular, due to inadequate training in adult literacy learner instruction (ewert 2014, mchardy and chapman 2016). in some contexts, it has been found that even when training is provided, teachers are not always implementing the training they have received (crevecoeur 2011; gerner 2018), and often resort to teaching as they were taught (decapua, marshall and frydland 2018; ewert 2014). traditional teaching approaches have offered few strategies to help english as a second language (esl) adult literacy learners (all) increase their motivation and investment in learning (esl all will hereafter be referred to as all). for various reasons, many all have had limited or no education, making them unfamiliar with the classroom setting and associated learning strategies (centre for canadian language benchmarks 2016). our literature review revealed the sociological concept of investment and the psychological concept of motivation to be key elements in teaching adult learners (blackmer and hayesharb 2016; darvin and norton 2015; dornyei 1994; norton-peirce 1995; norton and toohey 2011; zarei and zarei 2015). while motivation concerns the internal struggles of adult learners, investment aims to uncover the social barriers learners face when learning a language (darvin and norton 2015). our literature review supported the notion that motivation and investment are intertwined, finding that when learners are invested in a lesson, they will be more likely motivated to learn (darvin and norton 2015; norton and toohey 2011). considering the importance of investment and motivation, we asked: are there specific teaching strategies that encourage investment and motivation in all and, if so, what are they? our literature review uncovered six teaching strategies for increasing investment and motivation in adult esl learners or canadian-born adult low literacy learners (also referred to as adult basic education, or abe learners). the six strategies were: providing relevance, addressing settlement needs, incorporating life experiences, encouraging learner autonomy, promoting collaborative learning and building self-efficacy. we argue that implementing these six teaching strategies can increase investment and motivation in all, although there is presently almost no established connection linking these strategies with such outcomes. as teachers of this population, we have been using the six strategies in class and have shared our autobiographical narratives to extend the research. while the strategies yielded many favourable results, occasionally they produced unintended distress, or were ineffective. these varied reactions highlight the complex personal and social barriers that influence learning outcomes (darvin and norton 2015; dornyei 1994). in alignment with a post-structuralist severinsen, kennedy and mohamud literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 26 and transformative view of examining preconceived ideas, we feel it is important to embrace the victories and face the challenges of implementing these six strategies. given that all are prevalent in classrooms across canada (centre for canadian language benchmarks 2016) and the world (windisch 2015), and that motivation and learning are inseparable (wlodkowski and ginsberg 2017), we suggest that learners benefit when teachers adopt strategies that motivate all to invest in their educational process. this is crucial to all becoming active members of their new communities. the methodology used in this article is discussed below, followed by findings, discussion, autobiographical narratives, our transformational journey, suggestions for teaching all, limitations and possibilities for future research. methodology our literature review examined past studies related to key terms: ‘motivation,’ ‘language learning investment,’ ‘teaching strategies that help foster motivation’ and ‘esl adult literacy learners’. we used these terms to conduct online searches of four academic databases: university of calgary, proquest, eric and google scholar. we selected literature based on its credibility, similarity and relevance to our project (hendricks 2016). however, due to the limited literature on all, we had difficulty locating studies with similar contexts to ours. we thus expanded our criteria to include research on ‘abe learners’ and ‘adult esl learners,’ as these groups share similarities with all. like all, abe learners struggle with literacy in their first language, while adult esl learners are adults learning a second language (l2) for the first time. although dweck (2006) and seaton (2018) focus on adolescents, we included their work as it is fundamental to the growth mindset theory for developing confidence and motivation in learners. we did find one study connecting growth mindset with adult learners (brysacz 2017), but it made no connection to all. we located mainly empirical studies of both quantitative and qualitative methods as well as literature reviews from international sources. we found that six teaching strategies were consistently linked to increased motivation among adult learners: providing relevance, addressing settlement needs, incorporating life experiences, encouraging learner autonomy, promoting collaborative learning and building self-efficacy (fenwick 2004; norton and toohey 2011; po-ying 2007; rothes, lemos and gonçalves 2017; seaton 2018; windisch 2016; zarei and zarei 2015). these six strategies became our focus. we extracted and charted data from these articles relating to the six strategies (see figure 1 and table 1 in discussion). we found studies on teaching strategies and all, but with no connection to investment or motivation. thus, we extended current research on motivation, adult learners and teaching strategies to the all population with a focus on learner investment. we included our own autobiographical accounts to further support the limited literature on all. we are experienced literacy teachers who work in linc classrooms. we each offered our voices and experiences with all, the six teaching strategies and learner investment and motivation. this insider perspective supports the research, as our teaching experiences mirrored the results of the studies. we also used our autobiographical narratives to critically examine the findings. learners’ perspectives were not included for ethical reasons. theoretical framework a transformative worldview. we feel that a transformative framework best aligns with our goals because the aim of our study is to uplift and motivate an underprivileged, underteaching strategies that motivate english language adult literacy learners to invest in their education: a literature review literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 27 researched group of learners. according to a transformative worldview, ‘research contains an action agenda for reform that may change the lives of the participants […] and the researcher’s life’ (creswell 2014:38). many all are reduced to marginalised roles, because of their lack of cultural capital (norton and toohey 2011), but other external factors, such as emotional, physical and social issues should also be considered. we hope that effective implementation of the teaching strategies that we have identified will result in increased investment and motivation in all. furthermore, we hope that these changes will extend from the classroom into wider society, which would benefit from more motivated and educated community members. our firsthand accounts support the theoretical framework by highlighting the potential impact of these six strategies in literacy classrooms. motivation and investment. while the construct of motivation has undergone a significant paradigmatic shift, it has remained mainly a psychological concept (dornyei and ushioda 2009). gardner and lambert’s (1972) concept of integrative orientation suggests that a desire to identify with members of another culture can help spark learner motivation (cited in dornyei and ushioda 2009). dornyei’s ‘l2 motivational self system’ (2002) argues that l2 motivation is initiated when the target language is a part of one’s ‘ideal’ self (cited in dornyei and ushioda 2009). as a result, the learner will become motivated to learn the language in order to lessen the discrepancy between the ‘current’ and ‘ideal’ selves (dornyei and ushioda 2009). the construct of investment can be seen ‘as a sociological complement to the psychological construct of motivation’ (dornyei and ushioda 2009 and murray, gao and lamb 2011 cited in darvin and norton 2015:37). thus, we decided to also focus on investment to highlight the complex and fluctuating nature of all. this is further supported by our research findings and classroom experiences. norton-peirce’s (1995) concept of investment was influenced by weedon’s (1987) feminist post-structuralist approach to identity. weedon asserted that a language learner’s identity is a multifaceted and ever-evolving site of struggle, and that learners may exercise their agency by accepting or rejecting prevailing power relations (cited in darvin and norton 2015). norton-peirce (1995) was also indebted to bourdieu’s (1977) theory of identity and power. bourdieu (1977) asserted that one’s right to speak is determined by relations of power. thus, one’s position in society and one’s language abilities affect one’s right to speak and be heard. accordingly, norton-peirce’s (1995) investment theory claims that a learner’s motivation is tied to their belief that language acquisition will increase their social value and, in turn, enable them to assert their own identities. by adopting a post-structuralist framework and using norton-peirce’s (1995) construct of investment, we recognise both the individual and social factors that drive motivation among all. investment is an ever-changing entity, and by embracing this fluidity, we have learned that dichotomies, such as motivated/unmotivated or good/bad have no place in the classroom. what works for one student may not work for another, and what is effective today may be ineffective tomorrow. moreover, high motivation alone does not guarantee increased investment in language tasks (norton and toohey 2011). even highly motivated students require relevant, interesting and culturally accessible classroom activities to become invested. more importantly, external forces such as physical, emotional and financial barriers can inhibit even highly invested learners from acting on their desire to learn a language. we emphasise that teachers must consider these crucial factors when implementing the six suggested teaching strategies. severinsen, kennedy and mohamud literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 28 findings: six strategies to increase motivation commonalities in literature six dominant teaching strategies emerged as themes in the literature (figure 1) concerning effective learning in abe learners, adult esl, adolescent learners (dweck 2006; seaton 2018) and all. literature was collected from international sources, including but not limited to canada, australia, new zealand, russia, portugal, the united states and the united kingdom. research has not previously connected learner investment, motivation, teaching strategies and all. however, we believe that the six strategies can be extended to include all and are vital to encouraging motivation and investment in this population. figure 1 theme occurrences in literature review the available literature reveals that all require relevant content that focuses on settlement needs, provides space to discuss life experiences, encourages collaborative learning and learner autonomy while fostering self-efficacy. our literature review found 33 relevant articles (table 1). of those 33 articles, 45% displayed multiple themes. of that portion, 27% displayed two themes, 12% displayed three themes and 6% displayed four themes. the overlap suggests that a multiple and varied approach when teaching all is critical and that individualised responsive teaching is most effective. from our experiences, these strategies support differentiated instruction. as mentioned, all face significant obstacles, including emotional, physical and social barriers. the six teaching strategies discussed below are intended to increase all motivation while addressing learners’ complexities. teaching strategies that motivate english language adult literacy learners to invest in their education: a literature review literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 29 table 1 distribution of themes in articles number of themes in article number of articles percentage of all articles 1 18 55% 2 9 27% 3 4 12% 4 2 6% relevance a strong correlation exists between increased student investment, motivation and the use of learning tasks based on learners’ needs and interests (atkinson 2014; bedford 2017; blackmer and hayes-harb 2016; decapua et al. 2018; ollerhead 2012; rothes et al. 2017; windisch 2015). in their study with all, blackmer and hayes-harb (2016) found that using authentic tasks and materials is necessary when teaching all, who respond more strongly to the tangible and relatable. similarly, using real-world material can positively affect language learners’ experiences and increase their motivation (nicholas, rossiter and abbott 2011). for example, rothes et al. (2017) and windisch (2015) found that low-literate adults were highly motivated by extrinsic factors, such as seeking a pay raise or assisting their children with homework. they argued that low-literate adults were more interested and motivated by topics that focused directly on their quality of life. these findings further support dornyei’s (2002) earlier theory of the ‘l2 motivational self system,’ as well as norton-peirce’s (1995) construct of investment, because these adult learners were motivated by the idea of bridging the gap between their ‘current’ and ‘ideal’ selves in the pursuit of cultural capital (cited in dornyei and ushioda 2009). ollerhead (2012) also studied investment in all and found that classroom dynamics influenced their motivation and investment. to illustrate, ollerhead (2012) provided examples of two teachers, paula and lucy. paula created learning content that reflected her students’ ‘multiple identities as parents, nurturers, healers and consumers’ (p. 75). contrarily, lucy created learning content that was decontextualised and ‘culturally inaccessible’ to learners (p. 78). paula’s approach of connecting learning material to learners’ backgrounds resulted in all becoming visibly excited and engaged in the classroom. on the other hand, lucy’s approach resulted in a lack of response from the learners and their disengagement from the lesson. ollerhead (2012) concluded that the ‘onus is on literacy and language teachers to investigate which identity positions offer their learners best prospects for social engagement and interaction’ (p. 79). as a result, teachers are encouraged to base lessons on the needs derived from the class (richards and rogers 2014). this supports our own findings that indicate motivation and investment are best achieved through relevant and meaningful learning tasks that meet the needs and interests of all. settlement needs many of the needs that are relevant to all centre on settling into a new country. settlement needs have been connected to investment and motivation in adult esl learners (decapua et al. 2018; ewert 2014; mchardy and chapman 2016; norton 2001; norton and toohey severinsen, kennedy and mohamud literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 30 2011; ollerhead 2012; ramírez-esparza, harris, hellermann, richard, kuhl and reder 2012; rothes et al. 2017). ramírez-esparza et al. (2012) included both all and adult esl learners with higher levels of education. the contrasts between these groups allowed researchers to identify areas that are important to all specifically, which included addressing settlement needs. consequently, teachers need to share fundamental information with these learners, who often struggle with basic learning strategies, for them to connect their settlement needs with classroom material (ramírez-esparza et al. 2012). employment is an immediate settlement need for all, as many immigrant learners do not possess the literacy skills required to obtain a job in their new environment (ewert 2014; gerner 2018). in addressing this need, ewert (2014) suggested that ‘success hinges on meaning-based classroom instruction organised around content’ (p. 268). although contentbased instruction is unusual in english classes for newcomers, ewert (2014) asserted that all are motivated when the content is related to settlement. linc students learn language through content, such as shopping, going to the doctor and employment. similarly, there exists a strong positive correlation between classroom use of employment-related topics and the participation of adults with limited education (rothes et al. 2017). the need for a work-related curriculum is so great that the federal and provincial canadian governments are focusing on literacy and employment where learners can earn certificates such as first aid or work safety, while building their language skills. this allows all to work toward employment that is suitable for their life circumstances and areas of experience, although finding a job in their desired field is not always a reality. in addition to content-based instruction, teachers must be aware of ‘imagined communities’ (norton 2001), which ‘...focus on the future when learners imagine who they might be, and who their communities might be’ (norton and toohey 2011:422). norton (2001) asserted that if a learner cannot imagine themselves as part of a functioning community, they will not be motivated to learn. therefore, teachers are encouraged to spend time getting to know their students to build on their ability to envision themselves as community members, which is paramount to a successful settlement. life experiences in addition to their current needs, all are often motivated by opportunities to share their life experiences. according to norton-peirce (1995), adult learners acquire language by ‘collapsing the boundaries between their classrooms and their communities,’ (p. 26) and other researchers agree (biryukova, yakovleva, kolesova, lezhnina, and kuragina 2015; hellermann 2006; nicholas et al. 2011). effective instruction for all should incorporate life experiences and focus on the knowledge learners bring into the classroom (crevecoeur 2011; decapua et al. 2018; greenberg, ginsburg and wrigley 2017). most learners are eager to share aspects of their life stories, and lessons can be enriched by drawing on their experiences. one way to do this is to implement the language experience approach (lea), an interactive writing process that facilitates learning by focusing on learners’ shared experiences (crevecoeur 2011). for example, the literacy teacher in nicholas’ et al. (2011) study used lea to write a class reader dictated by the learners. currently, a disconnection exists between all and their teachers because of the gap in their abstract thinking abilities (decapua et al. 2018). teachers, being formally educated, bring abstract concepts to learners whose frame of reference relies largely on the concrete. to narrow this gap, teachers can incorporate all knowledge into lesson plans by using learners’ teaching strategies that motivate english language adult literacy learners to invest in their education: a literature review literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 31 personal information to close the gap between concrete thinking (e.g., names, addresses and birthdates) and abstract thinking (e.g., the act of writing in a box or circling the correct answer) (decapua et al. 2018). it should be noted that the studies that we found connecting language acquisition and personal experiences do not explicitly focus on the concepts of investment and motivation. there is a caveat to the use of life experiences in the classroom: ‘non-participation’ is a valid choice (norton 2001). discussing learners’ life experiences can trigger an array of reactions ranging from non-participation to emotional breakdown. the sociological and psychological barriers faced by many all can lead to frustration and unpredictable results when they are prompted to discuss their experiences. adhering to a post-structuralist framework, teachers need to proceed with caution. some learners may have experienced trauma and sharing past experiences could retraumatise them. it should always be clear that sharing is voluntary. this potential for negative reactions emphasises the complexity of all identities and should inform any careful lesson design. collaborative learning collaborative work provides all with opportunities to share their stories and experiences. placing learners into pairs or small groups facilitates l2 acquisition through joint problemsolving sessions which encourages the production of more target-like language (biryukova et al. 2015; naughton 2006; po-ying 2007; sato and ballinger 2012; storch 2011). collaborative learning sessions are enhanced by strategically partnering heterogeneous learners based on their compatible language ability, known as the zone of proximal development (vygotsky 1978 cited in robinson, kilgore and warren 2017). such partnerships mutually assist both learners because activities are scaffolded (robinson et al. 2017), allowing peers to assist each other in improving language performance (crook 1994 and donato 1994 cited in hsieh 2017). furthermore, collaboration supports ‘forced output,’ encouraging learners to apply their language abilities and produce more target-like results (swain 2000). collaborative learning may be effective with all, but research is thin. adult literacy acquisition is a progression of skills that build towards ‘interactional competence [from] adult learners’ socialisation into literacy events’ (hellermann 2006:377). hellermann (2006) documented this after observing a current student explain an activity to a new student. collaborative work promotes interconnectedness as all share with and learn more about their peers (decapua et al. 2018). additionally, all need to ‘[w]ork collaboratively to maintain a sense of success and accomplishment and support each other’ (centre for canadian language benchmarks 2016:7). research has not previously connected motivation, collaborative learning and all, but we believe existing research can be extended to make this connection. collaborative activities positively enhance the educational experiences of all and, in turn, increase their motivation and investment. however, flexibility is paramount under a post-structuralist framework. teachers need to be cautious of the social and cultural dynamics of classroom pairings (naughton 2006; storch 2011). for example, teachers can consider personality when partnering learners to avoid an introverted learner being dominated by a more extroverted learner, as introverted learners are less likely to initiate activities or ask questions than extroverted learners (ramírez-esparza et al. 2012). additionally, learners should have a choice in deciding with whom they are paired. severinsen, kennedy and mohamud literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 32 autonomy being respectful of learners’ choices, even if that choice is to work alone, helps strengthen all autonomy. in support of this, rothes et al. (2017) found that learners with less than a secondary school education demonstrated ‘lower levels of academic self-concept and use of deep-learning strategies, which can be explained by their shorter academic careers and even, for some of them, history of academic failure’ (p. 18). thus, all require bolstered academic autonomy through explicit strategy instruction (centre for canadian language benchmarks 2016). we could not locate empirical studies pertaining to explicit strategy training and all. however, literature on adult esl learners reported a positive relationship between knowledge of essential learning strategies, positive learning experiences and increased motivation (nguyen and gu 2013; po-ying 2007; seker 2015). similarly, learning strategies are strongly connected to intrinsic motivation and language learning achievement (seker 2015). research on learner autonomy and explicit strategy-based instruction found not only that the experimental group outperformed the control group, but that the experimental group also transferred their knowledge to other writing tasks and repeated the performance on the delayed test (nguyen and gu 2013). po-ying (2007) also found that by possessing metacognitive strategies such as self-assessment and goal setting, learners could identify their own learning difficulties and find solutions to overcome them. in the limited research regarding all, learners are found to voice their opinions about their needs and about topics they find interesting (blackmer and hayes-harb 2016). encouraging this autonomy is necessary for classroom participation and increased learner investment and motivation. similarly, some all have been found to display a sense of ownership of their work in the form of journal writing (atkinson 2014). literacy teachers need to acknowledge learner pride and responsibility, which helps all acquire a sense of identity in their education and in society (atkinson 2014). more importantly, this sense of ownership and pride is critical to learners asserting their right to speak and be heard (nortonpeirce 1995), which, in turn, can help break down all sociological and psychological barriers. if all feel in control of their learning process, their confidence and morale can be boosted, which results in more capable and confident members of society. thus, teachers are encouraged to create a learner-centered environment in their adult esl classrooms because adults need to play an active role in their education (biryukova et al. 2015; crevecoeur 2011). in support of our findings, we reaffirm that providing explicit strategy instruction and encouraging learner autonomy are two of the best ways to increase investment and motivation among all. self-efficacy encouraging autonomy is closely related to building learners’ self-efficacy, or their belief in their own ability to gain new knowledge. self-efficacy is an essential contributor to learner motivation (crevecoeur 2011; mchardy and chapman 2016; norton and toohey 2011; po-ying 2007) and learning (dornyei 1994; seaton 2018). abe learners have ‘lower levels of perceived self-efficacy’ (rothes et al. 2017:8) and, due to their limited education, all often display this trait as well (centre for canadian language benchmarks 2016). learner investment and motivation is supported by using learner strengths as a foundation for instruction and by fostering ‘a secure environment that will nurture learners’ second-language confidence’ (carter and henrichsen 2015:19). encouraging learners to see themselves as part of an imagined community (norton-peirce 1995) and to encourage a growth mindset (dweck teaching strategies that motivate english language adult literacy learners to invest in their education: a literature review literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 33 2006) is also important as ‘[m]indset affects motivation, as well as behavior, within all areas of life’ (dweck 2006 and ketting and heslin 2015 cited in brysacz 2017:12). building confidence and encouraging a growth mindset in learners lead to greater motivation (dweck 2006). the growth mindset theory suggests that learners are in constant flux between fixed and growth mindsets as variables fluctuate. therefore, mindset is situational: belief in one’s ability to develop a skill determines one’s likelihood of success and brings a natural motivation to learn. because mindset can change at any time, learners need to believe they have the capacity to learn (dweck 2015). this aligns with post-structuralist theory, which seeks to collapse dichotomies. one technique to encourage a growth mindset in learners is to praise their attempts rather than their intelligence. praising learners’ intelligence promotes the idea that they have achieved the goal due to their innate abilities. this is a fixed-mindset approach that promotes a fear of failure and a perceived lack of ability to learn, which could impede improvement. using comments such as ‘not quite’ and ‘not yet’ encourages a growth mindset because the feedback is directed at learners’ actions and suggests that they can improve over time (seaton 2018). discussion we do not believe existing research addresses the practical concerns of all teachers, who require more pragmatic strategies to cope with the challenges of teaching this group. research that we examined suggests that, although teaching strategies have been investigated, teachers are not capitalising on the training they have received (crevecoeur 2011; gerner 2018). teachers require more achievable models for lesson plans, resources and implementation strategies to apply to their all classrooms. the intention of our research is to provide teachers with functional ideas on practically applying abstract concepts while appreciating the complexity of individual learners and the social and psychological challenges they face. to accomplish this, we included autobiographical accounts of both our triumphs and adversities in implementing the six strategies as the classroom should provide a safe place to explore realworld scenarios all encounter every day. we also shared our transformational journey and included a list of suggestions for all teachers to consider. autobiographical narratives: our experiences implementing the six strategies relevance lori all can sometimes experience anxiety in unexpected ways. my all foundations linc class consisted entirely of newly arrived yazidi refugees, a religious minority from iraq who have experienced significant trauma. canada recently introduced a system for sending public emergency alerts by text message. as part of implementing this system, a series of test alerts were sent to all canadian phones. since we always practice basic concepts such as time, i thought it would be a relevant exercise to have students prepare for the test alert by warning them of it in advance. as the alert time neared, i watched as one student winced and covered her ears, visibly upset and expecting a loud disruption. when it finally occurred, the alarm was almost inaudible. afterwards, i quickly tried to reassure her. i felt bad but also felt it was important for her to know about the alarm and learn that it was nothing to fear. severinsen, kennedy and mohamud literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 34 settlement needs debbie i found some material for my linc class on how to read a pay stub. this class consisted of mostly refugees who had been in canada for roughly three years. one eritrean all really appreciated having the information in a format he was able to comprehend, and he shared his excitement with others. the material was relevant to him and pertinent to his immediate situation as he was employed. however, this was not the case for others in the class, many of whom were not working and saw no direct value in the activity. norton and toohey (2011) discuss the importance of imagined identities. employment is an area that can create anxiety for all, as they may not believe employment is an attainable goal and therefore not imaginable. in discussing potential obstacles, all may begin to articulate the barriers to settlement they experience. life experiences salwa since so many all love to share their cultures and life experiences, i create multiple opportunities for them to showcase their stories. last year, i was teaching a lesson about reading recipes to an advanced all class which consisted of east africans, all permanent residents. after learning the vocabulary and language skills needed to accomplish this task, students had the opportunity to write a simple recipe for one of their traditional dishes. students then took turns teaching the class how to make their chosen dish in the school kitchen. my students were visibly excited and proud to share their cultures and interests. after cooking, we enjoyed the meals together and talked about their favourite memories associated with their recipes. in sharing our love for food and culture, we were all connected. to showcase the complexity of learners, i also recall an incident with the same group where incorporating life experiences triggered traumatic memories. this can be particularly common when teaching all, as many have experienced war, poverty and other trauma. i was teaching a lesson about family, and i thought it would be a great idea to start by asking learners to talk about their families. i had not considered that family could be a source of grief for many of them. through our discussion, i found that many had lost loved ones due to hunger and war. some students were crying while relaying their stories of hardship and loss. i too got very emotional. collaborative learning lori i routinely implement collaborative sessions with my all foundations linc class of yazidi learners. i create collections of materials based on subjects we regularly review, such as time, date, numbers, the alphabet, colours and weather. learners are familiar with these activities and how they work. recently, two new students joined the class. i observed as a current learner explained, in simple english, an activity to one of the new students. they smiled, nodded and listened to one another as they collaborated, discussing the day’s weather by pointing to pictures. teaching strategies that motivate english language adult literacy learners to invest in their education: a literature review literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 35 on the same day, i had an issue attempting to pair one of the new students with one of my repeating students. i had observed one of the new learners for some time and, based on proficiency and age, thought of an ideal pairing with one of my existing students. i called on both students to partner up, but i was surprised when my repeating student abruptly folded her arms and shook her head, while the new student looked sheepishly at the floor. i quickly understood that they were not willing to work together and made another pairing. i realised that autonomy is critical in collaborative work, and that providing a choice of partners is important for success. autonomy salwa since many of my east african all have had little to no formal education, they do not possess key learning strategies such as organising worksheets or using classroom resources. i often teach them strategies to make learning easier. i instruct them to write the dates of their tests and assignments in their agendas at the end of class. i also ask them to write their names and the date on their worksheets to affirm ownership and aid in organisation. additionally, i teach students how to properly search for a term in the picture dictionary and to highlight important words or sentences when reading. after months of reinforcing these strategies, many students are able to apply them independently. my experience with explicit strategy instruction has generally been a positive one as it has led to students’ increased investment in education. however, we must always be mindful of learner differences because failure to do so can result in negative experiences. i have learned that students with different learning styles will prefer different learning strategies. it is okay for some to be more organised than others. i noticed that some all like to color-code their notes while others like to use tunes as a retention strategy. we should get to know our students and find strategies that work for each of them individually. self-efficacy debbie acknowledging a learner’s strengths reinforces the notion that every student has something to offer. during the beginning of every term my aim is to find a ‘techie’—someone who is good with technology. i later call on ‘techies’ to help others in the class who are struggling. i had one african all who had been in canada for almost one year but had not attended any classes. he was very quiet and did not participate in classroom activities. once i noticed his technological skills, i set him up with a smart board to take small groups of learners through a vocabulary building exercise. while his confidence soared during this activity, the effect did not carry over to other activities and he remained withdrawn. i had hoped that encouraging one of his strengths would help him find a more positive attitude, but the reality was more complicated. our transformational journey: how this research has informed our teaching since adopting a post-structuralist framework for this study, we have become more aware of the complexities of language learners and the language-learning process. we have discovered that there are no cookie-cutter solutions to motivational challenges. while the suggested severinsen, kennedy and mohamud literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 36 strategies can help increase investment and motivation, there are no guarantees when it comes to the complex nature of all. additionally, we have learned that any lack of motivation and investment should not reflect poorly on teachers or their learners. in many instances, learners can be unwilling to engage in classroom activities due to external factors such as familial and health problems, or stress. exhaustion is common, as many learners have jobs and raise families in addition to attending classes. however, a student who was unmotivated yesterday can become the most active participant tomorrow. one must consider these complexities when thinking about learner motivation. most importantly, we have learned that every day and every student present new rewards and challenges. despite the challenges, we now believe implementing the six above-mentioned teaching strategies can transform a classroom and produce more motivated all to invest in their learning. suggestions based on our classroom experiences and findings, we propose the following recommendations for all teachers: 1. incorporate learners’ stories. all have acquired rich life experiences. to make learning tasks more relatable and captivating, incorporate their stories, cultures and experiences when creating content. this includes using their names, countries and photos for activities. warning: be mindful of learners’ potential traumatic experiences; always make participation optional. 2. learn about your students. as adults, all have a clear idea of their needs and interests. create language tasks around these topics to spark interest and motivation. warning: due to the complex nature of all, each individual will have different needs and interests. as much as possible, allocate time to fairly address an interest of each student at least once during the term. we suggest creating a routine in which one student becomes the ‘student of the week’. this student gets to choose one problem or topic of interest to present to the class, which the others must collectively work to address. knowing that every student will get their turn can help motivate the rest of the class to work toward this common goal. 3. teach learning strategies. this is crucial for all because of their limited educational backgrounds. dedicate at least 15 minutes of every session to teaching or reinforcing these strategies. this can be as simple as reminding students to write their name and date on their work. warning: not all learning strategies will be effective for every student. get to know your students’ individual learning styles to find complementary strategies. 4. encourage collaborative work. collaboration is a crucial learning strategy for all, as learners can encourage and support one another. in our experience, many all come from group cultures. thus, collaborative learning may come naturally to them and can help them thrive. warning: be mindful of proficiency levels and social relationships when creating groups, as this can significantly affect the success of activities. 5. praise the effort, regardless of the result. capitalise on opportunities to showcase learners’ strengths and use them to help overcome their weaknesses. warning: remember that not all students will require the same amount of encouragement. also, be sensitive to how you praise your students, as some cultures may deem certain comments to be inappropriate. teaching strategies that motivate english language adult literacy learners to invest in their education: a literature review literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 37 limitations we identified four limitations in our research. first, we found no articles that incorporate each aspect of our topic: investment, motivation, all and teaching strategies. second, findings were extrapolated to all based-on research conducted on similar but distinct populations such as abe learners. although strategies designed for abe learners can be used with all, teachers will need to be mindful of the differences between these two groups (burt, peyton and van duzer 2005). third, studies on growth mindset focused on adolescent participants, some of whom were native speakers and some of whom were esl students. only one study connected growth mindset and adult learners, but no all participated in this study (brysacz 2017). finally, trauma was not explored in depth. this is significant since trauma can be detrimental to all learning and is common among this population. future research the limited research on all has negatively impacted the quality of the instruction they receive (crevecoeur 2011; decapua et al. 2018; greenberg et al. 2017). teachers are not using research-based strategies, even after some training (crevecoeur 2011; gerner 2018). thus, further inquiry into teacher implementation of knowledge would be invaluable. presently, research on curriculum development and evaluating program effectiveness is scarce (atkinson 2014; blackmer and hayes-harb 2016). future research should also incorporate all participation in piloting curriculum development and teacher training (crevecoeur 2011; norton and toohey 2011). research on all and growth mindset is also needed. although all were not included in windisch’s (2016) discussion on policy interventions, we believe long-term investment in research is critical to supporting all. such studies should also monitor learner retention rates. finally, original research is needed connecting investment, motivation, effective teaching strategies and all. conclusion our study addressed the unique challenges facing adult literacy teachers and learners by extending current research to draw connections between all, investment, motivation and six teaching strategies. tackling these issues support all settlement and integration into society, of timely concern due to the recent influx of refugees in many countries. we maintained a post-structuralist and transformative framework which supports the ever evolving and complex nature of language learning and learner identity. we also reviewed literature and reflected on our experiences. from this, we concluded that six teaching strategies can support increased investment and motivation in all when learning english, but future research is required. the six strategies are: providing relevance, addressing settlement needs, incorporating life experiences, encouraging learner autonomy, promoting collaborative learning and building self-efficacy. additionally, it is necessary for teachers to embrace an individualised, responsive approach when teaching all while simultaneously celebrating the victories and acknowledging the external and internal challenges associated with implementing the six strategies. in sharing this study, we hope that educators of all can adopt classroom strategies that bring about lasting changes to help 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adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 42 literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults vol. 25, no. 1 2017 © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: bellander, t. and nikolaidou, z. 2017. building health knowledge online: parents’ online information searching on congenital heart defects. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 25:1, 4-19. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns. v25i1.5358 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | epress.lib.uts. edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj research article (peer reviewed) building health knowledge online: parents’ online information searching on congenital heart defects theres bellander1 and zoe nikolaidou2* 1 department of swedish language and multilingualism, stockholm university, se-106 91 stockholm, sweden 2 department of culture and learning, södertörn university, södertörns högskola, se-141 89 huddinge, sweden *corresponding author: zoe nikolaidou, department of culture and learning, södertörn university, södertörns högskola, se-141 89 huddinge, sweden; zoe.nikolaidou@sh.se doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5358 article history: received 3/3/2017; revised 6/8/2017; accepted 7/12/2017; published 27/12/2017 abstract the study examines online searching as a digital health literacy practice and focuses on parents of children with congenital heart defects. over the period of four years, we have conducted interviews with couples at different stages of pregnancy or parenthood and have encouraged them to reflect on their literacy practices when receiving a heart defect diagnosis, during the remaining time of their pregnancy and when living with a child with a heart defect. we have also read and analysed health blogs written by parents and focused on extracts where literacy events are described. searching for information and support online is one of the most frequent practices amongst the participants in the study. the aim of this paper is therefore to highlight the complexity of looking for information online in order to take health decisions and provide care to a child with congenital illness. based on what parents say they do when searching online, we focus on three main paths to knowledge: looking for medical facts, looking for other parents’ experiences and looking for practical information. we discuss digital health literacy practices as complex activities that often involve parents in the diagnosis and in the child’s medical care to such an extent that parents build up knowledge and become experts, not only in finding information and support but in talking and writing about their child’s illness. we also problematise the notion of trustworthy health information and show how facts and opinions often go hand in hand in platforms where health issues are discussed. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 4 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5358 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v25i1.5358 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj finally, we show some of the affordances and restrictions inherent in using the internet as a source for meaning making and learning about children’s health. the results reinforce our understanding of the socially framed nature of health literacy and make us focus on the digital as an additional important aspect in the practice of health literacy. 1. introduction searching for health related information online has become an established practice of health literacy and using the internet for both knowledge building and interaction is now the norm (e.g. miller and pole 2010, hu and sundar 2010, rains and keating 2015). this study concerns self-initiated information seeking processes that exist outside but in close relation to an institutional framework. we take a closer look at digital health literacy practices as situated phenomena by focusing on what parents say they do when looking for information related to their child’s illness. information is here defined as medical, experiential or practical content, and we are interested in the functions that this content fulfil, e.g. informing and supporting the parent. the study presented here is part of a swedish linguistic research project called health literacy and knowledge formation in the information society. the project investigates parents’ discursive constructions of knowledge after their child has been diagnosed with a prenatal heart defect. in sweden, such defects are in many cases discovered in a routine ultrasound screening (rul) offered between weeks 18 and 19 of the pregnancy (bergman et al 2008). a few days after the rul the pregnant couple is scheduled for an appointment with a cardiologist. after the initial consultation, fetal cardiology follow-up is offered every four to six weeks to observe the progression of the heart defect, prepare the couple for the birth and if needed, plan for surgery during the first postnatal week. the fact that the couples are given a great deal of information in a fairly short time is one of the reasons that many of them use the internet as a major source of further information after the consultation (carlsson et al 2015a). the aim of this study is to examine searching online for information related to children’s health as a digital health literacy practice. we want to understand why the parents turn to the internet and what they look to find, as well as what attitudes they have to the information they find. we also want to discuss affordances and restrictions in engaging in health literacy practices online, and the way they are experienced by the parents in our study. we make the complexity of online literacy practices visible by analysing interviews with pregnant couples who have received a heart defect diagnosis about their baby’s health, and with parents of children with heart defects. a second source of data are blogs where parents of children with heart defects write about their online searching practices. 2. health literacy and digital health literacy within medical research, the concept of health literacy is often treated as an individual capacity to take personal responsibility for one’s own health and wellbeing (e.g. dewalt et al 2004, berkman et al 2011). the importance of individuals being literate in order to ‘read’ health messages, make choices about their usefulness and act on them are often stressed. poor health literacy is associated with individuals, or groups of individuals, having difficulties in engaging in preventive health care practices, in detecting disease early and in accessing primary health care such as visiting a doctor (green, bianco and wyn 2007). studies on health literacy often focus on measuring and judging literacy rates using, for example, the communicative building health knowledge online: parents’ online information searching on congenital heart defects literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 20175 and critical health literacy scale, and the ehealth literacy scale (eheals). seen from this skill-oriented perspective, people with low literacy are at a higher risk of disease, injury and death compared to people with more advanced literacy skills. by placing the study in the paradigms of new literacy studies (nls) (e.g. barton 1994, street 1984) and information literacy (e.g mckenzie 2002, papen 2013), we replace the skill-oriented perspective of learning about health with a social perspective where health literacy is understood as knowledge building and meaning-making processes, performed as social activities situated in time and in place (see dray and papen 2004). looking for and accessing information about one’s condition does not lead to an isolated act of acquisition of skills and knowledge related to health. instead as research has shown, health literacy presents complex cognitive, social, cultural and affective challenges for patients at multiple levels (e.g. green, bianco and wyn 2007, papen 2009, hunter and franken 2012). the knowledge gained is put in use by patients (or in this case parents) in order to take decisions (see yeoman 2010), provide care (to themselves or to others) and participate in, for them, meaningful communication with the medical staff. the information seeking practices are grounded in patients’ needs and often lead to new concrete actions. a significant shift in the field of nls is the digital turn (mills 2010:246), which followed what gee characterised as the social turn (1996) in literacy research and a consequence of globalization and technical developments in society (mills 2010). digital literacies are defined by barton and gillens (2009:9) as: ‘the constantly changing practices through which people make traceable meanings using digital technologies’. the concept is an extension of the concepts from nls, but with a clear focus on digital technologies, and the way they affect interaction with digital texts and the meaning making processes that are included in this interaction. in the fields of medical informatics and public health the term ehealth has been used for almost twenty years in order to describe institutional practices for developing the connection between health care information and communication technology (eysenbach 2001). when making reference to individuals’ practices (as opposed to institutional practices) the term ehealth literacy is used and it describes: ‘the ability to seek, find, understand, and appraise health information from electronic sources and apply the knowledge gained to addressing or solving a health problem’ (norman and skinner 2006:2). the same researchers discuss six core skills that when combined lead to ehealth literacy: traditional literacy, health literacy, information literacy, scientific literacy and computer literacy. for norman and skinner core skills are seen as synonymous to literacies but they need to preexist in individuals in order for them to engage in successful ehealth literacy. we find this notion problematic and want instead to discuss digital health literacy as a set of practices in which patients (in this case parents) engage without necessarily having pre-existing knowledge. instead we want to show how parents build up new experiences and acquire new knowledge in the process of practicing digital literacy (see barton 2010, gillen 2014). in this study, we show examples of digital health literacy where literacy is a broader concept than reading and writing practices and is discussed as processes of building up knowledge. 3. an ethnographic approach the use of ethnographic methods to study digital literacies has often been considered difficult compared to traditional (offline) ethnography. since internet users often move quickly between different websites and different digital activities it can be a real challenge for researchers to identify literacy practices especially when the object of study is not limited to one specific bellander and nikolaidou literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 20176 digital platform but to a theme that can take numerous expressions in the digital world (leander 2008). the participants in our study draw upon digital activities when they feel the need to find information. this means that their search activities are spread out over days, they alternate between using computers, tablets and mobile phones, and they perform searches for health information from their work, the bus or even their bed. nor is the time they spend doing online searches restricted to a specific period of time, for example only on the days after the initial consultation with the cardiologist. in order to address these difficulties, we had to be creative and use several methods that would bring us closer to parents’ online searches. one way was to perform in-depth narrative interviews (mishler 1984) with pregnant couples and parents, where we asked them to reflect on their information searching practices throughout their pregnancy and in the child’s early childhood. we used interview questions such as ‘tell us about...’ to promote narratives, for example ‘tell us about how you handled the information the doctor gave after the scan’. an additional source of information for the study are blogs written by parents of children with heart defects. the sequences that we have chosen to use from the blogs are reflective accounts on searching for health related information and they include the same kind of narratives as the ones found in the interviews. in a way, the blogs come closer to parents’ online searches than the interviews since they are often reported in real time in the form of a diary. mortensen (2014) discusses blogging as a hybrid product resulting from all previous kinds of personal writing (e.g. diary) and one that inevitably contains meta-reflection. it is on this feature that we base our data searches in the blogs, by looking for sections where parents discuss information they have found on the internet and reflect on the path they followed in order to access it. health blogging has become popular during the recent years and some of the reasons are that blogging gives opportunities to vent problems and to receive support and advice from readers at the same time as it reaches out to others in need (bellander 2016, pettigrew, archer and harrigan 2016). writing health blogs has been described as similar to expressive writing as health bloggers are articulating their experiences during a traumatic life event (sundar et al 2007). our interest in following the participants’ digital practices and the role they play in parents’ social practices ties this study to the methodological field of connective ethnography (leander 2008). this term describes an orientation to internet-related research that seeks for connections between online and offline social spaces. the parents’ online searches for information related to their child’s heart-defect often lead them to take action in their lives offline, at the same time as social practices they experience in everyday life lead them to participation in online social spaces. 4. research participants and methods of analysis as this study’s goal has been to capture the complexity of the literacy practices generated when having a child with a heart defect, our data vary to a great extent. we have recorded and transcribed 25 in-depth interviews where we have used open questions that enabled the participants to reflect on their searches for information on congenital heart defects as a social practice. the interviews were between 30 minutes and one hour long and were carried out between the years of 2013–2016. we were able to get in contact with most of the participants in the study through our project’s close collaboration with medical professionals at two of the largest hospitals in central sweden. some participants were contacted through their blogs where they had left their contact information. all participants were given oral and written information about the research project and signed their agreement to participate in the building health knowledge online: parents’ online information searching on congenital heart defects literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 20177 recorded interviews. all personal names and dates have been changed in the extracts shown in the article, and names of places have been replaced with explanations in brackets. the participants were aged approximately between 25 and 50 years old. they live spread in many counties in central sweden and they have different economic, educational and sociocultural backgrounds. three of them are multilingual and use either arabic, german or thai besides swedish in their families. all participants understand and use spoken and written english in their daily lives. english is a widely spoken foreign language in sweden and most citizens (89 percent of the population according to an eu-report in 2012), master it well enough to have a conversation, while 71 percent use english at a regular basis on the internet. some of the participants in the study were pregnant during the interview and some were parents of infants or toddlers. we also met two couples who had terminated their pregnancies after a diagnosis of a heart defect in their foetus. most of the participants had received the diagnosis during rul halfway in their pregnancy but some had found out right before or right after birth. the fact that the interviews had been conducted at different stages of the participants’ pregnancies or parenthood meant that they all brought different viewpoints when discussing their digital health literacies. pregnant couples were able to talk about their online searches in real time, whereas couples that had terminated the pregnancy looked at their health literacy practices in retrospect. the parents had the experience of going through the different stages of treatment; some had children who had gone through one or more heart surgeries and others had surgeries ahead of them. again, this meant that the participants could provide different stories about their digital health literacy practices, depending not least on the temporal differences in their experiences. we also analysed meta-reflections from 12 blogs written by parents of children with heart defects. like the interviewed participants, the blogging parents were aged between 25 and 50 years old and their social backgrounds varied to a great extent. all bloggers except for one were female. all blogs represented a personal journal type health blog in the sense that they describe the experiences of living with a specific disease (miller and pole 2010). similar to most health blogs, they contain long personal narratives and accounts of personal experiences (kim and chung 2007). some blogs in the data started with the aim to tell the story of a specific child’s heart disease and some blogs started with a different focus and became blogs about their child’s heart disease in the process. the software atlas.ti (paulus and lester 2015) was used to code transcriptions of interviews and blog content. in an initial analytical stage, we searched the data by marking sections in the interview transcripts and blogs where the participants talked or wrote about searching, googling and reading. as a second step in the analysis we coded segments in the selected sections where the participants talked or wrote about their online searching, i.e. what content they searched for, what type of websites they used and when and where they did their searching. 5. paths to knowledge in online searching the parents in this study engaged in online searching as a means of finding information and building up knowledge on two themes: heart defect and taking care of a child with a heart defect. these knowledge objects are large and therefore there seemed to be various ways to approach them. participants’ search efforts could be rather vague, using keywords such as ‘heart defect’ or ‘hole in the heart’. this often resulted in endless possibilities for information gathering. in other cases, participants looked for concrete answers to a specific question and their bellander and nikolaidou literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 20178 searches were thus more focused. some were not aware of what paths they had taken when accumulating information and learning on their child’s heart defect, whereas others seemed to have designed strategies and only approached the knowledge object from specific points of view, thus discarding some paths to knowledge in favour of others. we present our analysis by discussing three of the most dominant ways that the parents in the study used when approaching their knowledge objects, whether these were rather vague and large, e.g. life with a child carrying a heart defect, or concrete and focused, e.g. operating a heart. the three common ways of approaching knowledge when our participants were searching online are: looking for medical expertise, looking for others’ experiences and looking for practical information. 6. looking for medical expertise the first indication of a possible heart defect is presented during the routine ultrasound (rul) in pregnancy between weeks 18 and 19. usually the nurses performing the rul are not equipped to give the pregnant woman more information other than that they do not see a normal heart (see karlsson, melander marttala and mattsson 2014). the couples are scheduled for a detailed ultrasound examination and a consultation with a cardiologist a few days after the rul. when recalling the stage between the rul and the appointment with the cardiologist, many participants in the study expressed a need of turning to the internet for more information. during an interview a mother, susanna, wrote down some of the keywords she used when googling: ‘deformation of foetal heart’, ‘discovering heart-defect ultrasound’, ‘enlarged heart’, ‘chances of getting pregnant after termination’ and ‘late abortion after diagnostics’. susanna’s list of keywords shows that she, at this stage, used the internet to build up knowledge on two different topics: foetal heart defects and abortion. because the information from rul had been inadequate, susanna’s searches were rather broad. during this short period, she knew that something was wrong with the foetus’ heart but she had no details about the severity of the anomaly or the prognoses. like most participants in the study, she recalled feelings of uncertainty and confusion after rul. online searches at this stage seem to be used as attempts to prepare for the consultation with the cardiologist. some participants in the interviews talked about reading at this early stage about children with heart defects, for example in blogs, as a way of preparing for becoming a parent to a child with special needs.   the consultation with the child cardiologist that follows the rul usually gives the participants more knowledge although a definite diagnosis can sometimes be difficult to give (bergman et al 2008). a detailed ultrasound is performed followed by a consultation where the cardiologist explains the features of the heart anomaly. (s)he draws sketches of two hearts: one normal heart and one with defect(s). arrows pointing out the blood flow are drawn and the names of the defect(s) are written on the sketch. the cardiologist also gives information on possible surgical treatment as well as relevant information regarding termination of the pregnancy (carlsson et al 2015b). in cases where corrective heart surgery can be offered, the majority of swedish women choose to continue their pregnancy. termination of the pregnancy has predominantly been due to the most severe cases of heart defects (bergman et al 2008). usually the pregnant couples are offered to take the drawings from the consultation home with them and some use the medical terms on the sketch as keywords for further online searches, e.g. ‘vsd, ventricle septum defect’, ‘tetralogy anomaly’ or ‘hlhs, hypoplastic left heart syndrome’. finding relevant information still can still, at this stage, be perceived as problematic building health knowledge online: parents’ online information searching on congenital heart defects literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 20179 since diagnoses are often both uncertain and complex. in an interview, the couple marcus and rachel reflected on how the complexity of the diagnosis affected their attempts to find further information online: marcus: and after we got to know what was wrong, it was several things we looked for, we searched ‘hole in the valve’, we searched ‘the flap on septum’, we searched ‘right ventricle is too small’ but we didn’t really understand since most of them had small left ventricle and right flap, and as i said, it wasn’t exactly what we had, we couldn’t find anyone with the exact same defect that we had. interviewer: the combination you had been given, what the defects were. rachel: yes exactly i was looking for, oh well, maybe it’s called tricuspid atresia or maybe it’s called like that, there were a lot of maybes. the extract illustrates how the couple made use of different combinations of medical terms in order to find the correct information about a heart defect. other problems found in our data were difficulties understanding the medical descriptions of heart defects. rachel reflected on this difficulty:  rachel: all sorts of strange latin terms that my husband didn’t understand, he hasn’t studied biology but he just said ‘a hole in the valve’ and i thought, god, this belongs to the course in physiology that i took. i thought the pages were weird i didn’t understand anything. rachel claimed that the online information they found after the consultation with the cardiologist was presented using jargon such that it was to them inaccessible. she believed that searching for medical information online could imply having to recall knowledge from high level formal education. to this end, advanced medical descriptions available online seem to sometimes restrict, or simply not significantly contribute, to parents’ knowledge construction. the parents’ complaints about finding relevant and accessible information can be confirmed by a study in medical research, where the content of websites with information on children’s congenital heart defects was analysed and a majority of them were judged as inadequate in terms of, amongst others, currency, content production and ability to engage the reader (carlsson et al, 2015a).    other parents described the medical keywords provided by the cardiologist as an affordance, since they used them as starting points for further online searches and knowledge building around the child’s heart defect. anna described the current diagnosis of hlhs in her blog: hlhs is for hypoplastic left heart syndrome for you who want to google. it means that the left ventricle of the heart is severely underdeveloped and cannot pump blood properly. in her blog post, anna explained her child’s diagnosis and seemed therefore to have a good understanding of it, while she also suggested a keyword for readers who might want to read further upon this question. looking for medical descriptions online becomes relevant again for many parents once the child is born and during or close to the time of the heart surgery. even though all parents in the study seemed to be satisfied with the information provided by the hospital staff, some reported a need to gain further control over the situation by finding as much information related to the treatment as possible. christer talked about looking for information online while his new born son was being admitted in the intensive unit. bellander and nikolaidou literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 201710 christer: i felt that i needed [to google]. i don’t think tina needed it as much as i did but it can work differently. i needed it but i was nerdy. when he ended up in the intensive unit they connected him with a battery with those medicine pumps and there were, what can it have been, fifteen different preparations they gave him and on the displays you could see their names, so i wrote them down and went out and googled what it was. so, i was rather nerdy. christer described ‘googling’ for information as a ‘nerdy’ action. he seemed to have been aware that the information he found could not change his son’s health condition. the situation described by christer was therefore not primarily about filling in a knowledge gap. it was more about trying to gain control in a stressful and emotionally difficult situation. in this case, searching online lead to knowledge that was comforting and strengthening. this is an affordance with online searching that the majority of the parents in our study stresses as valuable. even at later stages, when the child is at home, consultation with medical staff can be complemented by information from the internet. the parents in the study often stressed the importance of knowing how to take care of their child after a heart surgery and seemed to rely upon the information found online. gunilla wrote in her blog that she had used the internet to build up knowledge on rayes syndrome: most of all i was worried about reyes syndrome, about which i have written earlier. reyes syndrome is a disease that affects the brain and the liver and can be life threatening. acetylsalicylic acid in combination with virus gives a higher risk for reyes syndrome and the syndrome attacks like lightning. earlier today i had also, of course, googled that high fever can be a symptom of reyes. gunilla had written about her child’s current health condition before explaining what rayes syndrome was. she explicitly mentioned ‘googling’ when she explained symptoms of reyes. based on the information that she had read, she made the decision to immediately call the hospital. in her blog post, she passed on information on rayes syndrome for others to read. the possibility of quick access of information that would help parents know what was regarded as normal or divergent behaviour in the case of a sickness proved here to be another great affordance with online searching for medical information. 7. looking for others’ experiences the second way of approaching the knowledge objects of heart defect and taking care of a child with a heart defect is by looking online for others’ (usually parents’), experiences. in our study, we found many parents who had actively sought other parents’ narratives and online interaction and found them helpful. a common reason that the participants gave for reading other parents’ blogs and participating in forums right after having a foetal heart-defect diagnosis was in order to understand what life quality a child with a heart defect could have. in an interview, the couple marcus and rachel reflected on the story of a teenager they had met in an online group and compared his situation to a possible future life for their child. it seemed that this comparison helped them place their son’s heart defect on a scale of severity. marcus: there was a boy who had graduated from high school, 18 years, he is one of the oldest i think rachel: he even got the highest grades in pe, that was to us marcus: yes he is very active building health knowledge online: parents’ online information searching on congenital heart defects literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 201711 rachel: because we were like, well our son will be standing in some corner not being able to move marcus: but in that group there are, well different, everyone has different experiences. i think right now when we read ours [the diagnosis of our foetus] it is, well, probably the mildest grade another mother, mali, said that she had started reading blogs as soon as she received the diagnosis. she found anna’s blog and read all about anna’s pregnancy and experiences after birth. mali explained that reading the blog and showing some of the posts to her partner helped them take the decision to carry their pregnancy to term. mali wrote a thank you e-mail to anna: i just want to say thank you for your blog about mark. it has helped us to make the decision to keep our son who has been diagnosed with hlhs. we got to know about it last week when i did an ultrasound in week 19. i will read your blog to prepare for the birth of our son. i wish our son will be healthy and lucky like mark. thank you from the bottom of my heart. mali told anna about her own experiences and wrote that she would continue reading anna’s blog to ‘prepare for the birth’ of her son. in the following interview extract, mali not only reflected on what specific information she got from reading about other parents’ experiences, she also reflected on her reasons for wanting this information: mali: i have read that all parents are scared and worried when their children are there [during surgery] and they can’t do anything but wait ten hours for a phone call from the doctor, if it went well or not [...]. i want to prepare myself to be able to receive the message when it comes. online searching as a health literacy practice seems to do more than providing knowledge; in this case mali drew strength and comfort from texts like anna’s blog. similarly, in her blog, anna wrote that people found comfort in realising that they were not alone in their agony. this was confirmed by many participants in the study who talked about comfort and feelings of solidarity when discussing the reasons why they read about other parents’ experiences. some participants seemed to have turned to a national heart child association for information, support and contact with other parents. engagement in the association can involve both digital events like reading information at the website and attending ‘real life activities’ e.g. meetings or summer camps. other participants in the study joined a facebook site that functioned as a closed group. aydah explained that it was much easier for her to open her heart in the facebook group than talking with her family and friends. this was because she felt there would be no judgment or feelings of pity amongst a group of people who shared similar experiences. in her blog, elin praised an online discussion group: i had a steady platform on the internet […] my life line. a group with amazing girls, girls from everywhere and nowhere, with different personalities and experiences but with big warm hearts always prepared to lend a listening ear or a shoulder to cry upon, to share the others’ joy and encourage when someone needed extra pep talk. elin described how the meetings in the forum group functioned as supporting, comforting and strengthening. she used physical metaphors like ‘lend a listening ear’ and ‘a shoulder to cry upon’, when she described activities like sharing joy and encouraging each other. meetings with other parents can take place both online and offline. the intertwining between online and bellander and nikolaidou literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 201712 offline here was part of the complexity of providing care to a child with congenital illness and disabilities. it became clear that reading about other people’s emotions seemed to be at least equally important for some parents as reading about medical facts. online searching provided parents with the possibility to explore other parents’ emotions and had an influence on their own feelings and consequent actions. the role of emotions in health literacy seemed to be a central one. parents’ decisions and actions did not always rely on medical facts; references to their feelings were common and essential and seemed to influence, to a varying extent, their health literacy practices. searching for other parents’ experiences online could also generate negative feelings. reading blogs and forums was experienced by some parents as disturbing, especially by those who happened to find too many negative narratives. some parents also said that they had been discouraged from the medical staff to read blogs. most parents admitted that they were cautious with reading blogs and forums and aware of the risks, as the information available could be in the best case irrelevant and in the worst case untrustworthy. in the following extract, per reflects on online family forums: but the problem as i see it with these sites, these family forums, is that i could go in and make an account in two seconds and write whatever i want and lie as much as i want […] they are no trustworthy source. issues of reliability and trustworthiness seemed to pose a serious restriction when it came to building up knowledge online and are common amongst internet users (hu and sundar 2010). the vast abundance of information and the potential lack of sources can make it difficult for parents to know what is real and what is an exaggerated account of reality, what is a fact and what is an opinion. the very activity of looking for information becomes problematic, as parents have different ideas of what meaning can be given to the concept ‘information’. for some parents, trustworthy information comes only from medical staff, whereas others find it easier to trust other parents who have similar experiences. the matter is further perplexed when parents become their own experts and participate in epistemic communities (landqvist 2016) by building up medical knowledge, being active in forums or by blogging about heart defects (bellander, karlsson and nikolaidou 2016). this brings facts and opinions even closer to each other and therefore more difficult to tell apart. here we see traces of two perspectives on knowledge where the first one is based on concrete information anchored in everyday experiences and the second one is evidence-based and scientific. no matter which perspective parents seemed to adopt, it was difficult to tell these types of knowledge apart and the issue could only be discussed as a matter of debate and contestation. 8. looking for practical information the third path parents in our data followed when looking for online information related to their child’s heart defect was by looking for concrete and practical information. at the early stages, between rul and the consultation with the cardiologist or immediately after the consultation, some participants turned to the internet in order to make an informed decision whether to terminate their pregnancies or carry to term. again, parents here look for both, content generated by other parents and sources from institutions like hospitals. in the following extract, rachel tells about how information from the internet of a concrete and practical kind helped her to feel safe in her and her partner’s decision: building health knowledge online: parents’ online information searching on congenital heart defects literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 201713 rachel: he read that there is an astrid lindgren’s house [an activity house at the hospital area] and there is this what’s it called the ronald mcdonald house, and they help and you can stay there and ‘look things have gone well for them’ so he read positive stuff. in this extract, rachel explains how she and her husband did not read only about how other parents experienced their child’s heart surgery, but also how they got to know details about the process, in this case about accommodation during the time of surgery. heart surgery means, for a lot of families, a movement away from home which can last for several weeks. many of the participants in the study expressed how they wanted to know details about the surgery, descriptions of the process before, during and after and of the way other parents have experienced it. rachel said that she read forum discussions on children with heart defects during her child’s surgery. in the interview, she mentioned some of the typical questions that parents discussed in these: ‘well, how do you do this, can you breastfeed the child after the first surgery? what is tube-feeding? do you use an oxygen machine?’ moa discussed pregnancy insurance in her blog and wrote: ‘i got the advice to sign as many pregnant insurances as possible from a mother on the internet who had lost her child’. mali said that she had read on a blog about how to protect a child from rs-virus after surgery: she wrote [in the blog], when we go to the grocery store we must always try to avoid rs virus, that is, we have to go in the morning so no one else is there and we need to keep the baby in the pram for protection, it was like in detail, how to handle, and, and it was, we didn’t know before. practical information seemed to also contribute to the parents’ emotional empowerment as it helped them build the knowledge they needed in order to carry themselves and their child through this difficult time. the parents in our data reported finding this kind of information mainly in forums and blogs. some of them expressed disappointment in that this practical information was not offered from the medical care, or in that it came at a late stage. in the consultation with the cardiologist after rul and at the check-ups every four to six weeks of the remaining pregnancy, the information from the medical staff seemed to focus on medical check up and preparing for birth and surgery. additionally, questions were often raised after the consultation meetings and the parents felt that it was easier to go online than to contact the doctors. it can be therefore concluded that searching online for practical information, everything from treatment process to health insurance, seemed to be for the parents an invaluable support in their knowledge building process. 9. building up knowledge on health as a digital health literacy practice most of the participants in the study talked or wrote about using the internet in order to make decisions and take actions in relation to the foetus’s or child’s heart defect. the parents visited medical websites, read blogs and participated in forums in order to find information on which they would base their decisions and actions. looking for medical descriptions was motivated by a need to better understand the illness and its cause and to make informed decisions when pregnant and when taking care of their child. reading about other people’s experiences could also offer information about medical issues, but in social media information was filtered through the lens of the lay expert: the parent, who becomes an expert by virtue of having experiences (prior 2003). the different form and sources of online information results because bellander and nikolaidou literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 201714 the information was often valued differently by the participants in the study. there were those who argued that trustworthiness could only be found in evidence-based and scientific facts (see also carlsson et al 2015b) and there were others who valued information from concrete everyday experiences and considered it trustworthy and worth reading. our study shows that the digital platforms have contributed in bringing these kinds of information closer to each other, in the sense that we cannot longer talk about knowledge coming from medical staff only or from lay experts only. many participants in the study looked for online information in order to gain a feeling of control. they often reported feelings of fear, frustration and hopelessness. using the internet as a source of information was for many a way to take matters into their own hands. participants in the study explained that the medical information found online often made the heart defect more accessible and easier to understand. here the practice of accessing information in medical consultations was often intertwined with the practice of looking for online health information. the parents in this study used their medical consultations as a starting point in their searches. looking for medical information online changes, to a certain degree, the power relations between doctors and patients, as patients are able to control, evaluate and complement the information they receive from experts. reading about other parents’ experiences gave to some of the participants emotional control, as they were able to prepare themselves for what was to come. many participants expressed that parents of healthy children do not understand their constant fear for the child, whereas this kind of understanding and support could be found in parents who experience a similar situation. the internet, in this case, seems to help parents become members of a larger community, to feel that they belong in a group where their thoughts and feelings are confirmed and where they are not shown pity, indifference or even anger (stommel and koole 2010, rains and keating 2011, pettigrew et al 2016). this practice involves participation in online discussion forums and closed groups in social networks like facebook. the analysis also shows that online literacy events are extended in time and space and take a global character. parents could communicate about heart defect with experts and lay experts all over the world, without always realising the digital distances they travelled when engaging in these health literacy practices. digital health literacy enables global communication about health, which however sometimes feels more local and relevant to the parents than interacting with family and friends. the practice of taking care of the child was talked about in blogs and some of the interviews. some participants used the internet for practical tips on caregiving already during the pregnancy. here, the internet was essential as a source of information since medical consultations seemed to be oriented towards medical questions. this practice became even more relevant when the child was born, as many parents in the study used the internet as a guidance book in caregiving, drawing information both from medical sites and social media.   the participants’ health literacy practices seemed to lead to a rather fast learning. we saw, for example, that in the process of searching parents learned to evaluate information and to navigate between medical sites in order to find the kind of information that was relevant to their case. many parents in our study seemed to have learned a lot about their child’s heart defect and some chose to communicate medical knowledge and their experiences to others in blogs, forum threads and facebook groups. this generated a new literacy practice, the one of passing on knowledge to others, for example by blogging. in different degrees and in different ways blogging involved creating and sharing knowledge. an example of this was elin, a building health knowledge online: parents’ online information searching on congenital heart defects literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 25, no. 1, 201715 mother who could not find a precise sketch of her daughter’s heart defect on the internet and decided to draw her own picture based on the notes she found in the child’s medical journey. the new picture was posted in her blog with a detailed explanation of the daughter’s heart defect. elin thus designed her own trajectory when reading digital texts (kress 2003). she, as many other parents in our study, was not a passive receiver of information; rather, she actively navigated between the vast material found online and evaluated it. furthermore, she alternated from the status of the reader to that of the writer and vice versa. this example illustrates that when engaging in digital health literacy practices, parents have the chance to draw on their own experiences and become active in creating and sharing new knowledge. the roles of producers and consumers of information are not always separable online and a lot of people in the study could not identify with only one of these roles. a clear restriction when it comes to searching for information related to heart defect online seems to be that the online content is not always adequate, relevant or accessible. this is confirmed by studies in medical research with a similar focus on parents of children with heart defect. in these studies, parents also expressed their frustration with the current information websites, both swedish and international, and the researchers suggest that health professionals should be more active in providing guidance in patients’ online searching (carlsson et al, 2015b and carlsson et al, 2016). the parents in our study felt that the first consultation meetings with the cardiologist were not ideally placed in time in order for the information to be digested. many of their questions came at later stages and this was one of the reasons why the internet was used as a main source of information. we wish therefore to argue here that engagement in health literacy practices go hand in hand with information appropriation and knowledge construction in matters of health. parents take an active role in their knowledge construction and design their learning path, as they navigate in the vast amount of information available online and make choices about what is relevant, trustworthy and read-worthy. in this way, parents who draw upon these practices become experts not only on their child’s condition, but also on the macro-practice of ‘doing digital health literacy’. at the same time, we have shown that the internet as a health information platform allows for everyone to show their expertise by means of blogging, participating in forums and social media. the parents in our study not only searched for facts in institutional websites, they also looked for other parents’ experiences and 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the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: appleby, r. 2020. humananimal relationships in adult literacy education: reading the australian magpie. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 28:1, 6–16. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.6958 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | url of journal research article (peer-reviewed) humananimal relationships in adult literacy education: reading the australian magpie roslyn appleby university of technology sydney. roslyn.appleby@uts.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.6958 article history: received 27/11/2019; revised 05/02/2020; accepted 01/03/2020; published 19/12/2020 abstract this paper presents a case for the inclusion of humananimal relationships as a focus for adult literacy education. it outlines the ways in which language is implicated in human alienation from nature in a modern technologyfocused life, and discusses the effects of naturedeficit disorder on human wellbeing. it calls for an ‘entangled pedagogy’ that attends to stories of local wildlife, and points to the importance of such a pedagogy for particular groups of adult literacy learners, including international students, new migrants and recent refugees, who may be unfamiliar with the flora and fauna of their new environment. as an example of entangled pedagogy the paper presents ideas for literacy lessons based on the iconic australian magpie whose relationship with humans is, at times, problematic. lost words in early 2015 a group of prominent authors, amongst them novelist margaret atwood, led a protest against the removal of certain words in recent editions of the oxford junior dictionary. the items in question, including almond, blackberry, budgerigar, magpie, fern, moss and willow, were words associated with the natural world, and their removal made way for the inclusion of a new group of words, including attachment, broadband, blog, database and voicemail, associated with the increasing use of technology in everyday life. in their protests, as reported in the guardian (flood 2015, para. 5), the authors highlighted the ‘proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing’, and drew attention to the role of technology in ‘the increasingly interior, solitary childhoods of today’ (para. 1). they argued that the dictionary should not simply mirror trends in language usage, but should seek to shape and extend children’s knowledge and understanding of the wider natural world. as declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 6 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.6958 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.6958 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v28i1.6958 nature writer and landscapelanguage specialist robert macfarlane observed, ‘we do not care for what we do not know, and on the whole we do not know what we cannot name’ (para. 12). language, he asserts, is in need of rewilding (macfarlane 2015). naturedeficit disorder while it’s true that the role of dictionaries is to document rather than dictate the use of certain words, the shift in language reflected in the oxford junior dictionary points to an issue that has been discussed more broadly in society over recent decades and has implications not only for children but also for adults who create a world for children. not long before these particular dictionary revisions, author richard louv coined the term ‘naturedeficit disorder’ to describe the negative effects on children’s wellbeing when we are alienated from nature as a consequence of living in the wired world (louv 2005). although the term naturedeficit disorder has been criticised for its part in medicalising childhood, it has been recognised that the process of alienation from the natural world at the heart of ndd has occurred incrementally over many generations (dickinson 2016) and recent studies have confirmed the negative effects of such alienation on human wellbeing (see, for example, miller 2005; soga & gaston 2016). for stephanie schuttler et al (2019) the problem of alienation is specifically related to people’s disconnection from local wildlife and local biodiversity. a similar term to describe human alienation from the natural world is ‘the extinction of experience’, a phrase coined by robert pyle in 1975. pyle’s contribution was to recognise that alienation from nature not only diminishes human wellbeing but can also lead to a cycle of further apathy in regard to environmental conservation, and ‘therefore to further extinctions: a cycle of disaffection and loss, sucking the life out of the land the passion out of the people’ (pyle 2005, p. 398). as a consequence of this negative feedback loop, alienation from nature is one of the biggest threats to conservation of the planet’s biodiversity (schuttler et al 2019). at the heart of this problem, as pyle sees it, is ‘the epic level of our nature illiteracy, amounting to almost utter ignorance of species other than our own’ (2005, p. 400). humananimal relationships not surprisingly, the primary solution proposed for addressing the problem of human malaise in an age of technological distraction is to attend to, and reconnect with, the transformative power of nature (louv 2011; pyle 2005), a remedy supported by both anecdotal and empirical evidence that demonstrates the physiological and psychological benefits of human encounters with, and education about, animals, plants, landscapes or wilderness (miller 2005; mackerron & mourato, 2013; townsend and weerasuriya 2010). while mackerron and mourato’s (2013) empirical study and townsend and weerasuriya’s (2010) review of existing studies are primarily concerned with the benefits accruing to human mental health and well being, a growing body of literature has focused more directly on the mutual benefits that accrue to both human and nonhuman animals. thus, louv’s (2019) most recent book, our wild calling: how connecting with animals can transform our lives and save theirs, makes a specific case for reconnecting with other animal species not only to overcome human alienation and loneliness but also in order to protect, promote, and create a sustainable habitat for all creatures on earth. this argument shifts human attention outwards, enlarging the locus of concern to encompass a more empathetic approach to the wellbeing of the non human animals with whom we share our planet. we have dual purposes, then, for engaging with experiences of nature: on the one hand, promoting species flourishing, while at the same time, promoting human well being. appleby literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 7 the role of language and literacy an interest in humananimals relationships, and concern about the often deleterious effects of humans on other animals and our shared habitat, have been taken up in a range of popular and academic studies in language and literacy. in the media, george monbiot (2017) argues that the language we use to describe – and therefore perceive – the natural world needs renovation, to more accurately reflect the wonder and beauty of nature, and urges the use of more precise language for ‘climate change’, for example, to recognise the current state of catastrophic ‘climate breakdown’. in applied linguistics studies, guy cook and alison sealey (2017) argue that the anthropocentric language we use reflects significant changes in the relationships between humans and other animals that have, in turn, come about as a consequence of human population growth, increased consumption of natural resources, and environmental degradation. also in applied linguistics, arran stibbe (2001, 2012, 2014) has written extensively about the ways in which english language obscures, distorts, and damages our relationship with other animals and the natural world. with the promotion of ‘ecolinguitics’, stibbe (2014) argues for a discursive shift away from destructive discourses that erase the natural world and the adoption of discourses that ‘begin vividly representing the natural world in ways which inspire people to take actions which protect and preserve it’, because ‘if the natural world is ignored, is erased from discourse, it will be physically erased, and so, ultimately, will we’ (p. 599600). the role of language and its use in exploring the natural world has also been a focus for dickinson (2013, 2016) in her field study of ecocultural conversations between adults and children. dickinson argues that going outside into wild nature – as if nature were somehow already separated from humans – must always be complemented by an inward shift in the way we think about and perceive nature by exploring the cultural, economic, and political discourses of alienation. in this regard, dickinson identifies poverty, racial segregation, and rampant overconsumption as contributing factors in the experience of alienation from nature. she recommends that conventional practices of engagement with nature through scientific framing, for example through taxonomic categorisation and naming, should be accompanied by nontraditional communication practices that value emotional, aesthetic, and sensory expression in order to reposition humannature relations. in these new modes of communication, nature becomes an agentive ‘partner in dialogue, not just a voiceless object’ (dickinson 2016, p. 41). the call to address the problem of alienation in this way, by incorporating an exploration of its cultural and symbolic dimensions, points to possibilities for a literacy education that engages with nature in multiple ways. a small number of language and literacy educators have taken up this challenge in a variety of ways. stibbe (2004, 2008), for example, has proposed a range of classroom activities based on an ecocritical discourse analysis of texts in advertising, complemented by other activities inspired by texts from zen, buddhist and taoist traditions that present alternative ways of appreciating nature. taking a different approach, evans (2006) describes a contentbased animal issues course for and english program in a japanese university. this course aimed to improve students’ english skills while, at the same time, deepening their knowledge on a variety of issues to do with ‘endangered animals, wildlife trafficking, pets and society, zoos, whaling, and animal research’ (evans 2006, p. 171). in a related body of work, research studies both internationally and in the australian context have focused on children’s environmental and placebased education. somerville and green (2015), for example, take up indigenous knowledges and artsbased approaches in their exploration of young children’s learning about language, literacy, and the natural world in australia. comber (2016) also focuses on australian children’s development of language and literacy through a critical engagement with place. my own interest is located at the intersection of adult secondlanguage literacy education and critical animal studies, where there are fewer examples of pedagogically focused research to inspire classroom practice. it is to my own work in this adult context i now turn. appleby literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 8 an entangled pedagogy for environmental literacy as a teacher of adult language and literacy, and as a teacher educator in this field, i have been concerned to try and bring some of these ideas about the importance of the natural world into my own classroom practice in order to offer adult learners of english as an additional language a means of thinking about and engaging with their local environments. i have argued elsewhere (appleby 2017) for the importance of an environmental focus in language and literacy education with older international students in australia and with refugee communities who may have been forced to flee their homelands as a consequence of environmental degradation and climate change. moreover, an environmental focus for these groups of students is important in order to foster an understanding of natural ecologies in a new location and to encourage engagement with the transformative power of nature. of course, not everyone may be so keen on getting to know local wildlife. people’s connections to nature and interest in the environment and wildlife will differ according to age and cultural history, and past experiences. in light of these considerations, schuttler et al (2019, p. 13) recommend the need for ‘culturally sensitive opportunities to engage diverse constituents with local wildlife’. in circumstances where direct contact with wildlife outside the classroom can be inappropriate or problematic, an environmental ethos can be engendered through educational experiences that engage learners with the cultural meanings attached to specific fauna and expressed, for example, in the arts and folklore (hopper et al 2019). as previously discussed in relation to dickinson’s work, learners may also be engaged through ‘ecocultural conversations’ that bridge the humannature divide by attending to emotional and cultural – rather than purely scientific – connections amongst species (dickinson 2013, 2016). both these avenues of engagement can highlight and harness the central role of language in reconnecting humans with their own natural environment. as an illustrative example of my own literacy work with an environmental focus, i have described (appleby 2017, 2019) how a particular incident of humananimal interaction appearing in the news media became the basis for english for academic purposes literacy teaching with a group of international students in australia. the focal story in that case was an encounter, filmed during a world surfing league event, between australian champion surfer mick fanning and a great white shark in south africa. i collected a variety of texts reporting on this incident in range of different media and together with my students explored the shifts in register as the texts moved across spoken and written modes (see figure 1). while these texts became a language and literacy teaching resource they also served to open up classroom discussions about the importance of sharks in healthy oceans. figure 1. register shift in texts about humanshark encounters appleby literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 9 the series of lessons was also designed to model a process of inquiry activated by personal interest in my own local environment. as a keen ocean swimmer i had become familiar with various shark species, i was already curious about the alarm expressed in media reports of shark ‘attacks’ in australian waters, and i was ambivalent about the efficacy of various shark control measures. my exploration of environmentally engaged texts was initially inspired by my own experience, curiosity, and inquiries; the collection of texts then gave rise to a form of teaching and learning that i have called ‘entangled pedagogy’ because it focuses on the transdisciplinary entanglement of humans in the natural world. an entangled pedagogy starts with small stories, with particular incidents, personal curiosities or puzzles, expands to explore how these stories are represented in discourse, and in turn considers the effects of those discourses on the ways in which we construct, understand, and respond to the world around us. looking at birds my second example of entangled pedagogy is inspired by a more common experience of humananimal relationships. for many english language and literacy learners, particularly those in urban contexts where most humans live, the most likely opportunity for interaction with local wildlife will be through an encounter with birds. birds offer us an opportunity to notice, attend to, and be curious and caring about other species with whom we share the planet. birds have already been incorporated into the practice of english language and multimodal literacy education in a project reported by cummins et al (2015) where primary school students linked their learning about migrating canada geese to their own experiences of migration and belonging in two geographically distant homes. before turning to other practical examples of birds’ involvement in literacy education, however, i want to first comment on their significance in planetary wellbeing and their popularity as fellow species: both of these points are important considerations in selecting our focus for literacy teaching. beyond their value as literacy friends, each bird we encounter has intrinsic value as the individual subject of a life, a being in pursuit of its own desires, with feelings of pleasure and pain, and with emotional connections to kin and other species. collectively, the wide distribution of birds across the continents is an expression of their ability to find a home, often alongside humans, in both rural and urban spaces. moreover, birds increasingly draw attention as indicators of environmental crisis, and in recent decades scientists have recorded a staggering decline in bird populations as a result of human interference. human use of pesticides, consequent insect population collapse, and the destruction of natural habitats across the world have led to a loss of bird abundance, with ‘major implications for ecosystem integrity [and] the conservation of wildlife more broadly’ (rosenberg et al 2019). scientists point out that the problem of bird population decline is not restricted to species that are nearing extinction and argue that the current loss of common and widespread species will disproportionately affect both ecosystem health and human wellbeing (simmonds, watson, salazar and maron 2019; see also birdlife australia 2015). in recent years, one conspicuous measure of the importance of birds in the lives of humans – beyond the interests of conservation scientists, ornithologists and dedicated birdwatchers – can be seen in the popularity of the ‘bird of the year’ poll conducted by the guardian in australia. reflecting the two poles of bird life discussed in conservation literature, both rare and common bird species are strongly represented in this australian poll. in 2019 the highlyendangered blackthroated finch, poephila cincta, won the poll with over 11,000 votes, almost 8,000 votes more than the secondplaced bird, the nocturnal tawny frogmouth, podargis strigoides (zhou 2019). it is reasonable to assume that most humans in australia have never seen a blackthroated finch in the wild because it has become extinct throughout most of australia; indeed, most humans are unlikely to have even heard of this bird prior to hearing or reading reports of its endangerment by a proposed giant coal mine in the country’s north. with one of its two small remaining colonies threatened by the coal mine, the blackthroated finch had become an icon for the extinction crisis facing australia’s birds and a poignant symbol of the planet’s environmental emergency. in this instance, it is the appleby literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 10 cultural meanings attached to the tiny bird, rather than its familiarity as a common backyard species, that engendered human affection and awareness of its significance. in contrast, the overall winner in the 2017 inaugural poll with close to 20,000 votes was the australian magpie, cracticus tibicen a magnificent black and white native songbird that is widespread across the australian continent and one of the most common species likely to be seen and recognised by the majority of australian humans residing in rural and urban environments (wahlquist 2017). the australian magpie is not related to the eurasian magpie, pica pica, which is found throughout europe and asia; the australian bird was mistakenly named ‘magpie’ by early europeans because of superficial similarities in both species’ black and white plumage. the australian magpies are loved for their rich songs, their intriguing behaviours, and their ability to form friendships with humans; they are highly intelligent and resourceful, having flourished alongside humans despite, or even because of, land clearing and the replacement of native vegetation with lawns. the australian magpie has been celebrated in a vast array of texts, from news media to poems and songs, from indigenous creation stories to posts on dedicated social media sites. given their widespread appearance and appeal, attending to the australian magpie offers many opportunities for an entangled engagement with literacy. textual encounters with australian magpies just as media stories about sharks provide the textual backdrop to australian summers, so too media stories about the australian magpie herald the arrival of spring. in this section, i discuss how such stories in a range of texts can play an important part in literacy and numeracy education, and can encourage ecocultural conversations about local wildlife. for new residents in australia, knowledge about the australian magpie is also crucial for another reason. despite its popularity, the australian magpie attracts mostly negative media coverage during the spring nesting season when some ten percent of male magpies choose to defend chicks in their nests by ‘swooping’ humans who encroach on their territory. although swooping only occurs in early spring and is isolated to specific nesting sites, it can cause alarm and injuries, and therefore receives consistent media attention as spring approaches. in fact, australian ecologist darryl jones (2013) has gone so far as to identify magpie swooping as ‘the most significant humanwildlife conflict in the towns and cities of this country’. in this sense, australian magpies and sharks have something in common: they are both known to interact with humans in ways that put humans at a disadvantage. what better topic to include in local literacy education through a thorough and sensitive exploration of australia’s iconic songbird? a preliminary collection of texts from news media published in early spring can be a useful resource for literacy learning in which students might focus on the ways in which australian magpies are represented, the typical narratives of humanmagpie encounters, and the language of advice about how to avoid becoming a target of magpie swooping (see, for example, thorne 2015; dye 2016; phelan 2018). students of english for academic purposes can focus on shifts in register and the reliance on evidence to build an argument when they compare ‘swooping stories’ in daily news media and in the online academic news source, the conversation (for example, jones 2013; bateman 2019). students will find a further shift in register if they explore the way australian magpies are represented in traditional research articles published in academic journals. in this regard, a research report that discusses the way print media represents human magpie conflict (van vuuren, o’keefe and jones 2016) provides a useful means of exploring the formal language features and structure of a traditional report. it can also be useful to narrow our focus from a broad study of texts about humanmagpie interaction to a particular small story that raises a range of larger issues of potential significance for literacy learners and educators. one such small story appeared in local and international news media in 2019, with reports that an australian magpie had been shot by the hills shire council in northwestern sydney (see, for example, appleby literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 11 taylor 2019; bbc news 2019). the reports stated that the council had received 40 complaints over three years about the magpie which was infamous for its swooping attacks on humans, mostly cyclists, along a particular stretch of road. because the australian magpie is a protected native species in australia, the council had to be granted a special permit from the national parks and wildlife service in order to shoot and kill the bird. the texts describing this particular incident offer many avenues for literacy education in the mode of critical entangled pedagogy (see, for example, bbc news 2019; cockburn 2019; drury 2019; heathcote 2019; lagan 2019; taylor 2019). to begin with, each of the reports presents a number of participants, some with colourful descriptors, and each with a role to play in the unfolding drama. classroom activities focusing on two of the reports (cockburn 2019 and taylor 2019), adapted as appropriate for the level of learners, could be designed to identify each of the participants and their part in the story: how is each human and nonhuman participant described (see the list below)? what did they do in this event? how would they communicate – orally and in writing – with each of the other participants? whose perspective is the most important in this event, and why? participants in the magpie shooting story: the magpie, ‘infamous for its attacks’ and nicknamed ‘the windsor road monster’ (cockburn 2019) the council, who tried various alternative methods to reduce the risks posed by the magpie, and whose final ‘course of action was not taken lightly’ (taylor 2019) the nwps, who described the bird as ‘very aggressive and uncharacteristically territorial’ and ‘a significant risk to public safety’ (taylor 2019) peter danieluk, a resident who claims the bird’s attacks ‘were responsible for giving him a heart attack’ (cockburn 2019) the animal justice party (ajp), ‘disgusted an iconic australian species had been targeted’ (cockburn 2019) heidi vasilevskis (ajp member), who is ‘outraged and upset beyond words’ and said the ‘bird’s death would put a whole family of magpies at risk’, and (cockburn 2019) these reports note that the magpie shooting prompted an outcry against the council, thereby raising crucial questions for students to consider in regard to the morality of shooting, and opening a space for debate and response from the various perspectives represented in the texts. moreover, the incident points to a wealth of broader cultural concerns for discussion and debate in the literacy classroom, particularly amongst adult learners who may have experienced disadvantage and discrimination: what does the story tell us about issues of belonging, territory, invasion, empathy, protection of home and family, and the coexistence of multiple species? which participant/s have the most compelling rights? how could these rights be expressed and communicated? students could also examine the range of texts reporting the incident to identify the different ways in which the magnitude of the event is emphasised, and the ways in which an emotion of fear is evoked. for example, lagan (2019) in the times, signifies the magnitude of the ‘attack’ by noting that ‘adult magpies are large birds with a wingspan that can extend beyond 33 inches’, and evokes an emotion of fear by claiming that such magpie attacks ‘echo alfred hitchcock’s 1963 the birds’ in which humans in one town ‘are killed by thousands of birds’. students looking across the range of texts might then discuss which of the reports is the most balanced, and how such balance is achieved. ecocultural texts beyond news media texts, literacy education can also find valuable inspiration and resources in social media sites and artsbased texts that embrace and celebrate the rich cultural heritage surrounding the australian appleby literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 12 magpie. this cultural heritage could be explored through the swoopyboiz instagram site, which provides a comical celebration of humanmagpie interactions, and through the facebook page the magpie whisperer which documents and communicates ‘feelgood experiences’ with magpies for over 150,000 followers. serving a different purpose with a range of different text types, the magpiealert website (https://www. magpiealert.com/) allows members of the public to record swooping incidents via an interactive map and a short narrative account. the site carries safety information and aggregates the incident data to produce a set of ‘magpie attack statistics’ displayed in a range of colourful graphs suitable for educational activities in literacy and numeracy. social media sites such as swoopyboiz and magpiealert need to be introduced cautiously, lest they risk engendering a needless fear of australian magpies amongst some literacy learners, particularly newly arrived migrants and refugees. however, a range of complementary cultural texts can be introduced to encourage more positive sensory, aesthetic, and emotional associations with this popular bird. it is the sensoryaestheticemotional connection evoked by the sound of the australian magpie’s song – a unique and distinctive warbling or carolling – that is most often referenced in poems and other narrative texts about the australian magpie. amongst these texts, one that i find particularly valuable for multimodal literacy education is denis glover’s poem ‘the magpies’ (glover 1964), recently translated into a song performed by wellknown australian singersongwriter, paul kelly, on his album ‘thirteen ways to look at birds’ (kelly 2019). the poem/song is a narrative that tells of two young australians who live and work on their wheat farm for many years but, as a consequence of drought and crop failure, eventually have to surrender their farm to the ‘mortgage corporation’. throughout the narrative we hear in a recurring refrain of the australian magpies’ song, translated into english language by glover: ‘quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle’. a literacy lesson based on the poem could begin with the sound of the australian magpie’s own song, recordings of which are readily available on youtube, followed by questions to elicit learners’ knowledge and experiences of australian magpies, and to hear learners’ stories about other birds that may be culturally significant. a series of activities can then be designed to scaffold learners’ engagement with the narrative text of the song and poem. in preparation for exploring the text with a group of teacher education students, i developed one possible series of scaffolding activities, including a set of drawings to be matched with the relevant words from the text and sequenced as learners listened to the song; this activity was followed by a range of conventional tasks to focus on the narrative genre structure and specific lexical and grammatical features. the text also lends itself to a close reading to explore, for example, how the natural environment is rendered, and how the passing of time is symbolically represented. the magpies narrative is then open to critical inquiry, with questions about the experiences of the two main characters and their entanglement with, and eventual enforced separation from nature; the economics of housing and the power of mortgage corporations in australia; practices of food production and sustainable farming in australia and elsewhere; the causes and effects of drought and climate change; and the significance of the birds singing throughout the changes that occur for the people and institutions in the story. both intellectual and emotional responses are called for here, with language used and extended to express the range of human thoughts and feelings. the poem/song also lends itself to collaborative writing extension activities that translate and rework the narrative into different genres for a range of different purposes and audiences, and collaborative research activities – in textual and experiential modes – designed to encourage students in exploring their local avifauna. concluding thoughts in recent years, many words relating to natural phenomena, creatures and plants have been lost from english language dictionaries designed for children, reflecting a broader alienation from nature that afflicts both children and adults in the modern world. a sense of alienation from local environments may be particularly appleby literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 28, no. 1 december 2020 13 https://www.magpiealert.com/ https://www.magpiealert.com/ acute for international students, newly arrived migrants, and recent refugees who find themselves in a new land with unfamiliar flora and fauna. adult language and literacy educators can respond to the problems of alienation in their own practices by designing literacy programs that invite a reengagement with nature at a local level. this article has outlined a series of lessons for adult learners that focus on textual encounters with australian magpies, iconic birds that are widespread and commonly seen across australia and which have a complex and complicated relationship with humans. it is the deeply localised nature of these particular humanbird encounters that makes the australian magpie a welcome part of literacy education, and the lessons outlined here are designed in the hope that students will gain a greater understanding of local wildlife at the same time as they extend their literacy abilities. wherever literacy education occurs, we need to look for ways that fellow species in our local environments can be invited into an entangled pedagogy in order to enlarge our engagement with, and 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https://www.deakin.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/310747/beyond-blue-to-green-literature-review.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/magpie-edges-out-white-ibis-and-kookaburra-as-australian-bird-of-the-year https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/magpie-edges-out-white-ibis-and-kookaburra-as-australian-bird-of-the-year https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/15/black-throated-finch-wins-2019-bird-of-the-year-as-tawny-frogmouth-comes-second https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/15/black-throated-finch-wins-2019-bird-of-the-year-as-tawny-frogmouth-comes-second microsoft word furness_formatted_230613.docx   l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 1 n o 1 2 0 1 3 33   principles and practices in four new zealand family focused adult literacy programs: towards wellbeing in diverse communities   jane furness         abstract the field of family literacy, both theory and practice, has much to offer adult literacy education. however, family approaches in adult literacy are under-theorised and underdeveloped if the holistic wellbeing of the intended participants in programs based on these approaches is the primary concern. this article discusses one dimension of a larger study which explored the wellbeing-related effects of participation in four family focused adult literacy programs in new zealand. this article discusses the principles and practices that were common across the programs. the study found that, despite differences in program content, foci and approaches, common principles and practices reflected shared values and beliefs about literacy and about people which shaped the program design and participants’ experiences of the program. i reaffirm the ideological nature of literacy, highlighting the necessity of paying attention to values and beliefs in literacy programs in order that the effects of involvement in them are in the best interests of individual participants, their families and their communities. introduction despite little progress in new zealand on government policy to support family focused approaches in adult literacy and numeracy education, such approaches have been part of the new zealand adult literacy milieu for over a decade. in an era in which the importance of meaningful context for successful adult learning is well understood, family is recognised as one important arena in which adults might develop their literacy and numeracy abilities. family is named in government adult literacy policy documents as a relevant context for adult learning alongside the workplace and resettlement (tertiary education commission 2008). the first use of the term ‘family literacy programs’ in new zealand appears to have been in the adult literacy sector, although many examples of family focused approaches are to be found in the education field more generally (for example, hohepa and mcnaughton 2003, mcnaughton 2001, phillips and mcnaughton 1990). early interest in family approaches in adult literacy contexts coincided with heightened activity by the new zealand government   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         34 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   following the international adult literacy survey (ials) in 1996 (walker, udy and pole 1997). the survey showed that over 1 million new zealand adults aged from 16 and 65 years had levels of literacy and numeracy below those thought necessary for participation in a knowledge-based economy and society. this was reflected in results such as 51% of all adults recording scores below level 3 on the ials scale (the level deemed necessary for participation in the economy and society) in document literacy. disproportionate numbers of māori (the indigenous people of new zealand) and pacific islands people who have settled or been raised in new zealand featured in the ials results. for example, 70% of māori adults and 66% of pacific adults were below level 3 on the measure of document literacy. the extent of the problem in terms of numbers of adults with low skills led to the development of the new zealand adult literacy strategy (the adult literacy strategy) (ministry of education 2001) and the inclusion of a foundation learning strand in the tertiary education strategy (ministry of education 2002). these strategies led to a decade of infrastructural development aimed at improving the quality of and access to adult literacy education, mainly within the learning for living project (see for example, ministry of education 2004). whilst results had improved in the adult literacy and life skills survey (alls) conducted in 2006, mid-way through the development period, they were still poor, both overall and for māori and pacific peoples (satherley, lawes and sok 2008). in document literacy, for example, 43% of all adults, 64% of māori adults and 57% of pacific adults were still below level 3. whilst working for the tertiary education commission, i became interested in the potential of family approaches to relate to the concerns and interests of people in their daily lives and, therefore, to be attractive to adults and families who might not otherwise actively engage in literacy and numeracy learning. later, i analysed 84 successful applications to the 2006 tertiary education commission adult foundation learning pool. this fund supported almost all english language-based adult literacy education in new zealand above esol (english for speakers of other languages) level. i found that elements of family approaches featured in large numbers of adult literacy programs in proportional terms (furness 2006, 2009). sixty-eight percent (57) of these programs involved different generations, expected to benefit different generations or included everyday literacy beyond preparation for further learning or work. in addition, a further eight government-funded and three privately funded adult literacy programs involved family (including extended family) and benefits to family were anticipated. overall, research on new zealand programs had shown outcomes participants appeared to have valued. these outcomes had been f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 35   quite wide-ranging and some ‘flow-on’ to other family members had been documented (benseman and sutton 2005, may, hill and donaghy 2004). further, it was clear that adults are attracted to literacy education that has a family focus (may et al 2004). these findings supported the idea that family approaches might help achieve the sought-after improvement in adult literacy and numeracy levels. simultaneously, i was concerned about the direction of adult literacy policy and the consequent shape of funding frameworks. this concern spanned two major areas of contention in the literacy field more generally. the first was the extent to which literacy (and numeracy) is seen as a singular phenomenon and as a set of skills (the dominant view) or as a multiple phenomenon in which there are many meanings of literacy that are embedded in the uses to which the literacies are put (the social practice view of literacy). the second was the extent to which the purposes of literacy and numeracy are seen as social or as economic (barton, hamilton and ivanič 2000, graff and duffy 2008, street 1984, 2008). both these areas were relevant to issues in adult literacy policy raised by māori adult literacy educators. deeply concerned about the failure of the adult literacy strategy to include a māori perspective, the report of the māori adult literacy educators working party (2001) put forward a different way of thinking about literacy expressed in the context of the differing worldviews of māori and pākehā (non-māori), rights of and obligations to māori under the treaty of waitangi and nationhood. for māori, literacy includes both english and māori language; oral linguistic traditions, performance and texts; and ‘reading’ other text forms such as tribally significant land features (hohepa and mcnaughton 2002, māori adult literacy educators working party 2001). in policy documents, discussion of adult literacy and numeracy has been largely skills focused but broadly couched in both economic and social terms. for example, in the tertiary education strategy and the learning for living project, the term ‘foundation skills’ was not linked exclusively to work. parenting and supporting children’s learning was a recurring theme alongside work, job acquisition and further education (ministry of education 2004, 2008). funding streams targeted literacy acquisition in the community as well as in workplaces and industry training certificate-level education. however, the social rationale for literacy development appears to be less strong than in the past and a stronger work link is appearing (ministry of education 2010). at the same time, and more hopefully, commitment to improving māori and pacific adults’ involvement and success in education through using appropriate approaches to attract, retain and ensure their success, is being more intensely articulated (tertiary   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         36 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   education commission 2008). this appears to leave scope for variation in program design and delivery. these points bring me to the notions of social justice and wellbeing. social justice refers to the fair and equitable distribution of power and resources in society (nelson and prilleltensky 2005). it includes the concept of cultural justice which draws attention to the rights and obligations of ‘collectivities’ or sections of communities that may be characterised by, for example, gender, ethnicity, social class, social role and (dis)abilities (griffiths 1998, nairn 2007). struggles over whose perspective (whether individual or group) counts are implicit in issues of social justice. such struggles are evident in the wider literacy field and are relevant in relation to any study of family approaches in adult literacy education. drawing on key concepts in the field of community psychology (my academic background), i considered that a broadly conceived notion of wellbeing and citizenship might provide a lens to view family focused adult literacy programs from the perspective of their implications for social justice in relation to those for whom such programs are intended (nelson & prilleltensky 2005). as well as being fundamental to humanity, the wellbeing of all citizens is also, at least ostensibly, the overarching objective of government in a modern democratic nation state (ministry of social development 2008, 2010). the ministry of social development has acknowledged the viewpoint of durie (an authority on māori health) that outcomes important in māori wellbeing include some which are distinctively māori (durie 2006, ministry of social development 2008). the corpus of new zealand research on family approaches in adult literacy education is small (benseman 2006, may et al 2004). government and research attention has focused mainly on programs which are adaptations of the kenan model prominent in the us (perkins and mendel 1989). however, problems have been identified with this approach from a social justice perspective (auerbach 1989). further, there has been no widespread discussion on what the aims of family focused approaches might be, the different ways family approaches might be delivered and what approaches would be appropriate in the diverse cultural communities that characterise new zealand. this situation poses a risk that yet-to-bedeveloped policy to support family approaches or family literacy more generally, and the practices that might follow, may not be in the best interests of those for whom such programs are intended. this observation foregrounds the role of values and beliefs in shaping policy and practice. policymakers, program designers and those who deliver programs need to think carefully about what these values and beliefs are. in the larger study to which this article relates, i explored the outcomes of four different models of family focused adult literacy programs f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 37   in relation to their contribution to the wellbeing of the adult participants, their families and their communities. in the current article i discuss common principles and practices that were evident in the study programs. the principles and practices reflected values and beliefs about people and about literacy. these programs, which differed in structure, content, aims, foci and ways they were family focused, achieved literacy gains at the same time as they contributed to the wellbeing of the adult participants, their families and their communities (furness 2012). the overall intention of the programs to improve participants’ wellbeing was clear, a strong reminder of the ideological nature of literacy work. this highlights the salience of which values and beliefs underpin programs. the current article underscores family focused literacy programs as ideological, showcases the relevance of values and beliefs in programs, and highlights the need for program principles and practices to be based on holistic concern for the wellbeing of individuals, families and communities. the notion of wellbeing used in the larger study, and which therefore underlies this article, includes people’s objective and subjective experiences of physical and mental health. it includes social-emotional, psychological and cognitive wellbeing and, for some people, spiritual wellbeing, as well as material conditions such as access to food, clothing and shelter (bornstein, davidson, keyes and moore 2003). it goes beyond meeting basic needs, being connected to what people value and see as important in life (durie 1998, nelson and prilleltensky 2005, rochford 2004). it includes different cultural interpretations of what it is and how it is achieved (durie 1998, mulitalo-lauta 2001). supportive relationships and environments and concern for the collective good are considered necessary for wellbeing at the individual and communal/societal levels (nelson and prilleltensky 2005). one of the difficulties in progressing the development of family approaches in adult literacy education in new zealand has been the ambiguous use of the terms ‘family’, ‘literacy’, ‘family literacy’ and ‘family literacy programs’ and failure to recognise and accommodate different meanings of these terms. before presenting the principles and practices, i therefore also explain the differing conceptions of family literacy seen internationally, in new zealand and in this article. family literacy across the international literature, the term ‘family literacy’ has three distinct though overlapping dimensions often associated with it. these are the literacy practices that occur naturally within families, family influences on children’s literacy development and programs aimed at enhancing the literacy abilities of family members (tracey and morrow 2006, wasik, dobbins and herrmann 2001). these dimensions include the literacy   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         38 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   practices of family members themselves, studies of and theories about the literacy practices of family members, and evaluations of family literacy programs (brooks, pahl, pollard and rees 2008). meanings of ‘family literacy’ are further augmented by the varying definitions and viewpoints associated with the terms ‘family’ and ‘literacy’. for example ‘family’ may mean parents and their children, extended family and/or unrelated people with whom there is a family-like relationship (barton 1997, taylor 1997). the abilities and capacities of families may be viewed from different standpoints; for example, families may be seen as having strengths or has having deficits which need rectifying (auerbach 1989, 1995, purcell-gates 2000). ‘literacy’ may be defined as neutral skills residing ‘in [people’s] own heads’ (gee 2008:2) or as social practice in which the meaning of literacy lies in the social and relational contexts of its use (barton and hamilton 1998). the purposes of literacy may be viewed as enhancing economic progress, enhancing social wellbeing or both. family literacy programs internationally, family literacy programs have predominantly focused on parents’ support of children’s school-based literacy skill development, emphasizing how adults can assist their children’s school learning and including how to encourage and model literacy behaviours valued by schools, a process through which adults may enhance their own abilities. other sought-after outcomes include parents’ completion of school qualifications or gaining employment. a skills-based, economic focus has dominated programs, alongside an assumption that improving the literacy abilities of families will ‘cure’ wide-ranging social problems (darling 1993). despite often-made claims to the contrary, programs still tend to be based on deficit views of families and their literacies (auerbach 1995). however, there are also programs which take a broader approach, have a strengthsbased view of families (hannon 2000, may et al 2004) and consider that societies’ problems require structural solutions to which family literacy programs can contribute. the purposes of family literacy programs may be seen as supporting children’s school literacy development and learning, supporting adults’ literacy development for their own purposes or both. family literacy programs in new zealand literacy and numeracy education efforts entitled ‘family literacy programs’ are relatively new in new zealand. however, as my 2006 analysis showed, many adult literacy programs have involved family members of different generations, recognised the benefits of adults’ participation in literacy development for their wider families, and/or actively sought such benefits (furness 2006, 2009). further, other programs with a long history in f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 39   new zealand, such as the home interaction program for parents and youngsters (hippy), may be considered as family literacy programs in a broad definition. the concept of family focused literacy education holds much intuitive, fiscal and culturally located appeal. adult literacy education providers and government officials have shown interest and there is evidence that such approaches are particularly attractive to māori and pacific people (may et al 2004). nevertheless, new zealand government policy and funding has been inadequate if a flourishing family focused literacy education sector is desired. the larger study sought to add to the body of local and international research and to encourage discussion about appropriate models of family focused adult literacy programs for new zealand. the study challenged commonly articulated conceptions about what family literacy programs are and what they are for, investigated some of the different ways family approaches were already being undertaken here, and examined their outcomes (furness 2012). one of the purposes of the investigation was to better understand the range within family approaches that may be useful given our differing communities, before any policy development locked providers into approaches that limited, rather than expanded, the achievement of desirable outcomes for adults, families and communities. in the study and in this article, ‘family’ is defined as related people and/or unrelated people who are thought of as family (mcpherson 2003). ‘literacy’ is viewed as social practice which includes skills. it is a multiple construct which includes many literacies and many modes of literacy (barton, hamilton and ivanič 2000, kress and jewitt 2003). ‘family literacy’ is all the reading, writing and communicating that occurs naturally in the everyday social practices of families (hannon 2000, harrison 1995, leichter 1997) and in their community interactions as they go about the business of daily living (barton 1997, hannon 2000, taylor 1997). ‘family literacy programs’ are organised efforts which bring family members together or which work separately with adults and children for the purposes, or in the expectation of, enhancing the literacy of family members (hannon 2000). methodology and method the research approach was critical-interpretive within a social constructionist paradigm. the study findings and conclusions are an interpretation of the phenomenon investigated (crotty 1998, denzin and giardina 2009, denzin and lincoln 2008). the study drew on māori or pacific-appropriate methodologies where relevant (bishop 1996, mutch 2005). this was essential to preclude continuation of the colonising effects of   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         40 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   past and much present research undertaken with māori by non-māori researchers. ethical and valid research in māori settings requires enacted respect for māori values, beliefs and worldviews and for the processes by which māori promote, protect and develop them. this meant entering the communities in which i sought to conduct the research through their support structures, seeking guidance from the ‘caretakers’ of these communities on my approach, presenting myself face to face, hosting and taking care of people in these communities and conducting the research well so that it might be valued by the research community and valuable to participating communities (mead 1996 and smith 1992, cited in powick 2002). participatory research approaches were used in all settings. research questions the overarching research question was ‘what is the contribution of adults’ participation in family literacy programs to the wellbeing of individuals, families and communities?’ specifically, the study asked: 1. what program effects occurred? 2. who was affected and how? 3. how were the effects linked to wellbeing? 4. what seemed to be the important program elements for achieving beneficial effects? 5. what ways can family literacy programs be delivered? participants could add questions. one program manager wanted to know about how important gaining a qualification was to program participants. program selection potential programs for the study were found from my 2006 analysis of adult literacy programs (furness 2006, 2009). first, i identified the most family focused programs – those in which adults formally participated, children were also engaged in some way and both adults and children were expected to benefit – of which there were 42. then, using a ‘theoretical sampling’ approach (silverman 2005), i identified those programs which also: 1. were well-established or were offered by a well-established provider; 2. were most likely to have a time-bound cohort of learners; 3. were geographically spread and contributed to a rural-urban mix; 4. were primarily for speakers of english as their first language or above esol level; 5. had been the subject of no or very little previous research; and f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 41   6. varied in their school and community links. nine programs which best met these criteria were approached, from which three were initially selected. in one case, relevant māori iwi (tribal) authorities were approached first. a fourth program which had been involved in previous research was added later as this enabled some data from a five-year period to be included and extended the geographic spread to the south island of new zealand. the four selected programs were wellestablished or were new programs offered by long-term providers and were above esol level. they varied in location, language focus, previous involvement in research and the nature of their community links as shown in table 1. in this table and in the following text, ‘benley’ refers to the benley whānau literacy program, ‘hpp-based’ refers to the hei awhiawhi tamariki ki te panui pukapuka (hpp)-based whānau literacy program, ‘ormond’ refers to the ormond whānau literacy program and ‘preston’ refers to the preston family literacy program. whānau is the māori word for ‘family’. all program names are pseudonyms. table 1: location, language focus, research status and community links of study programs location language focus previously researched community links benley large city, nia english above esol level no school-based hppbased rural community, ni english in bilingual setting no school-based ormond small town, ni english and māori no communitybased preston small town, sib english yes communitybased note a north island note b south island participants the ‘caretakers’ of each program community spoke first with participants in the program obtaining agreement in principle to join the study or agreement for me to talk with them. conversations with them and the relative informality of early data collection processes provided opportunities for them to get to know me. consent processes included the right to withdraw at any time which could be done through the caretakers. of the 19 participants in the study (54.5% of all participants in the   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         42 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   programs) eight were māori, seven were from pacific islands, three were pākehā and one was indian. aged from 19-65 years, all participants were women except for a cook islands man. fourteen participants were raising their children (and a niece in one case), two were raising or supporting the education of their grandchildren, two did not have children or grandchildren and one was expecting her first child. the number and ethnicity of the participants in the study from each program are shown in table 2. table 2: number and ethnicity of study participants in each program māori pacific pākehā indian benley 4a hpp-based 3 ormond 5 1 preston 3b 3 total 8 7 3 1 note a 3 samoan, 1 cook islander note b tongan   data collection and analysis the initial data gathering processes with participants included social network mapping and discussion of social roles and related literacy tasks. these were further explored in the first interview in which views on literacy and numeracy, family, community and wellbeing were also gathered. this information provided reference points in interviews conducted six and 18 months later in which participants reflected on their experiences of the program and its effects. information was gathered from program documentation and program staff on the purposes and delivery of the programs. staff were asked for their beliefs about literacy and how people learn, and their views on the program’s contribution to individual, family and community wellbeing. later interviews with program staff explored changes they observed in participants. participants also named other key informants (people who knew them well such as family members) whom i interviewed in relation to changes they had observed in the participants. together, seventy-nine interviews were conducted varying in length from 15 minutes with children to two hours with adults. interviews took place in a range of settings including school offices, in a kindergarten and in people’s homes, often in the presence of young children. almost all interviews were f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 43   audio-recorded. recorded interviews were transcribed and checked with the interviewees. field notes were recorded during 54 days on site which included time spent formally observing 12 program sessions. such observations aided understanding of how the programs worked. i also surveyed the program records of the adult participants’ learning progress, their children’s school progress records and records of progress of children they tutored (where applicable). this information contributed to understanding program effects. repeated interviews in which insights could be revisited and meaning clarified – processes of ‘spiral discourse’ and ‘dialogical reflexivity’ – enabled meaning to be co-constructed (bishop and glyn 1999). these approaches, combined with the use of multiple methods, allowed the researcher to build a composition or ‘bricolage’ (denzin and lincoln 2003) of what occurred and to construct an interpretation with which the participants agreed. the data collected through interviews and observations is summarised in table 3. table 3: observations, interviews and time on site per program no. of visits total no. of visits no. of formal observations on site no. of interviews benley 4 6 4 24 hpp-based 10 18 3 24 ormond 12 25 3 21 preston 2 5 2 10 total 26 54 12 79 latent theoretical thematic analysis (braun and clarke 2006) was applied to all the data. the analysis was driven by my theoretical and analytic interests reflected in the research questions, along with the broad and inclusive theorisations of ‘family’, ‘literacy’, ‘family literacy’ ‘family literacy programs’ and ‘wellbeing’ which underpinned the research. the analysis was at the latent level; that is, it went beyond the semantic (surface) content of the data to identify or examine the underlying ideas, assumptions and conceptualisations – or ideologies – that were theorised as shaping or informing the semantic content. a preliminary set of codes was developed from the theory and preliminary analysis of some data then used to code all data. next, coded chunks of data were transferred to data tables for more fine-grained analysis resulting in the codes being developed into potential themes. after checking that the themes ‘worked’ in relation to the coded   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         44 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   extracts and the entire data set, thematic maps were generated which were then further refined through repeated cycles of analysis and checking. for example, for the program analysis – the focus of this article – the process involved identifying from the data tables the key principles and practices evident in each program, then identifying themes and sub-themes, interconnections between them and, finally, overarching themes. the programs the benley whānau literacy program, located in a mainly pacific community in a large city, was run within, and in conjunction with, the community’s local preto year 13 school. english was an additional language of all but one of the program participants. this program ran on two half days per week for 16 weeks. parents, grandparents and carers were taught english reading, writing and numeracy strategies, which matched those that their children learned in school, and how to support their children with their school literacy and numeracy learning. other content included literacy related to the adults’ other roles and interests. the program took a critical stance overall, inviting participants to question the taken-for-granted in relation to schooling specifically and societal practices more generally. this was a family literacy program because it aimed to support adults to help their children’s learning and to support adults’ learning for their broader everyday purposes, it recognised the centrality of family in the community, and it fostered the possibility of the adults helping other children in the community in a family-like way. the hei awhiawhi tamariki ki te panui pukapuka-based whānau literacy program was located in a school in a small rural māori community. hei awhiawhi tamariki ki te panui pukapuka (hpp) is the real name of the children’s oral language program around which the adults’ program was built (atvars 2002). adults in the school’s community learned to use hpp with the school’s year one and two children who were below their chronological age in reading and oral language development. the adults learned about the theory supporting the approach and why various skills and knowledge taught and assessed by the school were considered important. while learning and using the program, the adults were encouraged to be questioning and creative; to reflect on their own abilities, interests and goals; and to apply their learning in their personal and family contexts. employed as teacher aides, other work in the school extended learning opportunities. this program ran in ten-week blocks with ongoing involvement encouraged. this was a family literacy program because the tutored children were usually members of the participants’ extended family, the adults practiced and used the skills with their own children, a family-like f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 45   approach characterised the school and all of the community were connected to one another. the ormond whānau literacy program was located in a town with a diverse population including a large māori community. involving mainly young māori mothers, this program aimed to help family members to help each other. it included twice-yearly 14-16 week programs run jointly with a local trust covering topics such as gardening, cooking and budgeting. driver’s license courses, crafts days, individualised literacy and numeracy tuition and help with developing curriculum vitae and such tasks as emailing took place in the centre where participants’ children were also welcome. participants varied their involvement as their circumstances changed. this was a family literacy program because of its focus on parenting, home management and the literacies of everyday life, along with the strong family focus of program staff and inclusion of family in the centre’s activities. the preston family literacy program was located in a predominantly pākehā community within which there was a small tongan community. this program brought together a group of women on one morning a week for organised activity that emphasised communication and social skills and provided opportunities for new experiences around which skills could be practiced. participants also had individualised literacy and numeracy tutoring connected to their personal interests and needs, and sometimes home visits. in addition, as an outreach, the program manager was building links with another extended tongan family to support their english literacy development and aspirations. the participants had varying involvement. this was a family literacy program because of its focus on the literacies of everyday family and community life and its involvement with whole families. findings and discussion while the programs differed from each other in content, foci and approaches, the study found many principles and practices held in common which reflected shared values and beliefs about literacy and about people (furness 2012). six principles and practices related to literacy and six related to people were found. names of people in the examples given are pseudonyms. principles and practices related to literacy 1. the dominant literacy is useful to have in some contexts. the study showed that, as was their purpose, the programs taught written text-based literacy in english, the dominant literacy in new zealand as in other western countries (graff and duffy 2008, tertiary education commission 2010). this included associated oral communication and numeracy. program staff   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         46 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   and partners (the principals in school-based programs) (program staff) saw these forms of literacy as useful for people in their communities to have in everyday life in new zealand and, this being the case, as critically important components of schooling. the benley program, participants of which were chiefly pacific settlers seeking a better quality of life for their families, including success for their children in the european/pākehā world as well as in the pacific world, provides one example. this program mainly taught very specific schoolbased literacy knowledge and skills (such as how to do the ‘rounding technique’ in addition and the ‘scooping strategy’ in reading fluency as taught to the children in the school) and more general knowledge of schooling in new zealand including expectations of parents. participants were thus equipped with a material foundation with which they could actively support their children (for example, help with homework and talk with their teachers about their progress), as well as techniques for strengthening their own use of the english language which could help them participate more fully and critically in new zealand life. one participant, for example, used the comprehension techniques she learned in the program to read union news on her workplace noticeboard when she obtained new employment (aveolela, interview 2). 2. there is more than one literacy. even though the dominant literacy was seen as important to have, it was not seen as the only, or the only important, literacy by program staff. a broad and inclusive multiliteracies perspective in which literacy was understood to take many forms – multiple languages such as english and māori and multiple modes or ‘texts’ such as written alphabetic text, oral performance and art – was evident (cope and kalantzis 2000, hohepa and mcnaughton 2002, kress and jewitt 2003, māori adult literacy working party 2001). in the following quotation, the principal at the bilingual school where the hpp-based program ran demonstrates this recognition and valuing of multiple literacies in the context of the school classroom: you’ll get the kids un-packaging [situations] in different ways and i feel that’s what we want in literacy too…we’re giving them a pathway of choice…and we’ve always said that speaking and listening go hand in hand and then the writing and the reading so māori being a very oral language and visual language, you know it’s quite important here…we’ve got some children who are very good at producing a picture so we might sit kids around [in] a group and say, ‘right, here’s the storyline, how are you going to express that?’ ‘i’m going to draw about that’, ‘i’m going to write a poem about it’, i’m going to write a bit of transactional writing here’, and ‘i’ll do some research and add to it’ so it becomes four or five [different f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 47   contributions] and they can package it up and make a very good presentation but everyone had a part in it, so some of the better artists don’t say much but their pictures say a thousand plus words and so that’s alright…its really quite a holistic approach. (interview 1) 3. literacy is partly technical skills. the programs demonstrated a view of literacy as including the technical literacy skills implicit in the idea of literacy as a technology (street 1984), which program staff explicitly taught. staff noted, and i observed, that they taught the rules and the ‘underlying knowledge’ and used and taught the relevant technical language (benley program tutor, interview 2; hpp-based program observations 1-3, preston program tutor record of programme delivery and student learning for hahana and selena). this approach was evident, for example, in the teaching of the specific techniques of ‘rounding’ and ‘scooping’ noted above. 4. literacy is partly individual activity. the programs demonstrated a view that literacy practices are in some senses individual. program staff appeared to recognise the highly individualised sociocultural histories and personally located motivations that each person brought to their participation in the program. staff seemed to understand that personal work is done in situations where literacy is present and that personal meaning is associated with what occurs and what changes as a result. whilst commonalities within groups were recognised (such as shared culture, religion, parental status and desire to help children) people’s individual differences were also recognised as relevant in their literacy experiences (barton and hamilton 2000, gee 2008, heath 1983, lankshear and knobel 2003). the ormond program manager’s observation that, ‘people are coming here for their own reasons…you’ve got the ones who want their license because they’ve been pulled up and they’ve got fines way up their arms’ (interview 1) is one example of recognition of participant’s personal motivations. in another example, the benley program tutor spent considerable time getting to know her students and maintaining rapport so that she could understand where literacy might help them in personally meaningful ways (interview 1). she would illuminate these links where they were personalised beyond the primary purpose of the program; for example, bringing low-sugar recipes for a diabetic participant which he read and his wife cooked (interview 2). she established patterns of turn-taking and asking questions of everyone as ongoing ways to monitor each learner’s engagement and progress (observations 1-4). 5. literacy is social activity. the programs reflected a view that literacy is more than technical skills and individual activity; that it is social and relational activity. in different ways program staff showed they saw the technical aspects of literacy as inseparable from their social and relational   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         48 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   contexts of use; that literacy involves ‘how to be’ with the technical skills and, as such, it involves values and beliefs, and behaviours beyond the mechanical aspects. in gee’s (2008) terms, it involves socialisation into particular ‘ways of being’, of being ‘particular kinds of people’. this interconnectedness was articulated by program staff, and the ‘ways to be’ in literacy events were explicitly taught. these ‘ways to be’ were understood as connected to culture and history, and to human needs. the hpp-based program provides an example. the traumatic history of the school where this program ran had led the principal to work very hard on modeling and building positive and warm relationships among children, parents, staff and the wider school community. the hpp-based program contributed to this goal. the principal commented: we’ve got to try and get a [oral language development] program that is non-threatening to the parent and non-threatening to the child and…has all those little bits like, ‘i’m talking to you nicely and this is how it goes and we say hello to each other’ because a lot of times you’d say hello to a [child] and they wouldn’t say hello back, they’d just take it as , ‘oh somebody said something’ so now they’re quite chatty. (interview 1) 6. criticality is essential. the programs shared a critical stance in that they all encouraged questioning. this stance seemed to be associated with a belief by staff in basic human rights; in particular, the right to know, to participate and to have a say. in the following quotation, the benley program manager observes the importance of the critical approach taken in the program. we’re not just talking about assimilating, we’re talking about transformation…in terms of them [the adult participants] looking at the education system and what works for their children…its not about fitting into pākehā ways so its looking at the power relationships, not face on but through being critical, [taking] a critical approach. (interview 1) one way a critical approach was taken was by teaching the literacy and numeracy strategies and the educational language used in the school so the parents could talk to and ask questions of their children’s teachers, understand their children’s school progress reports, talk to their children about school, help their children with their learning and know as much or more than their children about aspects of schooling (for example, aveolela, interview 2). further, participants deciphered and evaluated school notices and policies as a group. the tutor asked such questions as: ‘what do you think the principal meant here?’ ‘what do you think he wanted you as a f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 49   parent to do?’ ‘what do you think about that?’ ‘is that reasonable?’ the tutor taught the adults comprehension strategies so they could do this themselves (program tutor, interview 2). principles and practices related to people 1. people are already skilled. program staff showed recognition of participants’ existing abilities. they were aware of what they described as ‘gaps’ or ‘needs’ in the participants but these were seen as gaps or needs in relation to particular objectives or purposes and did not constitute the sole definition of the person. they were equally aware that participants already had skills and talents that they used in their daily lives and that they already made important contributions to their families and/or communities. they demonstrated and articulated respect for them as capable adults who, in the same vein, could be capable learners. a high level of trust and belief in their abilities and capacities was exhibited. this was a strengths-based view of adults (auerbach 1989, 1995, purcell-gates 2000, whitehouse and colvin 2001). program staff gave many examples of ways they knew that participants already contributed to their families and communities that required specific skills and knowledge including cultural knowledge. these included helping with kapa haka (māori song and dance performance), helping on the marae (whānau/iwi meeting area) during events such as tangihanga (funerals), working on local māori land issues, lobbying for improved road access to their marae, being on the committee of their local kōhanga reo (māori language immersion pre-school) (hpp-based project director, interview 1; hpp-based principal, interviews 2 and 3), helping their island-based community members with correspondence, raising grandchildren (benley program tutor, interview 1), raising a niece (ormond program manager, interview 1) and caring for elders (benley program tutor, interview 2). 2. people are multifaceted. in various ways the programs acknowledged that people had already existing lives and that these lives were often already very busy and often complex and that some people had multiple problems with which they had to deal. people were seen as multifaceted with each part affecting the other and thus, in the context of the program, were regarded holistically (nelson and prilleltensky 2005). effort was made to accommodate participants’ already-existing lives and their changing circumstances and needs. this accommodation of people’s lives reflects a view of participants that does not define them solely by the problems they are experiencing but by their whole selves, a strengths-based rather than a deficit view.   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         50 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   selena’s experience exemplifies this complexity (ormond program manager, interview 3). selena had two children of her own and was also raising her seven year old niece. selena loved learning, had done well at school and had been training as a manager at burger king. she had been participating in the program for two years and now sought to train as a midwife and was being supported in preparing for this. her friend, who had also been attending the literacy program, was now in a relationship with her former partner and father of her children. they all lived in the same street. the friend had returned to the program and selena had stopped attending. the program manager suggested selena came on different days so that she could continue her involvement in the program. 3. people are cultural beings. the programs demonstrated a valuing of people’s different ‘ways of being’ (gee 2008): their beliefs, values, and behaviours. these different cultural ways were seen as connected to their identities, the diversity of which was acknowledged and respected. matching the program content and pedagogy with participants’ cultural ways demonstrated awareness of and respect for differences between people. staff understood the hegemony of the dominant culture and that differences in cultural ways of being can cause misunderstandings. this valuing of people’s cultural ways was demonstrated, for example, by the benley program tutor spending the first three weeks of the program on activities aimed at getting to know one another and then maintaining regular time for talking together. the pattern of talking together enabled the participants to stamp their cultural mark on the way the program operated, instituting from the outset a protocol of opening and closing lessons with a prayer. beginning and ending activity with prayer was usual everyday practice and/or familiar to all members of the group and they appreciated it in the program (program tutor, interview 1; aveolela, interview 3; suni, interview 1). 4. children need support. program staff clearly believed that children need to be supported by adults in both relational and practical ways and that parenting was a critically important part of this (prilleltensky and nelson 2000). the role of other adults was seen as important too especially where circumstances reduced parents’ active involvement or rendered it less positive than was thought desirable. staff demonstrated that they believed that, in general, all parents care about their children but that sometimes, for various reasons, children were not getting enough of some of the important things they needed to flourish. the approach taken was to build a relationship with the parents, to share information with them, to model supportive behaviour towards children, to support families by providing the necessary equipment for the children to use for homework, and to encourage the parents through positive affirmation of what they are doing f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 51   rather than to admonish them for perceived inadequacies and, in addition, to recognise, refer to and draw on the wider network of people in the children’s lives as additional supports for them. ormond program staff recognised that many of the young mothers on the program did not know how to ‘do for the kids’, sometimes because their own parents had done everything for them. therefore, they included a good deal of parent and home-focused content, welcomed children at the centre, modeled engaging children in activities, gave ideas to parents for activities they could do with their children and, in getting the mothers together, provided a forum in which they could support each other and share the challenges they faced and ideas for dealing with them (for example, selena, interview 2; selena’s mother, interview 1). 5. adults who are parents are also people in their own right. program participants were seen as adults by program staff irrespective of their status as parents. within this view of them as adults (which included as already skilled, multifaceted, and cultural) their role as parents often took centre stage but was never the only aspect of their adult status of interest or concern. even though, for many of them, parenting was a significant, even their primary, role or their primary reason for participating in the program, the program staff and partners seemed to appreciate that their parenting role was not the only characteristic that defined them. in the quotation below, the principal of the school in which the hpp-based program was run showed her recognition and valuing of a participant’s knowledge, skills and development that included and went beyond her parenting role. i think she’s had all these good skills just sitting there and it’s probably [that] she’s seen, ‘help, i’m super valuable!’ you know? for the first time she’s thought, ‘well, i’m not just a mum of the kids, i can actually have a life outside’, and she’s got her license, she’s got her own vehicle, she’s got her own home and she’s doing a fantastic job, and she’s just moved, she’s moving on. i said to her, ‘the thing is you’ll move right on, you’ll get a full-time job. that’s basically what we’re doing is we’re moving you on from here, out there’. (interview 2)   6. human needs must be met. the programs reflected the understanding that all human beings have psychological, social and relational needs that are important to acknowledge with respect to everyone, all the time, not just in relation to learners in organised teaching/learning situations (bornstein et al 2003, durie 1998, mulitalo-lauta 2001, nelson and prilleltensky 2005). program staff articulated and demonstrated in their actions the view that relationships are fundamental to all human endeavours and that they valued   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         52 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   and classed as the right of all people warm, positive and respectful relationships; opportunities to extend themselves and discover their capacities; knowledge and understanding of what is happening around them and in their communities; and participation and having a say, to the extent that they wish, in their communities and society. the programs consciously, and constantly, worked within this theory/value framework. all other elements of the programs described above come together in this fundamental concern for people’s general welfare and wellbeing and the ‘right’ treatment of people – children and adults – which imbued the programs. an example can be seen in the hpp-based program. noting that hpp is based on glasser’s theory of human needs, the project director commented that: at the same time as you are training adults about [hpp] you are also demonstrating and modeling that you’re having fun, giving them a sense of belonging and acknowledging them, you’re praising them and you’re giving them choices. (interview 1) together the principles and practices reflected an ‘ideological positioning’ (furness 2012) summarised as: respect for participants as capable adults and people with potential and for differing ways of being; trust in people’s abilities and capacities; and belief in the right of all people to have knowledge, to participate and to have a say in things that affect them, to have fair access to resources and to have reasonable quality of life within a nation’s capacity to support this. concluding remarks the programs in the study differed in their structure, content, aims, foci and ways they were family focused yet all were family literacy programs within a broad definition, demonstrating that family literacy programs can be designed in different, locally-relevant ways. the study also found shared values and beliefs across the programs. overarching concern for people’s whole selves and a strengths and rights-based view of people meant the programs had the holistic wellbeing of participants, their families’ and communities’ at the heart of their approach as both literacy and social aspirations were addressed. it was apparent that program staff viewed literacy as social practice in which skills played a part but in which relationships were paramount, that they had concern for both the interests of adults as well as children and that they were concerned for both the individual and the collective good. the ideological nature of family literacy work is apparent – theories about people and literacy were in operation in f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s     furness 53   program design and delivery. this highlights for those working in this sector the importance of critically evaluating the values and beliefs that underpin family literacy programs and other family literacy work. acknowledgements: i wish to express my grateful thanks to the participants and staff in the programs in the study. the study was supported by a new 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tracey, d and morrow, l (2006) lenses on reading: an introduction to theories and models, guilford, new york, ny. walker, m, udy, k and pole, n (1997) adult literacy in new zealand: results from the international adult literacy survey, ministry of education, wellington, new zealand. wasik, b, dobbins, d and herrmann, s (2001) intergenerational family literacy: concepts, research, and practice, in neuman, s and dickinson, d, eds, handbook of early childhood research, guilford, new york, ny, pp 444-458. whitehouse m and colvin, c (2001) ‘reading’ families: deficit discourse and family literacy, theory into practice, vol 40, no 3, pp 212-219.   f a m i l y f o c u s e d a d u l t l i t e r a c y p r o g r a m s         58 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s     literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults vol. 27, no. 1 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: alkema, a., kerehoma, c., murray, n., ripley, l. 2019. hīnātore: empowering māori and pacific workplace learners. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 27:1, 1-16. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6833 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/lnj research article (peer-reviewed) hīnātore: empowering māori and pacific workplace learners anne alkema1, cain kerehoma2, nicky murray3, laloifi ripley4 1 industry training federation, ranchhod tower level 11 39 the terrace wellington 6011 po box 24 194 wellington 6142. anne.alkema3@gmail.com 2 kia ora consulting, gisborne, tairāwhiti, new zealand. cain@kiaoraconsulting.co.nz 3 industry training federation, ranchhod tower level 11 39 the terrace wellington 6011 po box 24 194 wellington 6142. nicky@ontask.co.nz 4 careerforce, level 1, 15 jack conway avenue, manukau city 2104, auckland. ifi.ripley@careerforce.org.nz *corresponding author: anne alkema anne.alkema3@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6833 article history: received 8/30/2019; revised 12/3/2019; accepted 12/5/2019; published 12/20/2019 abstract hīnātore: empowering māori and pacific workplace learners research project investigated the development of employees who undertook literacy and numeracy programmes in their workplaces, during work time. this article describes the findings from the project in relation to the processes used in the programmes and outcomes for these employees in eight workplaces. it illustrates ako (teaching and learning processes); mahi (work), how workplaces support learning and employees’ changed ways of working after a programme; and how learning is taken into and contributes to whānau/aiga (family) lives. introduction hīnātore (pronounced he-nah-tor-re) means phosphorescent light.1 in māori mythology, when ranginui (sky father) and papatuanuku (earth mother) were separated by their children, 1 this artwork was commissioned for the project. it is painted by evon wilson aka e.v.e artz, a māori artist and illustrator from gisborne, new zealand with iwi affiliations to ngāti porou. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6833 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6833 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj mailto:anne.alkema3@gmail.com mailto:cain@kiaoraconsulting.co.nz mailto:nicky@ontask.co.nz mailto:ifi.ripley@careerforce.org.nz mailto:anne.alkema3@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6833 the first glimmer of light was hīnātore. while the light was feeble and distant, it drove tāne’s ambition to bring more light to heaven and earth. he procured and distributed te whānau mārama stars, moon, sun – to fill the world with light. thus te ao mārama, the realm of light, this light-possessing world, came into being. the story of hīnātore relates to this mahi (work) in that literacy can be an empowerment tool, opening up new potential and new light. it is a glimpse at ‘possibility’ that can inspire new learning and new growth. the light is dynamic changing colours and shapes as different forces collide. this is an apt description of the nature of learning and growth witnessed in the participants of the eight workplace literacy and numeracy programmes in this study. policy environment new zealand is in a time of relatively high employment, with the overall unemployment rate at under four percent as measured by the june 2019 household labour force survey (statistics nz 2019). however, data by ethnicity shows higher unemployment rates for māori (7.7 percent) and pacific people (8.4 percent). in addition to having poorer labour market outcomes, the results of the organisation of economic cooperation and development’s (oecd) survey of adult skills, part of the programme for the international assessment of adult competencies (piaac) indicate that the māori and pacific respondents demonstrated lower levels of literacy and numeracy skills compared to respondents from european and asian alkema, kerehoma, murray, ripley literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 2 backgrounds (ministry of education & ministry of business, innovation & employment [mbie] 2016). research shows low literacy and numeracy skills impact on peoples’ work and life opportunities. those with lower skills: are less likely to be in employment and when employed to have lower wages; are less likely to own their own home; have poorer mental and physical health; and are less likely than their higher-skilled counterparts to participate in their communities and wider society (bynner & parsons 2006; schagen & lawes 2009; murray & shillington 2012). in addition to poor outcomes for individuals, bynner and parsons (2006) also found intergenerational impacts, whereby children whose parents were at the equivalent of level 1 in oecd’s international surveys were, ‘quite seriously disadvantaged and likely to fall behind their peers’ (p. 31). those with low skills, as measured by piaac, read and understand short texts and make some inferences; conduct basic mathematical processes and interpret simple graphs; and are either not able to use computers or, when they do, they can cope with simple tasks and use minimal functions in generic computer programmes (ministry of education & mbie 2016). this is problematic for employment given that analysis of skills profiles conducted in canada shows most jobs require level 3 or higher skills, with virtually no jobs requiring level 1 skills. this is coupled with the fact that most of the new jobs created in the last 20 years require level 3 skills (lane & murray 2018). policy intervention policy interventions that reach lower-skilled employees in their workplaces are important for reasons including the need to: • upskill workers throughout their working lives, particularly as the age of the working population increases; • bring equity to training delivery so lower-skilled workers have access to training in the way their counterparts with higher skills do; and • mitigate against the barriers (financial, time, opportunity cost) lower-skilled workers face in accessing education outside of work (martin 2018). the workplace literacy and numeracy (wln) fund is one such intervention. provided and administered by new zealand’s tertiary education commission (tec) the purposes are to increase the literacy and numeracy skills of lower-skilled employees and contribute to productivity through the provision of programmes in a workplace context. the fund is divided into two strands. one strand (provider-led) directly funds tertiary education providers to market and deliver programmes in workplaces. the other strand (employer-led) is contestable funding applied for by employers who then generally contract an education provider to run programmes for their employees. employees are eligible for funding if they have low or no qualifications, or low literacy and numeracy skills as measured against the adult learning progressions (tertiary education commission 2008). they have access to 25-80 hours of learning usually in the workplace and in worktime. the intent of the fund is not to ‘fix’ employees nor is about taking an approach that simply brings them to functional literacy and numeracy for the workplace. rather it has the wider remit of workplace development. this thinking aligns with jurmo’s categorisation of ‘collaborative, problem-solving’ (cited in derrick 2012:13) in that programmes are about hīnātore: empowering māori and pacific workplace learners literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 3 workforce and workplace development. here approach looks to lead to the transformation of both, through taking a holistic view of learning that is contextualised to the workplace and to the wider needs and interests of employees. rationale for the hīnātore project evidence of the reach and impact of the wln fund has been gathered since 2014 (alkema 2015; alkema 2016; alkema 2017; skills highway 2018; alkema & murray 2019). the findings show just under 40 percent of the employees who access wln funded programmes are māori and pacific people. they • have gaps in their literacy and numeracy skills as shown by the results of the literacy and numeracy for adults assessment tool (lnaat) 2 which is tagged to the adult learning progressions and a significant number of them have no formal qualifications; • have previously been offered few training opportunities that are not for regulatory or compliance purposes; and • come from across the age ranges from 20-60+, with higher numbers of males than females. the evidence also shows māori and pacific employees are engaged and retained in these programmes and use their newly developed knowledge and skills in their work, whānau/ aiga (family) and community lives. it also shows that during the time of these programmes and shortly after them, economic, social and wellbeing outcomes accrue to these employees (alkema 2015; alkema 2016; alkema 2017; skills highway 2018; alkema & murray 2019). however, not enough is known about the ako (teaching and learning) of the programmes, the cultural values that underpin teaching and learning, and the extent to which approaches which lead to success are practised, as articulated in literature (kerehoma, connor, garrow, & young 2013; luafutu-simpson, noa, uta’i & petelo 2018; ryan, kitone & fleming 2017; sciascia 2017). nor is enough known about the workplace as a learning environment that supports the ongoing knowledge and skill development of māori and pacific employees. hīnātore research project in 2017 the industry training federation applied for and was awarded funding from ako aotearoa to support a co-funded research project to explore the above aspects. research approach the key questions for this project were: 1. what factors and approaches lead to successful economic, social, and wellbeing outcomes for māori and pacific employees in workplace literacy and numeracy programmes? 2. to what extent do these approaches incorporate culturally responsive pedagogies and the concept of ‘ako’ and how are these practised and articulated? 2 further information on lnaat can be found at http://assessforadults.nzcer.org.nz/support/solutions/ articles/4000121824-what-is-the-assessment-tool-lnaat-what-was-it-designed-to-do; and on lnaat comparisons to piaac on https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/80898/comparing-literacyand-numeracy-scales-in-the-assessment-tool-and-survey-of-adult-skills alkema, kerehoma, murray, ripley literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 4 http://assessforadults.nzcer.org.nz/support/solutions/articles/4000121824-what-is-the-assessment-tool-lnaat-what-was-it-designed-to-dohttp://assessforadults.nzcer.org.nz/support/solutions/articles/4000121824-what-is-the-assessment-tool-lnaat-what-was-it-designed-to-dohttps://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/80898/comparing-literacy-and-numeracy-scales-in-the-assessment-tool-and-survey-of-adult-skills https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/80898/comparing-literacy-and-numeracy-scales-in-the-assessment-tool-and-survey-of-adult-skills 3. how do māori and pacific employees continue to develop their skills and transfer them to their working, whānau/aiga and community lives? kaupapa māori and pacific research approaches a key distinguishing feature of this project is the integration of kaupapa māori research and pacific research methodologies and analytical frameworks. this pertains to both the overall philosophy underpinning the research and to the ways in which the researchers interacted with employees, employers, and programme facilitators. kaupapa māori research is now a well-established academic discipline and research methodology (pihama 2001 & 2015; pihama, cram & walker 2002; smith 1999). kaupapa māori research locates māori at the centre of enquiry and locates māori understandings as central to the research design, process, analysis and intended outcomes (pihama 2001). it has of necessity an understanding of the social, economic, political and systemic influences on expanding or limiting māori outcomes and is able to use a wide variety of research methods as tools (curtis 2007). in simple terms kaupapa māori is literally ‘a māori way’. it is a way of understanding and explaining how we know what we know and it affirms the right of māori to be māori (pihama, cram & walker 2002). as with kaupapa māori approaches, building relationships with people and using culturally sensitive data collection methods was the focus when working with pacific people. here the research is informed by the work of chu, samala and paurini, (2013), rose (2014), and ryan et al. (2017). a fuller description of both approaches can be found in the final report that is due to be published by ako aotearoa early in 2020. data collection a purposive sampling approach was used to select workplaces for this project. this ensured, given the size of the study and the time allowed for it, that the workplaces would be information-rich, have sufficient māori and pacific employees, and employers and facilitators who were willing to participate in the research. researchers visited eight workplaces at the beginning and towards the end of their literacy and numeracy programmes. a combination of semi-structured and narrative, faceto-face interviews; focus groups; and observations were used to collect data from around 100 participants (employees, employers, programme facilitators, and family members). all the participants had the opportunity to tell their own stories by talking about their own perceptions and experiences. the face-to-face interviews with employees were conducted in workplaces usually during the teaching programmes. they varied in length between 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the time available and the extent to which employees wanted to engage with the researchers. employees also talked more informally with researchers during observations when the researchers were invited by the facilitators to be participants in lessons. interviews with employers and facilitators also took place at these times. interviews with family members took place at a whānau/aiga evening when, over a shared meal, researchers shared project findings and then invited them to share the stories of change for families that had occurred during the time of the programmes. hīnātore: empowering māori and pacific workplace learners literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 5 an observation framework was developed for the project.3 as a data collection tool it helped to ensure similar data were collected by the different researchers. the framework is built around five elements: akoranga (teaching and learning strategies); manaakitanga (relationships); rangatiratanga (learner engagement); wairua/mauri (spiritual/emotional connection); and whānau/aiga (family empowerment). in addition to the framework being used in session observations it also served as a touchstone for interviews with employees and facilitators. data analysis a grounded theory, inductive approach was used to analyse and code the data according to emerging themes at the site level. this was followed by analysis at a cross-site level using charmaz’s (2006) constant comparative approach to grounded theory. here researchers looked across sites at data from employees, employers, and facilitators to identify commonalities and differences. the key point to be made about this data analysis approach is that findings emerge from the perceptions and experiences of those who told their stories. of interest in the way it was undertaken was the iterative and sense making approach used by the research team, a process of re-searching as described by davidoff (2014). research – literally – suggests that we search – again and again – and in this way discover what we did not know before. and the notion of searching (the quality of this word as opposed to – for example – looking) suggests that what we are searching for is of real interest to us; really matters to us; that it is a way of stretching ourselves, of taking our knowledge and understanding further, and into realms beyond where we are at any particular point. it is not merely a way of confirming what we already know (p. 1). the re-search (davidoff 2014) took place during and after the data collection process. here each of the researchers brought a different cultural lens along with different perspectives about adult teaching and learning. this allowed for analysis, discussion, and reflection about what was observed and heard. our position as researchers was that of witnesses to the events and stories of the hīnātore project. based on the first nations protocol of witnessing, witnesses are called to be the keepers of history when important work or an event of historic significance occurs. at the end of the work, witnesses are called forward to reflect back and help to tell the story of the importance of the work that has been done. witnesses are also asked to store and care for the history they witness and, most importantly, to share it with others when they return home. as witnesses our role was to describe, interpret and draw conclusions based on the data in a way that excluded judgment about the programmes and the outcomes for the employees. the research team also held a sense making workshop with programme facilitators as a way of testing the early findings and gauging their views on the emerging themes. in addition, and as mentioned above, the findings were described to and discussed with around 60 whānau/aiga members at an end of project dinner. 3 it built from: the te kotahitanga observation tool (berryman & bishop, 2011); the kaupapa māori wellbeing assessment model hei ara ako ki te oranga (hutchings, yates, isaacs, whatman, & bright, 2013); professor sir mason durie’s te whare tapa whā model (cited in rochford, 2004); and fuimaono karl pulotuendemann’s fonofale model (cited in ministry of health, 2008). alkema, kerehoma, murray, ripley literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 6 validity in terms of validity cohen, manion and morrison (2000) talk about the importance, in qualitative research, of having honest and rich data, the appropriate participants, and being able to triangulate the data by gathering them from different sources and places. for this study, the focus is on descriptive and interpretive validity. in terms of the former, this relates to the factual accuracy of the account that is given of what the interviewees say. for the latter, it is about interpreting the data and giving it the meaning that the participants themselves have. this aligns with the researchers’ positions as witnesses to the participants’ stories. findings and discussion this section describes the findings under three headings: ako – teaching and learning mahi – the workplace and connections to work whānau / aiga – the family and community ako: teaching and learning upskilling māori and pacific employees requires a skilled educator workforce with the teaching/facilitation skills to deliver learning programmes in a culturally competent way. this means moving away from eurocentric and/or technocratic models of teaching and using culturally appropriate pedagogies that incorporate the context in which the employees live and work (luafutu-simpson, noa, uta’i & petelo 2018; prebble n.d.; sciascia 2017). in her review of 45 research projects on teaching adult māori learners sciascia (2017) concluded such teaching and learning incorporates a holistic approach. this is what māori refer to as ‘ako’. ako is a holistic concept that incorporates ways of knowing, knowledge systems, beliefs, values and practices that are strongly connected and related to concepts such as whanaungatanga, wairuatanga, manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga (sciascia, 2017:11). these findings echo those of bishop (2012) in the school sector where he talks about, ‘a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations’ (p. 40). central to this way of thinking is the value of self-determination that sees learning as ‘reciprocal and interactive … learners are to be connected to each other and to learn with and from each other’ (p.41). bishop goes on to say that when teachers create appropriate socio-cultural spaces, learners feel comfortable, safe, and actively learn rather than being passive recipients of the teachers’ knowledge. in a similar vein, luafutu-simpson, noa, uta’i and petelo (2018) developed five success indicators for pacific learners. these include: meaningful connections to families and communities; culturally responsive pedagogy; opportunities to learn and value pacific languages and cultures; acknowledge pacific values; and having environments that increase pacific visibility. this thinking is affirmed by the ministry of education (2018) in the school sector where examples of four ‘pacific-based pedagogical models and frameworks’ are presented (p. 26). the models talk about the importance of acknowledging cultural identities, understanding diversity, and the importance of connecting pacific world views with those of the mainstream education system. hīnātore: empowering māori and pacific workplace learners literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 7 such approaches are necessary for adult learners who may not have had positive experiences at school. a number of māori and pacific employees in the project spoke of negative experiences that resulted in learning trauma such as feeling ‘dumb’ or being ‘anxious’ around learning environments. they also noted the whakamana (restorative nature) of workplace learning in that they now identify themselves as learners and have a growing sense of selfefficacy in relation to this. effective facilitators in this project moved employees away from this state of anxiety and provided the space for deep relationships and reciprocal learning to emerge. before they started the programmes employees talked about their concerns about going back to learning given their less than positive schooling experiences. it’s very different from school – where we were asked to absorb all those things. now these things stick. we’re more active in how we learn. before it doesn’t mean anything to you. here you take it on. … you can talk your mind out. it’s more fun. have fun, enjoy and it sticks. (employee) underpinning the facilitators’ approach is the high expectations they have for themselves to be successful educators of māori and pacific employees and, in turn, the expectations they have for these employees. they shine when they come to class. i try make it simple. i think about my own school experience. i really wanted to learn [and couldn’t]. there’s a cultural barrier [in workplaces]. we’re [pacific people] carefree around time management and communication with others… (facilitator) in keeping with this is the cultural inclusivity practised by the facilitators who openly honour these employees for who they are. this is promoted in the learning spaces and the workplace, and was recognised by the employees and the employers … [the programme participants] were thinking, is this just another course that the employer wants us to complete to make us faster workers? but they could see that it was engaging them and the provider is really focused on cultural awareness in the workplace and what it is māori people like to see in their workforce and what’s important to them, as well as the pacific islanders. (employer) another important finding in this work was the vulnerability of the facilitators. this was noticed by employees when facilitators were open about themselves and their own cultural competence. he made everyone feel at ease … he was no different to us. he had his own struggles and he told us about those, and we shared ours … so it was great. (employee) some of the programme facilitators admitted they were not cultural experts and were prepared and able to learn alongside, with and from, the employees in the spirit of ako. the following two vignettes illustrate some examples of ako that incorporate deliberate acts of cultural competence and co-constructed approaches to teaching and learning with māori and pacific employees. alkema, kerehoma, murray, ripley literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 8 vignette one: ako daniel is a tutor with māori heritage, running a literacy and numeracy programme in a workplace in a community that is predominantly māori and pacific people. he recognises this and notes, what i do is about building a community of learning … i’m conscious that i’m a guest in their community, that i’m in their space – their workplace and community. and i’m always respectful and acknowledge their space. (facilitator) the outward practices that show this include greetings in different languages, correct pronunciation of names, and connections to people’s different cultures and beliefs through what is taught. the approach also includes encompassing employees’ stories into what is taught and teaching in contexts that appeal to them, such as work, religious or sporting events. as ako is a reciprocal concept daniel also becomes a learner and has the employees teach him about their work. he also gets them involved in peer learning in a tuakana-teina (expert-novice way). the biggest thing is getting them to help each other out. they are confident in their own skills to be able to do this. and they are much blunter with each other than i would be…(facilitator) vignette two: ako like daniel, simon was facilitating a programme in a predominantly māori community. he has māori ancestry and introduces himself and his whakapapa (genealogy), whānau and interests at the start of his programme. he also invites employees to talk about themselves and their interests. honouring and celebrating the employees as māori is key. ‘it’s as if they need to be given permission to be māori’. he also recognises the need to acknowledge the biculturalism that is intended by the treaty of waitangi. for simon, the concept of ako is also important. he said he has as much to learn from the employees as they do from him. he consistently affirms the employees, endorsing their thinking and feelings about personal and work situations. he takes a holistic approach whereby new learning and concepts are related back to the employees where there is space for their personal lives to be brought into the conversations and exercises. for example, they were able to talk about personal challenges and aspirations such as struggles with raising children, trying to be good role models and wanting to parent differently to the way they were. this deliberate approach to manaakitanga allows employees to settle in, talk about themselves, get to know each other, and at the same time allows them to bring their own cultural experiences to the learning space. manaakitanga is integral to simon’s way of working. along with acknowledging the individuals and the positive affirmation he gives them, he also ensures there is sufficient challenge to push the employees to think more deeply about communication and problemsolving at work and at home. employees discussed the factors that made the ako approach work for them. here their responses mirror those of the facilitators. employees talked about their facilitators having hīnātore: empowering māori and pacific workplace learners literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 9 high expectations of them and challenging them to think about and reflect on their workplace practices and behaviours. he wasn’t ‘judgey’ or ‘pushy’ but he did push everyone outside of their comfort zone and did challenge people’s thinking by asking questions like ‘why do you think he responded in that way?’ (employee) having fun and relaxing into learning was also important, ‘we like to have a good laugh and give each other a bit of stick’ and the way this has helped their learning. they also appreciated that the learning was relevant to what they were doing at work. i enjoyed how the teachers taught us to do things and most of all, what they taught us, we’re using in the workplace now, communicating, using words, how to do the emailing… (employee) along with fun and relevance goes the sense of belonging and inclusivity the employees feel as a result of learning at work and with their peers. this in turn generated a sense of comfort and a willingness to engage and participate fully in lessons. this atmosphere was created both by the facilitators and the employees themselves. if you were going to an outside class, you don’t really wanna say things just in case you feel like you’ve said something wrong or you look like an idiot, possibly. but within your own house, people know you already. that’s the first comfortable spot for you. you just speak your mind. (employee) some of the best learning came from peers, through some of the peer to peer exercises, role playing exercises, peer feedback exercises etcetera. that sort of stuff comes from a really genuine, sincere place which really makes you take notice and listen – some of the key highlights have been those moments with my peers. (employee) … the whakawhanaungatanga [establishing connections] side of things. i did see that, because a lot of us have been involved in the programme and you become closer. you start to analyse things … we’re learning off each other at the same time. (employee) the ako process results in facilitators and employees building collaborative relationships with both parties taking responsibility for teaching and learning. this collective and reciprocal approach transforms employees, builds their confidence and self-efficacy so they can continue on a learning pathway or progress to roles with more responsibility. ...this programme is a blessing because it’s changed his life. from a person that stopped going to school at 13 years old to now – now he’s trained as a foreman. how do you get to that? this is what boosted his energy and his confidence to keep going. now he’s going up to study level 2 ... (whānua/aiga member) mahi – the workplace and connections to work there is an expectation that programmes be negotiated by participants, and be bespoke and contextualised to individual workplaces, for example, by using workplace documentation and processes as the basis for programme activities. workplaces are strong teaching and learning environments because, as described above: the learning is highly relevant and meaningful to the employees; there are pre-existing collegial relationships between employees which provide alkema, kerehoma, murray, ripley literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 10 a high trust environment for collective learning; and the learning is done on-site and during work time, thus removing otherwise significant barriers. he would never go to a class outside of work. he doesn’t know the people, he doesn’t know who was telling him to do the courses. but with this one, i think he started with some of the boys that he knew from work. … outside would be no. (whānau/aiga member) considerable work was done upfront between the education providers and company management to identify the workplace needs, to co-design the programmes, and to ensure that there were clear understandings and expectations of the purpose and processes of the workplace learning. so to have buy in from senior management meant that it filtered down to our site management team and basically said, ‘we are going to do this. it’s going to be good for the company. it’s going to be good for your staff. it’s going to be good for your sites’. (employer) however, getting programmes up and running in workplaces is logistically challenging as sessions are delivered, for the most part, during work time. while programme delivery is funded by the tec, employers pay their staff to attend, provide a training room and resources, and often provide food. the pay-off for them comes when employees become more engaged and participate more at work. at first we were a little bit sceptical because we thought a lot of our staff already know their abcs and their one, two, threes and that wasn’t going to be something that they needed to focus on – that we could continue on with their technical training ... [but] we found it was so much more ... it was more about gaining confidence to speak up, why meetings happen, why we fill out forms ... and what happens to them. (employer) programmes focus directly on what is relevant to employees in their workplaces and family and community lives. here literacy and numeracy are brought alive through applied and relevant contexts and are geared towards workforce development rather than ‘fixing’ employees. we really tailored the programme … using their forms, but scaffolding the literacy involved, the words [vocabulary] and also some of the other communication areas like speaking up, what’s the importance of meetings …we’re lucky enough that we could really tailor the programme to each cohort … (facilitator) in the main, the approach aligns with derrick’s (2012) ‘situated-expansive’ framework . here, for example, literacy and numeracy are embedded into learning programmes; facilitators and employees take a collaborative approach; what is taught and learned is negotiable; literacy is seen as a social practice; and developing employees happens for work, and social and wellbeing purposes. in keeping with this framework, programme content has, for example, included workplace documentation (standard operating procedures (sops), health and safety processes); projectbased learning, often utilising continuous improvement projects that employees will present to management at the conclusion of the programme; and digital skill development – as workplaces increasingly move to digital reporting. while these cover off the knowledge and skills needed for work, programmes also look to improve social and wellbeing outcomes through a focus on, for example, communication skills hīnātore: empowering māori and pacific workplace learners literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 11 (active listening, above and below the line behaviour), financial literacy skills, and through connecting employees into community based services such as libraries. given the direct relationship of the learning content to the workplace, employees’ selfefficacy grows as they recognise they can contribute more at work. this is not just a case of doing their own job better, but also results in thinking about about innovation, how they as employees contribute to or increase productivity, and improve workplace culture. this comes from thinking about improvements to the way work is structured or completed and also through the ways in which they communicate their thinking. it’s really changed my thinking around learning and work. i wasn’t really into the whole learning thing before starting this but now more open and motivated to learn more and build new skills. (employee) the last few months i became a foreman in charge of the whole project ... so yeah, that’s where i’m at now. i’m controlling everything, like calling, ordering, planning. like i said, the course is really helpful. (employee) another outcome from programmes is improved communication skills and together with increased self-efficacy and confidence, means people are more able and willing to speak at work, not only to colleagues, but also to management i really enjoyed the speaking up sessions. i’ve always been a shy person who struggles with speaking in front of people, or speaking in public. still struggling with speaking up in front of big crowds but feeling way more confident in smaller groups. at one of the sessions i talked about an issue in the workplace. [facilitator] brought the boss in, and i talked about what was going on. the boss was really receptive and listened, followed up with me and the issue got resolved. this felt really good. (employee) programmes that have included workplace project-based learning highlight the ways in which employees take ownership for their work and contribute in ways they have not done previously. at a manufacturing plant, an employee talked about wanting to do more around quality assurance processes in his work area. he promoted this within his team through the use of quality forms. he said when these are completed issues get dealt with, and that, by reporting every day there have been fewer complaints at the other end of the process. his motivation for doing this was the pride he has in his work and the impact it has on others, ‘all making a good product together’. as stated above programmes are about workforce development for the company as a whole and individual employees. many employees want to stay with their companies and continue with their learning. numerous work-related outcomes were noted including job promotions, improved communication and literacy, health and safety, teamwork and workplace culture as well as quality improvement and innovation. … for us as a company, it’s made a difference. our staff retention has increased, because people want to stay with us now. they see a career direction for them. they see they have a career path, because we are investing our time and efforts into them. (employer) whānau / aiga– the family and community the impact of workplace learning programmes extends beyond the workplace and into the personal lives of employees. here, increased confidence and positive attitudes lead to stronger alkema, kerehoma, murray, ripley literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 12 engagement with family, positive role-modelling to other whānau/aiga members, and a renewed commitment to ongoing learning and upskilling. a lot of a change not only towards me, but towards our children. i definitely know it’s also in his workplace, because i’m hearing a lot of positive feedback from his workplace… now it’s come to our church. he’s a deacon. (whānau/aiga member) taking the learning home to have different conversations at home ... i talk about some of the stuff we learn with my wife and have conversations which have been really good – so the benefits are wide ranging, not just in the workplace. (employee) i learnt about how to use the questions, ‘why’. so i decided to use that and started asking her [daughter] why she’s having trouble [with maths]. what came out of it was she was ashamed and too embarrassed to put her hand up and ask for help. so i told her i want her to put her hand up and ask for help. i said, i’m doing this programme. that’s me putting my hand up and asking for help ... i want you to do the same. (employee) the transfer of learning to home and family lives comes about as a result of the conversations facilitators have with employees about the transfer of skills, the sense of pride employees develop around their achievement, and the tools they now have to, for example, communicate better, use computers, and talk with their children about learning. employers also appreciate this ‘snowball’ effect as they see and hear about how their employees are engaging more with partners and children. it’s made a big difference across many levels ... these learnings have been taken home. i’ve had quite a few guys come back to me and say, ‘i know what my son or daughter is talking about now on their phone... i can actually see that they’re doing on their phone and understand it now’. (employer) interviews with family members show how improved communication skills improve the engagment and relationships employees have with their families. here the common theme is that employees have the confidence to engage more with their families. they not only talk about what they are learning, but also take more interest in the what family members are doing. most definitely it’s been beneficial for my mother. yeah, she’s very happy to have done this course. like i was saying earlier, she gives me full paragraphs about her day instead of saying just ‘good’. (whānau/aiga member) ... since being part of the programme, he’s more talkative, wanting to know how we’re doing at work, how are the kids at school. it’s very good. he’s more active in their learning and in our lives too. cos we were quiet, but now we’re able to talk and able to understand. he’s able to understand our world as well in regards to education. yeah, we’re very proud of him. (whānau/aiga member) changes take time and employees need to be afforded the opportunity to develop confidence and practise new skills. one employee, who explained that he was more confident about public speaking, said he still gets very anxious when speaking to large groups but feels more confident amongst smaller groups. he had not had the confidence to speak at his mother’s tangi (funeral) or at family birthdays, even though he wanted to. ‘i’m still not there yet but feeling like i can get there as a result of what i have learned on the course’. hīnātore: empowering māori and pacific workplace learners literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 13 employees also spoke of their work whānau/aiga and how the workplace was a whānau-like environment which fostered learning that was collaborative, reciprocal, and authentic. they spoke of being motivated to support and help inspire their teammates, as well as the depth of learning facilitated through peer-to-peer (tuakana-teina, whānau-to-whānau) interactions. from a whānau/aiga perspective this reseach shows the ripple effect of employees taking learning home and the subsquent impact it has on partners and children. however, the reverse is also true, and there is a need to explore this further, as whānau/aiga support workplace learning as they observe changes that occur for family members. conclusion programmes run through the wln fund attract and retain high numbers of māori and pacific employees. the research described in this article explored why these employees stay in workplace literacy and numeracy programmes and engage with learning; illustrated the factors that lead to successful outcomes; and looked at culturally responsive pedagogies and how new learning transfers to employees ways of working and to their whānau/aiga and community lives. the findings highlight that the workplace is a context that suits māori and pacific employees. the opportunity to train in work time removes access barriers, provides a safe, whānau-like learning environment, and builds on the knowledge and skills they already have as workers. this is enabled by workplaces where there is strong leadership and commitment from senior managers to the learning and development of their people; managers and supervisors supporting and taking an active role in the workplace learning programmes (e.g., attending some of the sessions); and both employers and employees recognising each other’s respective investment and contribution to workplace learning. the programmes develop people through working in an expansive, rather than functional way. as a result of this the hīnātore research suggests that successful outcomes for māori and pacific employees, their workplaces and whānau/aiga are the result of a nexus of factors. • through ako the facilitators deliver with vulnerability and humility; understand the ako process and its collaborative, reciprocal nature; acknowledge the importance of relationships and cultural connections; and facilitate learning that incorporates a range of teaching strategies and in a culturally competent way. • through mahi, the programmes are bespoke and contextualised to the workplace, developing organically in response to authentic workplace issues; and the workplace context ensures relevance and shows employees they are valued by their employers. • through whānau/aiga comes the additional impetus that can lead to wider whānau/aiga wellbeing; greater connection with partners and children; and the realisation that they can engage with the wider lives of family and community members. references alkema, a (2015) maximising the benefits of the workplace literacy fund, tertiary education commission, wellington. alkema, a (2016) workplace literacy fund: employer-led outcomes report 2013-2015. industry training federation, wellington. alkema, kerehoma, murray, ripley literacy and numeracy studies: an 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https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/labour-market-statistics-june-2019-quarter https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/labour-market-statistics-june-2019-quarter literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults vol. 27, no. 1 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: daylight, r., and o’carroll, j. 2019. teaching university students to read and write. literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, 27:1, 1-19. https://doi. org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6959 issn 1839-2903 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/lnj article (non-referreed) teaching university students to read and write russell daylight1* and john o’carroll2 1 charles sturt university, panorama avenue, bathurst. rdaylight@csu.edu.au 2 charles sturt university, panorama avenue, bathurst. jocarroll@csu.edu.au *corresponding author: russell daylight. rdaylight@csu.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6959 article history: received 7/12/2019; accepted 12/5/2019; published 12/20/2019 abstract in 2013 the australian government introduced new literacy and numeracy standards for initial teacher education degrees. minimum standards were set for entry to teaching degrees, and students would be tested against these standards on graduation by the literacy and numeracy test for initial teacher education students (lantite). we, the authors of this paper – both members of the english discipline at a regional australian university – were invited by our faculty of education to create a foundation literacy program for students enrolled in teacher education degrees. our program consisted of two subjects run across the students’ first year of study: the first focused on reading, the second on writing. in attempting to describe our first five years’ experience (2014-2018) we find it necessary to make explicit a number of implicit literacy hypotheses from different disciplines and to test them against our direct experience of student accomplishment. whilst all the hypotheses tested have some sort of value, we have come to the conclusion that there is nothing like reading for improving reading, and nothing like writing for improving writing. this accords with what we call the immersion hypothesis. keywords literacy, university pedagogy, tertiary standards, lantite, language immersion. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6959 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6959 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj mailto:rdaylight@csu.edu.au mailto:jocarroll@csu.edu.au mailto:rdaylight@csu.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v27i1.6959 1. introduction in 2013 the australian government introduced new literacy and numeracy standards for initial teacher education degrees. minimum standards were set for entry to teaching degrees, and students would be tested against these standards on graduation by the literacy and numeracy test for initial teacher education students (lantite): entrants to initial teacher education will possess levels of personal literacy and numeracy broadly equivalent to the top 30% of the population. providers who select students who do not meet this requirement must establish satisfactory arrangements to ensure that these students are supported to achieve the required standard before graduation. the national literacy and numeracy test is the means for demonstrating that all students have met the standard. (australian institute for teaching and school leadership [aitsl] 2015:12) the authors of this paper – both members of the english discipline at a regional australian university – were invited by our faculty of education to create a foundation literacy program for students taking teacher education degrees. our mission, set by the group collegially, was not to ‘teach the test’. this was partly because we instinctively felt that it would be a pedagogically impoverished approach, but also because we didn’t yet have any idea of what would be in the lantite. our ambition was a general uplift in ‘literacy’, our working definition of which meant the ability to read and interpret complex texts, and to write grammatically and fluently. our program consisted of two subjects run across the students’ first year of study: the first focused on reading and the second on writing. from the outset, we had certain ideas about how we should proceed. we both held beliefs relating both to ‘literacy’ and to ‘student learning’ that carried through to our original subject designs. the more we taught our subjects, however, the more we found ourselves refining our ideas, questioning different approaches, trying things out and testing hypotheses on each other and in the classroom. we present our findings here in a certain order, working as warily as descartes at the outset of his discourse on method: an approach which tells ‘a tale’ (1960:38) blending experience, evidence of different kinds and learning contexts. like him, we are cautious enough to understand that those who ‘take it upon themselves to issue precepts’ are susceptible to the charge that they ‘must think themselves cleverer than those to whom they issue them’ (1960:38). our approach is careful, and we seek not to claim more than we have found. in that light, we contend that we have learned some things, and we claim too that we offer a usefully orderly presentation of hypotheses about literacy and about literacy development. 2. making hypotheses overt a year or so ago, one of the authors was asked by a friend to assess the literary worth of some personal letters written by a poet and academic about fifty years ago. the letters were not going to be kept, but it only took a few lines to notice just how literate their author was. written rapidly, yet in a neatly compressed cursive hand, their glancing sarcasm, wit and erudition were matched by a carelessly correct complex syntax and a casually rich vocabulary. as readers, many of us can sometimes take a selfish pleasure in the joy of language well used, in its vanities, its powers and its wealth. this person, clearly, was highly literate, was perhaps of the order of literacy by which other high order claims to literacy might be measured and found wanting. daylight and o’carroll literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 2 for literature readers and lecturers like us, such things can be judged very quickly, and indeed it is frequently our job to do so. but how do we know what we know? and what is literacy? 2.1 defining literacy the field of literacy is so fraught that we need to be clear about what we mean by the term itself. in the first place, we are not discussing ‘literacies’ in the broadest sense, to include digital literacy, media literacy or visual literacy. our task, and our expertise, such that it is, relates to the skills of reading and writing. we also do not mean ‘basic literacy’: students who matriculate into university are already literate in the sense of being able to read and to write sentences. however, their level of literacy at the commencement of their studies – what we might call ‘matriculating literacy’ – is sometimes not adequate to the demands of their higher education courses. william gray’s landmark work, the teaching of reading and writing, originally published by unesco in 1956, was directed at adult education. it emphasised a practical definition of what he calls ‘functional literacy’: a person is functionally literate when he has acquired the knowledge and skills in reading and writing which enable him to engage effectively in all those activities in which literacy is normally assumed within his culture or group. (1969:24) our experience is that the level of literacy of many of our first-year students is not functional, in the sense that it may not be adequate to the purpose of reading and writing academic texts. indeed, a recent oecd survey found that 44% of australians did not meet the third level of a five-level proficiency scale defined in the following way: adults performing at this level can understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts, and can identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information and make appropriate inferences using knowledge text structures and rhetorical devices. (oecd 2013:2) however, this definition leaves itself very open to interpretation: how do we define ‘dense’ or ‘lengthy’ for example, and what constitutes a ‘rhetorical device?’ definitions of literacy have contexts. in our context, we know basic, matriculating and academically-functional literacy when we see it. but even in the narrower contexts of tertiary education, things are not settled. for instance, most definitions of literacy rely, at some point, on making a tangible reference to an intangible object. james paul gee’s definitions of literacy, for example, rely on the distinction between the ‘acquisition,’ ‘control’ and ‘full and effortless control’ over dominant discourses (1991:5-6). but once again, these distinctions rely on implicit standards of vocabulary, grammar and erudition that are difficult to make explicit. how does one explain or qualify the difference between ‘acquisition’ and ‘control’? our context is also defined by the education courses our students are enrolled in – and the external yardstick of government assessment agencies. in theory, the australian government’s standard sidesteps the problem of definition by setting the minimum standard of literacy relatively. the stated requirement is that graduating student teachers must be in the top 30% of the australian population. however, as might be guessed, no such national survey exists to determine the nature of this cut-off standard. so, the administrators of the literacy test, the australian council for educational research (acer), are forced to make a number of judgements about this standard: teaching university students to read and write literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 3 in efforts to interpret the meaning of the ‘top 30 per cent of the population’ referred to in standard 3.1, a number of approaches have been implemented. (acer 2017:25) these approaches include the results of literacy surveys, such as the oecd survey mentioned above, and by establishing a ‘two-day workshop with expert groups’ (2017:25) to determine the final indicators of appropriate literacy for teacher graduates. the result of these deliberations is that the top 30% of australian society is said to correspond to an australian core skills framework (acsf) range defined by the upper end of acsf level 4 and lower end of level 5. at first glance, this seems to be another sideways step: a set of standards which refers to another set of standards. however, the acsf does, at least, go into rigorous detail about what it means by its own standards. for example, the level 5 reading standard includes specific attributes like: draws on broad general knowledge to aid understanding of texts on a wide range of subjects and within specialised disciplines; identifies how social relations, register and audience influence an author’s choice of text type, structure and language and how they may be used to express or hide attitudes and bias; recognises the distinguishing structures, layout, features and conventions of a broad range of complex text types and understands how to use these as an aid to locating information, developing understanding and focusing reading effort; understands the stylistic conventions of complex fiction and non-fiction texts. (acsf 2012:66-67) and the level 5 writing standard includes statements like: uses writing as a tool to develop hypotheses, explore complex issues, plan and problem solve; uses and experiments with a broad range of structures and features; understands and uses broad vocabulary, including idioms, colloquialisms and cultural references as appropriate; understands and uses linking devices effectively to demonstrate complex conceptual connections and/or causal relationships. (acsf 2012:92-93) these are the qualities and standards that we, as english specialists, immediately recognised as the implicit targets of our teaching program. our reading subject already had a lecture on the stylistic conventions of fiction and non-fiction, and another dedicated to reading the worldview (or bias) of the author. our writing subject already used composition experiments to foreground text forms and features. over time, the above-described acsf level 4/5 in reading and writing has become our practical guide to the qualities of literacy we need to work towards with our students.1 1 whether or not the lantite effectively tests these qualities and standards is a topic for another paper. all we would say at this point is that we do not immediately warm to a literacy test that does not ask the students to write. daylight and o’carroll literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 4 2.2 hypotheses about improving student literacy it is one thing to devise scales of literacy. it is quite another to support its improvement. what follows is only an attempt to describe our own teaching practice in terms of an orderly series of hypotheses, chief among which are rendering reading and writing practices overt and reflective. but before we consider what we do, let us set out the hypotheses we have used in the company of other hypotheses, and let us do this without discarding views we do not share. we begin in our own field, english, and our colleagues’ tacit hypotheses about ‘how to do things’ in subjects like ours. let us call these the english disciplinary hypothesis set. the most ubiquitous of them is the hypothesis of immersion, of making students read. this idea informs the entire foundation of english literature – of teaching in school and at university. in the latter case, it is a difficult one to substantiate because those students who elect to do english literature have a predilection for its approach and an interest in the texts. it is also difficult for ‘us’ to make our case beyond our own field, except to note that our hypothesis is obviously shared by those who frame school curricula and require reading both in primary and in secondary schooling. another english disciplinary kind of hypothesis involves choosing ‘good’ literature, the hypothesis being that rich vocabulary and complex syntax enhance literacy more strongly than simpler forms of writing. many outside our field object to these kinds of approaches. colleagues in commerce and in applied communications, for instance, see little point in using literature this way. they point to the issue of some students being averse to literature. there is also evidence of gendered dimensions to this interest: that women prefer fiction while men prefer non-fiction (see for example, national endowment for the arts 2015:71). this leads to a different kind of hypothesis, namely that students need to be interested for there to be any benefit in any reading-based approach. this kind of claim involves the scene of teaching, the teacher and the text. let us frame the engagement hypothesis this way: the student will learn if and (mainly/ only) if he or she finds the teaching and the text absorbing. then, another hypothesis comes quickly into play: the idea that the text being read is connected to something the student values. in a tertiary context, this might best be called the application hypothesis. the student asks: do i need to know this? is this useful to me? what will i do with it? churchill’s attack on his latin classes in his schooldays is apposite. he derided them as inherently useless knowledge, asking famously, when would one ever have occasion to use the vocative case in the declension of the latin noun for table, mensa? (churchill 1930:25). churchill is hardly alone in his objections, and we hear the refrain today as well. we work with colleagues in education. they too have literacy hypotheses. many of them have an interest in how curricula are laid out. they emphasise clarity in subject outline structures and assignment rubrics. this is true not just in school, but also at university. the hypothesis is that by the university being clear about where subjects fit into courses, where assignments fit into subjects and where weeks of work support assignments, there will be clarity of purpose for student and teacher alike. this is the constructive alignment group of hypotheses. in all fields of endeavour in education, including our own discipline, we find many who propose a variety of the technological hypothesis. a contradiction emerges. sometimes, it involves using more technology (like the bksb-branded literacy and numeracy modules our university uses), and by making more of our teaching material available online. at other times, however, teaching university students to read and write literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 5 we find the apparent opposite: that mobile phones, laptops and the like should be restricted at school and university. there are risks in making such hypotheses overt. profound and hard-won insights can seem obvious or trivial. highly wrought models of teaching can be rendered simplistic. there is an inevitable flattening of their value as soon as hypotheses are simply listed. they are not all of the same kind, or merit. it could be that one eclipses others so much that they are a side-issue. it could also be the case that accepting one hypothesis-set means rejecting one or more of the others. in our view, however, the value of making things overt is consistent with our own practice in teaching. we will ultimately conclude this essay by expressing some of them in an orderly way, in the hope that this helps others who share our journey. now, though, we turn to the reading and writing practices of our students and how we seek to support them. 3. teaching university students to read 3.1 our reading subject the original framework for our reading subject was borrowed from the office of learning and teaching project ‘the reading resilience toolkit,’ led by rosanne kennedy at the australian national university (kennedy et al 2013). the model uses reading guides (background to the text and its author, its context and themes) to scaffold the reading of a text, followed by intensive class discussion. in our hands, the ambition of this approach is to create a ‘community of practice,’ or what we call our ‘book club.’ with so many students in the same position, we find they can help and encourage each other, particularly in class. we structured the subject as follows. our students watch an online lecture (we teach to five campuses simultaneously) which provides some context and background information about the texts. then, students read one or two extracts each week, of 10-30 pages in length. we ask the students to read the texts on their own terms, so that they can explain what they understand it meant and how they felt about it. following our discussions in class, we ask them to write a 500-word report on each text, explaining what they thought it was about and whether they liked it, and why. with the support of the lectures, we also ask students to comment on any ‘technical aspects’ of the literature that struck them: genre, point of view, and cultural codes and contexts emerge here. no secondary reading is required: our process is to take the student’s honest reaction to the text and to turn that into a critical response. our abiding focus is to ‘force’ students to read short texts closely, by supporting and then testing them on the closeness of their reading. finally, our reading subject has a content, a focus of its own for its own sake. we study ‘the idea of australia’, as represented in literature, essays and film since the bush ballads of the 1890s. this focus was, again, decided collegially with the faculty of education. we felt that a thorough reading program in australian texts was appropriate for future australian teachers, and also that the ‘the idea of australia’ provided an engaging topic to drive students through the literacy tasks and outcomes. 3.2 how our students read so how do our students read? to give a sense of the challenge many students face, we begin with some common responses to the first written assignment of the year. the assignment, called the ‘reading reflection,’ asks students to describe their reading habits, their likes and daylight and o’carroll literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 6 dislikes, and their attitudes towards reading as a pastime. we have collected these responses over the past five years and observed certain patterns emerge. consider the following responses, which have been chosen to illustrate each point, but which represent the major typologies of responses: reading for me is not a natural thing and i have to be told to sit down and read this because it would be beneficial for me, but if i wasn’t forced i wouldn’t read at all. i can really relate to recipes books and different chefs, i love to cook and it is interesting to get an insight into the life of world famous chefs, for example jamie oliver. as a child i used to love reading by dr sues and the gumnut classics by may gibbs, but more than any thing i used to love listening to people read them to me. i believe that due to my parents reading to me i find more joy in listening to a book and actually reading it. i started reading again in year nine at night-time to make my selftired. [. . .] i cannot say i am an active reader as i would much rather listen to a tutorial or watch a movie although do to get some enjoyment out of reading. and like every one these days facebook seems to be the most common thing open and i am actively reading these days. when i was younger, i used to read every night before bed, wether it was a prescribed piece from school or a personal choice in the form of magazines, fiction and non fiction novels or short stories. as i got older i lost this habit and found myself playing on my mobile phone and more recently my i pad. my reading habits are starting to increase since i made it a new years resolution to read more novels and read before bed rather then playing on an electronic device and i find before bed is the time when my reading happens most. i find i don’t have time during the day to sit down and read. we note the wide range in the interests and abilities in our student cohort. but there are patterns too. it’s clear that many students in the teacher education degrees do not enjoy reading fiction or long-form non-fiction (biographies, histories, and so on). many of these students intend to be primary school teachers. they will have the task of ‘teaching literacy’ to young children. if they themselves struggle to find any pleasure in reading such works, they may struggle to instil any sense of the pleasure of the text in their own students. but why is this so? why is reading not a habit or hobby among the majority of our cohort? the responses we have received to this reading reflection task over the past five years suggest speculation along the following lines. 3.2.1 the communications revolution social media patterns have affected literacy of the traditional kind. many students who claimed not to ‘read’ also described the amount of time they spent on social media: reading is not a hobby of mine. i am not the kind of person who will sit down and read a novel a week or even a month. i would be lucky to just start reading a novel a year. the majority of the reading i do is based around my studies at university or on the internet such as a news update on facebook. i tend to use the internet as a major source for my reading. i find it to be easily accessible and a great outlet of information. living in a predominantly digital society, i find it the easiest way to stay up to date with world happenings and access material that interests teaching university students to read and write literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 7 me for free. being that the internet is available on so many different devices i am constantly accessing the internet throughout my day. while – to invoke ong (1982) and mcluhan (1987) – the media of communication have an impact on culture, the impact is challenging when it not only supplements long-form reading, but actually displaces it. educationally, the speed and brevity of information available through mobile devices can work to the detriment of long-form reading in both paper and digital modes. even among the engineers and entrepreneurs leading the communications revolution, a ‘dark consensus’ is forming that screens are changing young people’s brains in ways that we don’t yet understand (bowles 2018). 3.2.2 the unclear effect of cultural capital we have also been puzzling over the effects of what many people loosely call ‘cultural capital.’ we wonder whether growing up in a household of book readers makes a great difference to student outcomes. on the one hand, our personal experience suggests that a household full of books must generate a certain tendency towards reading. on the other hand, each time we measured student performance (as both pass/fail rates and grade point average in the bachelor of arts and the bachelor of education degrees) we found that the students’ socioeconomic status (ses) made no measurable difference to academic performance (daylight 2014). it could be, of course, that cultural capital is less dependent upon ses than is usually presumed. but in tandem with this, we have noticed repeatedly that the responses to our reading reflection indicate that our students were keen readers up to the age of puberty, when technology and relationships and high school study itself pushed reading for pleasure aside. this suggests to us that, regardless of socio-economic class or cultural capital, our task in higher education is to re-engage students with the pleasure of reading that they once felt. 3.2.3 narrowness of reading when students do read for pleasure, they often read narrowly. many of our students have read some young-adult and fantasy fiction, such as the harry potter series. we have also noticed that the nature of our students’ reading is gendered: young men tend to favour factual texts, most often popular histories or sports biographies; young women tend to favour inspirational narratives, or melodrama (either fictional or biographical), often of surviving illness or abuse. these kinds of books are not ‘bad,’ but they are limited in their structure and narration. we repeatedly encounter a kind of bewilderment with the texts we offer them to read: ‘i couldn’t work out who was talking’ is a frequent complaint. this is also true in their own accounts of books they read before they come to study with us. while many of them loved game of thrones on television, they did not always enjoy reading the novels: the last text i did not finish was ‘a game of thrones’ george r.r. martin (2006). i started reading this book because i heard great reviews about the series and wanted to give it a chance. i didn’t finish the text because i found that the character storylines were very disjointed and this confused me. 3.2.4 trouble reading outside of the present context we have also noticed that this tendency towards genre fiction does not lead to a capacity to read realist accounts of life outside of their own time and place. for example, while fantasy genres require a leap of the imagination, historical realism requires readers to place themselves in a milieu of assumed (rather than imagined) knowledge. novels written or daylight and o’carroll literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 8 set prior to, say, 1990, present two hurdles: (1) a set of cultural beliefs and (2) an english syntax that are foreign to the students. one text in particular made this clear. the merry-goround in the sea by randolph stow (1965) is an australian classic novel in the realist mode. it was taught to both authors in high school. however, its cascading syntax and assumed knowledge of twentieth century australia left our students with nothing sufficiently familiar to hold onto. the response was so desperately negative that it had to be dropped from the reading program. 3.2.5 not reading in bed (or in cafés, on trains, nor even on rainy days) in our reading subject, we asked our students to reflect on when and where they read. to our surprise, this produced the most poignant difficulty of all. even those who liked to read struggled to identify a time or place where reading is the main activity. in bed before sleeping, for instance, when many readers traditionally settle into a book, our students are online: i often like to read different online blogs and the news stories online but i rarely read the newspapers. i often read the blogs at night before i go to bed and i read magazines if i do not have the internet available. i like to read to relax myself, this is why i do it before bed. reading a novel is usually a last resort, when there is no internet or something else that i feel more important at the time. the golden periods for reading fiction, biography and other books – when all else is quiet, when a reader can sink into characters in an almost dream-like state – are lost to them. images of readers in bed, on park benches, in cafés or on trains are now mainly seen as stock photos on the internet, not in everyday life and our students are part of this large scale transformation. to each of these situations, we have a number of quite specific responses. the impact of the communication revolution extends well beyond our scope to effect change. we do have a duty, however, to at least create the space for students to discuss their reading habits openly, with peers, with support, and start to think their own way towards a future in which longer and more complex reading becomes a part of their lives. we can – and do – point out that cultural capital can be developed, that they too can build on what they have, working with their interests, making links from text to text. we can also encourage complex responses to other complex media texts, too – to cinema, music, and image for instance. we do this in both subjects in order to show how connections are made, and in order to encourage them to do it themselves. finally, as students who have to read texts, we begin by working over texts in class, reading over them together, making shared sense of them, and asking them to finish what we started when they get home. taking all these things together, we now propose a synthesis of hypotheses, which we call ‘the reading strategy.’ 3.3 the reading strategy over the past five years, the authors have developed the following framework for improving our students’ confidence, capability and resilience in reading complex texts: teaching university students to read and write literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 9 3.3.1 vocabulary and grammar when students face too many new words and sentence structures in a text, their reading becomes laboured and they may give up. we have learned to supply aids of one kind or another. for instance, in working over a text, we might stop reading aloud to discuss a word or turn of phrase, so as to discuss general difficulties of vocabulary and grammar in a staged way. we seek to instil a culture of being patient, of looking words up when useful, and allowing the contextual meaning to emerge. we start by teaching grammar as a reader, not as a writer. this generally means helping students to pay attention to, and interpret, an author’s stylistic choices. whether it is randolph stow or francis bacon, an author’s lexical and syntactical choices bear meanings that can be observed and discussed. 3.3.2 literary knowledge an experienced reader approaches a text with some implicit questions: what kind of thing is this? what genre is it? what does it want from me? how does this text relate to other texts, to history, to my life experience? the experienced reader has enough literary knowledge to situate the text in literary history. in our reading subject, students are faced with literary forms that they are unfamiliar with (the personal essay, the poem) and they are given more complex forms of narration than they are comfortable with (unreliable narration, free indirect speech). we therefore have another kind of work to do. that is, as well as building vocabulary and grammar, we have the task of situating the text in time, against other texts and text types, and indeed, in relation to their own lives and ambitions. in short, we ask and help to answer the question: what kind of thing is this? 3.3.3 social-historical knowledge and context most of our students, particularly those fresh from high school, come to our classes with limited knowledge of the twentieth century: the wars, the social movements and the changing political terrain. some students therefore struggle to make sense of essays, novels and poems about a world outside their own experience. we cannot teach all these things. but we do provide a social-historical scaffolding for each text and use this to generate discussion in the classroom. for example, we used the history of australian migration (from colonisation, through the gold rush, world war two and afterwards) as a background to reading christos tsiolkas’ novel loaded (1995), which itself takes this history for granted. daylight and o’carroll literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 10 3.3.4 empathy and openness in order to read well, a reader must be open to the text’s intentions and interactions with past and present cultures. we never demand that our students agree with the text’s point of view, but we do model the act of opening up to views different from our own. in the process, we discovered that many students are disturbed by texts in which the protagonist is flawed, or in which a narrative does not conclude in a ‘feel-good’ ending. this may reflect popular cultural narratives which align aesthetic pleasure with psychological affirmation. to some extent, however, accepting that life is complex and that people are flawed is an essential step in becoming an adult. this has led us, in our practice, to carefully balance the selection of texts between those which challenge our students’ values and those which offer more straightforward pleasures. these four focus areas act as a virtuous circle, as gains in one area help develop the other areas. better vocabulary means easier reading, which means more reading, and the acquisition of more social-historical knowledge. better social-historical knowledge helps students to empathise with the motives and desires of authors and characters outside of their own experience. 4. teaching university students to write 4.1 our writing subject as our first subject focuses on reading, we then offer a complementary subject which focuses on writing. the subject begins with a forthright account of grammar. we often hear from academic administrators that students find grammar boring. maybe that was once so, but this is not our experience in tutorial rooms. as academics, we have stood in front of a wide variety of classes, ranging from sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, media and communications, to english literature. students are capable of being bored by any of this. but whenever we work through a grammar lesson or break down a sentence into its components, all eyes are on the board and fingers clatter across their laptops. since primary school, students have been starved of information about a subject which they secretly suspect is very important. when that information is thematised in terms of their own writing, and their own struggles, they pay even closer attention. as the semester progresses, weekly classes introduce genres of writing, writing exercises, and class activities in which we experiment with language forms and features. in class, students write on unseen topics – just a few lines at first. we then share those lines, and comment on them as a group. later in the session, we co-write pieces using the whiteboard or powerpoint. we work towards clarity and power in these passages of writing by adding, subtracting and moving text around. the class exercises support a series of writing assignments. the first involves identifying a grammatical point the student finds difficult, and then presenting a lesson on it. this is succeeded by an assignment on the lyric form – and on syntax at work. while students reach readily for previously learned ‘literature skills’ (imagery, metaphor, etc.) we direct their attention to the effects that simple grammatical features have on meaning and aesthetic effect. the subject’s work converges in the final assignment: a composition. we ask them to create a new piece of work, but written in the ‘style’ of another writer. but what we mean by ‘style’ takes some time to develop. through direct instruction and tutorial interaction we observe how a writer makes choices about vocabulary, syntax, rhythm and voice. teaching university students to read and write literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 11 as with the reading subject, our writing subject has a content. most recently, we framed our writing work with a question: ‘how should we live today?’ we use the students’ intellectual and emotional engagement with this question as a way of generating the energy for completing grammar and composition exercises that might otherwise be very dry. 4.2 how our students write before we analyse the most common issues in the written expression of english speakers, we feel that it’s important to put to aside english as a second language (esl) student-writing. the example below carries errors in word order, tense, article, and subject-verb agreement that indicate the differing protocols of the source and translated language: the justice system is still factor of the obstacle of the reason of increase numbers of indigenous adolescent in detention centre. the justice system administer guideline that performances very well for common or prevailing australians but it works horribly well for people who are diminish or detriment. teaching esl students at tertiary level is a discipline unto itself. our experience, however, is mostly with native speakers of english. and just as our analysis of our students’ reading skills indicated that many struggle with basic vocabulary and grammar, the same is true of their writing. while some are tempted to make an unfavourable contrast between our students’ work and the challenges of esl students, the issues are quite distinct. consider these instances from our students’ assignments: australia is often depicted as a baron, dry waste-land that is mostly complied of bush. i felt like i can relate to helen garners as her essay really tells a story about how peoples opinions on your life affect the choices you make for yourself. my first thoughts on the novel extract ‘singing my sister down’ by margo lanagan, we’re not positive. all though after class discussion’s and re reading the extract i was able to come to a better understanding of the text. the errors seem obvious when singled out this way: misused vocabulary, punctuation errors (particularly the apostrophe) and missing or awkward conjunctions. conjunctions also play a role in the grammatical error we most often encounter: the run-on sentence. drugs are not only used to create victories but also sporting greats like lance armstrong 7 time winner of the tour de france (consecutive wins) the use of performance enhancing drugs put his leagues above his competitors and becoming an inspiration to some. whilst we are not alone in identifying the run-on sentence as a common error, we hope to shortly contribute something to the explanation of the frequency of this problem. from literally thousands of compositions and essays, a picture gradually forms about the general qualities of student writing. some systematisation of student writing is possible, and desirable, if we want to develop a program that addresses these issues. to systematise these errors in a grammatically orderly way, we observe the following categories: daylight and o’carroll literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 12 4.2.1 subjects and predicates grammatically, the ‘subject’ is what a sentence is about, and the ‘predicate’ is the claim that the writer wants to make about the subject. for example: the ball is blue. (subject) (predicate) many of our students, even very good ones, are deeply uncertain about subjects and predicates. this uncertainty leads to a variety of orders of wavering: sentences without a subject; dangling modifiers; duplicated verbs (leading to transitivity errors with missing verb particles); sentences phrased in a very awkward passive voice; ensembles of words which are fragmentary or incomplete quasi-sentences; and endless (and often eventually aimless), run-on sentences. consider the following examples: she’s one of australia’s most talented writers, with lyrical prose and fascinating characters. what i found interesting is, i understand this text to be an older and found it fascinating of the plot, as i wouldn’t expect it back then, or as much as a common occurrence. writing a grammatically correct sentence is something that i find difficult to do and know this is an area i need to work on. grammar is not something i remember focusing on greatly during school and therefore sometimes have difficulties in understanding the rules of grammar and how to apply them in my work. in each case, the subject needs to be recast, or slips; otherwise (for instance), it is ‘grammar’ that ‘has difficulties understanding the rules of grammar.’ whilst it would be possible to break down these passages into their component errors, we see the problem here as a more general uncertainty in how to establish a direct and stable relationship between: (1) the subject of the sentence; and (2) what the student wants to say about it. 4.2.2 lexical errors (nouns, verbs, modifiers, prepositions) clichés, modish colloquialisms (‘relatable,’ ‘majorly,’ and the like), and stock phrasing are inevitable shorthand for all of us. but every stock phrase and cliché has its context, its meaning and its sense. witness the following lexical choices: throughout high school i have always struggled with my literacy skills. the bksb has been able to identify aspects of my literacy that i didn’t know i needed work on whilst also giving me confidents in the areas that i understood. it was also able to reiterate the parts of my knowledge i already knew i was struggling with and provide me with activities to help improve those areas. ‘literacy skills’ could just be ‘literacy.’ ‘confidents’ should be ‘confidence.’ ‘reiterate’ should probably be ‘revise,’ although the student’s intention isn’t clear. the errors here relate to nouns and verbs, but the problem of lexical choice is clearest in the adjectives and adverbs: to achieve principal happiness is to live simplistic in the nature of our existence. although this song’s lyrics and musical composition are juxtaposing through the melancholy lyrics and the upbeat and consistent melody effortlessly progress through the song. teaching university students to read and write literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 13 whilst reading various pieces of austen’s writing including pride and prejudice i noticed reoccurring underlying themes of criticising society’s expectations and exploring the role of women and men in contrast of each other. i chose the topic and wrote the narrative composition in reflection of austen’s underlying themes. in each case, the inappropriate nature of the modifier blurs the meaning of the entire sentence. by themselves, they are small errors. collectively, they indicate a cohort of students generally uncomfortable with verb tense and agreement. finally, there are text-fragments which themselves have become stock phrases even though they make little sense when written. examples include: a grasp on the subject [a grasp of the subject] based off, focused around [based on, focused on] this was due to [this was because] in which [when ‘which’ alone is needed] majorly because, majority which [mostly because, most of which] 4.2.3 syntactical errors (conjunctions and punctuation) syntactical errors can refer to any kind of problem with word ordering and arrangement. despite the variety, the most common type seems to occur between clauses – where a conjunction or punctuation mark is required: i finally get the courage to roll out of bed and tumble down the stairs to adhere to my heroic mother cooking me breakfast, as i complain about going to school even though it’s the very first day back from a two week break, she continues to crisp the bacon and grind the coffee, ‘but my dear, it is important that you receive an education to succeed later on in life, think about all those who do not receive an education at all’ she mutters to me. first of all, the incorrect word choice in ‘adhere’ is counter-balanced by precise and powerful word choices in ‘crisp’ and ‘grind.’ but the fact that this movement from bed to conversation is written as a single sentence betrays a profound lack of confidence in the staging of clauses within a longer sentence. the comma is being used as a kind of median punctuation mark: probably not right, but probably not completely wrong either. this issue sometimes appears in the work of an otherwise accurate passage: when completing the questions in the various formats i found this to be quite challenging at times, especially being on a computer screen, the topics in particular i found to be challenging was when to use an apostrophe and the spelling section. in the spelling section, i found it harder to identify the misspelt words on the computer screen. compared to being written on a page in front of you. this punctuation needs to be completely rewritten with a mix of conjunctions and full stops. yet once corrected, the student has the potential to write clearly and precisely. 4.2.4 the problem of ‘word processing’ almost all our students speak in an orderly way. it is possible to ask them ‘what did you think of this reading?’ and they will respond in ways that reflect a sound (implicit) knowledge of how to connect a subject to its predicate, of subject-verb-object word order and agreement and of sound phrasing and general ordering of the material. however, this instinct for grammar daylight and o’carroll literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 14 that generally operates in the verbal mode is often absent in the word-processed mode. in response to our question, a student might say in class something like: ‘i didn’t really like this book as it was too descriptive and too long.’ the same student is likely to write something in their assessment task more like: ‘the reading of this book was less satisfactory for me as a reader majorly in that it was excessive in its descriptions and also the length was too much.’ in synthesising this kind of sentence, we don’t mean to belittle our students. it is only an attempt to analyse why a tertiary student’s written assignments can read so differently to their spoken english. we refer to this phenomenon as ‘word processing’ because it does not also apply to handwriting, or the ‘chirographic mode’ (ong 1982). this emerges most clearly in our reading subject which has an invigilated, handwritten exam at the end of semester. as with their spoken sentences, a generally sound subject-verb-object relation re-emerges in their handwritten sentences. to some extent, this observation mirrors those we have made in relation to the effect of the communications revolution on reading. their word-processed sentences give the impression of lashing together the flotsam of the literary jargon from our lectures with ready-made colloquialisms and ungrammatical punctuation. studies by walter ong (1982) and michael heim (1987) drew attention to the seriousness of this issue in its infancy, when word-processing was being brought into being, but very little pedagogical attention has been paid to the phenomenon. 4.3 the writing strategy in decoding our students’ writing, the general picture that emerges is this: description is much more difficult than it appears. the traditional hierarchy of tasks places description on the bottom rung of a ladder that exalts analysis and criticism. yet every class, every assignment, every discussion involves descriptive skill. universities take it for granted – but we as teachers have learned that we should not do this. in the field of writing, as in the field of reading, we believe educators tend to leap too quickly to what a particular field or discipline requires as its endpoint. instead, we have been learning to work from more basic principles. where reading involves understanding information, interpreting it and perhaps applying it to situations, writing involves an equivalent series of steps, the most fundamental of which is the capacity to describe phenomena. all disciplines – be they natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities – require one foundational capacity: the ability to describe phenomena. yet nowhere is this skill taught, or even recognised as a skill worth teaching. our writing strategy involves focusing afresh on writing as something which says things about the world. we have come to identify four main principles that guide our design: predication, the physicality of language, writing workshopping and making the talk about writing explicit. 4.3.1. writing makes a claim about the world almost every sentence that we write makes a claim about the world. that animal is a horse. the president has resigned. calcium reacts with oxygen. this set of words is a sentence. rather than treat dozens of grammatical symptoms individually, we have noticed that a strong instinct for the subject, and then for what the writer wants to claim about that subject, improves our students’ grammar immediately and significantly. when they follow this guidance, they instinctively start writing in the active voice. their subjects and verbs agree more often. they tend towards shorter, clearer sentences. we risk them creating grammatically correct but repetitive writing. however, it is always worthwhile to pass through this phase rather than leap over it. teaching university students to read and write literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 15 4.3.2 the physicality of language one of the most important tasks in our two subjects involves drawing students into an awareness of what we call the physicality of language. when we read together, we stop to ask what words mean. just as our reading subject offers texts with rich and precise vocabularies, our writing subject asks our students to write clearly and precisely. our contention is that precision and clarity emerge from the habit of ‘weighing our words,’ that is, by feeling our words for their nuances, their connotations and their exact sense. clearly, lexical choice of nouns and verbs is something any class of this kind would teach. not every verb complements its noun equally well. not every adjective or adverb modifies its subject appropriately. so, we ask students to weigh their words, and to make their lexical choices more carefully. but the physicality of language extends to even the smallest kinds of words. these ‘small words’ (our own very special technical term!) are used everywhere, but they have exact meanings. words like ‘so’, ‘then’, ‘yet’, ‘since’, ‘therefore’, all perform work in their sentences. they are the levers of sense. if verbs are the engines driving the relationships between subjects and objects, the small words are levers which switch the tracks, so to speak, and (to pursue the metaphor), shunt the component phrases and clauses into their precise lines, platforms, sidings. small words perform big wonders, we say, even if our students do not yet quite believe us. 4.3.3 writing practice in a grammatically orderly program our writing program involves writing practice. our students practise writing in different genres, forms, moods, purposes, places and cultures. they work individually and collectively. the work on the small pieces of reading and writing is intensive. then in the assignments, we ask for comparatively short answers paragraphs or half pages, with three or four such questions per assignment. rapid feedback is essential to any success whether it is in the classroom context, or to assignments. in some subjects taught by the school, we have used a model of iterative writing, where a single piece is resubmitted. in our subjects, especially the reading subject, initial reading responses are worked up into a final assignment. just as important, we believe, is that the writing program works through these exercises in a grammatically coherent sequence. we dwell on the structural features of language as they emerge, and we call the issues by their names – their grammatical names. in this respect, the fact our students may have to teach grammar to their own students makes them attentive. we believe that the basic terms of grammar that were lost to the generations between 1970 and the present are valuable, provided they are not taught abstractly or in absurd detail. still, the main focus of our directed writing is not formally grammatical. for example, when we present example of writing stylists (bacon, austen, woolf, orwell) to the students, we ask our students to say things – any things – about what they noticed. the simplest comments are often the best starting points. bacon uses lots of semicolons. austen’s sentence is complicated, woolf ’s even more so. bacon and austen both launch their respective pieces of writing propositionally – a term that itself needs to be explained. orwell writes clearly, doesn’t he? austen is making a claim and is like bacon, but there is something distinct too. bacon and austen deploy a kind of balance in their sentences, a kind of ‘syntactical balance.’ like many things in writing, we can feel things before we can fully explain them and ‘playing’ with writing samples is one of the best things we can do when we are in the room with them. daylight and o’carroll literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 16 4.3.4 multi-model writing which lecturer has not had this experience? a student comes to you with an assignment and asks for more feedback. at some point you ask: what did you mean to say here? very frequently talking to our students unlocks some meaning buried inside an ungrammatical sentence in the document. we seek to help students to connect the vocal, written and word-processed responses before the fact. to do this, we set handwritten exercises in class, we set speaking and reading exercises and we work closely together to form sentences on the whiteboard and powerpoint. there is, perhaps, a platonic irony in that this article was entirely word-processed from its origin (in between short bursts of handwritten notes and spoken conversation). but the authors – through their personal and educational histories – have found and practised ways to fully integrate the spoken, the handwritten and the word-processed modes. we don’t yearn for a simpler time prior to the ubiquity of computers and mobile phones. but we do recognise a writing problem when we see it, and we feel that we must try to connect these modes more solidly in the students we teach. 5. conclusions we began this investigation by stating some elementary hypotheses about how literacy might be taught. at the conclusion of our reflections on our own methods, we find ourselves with something to say about each of these hypotheses. how does a university student become a better reader? a better writer? at the end of these many pages, we hope that you will see that while we have made certain observations and have developed certain convictions, we disbelieve those who claim to have a magic answer of some kind. there are as many kinds of readers and writers as there are readers and writers, and not everything will work as well – or at all – for everyone. we begin with a story, one from the australian novelist, poet, and essayist, david malouf. he relates that when he first began as a high school teacher in the 1950s, he was sent to a school in leeds. he turned up at the working-class boys’ school with no idea of how to teach, but he was told to teach northanger abbey by jane austen. not knowing what else to do, he read them the book aloud – in class after class. he was amazed at the power that the book had over the students – how much they connected with the northern characters and how familiar they became with the words. telling them about the book was not the point – reading the book itself drew the class into its world. the point of that story is not just one about the power of the work of art, although it is that too. we do not have enough time in university classes to read an entire novel in class. but the process of reading is what teaches the ability to read. reading and writing are, then, a bit like swimming. in order to become olympic swimmers, our elite athletes swim for several hours every day. they are given direct feedback, and told to get back into the pool and carry it out. after five years of experiments with hypotheses and methods, we have come to the conclusion that there is nothing like reading for improving reading, and nothing like writing for improving writing. this much accords with the immersion hypothesis. it is useful – even essential – to aid the student in their reading and writing by providing reading guides and grammatical support. but if the student stops reading the text after a page or two because it is too long-winded or contextually confusing, there is no way to make up for this deficit by any amount of complementary teaching. teaching university students to read and write literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 27, no. 1, 2019 17 but this commitment to our own discipline’s principal hypothesis has led us to lean heavily on the principal hypothesis of another discipline: constructive alignment. in our two subjects, we use assessments to drive students through the reading and writing tasks. we require students to explain, in close detail, what they thought about a book only so that they will read the book closely. we demand that students write in the style of another writer only so that they will write, and pay attention to their grammatical choices as they do so. this may seem obvious to many, but it does invert the mechanism of constructive alignment as it often appears in courses on literature. we don’t ask students to read a book so that they can write a book review. we ask them to write a book review so that they will read the book. each of our subjects is organised around a theme: in our reading subject, we study the idea of australia; in our writing subject, we ask how we should live today. in this sense, each subject has its own content. in this way, in in our choice of reading and writing tasks, we continually consider the engagement and application hypotheses. we set texts featuring young people, often in rural communities. we set writing tasks that relate to their chosen profession of teaching. however, we stop short of asking our students to read lesson plans or write curriculum documents. and our themes do not lead directly to their professions, except that we may want our future teachers to know something about australia or to have considered the question of how to live well. more broadly, we could say that we took the opportunity to allow our students to develop their humanity and their citizenship, as much as their qualifications for particular employment. finally, and with some regret, we have formed a view within the technological hypothesis. as english specialists with some expertise in media and communications theory, we acknowledge that new media forms bring into being new forms of literacy. we recognise the value of these literacies in working and living in a digital world. however, we also highlight the risk that these newer kinds of literacy might displace older forms. we began our work with a basic definition of literacy: as the ability to read and interpret complex texts, and to write grammatically and fluently. we feel obligated to record that each year from 2014 to 2018, as our cohort became more and more ‘digitally native,’ we observed greater difficulties with long form reading and consistently coherent writing. we have learned to resist some of these trends, and to work towards integrating older forms of literacy within newer forms. and this is principally why we have shared our thoughts in this article. our main reason might just be the academic’s reflex to share new knowledge. over the past five years we have learned new things – things that were new to us, anyway – and we wanted to organise and to share this new knowledge. but we also felt that we have been witnesses to the rapid emergence of a new generation of students, in some ways radically different to previous generations. it is a generation that presents urgent challenges for tertiary educators, making many traditional methods and assumptions about tertiary education redundant. whilst we are not entirely hostile to the pedagogical impositions of academic administrators – who, surely, must want us to teach well – we have found that the best new knowledge is most likely to be produced by the teachers who have met and wrestled with this new cohort over the last few years. it is to enter into a conversation that we make these observations public. references acer (2017) literacy and numeracy test for initial teacher education students. assessment framework, the department of education and training, canberra. australian core skills framework (2012) commonwealth of australia, canberra. daylight and o’carroll literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and 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revised 24/09/2018; accepted 14/10/2018; published 24/01/2019 abstract adaptation to an unfamiliar currency is required regularly of international travellers – and also of citizens of countries changing their currency, such as the 19 (to date) eurozone members. we report on the currency adaptation process in the slovak republic during 2008-2011. we analyse its effects on citizens’ development of price intuition in the euro. our study draws on hofmann et al.’s (2007) work, which proposed four different strategies for coping, ranging from direct numerical conversion to developing intuition. we conducted repeated crosssectional surveys using structured questionnaires in realistic slovak settings. we describe european and slovak institutions’ supports for the public, such as dual display of prices, and readily available conversion tables. we found that, whereas the numerical conversion strategy was used most frequently by respondents in the first year, within two years they were already developing intuition in the new currency, especially for frequently bought products. we also investigated the ‘euro illusion’, the extent to which slovak citizens, in their evaluation of prices, may have been influenced to make decisions based on nominal values, whereby prices in euros seemed smaller than those in slovak crowns. we summarise suggestions for promoting learning in situations of currency change, and briefly discuss the features of the slovak process as a ‘numerate environment’. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding jana kubascikova received financial support from middlesex university in the form of scholarship to fund her phd on which this article is based. 3 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6301 https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6301 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj mailto:jkubascikova@yahoo.co.uk mailto:j.evans@mdx.ac.uk mailto:hafiz.khan@uwl.ac.uk mailto:jkubascikova@yahoo.co.uk https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v26i1.6301 keywords price intuition; numeracy; learning; intuition strategy; marker value strategy; anchor strategy; numerical conversion strategy. introduction when people travel to another country, they normally need to adapt to using a different currency. insights as to how they might do this can be gleaned from the way that citizens of the 19 eurozone countries responded to the introduction of the euro. the changeover required eurozone citizens to adapt, in order to understand the value of the new currency and to accept the euro as their own. a sort of ‘national pedagogic project’ in what might be seen as a carefully created ‘numerate environment’ (evans, yasukawa, mallows and creese 2017) had to be developed in each country. the resulting supports were crucial to individual citizens’ experience of the process. when a country changes its currency, citizens engage in currency conversion tasks to understand values in the new money. the value can be understood only by numerical conversion to the familiar currency or by comparing the prices of other products. however, to make a direct comparison to similar products, a certain level of price knowledge in the new currency is required, which may be lacking at the time of the changeover (gamble, gärling, charlton and ranyard 2002; jonas, greitemeyer, frey, and schulz-hardt 2002). according to dehaene and marques (2002) price knowledge is not stored as an exact price for a product but rather as an approximate range of values. when first developing intuition for prices in the new currency, the majority of people rely on direct currency conversion to make money related decisions, such as evaluating how much to pay for certain products and services, or just deciding how much money to withdraw from a cash machine. based on these experiences people learn, thereby developing their numeracy, and they also form attitudes. understanding attitudes and their social correlates is important, as they influence people’s decisions and practical actions (kokkinaki 1998), including the ways that they convert prices. some people may be emotionally attached to the national currency and, if the changeover is not handled sensitively, it can generate negative attitudes that can act as barriers to learning. furthermore, meier and kirchler (1998) show that social knowledge communicated through media and discussions can affect attitudes. individual perceptions and expectations of price changes and inflation (ranyard, missier, bonini, duxbury and summers 2008), can also affect attitudes. also crucial for the experience of individual citizens is the part played by the state in educating and supporting adults in the currency transaction process, assisting the public to access the available resources, and clarifying how the resources can meet learners’ needs. table 1 shows the exchange rate at the time that each of the 19 eurozone members joined the currency. we can see that levels of difficulty with currency conversion would vary from country to country; for example, they were considerably less difficult in the case of the slovak republic (exchange rate about 30 to 1), belgium (about 40 to 1), germany (about 2 to 1) and portugal (about 200 to 1) than in most other eurozone countries. table 1 also shows that, in most cases, the unit of national currency was of a lower value than one euro, except for four of the 19 cases (ireland, cyprus, malta, latvia). this means that eurozone citizens had different experiences with their development of price intuition, such kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 4 as differing perceptions as to whether prices displayed in the euro currency appeared to be cheaper or more expensive than in the domestic currency. table 1 official currency conversion date and exchange rate by eurozone countries euro adoption date country exchange rate 1€ = 1 january 1999* belgium germany ireland spain france italy luxembourg netherlands austria portugal finland 40.339 1.955 0.787 166.386 6.559 1936.270 40.339 2.203 13.760 200.482 5.945 1 january 2001* greece 340.750 1 january 2007 slovenia 239.640 1 january 2008 cyprus malta 0.585 0.429 1 january 2009 slovak republic 30.126 1 january 2011 estonia 15.646 1 january 2014 latvia 0.702 1 january 2015 lithuania 3.452 * cash changeover date: 1 january 2002 source: european central bank, fixed euro conversion rates (2017) we designed a repeated cross-sectional study to elicit responses from a total of 365 adults in slovak republic, carried out in four phases between april 2008 and january 2011. the samples were selected based on tightly designed quota sampling controlling for geographical region, age, and gender to ensure that samples were representative of the slovak population and comparable over time (see appendix a and kubascikova-mullen 2013). in each phase, the sample were asked a broadly similar set of questions, and asked to perform several realistic currency conversion tasks. to provide background, we also focus on the part played by the state in educating/ supporting adults in the currency conversion process. using available documents, we describe how these resources helped people to adapt in various ways, for example to use different strategies for coping with the numerical demands, and to develop positive attitudes towards the euro. we consider examples of different programmes used in slovak republic to support formal, non-formal and informal learning. development of price intuition after currency changeover the literature related to the introduction of the euro focuses on several aspects of the changeover: (i) adaptation to the use of new bills and coins; (ii) adaptation to the value development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 5 system of the new currency; and (iii) support given by various state, financial, and civil society institutions. developing intuition in a new currency is a lengthy process and studies from different eurozone countries show that the adaptation process varies from country to country and from individual to individual. various factors play an important part in the adaptation process such as people’s prior knowledge, involvement and familiarity with the euro currency (e.g. muller-peters, pepermans, kiell, battaglia, beckmann, burgoyne, and wahlund 1998). before, during and after the euro changeover, citizens were bombarded with a great deal of information. courses, leaflets and media advertisements were used to motivate citizens to learn about the new currency. the internet and other media made information more accessible. in the ‘background’ section below, we illustrate the programmes available, to support numerate learning – formal, non-formal and informal – in the slovak republic during the conversion process. the eurobarometer survey (e.g. european commission may 2008a), regularly tracked how many respondents in non-euro countries had seen, or had used, euro bank notes/coins. it is of course an advantage to have the opportunity to become familiar with the euro before a national conversion is launched, something the first 12 eurozone entrants in 2002 did not have. for example, irish citizens reported confusion with bank notes and coins even a year after the transition (ranyard, routh, burgoyne, and saldanha 2007). as early as 1998 the journal of economic psychology (volume 19) published a number of articles on the euro changeover. these articles show national differences in people’s attitudes which are affected by various factors including perceived advantages and disadvantages of the euro currency, and ideas of european identity and national identity. attitudes influence citizens’ economic behaviour. according to meier-pesti and kirchler’s (2003) study of austria, positive attitudes encourage savings and investments in home countries; negative attitudes decrease citizens’ trust in the economy and people start to invest abroad. thus our first research question (rq1) was: what was the previous experience of the slovak public with the euro and what were their attitudes towards it? the literature provides a conceptual framework to study and to understand how consumers learn the value of the euro and develop the intuitive price system. marques (1999) and ranyard, burgoyne, saldanha and routh (2003) studied the general challenges for citizens during and after currency changeover. marques and dehaene (2004) investigated the adaptation process in portugal and austria after the euro introduction, as a way to investigate two conflicting hypotheses. the rescaling hypothesis expects that in a process of adaptation, ‘all prices are being rescaled (i.e. transformed) at the same time’ (p. 149). in contrast, the relearning hypothesis assumes a shift from ‘an initial algorithm […] (i.e. the mental calculation of the price in euros from the estimated price in the former national currency) to reliance on memory-based solutions (i.e. prices in euros)’ (p. 149). they concluded that the results of their experiments were more in line with the relearning hypothesis, considering that price estimates became progressively more accurate ‘by a process that is […] faster for frequently bought items’ (p. 148). hofmann, kirchler and kamleitner (2007) also considered the adaptation to euro values to focus above all on the development of price intuition, that is, ‘to establish an intuitive value system for (understanding) the euro’ (p. 372). their research, using national surveys and focus groups, led to a conclusion that there were four strategies used by austrian citizens, to convert values between austrian schillings and euros; see table 2. kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 6 table 2 adaptation strategies strategy description conversion strategy converting (by numerical calculation) each euro price into the old currency. the calculation can be exact or rule of thumb. a range of conversion tactics used by french respondents were identified by lemaire and lecacheur (2001). marker value strategy specific values are learned for example how much 5€, 10€, 20€ is worth in the familiar currency. anchor strategy this requires learning (remembering) prices, mostly the regularly bought products for price evaluation. for other (similar) products the remembered prices are used as an anchor, a basis for comparison. intuition strategy no conversion or comparison of the euro to the old currency. people rely on their developing intuition as they buy what they need. source: based on hofmann, et al. (2007:373). hofmann et al. (2007) also found that the adaptation process took a great deal of time: after almost three years of euro use in austria, adaptation seemed to have progressed slowly: ‘the development of an intuitive system is still ongoing’ (p. 377). crucially, and somewhat differently from marques and dehaene, they recorded that ‘most austrians applied more than one strategy’ (p. 375) – although the set of strategies used changed over the course of the period they observed. nevertheless, hofmann et al. (2007) align the anchor strategy and the intuition strategy with marques and dehaene’s (2004) idea of relearning, and the conversion and marker value strategies with the idea of rescaling. lemaire and lecacheur (2001) identified a range of responses to conversion tasks produced by french respondents; some could be executed faster with less effort than others. their findings suggest that people can be helped to learn simpler and less effortful ways of converting. we re-conceptualised these as ‘tactics’ that respondents could use as part of the direct conversion strategy. thus our second research question (rq2) was: how did people develop their price intuition over the period following conversion? this research was further developed to understand the influence of nominal values on price evaluation. in the majority of eurozone countries, including the slovak republic, the transition to the euro meant that their national currencies were replaced by much lower nominal value currency; that is, a price of a given number of units in the original currency would equate to a smaller number of euros. a phenomenon, known as the ‘money illusion’ a tendency to think in the ‘nominal’ rather than the ‘real’ value of money, had been documented in other contexts (e.g. shafir, diamond and tversky 1997). citizens who are not familiar with the value of the new currency can be overly influenced by the nominal value, rather than by the real value of a given amount of money. for example, they may have thought a product was cheap if it cost 5 eur; however, they may not have said it was cheap if it cost 150 slovak crowns (skk). in fact 5 eur was approximately 150 skk in 2009. this can affect people’s purchasing decisions in the new currency. development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 7 in the context of the euro currency changeover gamble (2007) outlines techniques adopted to investigate to what extent citizens are influenced by the nominal representation of prices rather than the ‘real’ value, something she called the ‘euro illusion’. this effect is often investigated through interviews or laboratory experiments. gamble et al., (2002) also investigated the effect of the euro illusion’ on salaries. some of the factors found to account for the ‘euro illusion’ by gamble (2007) are: familiarity with the conversion technique, complexity of the conversion strategy and attitude towards the currency. this leads to rq3, given below. to summarise, this report investigates the following research questions: rq1 what was the previous experience of the slovak public with the euro and what were their attitudes towards it? rq2 how did people develop their price intuition over the period following conversion? rq3 what evidence is there that slovak citizens were influenced by the nominal representation of prices rather than the ‘real’ value? methodology to investigate these research questions, structured face-to-face interviews were used. the literature reviewed for this study provided the primary sources of questions: in particular, the eurobarometer survey and ranyard’s study (2007). to find out more about the learning process, we focused on the strategies identified by hofmann et al. (2007), drawing on responses to questions which presented realistic conversion tasks, to see how people solved such problems and how comfortable they were in thinking in the new currency; see questions 5 to 10 in the selected questions from the questionnaire in appendix b. translation and piloting followed, to test the reliability and validity of the questions. the full list of variables and their measurements can be found in kubascikova-mullen (2013). respondents were selected using a tightly designed quota sampling method, informed by breakdowns in the 2001 slovak census, and controlling for region, age and gender. because of time and cost constraints, the data were collected in only two selected regions, trenčín and bratislava; these regions are important in terms of contribution to economic growth and competitiveness. the samples selected for successive phases of the survey used the same design in order to assure comparability of data, and the samples’ characteristics matched those of the population to an acceptably close extent; see appendix a. (detailed results can be found in kubascikova-mullen (2013) under ‘sample characteristics’.) the data were collected using face to face street interviews in the two selected regions. they were collected at four different time points to capture changes in reported experiences, in attitudes, and in the development of relevant numeracy skills during and after the changeover; see table 3. kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 8 table 3 phases of cross-sectional surveys and sample size study time sample size (n) pilot study (before the changeover) april 2008 86 phase 1 (during the dual circulation) january 2009 102 phase 2 (7 months after the changeover) august 2009 89 phase 3 (2 years after the changeover) january 2011 88 total 365 background: the euro conversion process in the slovak republic and adult learning this section describes opportunities for learning created by the state and other agencies to support the changeover. they also used some judicious regulation. for example, to protect people from unjustified price rises, the government made dual display of prices compulsory from august 2008 until december 2010 and ordered strict price monitoring which worked well. the dual display of prices supported the comparison of prices and allowed for the gradual development of price intuition. to find background information that illustrates the opportunities for learning that were created during the time of the currency conversion we reviewed the material made available by the government, european and national banks, european and national statistical offices, the european commission, academia, newspapers and websites. these aimed to produce a positive attitude towards the euro, and to help people to prepare to adapt by learning. we describe the support available for learning about the euro (a) in formal education programmes; and (b) in nonformal or informal learning environments. learning about the euro in formal education programmes the directorate-general for economic and financial affairs [dg ecfin] allocated resources to provide pedagogical material for teachers and pupils to help with euro integration (european union 2010), considered the teaching curriculum in primary and secondary schools and identified relevant and existing subjects which had the potential to integrate teaching about the euro and the european monetary union (emu) (see table 4). they developed teaching materials that promoted a more positive perception of the euro. this study was carried out in the 27 eu member states using multiple methods, including desk study, online consultations, focus groups and interviews. the report considers subjects such as citizenship/ civics education, history, geography and social studies with some modest attention paid to mathematics. it briefly mentioned that in mathematics pupils learned to understand and work with money, and at a higher educational level, were introduced to some economic or ‘financial literacy’ ideas such as inflation (european union 2010). the range of topics displayed in table 4 also show the attention paid in the curriculum to the background and aims of the euro, so that young people’s attitudes would be based on information, rather than preconception, as far as possible. development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 9 table 4 educational tool recommendations; age group: 14-18 year oldsv subject learning outcomes tool themes and formats economics mathematics citizenship compare the basic notions and milestones of the emu have discussions on basic notions relating to the euro define the euro as a product of european cooperation/eu integration evaluate the benefits of the euro and debate drawbacks section on the euro and emu integrated into economics teaching. section 1 (14 – 16): home economics pupils learn about managing money and personal finances. pupils manage a family household. they have to make decisions on how to spend money. pupils learn about the roles of banks and make calculations on interest rates and investment decisions. section 2 (16-18 / vocational schools): what is the emu? pupils learn about the different stages of the euro and the emu, the conditions of joining the emu and governance of the emu. governments and their budgets, and how they work together under the emu. section 3 (16-18): the economic crisis and europe’s management in the context of the emu. pupils are encouraged to research economic management in the press and identify the key actors in the management of the euro currency. source: european union, (2010:69-72). the ministry of education in slovakia developed a special project for primary and secondary schools called ‘euro to schools’. time was allocated in the curriculum for teachers to help students understand the new currency using learning tools such as games. learning about the euro in nonformal or informal learning environments the learning programmes described in the previous subsection were aimed at those still in formal education, most of them 18 years of age or younger; nonetheless, many of these had a role in helping adults, through informal learning, during the changeover (as well as being consumers themselves). there were also a number of nonformal and informal learning initiatives directed at adults of all ages. as already mentioned, the long period of dual display of prices for each good provided multiple illustrations of exact price conversion between slovak crown and euro. they could also be useful in developing knowledge of prices of frequently bought goods that could act as ‘anchors’. copies of conversion tables were also widely distributed nationally, and provided examples of conversion between ‘round numbers’ of euros and crowns. this would help with developing the ‘marker value strategy’ which allowed the citizen to memorise useful equivalences between the two currencies. pre-programmed calculators provided support for those adults who wished to produce exact conversions at any stage. some adults were given additional teaching / revision of ‘times tables’ which aimed to enable them to ‘convert’ more fluently. kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 10 another support for nonformal learning provided by the state was the ‘bundle of shopping’ poster. these posters showed what items could be purchased for 10 euro, 20 euro and other amounts. this would help with developing the ‘anchor strategy’ which enabled adults to learn prices of regularly bought products such as bread, milk, newspapers. most local programmes were designed to help groups with limited access to information, such as the elderly, the visually or hearing impaired, and economically weaker groups, mainly the roma population. the local authorities provided presentations for the elderly about the new currency, especially to pensioners’ clubs and retirement homes. some pensioners received euro starting packs as a present. the slovak blind and partially sighted union organised training in the use of specially designed tools such as brochures in braille, and talking cards and calculators. dvds using sign language were provided for the hearing impaired. special training was provided to teach the roma how to convert between currencies.. the information campaign used further creative ways to attract the attention of the roma population: tv programmes and dvds, radio plays, and also theatre performances. a professional roma theatre company was recruited to explain to the roma population the adoption of the new currency in a humorous but informative way, using songs, dance and videos. other research has shown that, in the learning of numeracy, drama can be a useful learning tool (griffiths and kaye 2011); it allows the learner to engage in an activity through performing arts and it allows for a range of cultural perspectives. given the large amount of information available, it was important for people with different backgrounds to be able to gain access to activities that suited their own learning style. in general, the slovak republic did well in targeting vulnerable groups in the population and designing materials to support their specific needs. however, the tools designed did not always suit users. for example, some slovaks reported that the calculators supplied were too small to use conveniently. we can compare slovak efforts with what was tried in other european countries. in greece calculators appeared to be very popular and supported everyday small-scale purchases; they were available in shops, cafes, on folding tables on street corners (malaby 2002). in france, citizens were shown how to convert, using mental calculation, values expressed in french francs to euros and vice versa. as a result, people used fewer methods to convert and calculations became faster and more accurate (lemaire 2007). the provision of information is an important part of winning support for the conversion process. a study carried out in austria showed that people who were informed about the changeover process had a more positive attitude towards the euro (isengard and schneider 2004). nevertheless, there is also a danger of people feeling overwhelmed. a recent eurobarometer survey in lithuania (which converted to the euro in 2015) found that, although respondents were overall more likely to say they wanted more information, one quarter said that they had enough (european commission 2015). the next sections describe people’s experiences with the conversion and the strategies they used to cope in the slovak republic in 2008 2011. results (1): previous experiences with the euro and attitudes towards it from january 2002 the euro had been in circulation in the first 12 euro countries giving the opportunity to citizens of other countries, such as the slovak republic, to familiarise development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 11 themselves with the new currency prior to their own national changeover. before the slovak changeover, in april 2008, we asked citizens whether they had seen and used euro coins and bank notes, in order to investigate their awareness and familiarity with the currency. table 5 responses to questions: have you seen/used euro (coins or notes)? *slovakia april 2008 % yes **slovakia may 2008 %yes ***slovenia september 2006 % yes seen 88 77 95 used 66 49 84 * this survey ** source: european commission (2008a). *** source: european commission (2006). the first column of table 5 shows our sample’s results that 88% had already seen both the coins and notes, eight months prior to the euro conversion. according to the eurobarometer survey (european commission 2008a), conducted around the same time, 77% of slovak respondents had seen euro bank notes/coins. our figure is higher than the eurobarometer’s probably because our data were not collected in the remote areas where citizens were less likely to have seen the euro. to put these findings in context we compared these results with those of another eurozone entrant. the eurobarometer survey (european commission 2006) shows that the percentage of people who had already seen/used the euro coins and notes was much higher in slovenia, four months before their currency change (in jan. 2007), at 95% and 84%, respectively. the high percentage for slovenians who had seen or used the euro could have been due to the fact that slovenia is a frequent european tourist destination, bordering on italy and austria (eurozone countries since 1999). the eurobarometer survey compared respondents in slovakia with the other member states (slovenia, malta, cyprus) that had introduced the euro in 2007 or 2008, concerning the ease of using euro coins and notes; see table 6. table 6 distinguishing and manipulating euro currency: percentages reporting difficulties country coins rather/very difficult notes rather/very difficult slovakia 31 14 malta 21 9 cyprus 17 3 slovenia 26 5 source: european commission (2009). kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 12 the survey researchers concluded that ‘among the four countries, the slovak public had greater-than-average difficulties with distinguishing and handling the new currency in the first few months after conversion’ (european commission 2009:8). however, the differences were not great. we investigated slovak citizens’ more subjective experiences of satisfaction (or otherwise) with the euro currency, with questions 3 and 4 presented in appendix b. question 3 asked respondents: how happy/unhappy are you personally, that the euro has become our currency? in january 2009, just two weeks after the euro introduction our survey showed that 45% of respondents were happy that the euro was introduced, with a slight increase to 49% in august 2009, seven months after the changeover. however, two years after the changeover in january 2011, the percentage of respondents who were happy that the euro was introduced decreased somewhat to 39%, the lowest level recorded. when we conducted a series of chi-squared analyses of the relationship of a set of demographic variables with respondents’ reported levels of happiness towards the euro in august 2009, we found no significant relationship between ‘degree of happiness’ and gender, region, level of education or income level. however, those who claimed to be ‘rather unhappy’ were predominantly aged 60 plus. the german institute for economic research had previously found that those who benefitted most from the currency had fewer concerns regarding the euro currency (isengard and schneider 2004). this could perhaps explain why elderly people were more likely to be unhappy about the introduction of the euro. in order to further investigate changes in response to the euro over the transition, we used responses to question 4, an open-ended question: if i asked you to describe your personal experience using the euro nowadays, using one or more adjectives (descriptive words), what would you say? here respondents had the opportunity to mention as many terms as they wanted though the majority mentioned only one or two; we coded each response into one of four categories; see table 7. table 7 responses to the question ‘if i asked you to describe the experience of using the euro nowadays, …what would you say?’, for the 3 main phases of the survey phase positive ambivalent negative no response phase 1 january 2009 n=102 experience of using the euro described, for example, as ‘good’; or reports that the euro currency made them feel more european and proud (41). some ‘needed time’ to adapt to the new currency (12); and some did not have enough experience with the currency at the time of the interview (17). experience of using the euro described as ‘not good’, ‘chaotic’, ‘complicated’; complaints that they ‘had to convert’ (10). (22) development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 13 phase positive ambivalent negative no response phase 2 august 2009 n=89 for example, as ‘good’, ‘satisfying’ and ‘positive’ (26). experience of using euro described in a rather ambivalent way by some; for example, as something ‘that they need time to get used to’, or that they had to convert; and also that they were spending euros much more quickly (30). experience of using euro described using words like ‘complicated’, ‘angry’, ‘bad’ and ‘chaotic’ (8). (25) phase 3 january 2011 n=88 some respondents mentioned the word ‘european’ (20). others described the currency positively; e.g. ‘good’, ‘better’, ‘easy to use’, and claimed to be happy and satisfied (15). some said that the euro was something they still needed to get used to (4). some described their experience with the euro as ‘bad’, ‘chaotic’, ‘confusing’ or ‘silly’ (10). others used the word ‘expensive’ (14). some mentioned problems with budgeting (4) and others declared that they did not understand the currency at all (6). (15) table 7a summary of responses by phase response to question/phase jan-09 % aug-09 % jan-11 % positive 41 40 26 29 35 40 ambivalent 29 28 30 34 4 5 negative 10 10 8 9 34 39 no response 22 22 25 28 15 17 total 102 100 89 100 88 100 note: the small number of respondents who provided multiply coded responses were categorised in one of the three main categories; therefore totals in each period add to the number of respondents in that period. the results generally show an increase in negative responses over time. in phase 3 ( january 2011, two years after the changeover) we had many more negative comments about the new currency: 39%, in comparison with 10% and 9% in phase 1 and phase 2 respectively; table 7 continued kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 14 see table 7a. further example, words which were not mentioned previously, were mentioned in phase 3; for example, ‘difficulty in budgeting’; a feeling that prices in euros were cheaper or difficulty in discerning the real value of the euro; a perceived increase of prices in service sectors like plumbing and decorating. sometimes respondents became aware of price increases only slowly; for example, one respondent said: ‘it is only when i get home i realise the price has gone up’. some of these issues could be perhaps linked to ‘euro illusion’; see results (3) below. it was expected that two years after the changeover the concerns that citizens had would slowly decrease, but what appears to have happened is that they actually increased over time. results (2): development of price intuition after the conversion date to investigate which strategy people used after the changeover, the four strategies identified by hofmann et al. (2007) were used to shed light on the learning process. to investigate which ‘adaptation strategy’ people were actually using, we asked them how they performed the conversion tasks; see questions 9 and 10 in appendix b. respondents were presented with photographs of two products priced in slovak crowns (bread and dvd player) and two priced in euros (milk and mobile phone). two items were classed as regularly bought products of small value (bread and milk) and two as ‘exceptional purchases’ (not frequently bought) of higher value (dvd player and mobile phone). earlier, a number of shops had been visited to ensure that the prices used in the tasks were realistic. table 8 adaptation strategies applied when solving tasks: classification of respondents’ reports of strategy used for particular tasks adaptation strategy frequency august 09 percent august 09 frequency jan 11 percent jan 11 conversion 156 44 67 19 marker value strategy 61 17 102 29 anchor strategy 3 1 29 8 intuition strategy 80 22 146 42 total valid responses 300 84 344 97 no response 56 16 8 2 total 356* 100 352** 100 *n = 89 x 4 tasks = 356 **n = 88 x 4 tasks = 352 it can be seen from table 8 that in slovakia citizens used all four adaptation strategies; however, the frequency of usage of each varied over time. in august 2009, close to a majority of respondents used the ‘conversion’ strategy (44%), decreasing to 19% two years after the changeover. over the same period the ‘intuition’ strategy increased in frequency from 22% to 42%. overall these changes suggest respondents were developing a more flexible use of more than one strategy, rather than a preponderant use of simple numerical conversion. the literature suggests (marques and dehaene 2004) that the use of strategies may depend on the type of purchases involved. therefore, we divided the four products used in these tasks into ‘frequently bought’ and ‘exceptional purchases’; see table 9. development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 15 table 9 two types of conversion tasks: percentage of respondents using each strategy strategy frequently bought products aug 2009 jan 2011 exceptional purchases aug 2009 jan 2011 conversion strategy 48 18 56 21 marker value strategy 17 24 24 36 anchor strategy 1 10 1 6 intuition strategy 34 48 19 37 total 100 100 100 100 note: this table includes only ‘valid responses’, and excludes responses coded as ‘no response’ in table 8. thus the percentages presented here have a smaller base than those in table 8. the results in table 9 show that for frequently bought purchases, half of purchases in august 2009 used the conversion strategy (48%); however, in january 2011, this proportion had decreased to 18%, while the intuition strategy had increased from 34% to 48%. for exceptional purchases again in august 2009 conversion was the most frequently used strategy, but by january 2011 the intuition and marker value strategies were more often used. results (3): evidence that slovak citizens were influenced by the nominal representation of prices rather than the ‘real’ value? this study also sought to explore ideas from research reviewed above on the ‘euro illusion’, more specifically the way that prices expressed in the euro currency are perceived as less expensive than those in the original domestic currency. in order to begin to investigate this in the context of the slovak changeover we asked respondents whether they spent less or more in euros than they would have done, if they had been using the slovak crown; see table 10. table 10 ‘are you spending less/more money in euros than you would have done, if you had been using slovak crowns?’: percentages giving each response over 3 phases of survey phase 1 jan 09 phase 2 aug 09 phase 3 jan 11 always less 0 2 2 most often less 10 7 3 the same 72 45 16 most often more 16 38 47 always more 2 6 31 dk 0 2 1 total 100.0 100.0 100.0 kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 16 in january 2009, the start of full transition to the euro, the majority of respondents (72%) reported that they were spending the same amount that they would be spending in crowns, and only 18% believed they most often or always spent more than if they had been using slovak crowns. in august 2009, the percentages were 45% and 44% respectively. by january 2011, the percentage of respondents who reported that they often/always spent more than they would have if they had been using the slovak crown had increased sharply to 78%, with only 16% responding ‘the same’. we can attempt to explain these changes. in january 2009 the euro was already known as a currency of strong value, and people took care when using it. however, by 2011, the increase in the number of people who thought that they were spending more than under the old currency (18% to 78%) was striking. it may have more than one explanation. people appeared to report above that prices for their purchases had increased; the explanation for this belief may have been that there actually had been general price inflation across the economy, and / or that they may have been spending more freely in euros than they were aware because prices in euros appeared to be lower. to the extent that the latter was the case it would provide support for the hypothesised ‘euro illusion’ in the slovak republic. discussion the data for this study was collected from just before the international economic and financial crisis starting in 2008, in turn followed by the euro crisis, beginning in 2010. this was not an easy time to convert to the euro – but slovak citizens engaged in learning, including numerate learning, in order to cope with the demands of the change. in so doing, they were supported by the state and other agencies as we describe above. this was part of a national effort to accomplish something that offered hope for a better future. we consider here our conclusions relevant to rq1: what was the previous experience of the slovak public with the euro and what were their attitudes towards it? slovak citizens had had the opportunity in their travels (to 2002 euro-adopters) to see and to use the euro before it was introduced in their country in 2009. the eurobarometer did report slightly more difficulty at the outset with distinguishing and manipulating the currency in slovakia, compared with other ‘second-wave’ adopters of the euro, slovenia, cyprus and malta; however, these differences were small and may simply have reflected the greater tourist traffic in those other countries. when respondents were asked for more subjective reactions, our survey found a slight decrease in the percentage of respondents who claimed to be happy that the euro was introduced, from 45% in january 2009 to 39% in january 2011. more strikingly, when asked to describe their experiences with the euro, the majority of respondents at the beginning gave either positive or at least ambivalent responses, but by january 2011, the level of negative response had risen from 10 % to 39%. thus, it appears that respondents’ reactions to the euro experience had actually become more negative over time. there may be a variety of explanations for this, rather than the idea that there was something inherent in the experience of using the euro that put people off. slovak consumers may have had a developing perception of growing inflation, which may or may not have been caused by the introduction of the euro; we discuss this further in connection with rq3, below. or a general sense of unease with the developing economic and euro crises may have influenced the increasingly negative responses. we cannot be sure from the data we have, but we think it likely that all these factors may have been in play. development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 17 we turn to rq2: how did people develop their price intuition over the period following conversion? for this study the development of price intuition was assessed by the frequency of use of adaptation strategies (hofmann et al. 2007) in the four tasks we presented; see questions 9 and 10 in appendix b. after seven months of the changeover, in august 2009 the direct conversion strategy was the most frequently used for all purchases (44% of all responses, or 52 % of valid responses, in table 8), and none of the other strategies were used nearly as often. similar results were found by researchers in other eurozone countries (hofmann et al. 2007; marques and dehaene 2004; ranyard 2007). however, two years after the changeover the intuition strategy was the most frequently applied overall. results for regular and exceptional purchases show that the learning process was related to frequency of purchase by january 2011. respondents were less likely to convert prices via numerical calculation, or approximately (using the marker value strategy), for regular purchases than they were for exceptional purchases (42% vs 57%, combining conversion and marker value strategies in table 9). we infer that, through the repeated engagement with the new currency, drawing on their developing price intuition, and, where needed, on supports provided in nonformal and informal settings (see above), citizens have learned to become more flexible in the numeracy practices required to cope with the unfamiliar currency. people who persist in numerical conversion (re-calculating euro prices into slovak crowns) increase the cognitive demands of everyday financial decision making. this may lead to a range of undesirable consequences: fear of being cheated; disenchantment with the new currency; less identification with national goals, due to inability to adapt to the changed system. in addition, previous literature (ranyard et al. 2008) shows that people who use the conversion strategy for many years after the changeover may perceive there to be ‘unfair’ price increases as it is difficult to adjust prices for inflation. according to ranyard (2007) neither the intuition nor the anchor strategies involve reference to the former currency; therefore, there is no need to retrieve prices from long-term memory and adjust them for inflation. thus, these two strategies do not require mental calculation, and are less time consuming, hence putting less strain on cognitive capacity. their use also helps the person to develop price intuition over the longer term. finally, we summarise our conclusions related to rq3: what evidence is there that slovak citizens were influenced by the nominal representation of prices rather than the ‘real’ value? as reported above, the data could be interpreted as showing that slovak citizens correctly perceived there to have been price inflation – and / or that they were spending more freely in 2011 than in 2009, possibly because of a ‘euro illusion’. slovak citizens had similar perceptions to citizens of other countries, namely that there had been price increases following the currency changeover. the euro changeover in the first 12 eurozone countries had triggered perceptions in almost all countries that the currency changeover itself had led to increased prices (hüfner and koske 2008). from the psychological point of view the transition to the euro currency was associated with fear of ‘unjustified’ price increases. for example, in september 2008, 65% of slovak citizens feared an increase of prices after the euro transition (european commission, 2008b). however, it is difficult for consumers to understand whether price rises they notice are ‘justified’, in the sense of being caused by general economic factors, or ‘unjustified’, perhaps perpetrated by unscrupulous sellers taking advantage of people’s temporary confusion resulting from the changeover. kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 18 to put these findings into a broader context we considered official statistics on actual inflation levels (worldwide inflation data, 2016); see figure 1. at the start of the slovak currency changeover through 2009, there was very low inflation recorded in the eurozone (including slovakia). however, by 2011, inflation had increased. thus, people’s beliefs about general price increases, reported in table 10, were well founded. they may also have been subject to the ‘euro illusion’, but it is not possible to decide from the data which of these two interpretations is correct. figure 1: annual inflation 2007-2016. source: eurostat press office (2016). eurostat news release euro indicators. conclusions such ‘natural experiments’ of national currency changes are relatively rare, and we were fortunate to have the opportunity to study one of them. since this study was conducted the euro has been introduced in estonia, latvia and lithuania and seven more current members of the eu are expected to follow, in due course. the slovak case may offer interesting lessons for some of these countries – related to some of the supports for the changeover process described, and to the challenges facing participation in numeracy practices, including citizens’ reactions to the change. the slovak republic is of special interest as the first member of the visegrad group of relatively powerful central european economies, also including the czech republic, poland and hungary, to join the euro. slovakia is also the first country with a large roma minority to introduce the euro, and other countries with similar minorities, such as romania and bulgaria, are among those expected to follow. along with much previous research, this study suggests the value of anticipating the ‘euro illusion’, in countries where one euro is worth rather more than one unit of the local currency, as in slovakia. in general, research is needed into pedagogic methods of countering potential ‘money illusions’ in countries in the process of converting their currencies. such learning might also be useful for citizens of any country about to undergo a period of working or living abroad. the research reported here on cognitive strategies, following hofmann et al. (2007) and others, may be used to support formal and non-formal learning that could help individuals, or groups of adults (or children), to cope with the challenges posed by a change in the currency system. the strategy of direct numerical conversion provides a rich focus for numeracy development programmes, for all those who aspire to travel abroad, and can be extended to the use – and design – of calculation methods such as those used in france by lemaire and lecacheur (2001). the marker value strategy can be seen as the learning of a structure of values that would require, and eventually support, facility in the approximate calculation of currency development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 19 equivalences, which may be all that many adults will need. the latter two strategies were characterised by hofmann et al. (2007, following marques and dehaene 2004) as ‘rescaling’, whereas we see the other two hofmann strategies as ‘relearning’, and hence facilitating the expansion of the adult’s numeracy. thus the anchor strategy requires the learning (memorisation) of prices of key goods in the new currency and using these to estimate other prices, and the emergence of price intuition requires the development of ever more nuanced (memory-based) systems of price ranges of goods in euros. evans, et al. (2017) developed the idea of a ‘numerate environment’, suggested by the ‘literate environment’ described by the eu high level group of experts on literacy (2012). instead of focussing on individual adults’ ‘numeracy scores’which may reflect an educational and cultural life that is impoverished in numeracy terms, evans et al., direct attention towards features of the numerate environment that might be faced by groups of adults in a particular setting. they critically consider life in market economies such as the uk – in terms of whether such societies provide opportunities, supports and demands for adults to develop their numeracy, or alternatively pose barriers. certainly, slovak society during 2008-2011 produced demands for adaptation to the euro that required learning from the typical adult, including developing participation in the required numeracy practices (yasukawa, rogers, jackson and street 2018). given their border with austria, and occasions to visit other countries already using the euro, slovaks had plentiful opportunities to get to know and to use the euro. additionally, a range of european and slovak agencies put great effort and resources into providing supports to help citizens – especially those with limited access to information or unusual needs – to cope with the substantial changes underway. future research could consider in more detail the extent to which slovak society during the period of conversion to the euro could be considered to exhibit key characteristics of a ‘numerate environment’. it should also seize opportunities to study national currency conversion processes, when the opportunities arise. references dehaene, s, and marques, j f (2002) cognitive euroscience: scalar variability in price estimation and the cognitive consequences of switching to the euro, quarterly journal of experimental psychology, vol 55, no 3, pp 705-731. https://doi.org/10.1080/02724980244000044 eu high level group of experts on literacy (2012) final report: september 2012, retrieved 17 december 2019 from http://icm.fch.lisboa.ucp.pt/resources/documentos/cepcep/literacy_final_report.pdf european central bank (2017) fixed euro conversion rates, retrieved 16 july 2017 from https://www. ecb.europa.eu/euro/intro/html/index.en.html european commission (2014) fixed euro conversion rates, retrieved 31 july 2016 from http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/euro/adoption/conversion/index_en.htm european commission (2015) lithuania after the euro changeover, flash eurobarometer 412: the tns opinion, january. european commission (2009) slovak euro introduction, ex-post citizen survey. summary flash eurobarometer 259: the gallup organization, january. kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 20 https://doi.org/10.1080/02724980244000044 http://icm.fch.lisboa.ucp.pt/resources/documentos/cepcep/literacy_final_report.pdf https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/intro/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/intro/html/index.en.html http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/euro/adoption/conversion/index_en.htm european commission (2008a) introduction of the euro in the new member states. flash eurobarometer 237: the gallup organization, may. european commission (2008b) introduction of the euro in slovakia. flash eurobarometer 249: the gallup organization, september. european commission (2006) introduction of the euro in the new member states. flash eurobarometer 191: the gallup organization, september. european union (2010) educational study on the teaching of the euro and emu at school, retrieved 18 march 2011 from http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/general/pdf/euro_emu_curricula_en.pdf eurostat press office (2016) eurostat news release euro indicators 38/2016-25 february 2016, retrieved 27 february 2016 from http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/7191871/225022016-ap-en.pdf/25af21e9-e27d-4faa-898c-b39d44b251e6 evans, j, yasukawa, k, mallows, d and creese, b (2017) numeracy skills and the numerate environment: affordances and demands, adults learning mathematics: an international journal, vol 12, no 1, pp 17-26, retrieved 17 december 2018 from http://www.alm-online.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/almij_121_october2017.pdf gamble, a (2007) the ‘euro illusion’: illusion or fact? 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a preliminary report of experiences in the republic of ireland. euro-workshop at the international association for research in economic psychology (iarep), vienna, 3 july 2003. kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 22 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-007-9045-2 https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-898x.7.3.195 https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2002.0047 https://doi.org/10.1027//1016-9040.4.3.152 https://doi.org/10.1027//1016-9040.4.3.152 https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-898x.10.3.148 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0167-4870(02)00195-2 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0167-4870(98)00036-1 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0167-4870(98)00031-2 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2006.09.013 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2008.07.001 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-007-9050-5 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2008.07.002 https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040.12.2.139 shafir, e, diamond, p and tversky, a (1997) money illusion. quarterly journal of economics, 112(20), 342-374. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355397555208 worldwide inflation data (2016) historic inflation slovakia cpi inflation, retrieved 17 december 2018 from http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/slovakia/historic-inflation/cpi-inflation-slovakia.aspx yasukawa, k, rogers, a, jackson, k and street, b (eds) (2018) numeracy as social practice: global and local perspectives, routledge, new york and london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315269474 appendix a appendix b selected questions from the questionnaire used (translated from slovak) 1. have you already seen (a) euro coins? (b) euro notes? 2. have you already used (a) euro coins? (b.) notes? 3. how happy/unhappy are you, personally: that the euro has become our currency? 4. if i asked you to describe the experience using the euro nowadays, using one or more adjectives (descriptive words), what would you say? development of intuition in a new currency, the euro: the slovak experience literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 23 https://doi.org/10.1162/003355397555208 http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/slovakia/historic-inflation/cpi-inflation-slovakia.aspx https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315269474 could you please tell me to what extent or if at all the 4 following statements describe how you are today coping with the new value of the euro currency: 5. i know the conversion rate and i use the exact or approximate conversion to evaluate prices. □ always □ often □ sometimes □ rarely □ never 6. i know some specific values for example how much 5, 10, 20 euro is worth in slovak crown and i use these values to evaluate prices. □ always □ often □ sometimes □ rarely □ never 7. i know some prices of regularly bought products and i use the remembered prices to evaluate prices. □ always □ often □ sometimes □ rarely □ never 8. i know the value of the euro currency and i do not refer back to slovak crown to evaluate prices. □ always □ often □ sometimes □ rarely □ never 9. here is an item which was priced in skk; about how much should it be in euros now, if the proper exchange rate is used? white bread 1kg 31.50 skk _____€ how did you get the result? [record] _____________ dvd 499 skk _____€ how did you get the result? [record] _____________ 10. here is an item priced in euro; about how much should it be in slovak crown at the fixed exchange rate? semi skimmed milk 1l €0.83 _____ skk how did you get the result? [record] _____________ mobile phone €183 _____ skk how did you get the result? [record] _____________ 11. do you spend less/more in euro than you would have done, if you had been using slovak crown? kubascikova, evans and khan literacy and numeracy studies: an international journal in the education and training of adults, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018 24