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
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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 avant-
guard 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 over-
determined reading of the situation. Activist-educators also hold the
‘dangerous memory’ of alternative knowledges and possibilities (Giroux
1989: 99).
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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
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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.
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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.