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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  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 



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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 



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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.   



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