Literacy and 
Numeracy Studies: An 
international journal 
in the education and 
training of adults

Vol. 27, No. 1  
2019

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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.

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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

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