Session Information
23 SES 09 C, Connecting Alternative Stories: Challenging Narratives about Adults’ and Young People’s Literacy Skills and Practices
Symposium
Contribution
This symposium brings together an international discussion with papers from the UK (Scotland), Canada (Quebec) and Germany that challenge the ‘narratives’ (Hamilton, 2012)―preconceived ideas and stereotypes―about adults and young people with low levels of formal education and their literacy skills and practices. In so doing, it endeavours to identify and understand links between narratives, literacy policies, literacy surveys’ results, and education practices (formal or informal).
The central thesis of this symposium is that literacy is still too often understood as measurable individual skills and not enough as social practices (Papen, 2005). As a consequence, persistent and often negative narratives about ‘school-dropouts’ and adults with low levels of formal education are been told on the media and are embedded in public policies (Thériault, 2015). For example, these young people and adults are described as being more likely to experience ‘extended unemployment, early childbearing, low incomes in jobs with poor prospects, depression, drug addiction and criminality’ (Bynner and Joshi, 2002: 406). Economic, social integration and health/illness narratives are amalgamated with literacy and offer a homogenous portrait of this group of people. These preconceived ideas are partly shaped by international quantitative literacy and numeracy surveys. Rather than emphasizing what people do with literacy and what is really important to them in terms of reading and writing, these surveys are about what people cannot do. This is what Tett, Hamilton and Crowther (2012) call a ‘deficit view’. International literacy surveys generally show a significant correlation between people’s levels of education and their literacy skills (OECD, 2015). Some qualitative studies also contribute to this association by explaining and describing ‘functional illiterates’’ lives by looking at small samples of participants from Adult Basic Education and drawing generalities about them (see critique of this in Grotlüschen et al., 2014).
The individual papers in this symposium question this deficit view of adults’ and young people’s literacy skills and practices by using different research approaches: secondary analysis of quantitative data, ethnographic fieldwork, and discourse analysis of policy documents. They explore the literacy policy landscapes of the three given countries and look at how they relate to public narratives at national and international levels. This symposium hopes to generate a discussion around the responsibility of educational researchers to voice positive narratives about adult literacy learning on the one hand, and to point out the social inequalities of literacy education on the other hand.
References
Bynner, J. and Joshi, H. (2002). Equality and Opportunity in Education: Evidence from the 1958 and 1970 birth cohort studies. Oxford Review of Education, 28:4, 405-425, DOI: 10.1080/0305498022000013599 Grotlüschen, A.; Riekmann, W. and Buddeberg, K. (2014). Stereotypes versus Research Results Regarding Functionally Illiterate Adults. Conclusions from the First German Level-One Survey and the Learner Panel Study (leo. - News, 01). Retrieved from http://blogs.epb.uni-hamburg.de/leo/files/2014/10/Grotlueschen-et-al.-2014-Stereotypes.pdf. Hamilton, M. (2012). Literacy and the Politics of Representation. London: Routledge. OECD (2015). Education at a Glance 2015: OECD indicators. Retrieved from http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2015_eag-2015-en Tett, L., Hamilton, M. and Crowther, J. (2012 ). More powerful literacies. Leicester National Institute of Adult Continuing Education. Thériault, V. (2015). Literacy mediation as a form of powerful literacies in community-based organisations working with young people in a situation of precarity. Ethnography and Education. doi: 10.1080/17457823.2015.1101384
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