Session Information
23 SES 09 C, Connecting Alternative Stories: Challenging Narratives about Adults’ and Young People’s Literacy Skills and Practices
Symposium
Contribution
This paper will draw on a discourse analysis of OECD and Scottish policy documents as well as a recent evaluation of community-based adult literacies tutors’ practices to examine the impact of human capital ideology on the literacies curriculum in Scotland. Scotland has a devolved education system and, unlike the other countries of the UK, the Scottish Curriculum Framework uses a ‘social practices’ approach where literacies’ practices should be ‘about learners developing capabilities in making decisions, solving problems and expressing ideas and critical opinions about the world’ (Scottish Government, 2011: 7). In line with this approach learning is contextualised and participants’ individual learning plans are used to assess progress and so ‘distance travelled’ is measured rather than the achievement of formal qualifications. Moreover the literacies strategy emphasises the links between lower literacies capabilities and poverty (Scottish Government, 2011) thus considering the impact of structural factors rather than individual deficits. However this approach has been changing recently due to an increasing emphasis on human capital ideology, where countries and their citizens are seen as competitors in a global market place. The OECD has particularly promoted this ideology and it has, in turn, fed into Scottish policy. The underlying assumption is that ‘learning activities help to develop workers’ characteristics, which drive productivity and wage prosperity and ultimately result in individual and economic benefits’ (Rubenson, 2015: 189). This focus stresses the financial and economic, rather than the social aspects, of literacies and leads to a narrowing of the curriculum that prioritises narrow employability skills. It thus moves the emphasis away from the individual learner’s strengths on to the presumed generic skills needed by employers. Moreover, a focus on learners’ lack of skills reinforces the discourse of deficit that is, in turn, internalised by people leading to their denigrating their own knowledges. No policy is all encompassing, however, and so ‘they are always incomplete’ (Ball 1994: 10). A recent evaluation has shown that community-based literacies practitioners are working in the spaces created by policy ambiguities to promote a learner, rather than an employer-centric, practice. One factor that enables such practices is the commitment from the staff responsible for adult literacies policy implementation and another is the strong tradition in Scotland, influenced by Freire (1976), that validates the breadth and depth of knowledge that adults acquire in a variety of contexts particularly through their lived experience (Tett, 2010).
References
Ball, S. J. 1994. Education Reform: a critical and post-structuralist approach, Buckingham: Routledge Freire, P. (1976) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin Rubenson, S. 2015. ‘Framing the adult learning and education policy discourse: the role of the OECD’ in M. Milana and T Nesbit (Eds.) Global Perspectives on adult education and learning policy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Tett, L. 2010. Community education, learning and development, Edinburgh: Dunedin Press
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