Session Information
23 SES 08 C, Global / Local Conversations about Adult Literacy Research
Symposium
Contribution
Global financial crises that wreak havoc on individual lives. Poor health conditions among individuals and populations attributed to causes as varied as literacy competence and climate change. Skilled migration or enforced refugee movement generating mobility, opportunity and discordant employment and resettlement experiences. Urban renewal projects with contradictory goals of community regeneration and gentrification. These and many others storylines are part of the complex arrangements shaping adult literacy language and numeracy (ALLN) research and practice.
This symposium offers an occasion for dialogue about how ‘calculative regimes’ (Singh and Li 2004), as dominant global discourses, shape the thinking and reporting of ALLN research and practice. As Dorothy Smith (1999) argues, thinking and reporting on everyday practices within a field involves negotiating tensions between activist practices, the ‘politics of the ivory tower’ (p. 26) and dominant discourses of supranational assessment practices (OECD and Human Resources Development Canada, 1997; OECD and Statistics Canada, 1995, 2000; Statistics Canada & OECD 2005). This symposium explores these tensions through a broadly conceived ‘social practice’ theoretical lens (Hamilton and Hillier 2006; Belfiore, Defoe, Folinsbee, Hunter and Jackson 2004; Shore 2009). As researchers our approaches differ somewhat but we each recognise that ‘literacy-in-use’ and ‘meanings-in-use’ (Jackson 2004) are important organizing principles in investigating notions of adult literacy provision.
The discourses embedded in OECD discourses of literacy and the ‘survey talk’ practices generated by them (cf Shore 2009; Druine and Wildemeersch 2000) anchor ALLN practices in labour-market competencies. This has flow on effects in terms of the aims and purposes of national literacy policies and so also local teaching and learning practices for different student and educator constituencies. The effects of ‘calculative regimes’ and local accounting practices is evident in the increasing visibility of labour-market agreements within and across many levels of government (national provincial/state and local); in mandatory requirements to participate in training if in receipt of government benefits and in reporting practices that extend the influence of pedagogical achievements (student progress) to completion payments for government teaching contracts. Many of these practices generate low trust as well as marginalisation of local knowledges among learners/workers (Jackson 2005), educators (Harreveld 2006) and indeed between researchers (Singh and Li 2004) as each is drawn in to a common language of essential skills and required to report complex social and political learning in leaned down neoliberal accounts of ‘progress’.
The symposium presents research from three countries, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, with a view to generating conversations across borders – geographic, cultural, political, disciplinary and sectoral. The studies draw from a conceptual ‘toolkit’ that recognises the enduring similarities and continuities in dominant educational polices and so too how issues such as policy studies, worker literacy and prevocational training and pathways to further study are sites for making some sense of the similarities and differences within these sites.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.