1. Contemporary concerns about post-literacy
2. Innovatory Programmes
3. The Changing Context of Adult Literacy
Bay of Bengal comic book Tamil Nadu, India
Throughout our studies, we constantly met persons engaged in PL at all levels - donor, funders and aid agencies; government and middle level management; field workers and grass roots workers; participants - who expressed concerns about PL. These anxieties are to be found in all the countries we visited or reviewed. These voices are rarely heard, and this section of our report seeks to give space to their concerns. These views do not represent our own critique of contemporary PL programmes but rather they articulate the concerns we heard abroad.
Positive achievements: It is important to preface these concerns with an acknowledgement of the achievements of PL. As one of our respondents in India put it:
"There are one hundred ways one can take a negative view of the adult literacy effort in India, but with all the cultural, political and financial problems of India today, we can still say that there is some concern for literacy learning.....PL Centres are functioning and some people are interested; this shows that the providers and the people are working together" (Mathew 1998).
The same is true of the other countries we visited. Both the ILT and PL programmes have had some significant achievements in many different contexts. It is possible everywhere to find individual literacy learners who are reading booklets and writing letters and feeling considerably more confident, and PL groups which are earning money from their own activities and pressing others to provide their local communities with developmental services.
Recognition of difficulties: But equally most practitioners (including the respondent mentioned above) are keenly aware that the impact of these programmes has been well below expectations and the achievements have often not been long-lasting. It is to look at these issues that this section has been written.
It is also important to stress that these concerns are not universal. Some of them are expressed very widely; others are the concerns of a minority of PL practitioners. But everything here has been said to one or other member of the research team, often to more than one by more than one PL practitioner or planner.
Different voices: We need to note once again the different concerns of the various parties involved in PL.
|
We give one example. In Nepal, a survey of a specific PL programme revealed that · the implementing NGO staff were concerned that PL was donor-driven, that there was no space to innovate because of the need for quantifiable results and the pressure for the production of packages which could be used nation-wide. · the staff at district level (including the facilitators) were concerned at the lack of incentive to run PL classes regularly given the low salaries of facilitators and supervisors. They thought PL was more useful for politicians who gain support by 'giving' classes to certain areas. They said that it was difficult to recruit genuine class participants, that materials never reached the groups on time, that there was a gap between ILT and PL, sometimes of two years, because of political factors or central bureaucracies. · the PL participants were concerned about the value of the programme, that it was too short, led to no job, that it was boring ('I'd rather watch TV or finish domestic work'); that they felt too old, that it was better to send their daughters to the classes; that the facilitator did not know them; that they did not learn what they felt they needed in everyday life such as keeping group accounts. Different groups spoke with different voices about the same programme (Robinson-Pant 1998a). |
Expressed concerns
Nevertheless, some general issues have been raised more widely.
Isolation of literacy from basic education: A primary, though not perhaps dominant, concern is the view that ILT and PL, because they are viewed as relatively short sequential stages in a linear process, are isolated from other educational practices and will therefore always be ineffective. The failures of the current approaches to literacy skill development are (it is argued) only too plain for all to see. They spring from the view of literacy as a single injection of training which will solve all problems. Such failures cannot be remedied simply by reforming the system or methods or materials. Literacy teaching, it is argued, will only be effective if it is located within a firm framework of basic education for adults in which literacy skills may not be the first component (Torres 1998).
Audiences for post-literacy: Other concerns concentrate on the audiences reached by PL. Are they the right persons? Why do so few participants enrol for PL programmes? A report from Egypt states that "it is not reaching enough people or necessarily the right people" (Williams corresp). In many countries like Bangladesh, only one in ten graduates from ILT programmes are enrolled in PL programmes, although a few countries record figures as high as 25%. In most programmes, one PL centre is arranged to cover a cluster of ILT centres (see above, page 5). Again, although some countries record lower drop-out rates from PL than from ILT programmes (Robinson-Pant 1998a p5), nevertheless the fall-off rate in participation of those who enrol for PL concerns many practitioners and providers. Irregular attendance at activities is frequently reported. "There is not a big demand for libraries" (BangEval p42); indeed, many of those local libraries which are being used record that they are used more by children or those who have been well educated than by adult literacy learners (Botswana 1998 p5).
Materials: Another cluster of concerns relates to the materials being produced for PL. Some people feel that these are at the wrong level for the 'neo-literates'. Many practitioners are convinced from feedback they have received that these materials are often seen to be irrelevant to the interests of the PL participants and independent readers at whom they are aimed. The content is "too complicated for the intended audience .. and the material .. not sufficiently motivating to the learners" (Botswana 1998 p6); the "materials are irrelevant, uninteresting and hardly posing new challenges" (Omolewa 1998 p1). One donor has suggested that, because the producers of PL materials associate 'illiteracy' or 'barely literate' with being ignorant, the texts they produce may overlook the people's rich experience and local knowledge and their desire for specific information, and therefore may be patronising:
"Over the last decades, a lot has been invested into literacy programmes, but without at the same time producing interesting materials, both fictional and non-fictional, for the neo-literates. The need to keep the level of language quite low and uncomplicated was often interpreted in the wrong sense, so that texts were produced which are of little interest because of their contents. The fact that people's reading skills may not be very well developed was often seen as an expression of their general ignorance. As a consequence, reading materials and extension materials contain information which is of very little interest to the rather specific needs and questions of e.g. farmers (who have a very specialized knowledge and lots of experience in their fields)" (DSE 1995 p1).
The kind of instructions on sanitation, for example, offered in so many PL texts are felt to be simplistic, treating the adult participants like very young children. Some materials are accused of being gender biased (Townsend Coles 1994 p32), and it has been suggested that they reflect a view of development which sees the poor as being to blame for their own poverty, which ignores the structural element in poverty, and which informs the readers that development will come about when the poor and illiterate learn new things and change (Dighe 1995). The quality of production of many of the materials is thought to be inferior (although we need also to note that in many places the standard of production of many PL texts is very high indeed). The fear that the dependency of materials production on foreign aid agencies may lead to the collapse of the programme has been expressed on several occasions.
4. But the majority of the concerns are felt about the programmes in general, especially their delivery. Although there is greater awareness of the term 'post-literacy', and although it is generally accepted that some form of PL needs to be provided, nevertheless many problems are seen to exist in this area. The objectives of PL are often unclear: many policy makers are uncertain what PL is, how far it is the same as ILT and how far it is different. A recent survey of PL in Botswana for example records that "There is a lack of clarity on the policy on post-literacy in the various Government documents which are supposed to guide their activities and initiatives in the field" (Botswana 1998 p6). "In Brazil, there is a lot of confusion around this issue [PL]" (Magalhaes corresp). "The key weaknesses of the current situation with regard to post-literacy [in Kenya] are seen as a lack of conceptual framework or national policy together with a serious shortage of appropriate teaching and learning materials" (Newell-Jones 1998 p3).
Many complain that commitment by government and donors has fallen off in recent years, especially in relation to funds and other kinds of resources. The Botswana survey reported that "The Commission [the National Commission on Education in 1993] observed correctly that post-literacy has hitherto not been treated as a priority undertaking in the Department [of Non-Formal Education] in spite of the persistent concern by the learners on the question 'After literacy, what?'... In spite of the growing media influence in Botswana, limited attention has been paid to post-literacy" (Botswana 1998 pp3, 5). Torres describes PL in Latin America as a 'no-man's land' (Torres 1998).
There is a shortage of funds and other kinds of resources in almost all countries for PL. The high costs of materials production and publishing in some regions militate against the production of large print runs. Many agencies say that they have prepared appropriate materials but cannot afford to publish and distribute them. Both government and donor support for PL is often alleged to be lacking, although in India, there has been a good deal of provision and government support for PL without donor support. In Nigeria, "Facilities on the ground with respect to the quality of instructors, programme managers, materials, and the provision of resources are grossly inadequate" (Omolewa 1998 pp5-6). In Egypt, the whole programme "is hampered by a lack of funds and pressures from the Government to reduce the number of 'illiterates'" (Williams corresp). In Nepal, "every literacy worker interviewed stressed the lack of donor support for post literacy initiatives and a failure to ensure political commitment to the concept." One key official reported that "their [the National Planning Commission] first goal is to achieve universal literacy; there is no concept of post literacy, though I try to convince them that we need side-by-side programmes to sustain literacy rates" Others suggest that "There are no resources in post literacy. The Government will never pick it up. The only way in which it can be followed up is if it is dirt cheap" (Robinson-Pant 1998a pp3-4). Where donors exist, they may restrict the kind of initiatives which the field agencies may wish to take.
On the other hand, some see the main problems as lying in weak institutional capacity, especially the failure to indicate clear lines of responsibility, rather than lack of resources. "The [PL] programme is very ambitious", reports a respondent from Botswana, and Professor Youngman "concludes that the problem is not lack of policy or resources but it is the lack of institutional capacity and monitoring structures.." (Botswana 1998 p6). In particular, the scaling up from experimental pilot PL projects to larger programmes presents a major problem in many countries. In Nepal, where many small-scale experimental approaches to PL have been developed, "the problems of scaling up post literacy are foremost in planners' minds and influence the kind of programmes undertaken" (Robinson-Pant 1998a p4). The Indian PLC encouraged the Districts to experiment with different kinds and lengths of PL programme, but the eventual national Guidelines for PL reverted to a standard format of programme (NLM 1995).
Time and again, the distribution of PL materials carefully prepared in writing workshops is seen as a key weakness: "A great difficulty faced in most countries is how to get supplies out to where they are needed, .. as near to where the learners are coming together for instruction" (Townsend Coles 1994 p52). "It has become clear that the rural newspapers hardly reach villagers in the rural areas... Lack of transport facilities is given as the main reason. But lack of motivation on the side of those who are responsible for the distribution and of those who are responsible for the transport facilities is also mentioned" (Kater et al 1992 p71). Even in India, "the distribution of such materials among neo-literates has been very limited ... the problem of reaching the materials to the neo-literates on a sustained basis has not been very successful" (Ghosh 1997a pp2, 4).
A further issue which seems to arise from this institutional weakness is the 'gap' between ILT and PL - both in terms of timing and level. "It is often the case that between the conclusion of the conventional or primer stage and the possibility of commencing further study is a dangerous gap; a chasm which for many is so deep as to frustrate their motivation and cause them to abandon [literacy] learning altogether" (Townsend Coles 1994 p11). In India, there is often a gap of between 18 months and two and a half years between the end of the primer-based literacy teaching programme and the start of the PL programme - a gap caused by both local failures (to design an appropriate PL project, a task for which the local staff have received no training) and central failures (to provide the bureaucratic 'go-ahead' for the PL project). Other countries list the same problem. This is true even of NGO programmes (Robinson-Pant 1998a p3).
Even where there is a clear policy and effective institutional capacity, "the practice of post literacy in most cases is out of harmony with the broad principles outlined in policies and documents" (Omolewa 1998 p5). Poor teaching ("ineffective and dull teaching methods", Omolewa 1998 p1) is reported from a number of quarters. The problems of locating and selecting appropriate facilitators in the light of inadequate financial resources, and the difficulties of providing effective training for the new roles of the facilitators or for the functions of local librarians, all feature among common concerns.
Regularly, there are complaints about the failure of local libraries (see above, pages 16, 32), although they continue to be provided on a large scale. Even when the specially prepared 'neo-literate texts' reach the local centres, "most of the materials .. were put in storerooms and not distributed to the neo-literates" (Botswana 1998 p6). Cupboards and trunks containing collections of books and booklets chosen centrally by the literacy agencies remain locked (with keys often lost). Library books remain unread, or are borrowed (by staff as much as by participants) and not returned. In Nepal, there were complaints about PL materials being kept in glass cupboards and not being made available to local readers (Robinson-Pant 1998b).
Even when they are made available, the utilisation of these materials is reported by many bodies as being a problem after their production and distribution have been effected (e.g. ACCU 1998). The texts are found to be used very rarely, whether because they appear to have little direct local relevance or cultural appropriateness or because they are simply borrowed, read and returned without having impact on the lives of the readers or the community. Even when these books and booklets are read by the participants, there are signs of a lack of mediation of much of this material.
These concerns are expressed by both literacy teaching practitioners and the participants themselves. The causes of this failure are often seen to be different. The comment of a library keeper in Nepal that "women don't want books. They know nothing about the library", must be balanced against the comment of the women themselves: "If a male occupies the library or it is under his permission, we women never dare to ask him for books". "As all the books are in Nepali, the [Maithili-reading] women find difficulty using it. The books are usually taken by school teachers and some books are taken by them out of station for months" (Robinson-Pant 1998b p2). A report from Thailand reflects part of the problem clearly: "The principle of the series of booklets produced ... is to serve .. for further self-learning... But in reality, most of the learners are ... familiar with formal schooling which emphasizes didactic teaching. So the method of self-learning in the programme is not so effective in practice" (Thailand 1993 pp9-10). In Tanzania, "the utilization of rural libraries is minimal. Sometimes villagers do not even know that there is a library in the village.... Books had been borrowed and never brought back. No new books had been received for a long time" (Kater et al 1992 pp72-3).
Many take this failure of local libraries to work adequately to be an indication of the irrelevance of most of their PL materials produced by the different agencies for the 'neo-literates'. This irrelevance is seen to characterise the whole PL programme. In Sri Lanka, "the skills taught and the training given, particularly in the government sponsored programmes..., are too narrow and gender biased. Moreover they are thought to be far removed from the advancements that are being made in private industry... Because the [PL] programmes operate in isolation from private industry, the skills imparted are often out of date" (cited in Townsend Coles 1994 p32). Several commentators speak about the participation of the 'neo-literates' in developing their own programme as being rhetorical and not existing in practice.
While a large number of PL practitioners and planners attribute the weaknesses of PL to the lack of interest of the participants, there is growing recognition that such alleged lack of interest is really a failure on the part of providers to meet the real needs of the participant group. Often the PL facilitators (where they exist) are blamed for such problems. The difficulty of finding enough facilitators of the 'right kind' (educated, committed, innovative and creative, and knowledgeable) when they are paid so little (or even nothing), the problem of keeping them motivated over what is often a longer period than the ILT stage, the problem of facilitator drop-out - all these are thought to contribute to the weakness of much PL. And the training of all the personnel for PL (field worker, supervisor and manager alike) is frequently recognised as being inadequate. Even the training of the local librarians is felt to be inadequate. "The librarians are poorly equipped with material and equipment to work with and have not received any training. There are no written manuals or guides on what libraries are supposed to do and how to do it" (Tanzania: Kater et al 1992 p73).
5. A further group of concerns which have been expressed in several countries relates to the achievements of PL. The difficulty of developing proper indicators of success for PL (see above, page 25) relates of course to uncertainty about what its goals are. "There is a danger in current efforts on post-literacy [in Brazil] to fall back into the skills/functional literacy trap. .. Most government effort can be thought of in terms of figures, that is the kind of initiative that can win voters" (Magalhaes corresp). There is a lack of formal monitoring and evaluation, even by those who run the programmes. Informal evaluations reveal that both LGM and income-generating programmes lack sustainability; and the difficulty of both making and sustaining change in any local community forms part of the concerns of many PL practitioners.
6. Finally, we need to note a group of concerns which relate to gender. There is an alleged gender bias in the organisation and staffing (and often in training) of many programmes, with men supervising women facilitators. In Kenya, "the lack of women involved in the policy making and management of adult education" has been commented on (Newell-Jones 1998). Several practitioners feel that the programmes and the PL material are often gender biased; certainly evaluations have revealed a feeling that they are often not gender sensitive. The shift of interest from barriers to women's literacy to a deeper analysis of the basic ideological issues related to women and gender, which has been noticed in research into literacy (Mace 1992 p7), is not reflected in most PL materials when discussing women's development. Where materials address 'women's concerns', these concentrate mainly on what Moser calls the practical gender needs rather than the strategic gender needs (Moser 1993 p56). This is sometimes called the 'efficiency' approach, by which PL materials seek to help women to work more efficiently but do nothing to address the structural issues relating to gender inequalities. "The current reading materials .. portray girls and women only in their 'traditional' roles as child-minders, domestic workers, fetchers of wood, listeners to instructions from men teachers". It is suggested that newspaper inserts in some contexts may not reach women as easily as men (in other contexts, the reverse may be true). Women's use of libraries is an area of concern in some regions: where men control the library facilities, some women may feel excluded. In parts of Nepal, Muslim women prefer the madrasa school to the PL centre (Robinson-Pant 1998b). In Tanzania, concern about the compartmentalisation of the curricula of the Folk Development Colleges into tailoring for women and carpentry for men led to deliberate action to try to persuade women to take up carpentry and men tailoring, with some success (Sida 1998).
Such are the main concerns which have been expressed by many practitioners.
In several areas of the developing world, developments in literacy teaching have begun to take place outside of the traditional paradigm. Most of these can be described as non-course approaches to literacy skill development. Some are part of a search for a wider audience for PL programmes than simply those who are or who have been in adult literacy classes. Some are part of attempts to use local literacy practices as the basis for their literacy activities. Most of these experiments relate as much to ILT as to PL.
Some of these new approaches have been developed to challenge the traditional paradigm of adult literacy teaching. Others have arisen from quite different premises, often without any demand being heard for literacy training. We list below one or two which seem to us to be telling case studies, making particular points about new approaches to PL. They have not been chosen because we wish to commend them or criticise them, but because they point to issues which need to be addressed. There are many others which could have been included but space does not allow.
SoUL: In South Africa, the project known as SoUL (the Social Uses of Literacy) was set up to review critically current literacy policies in that country. Its central thrust was to uncover the role of literacy in the lives of those who are generally assumed to be 'illiterate'. The results of the project were intended to contribute to the current debate among educators and policy-makers centred around the construction of a national system of adult literacy.
The project consisted of a series of ethnographic studies of reading, writing and numeracy in different settings and among different communities from displacement sites to the taxi industry in Cape Town. The project explored the ways in which people with little schooling use reading and writing. These social uses of literacy were found to be highly contextualised and often different from schooled literacy practices. The case studies demonstrate how these 'illiterates' engage with various forms of literacy, make use of their informally acquired skills, and draw upon their social networks in order to deal with the literacy-related tasks of their everyday lives.
Some of the findings indicate that instead of literacy being an individualised activity, it is a highly collaborative activity. Literacy is part of communicative practices. The project found a demand for a kind of literacy learning programme which supports and advises the clientele on their literacy-related tasks of everyday life. This points to the fact that such a programme needs to be based on localised surveys of the existing literacy practices if it is to build on the real interests and concerns of the participants and is to lead to direct changes in their literacy practices. The participants themselves felt that a class and a set curriculum was not appropriate. Rather, an informal 'service and advice' type of activity was sought which made use of the people's own learning strategies. The project highlighted the need for contextualised localised literacy learning programmes; the logic of this would seem to be the inappropriateness of national uniform literacy learning programmes. The distinction between ILT and PL did not exist for these groups; all that existed were participants with different levels of literacy skills and different literacy-related needs (Prinsloo and Breier 1996).
Work-based literacies: In many countries, there is a growing movement to provide literacy learning programmes in specific workplaces. In Botswana, from the start, many of the adult literacy teaching programmes have been located in mining companies, meat firms, motor engineering concerns, and public bodies such as Botswana Power, to meet the need for the workers to acquire the literacy skills they require for their work. In Namibia, a request has recently been received from the transport firm TransNamib for literacy learning provision for its drivers. In these and other cases, it is felt to be inappropriate to expect the participants to enter the normal literacy class programme or to use the standard national literacy primer. Specific teaching-learning materials closely related to the particular workplace is seen to be more appropriate. As with SoUL, this points to the fact that in many cases there is little or no demand for 'literacy' per se but for literacy skills as part of a range of skill development to fulfil tasks which the participant groups have identified for themselves. Once again, there is no place here for the distinction between ILT and PL; the goal of the learning programme is the range of literacy skills needed to do different tasks within the work of the firm.
'Literacy comes second': A number of new programmes have been built on a 'literacy comes second' model in which the participant group does not consist of a group made up solely of 'illiterate' or 'neo-literate' learners but is a mixed group of people with some or no literacy skills who are engaged in a common task (Rogers 1999a). Such participant groups start their programmes with a developmental activity and work subsequently towards the literacy tasks related to that activity, using the texts of that activity as the basis for the development of the particular literacy skills needed. In Ahmedabad, India, a women's income-generation group started to learn literacy skills through developing basic book-keeping. In Kenya, a group of women growing tea asked for help to read leaflets on pruning which they got from a local agricultural extension training event (Newell-Jones 1998). Some women's credit and savings groups work on this principle. Most of the work of literacy skill learning is done through peer teaching and assistance in a collaborative way. There are no stages and hence no PL.
|
In Nepal, women developed their literacy skills through a sewing class, using the patterns as their 'literacy learning texts'. "For an example, one group of women wanted to learn sewing in a village in Nepal. These women were not literate, so that they could not read the manual that was developed for sewing. When told that they could learn to read and write so they could sew with the manual, they responded that by the time they recognized all the letters of the alphabet and learned to read that manual, their interest would wither. In this case, there is a group of people who are eager to learn a skill. They are in an environment where written materials and opportunities are available to them. But they are faced with a manual that expects them to be literate. Therefore they are afraid to take action on their goal of learning to sew, because they think the process of learning to read will be too slow. The problem here is the gap in people's assumptions about the way reading skills have to be taught before other things can be learned. .. Why should these women wait to learn sewing after reading? Why can't the sewing manual be adapted for use as a literacy text? It can, if we open our minds to new ways of teaching reading and writing.." (Dixon and Tuladhar 1994 p4). |
The Nepal Community Literacy Project: this is only at the planning stage; but its intention is to provide assistance to all those who have difficulty with their literacy practices in their daily lives - whether that is at work, in the home or in the community. Many of the activities of this project will take place outside of adult literacy classrooms, although one part of the programme will be to bring the real literacy tasks of the participants into the traditional ILT classes, so that the literacy skills learned in the classroom can be taken out again into the community life of the participants. The focus is on providing learning through the literacy practices of the people in their communities; and once again, there is no sense that ILT and PL are stages which succeed each other (CLPN).
The 'Real Literacies' Training Programme: As the result of a series of training courses run by Education for Development in the UK and overseas since 1993 (Education for Development 1997-8), in several countries, most notably Bangladesh, Ghana, Sierra Leone (despite the recent problems in that country) (Pemagbi and Rogers 1996), Nigeria (Omolewa 1997) and Botswana, literacy practitioners have developed a programme by which a search is made by the facilitators and participants alike to uncover the existing literacy practices of the participants in the communities from which they come. The aim is to introduce into the ILT programmes 'real literacy practices' and the written or printed materials which are used in these practices and to help the literacy participants to engage critically with these 'real materials'. The assumption is that this process will help the participants more easily to transfer what they learn in their literacy classes into use in their daily interactions in the community, in that the literacy practices engaged in during the classes come closer to the literacy practices found outside in the community. At the same time, the participants are being encouraged to challenge the different assumptions which lie behind the production of these real materials (Rogers 1999b).
|
In an urban slum in Jaipur, India, participants in a traditional literacy class were asked to bring items which they wished to read. Many brought cinema notices. Using these advertisements, literacy learning was fast, for the participants knew all the words on these notices and the ideas they expressed were close to the immediate concerns of the literacy learners. Further, they could use the material immediately outside of the class in their own communities with pride. The contents were also suitable for relevant calculations (prices of seats, dates etc). The interest aroused in learning through this material was considerable, and other women came to the classes, saying that "we did not think literacy classes were like this". This programme led to critical analysis, for there were discussions of how women were portrayed in the films and in the songs from the films. The participants were encouraged to write their own critique of the films they saw (Rogers 1983). Such an approach may not be relevant to other groups: this is not intended to be a plea to use this kind of material everywhere. But it demonstrates that a literacy learning programme based on real literacy tasks which the participants wish to undertake can lead to significant results. Other examples can be cited. In Bangladesh, the BRAC adult literacy programme uses 'real materials' extensively (Mazhar 1998; field notes Bangladesh August 1998). Other programmes with tea pickers in the Sylhet area use different real literacy materials. |
Help Age International (South Africa): Working with older persons to develop literacy skills, a group traditionally ignored by most providing agencies, Help Age International is pioneering an approach to literacy which is divorced from any pretension of access into more formal education. In particular, it addresses the language issue. Rather than teach first language literacy and then moving to English, the project plans to deal with dual language literacy. The people are encouraged to write what they need to write in the language they need to write it in. In this context, the scripts are the same, and the people use the local and English languages interchangeably. For example, the addresses of letters are in English even if the text inside the letter is in KwaZulu: it is argued that there is no point in helping the participants to learn to write in KwaZulu alone, since this will prevent them from reading or writing the addresses on letters. Once again, the immediate needs of the particular situation are the factors which dictate the kind of programme to be offered, not the need for some national uniform literacy learning programme (Millican 1998).
United Mission to Nepal 'Non-structural Approach': UMN has developed an approach to literacy learning which has no courses. Rather, it seeks to encourage and to facilitate reading wherever the participants are. It is perhaps best described in their own words: "The [traditional] structural approach [to learning literacy skills] means you go two hours a day, have a class, a facilitator, certificate. The 'non-structural approach' means books, but that work and reading can go together - women can do self-learning in their free time. We are developing small books that can fit in a pocket, also a calendar that they will see every time they go inside on a doorway or kitchen wall" (Robinson-Pant 1998a p3). Here the aim is that learning will take place at the level appropriate to the individual literacy learner and in a location and at a time and in a sequence chosen by the learner. UMN provide the materials; the 'learners' do all the rest for themselves.
The Nirantar/Banda NFE Project: This project grew out of the handpump project in India described in the earlier report (Banda 1994; ODA 1994 pp26-28). A group of women, with mixed levels of literacy skills and experience, were engaged on a handpump maintenance project. They decided to start a literacy enhancement programme as part of the project. In this case, the learning of literacy skills came after the primary task of learning about handpumps, and the group was not selected to consist entirely of non-literate persons. There was certainly here no question of initial literacy learning followed by PL. The project led to the development of a new non-formal curriculum prepared in a participatory way for some of the younger women in the group (Nirantar 1997). The learning within this project is not seen to be linear but multi-directional.
REFLECT is an approach to literacy teaching developed by Action Aid and linking PRA and literacy teaching. The practice of REFLECT varies from one location to another, but in general it can be said that the primary activity of REFLECT is a PRA survey of the local community and the development of a social action development project by the group itself. In most cases, the initial group is intended for non-literates alone, but sometimes others with some literacy skills join. The learning of literacy skills comes later in the project, if the participant group feels it is both desirable and achievable. The literacy learning programme "does not rely on an initial packaged course ... they [the participants] are generating their own texts in the literacy circles which can then be Xeroxed and these are taking the place of printed texts". "Rather than start with a primer, with the REFLECT approach, each literacy circle produces their own learning materials" (Archer and Cottingham 1996 p12). PL will only be provided if a course in literacy learning is provided during the REFLECT project. And PL is defined as "not just giving out reading materials but involves seeing literacy from the larger perspective of various communicative skills in the community" (Robinson-Pant 1998a p3).
"REFLECT rightly rejects the notion of splitting literacy programmes into a basic component, designed to acquire the technical skill of reading and writing, and a post-literacy component which aims to promote its application. If the learners have not found any use for their skills once they have acquired them, there are only two possibilities: 1. There is no use for their skills; or 2. The programme has failed to link up to or to create meaningful uses".
The aim of REFLECT is empowerment: and while the organisers see literacy skill development as a part of the process of empowerment, they are keen not to impose their own values in relation to the significance of literacy skills on the participant groups which determine the direction and pace of the development project:
"the first group of learners, who are now nominally in the 'post-literacy' stage, are no longer using their meetings for extensive practice of reading and writing. It could be argued that BAP [the Uganda REFLECT programme] has nothing to worry about since many learners are actively seeking opportunities to apply their skills regardless of BAP's efforts" (Fiedrich 1996 p8).
Nigeria Literacy Shop: The University Village Association of Ibadan in association with Education for Development has opened two literacy shops in Bodija Market. These offer help to all those who feel they need it with their own specific literacy tasks. There are no classes, no collecting of illiterates into special groups. There are no primers or other 'materials' in the sense of teaching-learning materials. The project assistants (who are two local shopkeepers) draw no distinction between 'illiterates', 'semi-literates' and 'literates' as the traditional adult literacy discourse does. Rather, there are people with differing literacy skills, tasks and confidence. The shops act in part as drop-in centres. The staff do not seek to do the literacy task 'for' the clientele; rather they set out to help the clients to do it for themselves and thus (in appropriate adult education fashion) to learn through doing. During the first year of the experiment, no charges will be made for providing this assistance but the situation will be reviewed before the end of the first year to see if a sustainable form of literacy assistance can be developed (Education for Development Nigeria 1998).
Rajiv Gandhi Foundation (RGF) Library Project, India: The RGF in association with New Age International (publishers) has established as a pilot experiment some 550 village libraries in eight states of India as far apart as Rajasthan, Assam and Tamil Nadu. These libraries have a stock of about 400 books and two daily newspapers. They are open every day (2-3 hours) unlike the TLC village libraries which tend to open once a week. And they are available to all the villagers, not just the graduates of the TLC classes; every household in the village is asked to appoint one member of the household as a member of the library. Library member families pay a small fee per annum towards the cost of the library. There is no talk about post-literacy as a learning programme, although the project is spoken of by RGF as "a novel effort in post literacy". The project seeks to promote reading as a culture among all those who wish to pursue it. Informal evaluations have been positive so far but a formal evaluation has not yet been conducted, and the problem of long term sustainability needs to be addressed (RGF).
Visual literacy: Such projects, outside the traditional paradigm, suggest that we may need to look at ILT and PL in a new light. We also note the increasing interest in visual literacy - the ability to decode and interpret drawings or pictorial symbols or colour codes rather than letters and words and sentences. Visual literacy relates in part to interpreting the signs and symbols in the social environment (e.g. signs on toilet doors, house styles on transport, political symbols etc). Another form of visual literacy is making meaning out of forms such as medical cards and passport applications, in which texts, boxes and spaces are arranged in a specific way; understanding of how to fill them in needs to be developed. But the main use of such material is probably the use of drawings to communicate messages in ILT and PL and extension programmes (e.g. Storyteller in South Africa; BOBP in Asia etc: see ODA 1994 pp31-38). In particular, the use of so-called 'comic books' appears to be growing to engage the attention of the users and to get messages across, especially in health. And in Thailand, some innovative projects in post-literacy using radio and video have been commenced (World Education corresp).
It is assumed that people can interpret such visual literacy materials without mediation. Tentative assessments suggest that where the users of such material are familiar with visual messages (e.g. through television), the readers can more easily access the style than in cases where the approach is imported. Few of these materials are mediated to the users (except again in health), and therefore there appear to be few if any training programmes in how to help readers to engage with this material. Once again in developing such formats, the distinction between 'illiterate' and 'neo-literate' becomes less important. Rather these materials are seen as a form of contextualised communicative practices - that is, within a particular context, they form part of a process of communication between the agency issuing the text and the users in their own groups or individually.
Wall literacy, Katatura, Namibia
3.1. Adult learning theory
3.2. Understanding of literacy as social practice
3.3. Language and access
3.4. Development theory and practice
3.5. Education, centralisation and decentralisation
3.6. Changing technologies
The context within which PL is set is changing. New insights are being developed, and these need to be applied to literacy learning programmes. We set out here some of the key elements in these changes.
Most of those involved in adult education, whether they hold constructivist approaches to learning or more traditional views, agree on two main differences between adult learning and learning programmes for younger persons (children or college students). Despite the danger of over-generalisation, the following principles are of value for the development of PL programmes.
a) the importance of 'starting where they are': Adult learning is in most cases voluntary. Adults learn when such learning meets their immediate or longer-term intentions. Thus modern approaches to adult learning programmes start with the current motivations of the participants rather than attempting to motivate the intended participants to learn things which they do not wish to learn. Adult education regards the participants as adult persons who know their own mind and are normally accustomed to make decisions about their own lives (including their own learning), not like younger persons who need to be told what they should learn.
Since adult learning programmes are built on the principle that it is important to start where the participants are, they need to reflect the divergent desires and concerns of the varied adult participants, their differing expectations which have been formed by their different experiences, the different preferred learning styles which adults have developed over the years, and their own chosen finishing point (Rogers 1996 pp94-116). Much adult learning is not linear; it is not based on a common starting point, but multi-dimensional, following paths through the material which suit the interests and concerns of the learners.
In terms of literacy, many adult literacy teaching programmes assume, because all the participants are 'illiterates', that they are all at the same starting point. But this is not true. The participants bring with them differing experiences of literacy practices and different perceptions and agendas. Non-literate adults are already engaging in literacy practices (Barton and Hamilton 1998): they are adopting many different strategies for dealing with the various literacy events and the various texts which they encounter, using their own networks (Fingeret 1983, Levine 1986, Prinsloo and Breier 1996). They have their own agenda in relation to these experiences. We need to start where they are, with their motivations, rather than try to motivate them to be interested in an agency approach to literacy.
b) the importance of learning by doing: Unlike most of the teaching-learning programmes devised for younger learners, adult learning programmes do not proceed by learning first and practising afterwards. This is of course well known. As long ago as 1973, the UNESCO report Learning to Be contrasted adult (lifelong) learning ('learning to be' what you are) with the formal education of younger persons which it characterised as 'learning to become' something which you are not yet.
The process of lifelong learning which many reports have identified as a key element in today's thinking about adult education implies that adults tend to learn 'on the job' - by doing what they need to do during the course of their life-related activities, and by critical reflection on these actions. One learns parenting by parenting with real children in real situations. One learns farming by farming and cooking by cooking, how to shop by shopping and how to build by building. If it were not possible to learn from experience but only from specially created learning programmes, many persons (probably in most countries, the majority) would never learn anything, for most adults do not enter such learning programmes.
Experiential learning again implies that a linear approach to learning, which may or may not be appropriate for children, is clearly not appropriate for adults. Adults learn best through their daily life experiences, however haphazardly those experiences may occur. There are many routes through learning, and much learning is episodic rather than systematic. Learning (for adults in particular) can be described as a 'messy process' (Rogers 1996 chaps 4 and 5).
Current understandings of lifelong learning are thus challenging the view that underlies many literacy learning programmes, that 'independent learning' can only start once an adult has completed the first stages of learning literacy. The concepts of lifelong learning reveal that learning is not dependent on literacy. Non-literate persons are already autonomous learners, are already engaged in experiential lifelong learning (Rogers 1992 pp9-17). Those who talk about a person achieving the status of 'independent learner' only towards the end of the process of literacy learning and continuing education are talking about a particular form of learning, i.e. book learning, which they usually see as superior to experiential learning.
Building literacy programmes on adult learning principles: Literacy programmes then which take adult learning principles seriously will seek to start where the participants really are and not where the providing agencies assume they are. These programmes will build on what the participants already know and seek to enhance what they are already doing, that is, using different strategies (some of them non-literate strategies) to engage in literacy practices with the texts they find around them, before moving on to help them to develop these strategies further and to explore new uses of literacy, new literacy practices. As we have noted, most existing adult literacy learning programmes start from the assumption that the 'illiterates' know nothing and are unable to do anything, although a great deal of research indicates that this is not true. Non-literate persons do have experience of engaging in literacy and from this experience have built up perceptions of, and attitudes towards, literacy (for example, Barton and Hamilton 1998; Doronila 1996; Prinsloo and Breier 1996).
And literacy learning programmes which apply adult learning principles will help the participants to learn through their own literacy experience, to learn by doing in reality. Just as it is impossible to learn to swim without swimming in real water, or to learn chicken rearing or rice growing without actually rearing chickens or growing rice, so it is impossible to learn reading or writing or calculating without engaging in real reading, writing or calculating in real situations - wherever possible with the assistance of a facilitator. Such programmes will use the real literacy tasks of the participants as the basis for their learning rather than (or as well as) the school-room based exercises using a prescribed textbook which most adult literacy learning programmes currently employ.
A number of contemporary approaches to adult education are concentrating on opening out and adapting the formal education system to meet the educational and training needs of non-traditional students, especially older persons. Those who are engaged in developing new and more relevant literacy learning programmes for adults are equally seeking ways of developing approaches to literacy skill teaching adapted to the needs of adults, rather than treat them in the same way as children are treated. Thus the adult education programmes designed to help people with their own literacy learning will be customised learning programmes for individuals or specific groups of adults based on their existing literacy practices rather than standardised and formalised programmes using only a set primer.
Today there is growing awareness of literacy as social practice rather than as a set of skills which a person has or has not. In this approach, literacy is what people do, not what they learn. "Literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script, but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use" (Barton 1994 p24). Literacy is part of a wider set of 'communicative practices' which embraces oral, written and visual communication - and communication is always for a purpose which lies outside of itself. Studies in the socio-cultural approach to literacy reveal once again that non-literate persons engage in literacy practices in their own communities, just as persons with advanced literacy skills engage in non-literate practices.
And literacy in this sense is a social activity. The idea that literacy is a discrete individualised activity is part of what has come to be called 'the literacy myth' (Graff 1979), People using literacy practices form part of social networks which serve as learning resources with the exchange of knowledge and skills, networks in which people are treated as equals and not as 'illiterates' and 'literates'. The categorisation of persons into 'literate' and 'illiterate' just does not work on the ground; we are all in different respects both literate and illiterate.
This is not to take a romantic view of people's local literacy practices but a realistic view. Literacy practices are always embedded in social relations of power and inequality. What counts as literacy and what is helpful or useful literacy practice depends on the specific situation. We are of course not arguing that people should be left with their existing strategies for dealing with literacy tasks. The provision of help to people to enable them to change these strategies (and thus to change the power structures on which the existing literacy practices are based) is the aim of literacy teaching programmes based on the new approaches to literacy as a social practice.
These new approaches to literacy then suggest that literacy is always contextualised, situated within a particular socio-cultural setting. There is a growing awareness that there is no one universally applicable form of literacy. Rather, there are different literacies and literacy practices for different groups (occupational groupings, for example) and for different kinds of activities (religion, education, commercial activities etc) and for different social and institutional contexts (bureaucracies, informal meetings etc). Literacy teaching programmes for adults, then, which are based on the new literacy studies would seek to help the participants with very specific types of reading and writing. And if, as we have seen, literacy skills need to be learned by engaging in literacy tasks within the context of the particular activity to which they relate, then for example, religious literacy will be based within a religious practices context, work-based literacies within the context of the performance tasks of the workplace, etc, each of these using the 'materials' which are needed to fulfil these tasks.
In this context, the term 'literacy materials' is not confined to texts which have been specially created or are used for the learning of literacy skills. Rather the term refers to all those texts found or created within literacy practices (these have been referred to in earlier writing as 'real literacy materials', but this term has problems in the sense that it suggests that other texts are not 'real'). All literacy materials (including literacy primers and other learning texts) need to be seen within their contexts to derive their meaning. A land document or a set of accounts make sense only when considered within their specific setting. Learning to engage with these texts depends on the kind of document being learned and the context within which it is used.
'Literacy' then is what people do with reading and writing - and this of course includes learning, even learning to read and write. The idea of literacy as social practice does not exclude teaching-learning literacy skills or the learning of new literacy practices. It also includes the learning of school-based literacy practices where there is a demand for that. What is done in an adult literacy class is a social activity or communicative process which includes particular kinds of literacy practices (reading and writing of specially prepared texts).
Literacy primers then are a specific kind of created text for a special set of literacy practices. They are created to help participants to develop a particular set of literacy practices, what may be called 'school-based literacies'. The aim of the learning programme is to help the participants to read pages of the primer in a classroom setting and to fill in spaces on a primer page etc. Like all other texts, they are contextualised, situated within a 'learning centre' environment rather than a community environment; and they only make sense within that context. Without some form of additional mediation, they will not assist the participants with the use of the other kinds of literacy practice which go on (for example) in the Post Office, bank, clinic or anywhere else in the community. If they are seen in this light and if we can help the participants to engage with them in this context, they will help the participants to develop classroom skills; but the transfer of these skills from the classroom to community use will rarely take place without some specific kind of help. And in adult education, it is (as we have seen) more effective to help the participants to learn in and from their own environment (in other words in and from the Post Office, bank, clinic etc) rather than in and from a more specialised literacy learning classroom or centre environment.
The most important implication of seeing literacy as social practice, and of seeing literacy teaching programmes as assisting people with their current literacy practices, is that such programmes will be built on careful localised research into the literacy practices of the participants, and the found and created texts which support these practices. This view of literacy suggests that literacy teaching programmes need to be situated in real contexts rather than be generalised (on localised research).
And this view of literacy as social practice also means that the evaluation of literacy learning achievements will be set in terms of how the participants use their literacy skills. If they only read a page at the end of the primer and do nothing more than this, the programme may have achieved what it set out to do, but in terms of helping the participants to use their literacy skills in real life, it has clearly failed. The key question which literacy practitioners face is how does each participant use their newly acquired primer-based literacy skills?
Performance indicators, rooted in particular situations, have been proposed as a more effective measure of achievement in literacy than standard tests (Powell 1991), but there is a danger here too that such indicators can themselves become decontextualised. Some of the surveys of retention of literacy skills (Roy et al 1975; Ramaswamy 1994; Comings 1995), although limited and tentative at this stage, suggest that literacy skills are best retained when they are used in real situations to accomplish real literacy tasks with 'real' literacy texts, not artificial tasks set by educators with specially prepared texts. Evaluations have shown that, despite some difficulties, the use of existing literacy practices as the basis of learning literacy skills (as in the Language Experience Approach of ELP and Storyteller in South Africa, where the authentic language transactions of the participants are used as the basis of the literacy learning programme) is more effective in developing sustainable literacy skills than more formal primer-based methods, even in countries where the written form of the language is significantly different from that which is spoken.
Much contemporary discussion concerning adult literacy concentrates on seeing literacy learning within the context of language (e.g. UNESCO 1993). Learning literacy skills on their own, detached from their linguistic context, is seen to be problematic.
There are two aspects to this discussion, which are sometimes distinguished by the use of the terms tongue and register (language constructs). 'Tongue' relates to the language spoken or written such as KiSwahili or Hindi or minority languages like Gurung in Nepal (Robinson-Pant) or Arakmbut in Peru (Aikman 1995). 'Register' relates to the form of the language used by different social groups or in different social contexts. While there is much debate in literacy circles about tongue, there is relatively less about register, but this too provides or restricts access to different kinds of literacy practices and to the power contexts in which those practices take place.
In recent years, there has been a great deal of discussion about first language (vernacular) as against national or regional languages and the power relationships involved in these tongues (Barton 1994b), not only in educational terms but in terms of social constructs. Issues of bi-lingual and multi-lingual education create a key thread in contemporary debates about schooling (Clinton Robinson 1990, 1994; IJED 1998).
Such issues affect adult literacy programmes (including PL) acutely. "Literacy is about language and education as well as the specific skills of reading and writing" (Rockhill 1993 p345). It is therefore not surprising that language concerns (mother tongue or standardised languages) are regularly reflected in current debates about adult literacy. Issues surrounding minority languages and the rights of different groups to use them; the question of disappearing languages; the power relationships involved in language - these are factors which will also affect any literacy teaching programme, particularly at the PL stage (Education for Development 1994). Nor are these matters for planners and policy-makers alone, especially in participatory adult learning programmes; for it is clear that the demands of the participants vary from place to place (Aikman 1995). It has been suggested that there is a hunger for the creation of new reading material in minority languages (Clinton Robinson 1990), but very little funding is available for this purpose. But it is equally arguable that many people are hesitant to learn literacy skills in their local languages when they are aware that they cannot use such skills to achieve any purposeful change in their own lives.
Equally, there is the question of register - who uses which kind of language for what kind of purpose? Issues of culture and modality are raised by these discussions - what kinds of language are used in public life, in government contexts, in religious contexts, in formal education, in social gatherings etc? Questions of 'high' and 'low' forms of language are raised here, of standardised and non-standardised language. Equally, what kinds of language have the participants learned their literacy skills in? - for this will help to determine what they can do and what they cannot do with the literacy skills they have learned in the classroom. The nature of the literacy skills developed through PL primers, while it may open some doors, may also prevent the participants from accessing other kinds of written texts which are in their own environment. A major question for the development of PL is, what can the literacy skills being learned be used for?
We cannot enter fully into these important and wide-ranging debates here. For they concern the structure of society and the nature of local power relationships:
"Literacy is not only useful, it is also violent, as Stuckney (1991) provocatively points out with reference to the segregation often undertaken with the help of literacy standards. Those who are literate are seen as capable, intelligent and modern, while those who are not make up the rest of the world's population - to be pitied at best" (Fiedrich 1996 p10).
The key issue for all adult literacy programmes which lies behind this discussion is that of inclusion and exclusion. Both language as tongue and language as register (the kind of language being taught to the participants in both ILT and PL) will themselves both include some persons and some literacy practices and exclude others.
This is not an abstract or academic issue. For the implications are that both the tongue and the register need to be of immediate concern for the planners and the participants in literacy learning programmes if these programmes are to be effective. To force adults to learn what they do not wish to learn or what they cannot (or do not wish to) use is to deny their adulthood. For example, the language policy of the Ghana Functional Literacy Programme which used 15 local languages was contested by the literacy learners' demand for English (Yates 1995). Literacy teaching is part of language teaching; and any language and literacy teaching which does not help the participants to examine the ways in which read texts and written texts are constructed will be of little use to the learners.
The context of most adult literacy teaching programmes in third world countries is as much one of development as of adult education and of language learning. This is particularly true of PL. Changes in the theory and practice of development will thus affect the way in which PL is provided.
It is impossible to summarise the major changes in development theory and approaches in this context. But the earlier deficit approach with its emphasis on meeting needs by inputs, which was challenged by the disadvantaged approach of more radical groups calling for structural changes and its emphasis on the inclusion of excluded groups, is now again being challenged by a more ethnographic 'third way' or 'alternative development' approach which may be called the difference approach, in which the different intentions of the participant groups are taken as the basis for development interventions and partnerships with local development groups and agencies as the key to sustainability (Rogers 1992).
Participation: Probably the most important recent influence helping to build up the insights of the 'difference' approach to development is that of participatory approaches to development which emerged during the 1980s. These have laid stress on people's purposeful and direct involvement in their own self-development (Rahman 1993; Sachs 1993). Recent writings have spoken of 'people first' (Burkey 1993) and of 'putting the last first' (Chambers 1983). The challenge of 'Whose Reality Counts?' (Chambers 1997; Holland J 1998) faces all development workers who take participation seriously. Much of this is of course rhetoric: in many cases, control is retained by the aid agencies. Development practice has changed relatively little, despite the language of participation. But the challenges of the rhetoric remain, to be fulfilled if possible.
Participatory approaches to development have led directly to the contemporary emphasis on the promotion of partnerships between donor and aid agencies (both governmental and NGO) on the one hand and development implementing agencies in the South on the other. Decision-making about the programme is (either in part or wholly) to be shared between the participant groups and the aid agencies. There are of course practical limits: it is difficult to promote participatory approaches within organisations that are not themselves participatory. But partnerships are being increasingly sought.
The implications of a fully participatory approach (rather than the partial approach which still predominates) are that the goals of the development programme will be set by the participants, not by the aid agencies. Externally assessed surveys of 'needs' are being replaced by PRA analyses and surveys of local intentions (Rogers 1992 pp146-158), and in some cases, participant groups are being encouraged to set their own developmental objectives.
And this means that beyond the rhetoric, the goals agreed for development programmes will vary widely according to the various groups involved rather than being pre-set by the external development agencies on a uniform basis for all the participant groups. And such goals may well change locally over time as the development programme continues, so that once again uniform goals cannot be imposed on all groups from the centre. Further, the agenda for development will also be local and diverse. The socio-political realities will of course in many cases limit participation, but there are a number of examples on both a small scale and on a larger scale where participatory approaches have resulted less in the importation of externally determined procedures which the participants need to learn to accept but rather in the strengthening of indigenous practices and the fulfilment of locally determined solutions to locally identified concerns. That at least is the ideal towards which participatory development seeks to move (Kaufman et al 1997; UNRISD 1994; Holland J 1998).
Participatory literacy: Participation in adult literacy programmes has tended to be very limited. The literacy learners are encouraged to help to determine the timing and the location of the courses, but participatory decision-making does not extend to the choice of material for learning, to the length of the training programme, to the sequencing of the material, or to the setting of the final goals of the learning programme. These are matters which are reserved for the providing agencies to decide.
Fuller participation in adult literacy would lead to encouraging the literacy learners in initial and post-literacy learning programmes to set the goals of the programme for themselves and to decide when they have had enough, rather than the donors/providers setting pre-determined levels of achievement. Participatory post-literacy in particular would be open-ended, a programme designed to help the participants - individually or in groups - to achieve their purposes and aimed at their desired levels of achievement. Some of the participants in participatory adult literacy programmes would opt for standardised school-based achievement levels, in which case the provision of classes with textbooks would be appropriate. In other cases, where the participants requested assistance with their own particularised local literacy practices (again, individual or group tasks), the adult literacy learning programmes would be based on their indigenous literacy practices and on the found and created texts used in these practices, so as to achieve locally determined goals. Some of these may not be seen to be fulfilling the developmental expectations of the agencies and funders, such as reading cinema notices in India or fashion magazines in Brazil, but they will be development in terms of the participants. Such a programme arising from the view of literacy as social practice is possible, and is likely to be more effective in bringing about sustainable enhanced literacy skills.
Measurable indicators: However, the use of log frames in developing project proposals in development has increased the emphasis on uniformly applicable and measurable indicators of achievement. The recognition of the importance of assessing and evaluating the impact of development activities also suggests the need for pre-determined outcomes. Both of these trends are understandable in view of the call for increased transparency and accountability in development programmes.
These trends have been exacerbated by the poverty-focused development agenda of much current aid and development administration. New ways of assessing progress in the reduction of poverty are being sought (Goyder et al 1998). The kind of question being asked is how the contribution which (for example) a chicken-rearing project is making to the relief of poverty can be measured.
These debates impact on adult literacy teaching provision. The search for indicators of poverty reduction has led to the inclusion of national, sectoral and gendered literacy statistics among the relevant data. Such statistics call for literacy achievement to be measured by standardised tests, and standardised tests call for uniform teaching-learning programmes. The difficulty of comparing the literacy skills used by a woman vendor in an Indian fishing community and those used by an Egyptian urban street trader, of measuring the literacy achievements of South African taxi drivers and those of Bangladeshi tea pickers, or even of taxi drivers and hospital porters in the same city, is encouraging literacy training agencies to fall back onto universal educational standards.
One answer to the desire to retain locally relevant and participant-determined measures of achievement has been the development of literacy performance indicators. In work-based literacy programmes, for example, the search is on to determine the "levels of literacy that are actually required for individuals to function effectively in different (work) contexts", for it has been recognised that "there is little evidence that grade attainment was an accurate indicator of literacy skills"; "performance tasks [may better serve] as indicators of literacy competence" (Benton 1996 p95). Another approach which holds some promise is the Progress Profile which is being used in some European countries to help the participants to engage in self-assessment of their own literacy progress (Holland and Street 1994). Elsewhere, ethnographic ways of evaluating achievements are being experimented with (Craig and Porter 1997).
There is then something of a contradiction within current trends in development approaches. On the one hand, there is a trend towards 'difference' as the key parameter of development, towards diversified and localised decision-making, participatory development towards goals which are not pre-determined by the aid and development agencies but are set locally by the participants. On the other hand, there is a trend towards the donors/providers pre-setting measurable goals for the development activity - social transformation pre-determined by the providers (often as much in terms of good government, democracy, transparency and accountability as in terms of health and productivity etc). In terms of adult literacy, this contradiction expresses itself, on the one hand, in the provision of formalised and universal literacy learning programmes with pre-set materials and standardised testing of achievements by educational criteria, and on the other hand, in the challenge of meeting the demand for literacy learning programmes directed towards localised literacy usages chosen by the participants. The need to develop new ways of measuring literacy progress in these situations and presenting these in statistical format is being addressed, but there is a long way to go yet.
Literacy teaching also stands within an educational world and will be affected by changes in theory and practice among educationalists. The two trends which appear to be of most relevance to our survey of PL are the increasing centralisation of some parts of education, notably the curricula and assessment, and the decentralisation of other parts of education, notably management and decision-taking.
Centralisation: In most countries, there is increasing central control over the curriculum taught in schools and colleges. Educational institutions are losing the ability to determine what they teach, at what level and in what sequence. Such issues are not always being determined on educational grounds. Much of the impetus towards the development of a national curriculum comes from politicians and administrators rather than from educators, and it is often aimed at fulfilling social agendas such as industrial and economic growth, social development and environmental goals, gender and other forms of equality, and communal harmony and peace.
Closely linked with the national curriculum is central control over accreditation. National levels of qualifications are being developed in every country, and increasing pressure is being felt in every educational establishment to conform to these qualifications. Formal modes of recognition of achievement through education and training are gaining momentum. Students as well as employers and educational providers are using them as a means of measuring and valuing outcomes. Access into subsequent levels of educational provision relies increasingly on some form of recognised certificates. In order for accreditation to be used as criteria for the measurement of success, it is often asserted that it needs to be nationally standardised, accessible and accountable. The difficulties around producing equivalent but contextualised tests for different groups of learners, like those which surround measurable indicators of development impacts, are considerable.
Decentralisation: On the other hand, in contrast, recent years have seen an increase in the pressure to devolve decision-making and accountability to a more local level. Schools are being made cost centres, with senior staff being required to accept increasing responsibilities for staffing and resource management. The responsibilities of the local educational centres, if not their powers of self-determination, are being increased. In many development contexts, community involvement in the provision of education, cost-sharing, and the responsibility for the maintenance of educational premises and sometimes for the payment of teachers are being built into educational programmes.
Literacy as Education. Such trends are apparent in educational programmes in developing countries. Donors are increasingly having more say in terms of curricular content and management, as national educational budgets are cut back and governments become more dependent on outside aid. And they are also affecting adult basic education provision including PL, although clearly to different extents in different contexts. The increased central control comes about through the provision of centrally produced teaching-learning texts and through the demand for statistics of achievement based on centrally prepared tests.
The advantages of this for PL can be seen in some contexts. Being locked into a national framework can result in PL achieving a higher profile nationally with increased and more secure resourcing, together with a coherent strategy for planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating the programmes. As part of a national provision (as the TLC in India suggests), there could be greater coordination between different providers, both governmental and non-governmental, leading to a reduction in duplication and an increase in the sharing of good practice. It calls for the development of some institutional framework for PL, without which many PL programmes appear to be vulnerable. As we have seen, there is everywhere in PL a shortage of staffing, of accommodation and (in some cases) of appropriate teaching-learning materials. A higher national profile and greater security of funding could provide the incentive to overcome these shortages. A national PL curriculum and comprehensive assessment programme linked to recognised progression routes can also be in the interest of some of the participants. They might provide these persons with a wider access into formal education or vocational training, or with nationally recognised accreditation leading to increased employment opportunities.
On the other hand, a national PL curriculum with standardised pre-set learning outcomes brings with it some disadvantages. Inevitably it will be less flexible than a locally developed scheme negotiated specifically with the literacy learners. Although efforts are often made to include the assessed needs of the literacy learners when devising such a national curriculum and the teaching-learning materials to go with it (especially in the use of distance or open learning methodologies), they cannot incorporate the specific local requirements of all the participants. Similarly, a system of imposed national qualifications has disadvantages. It is clear from the drop-out rates that not all the literacy learners want formal nationally recognised qualifications; few seek access into the formal system of education. The development of a generic competency-based scheme of assessment for adult literacy also has major implications for the training of facilitators and assessors.
The same is true for decentralisation of management and accountability. The diversity of the life-experiences, intentions and expectations of the participants in literacy teaching programmes is acknowledged. In those programmes where local decision-making is actively supported and responsibility at a local level is encouraged, the result has been the establishment of different models for different situations. Unfortunately, the tendency is for these differences to be reduced in the scaling up of a pilot project to a larger-scale programme.
Adult literacy teaching (including PL) in the 1990s is located within a context of fast changing information and communication technologies (ICT) and rapidly changing attitudes to those technologies. We cannot do more here than draw attention to some of the implications of these changes for PL, for this is a field which will require a great deal more research, including action research.
The use of distance and open learning methodologies is now well established, and has been extended to adult basic education programmes. We note for example the use of distance learning for basic education in countries like Uganda and Pakistan. There is experimentation with some of the newer forms of ICT, but the main format is still printed material backed up with radio and TV cassettes where possible.
It is however the newer technologies which are now commanding attention (ICT). We note for instance the apparently high levels of motivation and achievement of previously demotivated adult literacy learners when using computer-assisted literacy programmes in countries like the USA. We note the increase in creative writing on the internet through which large amounts of material can be disseminated very widely and used at will in many different ways and at times of convenience to the users - all at marginal costs. We note the spontaneous development of international study circles using ICT, to which the participants in PL programmes could contribute - and the feeling that they are sharing experiences which others value rather than simply receiving other people's wisdoms. We notice the spread of relatively advanced printing facilities into many of the smaller towns and villages throughout the Third World, through NGOs as well as commercial agencies. We note the economy of printing using the new printing technologies, such as desk-top publishing; several local PL newspapers such as the newspaper in Chittoor in India (ODA 1994 pp16-19) have been produced on existing technical equipment which has surplus capacity at very low costs.
However, access to these new technologies is not universal, although increasingly such access no longer relies on elaborate infrastructure such as on-line electricity supply. In particular, much ICT relies on international languages, access to which is still a weak point of most PL programmes despite demand from the participants. But it needs to be remembered that all the communicative technologies such as printing, the telephone, video and television were initially narrow in their field of influence. ICT brings with it challenges around access and power which require consideration.
And access to ICT can be increased. For example, modem developments such as computer mirroring can help local sources to use large amounts of material without elaborate or costly hardware and at greatly reduced on-line costs. In fact, the main problems seem to be different from questions of access. One important issue is how to handle the diversity of information available which is no longer controlled by print runs. There is already some indication that farmers in some areas in developing countries are no longer content with extension booklets which they feel go out-of-date quickly, but prefer to access more up-to-date and constantly renewed agricultural information on the internet. A second issue is how to contextualise the material. The problem appears to centre around ways of creating a collage, out of which the participants can draw the information they feel they need.
There are a number of ways in which ICT can assist literacy development programmes, including post-literacy. There is no need to provide every person with internet access. It is possible to leverage ICT services through centres to which, in the first instance, only facilitators and support staff would have access. The cost of high telephone bills for internet access can also now be circumvented using other media. This makes possible a number of services and opportunities such as
· interactive support for the facilitators which can be provided by e-mail from a bank of training support staff situated at some central location.· the provision of materials, from specific training materials to a wide range of interesting resources on a variety of media which require computers but which do not need telephone access or even access to electricity supplies.
· networks of materials-generating individuals and groups, linked to support personnel, again situated centrally.
These and other opportunities provided by new developments in ICT need to be explored. They are intended in the first instance to support and enhance learning and facilitation, not to replace them. But they can demonstrate substantial economies of scale and provide access to further opportunities that are in themselves not new but which have for the most part been inaccessible and/or too costly. They can also be used to help to draw people from remote and isolated areas into new learning networks, not as consumers but as active participants. Relocation of tasks and services can take advantage of the virtual network in which physical isolation can become relative, if not irrelevant.
Clearly PL will need over the next few years to explore ways of utilising these new technologies, to develop guidance services through the maze for the PL participants, to provide mediation to help the users to situate this material in their own context, and to create appropriate training programmes for those engaged in both ILT and PL. Traditional reading skills such as 'skimming and scanning' will need to be supplemented with 'searching and sifting' skills.
We are convinced that this is not utopian. We believe that the PL groups which we saw, with appropriate help, can utilise such new technologies, contribute to them and learn from them through interacting with them. The opportunities which lie ahead are not only exciting; they are very challenging.
7. CONCLUSION
These changing contexts provide a challenge, not just to the traditional ILT and PL programmes but also to all those who seek to develop new approaches to literacy teaching programmes. They provide us with a basis for our own critique of the traditional paradigm of post-literacy.
Egyptian bakery workers, Alexandria, during work break
