Relationships of Policy, Theory and Research in the Literacy Field

Brian Street

Outline:

• Policy < > Theory < > Research• Policy Reports: DfId; EFA; PISA; PIAAC• Theory: Literacy as Social Practice; Learning in/out of school• Research; Castanheira; LALS; King’s; Goldsmith’s• Conclusions: need for shift re theory and method; Implications for

Policy

Introduction

In this paper, I will argue for a more complex relationship between policy perspectives in the literacy field and the contribution of both theory and research. Along with some commentators, who, as I indicate below, are beginning to challenge the dominant policy perspectives, I would want to shift towards a more balanced social perspective that brings together Policy, Theory and Research. I will make this argument by linking examples of policy approaches with theoretical work in the field of Literacy as Social Practice (LSP). Taking a more qualitative approach, in particular drawing on ‘ethnographic’ perspectives that enable us to see and hear what the participants themselves are actually doing, and their local social meanings, researchers in LSP argue that engaging with literacy is always a social act even from the outset, rather than assuming that literacy can be learned ‘autonomously’, as it were, in formal contexts and then taken out into society afterwards, an approach that seems to suggest that the ‘skills’ can be measured and compared on some kind of universal scale.

A recent paper by Leung and Lewkowitz (2013) makes a similar intervention with regard to policy for curriculum and assessment in relation to language learning. A major international policy framework - the Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR) – has, they argue, exerted international influence beyond Europe, for instance with regard to the International Language Testing System (IELTS) used by English speaking universities world wide to identify the proficiency of applicants from other language backgrounds. These particular policy perspectives feed into both curriculum and assessment, leading to international comparative league tables, and they draw upon an assumed theoretical concept, the notion of ‘communicative competence’. Leung and Lewkowitz demonstrate that the interpretation of this concept is inadequate ‘for describing additional language proficiency levels and students’ ability to participate through spoken interaction in real-life content classrooms’.(p. 399). They link this theoretical debate with ‘empirical evidence from contemporary university classroom settings with linguistically diverse students’ (399). Adopting a similar approach to that which I will use here, with regard to the setting of international standards for literacy attainment, they argue that ‘meaning-making in social interaction is considerably more complex and fluid than is envisaged in

theoretical models of communicative competence’ (p. 398) and the research evidence they provide likewise demonstrates the importance of such a shift of focus. Similarly, with regard to literacy curriculum and measurement, I will argue that the dominant theory adopted by international agencies is inadequate to the complexity of literacy practices in diverse social contexts, whilst there is a growing body of research evidence that also testifies to the need to recognise greater complexity and local meanings. To be fair, however, to the similar complexity across international institutions themselves, I will begin with some examples of recent reports that do begin to address the kinds of detail that theory and research is pointing towards in the field of literacy and education, as Leung and Lewkowitz demonstrate with regard to the field of communicative competence.

Policy Reports

The Conclusions of a recent report commissioned by DfID in the UK (Literacy, Foundation Learning and Assessment in Developing Countries 2013) state:

While learning to decode print might proceed regardless, children will not be able to read with understanding or be ready for the next stage of education if attention is not paid first to language and second to strategies to develop reading comprehension. Similarly, they may bring to school an intuitive sense of number and even mathematical reasoning, but they will not be able to become numerate without a language within which to learn about and to solve mathematical problems. Therefore, a high priority for education in developing countries is to augment the emphasis on learning sight words, arithmetic facts and writing routines with a focus on the development of component skills of reading, writing, inference making and mathematical reasoning. For many children, a pre-requisite will be that attention be paid to oral language proficiency. In order to bring about such change, we argue that it is an imperative that culturally embedded approaches to learning are respected and where possible, indigenous methods are assimilated into new curricula.

Similarly a Report by Desforges, C. and Abouchaar, A. (2003) The Impact of Parental Involvement, Parental (commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills in London) states:

The most important finding from the point of view of this review is that parental involvement in the form of ‘at-home good parenting’ has a significant positive effect on children’s achievement and adjustment even after all other factors shaping attainment have been taken out of the equation. In the primary age range the impact caused by different levels of parental involvement is much bigger than differences associated with variations in the quality of schools. The scale of the impact is evident across all social classes and all ethnic groups

In contrast with these more qualitative and social practice approaches, dominant policy perspectives at an international level have tended to emphasize quantitative and narrowly defined literacy and educational skills which can then be ranked. I will briefly signal here the UN Education for All Global Monitoring Report  (2013/4) and OECD’s PISA reports and then indicate some of the critiques. I will argue, for instance that the EFA Report continues to present a policy perspective that ignores the qualitative and social practice approaches signaled in the Reports above and evident in the alternative theoretical and research perspectives that I will lay out below. The EFA report focuses almost entirely on children in isolation, claiming to show:

that a lack of attention to education quality and a failure to reach the marginalized have contributed to a learning crisis that needs urgent attention. Worldwide, 250 million children - many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds - are not learning the basics. Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all describes how policy-makers can support and sustain a quality education system for all children, regardless of background, by providing the best teachers. The Report also documents global progress in achieving Education for All goals and provides lessons for setting a new education agenda post-2015. In addition, the Report identifies that insufficient financing is hindering advances in education.

Another major international policy perspective of tihs kind is to be found in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). For a number of years this Programme has provided the main basis for country by country rank orderings in the field of Education in general and Literacy in particular, as a way to frame and steer education policy development. Gemma Moss, of the Institute of Education in London, writes of the history of PISA that it ‘emerges relatively late in the history of the OECD, an organisation with its roots in the post-war economic reconstruction of Europe, whose policy role evolved alongside the development of the European Union… From the 1960s onwards the OECD had begun to use the statistical data national governments produced, such as their Gross Domestic Product, educational expenditure and workforce data, to explore the relationship between education and economic growth and later to consider education’s capacity to foster social cohesion. The relative prominence given to these two themes in the OECD’s reports in part reflected changes in the wider economic and social environment, how these lined up or articulated with the state of knowledge within different sections of the academic community, and how this seemed to relate to the most pressing policy questions of the day.

As the economics of education matured as a specific disciplinary area, the OECD reviewed the kinds of data that might aid analysis, and decided there was a case for directly investing in data collection itself. PISA represents an end point in this process, a set of purpose-built instruments that can be used to directly gather data on the educational themes the OECD most wishes to explore. Importantly, they also capture education performance outcomes from different national systems using test instruments

specifically designed to compare pupil competence in reading, maths and science without reference to the taught elements of the curriculum. The tests run on a three yearly cycle, with the main emphasis resting on one of these three subject areas successively. They are administered to a randomised sample of schools, and within them a randomised sample of pupils aged 15, with individual participating countries recruiting more or less schools to this process. Since its inception PISA has attracted increasing numbers of participating countries, going well beyond the original OECD member countries. Its format has strengthened the ‘inquisitive’ and ‘meditative’ role the OECD plays internationally by significantly extending the level of detail at which a broader range of countries’ performance can be compared and the depth at which key themes can be explored. This has become a very public business, with the OECD publishing a range of policy advice based on the data. The rank ordering of countries in PISA tests is now widely reported in the media, often attracting much more attention than the detailed analytic reports that follow. Much of the academic literature has tracked the impact this process has had on the decisions governments subsequently take, focusing on the extent to which PISA now acts as a catalyst for policy change, potentially weakening the control national governments now exercise over their own education systems. Paradoxically, the emphasis in the critical history of statistics on the facticity of statistical data detracts attention from their inherent instability and the choices statisticians make as they work to stabilise the data.’ (Moss, forthcoming)

In a forthcoming paper Moss tproposes a more reflective and critical view of how PISA data is collected and interpreted. She considers PISA data:

as an example of specialised knowledge making that travels out into policy domains, in the process losing the caveats, qualifications and uncertainties that characterise statistical thinking. Through close examination of the formation, analysis and use of the term "reading engagement", as a key indicator and measure that explains variation in reading performance in the OECD reports, this paper will explore how far PISA data act as a case study for the social construction of statistical data. The paper will conclude by asking when and under what terms numerical data have a useful function to play in literacy research; and the role qualitative research traditions have in making this happen.

And a similarly critical review from a research perspective is offered by Ruben Klein (2013) with regard to the statistics on Brazil in the PISA survey. He claims that there is

a comparability problem in Pisa results of some countries among years and among countries. This problem occurs because the school age of each country is not considered and because there is no rule for the application date of the test in relation to the school year of each country.

In his article, the case of Brazil is analyzed in detail and, he adds, ‘there are analysis of some other countries too, among them Luxembourg and Chile, that together with Brazil, were pointed out as having the biggest evolution in performance since 2000. It is shown that this evolution of performance may not be real’. It is, he believes, ‘urgent to correct PISA 2012’. A blog discussion in Brazil (Schwartzman Simon 2013) highlighted a number of such problems with the statistical analysis and rankings used by PISA with regard to that country. For instance, Fransisco Soares signals ‘the potential problems that the PISA sample does not refer to the distribution between years of school’ and lack of clarity ‘regarding the comparability between the results of 2000 - 2006 with results from 2009-2011’. João Batista Oliveira Araujo, in the same discussion, argues that ‘the sub - samples of states are also not representative’, for instance ‘Initial testing was not sensitive to legions of students located in the left tail of the curve’. Further, ‘the PISA sample over- represented students in the second and third years of high school, and this pulled the average up’. These discussions are continuing and, as with other countries, the relationship between the statistical reports and what we know from theory and from qualitative data needs more rigorous attention – as Moss argues, we need to maintain ‘the caveats, qualifications and uncertainties’ that characterise good research and cannot take such Reports at face value. The reasons for lack of rigour in addressing the statistical issues in such reports – which she acknowledges statisticians themselves are fully aware of – lie not so much in the academic realm as in political pressures particular those felt by politicians in national contexts ‘In the current policy environment readers tend to abstract what they want to see from statistical reports, using the data as authoritative confirmation of assumptions they already hold. To do otherwise would mean reading the report much more forensically, with an eye to the detail contained in the presentation of the graphs. All too often this task is avoided making it harder to challenge what the statistical data seem to say.’

A recent book on PISA (PISA, Power and Policy: the emergence of global educational governance, edited by H-D Meyer and A Benavot 2013 Didcot: Symposium Books) locates this approach in a larger global movement in which ‘OECD is deliberately setting out to be in control of this new system of global educational governance’:

"In less than 20 years the OECD has moved from think tank to policy actor with global authority" (20). “PISA is a key instrument in the construction of a new governance regime that is widely embraced by the very governments that it disempowers" (15). "OECD is poised to assume a new institutional role as arbiter of global education governance, simultaneously acting as diagnostician, judge and policy advisor to the world's school [and potentially higher education] systems", occupying a "hegemonic position in national educational rhetoric... colonizing the educational world, self-explanatory and uncontested" (9, 51; see also 10). And its focus is clearly economic: OECD staff themselves say that "PISA is a measurement of the flow of human capital into the economy" (194).

In a review of the book Alan Rogers, a well known activist and academic in the field of international education and learning, summarises the argument as being that ‘There is emerging a new form of global educational governance based on the influence of international (aid) agencies - "globalization from above"’. He summarizes the contributors to the book as arguing that:

"Educational systems are losing their national distinctiveness as bounded systems and products of unique national histories ...; education ... is no longer seen as a national cultural project" (117, 123), especially in developing countries (chapter 7). The model of education promoted in this 'third age colonial project' by "emergent international standards" (3, 9, 141) is a Western model, (not at all neutral), neo-liberal, economistic, with a smaller role for national governments (12). The role of a national education system is seen by OECD to support markets and provide a workforce (12, 13, 16, 311); inequities and injustice for all are a small price to pay for economic benefits (17, 310 (although evidence provided here suggests that a more equal society flourishes economically). The result of this process of standardisation of educational measurement is the loss of "diversity - diversity of culture, traditions, beliefs and practices" and with that, the loss of cross- cultural learning (21-22); together with the denial to countries of the policy-line of 'alternative educational systems'.

Similarly Moss sees the relation between the policy reports and education as subject to market pressures;

Education outputs become no more than calculations of economic worth in markets that increasingly interlock internationally under the pressures of globalization. … New markets in educational goods open up as nations are encouraged to invest in the (same) skills deemed necessary to win the global economic race, re-shaping their education systems to meet the interests of a globalised economy not the needs of the citizen defined in other terms (Ball, 2013). This is neoliberalism at work (Moss, forthcoming).

Whilst PISA data maybe used from this perspective as “tools for governance” Moss also suggests that they ‘can be deconstructed in this way by focusing on the policy discourse which legitimates these moves and sanctions change in schools as number-driven policies unfold’. As we will see below, there are a number of ways in which such a challenge to this dominant legitimization can be approached.

And, in fact, there are alternatives. Indeed, the LETTER Programme in which Rogers is a leading member, has offered national governments in India, Ethiopia and Uganda a way of building on local knowledge and experience using ethnographic perspectives and social practice approaches to literacy (see Rogers and Street, 2011; 2012). And even some of the international Aid Agencies that are so vilified in the book he reports on, are beginning to advocate a different approach. The recently published OECD Skills Outlook (2013) Survey of Adult Skills, for instance, looks at older people and comes to rather different conclusions than PISA, which tends to focus on 15 year olds.

A product of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), this Report has provided important evidence on which International Literacy Campaigns in general and those concerned with gender inequality in particular can build (see Eldred 2013). In the Foreword, Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary-General, suggests that there is

‘one central message emerging from this new survey, it is that what people know and what they do with what they know has a major impact on their life chances … The Survey shows that higher levels of inequality in literacy and numeracy skills are associated with greater inequality in the distribution of income, whatever the causal nature of this relationship. If large proportions of adults have low reading and numeracy skills, introducing and disseminating productivity-improving technologies and work-organisation practices can be hampered; that, in turn, will stall improvements in living standards’.

Consequences for policy and action, the report argues, are clear: 

• Much of learning takes place outside formal education. • So it is important to ‘Make lifelong learning opportunities accessible to

all’.  

David Mallows, Director of Research at NRDC - National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy in the UK - notes that ‘Less than 2% of participating UK adults scoring entry-level and level 1 have participated in adult education & training recently’ and he draws an important conclusion from this: 

• This suggests that we need to increase participation, but also that a more radical approach to supporting informal learning, in the workplace and beyond, may be part of the solution

This, he argues, in relation to childhood literacy, demands an ‘Intergenerational’ approach, recognising the value of out of school learning rather than focusing on a narrow notion of ‘the basics’, to be acquired through schooling and ‘teachers’.

A Report on Family Literacy at a Conference in Cape Town, 2011 (Common Goals, Shared Purpose: Reading, Family Learning and the UPE Targets, Balid, 2011), similarly argued that:

the ways in which teachers or facilitators and their students interact is already a social practice that affects the nature of the literacy being learned and the ideas about literacy held by the participants, especially the new learners and their position in relations of power. It is not valid to suggest that 'literacy' can be 'given' neutrally and then its 'social' effects only experienced or ‘added on’ afterwards.

The issues the different approaches signalled above raise for policy makers and programme designers are not simply (1) the ‘impact’ of literacy -

to be measured in terms of a neutral developmental index - but (2) how local people ‘take hold’ of the new communicative practices being introduced to them (as Kulick & Stroud’s (1993) ethnographic description of missionaries bringing literacy to New Guinea villagers makes clear). Literacy, in this sense, is already part of a power relationship and how people ‘take hold’ of it is contingent on social and cultural practices and not just on pedagogic and cognitive factors. This raises questions that need to be addressed in any literacy programme: What local literacy practices already exist independently of those being brought in from outside through formal schooling? What are the power relations between the participants, both locally and in relation to those coming in from ‘outside’? What are the resources being drawn upon by different parties? Where are people going if they take on one literacy rather than another literacy?

The conference in S Africa, referred to above, concluded:

• It is therefore essential that all those with an interest in education and especially in the goal of Universal Primary Education (UPE) should consider what they can do to improve the educational experience of the children and young people of the world. This conference, entitled, provided one such opportunity for reflection leading to stimulus for action.

• Family Learning (also known as Family Literacy) builds on the strong foundation provided by the close relationship between parents and children and the desire of parents to promote their children’s development in every respect. These initiatives offer a means for parents whose educational experience may be limited or non-existent to give their children a better chance in life, and to promote their own educational achievement at the same time. While the form of Family Learning varies according to local contexts and needs, projects share many positive outcomes through enabling parents to be actively involved in the education of their children

The Report then cites the findings of Desforges and Abouchaar (2003), noted above that ‘the impact on children’s education achievement brought about by the involvement of parents in their children’s education is greater than that associated with variations in the quality of schools’.

With this array of reports and findings from a variety of perspectives and across different countries, we are, then, now better placed to see literacy as social practice and, in terms of PISA’s emphasis on schooled literacy, to recognize that children’s literacy is closely associated with family learning, in contrast with dominant perspectives that still separate the two or simply blame the parents for the children’s ‘lack of basics’. Despite the public dominance of PISA and the GMR, there are many organisations at international, national and NGO level which are beginning to recognise the social practices associated with literacy and the implications of this for education, rather than treating it as an isolated skill.

Theoretical Perspectives

Locating the debates outlined above in the broader context of understanding literacy as social practices (LSP), leads us to recognise , as Leung and Lewkowitz argued in the article cited above, that meanings and uses vary with context and participants. One practical problem that adopting the LSP approach has raised in the policy context is that the claim that literacy levels are associated with home background appears simply to justify assumptions, as in the recent GMR Report, that it is poor support by parents from economically poorer backgrounds that is the explanation for poor performance in school. The research data, then, is used in order to reinforce the hierarchy already established between ‘schooled’ literacy practices and everyday literacy practices. The LSP approach suggests an opposite policy as well as a more balanced view of these variations – namely that the differences indicated in the research suggest that teachers could fruitfully ‘build on the literacy knowledge and practices that children bring with them from home.’ Since these will vary with cultural context, then the school needs to be able to recognise and adjust to these differences. The pedagogic policy implication of this is that it is schools that need to adjust. If they do so and are able to build on home literacies rather than denying or demeaning them, then this, according to the theory and the research indicated here, will then lead to improved performance at school and in society generally. In order to reinforce this policy implication of current research, I will describe more fully some of the theoretical moves that have led us to this position and that can underpin policy and practice in the next phase.

The meaning of ‘literacy’ as an object of enquiry and of action – whether for research purposes or in practical programmes – is highly contested and we cannot understand the term and its uses unless we penetrate these contested spaces. Whilst in an earlier GMR Report (Street, 2006), I indicated four major traditions or areas of enquiry that, despite inevitable overlaps, provide a heuristic by which we can begin to understand different approaches and their consequences - Literacy and Learning; Cognitive Approaches to Literacy; Social Practice Approaches; Literacy as Text - in this presentation I will focus mainly on Social Practice Approaches and also indicate some recent work on Learning.

Whilst the concern with cognition and with "problems" of acquisition continue, a recent shift in perspective has emphasised understanding of literacy practices in their social and cultural contexts. This approach has been particularly influenced by those who have advocated an "ethnographic" perspective, in contrast with the experimental and often individualistic character of cognitive studies, and the textual, etic perspective of linguistic-based studies of text. These social developments have sometimes been referred to as ‘New Literacy Studies’ (Gee, ). Much of the work in this tradition focuses on the everyday meanings and uses of literacy in specific cultural contexts, what is sometimes referred to as an ‘emic’ perspective.

The argument about social literacies suggests that engaging with literacy is always a social act even from the outset. The ways in which teachers or

facilitators and their students interact is already a social practice that affects the nature of the literacy being learned and the ideas about literacy held by the participants, especially the new learners and their position in relations of power. It is not valid to suggest that 'literacy' can be 'given' neutrally and then its 'social' effects only experienced or ‘added on’ afterwards. As the report from Cape Town signalled above summarises:

For these reasons, as well as because of the failure of many traditional literacy programmes (Abadzi 1996; Street 1999), academics, researchers and practitioners working in literacy in different parts of the world are beginning to come to the conclusion that the autonomous model of literacy on which much of the practice and programmes have been based is not an appropriate intellectual tool, either for understanding the diversity of reading and writing around the world or for designing the practical programmes this required which may be better suited to an ideological model (cf Aikman, 1999; Heath, 1983; Doronilla 1996; Hornberger 1997, 2002; Kalman 1999; King 1994; Robinson-Pant 1997; Wagner, 1993).

The question this approach raises for policy makers and programme designers is, then, not simply that of the ‘impact’ of literacy - to be measured in terms of a neutral developmental index - but rather of how local people ‘take hold’ of the new communicative practices being introduced to them. Literacy, in this sense, is, then, already part of a power relationship and how people ‘take hold’ of it is contingent on social and cultural practices and not just on pedagogic and cognitive factors. Studies suggest that even those labelled as ‘non-literate’ persons, in fact find themselves engaged in literacy activities so the boundary between literate/ non literate is less obvious than individual ‘measures’ of literacy suggest.

Alan Rogers (2013) takes a similar perspective with respect to Learning, recognising the social complexity and variation beyond the narrow view of learning in formal education that has dominated much policy. He argues that:

Explorations of the different kinds of ‘learning’ which have been identified are now more frequent (for a recent summary, see Belanger 2011). One reason for this strengthened focus is a move away from talking about education (seen as teacher-centred instruction) to a more learner-centred approach; hence “the introduction of new and different concepts based on learning rather than education”’‘… studies confirm that most learning occurs "outside formal educational establishments. The majority of human learning does not occur in formal contexts". “The image has been used many times of an iceberg of learning: what cannot be seen is not only larger but also more influential than what can be seen, for it supports and indeed determines what can be seen above the water line. But because it “takes place below the level of consciousness”, much of this informal learning is not recognised as ‘learning’. ‘Learning’ is seen by many people to be what goes on in a structured programme of intentional learning, i.e. formal learning. But much learning is unconscious,

informal”; some have spoken of the “invisible reality of informal learning”.

Rogers concludes:

Our role, then, as educators and researchers is to identify more of what lies beneath the water line and to build on that in helping participants develop and expand their literacy practices.

The LSP approach also picks up the recognition of the ‘invisible’ features of learning, in that the development and use of literacy practices are recognised to derive from such everyday ‘invisible reality’ (what we have elsewhere referred to as ‘hidden literacies’ cf Nabi et. al., 2009).

A recent article in THES (19 Dec 2013) by Steven Rose (emeritus professor of neuroscience at The Open University, (His latest book, with Hilary Rose, is Genes, Cells and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology, 2012), picks up the reference to such ‘invisible’ realities but recognizes the danger of this becoming a belief in the properties of the ‘brain’. He worries that recent books and reports, such as "the Brain Waves report on “adaptive learning technology” or the foreword of Educational Neuroscience to a “robot tutor”, risk confounding teaching with learning. By instrumentalising teaching instruments, by focusing on the brain and not the child or student, these advocates seem oblivious to the fact that both teaching and learning are not timeless and isolated activities but in their very essence socioculturally embedded. To me as a neuroscientist, committed as I am to the research endeavour of trying to understand how the brain works and what relationship such working may have to mind and consciousness, studying what happens in the brain when someone solves quadratic equations or learns a poem is endlessly fascinating. I worry, however, that some of the enthusiasts for educational neuroscience may have it the wrong way round. For neuroscientists, the phenomenology of, for instance, dyscalculia or dyslexia, prompts questions about the brain processes that may be involved, and in this sense the Royal Society report is right to encourage knowledge exchange between practitioners and scientists. But I would suggest that this is less about what educationalists can learn from us, and more about how their experience of teaching can help to frame the questions that neuroscientists ask about the brain." (Rose, THES 19 Dec 2013)

Here it seems that ethnographers of education and at least some neureoscientists can agree that, whilst some features of learning may remain ‘hidden’ – or beneath the water line as Rogers puts it - nevertheless this should not lead to an over focus on the brain at the expense of sociocultural factors. I will conclude with some recent examples of work that recognises this perspective in addressing issues of literacy and learning in different contexts.

Research Findings

I conclude with brief reference to forthcoming work in the field of literacy and learning that reinforces the importance of addressing social practices in

general and family interactions in particular, in understanding educational literacy processes. I anticipate here the burgeoning research in Latin America in general and in Brazil in particular that pursues these lines of inquiry (cf Castanheira et. al., 2000; 2013; Kalman and Street, 2012) some of which I learned further about during a Colloquium in Sao Paolo in Dec 2013 (1st Colloquium “Languages, Childhood and the Literacy processes” UNIFESP (Universidade Federal de São Paulo)

Research by Maria Castanheira, of UFMG, over a twenty year period, provides detailed case studies of writing across generations. The first members of the families she worked with arrived on the outskirts of the city of Belo Horizonte around the 1970’s coming from a rural area within the state of Minas Gerais or from another state. She examined the role of different family members in changes in literacy practices. For instance, the 2nd generation stayed in school longer than their parents did, whilst their children in turn are currently not only staying on longer but also moving on to forms of higher education. One younger generation man has recently been involved in creating and running a factory, engaging in the literacy practices required by this enterprise and the funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992) available within this particular context. Castanheira also locates her detailed ethnographic accounts of these changes within the broader theme of local and global relations: by considering how the experience described relates to a broader context of changes promoted by Brazilian economic and educational policies, her research contributes to the discussion of the role of education and literacy in social and economic change and helps us to see what is meant by treating literacy as social practice rather than focusing simply on classroom practices.

I also provide some examples from the book Literacy and numeracy in Latin America: Local perspectives and beyond. (Routledge; Kalman, J and Street, B Eds. 2012). Marildes Marinho, in a Chapter entitled ‘The local and the global in literacy practices in “traditional communities”’ notes the abundance of terms that surround literacy in Latin America— alfabetização /alfabetización, letramento, letrisme, written culture— and argues that they are not synonyms but different social (and often political) concepts of reading and writing. Elisa Cragnolino calls on research in Argentina to demonstrate how such variation works in practice. The families she describes in rural Argentina, ‘implement certain alternatives of action in relation to written culture and discard others’, drawing upon a rich variety of literacy practices in the community despite being labelled ‘illiterate’. Again the definitions and meanings associated with literacy – and with ‘illiteracy’ – are shown to vary with social context and amongst actual users as well as observers, such as researchers and policy makers. Gloria Hernández also uses ethnographic perspectives to capture the various ways in which young rural students’ literacy experiences and practices in everyday contexts in a community in central Mexico influence their reading and writing practices at school. And Elsie Rockwell, also in Mexico, shows how teachers mediate pupils’ everyday oral and literacy in schooled contexts. Broadening the location of reading and

writing to wider multimodal contexts, she emphasizes the importance of recognizing that all uses of writing—on paper or on screen—“are seen as social practices in that they are constituted within and through social relations and are embedded in broader social contexts and processes”. Such detailed, ethnographic perspectives on everyday uses and meanings of literacy, in formal and everyday contexts, can enrich our understanding both of what counts as ‘literacy’ and of how we might address the issues it raises for educational purposes.

In the UK similar work can be found across the formal and everyday boundaries. For instance, Lucy Henning, a PhD student at King’s College London, is researching a PhD thesis the aim of which ‘is primarily to describe what young children do when they encounter schooled literacy’. Henning describes this ‘schooled literacy’ as it was shaped by adults such as policy makers, government agencies and school personnel at the time the data was collected. This is intended to provide the reader with a context for the children’s encounters in the classroom and she provides a brief overview of how adult perceptions of schooled literacy shape the events described. She draws upon a theoretical lens that has developed the concepts of literacy event and literacy practice and so links the detailed descriptions of classroom literacies in a UK school with the wider debates evident here regarding policy, theory and practice.

A forthcoming book on Religion In Young Lives: Navigating Languages, Literacies And Identities (Editors: Vally Lytra, Goldsmiths, University Of London, Dinah Volk, Cleveland State University, And Eve Gregory, Goldsmiths, University of London Routledge Critical Studies In Multilingualism) offers some detailed examples of culturally-focussed uses and meanings of literacy in different international contexts. The book aims:

• to investigate the rich multilingual, multiliterate and multiscriptal practices associated with religion which children and adolescents engage in with a range of mediators, including siblings, peers, parents, grand parents, religious leaders, religious education teachers and other members of the religious community,

• to consider how children and adolescents use text (e.g. print, electronic, musical) and engage in verbal practices associated with religion as they express personal and social identities, and to consider how these might be intertwined with their religious identities, values and dispositions, and

• to contribute to research on multilingualism, literacies and local-global processes by offering an analytical focus on religion in children and adolescents' everyday lives and experiences.

Included are also a number of Latin American references, including literacy learning and teaching in a Puerto Rican family, Mexican immigrant children in

two California Parishes and parental choices and childcare curriculum in two African-American Christian day-care centres.

Such rich, international and comparative accounts of literacy practices and their location within complex cultural and institutional contexts, provide a basis for moving on from the narrow, school-based or western-oriented view of ‘literacy’ that still dominates some policy perspectives. There are many more such examples ‘out there’ and the key step now is to make the link between such research evidence and the theoretical understanding of the field that is crucial to policy making.

Conclusions

In this paper, then, I have argued for policy shifts from the ‘autonomous’ model to ‘culturally embedded approaches to literacy and learning’. This builds on theory in the fields of Literacy as Social Practice (LSP) and Learning as Social Practice. In terms of methodology, I have suggested the value of adopting an ‘Ethnographic Perspective’ and would also point forward to the value of engaging in a more complex view of the relationship of such qualitative approaches with quantitative work of the kind evident in most policy Reports. In terms of examples of research that demonstrates some of the issues raised and the need for a change in the dominant policy perspective, I have cited examples from Latin America, the UK and Comparative studies. The questions these approaches have raised, involve especially the shift from asking how education, literacy and policy can have an ‘Impact’, to instead, focussing on how participants in literacy programmes can be helped to ‘Take Hold’ of those literacy practices relevant to their context. And amongst the policy and practical implications have been the shift from child-focussed, isolated and formal education to ‘Family/ Intergenerational Learning’ that builds on what people already know and works across the social relationships and networks in which people engage with literacy in their everyday lives. Some Policy reports already indicate a shift in this direction, although the dominant international perspectives, as demonstrated by the current EFA and PISA Reports, continue to depend upon a more detached, less culturally sensitive model. As Moss suggests, such an approach tends to lose ‘the caveats, qualifications and uncertainties that characterise statistical thinking’ and, indeed, are basic to qualitative research also. Moving towards a less certain, more qualified basis for understanding and evaluating educational practice and literacy learning in cultural contexts is an ambitious but, I argue, necessary step that needs to link policy, theory and research of the kind indicated here.

References

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