Casual literacy and campaign zeal: environment and conflict
Jane Mace, South Bank University, London, UK
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 29th Annual Conference, 5-7 July 1999, University of Warwick
In this, the UK National Year of Reading, there is much celebration of the pleasures of purposeful reading, particularly of books. It is the same year in which, again in the UK, a report on literacy and basic skills in adult life declared:
All have a part to play in what must be a national and ongoing crusade..The work of our group was stimulated throughout by the feeling that we were dealing with something big, something that could help millions of fellow citizens, and that now called for a genuine devotion of national energy and resources (Moser 1999: 4)(my italics)(1).
Both these activities - a ‘national year’ and a commissioned report - entail committees, papers, conferences, recommendations and initiatives designed to improve a perceived problem. The language of campaigning zeal is apparent in both. Literacy is something which will help millions of citizens.
The work which literacy ethnographers have been undertaking for some years now has given us some tools to question the assumptions behind this zeal. The careful work of Mary Hamilton and David Barton in collecting and examining how people use and interact with reading and writing in the fabric of everyday life is especially significant. The fruit of several years of research originating with a survey of over sixty individuals in Lancaster, UK, theirs is a meticulous account. Two features of the book provide a salutary caution against literacy zealotry. First is their argument for revisiting interviewees. In the light of later interviews, the original conversation can, in retrospect, turn out to be ‘superficial, if not misleading’; later meetings with the same person can enable them to ‘open out about areas they hadn’t talked of before... [And] get a sense of the range of our literacy interests’ (Barton & Hamilton 1998: 65).
The second is the data they gather on how differently literacy features in the life of school than in the home. In school, reading and writing function as tasks and specialisms, the performance of which are to be evaluated and assessed. At home, by contrast, literacy
is rarely separared from use; rather, learning and use are integrated in everyday activities, where literacy remains an implicit part of the activity (ibid. p.252).
The local literacies portrayed in their study add up to a casual business, part of other, often more pressing activities, one medium among others through which any one of us may seek to escape, inform ourselves, or relate to other people. A different matter altogether from a singular monolith for which a national ‘crusade’ is called for.
David Barton and Mary Hamilton are among a group of people who, in 1984, founded RaPAL - Research and Practice in Adult Literacy (2)- a national network of adult literacy teachers and researchers (of which I too am a founding member). A key purpose of RaPAL’s is to democratise research: to continue to find ways in which those who are characterised as ‘other’ - in this case, as ‘illiterate’ - have the right to challenge the research agendas others construct about them. Among RaPAL’s contributions to the Moser Committee’s deliberations was a call for literacy learners to be subjects as well as objects of research.
In posing a questioning the language of campaigning zeal, then, I do not want to be read as denying the urgency of good funding for good adult education, but as arguing for more careful evaluation of research. Certainly, the case for better funding is still having to be made, in council chambers, academic boards, governors’ meetings and the pages of tabloid papers. Twenty five years on from the 1974 ‘Right to Read’ campaign in this country, adult basic education provision - as the report points out several times - is once again patchy and often demeaning or dispiriting. Literacy and numeracy education is still too often seen as a small, barely used country railway line: rather than the Grand Central Station it is, through which all learning journeys must pass. Opportunities to learn and develop through literacy and numeracy education should be mainstream and widespread. All this, as I see it, remains absolutely clear.
The danger is when the campaigners for literacy are shouting so loudly that they can no longer hear those for whom they claim to be campaigning; so that, when they discover some of these people might have less interest in this campaign than they do, there is almost a feeling of irritation, even of petulance, at their indifference:
People with difficulties are often.... Unaware that they have a problem or that it matters. (3) Many people are unaware of their poor skills and many, if aware, don’t regard it as a problem. (4)
As one of those who contributed to the policy and language of the earlier UK campaign in the 1970s, I may be over-sensitive to the dangers of evangelicism in the language of adult basic education policy and practice. About the change in thinking which research evidence in the 1980s opened up to me and others, I have written elsewhere (Mace 1992). More recently, I have spent research and writing time trying to imagine how life would be if literacy was assumed to be not a majority but a minority pursuit (Mace 1998). In that book I wanted to challenge another orthodoxy: that mothers must be the prime agents for raising the standards of children’s literacy. Drawing on autobiographical and biographical memory, on social history, on poetry and on fiction, I sought to discover some of the meanings that literacy might have had for mothers themselves at a time, in Britain, when the literacy environment would have been different than today: different postal system, different pricing and availability of books and magazines, different franchise, different writing technologies and different cultural expectations of reading and education. All of these dimensions and many others add up to what we take for granted as the environment within which a group or an individual may exercise choices to read or write.
To see literacy not as ‘huge’ but as incidental, I suggest, is to help adult educators keep our voices down and pay attention to the environments and conflicts within which any group or individual can have room to express themselves. Two recent studies with which I have been engaged have helped me think some more about this. One was a ten-day visit to Gedaref, North Sudan, to work with others on the evaluation of a women’s literacy and development programme there. The other has been a six-month research and community publishing project on literacy and everyday life with adult education students in the London Borough of Lewisham, UK.
Between these two countries the contrasts are easier to see than the communalities. Sudan is a huge country, the largest in Africa, bordered by nine others. It has been in a state of civil war for decades. Famine, drought and disease have been the consequences for generations. Migrants to the North live in conditions of abject poverty in settlements outside Khartoum, and further East, Gedaref. The adult literacy rate has been estimated at less than 30% of its population; in 1995 UNICEF estimated a mere 12% overall female literacy rate in the country. Britain, by contrast, is a small island, with twice the population. It is among those nations designated ‘developed’, with public services of health, education and welfare benefits for the poor. Poverty remains acute in both rural and inner city areas but the proportions are different. The adult literacy rate, twenty five years ago, was assumed to be 94%; more recently, applying different measures, it is shockingly assessed at 80%.
The literacy environment I glimpsed in Gedaref is sparse. The blizzard of junk mail which routinely covers doormats and pavements in urban Britain is absent. Posters and advertisements are rare. Wordy packaging is a luxury. Homes with books, let alone bookshelves, are for the minority. Most critical of all, in a country where whole populations have been forcibly uprooted or driven to seek a life in another country, the postal system is widely mistrusted and expensive. Yet the single most common purpose which women voiced for seeking literacy for themselves was so that they could write their own letters.
Dar es Salaam is a married woman in her 50s, the mother of eight children. My opportunity to speak with her had the limits indicated by Barton and Hamilton: it was a one-off interview. We sat, each of us on one of the iron beds in the cool of her thatched one-room home, and talked with the help of Safaa, the interpreter. Through participation in the literacy programme, she said, ‘I have learned to express my feelings’. The most useful thing she felt she had learned was
Reading and writing. Sometimes I have to send my son or daughter to the shop. Now I can write a list with beef, sugar, oil on it (Mace 1998a: 25).
In Lewisham, Annette is a learner in an adult basic education class, talking with her class tutor about what reading and writing meant to her, also mentioned the writing of a list:
I always try to write my own shopping list but I always find it difficult to do. It’s really hard to write a list, but if you do have one, it makes shopping easier. You don’t have to remember everything in your head and you don’t forget everything. There are many things I wish I could write but I can’t: things like pepper and salt (5).
These comments struck echoes with the image one of the respondents offered me of her mother at their kitchen table in 1930s London,
licking her pencil and writing... I think she must have been writing shopping lists or something; because we would all be sent on errands, as they used to say in those days, and she would write it down: ‘Half a pound of marge; a pound of sugar’ (Mace 1998: 51).
The act of writing a shopping list, at first sight, is misleadingly simple act of literacy. It is, after all, only a list of words. Spelling is the only technical problem; punctuation, grammar, style, expression - none of these come into it as they do any ‘proper’ writing. Yet apparently casual though it is, the list of what must be bought for family and home is also a creative struggle, evocative of hopes, fears, determination and despair. The ability to spell words like sugar, beef, or marge is incidental to the primary task: the creation of a list of things that need to be bought but can also realistically afforded.
Over twenty yeras ago I sat on a bus, accompanying a woman to a literacy class in South London. I will call her Shirley. This was a time when smoking was still allowed on the upper deck of London’s two-decker buses. Shirley, at that time, was a student in our adult literacy scheme (only later did we learn to use the American term ‘programme’). She was about to make the transition from meeting her individual literacy tutor weekly at home to joining a class. She was nervous. The bus we took that day happened to be a one-decker bus, so the sign in front of us was more necessary than it would have been on the two-decker kind, in which everyone would know you could only smoke upstairs.
As we sat down, Shirley turned to me, opened a pack of cigarettes in her bag, and said: ‘Would you like a fag?’ adding, with a half-smile: ‘I can’t read that sign which says NO SMOKING’.
Everything else about that incident has long since gone from memory. I don’t remember any more what happened when we got to the classroom. I don’t remember what Shirley was wearing, or what I replied to her question. What has stayed with me is the irony in her voice. She could read that sign. There were, certainly, other things she could read less easily. There was reading she wished she could do. That was why we were travelling together. But what we was playing, with me, was the part of the chosen illiterate, so that, had she been challenged with a cigarette in her mouth, she would have been prepared to say: ‘What do you mean, I shouldn’t be smoking? No, I can’t read that sign. What sign?’ And in that response would have been all the defiance of someone who ‘did not know she had a problem’: illiteracy as resistance.
References
Barton, D and Hamilton, M (1998) Local literacies: reading and writing in one community. London: Routledge
Mace, J (1992) Talking about literacy: principles and practice of adult literacy education. London: Routledge
Mace, J (1998) Playing with time: mothers and the meaning of literacy. London: UCL Press
Mace, J (1998a) Literacy training development 1996-9: women’s education programme, Gedaref, Sudan - an evaluation of a WUS (UK) project. London: World University Service, 14 Dufferin Street, London EC1
Moser Report (1999) Improving literacy and numeracy - a fresh start. London, Department for Education
(1) Italics offer emphasis here. Had I used capitals, the effect on the reader might have been excessive - like someone bellowing in your ear. I suppose I had not thought consciously about this effect until quite recently, when I joined a mailbase on women’s literacy, established by the Centre for the Study of Adult Literacy in Atlanta, Georgia. () Among nine ‘netiquette tips’ is this one:
‘E-mail messages typed in all capitals are considered shouting, so please be considerate’.
(2) RaPAL’s website can be accessed at
(3) Moser (1999): 10
(4) ibid: 21
(5) unpublished interview data, Lewisham Reading and Everyday Life Project, April 1999