cont/d
Skills,
practices and sustainable growth
In BIS’ strategy paper, ‘Skills for Sustainable Growth’,
ALLN policy is entwined within a broader framework of vocational skills. In
planning for a world-class skills base, ‘Skills for Sustainable Growth’ views
the existence of adults with low-levels of literacy as evidence of school
failure requiring an OfSTED led policy solution to innovate more effective
teaching. The conceptualisation of language and literacy to be deployed by the
new policy framework looks set to be an extension and elaboration of what has
so far been developed within Skills for Life even if the discourse of ‘basic skills’
has been remobilised.
In Skills for Life ALLN are treated as clearly
definable, abstract skills that adults need to lead functional lives. The
core-curricular documents and the standards that underpin them detail precisely
what adults are required to be able to do and while learners may bring the
‘context of their lives’ to vivify the skills, the document specifies
community, employment and family as the imagined arena for skills for be
deployed. When constructed by policy makers, ALLN is imagined as existing along
a hierarchical ladder from Entry Level 1 to Level 2. Adults progress neatly
through the designated stages with their skills emerging, consolidating or
progressing with logical linearity. The narrative that drives policy
constructions of ALLN asserts that functionally literate or numerate adults can
then use their skills in any situation required as these basic skills are
easily transferable from one context to another. This view of language and literacy
has a reassuring back to basics common sense appeal. If ALLN is ‘autonomous’
the relationships between race, class and schooled educational inequality can
be erased as non-existent.
This view of literacy stands in diametric opposition to
a view of literacy as an ideological construct (Street, 1984, Street, 2003, Crowther et al., 2001, Hamilton, 2002,
Appleby et al., 2006, Barton, 2007)
a view that has taken considerable hold in the form of a paradigm shift that
rejects psychological or cognitive approaches to literacy in favour of one that
is informed by socio-cultural practices. Within this frame literacy is a
relational concept, defined by who, what, when, where and why that surroundings
people and their textual interactions. This is an approach that argues, there
is no one way of being literate but several culturally and historically
contingent literacies. This view of
literacy represents a sustained critique of Skills for Life with its distilled
insistence on literacy as skills. The pedagogic implications of this limitation
have been explored by various commentators (Dennis, 2010, Ivanic 2009)and while a more holistic view
of ALLN pedagogy has been deployed in Ireland, Wales and Scotland – the
approach adopted in England is one that persists in erasing the socio-cultural
dimensions of ALLN. In England, there is
what Green and Howard (2007)refer
to as a research, policy and practice impasse.
I situate my discussion from within this impasse. In as
much over the 12 month period of an academic year I have explored with trainees
registered on a University Diploma in Teaching Adult Language and Literacy the
ways in which they conceptualised their pedagogic subject. That is, how they negotiate
the reconciliations between literacy as skills and literacy as social
practices.
Un/reconcilable
literacies
The research, policy and practice impasse identified by
Green and Howard (2007)
has been the focus of considerable theorisation over the last 30 years (Haworth, 2006, Heath, 1983, Gee, 2008, Crowther et al., 2001, Kell, 2001,
Barton and Hamilton, 1998, Wilson, 2000, Ivanic 2009)
during which time policy prescribed notions of literacy have become increasingly
more rigid. While in the context of the UK, Scotland, Wales, England and Ireland have each
developed distinct approaches to framing literacy policy, England’s insistence
on an exclusively skills based approach designed primarily to improve rankings
on Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) leagues tables is one shared by several
industrialised economies (Hamilton and Barton, 2000).
Kell (2003)
compares policy text literacy – such as contained in National Adult
Core-Curricular documents - to the
modular climbing frame found in a children’s playground. She suggests this autonomous, uni-dimensional
structure persists within a discursive domain somewhat removed from the everyday
literacies distributed through networks of unschooled people. She further suggests that a phenomenon, ‘literacy
as sign’ (or simulacrum) interposes between the two domains, prohibiting other
forms of literacy from emerging.
She makes use in this theorisation of Wilson’s work on prison
literacies (Wilson, 2000).
Wilson, echoing Bhabha’s (1994)
notion of culture, locates a ‘third-space’ literacy. Between vertical policy
text literacy and horizontal distributed network literacy this ‘third-space’ literacy
is imbued with the potential for criticality, meta learning and reflectivity.
Kell
(2003)
and Wilson’s (2000)
polarised literacy dis/connections can be re-explored to emphasise greater
degrees of complexity (Rassool, 2009)
but it is a useful construct here to illustrate the tensions I seek to explore.
Professional teachers registered on a University Diploma course are required to
deliver a curriculum based on policy text literacy, while they learn about and experience
literacy in ways that undermine this construct. This study is an attempt to
explore they ways in which they negotiate this contradiction. Read (n.d)
frames this as a dilemma for teacher educators that involves challenging assumptions,
values and beliefs. He suggests that professionals
register on development courses wanting a toolkit of teaching tips and strategies
that they can use immediately and may find it problematic to be confronted with
esoteric theoretical discussions about the nature of language and literacy that
may seem somewhat removed from their role as a professional: an implementer of
government policy.
The
tension touches upon professional aspirations, motivations and purposes but my
primary focus is how trainees negotiate the different discourse to conceptualise
language and literacy - the subject they teach. I veer away in this discussion
from an examination of their preparedness to teach language or literacy ‘content’
(Van Driel and Berry, 2010). Instead my attention centres
on what teachers talk about, when they talk about literacy and this shapes their
teaching. More specifically for the professionals registered on this course –
what are the contours along which they experience the contradictions and
tensions between skills and social practices?
Entering a terrain in which I am already
present and deeply implicated: research participants and site
All research participants were professionals registered
on a University Diploma in Adult Language / Literacy over a one year period.
This is a level 5 qualification for qualified teachers wishing to develop a specialism
in language and literacy. Typically participants are already teaching the
subject. Aspirations for registering on the programme vary and may include a
desire to achieve career progression or career change. In the turbulent world of
colleges amidst an crisis of austerity, teaching language or literacy was seen
by some as a fall back position as existing sources of employment are becoming
more scarce. Participants teach in varied contexts including a local further
education college, prison, grant funded voluntary organisation and an adult
education institute, and had completed their initial teacher education from two
to 10 years ago.
All participants registered on the course are included
in the data. Broadly, at the start of the course during induction, trainees
were briefly introduced to the project as ‘research being undertaken by the
course leader’ and asked for permission for their data to be used. There was not detailed research schedule in place
and the sort of data analysed has unfolded in the course of implementation. At the end of the course a more detailed
specification was provided for trainees who were then asked to state explicitly
for permission to include their data in the project. Participants have been
provided with a copy of the paper and invited to comment.
Data sources and
collection
Sources of data collected included the personal profiles
participants offered at the start of the programme, their language history,
transcribed recordings of tutorials, an assignment that focussed on their teaching
and learning and training sessions. At key points during the course
participants complete a module evaluation, and a question – ‘What do you feel
it means to be a literate adult’ was attached to this and included in data to
be analysed. On some occasions teaching sessions were recorded and included in
data is an analysis of teaching, the feedback and exchange between teacher and participant.
Written into the approach was the desire to fit in with the ebb and flow of the
programme and avoid trainees having any sense of participating in a research project
– or at least to avid this placing any requirement on the over and above what
the course requires. Data sources evolved to include assignments as in depth
explorations and expressions of trainees’ views, but also to check and balance these
with recordings of tutorials. The intention is to compare how participants think
and talk about language and literacy in
different spaces and connect these to the demands being placed upon them – to articulate
and develop ideas of to meet the criteria for an assignment.
Researcher
positioning
Data analysis is ongoing rather than complete and draws
on grounded theory and situational analysis (Clarke, 2005).
The advantage of situational analysis – ‘grounded theory pushed round the
postmodern turn’ is that it acknowledges the presence of the researcher as part
of the analytical unit.
Published as part of Learning and Skills Improvement
Service support programme for teacher educators, Read’s paper on ‘Challenging Assumptions’
makes reference to the ways in which participants may resist the idea of
language and literacy as anything other than the skills they are required to deliver.
The struggle is framed as part of the learning process that requires trainees
to go through a ‘trough of diminished competence’ as they are compelled to
revise previously held in place and secure assumptions. He rightly points out
that into this mix is the style of the training offered to trainees (Read, n.d).
That a monotonous teaching style is likely to generate a situational resistance
that is unrelated to the nature of what is being taught.
A situational analysis allows my as researcher to
consider this possibility without reflexivity being overly central to the point
and purpose of the study. The nature of the
field excludes the proviso ‘all other things being equal’. In tutorials and
transcribed exchanges my own contributions are transcribed and coded alongside
that of research participants to as far as possible acknowledge the dialogic
nature of the data. In this study then, I am positioned as researcher, not as researcher
into my own practice: the question stands outside of my practice, though my
practice is the source of data. As researcher I am also participant and my transcribed
contributions are part of the data to be analysed.
Research
findings
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