Improving Learning in College

Rethinking Literacies Across the Curriculum

Roz Ivanic, Richard Edwards, David Barton, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Zoe Fowler, Buddug Hughes, Greg Mannion, Kate Miller, Candice Satchwell, June Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415469111
• eBook ISBN: 9781134031467
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What's the problem with literacy at college? How might everyday literacy be harnessed for educational ends?

Based on the first major study of literacy practices in colleges in the UK, this book explores the reading and writing associated with learning subjects across the college curriculum. It investigates literacy practices in which students engage outside of college, and teaching and learning strategies through which these can help support the curriculum. With insightful analyses of innovative practices, it considers ways of changing teaching practices to enable students to draw upon their full potential.

Recent research work has challenged the myth of individual student deficit, arguing cogently that people have 'funds of knowledge' from diverse and vibrant cultural roots, and that these have been misguidedly disqualified by the education system. It has claimed that different 'ways with words' can provide valuable resources for learning. However, the empirical exploration of this claim has lagged far behind the theoretical debate. Improving Learning in College resolves this by showing the integrity and richness of the literacy practices of a significant population, not previously the focus of such research: those who take vocational and academic college courses in colleges. It addresses an issue which has not until now been developed within this research tradition: that of how these practices can not only be valued and validated, but mobilised and harnessed to enhance learning in educational settings.

This book will interest all teachers, teacher-educators and researchers concerned with post-compulsory education and vocational education in compulsory schooling.

Part I
What are the issues?

Chapter 1
Literacies as a resource for learning in college

Literacy in public discourses: moral panics and crisis narratives

International literacy day: one in five people can’t read this!

Young people seen losing the love of reading

Study links drop in test scores to decline in time spent reading

Few advances in adult literacy made in last decade

As these newspaper headlines suggest, we are bombarded almost daily with crisis narratives, the notion that something is not working as it should or could. That there is a problem to be addressed, or that there has been a decline in some shape or form is a constant theme of media discourse. It seems to be endemic to social change that these changes are in some ways seen as marking the decline or end of something. Behind such narratives are a certain fear and often the notion of some golden age in the past against which the present can and should be judged. When the motor car was introduced, it was seen by some as the harbinger of an age of community and religious decline. Mobility would encourage people to change their habits of local and religious commitment. It is true that such changes might have played a role in the evolution of different social habits, but whether they marked a decline is a different question. More recently, the advent of the internet and mobile technologies have similarly been surrounded by crisis narratives as to their negative influence on social practices, in particular people’s capacity to communicate ‘properly’ and to engage in ‘appropriate’ social interaction.

In education, we are similarly surrounded by such crisis narratives. Almost annually we are confronted with newspaper headlines that standards are falling, education is not producing the results it did, should and so on. ‘Literacy’ is often singled out as a target for such attacks. There are dire warnings: that young people can no longer write to the standards which are assumed to have existed in some previous period of time; that they engage in non-standard forms of communication, such as texting on mobile phones; that people no longer read literature; that people coming through or returning to education are no longer as able as an earlier generation to read and write and understand as much as would have been the case. Employers constantly complain about the literacy standards of school and college leavers and graduates. The complaints are ubiquitous, the sense of crisis endless.

How as educators do we respond to such crisis narratives? Often we are contributors to them, but should we be? As educators do we not have a responsibility to stand back and consider the situation more dispassionately, to examine the evidence? It does not take much reading of history to realise that crisis narratives have surrounded education since its inception as a publicly funded practice. And perhaps that is unsurprising given the weight that is placed upon education to resolve the ills of society. In this situation, the responsibility is twofold. First, to examine the historical and social scientific evidence of what is claimed in such crisis narratives. Second, where appropriate, where there is robust evidence, to challenge those narratives.

This book draws upon evidence from a study of a specific context – college learning in the UK – to raise questions about such crisis narratives around student literacy, and to put forward ways in which both the debate about educational practices and the practices themselves can be reframed in a more positive way. It seeks to challenge some of the moral panics about literacy and to suggest that the issue is not so much the extent of students’ literacy capabilities, but more the sheer abundance of different possibilities for literacy that are being engendered by the changes in society and technology we are experiencing in the developed world. With the advent of new technology, and with the globalised spread of new technoscapes (Appadurai 1990; Kress 2003), we have seen the rapid diversification of artefacts (for example, new software) and of textual resources (for example, new genres such as websites and blogs) for communication within institutional and lifeworld contexts, and we have seen the opening up of new possibilities for literacy (for both print and screen literacies). Here, rather than a decline in literacy, we are witnessing the multiplication of literacies.

The crisis narratives are often based on simplistic interpretations of standardised and problematic literacy test results, yet there are a wide range of literacy practices at play in most people’s everyday lives, of which educators are often unaware. In real life, people do not read and write in a vacuum: they use reading and writing to get things done. Literacy is embedded in the rich and varied activities of people’s lives. Indeed, one might argue that the most salient factor in the contemporary communicative landscape is the sheer abundance and diversity of possibilities for literacy, as the range of artefacts and genres grow, diversify and hybridise. Literacies proliferate in response to social change and to the affordances of new technologies. The threat to the educational establishment may not be the individual student’s so-called literacy ‘deficit’, so much as the increasing abundance of text and screen literacies: the rich multimodality of communicative practices, and their ever-increasing hybridisation, which precisely cannot be reduced easily, if at all, to a single standard against which all literacy is measured.

As the communicative landscape grows in possibilities, so the artefacts and media are taken up by people in different and diverse ways in order to take and make meaning, communicate and do things through meaningful activity. In other words, there is the opportunity to explore the inherent creativity in the ways in which people use and do literacy, which, rather than be decried as a loss of standards, can be embraced as the achievements of people making meaning and communicating for themselves and others in their lives. Thus texting, for instance, like shorthand, Morse code, semaphore and the writing of telegrams in different contexts, is not necessarily a falling away from a standard of extended prose – the haunting of writing by liberal education – but a creative use of newly available technology through which to communicate and make meaning. The mundane practices through which communication is transformed from one medium into another become sites of communicative creativity.

The moral panics and crises of literacy might then be seen partly as a crisis of an educational and cultural milieu, a powerful minority schooled in particular forms of literacy, who fear for their dominance, insofar as the imposition of certain standards is constantly under challenge. We witness this in relation to debates about high culture and popular entertainment. A similar dynamic is in play around reading and writing, where a norm is established of extended prose as a foundation in reading and writing: a norm drawn from particular forms of culture. Magazines, games, reality television, and other forms of popular culture are by contrast positioned as inherently inferior.

Abundant possibilities for communication – for uses of literacy – are being engendered by wider changes in society. These are made possible by new technologies – screen as well as page – and by the social mobilities and migrations that bring different groups into contact with one another, which necessitate different forms of communication. The crisis is therefore one not of literacy or its lack, but of the very crisis narrative itself. We need to reframe our understanding of the issues if we are to find ways of addressing the future, or we are going to be caught within the dilemmas of the past.

The research projects we write about in this book were borne out of a concern that the ways in which we generally understand literacy do not help educators and that, to some extent, we set up students to fail, because we implicitly or explicitly ‘buy into’ the crisis narratives that circulate more broadly. These shape our pedagogic practices and lead to self-fulfilling prophecies that students are not capable of appropriate forms of communication. The end result of this is fault finding – with students, with teachers, with lecturers. This is not a productive educative response or position. The situation is far more complex and nuanced. We need to explore the evidence, and its possible implications.

The extent and nature of students’ communicative resources is a central issue in education generally and more specifically for the research projects which underpin this book. The book draws on this research in order to exemplify and analyse students’ capabilities in terms of literacy practices in the different domains of their lives, and the nature of literacies for learning in a range of curriculum subjects. It then provides examples of changes in pedagogic practice which are more resonant with students’ everyday uses of literacy, and discusses consequent factors to take into account when designing learning activities.

The aims of the book are to challenge the widespread assumption that a simple lack of literacy holds back students, to show the range and sophistication of their uses of literacy in their everyday lives, and to demonstrate how these literacy practices may be translated for more effective teaching and learning. It has often been claimed that different ‘ways with words’ can provide valuable translatable capacities for learning, if properly understood by educators. However, the empirical exploration of this claim has lagged far behind the theoretical debate. This book will contribute to this line of research first by showing empirically the integrity and richness of the literacy practices of a significant student body: those who take up vocational and academic courses in colleges in the UK. More significantly, however, it will address an issue which has, to date, not been developed within this research tradition: that of how these practices can be not only valued and validated, but also folded into the curriculum to enhance learning in educational settings.

Colleges in the UK: diverse and dynamic educational provision

Colleges are diverse and dynamic environments that play a crucial role in the lifelong learning and skills agendas of the UK, yet they are ‘the poor relation’ in terms of research. While a substantial amount of research has been devoted to all stages of compulsory schooling and to higher education, very few researchers have made colleges their research focus. This book takes a step towards redressing this balance.

Further Education colleges are a core part of the education service in the UK. Traditionally they provided occupational qualifications for school leavers and the bulk of their full-time students are still aged 16 to 19. However, over the years, the scope of what they provide and the profile of their students has changed significantly. Most UK colleges now provide educational opportunities from basic education through to higher education, as do community colleges and two-year colleges in Canada and the USA. They also provide both academic and occupational qualifications. The age range of students can vary from 14 to the elderly. Many of the lecturers enter from previous occupations, often moving into teaching of courses related to the areas in which they previously worked. Not all have qualifications at degree level and not all are teacher trained on entry, but it is increasingly the norm for all college teaching staff to be trained and to undertake significant professional development during their careers.

The diversity of college education in the UK is also impacted upon by the fact that Further Education colleges sit as institutions within different policy contexts. At the time of the research (2004–07), the education systems in England, Scotland and Wales were different in some respects. In terms of policy and funding they were governed by different governments and funding bodies – the Learning and Skills Council in England, the Scottish Funding Council in Scotland and Adran Plant, Addysg, Dysgu Gydol Oes a Sgiliau (the Department of Children, Education and Lifelong Learning and Skills of the Welsh Assembly Government) in Wales. This was also the case to a greater or lesser extent in relation to curriculum and assessment. The Scottish curriculum is governed by one body, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), which oversees all Scottish qualifications other than those offered by universities. In addition, Scottish colleges can also offer courses governed by English awarding bodies, such as City and Guilds. In England and Wales, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) is a central body responsible for establishing consistent standards, subject criteria and performance descriptions, but there is a vast array of awarding bodies which convert these into programme specifications and qualifications: bodies such as the Business and Technology Education Council (BTEC), and City and Guilds. There are also many awarding bodies devoted to particular curriculum areas such as the Council for Awards in Children’s Care and Education (CACHE) that specialises in Childcare programmes of study and awards.

Young people tend to go to college for a variety of reasons:

• They prefer to be in a college environment rather than continue at school.
• They need to re-take exams failed at school.
• They want to augment their existing qualifications for entry into work or university.
• They want to take occupation-related subjects or qualifications not offered at school.

Older people tend to go to college:

• to train or retrain in a different occupation;
• to study in a local setting to increase their qualifications having left school without them;
• to expand their horizons and to enhance the quality of their lives on a personal level.

For these reasons, the students at colleges are widely diverse and of differing ages, backgrounds and abilities. The likelihood is that the students have not opted for an academic course of study in their lives up to this point, although many mature students embark on academic careers through the college route.

Box 1.1 Introduction to Catering and Hospitality: a typical student group

A typical class of students taking an introductory course in hospitality and catering included: a majority of young people straight from school with low-level qualifications; two slightly older students who had taken higher-level qualifications in academic subjects in school, but then switched to a more practical subject area; one mature student from Nigeria who had a degree in Biology; and a mature student from Hong Kong. In terms of literacy, these students had widely varying experiences, expectations and capabilities, but they were all expected to undertake the same course content, using the same teaching materials and the same assessment tools. As with many of the courses we researched, there was a focus on practical work, but there was also a substantial weight given to recording in written form the practical experience gained, and learning – through classroom instruction – about conceptual framings of understanding underpinning the occupation for which they were training.

While the students described in Box 1.1 and the other students in our projects were pursuing their courses in a variety of subject areas and at a variety of levels, they were encountering and using a range of different forms of reading and writing to mediate their learning. These literacy practices were both generic, in relation to studying at college, and specific, in relation to studying a particular curriculum area.

The role of literacies in learning

We view learning as consisting of three components: the cognitive, the practical and the communicative. The commonly used discourse of ‘theory and practice’ can be said to embrace the cognitive and practical, but we suggest that the communicative element tends to be invisible or marginalised in such discourses. I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• List of authors
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I What are the issues?
• PART II What does the research tell us?
• PART III What are the implications?
• Appendix: researching literacies for learning
• Bibliography