Literacy, Lives and Learning

David Barton, Roz Ivanic, Yvon Appleby, Rachel Hodge, Karin Tusting

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415424868
• eBook ISBN: 9781136021503
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Demonstrating what it is like to be an adult learner in today's world, this book focuses on language, literacy and numeracy learning. The authors explore the complex relationship between learning and adults' lives, following a wide range of individual students in various formal learning situations, from college environments to a young homeless project, and a drug support and aftercare centre.

The study is rooted in a social practices approach and examines how people's lives shape their learning. Themes addressed range from: how literacy is learned through participation and how barriers such as violence and ill-health impact on people's lives. Based on a major research project and detailed, reflexive and collaborative methodology, the book describes a coherent strategy of communication and impact which will have a direct effect on policy and practice

1

INTRODUCTION

The relationship between people’s lives and their learning is complex. The overall aim of this book is to untangle this complex relationship and to demonstrate what it is like to be participating in formal learning as an adult in today’s fast-changing world. Participating in any activity involves learning and this is not necessarily conscious or deliberate. Formal learning takes place in a wide variety of settings, providing a range of learning opportunities. People make individual decisions about whether to attend, to participate, and to engage in activities which are offered. Decisions about participation and engagement are based upon people’s histories, their current situations and the possibilities they see for themselves. At the same time people’s lives are part of broader currents and people are making decisions within a changing global context which determines what choices they have. This global context is acted out in the particular places where people live; it also exists in the political context of government policies and strategies.

We study the relationship between lives and learning through a detailed examination of people’s lives over time in a range of settings. We focus on the learning of literacy and include language and numeracy, but we have a broader interest in all learning. This chapter begins with brief introductions to a range of people who have been participating in formal learning opportunities. This sets the scene, indicating the diversity in people’s lives and the complex relationship between lives and learning which this book further explores.

The first person, whom we refer to as Jason, was 31 years old when we first met him. He was single and lived on his own and he was attending a maths class at the local community college. The maths class was offered, free, as part of the high profile Skills for Life strategy in England which offered support for numeracy as well as more traditional support for reading and writing. Jason stopped going to school at 12 years old, spending his time hanging about Liverpool docks and riding the Mersey Ferry. He worked on building sites as a scaffolder and later unloading containers at the docks, just as his father had done. Jason got jobs through a network of local contacts and these were jobs which did not need much reading and writing. A serious hit-and-run road accident left Jason unemployed and with depression. We later worked with him at a tenants’ association where he did voluntary work. People in the association had persuaded him to take courses in computing, in maths and in family history. He had helped set up and run their computer, and maintained the association accounts. However, he also lapsed into bouts of drinking and was irregular in his attendance at college courses. Over time we could see the different ways Jason participated in formal learning situations and the unsettledness of his life outside class as he responded to a rapidly changing world around him.

Another person we met at that maths class was Katrina. She was 20 years old at the time of the research and was working as a play worker. She lived at home with her parents, returning home for lunch every day between shifts. Katrina had done a variety of jobs including packing and factory work. Although working hard to study health-care subjects at college, she struggled with telling the time and doing multiplication tables. Katrina attended the maths class to learn topics such as this which she and her teachers felt were holding her back and which were vital for her work. She also wanted to be able to pass her driving test so she could be more independent. In her everyday life we saw the complex ways in which she used maths. For instance, as she was concerned about her weight, Katrina had started to read food packets to work out the calories and fat content of what she was eating. She monitored her weight carefully, noting down any decrease, or increase, from the week before. She worked out ideal body weight in relation to height and then how many calories could be consumed to achieve this. This also meant working out how many calories could be burned off walking to work compared to other activities. We are interested in the ways in which what is offered in classes relates to what people such as Katrina do in their everyday lives.

We also worked with, Susan, a 69-year-old widow who lived alone. She was attending a spelling class. She had six children and was a grandmother and great-grandmother with many family members living nearby. She told us about her life and described going through her primary schooling without her deafness being picked up. This affected her confidence and skills in English. This was made worse as her schooling was interrupted when she was evacuated during the war.

Someone else attending a spelling class, but in a smaller town, was Jack, who ran a successful dairy farm. He had been attending this class for five years. He had had great difficulties with spelling when he started attending the class and was making gradual progress, working with the same volunteer for much of the time.

Other people were attending language classes to improve their English. Sameena from Pakistan had come to England ten years previously to get married, when she was 16 years old. She had two young children and her husband ran a jewellery business here. She finished her secondary schooling in Pakistan and after coming to Britain she attended a community-based English class. Her studies were interrupted whilst she was caring for small children. Three years ago she again attended a community class, and had to ‘catch up’ on previous learning. When she re-entered education she also attended a First Step childcare course, which she found very demanding as it was not tailored for second language learners. Eventually, after attending college English classes, she opened her own women’s clothing business.

English classes have a wide variety of students with very different levels of education. Abdul, from Iraq, came with his wife and two children to Britain a year before we met him. He was in his late forties and had worked as an agronomist. He was highly motivated to learn English so that he could gain employment. He felt that this goal was not in his control as he was waiting for the Home Office to give him permission to stay in Britain and to be able to work. He spent his spare time reading newspapers, books and the dictionary to try to keep learning, watching news coverage on TV, taking the children to the park and town centre and helping them with their science and maths homework. He also attended the BBC Learning Centre in town most days where he was learning, with some tutor support, to use a computer. He said that he had little opportunity to talk to English-speaking people outside the class so felt he did not get enough practice.

There were also people in our study who were not attending college classes. We met Sophie, an 18 year old, at a shelter for young homeless people. She had been expelled from school as a result of repeated assault and arson offences. She became homeless at age 15 and did not do well in her school exams. She had dipped in and out of college and gave up her most recent course, in landscape gardening, when she became pregnant. At the shelter she liked creative and practical activities, but preferred not to attend drugs and alcohol advice sessions. She found the basic skills education she was offered boring and easy. In her own time Sophie read novels and wrote poetry. Towards the end of the study Sophie had just had a baby girl and was in much better health. She was moving on from a mother-and-baby unit to her sister’s house for a while, and wanted to find her own flat. She was determined to go back to college, take her GCSE and A-level exams and eventually study veterinary medicine or psychology. Sophie later faced further difficulties with drug dependence and lived with her child in a hostel for homeless single mothers.

Steve was in his early thirties and attending a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre. He had dyslexia. He told us that he had frequently skipped school from the age of 13 and left officially at 16. He sat some exams but never found out his results. After leaving school, he worked as a joiner. He had been a drug user since his early twenties and had been in and out of prison. He was now committed to sorting his life out and was eager to engage with the educational and support provision provided at the rehabilitation centre, which he perceived as being useful and productive for him.

Jez, who was 17, did not feel ready to attend college but, as a condition of being on probation, was participating in an equivalent course for 16–18 year olds. This was delivered by a private provider. She lived in supported accommodation for young people under the age of 18 years. Jez had an unsettled childhood living with her mum, changing schools frequently and finally leaving home aged 13. She became involved with the local Children’s Rights Service, training advocates and helping with their website and information leaflets. She had also just completed a ‘runaways project’ DVD, acting, filming and editing it. When she reached the age of 16 they were able to employ her for seventeen hours a month but she did a lot more hours than this as a volunteer. Reading and writing were central to all these activities. In her spare time she read novels and loved writing, both her diary and poems. She says she thought she learned to read music before she could read print. She had lots of music books and played the keyboard.

These nine people are just some of those who participated in our study. They represent the rich variety of people who are touched by the Skills for Life strategy. This diversity raises questions about how we talk about people attending Skills for Life courses, and how we characterise this area of education. These issues of terminology, which we will highlight now, run as threads throughout this book and lead to the key issues which we address.

Is there something that these people have in common? How should we talk about them in relation to the particular educational provision of Skills for Life? Many of them dropped out of school or left as early as they could, but not all. Abdul, for instance, attending a language class was highly trained as an agronomist, and there were people with various levels of education in the numeracy and the spelling classes. Many were young people, but not all; many were unemployed, but not all. For some, Skills for Life provision was central to their activities, whilst for others it was on the edge of their concerns or embedded in some other activities. For some, a difficulty with literacy, numeracy or language is the only disadvantage they face. For others, this is one amongst many barriers: being unemployed, homeless, having specific disabilities such as deafness, or having had an interrupted education.

These people do not fit into some neat category. For the most part they are ordinary people who missed out on education for a wide variety of reasons or who need to develop their skills to face new demands, such as in employment or in managing life in a new country. Looking across the three areas of literacy, numeracy and language provision, it is already clear in our data that quite different groups of people attend these classes.

There are shifts in the relative attention paid to these three areas by policy makers and funders, which we trace in the next chapter. There is a tension between treating them as distinct areas and lumping them together as one field of education. We wish to emphasise the distinct nature and contributions of the three fields and how they are responding to extremely diverse learning needs of different individuals and groups of people.

There is also a recurring issue around how to talk about this area of educational provision. At the time of writing it is referred to in England as Skills for Life, though it has been named in different ways since the 1970s in relation to developing policy initiatives and agendas, as documented in Hamilton and Hillier (2006). It has been known generically as basic education and more recently as basic skills, at least within policy discussions. On the ground providers and teachers have not wanted to publicise courses as ‘basic’ preferring terms such as English, or writing or spelling which they feel are more positive and less stigmatising. One crucial point is that many of the people identified as belonging to priority groups in terms of the strategy are not at some ‘basic’ level of literacy and numeracy. We have had to make many decisions about terminology in this book; for instance, people in the field generally use the term numeracy rather than mathematics, and we will do likewise. However, where a class is advertised as a maths class, we will follow the usage of teachers and colleges.

People accessing skills for life provision are usually referred to as learners by practitioners and policy makers and this term has common currency in the field of adult education. However, we do not want to lose sight of the fact that much learning takes place outside such courses, as discussed in Chapter 3. An alternative term in some provision is student and other organisations we worked with have referred to people in different ways, such as client. Similarly, the terms teacher and tutor are used in different ways in different places, and we use these terms interchangeably, reflecting current debates.

How we talk about these issues and the words we use are not just arbitrary choices; this is an issue of conflicting and competing discourses. People in the Skills for Life priority groups are often referred to in educational discourse as hard-to-reach, as if they are invisible, hiding or absent. Therefore understanding and representing their local experiences within a national context is particularly important, showing them from the perspective of their presence in their own lives, rather than of their absence from spaces defined by others. We have been working here with groups which include people in positions of social inequality, many of whom have experienced marginalisation at some points in their lives. Dropout and retention, like hard-to-reach and learner, are terms common in the prevailing discourse of adult education and lifelong learning. Again, these words view people from the perspective of policy makers and funders. This affects the targets and funding of the college or other organisation which they drop out from, and which cannot reach them or retain them. Such people are constructed as being a problem for the college, to be solved. However, in this study we look from a different perspective: we want to say something about the meaning of learning from the point of view of the people participating, for whom ‘dropping out’ might well mean ‘moving on to something else’.

These terms fit together in a powerful dominant discourse which positions people in narrow educational terms as needing to learn a set of skills. These skills are mapped on to a set of levels to which people are assigned and against which they can then be measured. These levels are used as the basis of targets for colleges and other organisations to achieve. Within this view literacy seems very one-dimensional. It is something which people either have or do not have, and it leads to deficit views which define people in terms of what they cannot do. For instance, adults are compared to children in relation to reading levels, in statements such as ‘one in six adults do not have the literacy skills of an eleven year old’. A moment’s thought should make it clear that adults have broader life experiences, wider vocabularies and more general experience with language, making such comparisons with children inaccurate and invidious. What also happens is that people who are labelled as having problems with literacy are treated in general deficit terms; literacy is used as a marker, or proxy, for other social problems such as poor health or poverty.

We want to provide an alternative richer view to that offered by the dominant discourse on literacy and learning. The deficit view creates a comfort zone in public discussions which the field needs to move out of. It represents an over-simplified way of talking about people which we contest. Our research brings to light aspects of life salient in people’s experiences which impact on learning and which are often hidden by not being discussed within current discourses of adult education, such as gender, health, violence and bullying. We want to get beyond common generalisations, public myths and established narratives of people as ‘learners’ in need of ‘functional skills’, moving towards more realistic representations of what people do do and can do, and the conditions within which they act.

Our concern with competing discourses develops from the underlying theories we draw upon – theories of language, literacy and numeracy, and of learning. Our framing comes primarily from work in literacy studies, but we believe it is also applicable across the fields of language and numeracy. The book is rooted in an approach that sees literacy, numeracy and language as social practices, rather than just as skills to be learned, unconnected to anything else. This approach entails observing people engaging in these practices in their everyday lives, and listening to what they have to say about these practices and the meanings that they have in their lives. The book provides rich detail about the lives of a wide range of people participating in formal learning. It is based on research in a broad range of situations, including college environments, but also community environments such as a drug support and aftercare centre, a young homeless project and a domestic violence project. We put forward a view and approach that provides an alternative to the skills and deficit discourse.

We take a social practice perspective not only on language, literacy and numeracy, but also on teaching and learning. We explain this perspective in more detail in Chapter 3. This approach has more general implications for understanding the learning experiences of adults and young people in settings other than educational ones. In this book we draw particular attention to the importance of the social elements of the teaching and learning interactions we observed, which can often be overlooked, and to the relationship between learning issues and social issues in the wider context beyond the classroom. The book is concerned with teaching and learning interactions in these sites through the perspectives of individual students, covering their motivations for attending, ways of participating in the classes and experiences of learning. It explores how learning opportunities are created. It looks at what learners bring and what teachers bring to specific situations and illustrates the negotiations which teachers and learners engage in. It emphasises the active role of learners and the broader outcomes of their participation in learning. What learners bring to these settings is analysed in terms of four aspects of their lives: their history, their current practices and identities, their current life circumstances and events, and their imagined futures. By analysing patterns of participation and engagement in learning, the book is able to examine how people’s lives shape their learning and how learning shapes their lives in broader ways.

The overarching research question in this book is: what is the relation between people’s lives and their participation in learning opportunities? What from their lives do people take to the learning situations and what from the learning s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The context of adults’ learning
• 3 Literacy, lives and learning as social practice
• 4 Situating adult learners’ lives
• 5 A collaborative and responsive methodology
• 6 Literacies in people’s lives
• 7 Literacy and learning for life purposes
• 8 Ways of participating in classes
• 9 The negotiation of teaching and learning in classes
• 10 What people bring to learning settings
• 11 The negotiation of learning in community settings
• 12 Life careers
• 13 Towards a social practice pedagogy
• References
• Index