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What's new in New Literacy Studies? Critical
approaches to literacy in theory and practice
Brian Street
Kings College London
The Context and Background
A rich vein of articles and books has recently addressed some critical issues in
the field of New Literacy Studies, both in terms of theoretical perspectives and of their
implications in educational and policy contexts. I address some of these critiques as a
way of both updating NLS and of addressing its implications for practice.
What has come to be termed the New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Gee, 1991;
Street, 1996) represents a new tradition in considering the nature of literacy, focusing
not so much on acquisition of skills, as in dominant approaches, but rather on what it
means to think of literacy as a social practice (Street, 1985). This entails the
recognition of multiple literacies, varying according to time and space, but also
contested in relations of power. NLS, then, takes nothing for granted with respect to
literacy and the social practices with which it becomes associated, problematizing
what counts as literacy at any time and place and asking whose literacies are
dominant and whose are marginalized or resistant.
To address these issues ethnographically, literacy researchers have co nstructed
a conceptual apparatus that both coins some new terms and gives new meanings to
some old ones. My own work, for instance, begins with the notion of multiple
literacies, which makes a distinction between autonomous and ideological models
of literacy (Street, 1985) and develops a distinction between literacy events and
literacy practices (Street, 1988). The standard view in many fields, from schooling to
development programs, works from the assumption that literacy in itself--
autonomously--will have effects on other social and cognitive practices. Introducing
literacy to poor, illiterate people, villages, urban youth etc. will have the effect of
enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, making them
better citizens, regardless of the social and economic conditions that accounted for
their illiteracy in the first place. I refer to this as an autonomous model of literacy.
The model, I suggest, disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin
it so that it can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal and that
literacy as such will have these benign effects. Research in NLS challenges this view
and suggests that in practice literacy varies from one context to another and from one
culture to another and so, therefore, do the effects of the different literacies in
different conditions. The autonomous approach is simply imposing western conceptions
of literacy on to other cultures or within a country those of one class or cultural group
onto others.
The alternative, ideological model of literacy, offers a more culturally sensitive
view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another. This model starts
from different premises than the autonomous model--it posits instead that literacy is a
social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill; that it is always embedded in
socially constructed epistemological principles. It is about knowledge: the ways in
which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of
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knowledge, identity, and being. It is also always embedded in social practices, such as
those of a particular job market or a particular educational context and the effects of
learning that particular literacy will be dependent on those particular contexts.
Literacy, in this sense, is always contested, both its meanings and its practices, hence
particular versions of it are always ideological, they are always rooted in a particular
world-view and in a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and to marginalize
others (Gee, 1991; Besnier & Street, 1994). The argument about social literacies
(Street, 1995) 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 afterwards.
It follows from this distinction that researchers in NLS employing an ideological model of
literacy would find it problematic to simply use the term literacy as their unit or object of
study. Literacy comes already loaded with ideological and policy pre-suppositions that
make it hard to do ethnographic studies of the variety of literacies across contexts. So we
have found it helpful to develop alternative terms. I have developed a working distinction
between literacy events and literacy practices (Street, 1988) that I suggest is helpful
for both research and in teaching situations. Barton (1994) notes that the term literacy
events derived from the sociolinguistic idea of speech events. It was first used in relation
to literacy by A.B. Anderson et. al. (1980), who defined it as an occasion during which a
person attempts to comprehend graphic signs (pp. 59 -65). Shirley Brice Heath, further
characterized a literacy event as "any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to
the nature of the participants' interactions and their interpretative processes" (Heath,
1982, p. 93). I have employed the phrase literacy practices (Street, 1984, p. 1) as a
means of focusing upon social practices and conceptions of reading and writing,
although I later elaborated the term to take into account both events in Heath's sense
and of the social models of literacy that participants bring to bear upon those events and
that give meaning to them (Street, 1988). David Barton, in an introduction to his edited
volume on Writing in the Community (Barton & Ivanic, 1991, p.1) attempted to clarify
these debates about literacy events and literacy practices and in a later collaborative
study of everyday literacies in Lancaster, England, Barton and Hamilton begin their
account with further refinements of the two phrases (1998, p. 6). Baynham (1995)
entitled his book Literacy Practices: investigating literacy in social contexts. Similarly
Prinsloo and Breier's volume on The Social Uses of Literacy (1996), which is a series of
case studies of literacy in South Africa, used the concept of events, but then extended it
to practices, by describing the everyday uses and meanings of literacy amongst, for
instance, urban taxi drivers, struggle activists in settlements, rural workers using
diagrams to build carts and those involved in providing election materials for mainly non -
literate voters. The concept of literacy practices in these and other contexts not only
attempts to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy events, but to
link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind.
Recently, I have further elaborated the distinction with respect to work on literacies
and multilingualism, in an important edited volume by Martin-Jones and Jones (2000). As
part of that broadening, for instance, I noted that we bring to literacy event concepts and
social models regarding what the nature of the event is and makes it work, and give it
meaning. Literacy practices, then, refer to the broader cultural conception of particular
ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts. A key issue, at
both a methodological and an empirical level, then, is how we can characterize the shift
from observing literacy events to conceptualizing literacy practices.
A wealth of ethnographies of literacy has emerged deploying and developing
these and other key concepts in a variety of international contexts, including the U.K.
(Barton & Hamilton, 1998); the U.S.A. (Collins, 1995; Heath, 1983); South Africa
(Prinsloo & Breier, 1996); Iran (Street, 1986); India (Mukherjee and Vasanta, 2003);
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Mexico (Kalman, 1999); South America (Aikman, 1999); and multiple development
contexts (Street, 2001). The strength and significance of the approach and the
considerable literature it has generated is attested by a recent spate of critical
accounts that have addressed some of the problems raised by it both in general
theoretical terms and, more specifically, for practice in educational contexts. I firstly
summarize some of the theoretical critiques and then turn to the applications to policy
and practice that they entail.
Theoretical Concerns
In terms of theory, Bran dt & Clinton (2002) have recently commented on the
limits of the local apparent in many NLS studies. They argue that NLS ought to be
more prepared to take account of the relatively autonomous features of literacy
without succumbing to the autonomous mo del with its well documented flaws. This
would involve, for instance, recognizing the extent to which literacy does often come
to local situations from outside and brings with it both skills and meanings that are
larger than the emic perspective favored by NLS can always detect. Whilst
acknowledging the value of the social practice approach, they:
wonder if the new paradigm sometimes veers too far in a reactive direction,
exaggerating the power of local contexts to set or reveal the forms and
meanings that literacy takes. Literacy practices are not typically invented by
their practitioners. Nor are they independently chosen or sustained by them.
Literacy in use more often than not serves multiple interests, incorporating
individual agents and their locales into larger enterprises that play out away
from the immediate scene. (Brandt & Clinton, 2002, p. 1)
They also point out the important and powerful role of consolidating
technologies that can destabilize the functions, uses, values and meanings of literacy
anywhere. These technologies generally originate outside of the local context; they
cannot be undertood simply in terms of local practices. Whilst the field has learned
much from the recent turn to "local literacies", they fear that something [might] be
lost when we ascribe to local contexts responses to pressures that originate in distant
decisions, especially when seemingly local appropriations of literacy may in fact be
culminations of literate designs originating elsewhere (p.2).
I would agree with most of Brandt & Clinton's characterization here of the
relationship between the local and the distant and indeed it is the focus on this
relationship, rather than on one or other of the sites, that characterizes the best of
NLS. Brandt & Clinton's account here provides a helpful way of characterizing the local/
global debate in which literacy practices play a central role. But, I would want to
distinguish between agreeing with their caveat about overemphasizing the local and
labeling the distant as more autonomous. The distant literacies to which Brandt &
Clinton refer are also always ideological and to term them autonomous might be to
concede too much to their neutralist claims.
Brandt & Clinton's concern with the overemphasis on the local in some NLS
accounts; their recognition that for many people the literacies they engage with come
from elsewhere and are not self invented; and that there is more going on in a local
literacy than just local practice, are all important caveats to deter NLS from over
emphasizing or romanticizing the local, as it has been accused of doing (cf response by
Street to McCabe, 1995 in Prinsloo & Breier, 1996). But this important debate can be
continued without resorting to terming distant literacies as autonomous--as
Brandt& Clinton imply in their attempt to address certain "autonomous" aspects of
literacy without appealing to the "autonomous model" of literacy. The features of
distant literacies are actually no more autonomous than those of local literacies, or
indeed than any literacy practices: their distantness, their relative power over local
literacies and their non-invented character as far as local users are concerned, do
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not make them autonomous, only distant, new, or hegemonic. To study such
processes we need a framework and conceptual tools that can characterize the relation
between local and distant. The question raised in the early NLS work concerning how
we can characterize the shift from observing literacy events to conceptualizing literacy
practices does, I think, provide both a methodological and empirical way of dealing
with this relation and thereby taking account of Brandt and Clintons concern with the
limits of the local.
NLS practitioners might also take issue with the apparent suggestion that
distant literacies come to local contexts with their force and meaning intact. As Kulick
& Stroud (1993) indicated a decade ago in their study of new literacy practices brought
by missionaries to New Guinea, local peoples more often take hold of these new
practices and adapt them to local circumstances. The result of local-global encounters
around literacy is always a new hybrid rather than a single essentialized version of
either. It is these hybrid literacy practices that NLS focuses upon rather than either
romanticizing the local or conceding the dominant privileging of the supposed global.
As we shall see when we discuss practical applications of NLS across educational
contexts, it is the recognition of this hybridity that lies at the heart of an NLS approach
to literacy acquisition regarding the relationship between local literacy practices and
those of the school.
Collins and Blot (2002) are similarly concerned that, whilst NLS has generated a
powerful series of ethnographies of literacy, there is a danger of simply piling up more
descriptions of local literacies without addressing general questions of both theory and
practice. In exploring why dominant stereotypes regarding literacy are so flawed, such
as the notions of a great divide between oral and literate, and the now challenged
assumptions of the autonomous model, they invoke NLS, but then want to take
account of its limitations and to extend beyond them:
Such understanding also has a more general intellectual value for it forces us to
explore why historical and ethnographic cases are necessary but insufficient for
rethinking inherited viewpoints
although ethnographic scholarship has
demonstrated the pluralities of literacies, their context--boundness, it still has
also to account for general tendencies that hold across diverse case studies.
(pp. 7-8).
They argue, then, for a way out of the universalist/particularist impasse which had
troubled Brandt as we saw above, by attending closely to issues of text, power and
iden tity. These are issues that are at the heart of current developments in NLS, from
Bartlett and Holland's concern with identities in practice (see below), to Street's
attention to literacy and power in the ideological model and Maybin's refinement of
Bakhtin's intertextuality with respect to literacy practices. Writing in Situated
Literacies (2000), Maybin, also links NLS to wider strands of social-critical work,
offering a way of linking Foucauldian notions of Discourse, Bakhtinian notions of
intertextuality and work in Critical Discourse Analysis with the recognition from NLS of
the articulation of different discourses [as] centrally and dynamically interwoven in
people's everyday literacy activities. Gee (2000), in the same Situated Literacies
volume, also located the situated approach to literacies in relation to broader
movements towards a social turn which he saw as a challenge to behaviorism and
individualism-a challenge which NLS has also pursued. Janks (2000), located in South
Africa, likewise links literacy studies to broader social theory, invoking the concepts of
Domination, Access, Diversity and Design as a means of synthesizing the various
strands of critical literacy education. Freebody, writing from Australia, but like Janks
taking a broad theoretical and international view, likewise writes of the relationship
between NLS and critical literacy, an approach to the acquisition and use of reading
and writing in educational contexts that takes account of relations of power and
domination (Freebody, forthcoming).
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Bartlett & Holland (2002) likewise link NLS to broader social theory. They
propose an expanded conception of the space of literacy practices, drawing upon
innovations in the cultural school of psychology, sociocultural history and social
practice theory. In locating literacy theory within these broader debates in social
theory, they build, especially, on the concern of Bourdieu to characterize the
relationship between social structures (history brought to the present in institutions)
and habitus (history brought to the present in person) and suggest ways in which
NLS can adapt this approach:
Bourdieu's theory suggests that we can analyze literacy events with an eye to
the ways in which historical and social forces have shaped a persons linguistic
habitus and thus impinges upon that persons actions in the moment (p. 6).
However, they argue that Bourdieu's theory is itself limited by his tendency to
underplay the importance of culturally produced narratives, images and other artefacts
in modifying habitus (p.x). It is here that they suggest ways of extending both
Bourdieu and literacy studies by putting them together with other key concepts in their
work:
We propose to strengthen a practice theoretical approach to literacy studies by
specifying the space of literacy practice, examining in particular the locally
operant figured world of literacy, identities in practice, and artefacts (p. 6).
Applying their concept of figured worlds-a socially produced and culturally
constructed realm of interpretation-to literacy practices, they suggest that 'a figured
world of literacy might include "functional illiterates", "good readers" and "illiterates"
any of which might be invoked, animated, contested and enacted through artefacts,
activities and identities in practice (p. 6). In the world of schooled literacy in
particular, scholars have noted the tendency to invoke and deploy such figurings and
identities to characterize children and their attainment-Holland and Bartlett enable us
to see such characterizations as themselves part of what we should be taking into
account when we try to understand literacy practices in context: we should be wary of
taking them at face value, a skepticism that will prove useful as we move towards
applying social literacy theory to education in general and schooling in particular.
Pahl (2002a and b) has built upon Holland and Bartlett's use of habitus in
relation to figured worlds in order to help her describe the multi modal practices of
young children at home in her research on London families. Drawing also upon Kress
and van Leeuwen (2001) for multi-modality and Street 1988; 1995) for literacy
practices, she describes the ways in which young children take from and adapt family
narratives as they do drawings, create three dimensional objects and write graffiti on
walls. The work of figuring these family worlds is done through a combination of oral,
visual and written artefacts through which over time key themes-such as a family's
connection with the railways in India or with a farm in Wales--become sedimented and
persistent. Through these narratives, embedded in material and linguistic form, the
identity of family members is constructed and adapted over time. Again, there is a
pedagogic message regarding how schools might recognize and build upon such home
practices, but there is also an important theoretical contribution to NLS, namely that
Pahl shows how any account of literacy practices needs to be contextualized within
other communicative modes. Also, like Bartlett & Holland (2002) and Collins (1995),
she develops a sophisticated analysis of how such practices relate to concepts of
textuality, figured worlds, identity and power.
Another update and extension of NLS is to be found in Hornberger's edited
volume (2002) in which authors attempt to apply her conception of the continua of
biliteracy to actual uses of reading and writing in different multilingual settings:
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biliteracy is defined as "any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or
more) languages in or around writing" and is described in terms of four nested sets of
intersecting continua characterizing the contexts, media, content, and development of
biliteracy. A number of the authors, as in the Martin-Jones & Jones (2001) book, draw
out the links of NLS to such multilingual settings.
Applications to Education
The next stage of work in this area is to move beyond these theoretical
critiques and to develop positive proposals for interventions in teaching, curriculum,
measurement criteria, and teacher education in both the formal and informal sectors,
based upon these principles. It will be at this stage that the theoretical perspectives
brought together in the New Literacy Studies will face their sternest test: that of
their practical applications to mainstream education. Hull and Schultz (2001) have
been amongst the first researchers to directly apply insights from NLS to educational
practice and policy. They build upon the foundational descriptions of out-of-school
literacy events and practices developed within NLS, to return the gaze back to the
relations between in and out of school, so that NLS is not seen simply as anti school
or interested only in small scale or local literacies of resistance. They especially want
to use the understandings of children's emerging experiences with literacy in their own
cultural milieus to address broader educational questions about learning of literacy and
of switching between the literacy practices required in different conte xts. They
are troubled by a tendency
to build and reify a great divide between in school
and out of school and that sometimes this dichotomy relegates all good things
to out-of-school contexts and everything repressive to school. Sometimes it
dismisses the engagement of children with non -school learning as merely
frivolous or remedial or incidental (Hull & Schultz, 2002; p. 3).
In contrast to this approach and drawing strongly on work in NLS, they argue for
overlap or complementarity or perhaps a respectful division of labor. They cite
Dewey's argument that there is much we can learn about successful pedagogies and
curricula by foregrounding the relationship between formal education and ordinary life.
From the standpoint of the child" he observed, the great waste in the school
comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside of the school
in any complete and free way within the school itself; while on the other hand,
he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school (Dewey, 1899/
1998; pp. 76-78).
But how are we to know about the experiences of the child outside of school? Many
teachers express anxiety that the children in their classes may come from a wide
variety of backgrounds and it is impossible to know them all. Hull & Schultz (2002)
respond by invoking the work of researchers who have made important contributions
to understanding literacy learning through ethnographic or field-based studies in
homes, community organizations and after-school programs (p. 14). Their edited
volume consists of accounts of such research in a variety of settings. They are aware
of the criticism of such approaches that might over-emphasize the local or even
romanticize out-of-school contexts and aim instead to acknowledge the
complexities, tensions and opportunities that are found there. Nor is their aim to
provide an exhaustive account of such contexts-teachers are right to argue that this
cannot all be covered. Instead, they aim to provide us all, but especially those
responsible for the education of children, with understanding of the principles
underlying such variation and with help in listening to and appreciating what it is that
children bring from home and community experience. Indeed, the book consists of
both articles about such experience and comments by teachers and teacher educators
on their significance for learning. Here, then, NLS meets educational practice in ways
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that begin to fulfill the potential of the approach, but through dialogue rather than
simply an imposition of researchers agendas on educators.
In Australia the work of Peter Freebody and Allan Luke, provide powerful
examples of the application of new theoretical perspectives on literacy, including NLS,
to education, especially work on curriculum and assessment in Queensland (cf Luke,
and Carrington 2002; Luke and Freebody 2002.
In a forthcoming edited volume (Street, forthcoming) a number of authors from
a variety of international contexts likewise take on this challenge and attempt to follow
through such practical applications of the NLS approach. As with Hull & Schultzs work,
the authors are conscious of the links between theoretical debate and the work of
teachers in school addressing literacy issues. The collection of case studies ranges
from formal education, including elementary, secondary and higher education and
informal sectors such as community associations, international development programs
and workplace literacies. Across these educational contexts, the authors are concerned
not just to apply the general principles of NLS but with offering practical critiques of its
application that force us to refine the original conceptualization: the volume, then, is
intended to be not a static application of theory to practice, but a dynamic dialogue
between the two. In attempting to work through the implications of these approaches
for different sectors of education, the authors find limitations and problems in some
NLS approaches-such as the limits of the local in educational as well as theore tical
terms--that require them to go back to the underpinning conceptual apparatus.
Theory as well as practice is subject to the critical perspective being adopted there and
researchers and practitioners will have to either adapt or even reject parts of NLS as it
engages with such new tasks.
Such a challenge is raised by current research by Baker, Street and Tomlin
(2002) applying literacy theory to the understanding of numeracy practices in and out
of school (Baker et al, 2002; Baynham & Baker, 2002). Numeracy even more than
literacy has been seen as a universal, context free set of skills that can be
imparted across the board, irrespective of childrens background experiences and prior
cultural knowledge. Recent approaches to situated learning, when allied to those
from situated literacy suggest that such a banking model of education, as Paulo
Freire termed it, is inappropriate especially in the multilingual, multicultural situations
that characterize contemporary hybrid cultural contexts. The question that Street &
Baker address is how far such a culturally-sensitive approach can be applied to
numeracy education: can we talk of multiple numeracies and of numeracy events and
practices as we do of literacy? Can we build upon cultural knowledge of number,
measurement, approximation etc. in the way that Hull & Schultz and those in the
Literacies across the Curriculum volume believe we can do for cultural knowledge of
literacies, scripts, languages? Again, the questions being raised by NLS, when applied
to new fields such as this will lead to critiques not only of current educational practice
but also of the theoretical framework itself. As with the critiques by Brandt, Collins
etc., NLS will be forced to adapt and change--the validity and value of its original
insights and their applications to practice will be tested according to whether they can
meet this challenge.
In an international context the application of NLS to both schooling and adult
literacy has likewise raised new questions and faced new problems contingent on the
nature of the particular context. The aim of such applications has not been to simply
impose a pre -given template on to local work in the field but to enter a dialogue (cf
Street's 2001 edited volume of essays on literacy and development in a dozen
different countries for detailed examples). A telling case of such work is the
Community Literacies Project in Nepal (CLPN, 2001) supported by the U.K.s
Department for International Development (DFID) and based in Kathmandu. CLPN
provides a resource for supporting local literacy initiatives, be they women working in
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credit groups, Forestry User Groups, or people setting up wall newspapers and local
broadcasting. Such organizations come to CLPN for support when their members need
to enhance their literacy but instead of sending them to sit in formal classes-to be
infantilized, treated like their children with desks, grade levels and demeaning
assessments-the CLPN team attempt to work with them in the local context and to
build upon what they already know as a way of developing what else they want to
know--to create better forms for the credit group, to read and write minutes for the
Forestry Users Group, to makes tape recordings for broadcast .
However, as with other applications of NLS (cf Rogers, 1994; Street, 2001),
the local context generates it own new problems that force us to rethink and adapt the
initial conceptualization. In this case, as in many development contexts, the problem
arises as to whether there is a conflict between theory and policy and between the
local and the needs of scale faced by administrators? The more those ethnographers
explain the complexity of literacy practices, the more policy makers find it impossible
to design programs that can take account of all that complexity. The more
ethnographers demonstrate that literacy does not necessarily have the effects that the
rhetoric has suggested --improved health, cognition, empowerment--the harder does it
become for policymakers to persuade funders to support literacy programs. The more
ethnographers focus on specific local contexts, the harder does it seem to upscale
their projects to take account of the large numbers of people seen to be in need. So
how can contemporary literacy projects bridge this apparent divide between policy and
research in general and in particular between large scale needs and micro
ethnographic approaches?
The Community Literacy Project Nepal aims to do precisely this. Based on a
spirit of engagement between theory and practice, academic and applied concerns, it
aims to make a contribution at the interface, clarifying conceptual issues, and
enhancing knowledge on the one hand and aiding policy making and program building
on the other (cf Rogers, 1992). The participants approach the issues in a spirit of
reflective and critical enquiry, less concerned to advocate particular approaches,
methodologies and theories than to extend current thinking and thereby facilitate
informed local practice. Anna Robinson-Pant's book about Nepal, 'Why Eat Green
Cucumbers at the Time of Dying?' Exploring the Link between Women's Literacy and
Development (Unesco, 2000), which won the Unesco Literacy Prize, provides some of
the answers to the worries about ethnography that some literacy campaigners might
express. Why eat green cucumbers at the time of dying?--why take on the luxury of
new literacy practices when your communicative repertoire seems already sufficient?--
because, says Anna Robinson-Pant, learning to read--like eating cucumber in rural
areas--is both a luxury and a challenge when you are old (indeed, at any age) (p. 1).
Taking on reading, new readings, and new literacy practices, broadening the
communicative repertoire, and challenging dominant epistemologies are continuing
processes, not a one -off shift from illiteracy to literacy, from dark to light, as the
early approaches to literacy work would have it. There are always new things to
experience and learn and life can always be enhanced --even at the time of dying!
Policy Issues
Despite the willingness of DFID to fund such imaginative approaches to literacy
work overseas, in the UK itself as in the U.S.A., the qualitative and ethnographic--style
work that characterizes NLS and underpins such an approach is currently out of
fashion in higher policy circles. A recent important political development in the
validating and funding of research in education in general and literacy in particular has
been the demand that such research conform to scientific standards. Key words in
this approach include Systematic Reviews, Rigor, and Evidence -Based Policies. In
both the U.K. and U.S.A., governments and their agencies are insisting that funding
will only be permitted on the basis that programs and the research on which they are
based can be proven to be scientific. A number of commissions and panels have
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reviewed research on literacy in this light e.g. the National Academy of Science report
Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, Griffin, 1998); the
National Reading Panel set up by the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development (NRP, 2000); and the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) newly formed
Institute of Education Sciences plan to evaluate research as part of its web-based
What Works Clearinghouse project. For instance, the Clearinghouse, founded in August
2002, aims to become a trusted, one -stop source of scientifically proven teaching
practices for educators, policy makers, and the public. It will contain systematically
evaluated research to help educators more easily identify scientifically proven teaching
methods as required by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).
Academic researchers, including those active in the field of literacy, are playing
a leading role in these developments. For instance, in the USA Robert Slavin, the
founder of Success for All, argued in a recent paper in Educational Researcher that:
the use of randomized experiments that transformed medicine, agriculture and
technology in the 20th century is now beginning to affect educational policy (p. x). He
concludes from a survey of such research that a focus on rigorous experiments
evaluating replicable programs and practices is essential to build confidence in
educational research among policymakers and educators (Slavin, 2002, p. x). In
particular, this approach suggests ways in which what is known from experimental
studies of literacy acquisition can be built into programs and policies for early
schooling. In the U.K., the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information Coordinating
Centre (EPPI-Centre) has been established at the Institute for Education in London to
conduct systematic reviews of research in designated fields and the English National
Literacy Strategy was justified on similar grounds, although the use of systematic
reviews etc. was less well developed at the initial stages. Researchers summarizing
the research base for the National Literacy Strategy have since claimed that we now
know what works in teaching initial literacy and that the task is simply to apply this
in schooling (Beard, 2000; Harrison, 2002).
Critiques of these approaches have come from a number of well -known
qualitative researchers in the literacy field (Gee, 2002; Coles, 2001; Goodman, 2001;
Hamersley, 2001; Erickson & Gutierrez, 2002). A special issue of Educational
Researcher (Vol. 31, no. 8, Nov 2002) was devoted to the question of Scientific
Research in Education and a special edition of the Journal of Teacher Education was
devoted to teacher preparation research (Journal of Teacher Education 53 (3): May -
Jun 2002; see refs below). In the UK the British Educational Research Journal likewise
published a number of articles on Systematic Reviews in its Nov 2001 issue (Vol. 27,
No. 5, 2001). Hamersley, for instance, writing in that issue, links the trend to
systematic reviews to a resurgence of positivist epistemology as an alternative to
narrative (subjective, qualitative, interpretive?) reviews. Hamersley comments:
What is curious about the dual (both doing research and producing research reviews)
application of the positivist model to the task of reviewing is that it takes little or no
account of the considerable amount of criticism that has been made of that model
since at least the middle of the twentieth century (Hamersley, 2001, p. 545). Adam
Lefstein (2003) provides a helpful survey of much of this literature, invoking the
philosophical terms techne and phronesis to analyze the difference between
scientific technical rationality and practical reason as they are applied to education
and specifically to the UK Literacy Strategy.
In the U.S. likewise qualitative researchers in the literacy field have addressed
both the wider epistemological assumptions underpinning the scientific move and the
specific issues regarding acquisition of reading that are often the focus of such
approaches. Ken Goodman has set up an email network (see refs) that circulates
details of new initiatives, e.g. the What Works Clearinghouse project, and offer
scathing critiques. Joanne Larson's wittily titled Literacy as Snake Oil (2001) has a
number of sharp criticisms of the way the Reading Panels have been set up, run and
Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2)--article (May 12, 2003)
10
then invoked for policy purposes. The authors demonstrate some of the problems with
the scientific approach-its inability to engage with the nuances of cultural
meanings, the variation in uses of literacy across contexts and the problems already
highlighted with the autonomous model of literacy - and attempt to construct more
meaningful solutions. (cf , 2001; Coles, 2001). Similarly, critics in a special issue of
Educational Researcher, berate the U.S. Dept of Education initiatives for confusing the
methods of science with the process of science (Berliner, 2002). Erickson and
Gutierrez, for example, critique the NRC Committee for taking an evidence -based
social engineering approach to educational improvement and argue for replacing the
"white coat notion of science
with a more complicated and realistic view of what
actual scientists do (cited in Lefstein, 2003).
All of this has considerable importance for literacy work, both in terms of the
kind of research that can get funded , the kinds of procedures for reviewing research
that are considered legitimate and the policy effects of that research which does get
through the sieve. The wider political and ideological context of such research is itself
part of what counts as engaging with literacy in theory and practice
Conclusion
The effects of these critical engagements with social theory, educational
applica tions and policy is that New Literacy Studies is now going through a productive
period of intense debate that firstly establishes and consolidates many of the earlier
insights and empirical work and secondly builds a more robust and perhaps less insular
field of study. A major contribution arising from the work cited here has been the
attempt to appeal beyond the specific interests of ethnographers interested in the
local in order to engage with both educationalists interested in literacy acquisition
and use across educational contexts, both formal and informal, and with policy makers
more generally. That practical engagement, however, will still need to be rooted in
sound theoretical and conceptual understanding if the teaching and studying of literacy
are to avoid being simply tokens for other interests. We still, then, need to analyze
and contest what counts as literacy (and numeracy); what literacy events and
practices mean to users in different cultural and social contexts- the original
inspiration for NLS - but also what are the limits of the local; and, as the writers
cited here indicate, how literacy relates to more general issues of social theory
regarding textuality, figured worlds, identity and power.
Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2)--article (May 12, 2003)
11
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do you want to put it at the end?
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What Works Clearinghouse
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/ssunreg.cfm?ArticleID=4110&ul=%2Fnews%2Fsh
owStory%2Ecfm%3FArticleID%3D4110.
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