Challenging Ideas:

Projects and Principles

New Literacy Studies; Participatory Rapid Appraisal;

Participatory Needs Assessment; Real Literacy Materials;

Reflect; Freire; Social Uses of Literacy (SOUL)

Concepts and Theories

'Literacies' - multiple; 'new'; multi', 'micro literacies'

Literacy events and literacy practices

Critiques

Relativism, romanticism relevance (3Rs); 'no change";

teachers need support - primers,, pacing of acquisition, phonics, management,, training in uses of 'real materials"

too micro for large scale campaigns cf Egypt

RLM doesn't work where no 'local lit. materials"

Case Studies

Social Uses of Literacy (S. Africa)

Older People's Literacy (S. Africa)

Community Literacies Project (N@pal)

'Real Literacy Materials' (Bangladesh) The Banda Project (India)

Reflect (Action Aid)

Implications for Policy and Programmes

pre-programme research; programme design; curriculum; materials; pedagogy; ongoing research - qualit. and quant.

empowerment" - power within programmes/ power as outcome

Why Research Multiple Literacy Practices?

Why have I taken on research in this area'? The answer is given in my own research history (Street, 1984). 1 went to Iran during the 1970s to undertake anthropological field research. I had not gone specifically to study 'literacy' but found myself living in a mountain village where a great deal of literacy activity was going on: 1 was drawn to the conceptual and rhetorical issues involved in representing this variety and complexity of literacy activity at a time when my encounter with people outside of the village suggested the dominant representation was of 'illiterate', backward villagers. Looking more closely at village fife in the light of these characterisations, it seemed that not only was there actually a lot of literacy going on but that there were quite different 'practices' associated with literacy - those in a traditional 'Quoranic school; in the new State schools; and amongst traders using literacy in their buying and selling of fruit to urban markets. If these complex variations in literacy which were happening in one small locale were characterised by outside agencies - State education, Unesco, literacy campaigns - as 'illiterate', might this also be the case in other situations too? 1 have kept this image in mind as 1 have observed and investigated literacy in other parts of the world - urban Philadelphia, South Africa, Ghana, the UK etc. In all of these cases 1 hear dominant voices characterising local people as 'illiterate' (currently media in the UK are full of such accounts cf Street 1997) whilst on the ground ethnographic and literacy-sensitive observation indicates a rich variety of 'practices' (Heath, 1983; Barton & Hamlilton, 1998). When literacy campaigns are set up to bring literacy to the illiterate - 'fight into darkness', as it is frequently characterised - I find myself asking first what local literacy practices are there and how do they relate to the literacy practices of the campaigners? In Ugly cases the latter ' fad to 'take' - few people attend classes and those who do drop out , precisely because they are the literacy practices of an outside and often alien group. Even though in the long run many lock people do want to change their literacy practices and take on board some of those associated with western or urban society, a crude imposition of the latter that marginalises and denies local experience is likely to alienate even those who were initially motivated.

Research, then, has a task to do in making visible the complexity of local, everyday, community literacy practices and challenging dominant stereotypes and myopia. This indeed has become a n4or drive in my research, teaching and writing, both in the research community and in the public arena. Following through its implications for proramme design including pre-programme research of local literacy practices- of curriculum pedagogy and assessment/ evaluation are major tasks that require first a more developed conceptualisation of the theoretical and methodological issues involved in understanding and representing 'local literacy practices'.

Barton,D & Hamilton,M (forthcoming) Local Literacies London: Routledge Heath,S.B. 1983 Way s with Words Cambridge, C. U.P.

Prinsloo,M & Breier,M (eds.) 1996 Social Uses of Literacy Benjamins: Amsterdam

Street,B 1984 Literacy in Theory and Practice CUP: Cambridge

Street,B 1997 "The Implications of the New Literacy Studies for Literacy Education",

English in Education, NATE, vol. 3 1, no. 3 autumn pp. 26-39

Street,B (ed.) 1993 Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy Cambridge: CUP

Contact Info:

Brian V. Street
U.K.