ABSTRACT
In their recent review of research studies that have investigated literacy in out-of-school settings, Glynda Hull and Katherine Schultz (2001) remarked that “Empirical, field-based research on out-of-school literacy has led to some major theoretical advances in how we conceptualize literacy … when researchers examined literacy in out-of-school contexts they often arrived at new constructs that proved generative for literacy studies.” (p. 578). Making the links between research on out-of-school literacies and educational practice is urgent in the context of adult literacy in England. Just as in Canada and other countries, increasingly formal, standardized, and narrow boundaries are being drawn around literacy. The understandings of literacy on which programs are based are backward looking, rather than forward looking and do not take account of the new theoretical insights referred to by Hull and Schultz, or of the new shape of literacies in diverse cultural and multimodal contexts. In this chapter, I draw from ongoing ethnographic work in everyday settings (Barton & Hamilton, 1998) to explore useful ways of thinking about the relationship between the lived experience of literacy and learning and to examine what is done in the name of literacy in formal educational settings.
