ABSTRACT
As other chapters in this volume unpack the problems associated with traditional approaches to women, literacy and development, this chapter will focus on the implications of the New Literacy Studies for researching women’s literacy programmes. In particular, I examine problems with current approaches, putting issues of gender in the broader context of adult literacy policy as articulated amongst international organisations, such as the World Bank; and the problems associated with cultural insensitivity that have been highlighted by more ethnographic approaches to the uses and meanings of literacy in context. An ‘ethnographic’ perspective involves making the invisible visible; theorising ‘context’; paying greater attention to local meanings and uses; and describing real practices in everyday life, in the context of literacy involving such ‘real’ materials as credit slips, notes, notices, water slides. Rather than just considering ‘educational’ material, ethnographic approaches, then, lead to a focus in teaching and learning on ‘Real Literacy Materials’ (RLM) (cf. Rogers 1994). Such approaches also entail pre-programme research that starts from social practices, not necessarily from literacy itself: this includes, for instance, looking at subjects’ engagement with markets, religion and political relations between the local and the global, within which literacy may take on different priority for different participants. I draw on the theoretical foundations of these approaches, in what have come to be termed the ‘New Literacy Studies’. An account of literacy in this tradition begins with social theories and research. I describe my own personal history in this field and how my experience in Iranian villages in the 1970s, later reinforced by work in South Africa, Ghana, Nepal and elsewhere, made me aware of the remarkable contrast between what an ethnographic approach was telling us about people’s uses of literacy and how it was viewed from ‘outside’ as it were by agencies and formal institutions. Such experience, both my own and that of other ethnographers of literacy, has led to a new theoretical framework for conceptualising what counts as literacy and how we might design programmes to address people’s literacy needs and desires.
