ABSTRACT
There was a great deal of focus in the early days of the project on its uniqueness – because it was dealing with older people, taking a participatory approach and using a social literacies perspective, and Street in particular stressed the need for documentation. The evaluators collected facilitator diaries, student writing, project reports, workbooks, minutes of committee meetings . . . to the extent that they became unwieldy. Some learner writing was reproduced in the final evaluation, but the struggle to produce facilitator diaries is probably not justified by their subsequent use. Faciltators and local project staff seemed to be very aware of the division between academics who ‘came to look at and write about the project’ and their own daily struggle to cope with the tasks they had. Looking at some of these materials in retrospect they indicate to me one or two important things:
• A focus on literacy practices and the reluctance to see literacy as a skill often ignores the amount of actual practice it takes someone to write something for the first time. Most of the elders’ workbooks don’t look very different from those of a first or second-year primary school pupil: the same shaky handwriting, the same stiff attempts to produce curves and straight lines. This is exacerbated for elderly people with fading eyesight who have spent a lifetime on heavy domestic or agricultural rather than more manipulative tasks, and the provision of adequate reading glasses was something we struggled to get right throughout the project. But in a sense we knew that already, there were no great surprises.
