ABSTRACT
The chapters in this part of the book all address educational interventions, whether at the level of school or of adult programmes. Adopting an ethnographic perspective on education involves, first, suspending judgement on the educational aims and agendas of developers rather than taking them as the ground from which further analysis follows. It is not, for instance, self-evident that programmes for literacy acquisition are necessarily in the best educational or social interests of the target audience. Nor are approaches to learning and teaching considered ‘state of the art’ or ‘progressive’ by developers and Western educators necessarily the most effective or successful in different contexts. Particular approaches, such a ‘learner-centred’ or process writing may work in some contexts but we will not know whether they work in others until we have studied those other contexts: we cannot simply impose apparently ‘effective’ methods and expect to see the same results everywhere-as Wagner states, ‘one shoe does not fit all’. An ethnographic perspective, then, obliges us to suspend judgement on such methods until we have understood better the context in which they are being applied. Local meanings and uses of communicative practices in general and of literacy practices in particular may indicate alternative approaches to the design of literacy programmes to those that may seem obvious from outside. The accounts in this part, based upon ethnographic research mainly in India and Africa, both on local literacy practices and on educational projects as themselves social practices, call into question such centralist sentiments. We are helped instead to ‘see’ local perspectives and nuances in indigenous and central conceptions of the educational process. Out of such re-viewing the authors hope that more sensitive programmes might emerge. That is, the researchers are not interested simply in the theoretical and methodological insights arising from their research but are also committed to working through their practical implications. Developers and programme designers as well as academics in the field of language and literacy should therefore find much of interest in these chapters: if these traditionally separate groups are facilitated to overlap to some extent and to learn from each other’s perspectives, then the authors will feel their work has been worthwhile.
