ABSTRACT
Researchers going into the developing world may, in good faith and with all heartfelt compassion for the desperate plight of the people there, fall rather short of the mark in interpreting what is happening between the very teachers and students they are trying to help.1 It is understandable that the sight of such dreary classrooms, often dark and cold, even in North Africa, lacking all the niceties of modern Western elementary schoolrooms-or even the necessities, to Western eyes-could be overwhelming: the small, thin children dressed in little more than rags, crowds of them packed on to broken desks, with only broken pencils, a blackboard they can barely see, no textbooks and only a few thin copybooks donated by some aid organisation. The din of these sixty children shouting their replies to the teacher’s questions, seemingly at the top of their lungs, only to be told to say it louder, can be stupefying to the researcher trained to look for communicative methods, who sees no literacy being practised and only ‘chanting’ taking place in these classrooms. Perhaps those of us going into the field need to consider if we have failed to recognise what the people we are studying already do have; perhaps we need to see if we have allowed ourselves to be blinded to the gifts and abilities of the people themselves because we have, perhaps unwittingly, assumed them to suffer an intellectual impoverishment commensurate with the material. Some have already begun to do so, as the ‘number of literacy projects in recent years have challenged [Western] assumptions by stressing that before launching into literacy programs and interventions it is necessary to understand the literacy practices that target groups and communities are already engaged in’ (BVS, p. 1).2
