Defying Categories: A worker's story

Guiseppe the cleaner couldn't read or write and they fired him.
In desperation he opened a delicatessen in Carlton which was an immediate success. Soon he owned a thriving chain of stores.

"Imagine,"
they said, "what you could have been if you could read and write?"

"A cleaner" said Giuseppe.graphic - end of article decoration

graphic of a woman looking at a instructions

From: Watts, Maree
"How do Power Relationships, Within an Adult Literacy Initial Assessment for CESReferred Clients, Influence the Assessment Discourse?" in I. Eds.

Ian Falk and Margaret Penson.
Literacy and Learning Series, no. 1,
National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia. 1996.
[CES-Referred clients are unemployed workers referred by Commonwealth Employment Services.]



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What's the question? Practitioner/researcher queries

by Sheila Stewart and Nancy Jackson

graphic of a woman lost in a pile of paper

Why bother doing research? Who is it for anyways?
Do I have to have a hypothesis? Do I have to do a literature review?
What does culture have to do with it?
What about a research question? Do I need one?
What’s a focus group? A control group?
Who’s in control anyways?
What’s ethics got to do with it?
Does research have anything to do with practice?
Could it help tutor training? Learners? Intake?
How the heck would I find the time to do research anyways?
Why would I want to?
Can I avoid stealing people’s stories? Whose stories does research tell?
Am I supposed to be objective?
What about surveys? What’s a sample?
What is data? How do I collect it? Organize it? Analyze it?
Where do I keep it? Does it need watering? Feeding? A litterbox?
How do I choose research partners? What if we disagree?
Should I do research in my own program? Would it be biased?
What about confidentiality? What if others ask to see my data?
Who can I talk to about what? Who’s in charge?
How would I recognize a finding if I bump into one?
How do I get conclusions? Do I need to have recommendations?
How do we get the money? Who owns the research?
How do I deal with the funder? What’s the role of government?
What should the research report say? Who is for? What if no one reads it?
What do we after the final report? After the party? Is it over?