Literacy for Social Change

by Nadine Sookermany

Literacy practices are ways of acting and behaving that reflect power positions and structures (Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic, 2000). The ways in which these practices reflect and shape social structures are what we do in our work as literacy workers. The main factors of 'really useful literacy' are first, recognizing learners' experiences, and second, letting learners recognize their potential power to effectively and collectively change their situations. These are linked to two core elements of adult education as social change: first, education must be grounded in real and realizable struggles for democratic control and second, it does not perpetuate the status quo. Instead, it challenges the learner to move forward, to look through a different lens, to rethink their goals (hooks, 1994). We must employ liberatory and emancipatory pedagogies in literacy programs in order to provide students with different lenses through which to view, perceive, and understand reality and, subsequently, to produce social change. When we look at learners' experiences and needs, we see that adult learner goals are broader and more complex than simply employment or further training. There are also many measurable changes that learners can and do experience through education that incorporate not only knowledge and skills, but also attitudes and behaviours. Literacy is about much more than reading and writing; it is about who decides what kind of knowledge counts, why it counts and what they want to do with it (Martin and Rahman, 2001).If literacy programs continue to leave unexamined the sources of knowledge they use, then learners' knowledge will be unexamined and unacknowledged too and we will be ignoring the real work that needs to be done. If we examine and acknowledge the forms of literacy that are practiced in learners' lives we see the many ways that learners engage with literacy daily in order to get by in the world such as interacting with social workers, teachers at their children's schools, the transit operator as they attend appointments, the medical receptionist at the doctors' office, etc. When one looks at the multitude of social literacies that we engage in on a daily basis, we begin to understand how groups on parenting, citizenship and community action are important and valuable as real knowledge. "Useful literacy can teach people to read and write, but we can only learn what 'really useful literacy' means from our students" (Martin and Rahman, 2001). This is the crux of our work in literacy. It is the difference between teaching skills and empowering action. Until we empower learners to recognize their experiences and their ability to make change, we just aren't doing the work.

Works cited

Barton, D., Hamilton, M. and Ivanic, R. (Eds.). (2000). Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context. London: Routledge. hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge Press.

Martin, I. and Rahman, H. (2001). "The politics of really useful literacy: six lessons from Bangladesh." In J. Crowther, M. Hamilton and L. Tett. (Eds.), Powerful Literacies. National Institute for Adult Continuing Education (NIACE)