Ulasan
Artikel 2
Oleh :
Maslinda
binti Mat Daros
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Title of article : The
changing literacy demands of VET: a global issue with local
implications
Author : Sue Shore
University
of South Australia Author
Literacy: skills and
knowledge or gift relations?
Australian
Bureau of Statistics 1996 have provided clearer pictures of the literacy and
numeracy skills of the general Australian population. Each of the national
surveys was at pains to point out that the concepts of literacy underpinning
them drew on complex relationships between social practice, cultural milieu and
the purposes for using literacy.
Popular culture, media and public interest dictate, to
a certain extent, the presentation
of
these stories, but its more convinced
that the campaigns themselves help to wage an ongoing
war against those with literacy difficulties.
In fact the campaigns are
responsible in part for sustaining the perception that literacy difficulties
reside in the individual. Moreover they
also resuscitate the erroneous argument that the cure to literacy problems lies
in better schooling. This perpetuates
the idea that literacy development, or lack thereof, is like an illness that
can be cured. It ignores the significant
changes that occur over time as people engage in work and
wider
social activities.
There’s a different set of
understandings about literacy development.
These understandings
are informed by the manner in which literacy is used in everyday moments at
work and at home, with partners and strangers, with children and retail
assistants, with friends and colleagues, with bullies and allies. This set of understandings has a number of
points in common with the belief that literacy is important in creating a range
of life choices about employment and citizenship. Nevertheless, the understandings of literacy also include the
challenge to consider how literacy learning is implicated in limiting those
choices for particular groups of people in particular located.
Putting literacy on the
agenda
In Australia, as in many other
countries, International Literacy Year (1990) served as a vehicle for educators
and lobbyists to ‘put literacy on the agenda’.
During the lead up to ILY and in the ensuing years many countries used
the opportunity to lobby their governments, to advocate for changes in funding
as well as a reorientation in the kinds of programs available to learners. In Australia a publicly funded Adult Literacy
Action Campaign (ALAC) received Federal funding during 1988/9 to prepare the
ground for a national effort to provide better awareness, participation and
infrastructure for adult literacy provision.
Over the next few years it was common to hear literacy practitioners,
policy makers and industry stakeholders talk of moving literacy ‘from margins
to mainstream’, a reflection on the educational values and status accorded
literacy researchers, policy makers and ‘the field’ itself (cf. Gilding 1994).
One key aim of ILY, like many other
designated ‘international’ years, was to initiate policies and structures that
would have an effect beyond the immediate domain of literacy agencies (for
example in community health centres, youth shelters, labor market programs and
especially workplaces). It also aimed to
consolidate provision beyond the narrow confines of the ‘designated year’.
Literacy and training
policy: an idiosyncratic mapping of some changes
Just as literacy and numeracy are
embedded in socio-cultural, political and economic contexts, so too, the
challenge of providing good research, policies and structures for provision are
also embedded in changing contexts. In
international exchanges and in conferences I have been asked to explain why Australia
has a ‘literacy problem’, when it is clear that the dimensions and scope are
quite different from that of, say, India or Thailand. For example in the decades before 1990 it was
frequently claimed the Australia had a 100% literacy rate. Yet clearly evidence from a major literacy
survey Aspects of Literacy (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1997) and reports
from many associated professional agencies claimed otherwise. Marion Norton (1996, 59) describes it this
way:
[Aspects of Literacy] demonstrates that
there is, in fact, a very wide range of reading
skills which are affected by the
difficulty of the text. Therefore there
is no simple
answer to the question ‘How many people
can't read?’ The question has to be put
‘How many people can’t read something
for the purposes they need?’ This
approach
emphasizes the view of reading as an
interactive process in which readers bring prior
knowledge and experience to the text and
use new information for their own
purposes.
The policy set the framework for a
number of responses to overall funding formulae, dispersal of funding to
‘target groups’, curriculum, assessment and outcomes. Over the next decade accompanying policy,
research, curriculum and advocacy attempted to address:
• the misconception that literacy
problems were a product of poor schooling;
•
the misconception that school practices alone were responsible for preparing
adults for
the world of work;
• the pervasive deficit discourses often
used to guide literacy debates;
• the need for understandings of Plain
English use in workplaces, public documentation
and general communication practice;
•
the range of literacy practices in use amongst ‘target group’ populations that
were
commonly believed to be most severely disadvantaged
when it came to acquiring
literacy skills for work and community use.
Conclusion
Thinking about literacy in this way is
not a simple process of reflecting on an event and determining how far ‘we’
have strayed from our original objectives.
Rather taking these ideas to heart involves a fundamental shift in
understanding relations of literacy, power, knowledge and ‘progress’. It is a reflexive act which is not simply
“rectifying and justifying” (Trinh T. Minh-ha 1991, 48), rather it is deeply
implicated in the act of continued becoming, of self-constitution, which Trinh
explains so well:
Subjectivity does not merely consist of
talking about oneself, be this talking
indulgent or critical. …What is at stake is a practice of
subjectivity that is still
unaware of its own constituted nature …
unaware of its continuous role in the
production of meaning (Trinh T. Minh-ha
1991, 77).
In this respect being reflexive about,
as distinct from reflecting on, our role in provision involves pushing the
imagination to think otherwise, to notice how assumptions about literacy define
the limits of involvement in working life for employers and employees; how
clean categories of literacy become the frame of reference for continued talk
about the ‘unproductive’ worker; and, how assumptions about literacy for work
and life continue to ignore the dynamics at play that constitute the kinds of multi literacy
available in culturally diverse communities of workers and citizens. Equally important, reflexivity is about
rendering visible the extent to which literacy is framed as a gift, an
assumptions that pervades many debates about literacy, yet the problematic
nature of the gift is rarely examined.
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