NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
Good Practice in Supporting Environments for Literacy
By John Oxenham, Council for Education in the Commonwealth
KeywordsLiteracy, Literacy environment
Summary
While a supportive literate environment is necessary to bring investments in literacy programmes to more complete fruition, the adult education profession has still not given potential investors the information on what good practices will promote such fruition and what level of investment is necessary to achieve it. This article investigates the supporting environments for literacy to be sustainable.
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It has long been clear and been made clearer by contemporary studies that simply teaching people how to read, write and do written arithmetic will not ensure that they will go on reading, writing and doing written arithmetic. They seem to need an environment that demands that they do so. Otherwise, the skills so prized by the international community ?lodge with them useless?. Worse, they gradually erode away. Apparently, securing your right to literacy does not necessarily secure your grip on it.
This fact raises the issue of the balance between ensuring just the human right to literacy for every individual, on the one hand, and on the other, regarding expenditures on literacy programmes as investments in social, civic and economic development for society as a whole. An argument could be made that offering individuals adequate opportunities to learn literacy satisfies the obligation to honour the right to literacy. Consolidating and developing the skills once they are grasped can be left to the individual. On the other hand, regarding literacy programmes as social investments involves the question of adequate capitalisation. If an enterprise is under-capitalised, it courts failure. Failing to foster a supportive environment for literacy could be viewed as under-capitalisation. The inference would be that, unless a programme supports the continued development of its neo-literates, it would more than likely be wasting its investment.
More than half a century ago, Dr. Frank Laubach and his team recognized this probability and ran workshops on how to produce materials that would encourage and enable neo-literates to become permanent literates. Thoughtfully chosen topics and rigorously controlled and developed reading vocabularies with attractive illustrations and layouts formed the grist of instruction for would-be writers. As with so much in literacy and adult education, the outcomes were apparently not evaluated, so that no assessments of their returns on investment are available to policy makers and financiers. Nevertheless, in principle, Laubach?s approach would seem to constitute good practice.
Mrs. Welthy Fisher?s Literacy House in Lucknow, India, again a half century ago, not only produced such targeted and graded literature, it also organised box libraries that circulated on bicycles through villages to reportedly good effect. The model seems sensible and appeared in several other countries. However, no assessment of whether it was a necessary or superfluous capitalisation is available to guide policy makers.
In the mid-1970s the government of Indonesia applied kindred principles in creating a ?Paket A? of 100 booklets on a variety of ?functional? subjects, all graded for reading difficulty. Completing the first 20 of the series constituted the attainment of basic literacy and managing to read all 100 of them signalled the official attainment of permanent literacy. Reading 100 booklets amounts to more than mastering one or two primers and, on the face of it, could be deemed good practice. However, the available evaluations do not assess whether the investment in ?Paket A? was excessive, deficient or just about sufficient capitalisation to ensure that successful learners did take up the literate practices of mainstream society and contribute to social development.
Contemporaneously, the literacy authorities of Thailand published and disseminated large news-sheets for villages, which were put up for public reading. Again, the idea seemed sound, entirely relevant to the interests of neo-literates and likely to promote social development ?in short, good practice. Again, however, evaluations of whether the news-sheets constituted sufficient or over-capitalisation do not seem to be available.
To summarise: while a supportive literate environment is necessary to bring investments in literacy programmes to more complete fruition, the adult education profession has still not given potential investors the information on what good practices will promote such fruition and what level of investment is necessary to achieve it.
Further reading
Cawthera, A., (1997) Let?s Teach Ourselves: The Operation and Effectiveness of a People?s Literacy Movement, Manchester UK, University of Manchester Centre for Adult and Higher Education
Cawthera, A., (2003) Nijera Shikhi and Adult Literacy: Impact on Learners after Five Years, Effectiveness when Operating as an NGO. http://www.eldis.org/fulltext/nijerashikhi.pdf
Dikmas.(1998) Impact Evaluation of Nonformal Education Program in Batch I and II Intensive Kecamatan. Final Report. [main author Menno Pradhan, printed by Pusat Pengembangan Agribisnis]. Jakarta. Directorate of Community Education, Directorate General of Out-of-School Education, Youth, and Sports, Ministry of Education and Culture.
Karlekar, Malavika (ed.), (2000) Reading the Wor[L]d: Understanding the Literacy Campaigns in India, Mumbai, Asian Pacific Bureau of Adult Education
UNESCO. (2005) EFA Global Monitoring Report 2006: Literacy for Life. Paris. UNESCO Publishing
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