Reading Our Work: Implications for practices from
researching literacies as social practice
with Tracy Defoe

Rapporteur: Caroline Vaughan

Tracy presented research from a study of four workplaces that will be published in late 2003 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This research examined the place of literacies in work culture including examples of where literacies are intermeshed with relations of power within the workplace among interacting groups, and how communication is enhanced or distorted by these interactions.

Tracy then gave a detailed ethnography of literacy use within one of the workplaces studied, "Metalco". Behaviours often ascribed culturally as characteristic of certain groups were noted, not without some well-intentioned humour – for example the engineers within the workplace who defined Tracy's work as a "communication system quality audit". More seriously, however, social behaviours influenced some of the greatest breakdowns in communications. For each distinct, natural grouping within the workplace, a particular directive could have multiple meanings.

Tracy described the technically detailed work at "Metalco". Teams of engineers work alongside machinists and others who each have defined parameters of exacting precision ("To 1/10th of a thousandth of an inch"). When applied to the broader workplace, however, the ethos of exacting precision, with authoritative and sometimes unquestioned directives, allowed for communications breaks and barriers between groups. Various groups operating within the workplace could apply differing interpretations, and one word within a memo was able to change the entire meaning. Often, the source of a system problem was miscommunication, not a lack of technical or fundamental "literacy" skill on the part of the worker or worker group.

Some of the research techniques detailed in the session included:

• Seeing literacies in the weave (i.e. practice where people are, not in the "classroom")
• Getting past the surface (Looking beyond skill to social relationships, greater work environment, etc.)
• Looking back; seeing the 'filters' in past practice (i.e. using a language of assessment in reviewing past practice)
• Reading a workplace (not just what kinds of notes did people take, but what did things mean there)
• Multiple, local meanings
• Paying attention to resistance, expect and honour it (valuing the work)
• Recognizing the value of each distinct group, and their applied knowledge

Finally, the information which emerged from the research converged around new ways of viewing literacy in the workplace. Beyond the traditional view of functional language skill sets, Reading Our Work describes the complexities of literacy as a social practice and how it is embedded in workplace knowledge, culture and action.

Suggested resource:
Belfiore, Mary Ellen, Tracy A. Defoe, Sue Folinsbee, Judy Hunter and Nancy S. Jackson. Reading Work: Literacies in the New Workplace. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.