Reading Work: A Social Practice Approach to Workplace Literacies

NANCY JACKSON

To be literate in a workplace means being a master of a complex set of rules and strategies which govern who uses texts, and how, and for what purposes. [To be literate is to know] ... when to speak, when to be quiet, when to write, when to reveal what was written, and when and whether and how to respond to texts already written… (Hull, 1995, p. 19)

Reading Work: Literacies in the New Workplace is a forthcoming book about workplace literacy in Canada. It explores the idea that being literate means not just reading and writing or performing tasks with print, but actually understanding the meanings and participating in workplace activities as a full member of a social group. It paints a picture of workplaces as complex communicative environments full of agreements and disagreements, satisfactions and dissatisfactions, participation and resistance, confidence and apprehension, and risk and opportunity related to changing work requirements. Literacy is at the centre of this story of complexity and change.

The book is written by a group of workplace educators and academics1 who did ethnographic research in four quite different work sites across Canada: a food processing plant that supplies the international fast food industry; a textile factory that makes specialty products for international markets; a state-of-the-art tourist hotel that is part of a multinational chain; and a high-tech metals manufacturing company that makes parts for a world market.

Each researcher in the In-Sites group spent from eight to ten months in one of these workplaces, got to know people and their work, and listened to their stories. Our goal was to look systematically at what people actually do and what they understand when they participate in various literacies in these workplaces. We also wanted to know what is happening when people do not engage with these literacies, even though they are expected to do so. Through this kind of close-up exploration of front-line experience at work, we have tried to understand the nature of literacies at work and what they mean from the point of view of people actually doing them.

Of course, we discovered that there is not one answer to these questions. There are diverse and sometimes conflicting answers, depending on where people are located in the culture and power relationships of the workplace. That’s why we became more and more convinced as we went along of the power and significance of a social practice approach to understanding literacy.