From Skills to Social Practices

For nearly two decades researchers, theorists and innovative educators around the world have been talking about a major shift in thinking about the nature and meaning of literacy. They have moved away from defining literacy narrowly as the technical skills of reading and writing. Instead, they are stretching the meaning of the word to include the many ways that reading and writing are interwoven with knowledge, practical activities, social relationships and cultural meanings. They see “becoming literate” as intimately bound up with how children and adults learn to use texts and images in daily life, as an integral part of participating in schools, families, workplaces and communities. This broader view treats literacies as plural and as complex, cultural and social practices.

We have found the metaphor of a tapestry very helpful in grasping these ideas. A tapestry has multiple threads, densely interwoven to make a whole cloth with a pattern that is inseparable from the cloth itself. Without the threads, there is no pattern, no cloth, no tapestry. And conversely, if one strand is pulled out of the tapestry, it becomes “just” a thread. It loses the meaning and beauty it has as part of the weave. These same ideas can be used to understand literacies in the workplace. A whole working environment is made up of many threads, including literacy threads. But if individual literacy threads are pulled out of their place in the weave of everyday working life, they lose the meaning they have as part of the whole.

This idea is remarkably simple, yet complicated to apply in practice, especially when it comes to learning. But it is essential, because when the everyday meanings are stripped away from literacy practices, it turns out that so are many of the conditions needed for their effective learning. This is a serious dilemma for all stakeholders in the field of adult literacy.

Changing Work, Changing Meanings

Meanwhile, workplaces too are under enormous pressure for change to survive in conditions of increasing international competitiveness. New electronic technologies and new management methods have brought an avalanche of new “texts” into workplace life. Examples include computerized manuals and records of Standard Operating Procedures; software programs providing a script for employees interacting with the public; and intensified use of visuals like charts, tables, graphs, symbols, and photos, all in addition to greater use of traditional modes of communication like bulletin boards and chalk boards.

It is conventional to interpret many of these workplace developments as evidence of higher skill requirements. Most current literacy policy follows from this assumption. But our research investigates this assumption more closely, focusing on the nature of these changes and their implications for both literacy learners and teachers. We discovered that as work changes, so do the nature and meanings of literacies in all kinds of working environments. This challenges us as educators to become more “workplace literate” as well.

In taking up these ideas, we are following in the footsteps of many researchers before us who have warned against relying too heavily on prevailing views of skill requirements as the starting point for understanding what it means to be literate in the workplace. They argue that starting with this notion abstracts people’s actions from the situation in which they take place.