Rethinking Adult Literacy with a special reference to Self-help Groups in Rural India

1. Rethinking Adult Literacy with a special reference to Self-help Groups in Rural India Sk Aktar Ali Erasmus Mundus Scholar European Masters in Lifelong Learning: Policy & Management The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University; Duesto University, Spain & Institute of Education, London University Email: ali.aktar@gmail.com

2. Agenda • Formulation of the Problem (Case Study) • Research Questions • Concepts & Issues • Theoretical Understanding • Analysis

3. Problem Formulation (Case Study) ‘Evaluation of Continuing Education Programme & Self-help Groups in Midnapore District’ – This project has been conducted jointly in 2002 with National Institute of Adult Education (NIAE), New Delhi & Department of Adult Continuing Education & Extension, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.

5. Midnapore District • Located in the southern part of West Bengal. • Very rich tribal population. • Total Area: 14081 sq. kms. • 11736 villages, 54 blocks, 12 municipal towns & 47 police stations. • Total Population: 15 million (approximately). • Literacy rate: 75%. • Main occupations: Agriculture, Fishing.

6. District Literacy Movement • Started Total Literacy Programme (TLP) in 1990. • Linked Total Sanitation Programme (TSP) with TLP. • Continuing Education Programme (CEP) started in 1998, popularly known as Ishwar Chandra Jana Chetana Kendra (ICJCK). • Linked Micro-credit system (Self-help Groups) with CEP.

7. Continuing Education Programme (CEP) Objective Provide learning opportunities on a continuous basis and improve the quality of life of the poor people. Criteria • Neo-literates, who completed Total Literacy Programme/Post-Literacy Programme. • School dropouts. • Pass outs of primary schools. • Pass outs of non-formal education programmes and others who are interested in availing the opportunity.

8. Function: CEC One CEC caters to a population of about 2000-2500 in a village, one Nodal Continuing Education Centre (NCEC) for cluster of 10-15 CECs. • Teaching-learning centre for remaining non-literates and neo-literates, • Library and reading room, • Venue for group discussion, • Venue for vocational training programmes and skill upgradation, • Agency for promoting sports and adventure activities, • A composite information window and a community centre.

9. Self-help Groups (SHGs) Objective Access to low-cost financial services with a process of self-management and development for the adult learners. Functions • Only neo-literates in CEP have permission to participate in SHG. • SHGs are small informal and homogeneous groups of not more than 10 members. • The group should form under the Block officials, local Panchayat bodies. • The group regularly collects a fixed amount (Rs. 2 = 0.238 Dkk per day) to thrift from each member. • The group should open a savings bank account with the bank. • The group should maintain simple basic records such as minute book, membership register, savings and credit register and bank passbook.

10. Problems: What learners say? Informer A: I could not use it in practical life and thought it to be simply ridiculous. I enrolled in an adult literacy centre and was regular, but felt that these new literacy skills from the centre were not helping me in performing the daily literacy tasks related to my requirement. Informer B: I was struggling to relate classroom education to maintaining my account. I felt discouraged and was becoming irregular in attending the class. Informer C: I want to learn to teach my daughters. I found that literacy classes are very irregular and disappointing. I do not like the way of teaching in the classes. Informer D: I found that the way of teaching and curriculum are very childish. The teacher treated us as a child.

11. Informer E (a group of SHG members) We have comprehended our daily life without literacy. Therefore we do not feel to attend the literacy class again. We started making incense sticks for our economic gain but even in this case we had to face lot of problems like keeping record, maintain account and dealing with the customer, proper marketing of the product and so on. Now we have come to realize the significance of literacy.

12. Reasons for not participating in the Literacy Programme • would not fulfill our belly, • cannot use it in practical life, • irrelevant for occupations, • very irregular and disappointing, • treated as a child, • comprehended daily life without literacy, • classroom activities do not address SHG problems, • literacy does not produce income, • going to literacy centre is a waste of time, • feeling lazy to go at night, • literacy primer is very odd.

13. Problem of Definition Census (2001) defines literate as ‘a person, who can read and write with understanding in any language...’. National Literacy Mission (1994) defines literacy as ‘acquiring the skills of reading, writing and arithmetic and the ability to apply them to one's day-to-day life’.

14. Few Examples Few Examples

15. Questions Need to be Asked • What do we mean by literacy? • What are the different dimensions of literacy practices? • What is the relation between literacy and development? • What kind of literacy is needed as a pre-requisite to economic development?

16. The International trends of the Concept of Literacy

17. 3 Concepts

18. Functional Concepts of Literacy A person is literate when he/she has acquired the essential knowledge and skills which enable him to engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning in his group and community, and whose attainments in reading, writing and arithmetic make is possible for him to continue to use these skills towards his own and the community’s development. (Gray, 1956) A powerful construct in defining literacy in terms of its social purposes, the demands made on individuals within a given society, to function within that society, to participate and to achieve their own goals. (Baynham, 1995) The acquisition of technical skills involving the decoding of written texts and the writing of simple statements within the context of everyday life. (Rassool, 1999)

19. Characteristics: Functional Literacy • Literacy is described as a skill, which is required for a broad range of activities associated with the individual’s participation in society. • Literacy became identified with the skills needed in the context of employment and economic development. • Literacy is seen to have high economic value and it serves as an indicator for economic and societal development. • Literacy becomes linked to work-related skills and emphasizes society’s demands on the individual. • Externally-set needs for reading and writing. • Economic needs, not individual needs. • The functional model sees literacy as a fixed set of discrete skills, which are believed to be universal and transferable to all kinds of situations that require the use of written language.

20. Critical Concept of Literacy Opposing to the functional model, critical literacy’s primary purpose is not to help the individual to move up higher on the existing social hierarchy, but a fundamental critique of the dominant culture and the existing power relationships between social groups. (Shor, 1993) Critical literacy refers to the perspective of literacy as not only ‘reading the word’, but also ‘reading the world’. (Freire and Macedo, 1987) To decode critically their personal and social world and thereby further their ability to challenge the myths and beliefs that structure their perceptions and experiences. (Giroux, 1988)

21. Characteristics • Moves away from the ‘utilitarian-vocational meanings’ (Rassool, 1999) of the functional model towards pedagogy. • Allow participants to understand their world in terms of justice and injustice, power and oppression and so ultimately, to transform it. • A new way of thinking of literacy programmes, what their aims are, what methods they use, what content they teach, etc. • Critical ideology as ‘literacy for emancipation’.

22. Literacy as Social Practice • What does it mean to say literacy is a social practice? • Why is literacy social? • What do people mean when they refer to literacy as a social practice?

24. Main Principles: NLS

25. NLS: Conceptual Origin • Opposed ‘Great Divide’ Theory. • Eradicating any clear distinction between orality and literacy. • As ethnographic studies of literacy practices in a variety of contexts accumulated during 1980s, theorists began to systematize new ways of understanding the development, acquisition and use of literacy. • Literacy practices as windows into a group’s social and political structure – that is, not only can one look to local contexts to understand local literacy, but one can also look literacy practices to understand the key forces that organize local life (Brandt and Clinton 2002).

26. Great Divide Theory (GDT) • GDT has been influential in shaping adult literacy policies in 1960s. • Grew out of seminal articles and books such as Levi-Strauss’ (1962) The Savage Mind, Goody and Watt’s (1963) article ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Havelock’s (1963) Preface to Plato, and McLuhan’s (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy. • Anthropologists and Historians ware primarily concerned with cognitive differences between literate and non-literate societies and individuals. • Psychologists and Social Scientists were concerned with the cognitive differences among individuals of varying literacy statuses within literacy society. • Categorical differences in cognition and language as consequences of literacy: ‘Literacy Thesis’. • Literate and non-literate societies (e.g. primitive vs. civilized, simple vs. advanced). • Modes of thought ( e.g. pre-logical vs. analytic, concrete vs. abstract). • Ways of using language ( e.g. utterance vs. text, context vs. abstract). • Literacy is an important motor of individual cognitive and societal development.

27. Criticism: Great Divide Theory • The landmark study by Scribner and Cole (1978), ‘Literacy without Schooling: Testing for Intellectual Effects’: breaking down the GDT at the individual level; rather than seeing literacy as a set of portable, decontextualized, information processing skills which individuals applied – literacy as a set of socially organized practices in which individuals engaged. • Great Divide ignored the knowledge and understanding of any ‘indigenous’ communication system and any local forms of knowledge and experience that are not codified in writing.

28. Key Concepts: New Literacy Studies • Make a distinction between autonomous and ideological models of literacy (Street, 1985). • Develops a distinction between literacy events and literacy practices (Prinsloo & Breier, 1996). • Local practices towards literacy (Barton & Hamilton, 2002). • Ethnographic approaches towards literacy research (Street, 1995). • Constructivist Learning (Piaget, 1967, Vigotsky, 1978).

29. Autonomous and Ideological Model of Literacy • Introducing literacy to poor, ‘illiterate’ people will have the effect of enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, regardless of the socio-economic and cultural conditions that accounted for their ‘illiteracy’ in the first place. The autonomous approach is simply imposing western concepts of literacy on to other cultures or within a country those of one class or cultural group onto others. • It tends to based on the ‘essay-text’ form of literacy. • Institutional ‘given’ programme. • Ideological model of literacy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill; it is always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. • It is about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity and being. • Offers a more culturally sensitive view of literacy practices as they differ from one context to another.

30. Literacy events & Literacy practices Literacy event as any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants’ interactions and their interpretative processes. Literacy practices as a means of focusing upon social practices and conceptions of reading and writing. e.g. Urban taxi drivers (Prinsloo & Breier, 1996), struggle activities in settlements, rural workers using diagrams to build carts and those involved in providing election materials for mainly non-literate voters etc. The concept of literacy practices in these and other contexts not only attempts to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy events, but to link them to something broader of cultural and social kind.

31. Ethnographic Approach • B. Malinowski (1922), widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern ethnography. • Ethnographic research draws its data from the observation of, and participation in, everyday life events. • It is based on an interpretive process that involves both the researcher’s and the research subjects’ perspective on the issues in question. • The use of ethnography to study literacy centrally has to do with the NLS’s interest in understanding the role of reading and writing, rather than just observing the way it is taught and learned in educational settings. • Ethnographies of literacy are primarily interested in what people do with literacy, as well as what meanings it has for them in their lives.

32. Learning Theories

33. Constructivist Learning The work of I. Kant, J. Piaget, L. Vigotsky, J. Dewey and J. J. Rousseau are often mentioned as some of the most influential founding sources. • Learning is the process of constructing and negotiation of meaning, and is exhibited when a group of learners arrive at a shared mental model of a concept by reconciling their personal experiences with those of others. • Learners construct new knowledge and skills through interacting with others and the environment and by reflecting upon these experiences. • Situated learning theory is ‘transactional contextualism’, a view that learning occurs in collaboration with others in the particular social world in which they find themselves. • ‘Practice-engagement theory’ – participants learn through ‘social situation in which literacy is encountered and practiced’. • Learners, with teachers can co-create the curriculum and construct their knowledge. • Teacher can design with learner’s instruction to meet the learner’s needs, interests, background knowledge and skills. • Learners have right to develop their own beliefs.

34. Six Propositions for Social Theory of Literacy • Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these can be inferred from events which are mediated by written texts. • There are different literacies associated with different domains of life. • Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationships, and some literacies are more dominant, visible and influential than others. • Literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices. • Literacy is historically situated. • Literacy practices change and new ones are frequently acquired through processes of informal learning and meaning-making.

35. Rethinking Literacy and Development What is the relation between literacy and development? What kind of literacy is needed as a pre-requisite to economic development?

36. Rethinking Literacy The most significant rethinking about the relationship between literacy and development is the questioning of whether literacy in the conventional form is meaningful for development or not.

37. 3 Arguments Argument: 1 Literacy is not a pre-condition for the spread of some forms of basic knowledge, however much it would be facilitated by literacy (UNICEF, 1990, pp. 53-54). Argument: 2 Literacy is neither an entry requirement, nor necessary for the clientele to learn. The facilitation of adult and continuing learning can be provided without first teaching learners to read and write (Bas, 1991, cited in Lynch, 1997, p. 90). Argument: 3 While literacy is a pre-requisite to ‘school ability’, it is not crucial to either the ability or the need of non-literates to learn” (Grandstaff, 1976, p. 300).

38. Argument: 4 It has now come to be believed that adults can and do learn effectively without being ‘literate’. They learn from each other; they learn from radio, television, bollywood films, music, etc. {proximate literacy}. Research has found adults who are aware of their situation (including their oppression) without being literate, adults who engage in decision-making about their future and their community’s future without being literate, who run substantial enterprises without working with texts (Rogers, 2001).

39. Examples Of 21 community leaders in the area, only four could read and write. But it was these men who possessed the social capital to engage in discussion with power holders, such as the local mayor, regarding resources for the community, which their younger, more educated and ‘literate’ neighbours could not. (Betts, 2002, p. 5) In a country like India, there are millions of men and women who still possess traditional knowledge in areas as diverse as medicine, health practices, architecture, agriculture practices and knowledge about self-fulfilment, but most of them could be illiterate. (Sanshoden, 2000, p. 29)

40. Examples A group of women wanted to learn how to sew. When they were given a sewing manual and told they needed to read it before they could learn to sew, they lost hope. (They were told that) in order to read the sewing manual, they would have to take a literacy class. They felt that by the time they had learned to read well enough to understand the sewing manual, their interest in sewing would be gone. Literacy was seen as a barrier to their goal, because they and their teacher assumed that reading was a pre-requisite to all forms of learning (Dixon and Tuladhar, 1994). Why should these women wait to learn sewing after reading? Why can’t the sewing manual be adapted for use as a literacy learning text? Why can’t the sewing class serve as motivation for the literacy lessons?

41. Model Literacy can come Second Model D 1 L D 1

42. Literacy can come second Model If literacy does not come first, then our participants can start with developmental activities. We cannot reasonably ask adults to wait to learn literacy skills before engaging in developmental tasks; we cannot say to all those who will never come to classes that they are permanently excluded from development. Therefore, we can start with developmental activities and fit literacy in, as one of the many different sets of skills and knowledge, the group will find themselves acquiring in the course of that activity.

43. Arguments We came to the conclusion that literacy education could be introduced, where appropriate, into classes on business skills, for example, or …training, but it [literacy education] was unlikely to attract large number of learners on its own (Prinsloo & Breier, 1996, p. 231). The work of Nirantar in various places with women who have been learning about water pump maintenance and awareness animators, showed that the learning of literacy skills came after starting development activities (Rogers, 1994, pp. 11-22). In Bangladesh, a group of men running a tempo service have been learning literacy through the literacy tasks attached to that project (Rogers, 1994, pp. 11-22)

44. Stopped worrying about Literacy Literacy by itself had no meaning or relevance for those with whom we worked. Adults attended the literacy classes only as long as it took them to find work, anything to help them to augment the family’s low income. They bluntly told to the teachers to go away or stick to teaching children. Learning how to sign their names or write the alphabet would not help to fill empty bellies. So we stopped worrying about literacy as an end in itself or as being central to our work. We began to work together with the people in trying to understand their immediate and daily concerns and difficulties; learning together to analyze the problems and understand the root causes; then planning how we could, together, find the answer and, above all, to take action.