Kristen H. Perry

Primary school literacy in Southern Africa: African perspectives

This research review examines trends in recent scholarship concerning primary school literacy instruction in Southern Africa. Past scholarship, particularly that which originated from western researchers, focused on technical or structural issues facing literacy instruction in the region, such as language of instruction, school conditions, availability of books, and teacher training. Newer scholarship that has emerged primarily from African researchers focuses more on sociocultural and sociopolitical issues such as promoting a ‘reading culture’, shaping language policy, and examining literacy as a local social practice. Increasingly, researchers advocate local, rather than western/northern, solutions to African problems in literacy development and instruction. However, African perspectives are nevertheless influenced by western perspectives and agendas, as a result of colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalisation. Hybrid solutions that combine western and African perspectives therefore may be important for literacy development in the region.

What I Feel in My Heart: Literacy Practices of and for the Self among Adults with Limited or No Schooling.

Through this international cross-case analysis of ethnographic literacy practices data, we investigated two questions: (1) In what literacy practices do adults with limited or no schooling engage for personal fulfillment? and (2) What do these practices reveal about the nature of literacy for individuals who are often characterized as illiterate? Data came from 92 participants across 13 case studies from Africa and the Americas in the Cultural Practices of Literacy Study database. We queried the database to identify (a) the social activity domains in which participants read or wrote, and (b) their purposes for doing so, then narrowed our analysis to practices related to personal fulfillment (i.e., practices that were clearly for themselves and/or for personal expression, self-understanding, and/or identity). We categorized purposes into themes, contextualized the practices within the original ethnographic data, identified participants representing “rich cases”, compiled participant portraits, and developed coding schemes to examine data for patterns. Participants across worldwide contexts read and wrote for a variety of personal purposes, including coping with life, facing problems, or escaping their daily realities, or for entertainment. Practices often connected with spiritual or religious life domains or with participants’ attempts to make sense of their lives. An important theme across practices and contexts was participants’ marginalized status, reflecting the ways in which practices connected with other aspects of context. Our findings challenge current understandings of the ways in which those assumed to be illiterate or low-literate practice literacy, suggesting implications for redefining functional literacy and for adult literacy instruction.

The "Ofcourseness" of Functional Literacy: Ideologies in Adult Literacy.

We used metastudy and metasynthesis techniques to conduct a discursive review of 101 recent publications on the topic of adult functional literacy (FL). Our purpose was to understand the ideologies shaping current definitions and conceptualizations of FL, as well as how and why FL is researched and assessed as it is. Using discursive review techniques, we analyzed instances of legitimation, dissimulation, reification, and “ofcourseness” to explore the ideological underpinnings of the field. Close analysis of three passages related to theory, research, and assessment illustrates ideological patterns in what “counts” as FL. These patterns are grounded in ideological divisions between cognitive and sociocultural perspectives on FL—the effects of which we traced through our findings on what “counts” as FL, the logics of inquiry that undergird the field, and the ways in which these ideologies shape adult literacy assessment. Our discussion considers the larger implications of these ideologies: What is legitimated or reified, and what is ignored, dismissed, or subsumed, by these ways of conceptualizing FL? We offer future directions and raise important questions that arise from these conclusions.