LETTER: Learning for Empowerment Through Training in Ethnographic-Style Research: Theory and Practice in the Adult Literacy Field From a Bourdieusean Perspective

• In Event: Bridging New Literacy Studies, Classroom Language Ethnography, and Bourdieu’s Social Philosophy

Abstract

This paper uses an Adult Literacy intervention programme to explore relationships between theory and practice in the literacy field. It combines methodological perspectives derived from ethnography with theoretical perspectives rooted in Bourdieusean approaches.
The LETTER (Learning for Empowerment Through Training in Ethnographic Research) Project is a development project that helps adult trainers and course organisers gain first hand experience of ethnographic approaches to local literacy and numeracy practices in order to support learning and teaching. The project starts by working with the trainers of those who teach in adult and nonformal education programmes – the facilitators and teachers - so that the trainers can train them to adapt these approaches to their own local situations. The project is based on recent understandings of literacy and numeracy as social practice, which assumes that both literacy and numeracy have many different cultural/social uses and meanings in different contexts, and that those preferred by some educators are only a few amongst many. The LETTER workshops aim to train trainers in ethnographic style methodologies in discovering local literacy and numeracy practices. They then pass these methodologies on to literacy and numeracy facilitators and teachers for application in classroom.
Key questions here are: What can Bourdieusean theory contribute to our understanding of the LETTER Project? How does this example of practical studies in ethnography and education help to clarify such theory? And, in particular, how does the literacy dimension of such activities help to extend the links between Bourdieu and New Literacy Studies?

Bourdieu’s conception of the relationship between habitus and field offers a way of relating the LETTER approach to others in the field of literacy. As Rowsell argues: ‘The dialectic between habitus and field, or in other terms, between agent and structure is central to looking at how artistic practice operates in social context’; these ideas also extend to educational practice. At the first level, we might see dominant approaches as a ‘field’ of literacy working with institutional sedimented notions of skill, etc. which moves from international, usually western, contexts ‘downward’ to local contexts assumed to be ‘deficit’, ‘illiterate’ etc. In contrast, an ethnographic perspective begins within the field of local institutional practices in different contexts, to describe and engage with local habitus of participants, to recognise their practices and then to work outwards towards what new literacy practices they may wish to adopt in particular fields. The contrasting perspectives may be represented in terms of field/ habitus relations:

FIELD 1 ----> HABITUS <--------> FIELD 2

In Field 1 relations, the arrow moves in a single direction, whilst in Field 2, the kind of perspective represented by LETTER, the arrows move in both directions – relations are dialogic. This perspective has implications both for how such theory might address issues in practical programmes, in schoolingl and in adult literacy programmes, in the ‘north’ as well as the ‘south’, but also for how we might review the field of policy approaches to literacy and its implications for local meanings and uses of literacy.

Author

• Brian V. Street, King's College London