The value of literacy practices

Abstract

The concepts of literacy events and practices have received considerable attention in educational research and policy. In comparison, the question of value, that is, ‘which literacy practices do people most value?’ has been neglected. With the current trend of cross-cultural adult literacy assessment, it is increasingly important to recognise locally valued literacy practices. In this paper we argue that measuring preferences and weighting of literacy practices provides an empirical and democratic basis for decisions in literacy assessment and curriculum development and could inform rapid educational adaptation to changes in the literacy environment. The paper examines the methodological basis for investigating literacy values and its potential to inform cross-cultural literacy assessments. The argument is illustrated with primary data from Mozambique. The correlation between individual values and respondents’ socio-economic and demographic characteristics is explored.

Keywords:

• literacy practices
• values
• weighting
• Mozambique

Notes

1. The decision to use equal or unequal weights has been the subject of academic debate. Hsieh (2004) suggests the usefulness of unequal weights, while opposite conclusions are reached by Trauer and Mackinnon (2001), Wu and Yao (2006a, 2006b), Stapleton and Garrod (2007) and Wu (2008), while mixed evidence is provided by Russell et al. (2006) and Philip et al. (2009). Decancq and Lugo (2013) provide a review of weighting methodologies.

2. Recent papers have tried to correct for this through the ‘anchoring vignettes’ methodology, where personal valuations are set against a standard in order to increase interpersonal comparability – see Angelini et al. (2009), Beegle, Himelein, and Ravallion (2009), Kaypten, Smith, and van Soest (2007), King et al. (2004), Kristensen and Johansson (2008) and Salomon, Tandon, and Murray (2004).

3. The pilot comprised structured interviews with eight respondents, four males and four females. The purpose of the pilot was to test both the understanding of the questions being asked and the efficacy of the flashcards as mnemonic support for the interviewee. The pilot led to improvements in the design of the questionnaire and in the phrasing of the questions and, in addition, as mentioned in the text, it confirmed that the flashcards were effective in representing a certain literacy practice for the benefit of the interviewee.

4. The concept of literacy practice is a ‘higher level of abstraction’ to that of literacy events, including ‘folk models’ and ‘ideological preconceptions’ (Street 1993, 12). Barton and Hamilton (2000) describe literacy practices as ‘general cultural ways of utilizing written language’ that incorporate ‘values, attitudes, feelings and social relationships’ (7, emphasis added). Calculation (CALC) is viewed as a social practice of numeracy (see Baker 1998). The flash card and description for calculation implied numeracy including written numbers. We apply the conceptual abstraction associated with literacy and numeracy practices to support statistical investigation and aggregation. The situated detail of literacy and numeracy practices and question of why people attribute value to them are beyond the scope of the study and would be an interesting avenue for further research. 

5. Quoting from our respondents, some of the intrinsic and more abstract reasons for valuing literacy were ‘being knowledgeable’, ‘being open-minded’, ‘having a mild temperament’, ‘being able to understand the importance of things’, ‘see things in different ways’, ‘develop your mind’, ‘have good feelings’, ‘being able to forgive’, ‘distinguish the good from the evil’ and ‘understand that you should help others’.

6. It is important to note that due to the specificities of certain occupations it was not possible to achieve an even gender balance across occupations. Given that occupational categories are found to influence valuation of literacy practices, one may wonder whether this gender result may be biased. In order to check for that, we ran the same regression using the subsample made of the occupational categories that are gender balanced (market sellers, street sellers and farmers, accounting for 73.43% of the total sample) and our gender results still held, which makes us confident that the gender imbalance of some of the occupational categories did not bias our findings. We thank a referee for raising this important point.