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Women's literacy is held to be a key factor in promoting better health, family planning & nutrition in the developing world. This book assesses the connections & tests common assumptions, bringing together experience from South Asia, Africa & South America.
Women's literacy is often assumed to be the key to promoting better health, family planning and nutrition in the developing world. This has dominated much development research and has led to women's literacy being promoted by governments and aid agencies as the key to improving the lives of poor families. High dropout rates from literacy programmes suggest that the assumed link between women's literacy and development can be disputed. This book explores why women themselves want to learn to read and write and why, all too often, they decide that literacy classes are not for them. Bringing together the experiences of researchers, policy makers and practitioners working in more than a dozen co...
Offering new theoretical, empirical and methodological perspectives on adult literacy, lifelong learning and social change, this book challenges traditional debates on adult literacy and development. The volume brings together debates and research from the Global South and Global North and is original in moving beyond descriptive accounts of adult literacy programmes, classrooms and a focus on best practice. It provides both a historical perspective on this field as well as looking forward to future research and pedagogical directions. By broadening from an international development to a social change perspective, this book offers an alternative starting point. Unlike development, social tra...
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this book explores the learning and literacy dimensions of local volunteering for social change in the Philippines. It tells the story of youth and adult volunteers who experience vulnerabilities yet play central roles in local development efforts in housing and sexual health. Why do people who themselves experience vulnerability volunteer to help others? And what are their learning experiences in the process? In its unique application of a literacy lens to the study of volunteering, the book unravels how marginalised groups, often seen as 'thankful receivers', (re)use texts, words and labels to (re)define their roles in shaping social change and fo...
Adopting a 'social practice' approach to literacy research based on ethnographic methods, this book provides a strong critique of dominant understandings of the role of literacy in the lives of adults. It explores how groups of working-class adults can manage the literacy practices of their everyday lives by drawing on social networks of support. It is based on research conducted by the author over a 40-year career in adult literacy education, featuring the voices of varied adult groups, including prisoners, the long-term unemployed, local council workers, manufacturing workers, adult literacy students, marginalised young people, vocational students, and patients living with a chronic illness (type 2 diabetes). Each chapter follows a format of firstly explaining how dominant society views these adult groups in relation to literacy, followed by a qualitative examination of the perspectives of members of these groups on how they manage the literacy practices of their everyday lives.
Winner of the BMW Group LIFE Award for Contribution to Intercultural Learning, 2007 The research student population of higher educational institutions continues to expand to include people from an ever-widening range of cultural and educational backgrounds. However, many research methods courses are still directed at the traditional student population. This book examines aspects of postgraduate research from a cross-cultural perspective, analysing the dilemmas faced by international students when defining a research question, choosing research methods, collecting data, deciding which language to use and writing their theses. Through an exploration of how international students re-examine the...
Literacy and Development is a collection of case studies of literacy projects around the world. The contributors present their in-depth studies of everyday uses and meanings of literacy and of the literacy programmes that have been developed to enhance them. Arguing that ethnographic research can and should inform literacy policy in developing countries, the book extends current theory and itself contributes to policy making and programme building. A large cross-section of society is covered, with chapters on Women's literacy in Pakistan, Ghana, and Rural Mali, literacy in village Iran, and an 'Older Peoples' Literacy Project. This international collection includes case studies from: Peru, Pakistan, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Mali, Nepal, Iran, Eritrea, Ghana.
Based on an ethnographic study in a village in Malawi, the book focuses on understanding power relationships and identity in literacy practices using the concept of 'figured worlds'.
Assuming that women’s empowerment would accelerate the pace of social change in rural Nepal, the World Bank urged the Nepali government to undertake a “Gender Activities Project” within an ongoing long-term water-engineering scheme. The author, an anthropologist specializing in bureaucratic organizations and gender studies, was hired to monitor the project. Analyzing her own experience as a practicing “development expert,” she demonstrates that the professed goal of “women’s empowerment” is a pretext for promoting economic organizational goals and the interests of local elites. She shows how a project intended to benefit women, through teaching them literary and agricultural ...
"Through a number of case studies from England and Scotland, this book explores the complex relationship between adult learning and social change in the UK. Instead of the common focus on adult learning as kick-starting 'development', the authors consider how adult learning can emerge from and contribute to both wider and more local processes of social change. The first part features a study of the history of UK adult education from the 1919 Report and a chapter on the future after the failure of radical adult education in the UK. This is followed by analyses of the major social changes of our time, on health and well-being, on migration, on family literacy. The contributors then focus on re...