Author: BALID Admin

Uta Papen (University of Lancaster), Ahmmardouh Mjaya (University of Malawi), Vicky Christoforatou, Mohammad Naeim Maleki, Catherine Jere and Anna Robinson-Pant (University of East Anglia)

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The New Literacy Studies (NLS) emerged in the 1980s (Street, 1984) as a response to the growing recognition that literacy is used and learned, not only within classrooms, but within everyday life. Based on in-depth ethnographic research conducted in different contexts such as religious institutions, markets, health centres and homes (Barton, 1994), the NLS have informed sociocultural and practice-based approaches to literacy and still have much to offer to teachers and policymakers. And yet this impressive body of work has had little impact on policy (Papen, 2023).

On the 18th of January 2024, the UEA UNESCO Chair for Adult Literacy and Learning for Social Transformation kickstarted the new year with a thought-provoking and engaging literacy forum, raising the question ‘Why do the New Literacy Studies struggle to influence policy?’ Posing this question was Professor Uta Papen from the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, University of Lancaster.

Uta Papen’s insightful presentation explored the interface between literacy research and policy, focusing on primary education in England. It addressed three factors that have hindered the influence of sociocultural and practice-based literacy approaches on policy: the policy environment itself and how it has changed; the wider economy of literacy research and what knowledge counts in the interface between research and policy; and the role of the media and public discourse in the relationship between research and policy. Uta shared her reflections on the use of phonics in early years literacy education to illustrate these constraints.

Over the past 30 years, there has been a substantive rise in the use of systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) in primary schools in England. The centralised policy system emphasises daily phonics instruction using specific government-approved programmes. Additionally, the Phonics Screening Check, where pupils’ decoding abilities are tested through 40 words (20 of which are pseudowords, phonetically regular combinations of letters forming a word that, however, have no meaning) is a nationwide assessment tool and has reinforced phonics teaching. These policy developments have made it challenging for teachers to incorporate diverse literacy practices and ideas from sociocultural approaches, as the focus is on promoting a uniform approach to literacy teaching.

The audience also heard that, in terms of research evidence, the policy move to SSP has been influenced by a limited number of studies which were consistently referenced in DfE documents, with Pearson’s “Clackmannanshire study” as the ‘darling’ of the English Education Minister’s phonics programme being consistently referenced. Uta argued that research critical of SSP has been largely disregarded. Recent policy papers continue to reference psychological studies, emphasising evidence-based practices and randomised-controlled trials (RCTs). The preference for RCTs in policy making suits the sector-wide reform agenda desired by policy makers, as they offer easily identifiable and defined knowledge, while excluding studies adopting other methodologies, such as ethnography which is frequently used by New Literacy Studies researchers.

The presentation concluded by exploring new pathways to policy impact, including proposed alliances with teachers, a focus on creating evidence and pedagogical models, drawing in ideas from the New Literacy Studies that can be implemented on a larger scale.

Vicky Christoforatou (Lecturer in Education on the Secondary PGCE course (English) at the University of East Anglia) offered important context to the discussion. She argued that policy, including the Education Inspection Framework in the UK, foregrounds one kind of knowledge only: schooled, academic, and ‘true’ knowledge; knowledge that must be learned and remembered.

Within the context of secondary English Language and Literature Education in England, this is problematic when engaging pupils with reading and responding to texts as well as producing texts. For example, in reading, different interpretations of texts are possible and, in writing, pupils, like authors, make choices. Manufactured responses that meet assessment criteria are privileged, whereas authentic responses and pupils’ own experiences with texts are not valued.

In another context with its own fabricated crisis, Initial Teacher Training, a mandated curriculum (ITT Core Content Framework) is a reductive list of ‘what works’ statements that pre-service teachers have to consume and then implement in their practice. All, irrelevant of phase or specialism, must also learn that SSP is the best way to teach reading.

In the two contexts above, it may seem that there is little space for sociocultural approaches. But there is space for creative compliance, for teachers participating in small or larger action research projects. Vicky concluded her contribution to the forum by bringing to mind Lawrence Stenhouse and calling for ways to celebrate teachers’ voices, create opportunities for teachers to collaborate and share their findings in accessible ‘platforms of knowledge’.

Responding to Uta’s presentation and presenting a perspective from Sub-Saharan Africa, Dr Ahmmardouh Mjaya of the University of Malawi, noted that an emphasis on valued, functional skills overshadows the socio-cultural and practice-based understanding of literacy.  And that reconciling functional skills and ‘literacy as social practice’ perspectives is an ongoing dilemma; a skills perspective that values assessment and its associated metrics is more easily accessible to policymakers.

Unfortunately, literacy measurement and assessment processes, in their current form, contradict the very spirit of the socio-cultural understanding of literacy and the contribution of the NLS. By contrast, the practice approach is learner-centred, focusing very much on what the learners do with their literacy and not on how much they have learnt after a programme.

However, Ahmmardouh argues, objection to current forms of literacy assessment without providing an alternative approach does not help to make a case with policy makers.  He agreed with Uta and Vicky about the importance of working with teachers and keeping conversations regarding the practice approach to literacy alive. He raised significant concerns that working with teachers, instead of policymakers, might appear as if we are pushing the approach through the back door. And that literacy learnt through the socio-cultural approach could appear as secondary or less important; while the phonics approach would be deemed the ‘real’ literacy.

Ahmmardouh also spoke of how, in certain contexts, alliances might raise ethical issues.  In Malawi, the curriculum is centralised and teachers are regularly monitored by education advisors to ensure that they are teaching the stipulated content. In this regard, there is a possibility that teachers found to be teaching ‘unsanctioned’ content could be disciplined. Related to this point is the issue of the purposes for learning literacy in preschool and lower primary and how the socio-cultural approach to literacy relates to these aims. In a Malawian context, at this level, literacy is mainly taught for academic advancement. So, it may be difficult to convince even teachers to forge these alliances in a context where the education system expects all learners to move in one direction.

The suggestion about producing a synergy of empirical evidence that may help in convincing individuals outside our circles is plausible. Perhaps, what is critical is the development of clear pedagogies of the socio-cultural approach to guide teachers, and to provide an operational outline of how learning through this model can be accounted for and by whom.

Uta Papen’s reflections on the links between the NLS and policy contexts, combined with the respondents’ ethical and political perspectives from Malawi and England provided a stimulating discussion at our UNESCO Chair Forum. We are looking forward to hearing about your ideas on literacy, research and policy in the contexts where you work – do share your comments!

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About the UEA UNESCO Chair

This partnership between UNESCO, the University of East Anglia and six universities in the Global South was established in 2016. We aim to develop understanding about how adult learning – particularly for women and young adults – can help address inequalities in the poorest communities of the world. Through investigating how or why adult literacy might facilitate or respond to processes of social transformation, including women’s empowerment, this UNESCO Chair programme sets out to strengthen the interaction between formal, non-formal and informal learning in research, policy and programmes.

See: https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/school-of-education-and-lifelong-learning/research/international-education-and-social-change/unesco-chair-programme

Contact: UNESCO Chair unesco.chair@uea.ac.uk

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References

Barton, D. (1994) Literacy: an introduction to the ecology of written language, Oxford: Blackwell

Papen, U. (2023) Literacy Research and Its Relationship with Policy: What and Who Informs Policy and Why Is Some Research Ignored? Research in the Teaching of English, 58/1, August 2023

Street, B.V. (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Learning and literacies in young people’s everyday lives: A blog series

Young people are navigating an increasingly complex world. They face intersecting crises such as the climate crisis, rising unemployment, deepening inequalities and the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, young people are often also at the forefront in responding to these issues in many communities – learning various repertoires of social action that constantly change. Against the backdrop of ceaseless flow of information, young people need to sift through a multitude of information both in ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ media.

BALID is curating a blog series to explore the role that learning (particularly informal learning) and literacies play in young people’s lives (beyond formal schooling), livelihoods and social action. The series hopes to feature young people’s work and ideas, inspire intergenerational conversation and become the basis for future action / research in these areas. We invite academics, practitioners, youth-involving organisations, activists and young people themselves to join us in conversation around the broad theme above and/or to explore the following questions:

• What sorts of learning occur when people engage in their daily activities online and offline (e.g. at home and in their wider community)?
• What kinds of knowledge do young people have and value? And, in turn, what are some of the best practices or programmes that value young people’s knowledge and skills?
• How do young people use texts, words and other forms of literacies in their everyday lives and in engaging with issues that are important to them?

If interested, please email Yeonhee Sun (yeonheesun1@gmail.com) or Chris Millora (c.millora@gold.ac.uk) with a brief description on what you plan to write. We welcome various blog formats such as video-based, animations, conversations and others. BALID blogs are around 750 words long and include 2-3 photos/visual media.

Zubair Torwali

Idara Baraye Taleem wa Taraqi, Pakistan

Twenty years ago, in November 2002, a symposium was held in Kyoto, Japan, under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) where a group of experts named as UNESCO’s Ad Hoc Group on Endangered Languages worked on a document entitled ‘Language Vitality and Endangerment’, which was published by UNESCO in 2003. This document lists nine factors in language vitality including:

 1) Intergenerational language transmission,

 2) Absolute number of speakers of the language,

3) Proportion of those speakers within the total population,

4) Trends in use of the language in existing language domains,

5) Response to emerging domains and media,

6) Materials for language education and literacy,

7) Official status and use including institutional and governmental policies,

8) Community members’ attitude toward their own language and;

9) Amount and quality of documentation.

All these factors are integrated and related to each other. Government and institutional policies affect the community’s attitude toward their own language, which further impacts intergenerational transmission, community response to new domains and media including the production of materials for language education and literacy. Government policies greatly impact the availability of materials for language education and literacy directly as well. The quality and amount of documentation influence literacy materials in a direct way, too, for no literacy materials in a language can be produced without documentation. Traditionally, documentation is text oriented as suggested by Prof. Himmelmann in his work on documentary linguistics. Many linguists follow the contrast he makes between language description on the one hand and language documentation “characterized as radically expanded text collection” on the other (Himmelmann, 1998, p. 2)

In a society like ours in Pakistan, where education is limited and mostly held as writing and reading of a certain language – in other words, conventional literacy – text still dominates, and great prestige is attached to it. In our Pakistani context a ‘language’ is what is written whereas the general perception holds that any language, not in writing, is a ‘dialect’ meaning speech but devaluing the language.

Given this particular educational and social context we had to first bring our languages into writing and promote their literacy with primary focus on its writing and reading. The writing systems of most of the indigenous languages in North Pakistan including my language , Torwali,  were developed after 2000 CE.

I began to develop the first ever alphabet book of Torwali in 2004 and after two years I, along with a team of other Torwali activists, started to develop a curriculum and course books in Torwali for the multilingual education (MLE) schools which started in 2008. This was after we had developed the course books for the literacy and non-literacy subjects. We got our preliminary training from the Frontier Language Institute , which is affiliated  to SIL International and is now named the Forum for Language Initiatives (FLI), based in Islamabad, Pakistan. Since 2008 our Torwali MLE schools, now called the Innovative Learning Model Schools, have grown to four in four different locations and the higher grade now is grade four.

Forced and motivated by the interplay of all the language vitality factors, we have tried a holistic approach to overall language literacy and development. Our organization, Idara Baraye Taleem wa Taraqi (IBT) which we established in 2007 has since then undertaken many integrated activities along with the MLE schools which include holding cultural and musical festivals, producing materials in Torwali for adults, developing literacy among the Torwali women, advocating for the cultural and other rights of the community, conducting research in Torwali people’s history, reclaiming and strengthening the ‘Torwali’ identity. These activities helped in changing the community’s attitude toward their language and culture, built their self-esteem, fostered greater self confidence among the youth and made the community recognized among the dominant communities. We also made greater use of social media and conventional media to promote Torwali, its culture and identity.

The Torwali language revitalization program is greatly acclaimed in Pakistan and internationally by academics, activists and the media. Our model fits into what Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope suggest in their book ‘Literacies’ (2012) as a ‘Multi-contextual and multimodal’ approach to literacy instead of the conventional literacy which focuses on the ‘textual formalities such as correct spelling and grammar’.

We have also been facing many challenges including the use of digital media in enhancing the Torwali language. Our current donors have also refused to extend funding our program beyond June 2023. This is undoubtedly the biggest challenge we now face: how to sustain our Torwali MLE program for the children as well as continuing the overall Torwali literacies and language development work.

 

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References:

1. Himmelmann, N. (1998). ‘Documentary linguistics and descriptive linguistics’. Linguistics, 36, 161–195.
2. Kalantziz, M. & Cope B (2012). ‘Literacies’. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Arianna Berardi

Musician and music therapist working for Nordoff Robbins

Over the next few months, BALID will bring you a series of blog conversations following BALID’s last interactive Informal Literacy Discussion (ILD) on the theme of ‘applying visual and sensory literacies in refugee research and practice’. Taking some definitions of visual and sensory literacies as a starting point, the blog series will look at further examples of its use in research, teaching, and arts practice, as well as raising important considerations around ethics, voice, and agency.

The first post in this series could be accessed here. The second post is available here.

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This blog follows my participation in BALID’s Informal Literacy Discussion (ILD) on ‘Using Visual and Sensory Literacies in Refugee Research and Practice’. In the ILD I talked about my sessions at a community refugee organisation where I have been working since October 2021. In this blog I share in more depth the nature of my music wellness sessions and reflect on the way in which these sensory practices support the building of community, belonging, and identity.

The music wellness sessions at the community and refugee organisation have now been running for seven months, and they have taken different forms and shapes: depending on the attendees, the type of music, and the various group dynamics. For example, this could include 1:1 sessions or larger open group sessions. At this particular setting, I work with people seeking asylum as well as people who are local to the area and I strive to create a safe and open space for all.

Most of the sessions at the refugee organisation have been in the format of an open group, which allows people to join and leave without a strict schedule, and this often creates a sense of flow and freedom in the group. More often than not, most attendees end up staying for most of the session.

These sessions aim to foster connections amongst participants and support the creation of a musical community where participants can share music from their own culture and background as well as learn new music. This process creates a unique sense of togetherness based on the rich and varied cultural and social experiences that everyone brings to the group: ultimately cultivating cross-cultural collaboration through music.

In the open group sessions, I encourage participants to experiment with playing various instruments, and participants are also given the opportunity to facilitate and lead musical interactions and activities. This supports a sense of shared agency and co-creation of musical material and the co-creation of a space where people can feel heard and acknowledged musically. Often, participants have commented on how empowering it has felt to be able to teach the group a song from their culture, and to hear and see everyone else being really interested and curious to learn. In this context, music allows the building and co-creating of a community that thrives because of its diversity, which can be a powerful message in a society that consistently aims to divide and separate people based on cultural, religious and socio-economic differences.

In this particular musical community, participants have also been able to re-shape and re-appraise their cultural and musical identity in a different context and under a different light. By playing, singing and re-creating songs from their cultural backgrounds, participants have, to various extents, re-shaped and re-defined their identity in connection to other participants’ identities. Through this process they have negotiated a broader, inclusive group identity which encompasses the nuanced and multi-faceted nature of the group.

Through the musical practices we have been engaging in in the sessions, participants have explored building a unique sense of belonging to the group: that is a belonging which is not merely the sum of each individual identity, but rather a communal identity which is fluid and constantly being shaped and redefined by those who are part of it.

I look forward to seeing how the sessions keep evolving and taking different shapes and meanings.

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Arianna Berardi. I am a musician and music therapist working for Nordoff Robbins, the largest independent music therapy charity in the UK. I have a background in Psychology and in the performing arts, and I began working as a music therapist in 2021. I am currently working in a variety of settings including special needs education, adult mental health, and refugee organisations.

 

Katie Blair

University of Birmingham

Over the next few months, BALID will bring you a series of blog conversations following BALID’s last interactive Informal Literacy Discussion (ILD) on the theme of ‘applying visual and sensory literacies in refugee research and practice’. Taking some definitions of visual and sensory literacies as a starting point, the blog series will look at further examples of its use in research, teaching, and arts practice, as well as raising important considerations around ethics, voice, and agency.

The first post in this series could be accessed here.

 

 

Arrival of the Ararat

The first refugees to be given sanctuary in the small town of Riace, in Calabria, Southern Italy, were Kurdish. Their sailing boat (named Ararat, an ironically apt name for people seeking sanctuary*) washed ashore in 1998, an event that marks the beginning of a period of unprecedented refugee hospitality in Riace, that subsequently extended its welcome to people fleeing Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Twenty years on, in October 2018, a change in Italian law, motivated by the government’s increasingly hostile anti-immigration policies stripped many refugees of their humanitarian status in Italy, and the majority of those resident in Riace were forced to leave. However, left behind in the now quiet streets is a valuable archive of street art, that reveals the impulses that underlie the town’s extraordinary openness and generosity to refugees, and which connects Riace’s recent story to its long history.

 

Ghost Town

Up to the end of the 1990s, Riace had experienced constant poverty caused by drought, economic decline, isolation, and organised crime, that resulted in successive waves of emigration to northern Italy, northern Europe, the USA, and beyond. Its medieval historic centre, with its remaining population aging and many of its houses abandoned and dilapidated, seemed destined to become a ghost town.

In 1998, to accommodate those first refugees, town councillor Domenico Lucano, who later became mayor, proposed and spearheaded an innovative humanitarian solution: by providing sanctuary, homes and jobs for the refugees, the town could be physically rebuilt and demographically and economically rejuvenated. This reciprocal exchange grew over the following twenty years into what became known as the ‘Riace Model’ of hospitality and integration, welcoming many thousands of people originating from more than 20 different countries, who brought with them a repertoire of many languages. The nearly-abandoned medieval town, previously isolated and remote, became a place of contact, connection and change, with the exchanges of ideas and cultures creating a new globalised community brought together under, or in solidarity with, the Riace model.

 

The Solidarity-Scape

As Riace developed a new identity as an open and welcoming ‘global village’, a distinctive multi-modal linguistic and semiotic landscape, comprised of signage, public art and murals, was simultaneously created through civic participation and the sponsorship of professional street artists. This ‘solidarity-scape’ became the backdrop to local life and an integral part of campaigning and activism, locally, online, and in the news.

Despite the termination of the Riace Model in 2018, its traces remain woven into the fabric of the town. The public art, and its reproduction in digital images, act as metaphors or metonyms for the Riace Model’s philosophies of solidarity, progressive politics and positive refugee inclusion, and it is these elements that interest me in my research. Using the methodological approach of linguistic landscapes to look at multi-modal forms of communication (signage and visual images, both with and without text), I aim to understand the ideology underpinning their creation, and their subsequent digital deployment.

Notable in Riace’s street art are the many recurring themes that I believe fit under a broader thematic umbrella of solidarity. From welcome signs greeting you in various languages, the use of flags (e.g. the representation of many nations within numerous artefacts, the recurring use of the ‘peace’ flag’s rainbow colours, and the colour-palate of Pan-Africanism), anti-mafia sentiments and commemorations of mafia victims, to naïve or folk art representations of global figures of resistance or revolution – the art and artistic expression in Riace all appears to have been created through an expression of solidarity. This language of international solidarity, encompassing progressive, pro-immigration and anti-mafia philosophies, and a recognition of the unequivocal correlation of southern Italy’s history of emigration with contemporary immigration has, in my view, been the principal inspiration underlying Riace’s extraordinary refugee welcome project.

 

 

 

And finally …

Here’s the word cloud generated during March’s Informal Literacy Discussion in response to our digital walking tour. It shows reactions and sentiments inspired by some of Riace’s artefacts, such as “welcoming”, “inclusivity” and “solidarity”. It was lovely to see that “warmth” appears at the centre and in larger font, indicating that this response was chosen more than once. 😊

 

 

Like to see more on Riace’s solidarity-scape?

If you would like to see the creative process in action, I recommend two videos available on YouTube:

• This short video beautifully evokes the day in 2009 when artists arrived in Riace from all over Italy for a collaborative artistic event called “The Colours of Memory”. (There are no English subtitles. The film begins with an Afghan child narrating the bombardment of their town by the Taliban and how they prayed for survival. Later the mayor talks about how the event commemorates those murdered by the mafia and calls for a fight for just world.)
• I highly recommend this time-lapse video of the creation of “Il Sogno del Guerriero” (The Warrior’s Dream) (2018), by Peruvian street artist, Carlos Atoche. The warriors’ dream, according to the artist, is the realization of the Riace Model of refugee integration. (Watch the video to the end to see the fully completed piece.)

For further information on Riace or linguistic landscapes research in a refugee context, please email me on cbb711@student.bham.ac.uk.

*The mountains of Ararat, located in the east of modern-day Turkey, were (according to interpretations of Genesis 8:4) believed to be the landing place of Noah’s Ark once the flood waters began to recede.

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Katie Blair is undertaking a PhD in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, researching the ‘Riace Model’ of refugee resettlement. Her study looks at identity, inclusion, and activism in multimodal solidarity-themed street art through digital linguistic landscapes analysis.

 

Professor Alan Rogers served BALID as President from 2020 but before that he had been an outstanding supporter and ‘critical friend’ for many, many years! We will miss Alan’s enthusiasm and energy not only on literacy and development but adult learning in general. In this blog post, BALID committee members share their memories and tributes to Alan – celebrating his impact on many of us over the years!

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Chris Millora, BALID Chair

Adapted from a tribute Chris read during Alan’s funeral service on 22 April 2022 at Southwell Minster.

Alan once told me a very useful analogy when I was having a hard time writing my thesis. He said that I could imagine my thesis as exploring a house. Now, I am going to discuss the kitchen and the dining room and their relationships, not the whole house, because I do not have enough space to write about the whole building. When I was writing this tribute and reading the many good words from colleagues about Alan, I was once again reminded of this analogy. I can certainly not capture the vastness of Alan’s impact to me as his former PhD student and to us at BALID. We at BALID greatly benefited from Alan’s incredible support, wisdom and commitment as a colleague and friend. As a tribute, I can only share some of this impact – just a couple of rooms in the big, beautiful house that Alan has helped built over the years.

Alan was a long-time supporter and critical friend of BALID. He served as committee member for many years and in 2020 was elected President. Many of us at BALID remember Alan’s intellectual energy. He often challenged our fundamental thinking around literacy – especially at a time when we were expanding our membership to include international partners in the Global South, some of whom such as our colleagues in Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Uganda, drew from Alan’s scholarship. I can also remember how Alan spoke so enthusiastically about a fantastic programme BALID used to conduct for many years during the Easter university vacation – gathering students from the Global South doing PhD research in the UK for a week of engaging with each other and with literacy scholars and experts in the field. When I heard this, I knew his heart had always been in supporting future scholars and facilitators in the field.

I knew Alan personally as my PhD supervisor. Having read much of his work, I was in awe of his wisdom and his humility and commitment to supporting young scholars. I can still remember vividly our first meeting. Anna, who was my primary supervisor, explained that she would be giving 80% of the supervision and Kate, my second supervisor, would give 20%. Alan, who was part of the team on a voluntary basis, remarked something like, “And I will be giving another 100%. So, you have 200% of our support!”. And it did feel that way – mentorship that went over and beyond the writing of a thesis. A year before I finished my PhD, Alan encouraged me to accept the invitation to be BALID Chair – a change in their leadership after 15 years and a decision that has helped me grow personally and professionally. In fact, I was unaware of his declining health because he had been so active giving comments to my book proposal for a series which he and Anna Robinson-Pant were co-editing. I signed the contract last month and it is a great pity that Alan will not be around to read the final product.

I’d like to think that Alan did not only ‘teach’ us something, but he ‘helped’ us. He was always generous with his time and ideas – and was very open to listen and give advice. Last December, Alan wrote a thought-provoking piece in the BALID blog which powerfully explained his distinction between teaching and helping. And I’d like to close my tribute today by sharing part of Alan’s blog:

It may seem strange that I – who have for years been researching and teaching about adult learning – should say that we should stop talking about learning and teaching and instead talk about helping.  But let me assure you that, if you really sit beside someone and with their willing assent help them with their tasks (like helping a child with their homework), the adult will learn much more than if you try to teach them.  It is a very simple change to make but it starts with us, not with the facilitator or the ‘learners’.  No more ‘teaching’, just helping.  And helping people with their tasks is so much more rewarding than teaching them something we think they should learn. At least, it is worth a try.

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Katy Newell-Jones, former chair of BALID

Alan generously planted seeds, showed people opportunities and threw out challenges.

I first met him in 1992, when he was coordinating the NGO Education for Development and needed free space for some workshops for literacy practitioners from Egypt. At the end of an inspiring week, Alan asked if I had ever thought of supporting literacy overseas. No, I hadn’t, but he planted the seed, showed me the opportunities and threw me the challenge.

As well as supporting early career researchers, Alan also supported early career facilitators. He promoted participatory approaches, actively encouraged participants to discuss in languages in which they felt most comfortable, and questioned facilitators’ motivation behind needing to follow every conversation.  Again, seeds, opportunities and challenges.

During my time as chair of BALID, Alan provided valuable links to early career researchers and input into key events. I am reminded particularly of December 2019, when he gave the closing comments at the Brian Street memorial event Literacy as Social Practice, hosted by BALID, the UNESCO Chair in Adult Literacy and Learning for Transformation, and King’s College London (See here for the report of the meeting.) The room was buzzing with energy. The event had been highly engaging and interactive.  Alan had three points which he shared in characteristically clear, direct language, referring back to seeds planted long ago, like “literacy comes second”[2] (see Alan Rogers, 2000, “Literacy comes second: working with groups in developing societies”, Development in Practice 10.2, pages 236-240).

• I came to wonder if sometimes we are as much part of the problem as we are the answer to the problem.
• What matters?
• ‘Them’ and ‘us’

I am grateful for the immense learning which resulted from opportunities to engage with Alan, and the legacy he has left for us all to continue to develop and learn in the future.

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Ian Cheffy, SIL International, BALID Treasurer

Although Alan was a committee member I recall that it was difficult for him to travel to London for our face-to-face meetings which were the norm in those pre-Covid days so his contributions were largely by email. He was certainly keen to keep us on track, and I recall that he could be quite challenging at times! The phrase “critical friend” comes to mind!

He was certainly passionate about adult education, and it was interesting to see how his interest in adult literacy in development led to him collaborating with Brian Street on the LETTER project, introducing literacy practitioners in several countries to the approach to literacy as a social practice. I very much appreciated his desire for adult literacy teachers and facilitators to recognise the actual uses of reading and writing which were important to people and to design teaching programmes around those. Such an approach is vitally important but I regret that it has not made the impression that it deserves.

Alan was committed to helping people grow. I was particularly glad of his support which was instrumental in the publication of the BALID book “Theory and Practice in Literacy and Development” edited by Juliet McCaffery and Brian Street (see McCaffery, J and Street, B (2016) Theory and Practice in Literacy and Development: Papers from the BALID Informal Literacy Discussions BALID and Uppingham Press)

Alan was a pioneer with a deep commitment to the study and the practice of adult education. He was an initiator too – here I am thinking of his Uppingham Seminar series, which he organised and which were held in a thoroughly collaborative manner. I attended only the one in 2016 but it was fascinating to see how he had been able to bring together a number of significant people in our world of literacy and development including some from UNESCO as well as literacy leaders from other countries.

We will miss Alan in person but his influence on our thinking and practice will not disappear.

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Suzan Voga-Duffee, Rift Valley Institute, South Sudan

It was Katy Newell-Jones who introduced Alan to me. At the time he was trying to get in touch with a group of South Sudanese who were conducting research for him. Katy put us in touch hoping I might know some of the students and could let them know that Alan was trying to contact them. It so happened that the same students got in touch with him while we were still emailing back and forth.

I immediately knew Alan was a good man with a golden heart, because he started to ask me what my interests were and if I was interested in academia, to which I said I was. He wanted to know my educational inspirations and asked about my work and we ended up discussing my Master’s thesis. He suggested I publish it, with his help of course. We had planned on how to do this, with him sending me guidance on how to rewrite the thesis. I am now in the process of editing it…and then came this news of his demise. May his gentle soul rest in peace.

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Mary-Rose Puttick, Birmingham City University

Sadly, I didn’t get the chance to meet Alan in person. However, I feel lucky that I have had email correspondence with him over the last year when he gave me the opportunity to write a chapter for his forthcoming book with Jules Robbins. Alan was very kind and supportive to me throughout this process.

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Gordon O. Ade-Ojo, University of Greenwich

 

Really devastated by this news, as I have only this week realised that Alan had invited me to contribute a chapter to a book he was editing but somehow the email had been ‘junked’. On Wednesday, I was just going to delete all the mails in my ‘junk’ and, for some reason, decided to take a quick look and found the email he had sent to me back in 2021. I now feel that I missed the opportunity of associating with greatness.

Talking about greatness, that exactly describes Alan. I had recommended his books and other contributions to my students for decades and was totally in awe when I finally met him in person. For such a great man, so much humility and readiness to interact with mere mortals like me. A sad day for the academic community in general, and for those he has admitted into his academic family.

True greatness in academia is never transient. It endures forever. Rest in peace, Alan

 

Mary-Rose Puttick

Birmingham City University

 

Over the next few months, BALID will bring you a series of blog conversations following BALID’s last interactive Informal Literacy Discussion (ILD) on the theme of ‘applying visual and sensory literacies in refugee research and practice’. Taking some definitions of visual and sensory literacies as a starting point, the blog series will look at further examples of its use in research, teaching, and arts practice, as well as raising important considerations around ethics, voice, and agency.

Attuned to the interactive and dialogical nature of the ILD, in this introductory blog, Mary-Rose revisits some key aspects of the event, interwoven with a set of visual artefacts, and uses this as a stimulus for thinking and ‘putting to work’ some of the ideas from her co-presenters Arianna Berardi and Katie Blair: applying them to her distinct, yet interconnected, research assistant and volunteering roles.

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The ILD opened with a visual artefact that, for me, symbolises the start of my doctoral research and my move to a new city. Perhaps heightened by its location under a grey concrete bridge on the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, as well as the temporal circumstances of a new chapter in my life, the ‘Welcome to Birmingham’ street art always gave me a sense of comfort when I cycled past on my way to the Somali community centre and never failed to bring a smile to my face (and still does).

I continued to give an overview of some key definitions in visual literacies, to which I keep returning. Rowsell defines visual literacy as ‘the ability to make meaning from information in the form of the image’, recognising the competence or the ability of the ‘reader’ of the image ‘to interpret, evaluate, and represent the meaning in visual form’ (2012: 444). Important also in my participatory ‘reimagining family literacy’ research with two groups of women, upon which I based my ILD talk, is the ‘artifactual literacies’ work of Pahl and Rowsell (2010): this work has helped me to think about how artefacts evoke memories and how they embody places, movement, intergenerational stories, feelings, memories, and communities. Thinking with embodiment, I now revisit some of the key aspects from my co-presenters, Katie and Arianna.

 

‘Thinking through the linguistic landscapes of Covid-19’

Katie Blair’s interactive digital walking tour through the Southern Italian town of Riace gave us a fascinating insight into her doctoral research and what she has conceptualised as the ‘Solidarity-Scape’ (read the second instalment of the series to learn more about Katie’s work). Seeing all those vivid community artefacts and visual signs inspired me to think about the linguistic landscapes of the two areas of Birmingham that I volunteer in, with the ‘Welcome’ sign above being part of one of these, and to think about the affective power of these representations.

I considered how I could re-enact Katie’s interactive walk with the families I work with from newly arrived and refugee backgrounds. Taking them on an interactive walk of their local areas could support families to feel a sense of belonging to their area by sharing in dialogue about the linguistic landscape of their new, and for some very temporary, ‘home’ and to learn multi-modal, and multilingual, ways of expressing welcome and solidarity. As well as thinking about the possibilities of linguistic landscapes in spatial dimensions, I also thought about how they can be applied to specific moments or periods in time, particularly considering the ephemeral nature of some of the street art of cities.

As I am currently working as a research assistant on the ‘Collaborative Community Mapping’ (Co-MAP) Erasmus+ project which explores how young people navigated diverse forms of learning during the Covid-19 school closures, I decided to try applying some of the principles of Katie’s approach to the research context of the Co-MAP project.

Scanning the hundreds of photographs I took on my walks of the city during the period of lockdowns, I found numerous images of the rainbow, in multiple abstract forms, that came to symbolise public gratitude to the UK’s National Health Service during this time: the rainbow would certainly feature on my Co-MAP linguistic landscape. However, there are two special images that I will always associate with that time of my life and historical moment: both of which, to me, embody the notion of ‘solidarity’. I considered the two visual artefacts with some of the questions that Katie raised in the ILD as stimulus: how do they make you feel? what impressions and reactions are you getting from these now?

These ‘Posters of Positivity’ became a surprisingly important mental health support to me during the Covid-19 lockdowns. I was immediately struck by the combination of the bright colours and the powerful directness of the messages. As time went on, I started to find more of the posters in different parts of the city, often in unexpected places such as in rundown backstreets. Every time I encountered one of the posters it sparked some excitement in me as I took a new photograph to add to the positivity trail I was imagining across the city. The posters gave me a sense of a collective, community mantra that brought people together during deeply challenging times.

The second artefact was particularly special as I saw it being created in action by street artist Gent 48 and also had the opportunity to speak to the artist. I was transfixed by the scale of the work and to see it emerging before my eyes. I was not only learning about the process of creating a large-scale art piece, but also was privileged to learn about the artist’s thinking behind the piece. To me, the entire image encapsulates the coming together of key workers and communities against this invisible, persistent, and dangerous force. When I now look at the visual artefact, it gives me a renewed sense of respect for all of the frontline workers that put themselves at risk to help others: a poignant feeling that has deepened now that I look at this two years later, at a different point of the pandemic, knowing what has happened in the ‘time and space between’.

 

‘Reimagining through rhythms’

I am using my final visual artefact as a stimulus to revisit Arianna’s interactive activity (see Arianna’s forthcoming blog to learn more). Hearing about Arianna’s music therapy work with refugees, and wider community members, was deeply moving, particularly her spontaneous approach that is unique and adaptive to each group she works with. Watching the way that she integrated her interactive activity into mine made me think about sensory literacies in ways I hadn’t considered before. Following my ‘sensory intra-action’ in the ILD where I asked the audience to recollect a smell that conjured up a particular memory of a place or time, Arianna asked us to revisit this memory. She invited us to add a rhythm to our memory: using an everyday object around us, and later demonstrated how she would vocalise her own olfactory memory associated with her grandmother’s house.

Recently I went to visit the women at the Somali centre and one of them, Zainab, had the most beautiful henna (which she told me was ‘xinaha’ in Somali) design painted on her hands and arms ahead of a wedding that she was going to at the weekend. Although I had seen henna many times before and loved the different designs I had seen, hearing Zainab and the other women talk collectively about the meanings of the henna in terms of gendered and cultural traditions added to its beauty. Later I started to think about Arianna’s work and about how the women might interpret the process of henna rhythmically and vocally: how would the feelings of family and cultural histories that are embodied within the artwork sound? How would the sounds come together in a collective: in women’s solidarity? Does henna have a particular smell attached to it and how could that smell sound?

 

Future thinking

I would like to draw my reflections to a close with a few important reminders. Sensory activities can unearth potentially emotive, or even traumatic, memories and therefore what remains of utmost importance throughout is to cultivate an inclusive, agential space in which all individuals are invited to participate, yet do not feel under any obligation. Sensory sharings must be accompanied by a respectful, caring, and ethical dialogue that involves refugee participants in decision-making around what sensory activities might look like and with whom they are shared.

Finally, at the end of the ILD, we explored some prompt questions in breakout rooms and two websites were kindly contributed by participants. I am looking forward to exploring the websites further and to continue learning in the area of visual and sensory literacies:

• https://www.leslla.org/resources-in-mother-tongues (contributed by Ian Cheffy)
• ALEF, a Swedish adult literacy organisation working in Togo, the Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia! https://en.alef.org/om-oss (contributed by Margareta Langbacka Walker)

 

References

Pahl, K. and Rowsell, J. (2010) Artifactual literacies: Every object tells a story. New York: Teachers College Press.

Rowsell, J., McLean, C. and Hamilton, M., 2012. Visual literacy as a classroom approach. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(5), pp.444-447.

 

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Mary-Rose Puttick is a Research Assistant at Birmingham City University, working on the Erasmus+ Co-MAP project. Her British Council project ‘Waiting for School’ is exploring educational provision for children from asylum seeking backgrounds between UK arrival and school. Mary-Rose’s PhD, completed in 2021, focused on family literacy provision in the refugee third sector.