Digital storytelling in adult education and family literacy: a case study from rural Ireland

Previous research on digital storytelling (DST) has focused chiefly on children and youth, but we know little about how it is used in non-formal adult education. This article analyzes a DST class in rural Ireland, which was organized by a family literacy program and offered for parents at an elementary school. Data sources included fieldnotes, interviews, and digital stories by the parents who finished the class (n?=?3). Janks's interdependence model of critical literacy is used to analyze how the class incorporated power, access, diversity, and design. The class did not engage in ideology critique or analyze the origins or consequences of dominant technologies, languages, and literacies (i.e., investigate power as domination). However, the class did provide access to technology knowledge and skills; affirm parents’ diverse knowledge, languages, life experiences, and identities; and equip participants to design and disseminate their digital stories. The study highlights possibilities for using multimodal composition in family learning and adult education.     

Literacy,power and practices: taking a discourse-ethnographic approach to exploring adult literacy practices in Pakistan and the UK

ABSTRACT

The framework for this paper takes its central orientation from the New Literacy Studies (NLS) body of research which focuses on the analysis of texts and practices rather than the skills-oriented perspective of large-scale quantitative studies. In this paper, these are the texts of everyday life and the literacy practices of adult migrants before and after their migrations. Barton and Hamilton (2000) claim that practices are neither accidental nor random but are given their structure by institutions. This includes social institutions, such as the family, education and religion, and includes those institutions which are formally structured through rules and procedures, such as schools. The analysis in this paper focuses on the sponsorship of literacy in Pakistan prior to one adult’s migration and the ways in which these literacies are taken up after migration to the UK. The contribution of this paper to the field of adult literacy is the multi-disciplinary methodological framework it presents for analysing the socio-political influences which shape the accessibility of literacy, accessibility which is taken for granted in large scale surveys which measure literacy skills. To do this, I combine work using the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Studies (Wodak 2011) with the literacy practices approach set out above to explore how one Mirpuri family deploy their multilingual literacy resources.     

Building knowledge,building community: reflecting on the value of a national research programme in adult literacy

In 2003 the National Literacy Secretariat (NLS) of Canada, at that time a branch of the Department of Human Resources and Development Canada, decided to review its research function. This article discusses some of the questions the review raised for the field. Many of these issues are to do with the management of knowledge – what research gets funded, to be performed by whom, and with what kind of approach – whereas others are concerned with the meaning of the research function itself, and what it can contribute to a field of practice such as adult literacy.