The literacy and numeracy ‘crisis’ in Australian workplaces: discursive rhetoric vs. production floor realities

The dominant discourse on adult literacy and numeracy in Australia sees the federal government, industry, workforce skills agencies and the media speaking with one voice on the ‘crisis’ involving workers’ low literacy and numeracy skills. Underpinning this discourse are the Australian results of the international Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALLS) which are used to model correlations between low literacy/numeracy levels and productivity. In turn, these correlations are deemed to have implications for the competitiveness of individual enterprises and the prosperity of the nation. In the ALLS, approximately half of manufacturing workers are found at the lowest two levels. Adopting an ethnographic perspective, and viewing literacy and numeracy as social practices, this paper investigates this ‘crisis’ from the situated perspectives of managers, trainers and workers in three manufacturing companies. Multiple observations of production work and semi-structured interviews with over 50 company personnel reveal a contradiction between the crisis discourse rhetoric on workplace literacy and numeracy and the realities of production work. Literacy and numeracy are found not to have a negative influence on production work in the three companies. This raises questions about the basis for the crisis discourse, and government policy and programmes that flow from it.     

British Cultural Influence and Japan: Elizabeth Phillips Hughes's Visit for Educational Research in 1901–1902

The ideal of Japanese womanhood was created according to an educational ideology suited to a modern nation state. One regularly used concept was ‘ryōsaikenbo’, a mixed ideology, drawing together idealised images of the British lady and traditional Japanese women. Another imitated concept was Japanese athleticism called new Bushidō influenced by British boys' public school morality during the era of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. However, there was a strong sense of Japanese cultural nationalism that grew in reaction to the threat of foreign enemies and the hardship of two wars, the Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895, and the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1905. This created a potential problem. Despite an occidental veneer, those new values were combined with traditional Japanese religion. Elizabeth Phillips Hughes' articles published in Japan during 1901 and 1902 reflect this process of inventing a tradition of both Japanese women's and men's ideal that was originally influenced by the values of the British middle class and the fact that early feminism was trapped within imperialistic ideology. Eventually, girls' physical exercises were recommended as long as they did not damage femininity. Less feminine sports took popular underground paths. Girls' physical exercises flourished after the First World War in Britain and the Second World War in Japan.     

A comparative analysis of national media responses to the OECD Survey of Adult Skills: policy making from the global to the local?

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is put forward as a landmark development in the lifelong monitoring and international comparison of education. The first round of PIAAC’s Survey of Adult Skills compared performance in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments across 24 countries. However, the translation of any OECD agenda into national policies is mediated by many actors, including the media. This paper examines and compares how the national media of Japan, England and France reported on the PIAAC results of their countries and the extent to which these reports mirror key messages from the OECD’s Country Notes. It begins to trace how the OECD PIAAC agendas materialise into national policies. Although their role in this initial period was limited, we argue the roles of the media together with other policy actors must be monitored as they interact to shape possibilities for sustainable adult education policies.     

‘The history of the Ouinkai’ – the alumni association of the Tokyo higher normal school for women: a milestone in Japan’s education for women

ABSTRACT

The book, The History of the Ouinkai, was published in 1940 as a commemorative project for the 60th anniversary of the Tokyo Higher Normal School for Women (THNSW). The purpose of this article is to illustrate the type of data collected in the surveys and their findings, to explore some of the activities of the association, and to discuss how the Ouinkai alumni association, in collaboration with THNSW, worked with female teachers nationwide. The paper traces some of the multi-norms and multi-roles for female teachers that THNSW promoted and their relation to norms thought to characterise ‘ideal’ Japanese women. The publication of The History of the Ouinkai was a milestone in Japanese women’s education because it demonstrated the Ouinkai’s successes in respect of Japanese educational policy for women as well as the leadership that the Ouinkai provided to female graduate teachers, whom it organised with skill.