WHERE TO NOW FOR ADULT LITERACY? by Rosie Wickert
This is an adapted version of that talk and is published with kind permission of NSW ATESOL.
These are volatile times for adult literacy. In spite of considerable efforts in recent years to position adult literacy strongly in education and training reform agendas, its future is insecure. The current enchantment with delivering vocational education and training to the regulatory mechanisms of the market means a major rethink of many of the assumptions that adult literacy and ESL professionals hold about the organisation and practice of their work. What are the possibilities for the future? This paper briefly explores the policy contexts of adult literacy and considers some challenges for policymakers and practitioners in the field and beyond.
Educators cannot ignore the impact of globalisation on contemporary governments. Globalisation is demanding a radical rethink of what nations or countries understand themselves to be and how they operate. To become players in the global economy, nations must become internationally competitive. For governments this requires a shift from a nationalist to an internationalist focus. Thus, education's traditional role in the production of citizens in the interests of national identity is being displaced by a requirement that education deliver productive 'human capital' in the interests of international competitiveness.
Alongside this challenge has been the related insistence that the public sector itself become more efficient, more effective, more competitive and more capable of responding quickly to rapid change. The resulting reform of public administration, often referred to as 'corporate managerialism' (Taylor et al.1997, p. 79) is characterised by, among other things, a focus on targets and outcomes, reporting systems against performance indicators, strategic planning and performance based contracts of employment.
As teachers we have been experiencing for some time this dual thrust of restructuring in the interests of the delivery of a more competitive labour force (what some refer to as vocationalism) and restructuring in the interests of efficient management of public resources. This complex set of pressures are often generically referred to as economic rationalism. Economic rationalism is frequently cited as the cause of what many teachers see as an undermining of the educational values of justice and participation; as though moves to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness necessarily result in a less just and humane educational system. Although there are indeed many instances of the inequitable effects of micro-economic reform, there is an important point to be made about what Yeatman (1990, p.101) calls the 'moral components of economic activity'. I understand her to mean by this that the rationale for pursuing efficiency and competitiveness is itself framed by a prior set of values (an ethos) which will have a normative effect on how such policies are enacted, what strategies are determined and what kinds of outcomes are desired. Economic rationalism then is not necessarily 'bad' or unjust in itself, its application will be inflected with the norms and values of the broader political context in which such orthodoxies are practised. For example, many argue that the Australian Labourist version of economic rationalism retained a strong commitment to social justice and democratic participation, whereas a conservative one, associated historically with the UK and New Zealand, is less likely to foreground these values.
Readers may recall the equity rhetoric surrounding the publication of the Finn and Mayer reports in the early 1990s. This was also the period of much activity in relation to what was then called award restructuring and the associated development of occupational competency standards as a mechanism for both restructuring awards and reforming education and training. You may further recall that much of the opposition to the development of competency based approaches to education came from conservative educationalists, apprehensive of the dilution of traditional (and exclusive) academic standards in relation to knowledge and expertise. The unions and many Left educators rehearsed powerful arguments in support of the training reform agenda as a potentially powerful way of achieving greater accountability from the education system for the education and training of the less academic population for whom traditional forms of assessment such as the HSC had done little or worked against. Under the Labourist version of an economically rationalist reform agenda, many of us educators, committed to the principles of flexibility, transparency, accountability and so on, were prepared to pursue these within framing discourses of efficiency AND equity. Aware of the risks of reductionism we constructed complex, principled, and yes admittedly, protective, frameworks which we believed would enable us to respond to the demands for greater accountability whilst fostering the continuing professional development of a new field of practice and taking into account the knowledge and understanding we have of literacy as social, cultural practices. However, arguably, educators of all political hues failed to recognise the greater risk - that of losing control of education. This is the dilemma we now find ourselves in. Increasingly we find those frameworks that were developed to respond to effectiveness demands in an educationally sound and equitable manner being, in a sense, disciplined and made to work in ways that we feared - managerially not educationally. Drawing here on Foucault's terms, we find ourselves 'governed' by these 'technologies' simply in order to continue to have a place in the determinedly industry driven (as opposed to provider driven) and market driven agendas of the new federal government.
Needless to say the benefits or otherwise of the disciplining of language and literacy to the new technologies or techniques of public management will continue to be debated. Whatever one's position on this however, what are the realistic choices available to a field such as adult literacy? To retreat to the old battle lines or (as Luke (1994) characterises it), to the Left academic's 'safe haven of critique and take apart Labor's economic rationality agenda from the sidelines as many have' is an option unavailable to most and a position of dubious strategic value anyway. Adult literacy, in order to maintain funding, has had to become part of mainstream VET provision.
In response to this challenge it:
- foregrounded the significance of literacy to economic reform
- developed competency based curriculum frameworks so as to get curriculum accredited according to the principles established through the reform agenda AND in order to be eligible to tender for labour market program funds
- argued for and developed models for the integration of language and literacy into occupational competency standards AND into mainstream vocational training
- developed (draft) teacher competencies
- developed a national reporting system - in order to maintain commonwealth funding within a discursive framework of outcome purchase. ie. If you can't demonstrate outcomes how can we purchase them?
- tendered for program funds.
To an extent these efforts to ensure a place in a rapidly changing VET environment were strongly influenced by advice from experienced policy activists about the need to mainstream literacy. There are now some who are questioning the wisdom of this advice. For example, Joe Lo Bianco questions whether adult literacy is tractable to the demands of corporate managerialism and asks 'whether the lesson to be drawn the past ten years [is]that policy processes have corralled adult literacy provision into narrow confines, excluded many students who genuinely ought to be assisted and seriously damaged the profession by converting much of its mission into economistic and labour market orientation not relevant to many potential students' (Lo Bianco 97). Others, such as Helen Moore warned of such possibilities many years ago. However, as I have suggested I am dubious about whether the choice exists to remain outside of these changes.
As I commented earlier, many of us involved ourselves in the new modes of working in principled ways motivated by an ethic of transparency, accountability, equity and so on. In other words, many of us did think we could and should improve our practice. And there is no doubt that much of this work has contributed to stronger practices - partly because it was accompanied by an extensive professional development and research program. But what we may have also done is deliver this form of education to a regime of control that is not now driven by the same ethic. Making a complex educational field accountable (ie subject to being counted) commodifies it, transforms it into something that can be purchased. It enables control to be passed from the provider to the user - the consumer. In new management terms this is intended to increase options (purchase options) which, theoretically, should improve provision. In our field this supposed outcome is complicated by the situation that the real consumer/purchaser is not the student, but the employer or, in the case of unemployed people, the employment assistance provider; whose interests are protected by the application of certain 'fitness tests' for potential 'clients' of their services and whose activities are constrained by a payment by results condition.
The new rhetoric continues to foreground the magic potions of flexibility, efficiency and so on, but they are being drawn in to service a different meta discourse - that of user choice within a competitive training market whose effectiveness (ie the achievement of employment and training success) will be judged in terms of the acquisition of industry developed competency standards and NOT the achievement of curriculum or educational standards. This will be ensured by the linking of industry endorsed competencies rather than curriculum outcomes to qualifications. The policy rhetoric around 'real jobs' of course dictates this. Where is equity in all this? One significant difference between the positions of the two governments appears to be that equity provisions are now contained within a set of eligibility requirements linked around the concept of 'capacity to benefit' that has yet to be defined. Equity, it is suggested within the emerging rhetoric of the new National Training Framework will be met through the principles of flexibility, quality and a performance based system but conditional on an individual's 'capacity in terms of achieving a sustainable employment outcome' (FlexServices , the facts - DEETYA Home Page). In other words, equity appears to be conditional on capacity. A strange conception of equity. In the policies of the previous government there is a much clearer commitment to a range of equity strategies designed to help remove various barriers to employment through, for example, child care, a scheme to more readily recognise overseas gained skills and qualifications, Austudy, counselling support and, of course, language, literacy and ESL provision - more a structural than an individualised notion of barrier.
How the new assistance will be delivered is a key issue for teachers in adult literacy and ESL, given a potentially fragmented network of EPEs competing for potentially successful outcomes within a 'payment by results' system. At the time of writing, how this will work is not clear. Although there is provision in the legislation for the existence of specialist EPEs, these may be restricted to those working with specific groups such as Aboriginal peoples. However all this pans out, the implementation processes will significantly change what is now called 'service' provision, as case managers in EPEs work to broker customised packages for their clients and develop links with potential employers of these clients. I have an open mind about whether this kind of approach is likely to be more effective for the long term and young unemployed. I have no doubt however that it will deliver to government an increased potential for surveillance of the unemployed and also of the provider of the literacy and numeracy 'services'.
It is difficult for practitioners in ABE to know how to read these changes to Commonwealth funding. There is no doubt that there were problems with the labour market programs of the previous government. However the uncoupling of labour market program funds from accredited curricula in favour of a more direct linkage with industry competency standards appears to meet the worst fears of the critics of competency based approaches to teaching and assessment. Further, as competency standards are to be the direct responsibility of ITABS it is hard to see how the more general educational needs of many ABE students can be met within the proposed arrangements.
There are just so many assumptions behind contemporary policy directions that demand exploration but the confidence with which successive governments implement their new found solutions makes such questioning very difficult. Earlier this year, John Ralston Saul, the Canadian philosopher characterised this dilemma as follows:
'The corporatists are truly in power today, in every way, at every level. The confusion over what is left wing, what is right wing, so common in political parties today, is an illustration of how corporatism has become the sole way of managing and running a society. The political debate has become so corporatist, so technocratic, so artificially complex that most citizens cannot find their way into the public debate.... Everything is rhetoric or specialist dialects. And thus our debates circle around the illusion of absolute solutions to our problems - solutions which are presented as inevitabilities.' SMH. date unknown
Examples of the kinds of questions that many adult literacy and ESL practitioners might want to pose of such absolute 'solutions' would include:
1) what is the evidence to suggest that a more competitive market yields a more equitable outcome?
2) What is the evidence that tendering and contracting out public service is more efficient?
3) what is the evidence that case management and customisation of service will more effectively meet the basic education needs of unemployed people?
4) And closer to home - what is the evidence to support the marshalling of language and literacy competencies into particular levels on a matrix?
Policy texts are texts of desire. This is nicely captured by the counterpositioned notions of policy as threat and policy as promise. The policy edicts from the present ministers of vocational education training and youth affairs can be read as the desires of powerful people who believe in the promise that a competitive free market will deliver efficient, flexible and quality training. To those who don't share this, they are the threats. The challenge to those of us caught up in all this is about how to 'read' policy shifts in ways that enable productive and constructive engagement.
Critical linguists such as Kress and Fairclough who explore the work that language is made to do in policy texts, show how deconstructive textwork can create spaces for creative interpretations by revealing, amongst other things, the contradictory and clashing discourses that are always at play in policy texts. A recent paper by Poulson considering the concept of accountability discusses how governments engage in redefining or reconstructing the meanings of particular terms for the purpose of supporting political aims. She shows how the term accountability has been 'used by successive governments to attempt to establish a discursive consensus which constructs teachers and schools as being in need of external regulation' Poulson 94,p.585). However she also shows that not all teachers obligingly occupy such a subject position - many interpret accountability as a moral issue of self-regulation which enables them to 'contest the discursive disciplinary power of accountability' and 'redefine situation according to their own principles and priorities' (p. 590). I think that this is what many Australian language and literacy educators were also doing, but the space to manoeuvre has significantly shrunk.
Stephen Ball's (1993) framework of the policy process is also oriented to an optimism. He identifies three contexts for policy action - the context of influence, the context of text production and the context of implementation in which respectively policy can be understood to be an intention, a text and in action. This is a helpful model and one that many teachers intuitively and pragmatically adopt as they reinterpret policy intentions in their everyday work. But, here again, the fragmenting effect of current changes to the working contexts of adult literacy teachers will reduce the potential for teacher practitioner 'rewriting' of policy in the context of implementation; the classroom or other site of work. Indeed, this is one of the intentions of this government - to minimise the possibility of educational capture of its VET Agenda.
The reader may be a little surprised that a discussion about adult literacy has been so focussed on the broader changes in education and training and employment access. However this is where the work opportunities for literacy teachers will increasingly lie. All indications are that funding for stand alone adult literacy and numeracy access programs are reducing and that opportunities for literacy education will be increasingly integrated with the policy priorities of training and workplace reform. Ongoing change is thus inevitable. A choice to be located outside of all this is illusory. To constitute the policy problem of adult literacy outside the new public management assumptions will be to again marginalise it as a policy issue. It is no longer sufficient to argue the importance of literacy and numeracy as a basic human right - the continuing challenge is how to continue to attract funding to an area of provision that finds it hard to demonstrate strong learning outcomes in terms that are acceptable to an assessment driven system. The radical 'literacy agenda' cannot be reclaimed because 'presentness is all we have', not some humanist romantic ideal of it. One thing is very clear. We can no longer rely on a separate notion of adult literacy and numeracy curricula and be assured of infrastructure for that provision. As McKenna (1997) recently explained, the emphasis will be on broader outcomes of employment and productivity and adult literacy teachers and managers will be found as case managers, industry trainers, and assessors and consultants to ITABS, enterprises and trainers. The notion of a career as a teacher in this field is rapidly disappearing. As the nation's attention is turned once again to a 'literacy crisis', a sophisticated 'policy literacy' will be required of those who see their task as to keep alive some form of equitable adult literacy provision.
References
Ball, Stephen (1993) What is Policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes. Discourse. Australian Journal of Education Studies. Vol.12, no.2, pp.10-17
Lo Bianco, Joseph (1997) Policy Proliferation: Can literacy cope? Fine Print, Vol 20, No 1, pp.3-11
Luke, Allan (1996) Getting Our Hands Dirty: Provisional politics in postmodern conditions. In
Smith, R and Wexler P (Eds) After Postmodernism: Education, politics and identity. London: Falmer Press, pp.83-97
McKenna, Rosa (1997) Instruments of Change: policy implications for adult literacy. Fine Print Vol 20. No.1 pp.9-21
Poulson, Louise (1996) Accountability: a key-word in the discourse of educational reform.Journal of Education Policy Vol 11, No. 5, pp.570-592
Taylor, Sandra, Rizvi F, Lingard B, Henry M (1997) Educational Policy and the Politics of Change London: Routledge
Yeatman, Anna (1990) Bureaucrats, Technocrats, Femocrats, Essays on the contemporary Australian state. Sydney: Allen & Unwin
Saul, John Ralston (1997) Meaning Lost in Corporate World. Sydney Morning Herald. Date unknown.