President's message
Literacy, whether achieved as the core of schooling in childhood or through learning later in life, is the passport that allows an individual to participate in contemporary social, economic and political development. Amartya Sen defines development as freedom, and literacy is the high road to freedom. The developing countries of the Commonwealth see literacy as a pre-eminent requirement and it is a central priority for the Commonwealth of Learning (COL).
The challenge, however, is enormous. In South Asia alone there are 380 million illiterate people, whilst in sub-Saharan Africa 80 million children are out of school - to say nothing of the further millions of illiterate adults. Although there are many basic literacy programmes operating throughout the developing world, they cannot meet the need. We must put new and more powerful tools in the hands of educators.
This report records the experience of literacy workers in India and Zambia who, with support and technical assistance from COL, used modern ICTs to design, create, develop and deliver literacy programmes in the rural parts of these two Commonwealth countries over a three-year period. Dr. Glen Farrell led the team and was at hand to encourage, motivate and support them throughout the work.
In today's challenging world new programmes must be carefully focused in order to ensure that they address realistic targets and optimise the impact of the specialist skills contributed by partner organisations. COL's mandate is to respond to the needs of the developing Commonwealth by applying its expertise in distance and open learning and harnessing appropriate technologies to education and training. The significance of the methods tested during this study is their capacity to reach out to learners in isolated regions as well as to penetrate into homes, work places and study centres in urban areas. Very importantly, they also hold the promise of significant economies of scale.
I congratulate warmly all those who made this activity a success and I commend their report to all who take an interest in this fundamental area of human development. Its lessons are highly relevant to the world's ambitious campaign to reduce the scourge of literacy by half in the next decade.
Sir John Daniel
President
Commonwealth of Learning
10 August 2004
Foreword
The COL Literacy Project (COLLIT) brings together three different fields of activity: development, information and communication technology (ICT), and adult literacy. Thus, any report about this project needs to be set within a wider context of the trends that are occurring within each of these fields.
The field of development is changing rapidly. Just as in the 1970s when development theory and practice took a sudden lurch towards more mass and socially oriented goals and away from an economic and technical paradigm, so today development policy is undergoing a change of focus towards the alleviation of poverty, and programmes are changing from participation to partnership. ICT is undergoing equally fast-moving changes, which on the whole strengthen the elitist control of these means of communication and present challenges to countries in closing the digital divide. In contrast, the changes which are under way in the field of literacy are not so obvious, but they still represent major challenges.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY LITERACY?
Literacy has traditionally been defined as the process of writing and reading (i.e., making sense of written texts), and of writing and interpreting written numerals and their relationships. But recently, this definition of literacy has come under challenge.
First, literacy is often confused with both language and mathematical calculations of various forms. (Numeracy is almost always included in the portmanteau term of "literacy.") For example, statements are sometimes made which seem to imply that adults cannot learn a language or how to do a calculation without literacy. But adults universally learn to speak a language without any formal assistance; they learn to calculate in their heads, again without formal assistance (though it is true that such calculations are in general limited to relatively small totals and simple processes). The adults who come to literacy learning programmes have already acquired their language and their calculation processes. Many adult literacy learners in Africa and Asia themselves confuse literacy with language, frequently making statements such as, "It would be good if we could learn English." But, in fact, many people learn to speak English without acquiring the skills of literacy. This use of the term "literacy" to mean language learning rather than working with written texts can confuse the larger issues of literacy that need to be addressed.
A second challenge comes from the increasingly common use of the term "literacy" in widely diverse fields. It is used in phrases like "computer literacy," "environmental literacy," "legal literacy" and "video literacy." The intention behind these terms is very different from the meaning of literacy as the process of writing and reading texts. "Computer literacy" means having computer skills, "environmental literacy" means having environmental awareness, and "legal literacy" means having knowledge of the law and the confidence to use this knowledge. The use of the term "video literacy" is particularly interesting. It means not only developing the skills of analysing existing videos and films to disentangle the messages which are being conveyed (e.g., how women or poor people are being portrayed); in some cases it also implies people coming to control the processes by making videos and films of their own reality, reflecting their particular world picture and concerns. In these cases, "literacy" is used as a metaphor for "use and control." ("Visual literacy" would seem to be different, for there is a process of decoding and interpreting symbols involved here in a way which is absent from these other cases.)
THE BENEFITS OF LITERACY
The different uses of the term "literacy" highlight the fact that some people see literacy as leading to other outcomes, such as cognitive development, skill enhancement and changes in personality. Many writers (particularly those coming from psychological and educational backgrounds) stress the benefits which they feel literacy inherently brings with it in thinking and doing.
But, increasingly, this view is being challenged. Others argue that literacy is not the same as awareness, skills, knowledge and confidence. They point out that it is possible to develop awareness without literacy, as people in Nepal are doing; to develop skills in many fields without literacy, as people in Kenya and other countries do; and to increase knowledge without literacy, as demonstrated in a legal literacy project in India being run by facilitators, some of whom are non-literate. And as development projects in Bangladesh show, many non-literate people can grow in confidence and act in their own development without taking part in literacy learning programmes.
Such practitioners assert very strongly that literacy is not some kind of magic, bringing with it inevitable changes in the personality and situation of the successful learner. Studies of a number of communities suggest that many of these cognitive benefits, where they can be identified, spring not from the acquisition of literacy skills but from engaging with others in all kinds of social action programmes. It is working with others on developmental tasks, not literacy, that brings about increased self-confidence, initiative and developmental attitudes and skills.
LITERACY AND MOTIVATION
The debate over the benefits of literacy exists partly because of the need felt by many agencies to motivate adults to learn literacy skills. UNESCO, for example, stresses that literacy is the key to health, wealth and happiness: "Without literacy there is no development." They exaggerate the benefits that literacy will bring (e.g., that you will not be cheated) and the disadvantages of being non-literate (e.g., you will be more susceptible to diseases). But once again this view is strongly challenged in both theory and practice. It is argued in rebuttal that if such statements were true, then some 900 million adults throughout the world would be permanently excluded from all forms of development, for these people will never acquire effective literacy skills. And experience shows that many men and women do indeed engage in effective developmental programmes without having literacy skills.
Left to decide for themselves, poor people in developing countries rarely place literacy very high on their developmental agenda. They perceive more clearly than many agencies that the economic and social benefits of literacy are tenuous and long delayed. It takes at least two years and often longer for an adult to become fluent enough in literacy skills for there be any effect at all on the quality of his or her life. And poverty cannot wait for two years, nor can the very poor afford to divert this length of time away from the more urgent cares of living. This, it may be argued, is the real reason why most adult literacy campaigns have failed. Until the right reasons (i.e., locally and individually relevant reasons) for adults to develop literacy skills are revealed, reasons that lie in communications, personal growth and social and religious life rather than economic enhancement, indeed in the complex power relationships which underlie literacy practices everywhere, the programmes will fail to achieve what are in fact the agencies' goals rather than the people's goals.
LITERACY FOR...?
There is a growing awareness that it is not the learning of literacy skills that brings about social and economic benefits, but the use of literacy in specific instances which does so.
This being the case, programmes of literacy learning are now being framed in terms of encouraging the use of literacy in real life and promoting the transfer of the literacy of the adult classroom into the external world (often by the transfer of that real life into the classroom as a basis for literacy learning).
It is this which has led to the recent emphasis on literacy existing to bring about the achievement of certain other specific goals rather than literacy for its own sake. Thus many programmes have been launched in terms of literacy for health (in Nepal), for citizenship (in Brazil) or for communal harmony (in UNESCO's "learning to live together" programme). One aim of literacy today is to promote the international initiative of Education for All to increase children's enrolments in school.
But once again there is an opposing view. It is argued that there is a danger in implying that without literacy it will be impossible to attain these goals: that improved health, citizenship, communal harmony or school enrolment rates cannot be achieved without literacy. Some countries have launched very successful children's school enrolment programmes without having to run adult literacy classes for the parents first. Literacy skills, if used (and many adults acquire some literacy skills but never use them to bring about changes in their way of life), will enhance the process and quicken the pace of improving health, of engaging actively in political activities, of challenging the intolerance of others (often the literate) in their own societies and of increasing school enrolment and retention rates. But literacy, so it is argued, is not necessary for the achievement of such goals.
LITERACY FOR LIVELIHOODS
The recent focus by international and national agencies on the relief or eradication of poverty has led to a concern of "literacy for livelihoods." The definition of "livelihoods" taken is more comprehensive than the earlier concept of "income generation." It now includes all members of the family unit rather than just the income generator. It includes both income and non-income elements of the family life systems. It includes things like health and housing, for these have an impact on livelihoods. It draws attention to the ongoing security and sustainability of such livelihoods rather than concentrating on short-term training for increased income.
The problem is that literacy is not an essential component of livelihood development. Family livelihood can be enhanced without further developing literacy practices. Studies of family, intergenerational and cross-generational literacies suggest that what is needed is access to rather than the acquisition of literacy skills by every individual, and that families with high levels of access to literacy skills may be better placed to exploit livelihood opportunities than those with low levels of access. Once again, it is the use of literacy skills rather than the learning of literacy which brings benefits.
A FAULT LINE
A fault line seems to be appearing in the world of adult literacy in developing societies. It may be worth highlighting this fault line even at the expense of being accused of over-generalisation.
On the one hand there are those who see adult literacy in terms of adult schooling set within the educational sector. On the other hand there are those who see adult literacy as rooted firmly in social and economic development. The impact of these two world views can be seen in both the programmes offered and the location of control of those programmes.
In the educational approach, programmes are normally located within Ministries or Departments of (Adult or Non-formal) Education. They usually take the form of learning groups or classes with set but flexible terms, taking into account local variations of harvests and holidays, using facilitators who have received some (although often limited) training in teaching methods. The discourse used is one of overcoming exclusion and encouraging the inclusion of adults in education. Textbooks are written by "experts" with every effort being made to root these in the experience of the (generalised) learners. The aim is to encourage formalised learning within a dominant literacy - normally a national language with an international language as a second stage.
In this model, literacy skills are taught in isolation from other learning activities. Indeed, literacy is increasingly being identified with basic education. Country after country is developing, under the influence of the growing acceptance of the ideologies of lifelong learning, the integration of adult literacy into adult basic education and training, leading not simply to post-literacy but to continuing education centres of one kind or another with a prescribed curriculum.
Although efforts are being made to ensure that such programmes are adapted to the needs of adult literacy learners, nevertheless the fundamental approach is similar: it is schooling for adults. Control over all of the essential elements still lies with the providers (e.g., the length of the course, the choice of teaching-learning materials), even though some elements such as the location and timing of the learning sessions may be determined by the individual group of learners. Despite some decentralisation, the provision is characterised by a "one-size-fits-all" approach. A generalised literacy (e.g., reading the primer; writing the primer exercises) is seen as the basis for a later process of reading other materials (e.g., newspapers) and writing (e.g., accounts) outside the classroom. Literacy learning is divorced from the immediate context, and the application of the newly learned literacy skills in real life is left to the literacy learners.
In the second view, adult literacy as a part of social development, programmes are normally located within social development agencies (e.g., the Ministry of Community Development or Women's Affairs). Governments often view literacy as a means of getting their own messages to the people more effectively and quickly, and seek to base their assessments of literacy on how far such messages are received. In this approach, literacy learning programmes are set within the context of some other development activity. The location of the learning activity tends to be the same as that of some other developmental activity, and the learning materials are often those being employed for that task. For example, credit and savings groups use the literacy activities of such groups as the basis for developing literacy skills, groups of women concerned with health development write diaries of their children's growth and illnesses, and members of a farming group learn literacy skills through instructional material relating to crop pests. Different literacies are accorded different status, so some programmes promote reading the Bible and the Koran as much as extension training manuals. This is not schooling in any sense.
This view looks at literacy learning programmes in a new way. Literacy practices and written texts are seen as part of the fabric of daily life, essentially bound up with power, class, caste, bureaucratic regulations, and the religious and economic life of the various overlapping communities of which every individual is a member. A textbook is not separate from the society which produced it: it is part of the dominant group's attempts to persuade others to conform to the norm of a "developed society" and become "literate." But on the social side of the fault line, more of the control of the programme lies with the literacy learners. They set out to learn what they need for their own purposes within their own specific and immediate context. In this sense, it is a more limited approach, more highly focused and more practical, for it concentrates on the use more than on the acquisition of literacy skills, and it ceases when participants feel they have enough control of literacy to achieve their own goals. It is not a case of progression into continuing education, but of learning literacy while engaged in community development, self-help groups or sustainable family and individual livelihoods.
The literacy for livelihoods approach is clearly on this social side of the fault line. It argues that the literacy practices of taxi drivers are different from those of domestic cleaners; to ask both to sit in a class with a common textbook is hardly the best way to treat adult learners. It argues that adults are not grownup children to be told what and how they should learn. They will learn what is of immediate concern to them. One size cannot fit all.
MEASURING SUCCESS IN LITERACY
This fault line between literacy as education and literacy as development, between literacy isolated and literacy integrated, is reflected in current approaches to the measurement of literacy. In the main, success has been measured by counting heads: the number of those who enrol, who complete or who pass a test. But those on the other side of the fault line argue that if the goal of an adult literacy learning programme is some activity other than literacy learning such as livelihoods or health, the measurement must increasingly be in these other activities, however diverse they may be.
A question of values arises at this point. How does one assess those who say they are able to read and write but do no reading or writing? How can the different uses which literacy learners put their new skills be assessed? How can one compare writing Christmas or Diwali cards, making shopping lists, keeping a diary, writing songs or filling in applications for development assistance? Is reading film notices, fashion newspapers and sports magazines to be equated with reading manuals on mushroom growing or children's health?
The evaluation of adult literacy programmes is thus affected by the fault line. On one side is the collection of a set of statistics based on a division between "literate" and "illiterate" persons. Highly quantitative, such an evaluation concentrates, like school, on enrolments, attendances and externally established performance indicators (i.e., tests). Sociological criteria dominate. Barriers to enrolment and causes of dropouts (or pushouts) are identified. Such evaluation ceases at the end of the learning programme.
On the other side, since literacy learning programmes lie within a developmental programme, the evaluation tends to be more qualitative. It measures how far the literacy practices of the individual literacy learner or those practices which are located within the group activity have been enhanced, and these can be discerned only after the conclusion of the learning programme. And because of the diversity of uses of literacy by individuals and groups, ethnographic approaches tend to dominate - case studies, interviews, changing perceptions and the words of the participants rather than externally observed calculations.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE FAULT LINE
The main challenge presented by this fault line is to see how far both approaches can be employed in any adult literacy learning programme, especially an experimental one such as the COLLIT project. For example, in evaluation the use of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies may be necessary. Again, a formalised learning programme alongside or based on a more highly contextualised kind of learning may widen the applicability of the literacy skills of the participants beyond their immediate world.
The COLLIT project, then, needs to assess itself in terms of this fault line. Does it see the use of ICT as a tool to promote universally applicable literacy skills, or does it see ICT as a part of a world influenced by power processes, a means of manipulating the poor to conform? This is the challenge of such a project. In one sense, it can be interpreted as a challenge to the dominant users of ICT, as widening access to new technology. In another sense, it can be seen as controlled by the providers to achieve goals set by the providers. Just as today participation is seen as a tool by which resistance to the agendas of the developers is weakened, a way by which compliance is secured, so a project like this can be seen as seeking to achieve the generalised goals of the development agencies rather than the diverse and often contradictory goals of the participants. For literacy can be and often is a tool of domination, not liberation. And the same applies to both ICT and to development in general.
Professor Alan Rogers
Preface
The need to increase literacy levels remains one of the most pressing educational challenges facing developing countries in the Commonwealth. The promises from the 1990 Education for All Conference are far from fulfilled. Illiteracy rates remain unacceptably high, particularly in developing countries, and particularly among women and young adults. This situation has been attributed, in part, to a lack of innovation in curriculum design (too little emphasis on functional skills), a lack of instructional materials and inappropriate pedagogical strategies.
Against this backdrop, there is a worldwide increase in the use of learning technologies that enable the development and delivery of learning materials tailored to the needs and circumstances of particular groups. However, this increase is occurring to a much greater extent at the post-secondary levels of educational systems than it is in the context of basic and non-formal education.
In response to this need for increased literacy, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) requested and received support from the British Department for International Development (DFID) to undertake a pilot project in selected Commonwealth countries to explore ways in which literacy programmes might be enhanced through the use of appropriate technologies. A grant was provided in 1998, and the Commonwealth of Learning Literacy Project (COLLIT) was born.
The venues for the three-year pilot project were located in India and Zambia. Implementation began officially on 1 July 1999 and was intended to terminate on 30 June 2002, but the end date was extended to 31 December 2002 because of some initial delays in getting partnership arrangements in place, acquiring and distributing equipment and mounting the necessary training programmes.
Data for this report were gathered over the three-and-a-half years of operation of the project and were used to inform decision-making as implementation occurred and to supplement the summative evaluation data that were collected in the months following the official end date. A post-project assessment was also carried out one year after the official end to assess the sustainability of the various activities that were initiated during the life of the pilot project.
This report is intended to provide readers with a comprehensive description of the context of the project, the experience of implementing it, an analysis of the outcomes and the insights gained. Hopefully it will help practitioners in their planning of future information and communication technology (ICT) applications in the context of community-level literacy development, and add to the general literature concerning the use of ICTs in the provision of literacy and non-formal education. A recent UNESCO study (Meta-Survey on the Use of Technology in Education in Asia and the Pacific, 2003-2004 - see www.unescobkk.org/education/ict/metasurvey ) pointed out that while there are many projects using ICTs, there is very little information regarding the evaluation of results.
Alan Rogers' Foreword to this report provides a background for the project in the historical as well as the current context of literacy programmes generally. The report proper begins by describing the role that COL played in managing the implementation of the project and the national contexts for the project in India and Zambia (chapters 1 and 2). This is followed by a description and discussion of the learning centres that were established in villages, the types of learners involved and the teaching approach used (chapters 3, 4 and 5). A financial analysis and a look at the impact of the project are also included (chapters 6 and 7). To conclude, the report documents the outcomes that occurred and the lessons learned (chapter 8), and provides an overall summation in the Epilogue.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge those who have contributed to the preparation of this report. The country directors of the project, Dr. Richard Siaciwena in Zambia and Dr. Anita Dighe and Dr. Usha Reddi in India, each prepared comprehensive reports covering the implementation of the project in their venues. The country-level evaluators, Mr. Zanzini Ndlovu and Mr. Chris Haambokoma in Zambia and Dr. Ila Patel in India, collected data through periodic site visits, interviews and questionnaires and prepared both interim and final reports on the implementation process and outcomes of the project in their countries. This report is a synthesis of the information and observations presented by the country directors and evaluators in their respective reports, copies of which may be obtained in unedited form from COL.
Dr. Glen M. Farrell
Project Manager
Epilogue
In the Foreword to this report, Professor Alan Rogers presents the notion of a "fault line" that is appearing in developing countries as a result of contrasting world views about the purposes and processes of adult literacy. He states that on one side of the fault line there is the view that adult literacy is analogous to adult schooling with programmes set within the educational sector, using learning materials that have been developed by "experts," and with the essential elements of the learning process controlled by the providers. On the other side are those who see adult literacy as inextricably linked to social and economic development with more of the control of programmes, and the determination of content, resting with the literacy learners. The emphasis is more on the use rather than the acquisition of literacy skills.
It is fitting to conclude this report with some observations about the COLLIT project in the context of Professor Rogers' fault line analysis, in part because the different approaches used by the partners in implementing the project illustrate these two world views of adult literacy, and also because of the apparent impact that the use of ICTs had in terms of modifying these views over the course of the project.
The differing views were most evident in the way the project was implemented by the local partners in India. The SRCs, integral components of the national adult education infrastructure, began the project using a national curriculum model, scheduled classes and pre-existing materials. MSSRF, on the other hand, incorporated the project into their ongoing social and economic development activities, with the learners, their families and their communities as the starting point for developing both curriculum and materials.
These contrasting approaches led to different perceptions of success. MSSRF defined a "quality" literacy programme as one that met the goals of the learner rather than the standards of an externally developed literacy curriculum. In contrast, the SRCs tended to use the examinations associated with the national literacy curriculum to determine learner achievement. However the fault line began to blur as the project progressed. MSSRF staff began to foresee that some of their learners might want to progress into the national curriculum and achieve the recognition of meeting national literacy standards. The SRC staff, on the other hand, became more "learner focused" in terms of both outcomes and learning materials.
The implementation of the project in Zambia straddled the fault line in several ways. The national literacy programme is the responsibility of the Community Development division of the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services rather than the Ministry of Education, which perhaps accounts for the strong emphasis on the need for the programme content to be functional in the sense of being applicable to the health and livelihood of the learners. This relationship between literacy and livelihood is a core concept guiding all literacy programme activities of the ministry. On the other hand, the basic delivery model, with scheduled classes and centrally produced materials, is largely borrowed from traditional education. However, this changed, as it did in India, as the project evolved and learners and tutors became more involved in the development of learning materials.
The fault line also has implications regarding the use of ICT in literacy programmes. Those on the "literacy is like education" side of the fault line would be more likely to use the technologies to produce curriculum materials for use in classrooms and, perhaps, to assist in classroom teaching. Those that view literacy education as an ingredient of socio-economic development would be more likely to put the technology in the hands of the learners and to encourage applications that are meaningful in the context of their daily lives.
However, in the COLLIT project, the use of ICTs appeared to contribute to a blurring of the fault line. For example:
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When learners and their tutors were provided with the tools and skills to produce their own learning materials, the focus of their learning shifted to the issues and outcomes that were priorities for them rather than those of the programme provider.
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The enhanced self-esteem and personal confidence resulting from becoming computer literate appeared to foster teamwork and collaboration among learners as well as a greater degree of involvement in the development of their communities generally - and, presumably, a demand for greater control over their learning.
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The need to share the costs of providing ICT appliances, related infrastructure, electricity, connectivity and training became an incentive for inter-agency collaboration in order to achieve sustainability. This seemed particularly evident at the Katete centre in Zambia where the involvement of different agencies led to collaboration on the development of learning materials for use in a variety of contexts.
Obviously, the circumstances that pertain to the implementation of any given literacy education initiative are important determinants of how it can be delivered. The lesson that evolves from this project with regard to the use of technologies seems to be to "start where you can," keeping in mind that, given the opportunity, learners are quite capable of using the appliances in ways that not only help them achieve educational goals, but that are also remarkably motivating and applicable to other facets of their lives.
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