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Ethnographies of Literacy: Introduction

Mike Baynham
Published online: 29 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Mike Baynham (2004) Ethnographies of Literacy: Introduction, Language and Education, 18:4, 285-290,
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 LE 579

Ethnographies of Literacy: Introduction

Mike Baynham
University of Leeds, School of Education, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

In this paper I review ethnography of literacy as a well established, indeed central

research methodology in the ‘New Literacy Studies’. Starting from Szwed’s program-
matic 1981 paper, I identify a move away from questions of instruction that had hitherto
characterised literacy research towards a focus on literacy use in contexts beyond the
classroom. I argue that, despite this apparent shift of gaze away from questions of
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teaching and learning to questions of use in context, there has been a continued, if at
times implicit, orientation to pedagogical questions in a number of these studies. I then
go on to review the papers in this theme issue, asking what are their stances, implicit or
explicit, to questions of literacy pedagogy? I conclude by arguing that it is time for
ethnographies of literacy to re-engage with the question of instruction, understood as
situated teaching and learning.

Keywords: literacy, ethnography, situated teaching and learning

The ethnographic perspective on literacy is now a well-established strand of

literacy research, with some two decades of empirical work to draw on. Classic
first-generation ethnographic studies of literacy are Heath (1983), Scribner and
Cole (1981), Street (1984), second-generation studies might include Barton and
Hamilton (1998), Besnier (1993), Kulick and Stroud (1993), Prinsloo and Breier
(1996). In this themed issue we present three current (third-generation?) empiri-
cal contributions to the ethnography of literacy paradigm.1 In this introduction I
would like briefly to set the scene by recalling the theoretical origins of the
ethnography of literacy perspective, pointing out its initial shift of gaze away
from a focus on literacy teaching and learning towards the study of literacy
outside the classroom. In a programmatic paper,2 Szwed (1981) writes:
I propose that we step back from the question of instruction, back to an even
more basic ‘basic’, the social meaning of literacy: that is, the roles these abilities
play in social life; the varieties of reading and writing available for choice;
the contexts of their performance; and the manner in which they are inter-
preted and tested, not by experts, but by ordinary people in ordinary activi-
ties.
I will argue that, despite this apparent shift of gaze away from questions of
teaching and learning to questions of use in context, there has been a continued if
at times implicit orientation to pedagogical questions in a number of these
studies, partly arising out of the intellectual histories of the researchers, partly
out of the contexts and commitments that framed their research. I will go on to
review the three papers in this theme issue asking: what are their stances, implicit
or explicit, to questions of literacy pedagogy?3 I will argue that a distinction
between universalising global and situated local literacies is implicit in this
perspective and suggest that one way of seeing the universalised, dominant

0950-0782/04/04 285-06 $20.00/0 © 2004 M. Baynham

LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004

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Ethnographies of Literacy: Introduction

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286 Language and Education

literacies is that they too are profoundly local: local that is to particular nexuses of
power and influence.

Ethnographies of Communication/Ethnographies of Literacy:

Focus on Situated Literacies
A clear intellectual antecedent of the ethnography of literacy approach is
Hymesian ethnography of communication, although interestingly this is not
sourced in any of the studies reported here and indeed, as I suggest below, has
not been an explicit influence in the New Literacy Studies more generally. There
versions of critical anthropology have been more central, insisting on the need to
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relate situated literacy activity to macro relations of social power and domi-
nance. Looking back to the classic first-generation studies, Brice Heath seems to
draw more strongly on the North American, Hymesian ethnography of commu-
nication tradition, while Street’s distinctive contribution has been to bring
perspectives from critical anthropology to bear on the literacy problematic.
Street famously distinguishes between literacy events and practices. The event
construct is clearly drawn from the theoretical apparatus of ethnography of
communication; while his conceptualisation of practice brings into focus the
frameworks and perspectives of critical anthropology, with its intellectual roots
via Bourdieu in the early Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach (cf. Baynham & Baker,
2002). Hymes’s focus on the communicative event, reframed in the ethnographic
studies as the literacy event is, however, crucial in a reconsideration of the rela-
tionship between speech and writing as two interacting modalities, further
developed in studies of multi-modality. Blommaert and others (cf. Blommaert,
2001) are currently leading a re-evaluation of the contribution of Hymes, so to
that extent Hymes can be seen as re-emerging as an influence, where hitherto the
impact of Critical Anthropology has been more salient. Having made the critical
turn, however, the question of how to theorise the social becomes an open one
and we can note through the 1990s an increased interdisciplinarity in literacy
studies, well summarised in Gee (2000), drawing on theorists like Bourdieu,
Foucault and Bernstein and de Certeau to provide more sophisticated analyses of
the power relations which are played out in literacy activity. Interdisciplinarity
can lead to productive syntheses: as in recent work by Holland and Bartlett
(2002) which draws on sociocultural theory to provide a more nuanced account
of Bourdieu’s habitus. A significant influence in those researchers who insist on
an account of both texts and practices is critical discourse analysis (Pitt, 2002) and
social semiotics (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). The influence of studies of
multimodality, as I will discuss below, leads to a re-evaluation of what counts as
literacy.

Implicit Models of Pedagogy in the Ethnographic Studies

One way of reading such research is to read for its gaps and absences, its
implicit assumptions as well as its explicit foci. It has struck me recently, that it is
always an interesting question to ask of an ethnographic study of literacy
whether it has an implicit or explicit orientation to literacy pedagogy. In
Baynham (2003) I suggest, briefly, that Brice Heath’s classic Ways with Words is
driven by a home/school dynamic: a desire to make the ‘invisible’ literacy prac-
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Ethnographies of Literacy: Introduction 287

tices and meaning orientations of the home visible and accessible to the school in
the interest of improving outcomes across the range of students. Implicit in Ways
with Words is an agenda to improve the structures and practices of schooling for
diverse students. We read how Brice Heath worked with teachers to sensitise
them to the literacy practices of the Roadville and Trackton communities. Recent
work by Pahl (2002) seems driven by just this agenda of making discounted,
local, family practices visible and available to be taken into account in the main-
stream environments of schooling. This is clearly a powerful argument for the
relevance of such studies, although it needs to be accompanied by some attempt
to theorise the relationship between the local, home literacies and those of
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schooling. Moss (2001) addresses this using Bernstein’s notion of vertical and
horizontal discourse in ways that have still not been sufficiently taken up by
ethnographers of literacy. I have argued that a pedagogical orientation implicit
in much of Barton and Hamilton (1998) is that of an adult educational, informal
learning agenda.4 From Kulick and Stroud (2001) we gain an important perspec-
tive on ‘literacy learning as appropriation’5: that there is no necessary way of
predicting how a particular literacy innovation will be taken hold of and trans-
formed by particular communities of users. Studies which focus on ‘literacy and
development’ (cf. Street, 2001) invoke a broad range of pedagogical issues.
I am not, of course, suggesting here that all ethnographies of literacy are
explicitly informed by theories of literacy teaching and learning. Literacy has
also become a research focus in the anthropological literature in relation to a
number of themes with no immediate pedagogical relevance, for example
Besnier’s work on literacy and affect, though it would not be hard to make the
connection, even in such studies, with pedagogical concerns. Who would want
to argue that questions of affect and personhood are not relevant to pedagogy? I
suppose the point of this is that, just as we live in a literacy saturated world, we
live in a pedagogised world, where questions of pedagogy, implicit or explicit,
are never far from the discussion. So how do the studies reported in this special
issue engage with pedagogical questions?

Literacy is Child’s Play: The Literacy Researcher in Khwezi Park

Prinsloo’s paper in this special issue can be understood as a contribution to the
literature on out-of-school literacy practices. Barton and Hamilton (1998: 189)
point out two distinct orientations in the home/school literacy literature: ‘The
normal direction of movement in studies of home literacy is to start with school
practices and then to investigate whether and in what ways these are supported
in the home.’ Prinsloo starts from emergent literacy practices as they are
evidenced in the multilingual (Xhosa, English, Afrikaans) out-of-school peer-
play of children in the Khwezi township, Kayelitsha, Cape Town. He shows how
through deploying multilingual and multimodal resources in this play the chil-
dren demonstrate sophisticated meaning-making capacity which can be set
against the highly restricted version of literacy in the school. Although this
aspect is not developed in the paper, there is a clear suggestion that the richness
and diversity of this semiotic activity should be used to read the ‘highly circum-
scribed version of literacy’, characterised by ‘drill-based learning of phonemes
and coding, and language drills’. We can understand the pedagogical implica-
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288 Language and Education

tions of this research in two ways, I think. Firstly as a contribution to researching

the disjunctions between the richness of available conceptual and linguistic
resources of children out of school and their subsequent failure in and by school
literacy (the Brice Heath perspective), but secondly as a commentary on the
curriculum in which a narrow version of literacy predominates, not taking into
account what is now known about multimodal literacy practices. For Prinsloo,
the out-of-school literacy practices can be used to read the schooled literacy prac-
tices. His identification of emergent literacies in children’s play points to a signif-
icant reframing of our understanding of literacy as print-based, alphabetic or
logographic, towards literacies involving complex interactions between differ-
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ent semiotic modalities.

Love Letters and Development in Nepal

Ahearn’s paper can be read from one perspective as a contribution to the liter-
ature on the unexpected consequences of literacy.6 Did the writers of the high
school textbooks and the New Path female literacy textbook imagine that they
would be contributing to new, textually mediated means of courtship? Through
an opportunistic coming together of development discourses, access to literacy
and self-help literature on love-letter writing, a new practice emerges in a way
that could not be predicted. Clearly a contribution to the literature on literacy and
development, Ahearn’s paper also identifies another pedagogical orientation to
literacy, the contribution of self help literature, leading to what one might call a
self-help vernacular pedagogy. The availability of this literature on romantic
letter writing combines with new literacy capabilities and the development
discourse, and out of these a new practice emerges. We can also see this as a
contribution to Kulick and Stroud’s notion of literacy-as-appropriation. The
love-letter writers portrayed here take hold of available literacy resources and
adapt them to their own purposes in unexpected ways. Social sciences research is
typically predicated on the idea that social processes can be and should be
predictable. It may be that a heuristic to be built into any research in dynamic,
changing environments is precisely to expect the unexpected.

Literacy for Sustainable Self-development

In Cavalcanti’s paper, a young teacher of the Asheninka ethnic group in the
south-west of the Brazilian rainforest raises questions which resonate with the
work of Aikman (2001) who describes the role of literacy in the political processes
of negotiation, through which the Harakmbut peoples of south-eastern Peru
work to achieve their self-development objectives. Do indigenous peoples accept
‘the literacy package’ along with the development package, wholesale, or do
they attempt strategically to negotiate a package which suits them? In doing so
the teacher, Pinhanta, pulls back from the logocentric construction of literacy,
suggesting that the printed word may not be the only agenda and that meanings
may be negotiable using other semiotic modalities. We see a kind of unsticking of
the Freirean formula on reading the world and reading the word, suggesting that
the world can be read in non-logocentric modalities. Clearly a contribution in the
literacy and development tradition, Cavalcanti’s paper also reiterates the theme
already identified in Prinsloo of the broadening of our conceptions of literacy to
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Ethnographies of Literacy: Introduction 289

encompass other semiotic modalities. It suggests also that in certain contexts,

principled resistance may be the right pedagogical strategy.

Literacy Practices: Global or Local?

A recurrent theme in the ethnographic research on literacy practices has been
the local, situated nature of literacy and the papers collected here are no excep-
tion. This is raised anew at the beginning of Prinsloo’s paper. Street (2003)
responds to a critique from Brandt & Clinton (2002) concerning the ‘limits of the
local’ in ethnographic literacy research, discussing this in terms of a contrast
between ‘local’ and ‘distant’ literacies. Underlying this discussion, I think, is an
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idea of dominant, universalising, generalised literacies (the literacies of school-

ing?) contrasting with embedded, situated, local literacy practices. It seems to me
an important insight, which I discussed in Baynham (1995), that the dominant,
universalising literacies can be seen on closer inspection, as profoundly local.
There is not space here to review that argument in detail, but it is enough to say
that work on academic literacies and indeed the sociology of science (cf. Latour,
1987) points to the highly local, contingent nature of prestige forms of literate
knowledge production. Coming back to the programmatic call made by Szwed
at the beginning of the 1980s to turn away from the question of instruction, I think
that it is now time, two decades later, to turn back to the question of instruction,
understood as situated teaching and learning, using the fine-tuned resources of
critical ethnography to understand and re-imagine the literacies of schooling.

Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Mike Baynham, Professor of
TESOL, University of Leeds, School of Education, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK (M.Baynham
@education.leeds.ac.uk).

Notes
1. The papers in this special issue were presented at the Global and Local Issues in Liter-
acy Research symposium held at the AILA conference in Singapore, December 2002.
2. There are similar statements in Scribner and Cole (1981).
3. Much important work is currently going on concerning the research/policy nexus (cf.
for example papers in Baynham and Prinsloo, 2001); however, in this discussion I
focus on the research/pedagogy nexus.
4. In Chapter 11, however, they look at ‘Home, Literacy and Schooling’, albeit largely
from the perspective of adults: ‘rather than starting from children and their needs, we
have concentrated on adults and their practices in order to point out how powerfully
adults’ lives and practices structure home literacy’. In the best of the home/school
literacy studies, for example Gregory and Williams (2000), there is a clear two-way
traffic between home and school literacy practices.
5. Resonating with de Certeau’s (1988) notion of appropriation.
6. For an early example of this see Levi-Strauss’s ‘A Writing Lesson’ in Levi Strauss
(1976).

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