Timor-Leste 1974–1975: Decolonisation, a nation-in-waiting and an adult literacy campaign

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (259) ◽  
pp. 39-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estêvão Cabral
Keyword(s):  
Adult Literacy ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Literacy Studies ◽  
New Literacy ◽  
New Literacy Studies ◽  
Literacy Campaign ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
Adult Literacy Education ◽  
Oral History Interviews

Abstract This article contributes to the strand of research within the New Literacy Studies that has investigated the ways in which adult literacy campaigns are bound up with social and political movements. The focus is on the adult literacy campaign initiated in Timor-Leste in 1974, as the process of decolonisation from Portugal got underway. This campaign was based on a Freirean approach to adult literacy and was initiated by Timorese students returning from Lisbon. The article draws on archival research and oral history interviews with people who volunteered to serve as adult literacy tutors at the time. The analysis presented in the main body of the article provides insights into the nature of the training, and into the tutors’ own understandings of the purpose of the campaign and of adult literacy pedagogy. It also draws attention to the difficult conditions in which this short-lived campaign was conducted in 1974 and 1975. The final section of the article details the worsening nature of the conditions encountered after the Indonesian invasion of December 1975 and concludes that, despite the constraints imposed by these conditions, this campaign has had an enduring symbolic legacy in the field of adult literacy education in Timor-Leste.

scholarly journals At Play in the Space: The concept of 'the social practice approach' in the Scottish adult literacies field

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aileen Ackland
Keyword(s):  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Adult Literacy ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Personal Construct ◽  
Literacy Studies ◽  
New Literacy ◽  
New Literacy Studies ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practice Approach

This paper focuses on Scotland’s policy response to the International Adult Literacy Survey (1994-1998) and the ‘grand experiment’ (Merrifield 2005) to implement a social practices perspective of literacies.This radical perspective, derived from the New Literacy Studies (NLS), has profound implications for pedagogy and is promoted in Scotland as ‘the social practice approach’.The paper begins with a discussion of the distinctive developments in Scottish policy in the context of the international interest in Adult Literacy. The rhetorical claims made in Scotland are then examined through a study which used a methodology drawn from Personal Construct Theory (PCT) to explore how practitioners understand ‘the social practice approach’. This research found little connection between the theoretical concepts of the New Literacy Studies and practitioners’ interpretations. Dissonances in the data highlighted power issues between policy and practice.In the latter part of the paper, Bernstein’s (2000) ideas about how theoretical knowledge is translated into pedagogical knowledge are used to explore the dissonances further.The paper concludes that there is an ideological conflict of purpose within the discourses of adult literacies in Scotland and that the critical pedagogy implied by the New Literacy Studies is also necessary within teacher education if practice is to be transformed in response to the radical social theory.

scholarly journals Multiple Literacies Theory: how it functions, what it produces

Perspectiva ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Masny
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Literacies ◽  
Literacy Studies ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
New Literacy ◽  
New Literacy Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
The Moment

At the moment, there are two literacy theories that seem to dominate the research on literacies. They are known as the New Literacy Studies (NLS) (BARTON; HAMILTON; IVANIČ; 2002; STREET, 2003) and Multiliteracies (COPE; KALANTZIS, 2009). This article is about a different theory, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) that demarcates itself from them ontologically and epistemologically. It will also highlight aspects of NLS and Multiliteracies in order to point out the differences with MLT. This article aims to put forward the major concepts that underlie this theory and present vignettes from a study examining how perceptions of writing systems in multilingual children contribute to reading, reading the world and self as texts.

scholarly journals Typing your way to technical identity

Pragmatics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 553-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia G. Lange
Keyword(s):  
Identity Performance ◽  
Literacy Studies ◽  
New Literacy ◽  
New Literacy Studies ◽  
Online Environments ◽  
Creative Self

Informal, online environments facilitate creative self-expression through typographic and orthographic stylistics. Yet, ideologies of writing may be invoked to discourage written forms that are purportedly difficult to read. This paper analyzes how members of an online, text-based, gaming community negotiate appropriate, written communications as expressions of technical identity. These encounters may reify communities of technologists who are associated with using or avoiding forms such as abbreviations, capital letters, and “leet speak.” Amid the technologizing of the word, the paper argues that those who do not conform to assumed norms may be indexed as less technical than those who do. By examining troubled encounters, the paper explores how metapragmatic negotiations affect creativity and technical identity performance online. The paper argues that contrary to discourses that online interactants pay little attention to written stylistics, the present participants closely attended to subtle and small forms. Further, it discusses how ideologies may be idiosyncratically applied to assist in forming asymmetrical, technical identities. Finally, it argues that technical affiliations are just as important to study as other variables such as gender, ethnicity, age, and class that have traditionally received attention in analyses of ideologies of writing and New Literacy Studies.

What is visual-numeric literacy, and how does it work?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elise Seip Tønnessen
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Upper Secondary School ◽  
Literacy Studies ◽  
Science Classrooms ◽  
New Literacy ◽  
New Literacy Studies ◽  
Use Of Data ◽  
Upper Secondary ◽  
System Variables ◽  
Data Visualizations

This article explores the concept of literacy related to the use of data visualizations. Literacy is here understood as the ability to make sense from semiotic resources in an educational context. Theoretically the discussion is based in social semiotic theory on multimodality in the tradition of New Literacy Studies. Empirical examples are taken from observations in two Social Science classrooms in upper secondary school in Norway, where the students work with publicly available data visualizations to answer tasks designed by their teacher. The discussion sums up factors that affect reading and learning from such complex resources: taking time to explore axis system, variables, and digitally available options; questioning data; and contextualizing results.

scholarly journals Tracing interacting literacy practices in master's dissertation writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathrin Kaufhold
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Academic Literacies ◽  
Literacy Studies ◽  
New Literacy ◽  
New Literacy Studies ◽  
Business Partners ◽  
Dissertation Writing ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches

Academic literacy practices are increasingly varied, influenced by the diverse education and language backgrounds of students and staff, interdisciplinary approaches, and collaborations with non-university groups such as business partners. Completing a master's dissertation thus requires students to negotiate literacy practices associated with different domains. To enable an investigation of conditions for such negotiations, this article extends the concept of literacy practices by combining insights from Academic Literacies, New Literacy Studies and Schatzki's (1996) social practice ontology. The resulting framework is applied in a case study of a student who negotiates academic requirements and entrepreneurial goals in completing a master's dissertation.

scholarly journals Kid friendly? Constructions of comics literacy in the classroom

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-94
Author(s):  
Lars Wallner
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Psychological Approach ◽  
Literacy Studies ◽  
New Literacy ◽  
New Literacy Studies ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Grade 3 ◽  
Video Material

This article explores how teachers and pupils construct and negotiate discourses around comic books as part of interaction in the classroom from a New Literacy Studies perspective. The combination of imagery and text, the essence of comics, makes them relevant tools for exploring how literacy is constructed in social interaction in the classroom. The analysis is based on video material from two different Swedish schools, one class in Grade 3 and one class in Grade 8. Nine interactional sequences were initially found, and these have been analysed using a qualitative discursive psychological approach, investigating how assessments are utilized to perform social actions – how participants use assessments of comics as easy or difficult reading, or assessments of themselves or others as being or not being comic book readers – to make something happen in interaction. The results show that participants utilize discourses of personal, visual and textual literacy to construct a comics literacy in which image and text are both construed as important for, as well as a difficulty in, reading comics. This demonstrates constructions of comics literacy and readership, how personal experiences of reading comics are important and the importance of broadening the view of comics as school literature.

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