literacy for life; EFA global monitoring report, 2006 - Institut de ...

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220 / CHAPTER 9
Education for All Global Monitoring Report
High-quality
literacy primers
remain key
to programme
success
undertakings that the learners proposed. Learners
had a choice regarding the language of instruction
and the class schedule (Nordtveit, 2005b).
The experience of functional programmes is
mixed. Some run literacy and income-generation
activities in parallel, others separately. A literacy
course may be followed by income-generation
activities. A common mistake seems to be to
combine the two, in too short a time, with
educators insufficiently qualified to deal with both.
Each element needs sufficient learning time, and
cross- or multi-sector collaboration should be
undertaken so that a given group of learners
has different educators for the two components
(Oxenham et al., 2002). It also appears easier
to offer livelihood-related training to those who
already have basic literacy skills.
The use of literacy primers and manuals,
common in many programmes, can become too
rigid (Riddell, 2001). 13 High-quality literacy primers
and manuals, and their interpretation by welltrained
educators, remain key to programme
success, but materials that are too prescriptive
and ‘top-down’ in approach, and insufficiently
responsive to local needs and priorities, have
limited value. ActionAid’s Reflect Mother Manual
was created to be a resource that would generate
new, locally produced and locally relevant manuals.
The experience of this approach in South Asia
(Box 9.2) highlights the importance of flexible
application in response to local demand and
capacity, as well as coherence and consistency
between curriculum, pedagogy and training.
Even where programmes follow a welldesigned
primer-based approach, literacy
teaching is often hindered by the insufficiency of
texts or scarcity of learning materials. In Senegal,
many literacy classes are taught orally. The few
books available are poorly designed and written.
The lack of good materials is most obvious in
mathematics teaching, where poor results are
due largely to poor materials and to educator
training that fails to address how to teach various
calculation methods in a clear, step-by-step way
(Fagerberg-Diallo, 1999).
Indeed, the numeracy dimension of literacy
curricula tends to ignore the contextual realities
of learners even more than the reading and
writing components do. Yet, most adults have
numeracy skills, including oral counting. They
possess some mathematical structures and
mental arithmetic skills that are more or less
adequate for daily life. This is important
knowledge and should be (but rarely is) surveyed
before numeracy programmes are developed
(Archer and Cottingham, 1996a). Still, written
numeracy is important. People are aware of
the limitations of memory for storing complex
numbers and managing household accounts.
The teaching of numerical calculations in ways
Box 9.2
Three responses to the Reflect Mother Manual in South Asia
13. A primer is a textbook
for learners, while a
manual is a handbook
for facilitators. ActionAid
argues that in many
circumstances using a
manual has not helped
facilitators teach
creatively. If used, the
argument goes, the
manual becomes
prescriptive rather than
a guide to good contextual
practice (Gautam, 1998).
14. Most existing
research on the selective
transmission and
reproduction of values
and beliefs highlights
how class, race and
gender inequalities work
their way through the
content and organization
of the school curriculum
(Apple, 1996).
For many years in Nepal, primer-based literacy
programmes have published manuals or guidebooks
for literacy facilitators. Significant investment has
gone into preparing the manuals, but less to
developing the capacities of rural practitioners, who
after a couple of weeks of training are expected to
run literacy centres with little help. As a result, the
programmes experience problems of drop-out and
poor performance, leading to facilitators’ rapid
disillusionment and departure.
The Reflect Mother Manual suggests that a local
team should prepare the local facilitators’ manual,
and recruit and train facilitators in its use. This
approach was rejected in Nepal because it was feared
that the result would be a manual not unlike the
existing ones, with people told what to do but rarely
able to do it. Instead, the focus has been on training
facilitators in the ideas and methods of Reflect so
that they can internalize the approach and make
it their own.
In Bangladesh, by contrast, the Reflect Mother
Manual and the manual from the Reflect pilot
programme were heavily relied upon in the
production of local manuals, with little variation or
adaptation. Now diversification is being emphasized,
indicating that the weight of a ‘definitive manual’ was
distorting the very philosophy of the manual itself.
A third way is taken in India. Facilitators produce
their own local manual during initial and ongoing
training. Having been introduced to basic
participatory tools, they adapt the tools to address
critical local issues in writing their own manual.
Because they have written it, they are less likely to
regard it as sacred and are more able to adapt the
approach to their individual contexts. The guideline
they produce is loose-leaf, so it can be updated and
revised, and never becomes a fixed or frozen text.
Source: Gautam (1998).