Promoting Employability through Specific Literacies

Literacies VICKY DUCKWORTH Edge Hill University, United Kingdom GORDON ADE-OJO University of Greenwich, United Kingdom This special issue of the International journal of multidisciplinary comparative studies (IJMCS) is drawn from the papers presented at the week-long Research Workshop, run by Literacy Research and Development Centre (LRDC) at the University of Greenwich. The papers were accompanied with a series of seminars sharing research informed teaching and learning strategies in adult literacy to promote employability. Playing host to adult literacy teachers and researchers from a variety of different education settings in Europe, the Workshop aimed to facilitate a discussion on how to design literacy curricula to meet the needs of both learners and employers. As highlighted by Ade-Ojo and Duckworth (2014), the notion of what constitutes literacy (that being the ideologies interpolated into it) is not static; it has a changing ideological historical thread which has encompassed an embodiment of a trinity; perceptions/theory, policy and practice. Each aspect of the trinity has in some way fed into the emergence of the other parts of the trinity. However, with the changing of time and political landscapes, the relationship between the three components of this trinity has not necessarily been consistent. In recent times, nonetheless, we would suggest that the relationship amongst the components of the trinity has become more evident following the seminal contribution Street (1984, 1993) made on the autonomous and ideological models of literacy, and similar voices on perceptions and models of literacy which have persistently echoed across the globe. Contributions from Barton (1994) on the ecology of language, Barton and Hamilton (2000) on social literacy, Gee (1998a and 1998b), Lankshear (1999) Luke (1992) and indeed the New Literacies group, have been consistent with the injunction that observations of literacy must take into account the social nature of literacy which must, therefore, be seen as a social practice. Literacy for learners, therefore, must be situated in the learners’ real life and everyday practices. Illustrating how this has been enacted in the classroom, products such as teaching and learning resources developed by learners have been used in several instances to capture and give meaning to their experience, motivation and aspirations. In other instances, these products have been co-produced with the teacher (see McNamara 2007; Duckworth 2008; 2013) to the same end. This has promoted what might amount to a paradigmatic departure from learning outcomes that arise purely from a prescriptive pre-set curriculum that echoes Freire’s (1974) banking education concept.