 |
| Early Childhood Learning at UPNG on a bus tour. |
I
like this citation from Luke and Freebody’s book on constructing critical
literacy because of the thoughts I had right throughout the National Literacy
Week in the first week of September 2012.
Apart
from closing the Literacy Week at Waigani Primary School I also attended a
conference on literacy at the National Library site between Wednesday and
Thursday of the same week. What stood out for me in both events was that the
importance of literacy in this country is often down-played, undermined, and
delegated to others. Who are these others? Obvious answers are churches, NGOs,
CBOs, and other development partners. So the question that begs the answer is:
So what is the National Government’s role in dealing with the issue of literacy
or illiteracy?
The
cooordinating agency of the government is the National Literacy and Awareness
Secretariat (NLAS). This agency is struggling to deliver the government vision
and realize the full potential it was envisioned and created for. The NLAS was
moved around and housed in many different locations without having a home of
its own. Right now the NLAS is adopted into the Office of National Library and
Archives, a perilous position, which many of us question its logic and output
strategies.
I
think, and I am blunt about it, the NLAS needs to be reinvented under a new
organizational structure known as the PNG Institute of Language and Literacy.
It should have a statutory function with its own budgetary allocation and
sufficient resources to carry out its roles and functions. With such an
establishment it will have a more fully developed organizational structure,
core staff, researchers, student interns, and inter-institutional capacity to
train, offer worshops, and advance government policies on literacy and language
preservation.
Papua New Guinea must
have the PNG Institute of Language and Literacy because many literacy programs
and instructional approaches attempt to provide generic textual tools and
practices for what are emerging as definitely nongeneric heterogenous learners,
places, conditions, and times. The point here is that the establishment of such
an institute will enable the government to tae control of the issues and
challenges of literacy or illiteracy, instead of passing the buck to
non-govenmental organizations and churches.
How much control is
there, for example, of early childhood learning and high cost private tuitions
and schools where issues of literacy are taken head on by providers of literacy
education?
The contrast
seems more to do with promotion of literacy, but at the cost of ignoring the
prevailing tendencies, conditions, and difficulties of learners. The
development of a National Institute of Language and Literacy would make the
social and economically marginalized communities to participate in the national
and political economy in the same way as those in the social and economically
well-off bracket of society.
Is there a
neutral playing field in the debate on literacy? Many scholars of literacy and
cultural diversity have pointed out that the environment in which literacy is
taught is never a neutral playing field. The social nature of literacy is
“constitutive of and by material relations of discourse, power, and knowledge” (Luke
and Freebody 1997: 3).
The inequality
in learning environments and the conditions that are present for literacy
activities are themselves the manifestation of the power relations that
determine the outcome of literacy. Luke and Freebody (1997: 3) point out: “By
arguing that the context of literacy instruction are not “neutral,” we argue
that in contemporary conditions the contexts of literacy events are not
necessarily “level playing fields” where all learners have comparable access to
resources, whether construed as access to representation systems and
mediational means, linguistic knowledge, and cultural artefacts, or in terms of
access to actual financial capital, institutional entry, and status.”
Given this
view, our perspectives of literacy or the practice of it are influenced by how
we see what literacy is. Literacy is a socially constituted human activity and
thereby in dealing with literacy we must keep in mind that the social “is
defined as a practical site characterized by contestations over resources,
representation, and difference. These disputes over material and discourse
resources are disputes over how and which forms of life are to be represented,
and whose representations of whom are to “count” with what material
consequences for literacy learners” (Luke and Freebody 1997: 3).
The debates
over the provision of literacy have become the unresolvable challenges that
practitioners and theorists face. Luke
and Freebody (1997: 3) point out that these are “the basis of many of the
political arguments in education, and, not surprisingly, they are at the heart
of flare ups of “literacy crisis” in popular press, from debates over phonics
and basic skills to debates over censorship and literary content, or, to take a
current example, debates over the relationship between school literacy and the
practice of new workplaces and technologies.”
The
discussions I have constructed here are also non-neutral in the sense that we
have a serious crisis at hand in Papua New Guinea. Ignoring it only increases
the impossibility of decreasing illiteracy as the ultimate goal. Every few
years insteading of being comforted by the knowledge of a reduced illiteracy
rate we hear about another goal set to reach.
Right now the
priority for the government should be to set up the PNG Institute of Language
and Literacy as a constructive way forward. The current government could take
on board the proposals and suggestions of the NLAS Taskforce to begin with.
We need to
get serious about what we are doing or not doing to address the problem of illiteracy
and dying languages in Papua New Guinea.
Comments
Post a Comment