Studying Literacy as Situated Social Practice: The Application and Development of a Research Orientation for Purposes of Addressing Educational and Social Issues in South African Contexts Mastin Prinsloo Town Thesis presented for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Cape of Department of Social Anthropology Graduate School in Humanities UnivesityUNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN Supervisor Associate Professor Andrew Spiegel September 2005 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is my own work, except where indicated, and has not been submitted before for any degree or examination at any other university. Signed: signature removed Mastin Prinsloo September 2005 DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my mother Isabelle, and to my son Ben. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor, Associate Professor Andrew Spiegel wholeheartedly for his support and commitment from the inception to the completion of this research. IV Abstract This is a study of the application in South Africa of a social practices approach to the study of literacy. A social practices approach conceptualizes literacy practices as variable practices which link people, linguistic resources, media objects, and strategies for meaning-making in contextualized ways. These literacy practices are seen as varying across broad social contexts, and across social domains within these contexts, and they can be studied ethnographically. I examine how this approach is applied across four critical themes of study in South Africa, namely: the uses and valuations of reading and writing by adults without schooling; the historical circumstances whereby literacy comes to be identified as a resource of European culture in colonial South Africa; children's early engagement with literacy in formal and informal contexts; and reading and writing in relation to electronic and digital media. I review examples of ethnographic research in each case, in which I have participated as a researcher, and examine how the approach has been applied, tested and modified in each case of its application. The research in each case showed literacy's incorporation in complex and variable ways in situated, located human activities. Whereas the first application of the social practices approach, that of the SoUL project detailed how literacy operated as everyday practice amongst people with little or no schooling, the research lacked a theoretical perspective to explain how these practices came to take the form and status that they did, as regards the influences upon them from outside the immediate settings that were studied. Over the subsequent studies I developed a revised approach to the study of literacy which detailed the explanatory usefulness of studying how literacy practices that network across larger domains than the local have effect on the construction of local practices, in both historical as well as contemporary examples. Literacy practices were not simply the products of local activity but involved rather the particular local application of communication technologies, language and artefacts that originated from outside the immediate social space. However, local applications involved original, indeterminate and varied uses of those resources. v CONTENTS Acknowledgements iv Abstract v Fonnative Studies Chapter One:, The New Literacy Studies First application of a social practices approach to literacy in South Africa Chapter Two: The development of a research orientation in the study of literacy as situated social practices in South Africa 29 Chapter Three: The Social Uses ofLiteracy research project: methods, findings and directions 49 Further application ofthe social practices approach to literacy in South Africa (i) The historical study of literacy as situated social practice: Chapter Four: Tenuous literacies. Pre-colonial and early colonial literacy encounters 75 Chapter Five: Native awe. Refracted literacy practices in early colonial contexts 107 (ii) The study of early childhood literacy: Chapter Six: Early childhood literacy practices in formal educational contexts 135 Chapter Seven: Children's meaning-making and semiotic play in informal contexts 167 New directions in the application ofthe social practices approach to literacy in South Africa Chapter Eight: The study of digitalliteracies as situated social practice 183 Bibliography 203 Formative Studies in a social practices approach Chapter One: The New Literacy Studies Introduction This thesis is a study of the application in South Africa of an ethnographic research perspective on the study of literacy, also known as the New Literacy Studies (NLS) or what I will mostly call in this thesis a social practices perspective. A social practices approach conceptualizes literacy as sets of social practices that are contextually embedded and situationally variable, rather than as an autonomous skill, practice or social technology whose forms, functions and effects are unchanging and neutral across social settings (cf. Street, 1983, 1995). The mode ofresearch and analysis that is characteristic in research that draws on a social practices orientation to the study of literacy is that of the detailed ethnographic investigation of literacy practices (as situated social practices) in particular settings. It is an approach that does not take as a given the uses, worth and valuations of literacy in specific social contexts. Instead, it is concerned to study literacy as variable with regard to its forms, functions, uses and values across settings, and thus varying in its social meanings and effects. From this perspective literacy is a socially contested term, and it can be and is used in several different ways (Barton, 1994, 13). Each choice of how the term applies has social and moral consequences because such choice is shaped by particular values and interests. Each understanding or model of literacy, what it is and how it works, incorporates a tacit or overt theory about the functioning of power in and across social contexts (Gee, 1990,27; Street, 1984). Rather than assigning universal effects to literacy and ill iteracy, thererefore, the research orientation I apply in this thesis is concerned to study, in particular settings, I. what understandings people have of reading and writing; 2. what uses reading and writing have in specific circumstances; 3. what social practices give shape to these lIses and understandings; and 4. how these relate to the wider dynamics of social relationships, including those ofthe production and distribution of things, and the workings of power and authority in specific contexts and across contexts. The value claimed for this approach to the study of literacy is based on the argument that detai led ethnographic study can provide an understanding of literacy and its uses, functions, effects and acquisition processes in particular settings. Such understanding can be productively applied in educational and other societal settings. The thesis examines the capacity of this approach to provide productive explanations and understandings of key questions to do with reading and writing in South Africa, in selected contexts. My task in this thesis is thus to carry out and review particular applications of this approach to the study of literacy in a number of pivotal or telling contexts in South Africa. This work is carried out in a reflexive manner so that the individual studies themselves raise questions and challenges for the research orientation, and point to directions in which this way of studying literacy can be applied and developed in relation to particular contexts. In summary, in this thesis I am concerned to examine what the theoretical and empirical contributions are ofa sequence of studies of reading and writing across multiple social contexts in South Africa. In broad overview, in this thesis I set out to 1. summarize the conceptual roots and arguments of the approach to the study of literacy as situated social practice internationally; 2. apply this approach, and review its application, to the study of literacy in selected socially and educationally relevant sites of study in South Africa; 3. examine ways in which the conceptual and methodological resources of this approach to the study of literacy are challenged and can be developed by the research evidence that I examme; 4. outline an empirically grounded account of how literacy works as situated social practice, that draws on the analyses in the cases that I have examined. Amongst the key aspects of social life in a South African context where social anxieties and pedagogical concerns related to literacy loom particularly large are the following themes: I. the presence in South African society of very large numbers of people who received little or no schooling, or dropped out of school early. 2. the historical circumstances that produce associations with literacy as commencing as a resource of European culture in South African, and a concern with what the hegemonic effects of those cultural origins of literacy in South Africa might be. 2 3. concerns that very large numbers of children are not succeeding in learning to read and write effectively in South African schools