Rosanna Festa (translator)

(1)

Translator

"A key empirical study carried out at Lancaster was the Local Literacies research (Barton and Hamilton, 1998), where we examined the role of reading and writing in the local community of the town in which we lived. The study identified key areas of everyday life  where reading and wring were significant for people and it contrasted these vernacular literacies, which were often voluntary self-generated and learned informally, with more dominant literacies which were often more formalized and defined in terms of the needs of institutions, The research also demonstrated the importance of social networks and relationships in these practices, with literacy being used for social communication. People also drew on these social networks to help them with particular literacy requirements. So, for exemple, we saw the ways in which literacy is significant in terms of local democratic partecipation in a range of community activities. This data shows the importance of literacy as a communal resource, rather then just an attribute of individual people. Literacy was used by people to make sense of events  in their lives and resolve a variety of problems, such as those related to health, legal problems, employment-related problems and issues around schooling. Often this involved confrontation with professional experts and specialized systems of knowledge, and people often drew on their networks for support and knowledge, thereby becoming expert in a particular domain and becoming a resource for other community members themselves. Literacy was also used for personal change and transformation, both within and outside education-related domains, for accessing information relating to people 's interests, for asserting or creating personal identity, and for self-directed learning. Further exemples of local and community literacy research can be found in the later edited volume, Situated Literacies (Barton, Hamilton and Ivaniç, 2000), which brought together a number a studies of reading and writing in a variety of different local contexts, informed by the same theoretical perspective outlined above. Many of the studies in this collection show how qualitative methods and detailed local studies can deepen our understanding of literacy. A study of literacy in prisons by Anita Wilson demonstrated the role of literacies in the struggle against institutionalization and 'losing your mind', the importance of literacy in attempts to maintain an individual identity within a bureaucratic controlling institution, and how people used literacy to construct a 'third space' between prison and Outside. This resistant use of literacy contrasts with work  by Kathryn Jones with bilingual Welsh farmers at an auction market, where literacy inscribed the people's lives into a broader social order, how the local and the global are linked by textual activity. Jones focuses on the process of filling in a particular form, showing how the individual farmers are incorporated into the agricultural bureaucratic system through a complex process of locally-situated talk around texts and the interweaving of spoken Welsh with written English. A study by Karin Tusting on the role of literacy practices within a Catholic congregation shows as literacy is used to manage time in a variety of ways: hoew literacy artefacts are produced within a preparation class both as tangible evidence of commitment through showing investment of significant amounts of time, and to serve as a permanent historical record of a fleeting set of events; and how the parish bulletin is used to synchronize events in time, both locally within the parish community and globally in relation to the Catholic Church as a whole, thereby maintaining community identity".

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Native language: Italian
Translates from: English, Spanish, French, Italian
Translates into: English, Spanish, French, Italian


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