Some Ethnographic Challenges to Policy and Practice
A CARE Working Paper No. 2 ‘Skills Development and Literacy’
This paper emerges from comprehensive fieldwork into adult education projects in contemporary, ‘reconstructing’ Afghanistan. It will be of interest to researchers and policy makers in Literacy and Numeracy, in Workbased Literacy and other employability courses. It is of course an international development context that is being drawn on, but it is cutting edge not only in that field of work but also, broadly, in the field of ethnographic studies in adult education. The study is also rooted in New Literacy Studies approaches.
Reading about the diverse training and literacy schemes in Afghanistan will help many scholars to understand what thorough, bottom-up research could do to make policy making more flexible and responsive or in his own words: ‘ethnographic-style studies reveal a more nuanced picture’.
Professor Alan Rogers has been influential and always constructively critical in his field work and written work and this paper is no exception. He states, ‘Wherever case studies reveal valuable lessons even in different contexts, they have been used to ask questions about dominant assumptions and paradigms.’ (p3)
The full article can be found here. Thanks to Sarah Freeman, our Reviews Editor, for this.
- Posted in: Uncategorized
- Tagged: adult education projects, Afganistan, employability, ethnographic studies, international development, literacy, numeracy, policy, research, women
And if you find that interesting, you may also be interested in the article published in the last couple of days on the work of Swaroop Rawal in Gujarat, India http://mediatoday.co.in/stories_discription.php?id=294520
You can access Rawal’s latest paper in the Educational Journal of Living Theories (EJOLTS) at http://ejolts.net/node/226 and share details of your own values/enquiries in the Community Space of EJOLTS at http://ejolts.org/login/index.php
With thanks to Jack Whitehead on the Practitioner Researcher forum.