Some Ethnographic Challenges to Policy and Practice

Tara Furlong ♦ November 5, 2014 ♦ 1 Comment

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.