Abstract
As a teacher and researcher of literacy, Brian Street introduced ethnographic inquiry to two quite different communities: adult literacy practitioners in India, Ethiopia and Uganda, and university students in the UK and USA. Through re-visiting his teaching materials and approaches, the article explores how he mediated key concepts within anthropology - such as ‘context’ and an ‘ethnographic frame of mind’ - through practical activities with university students and adult educators. Within higher education, Street’s research on academic literacies both emerged from and built on engagement with students and colleagues around the notion of literacy as a social practice shaped by institutional hierarchies and cultures. In development projects, Street extended his early (1984) research in Iran on multiple literacies, including what he termed UNESCO ‘essay-text’ literacy, into a ‘hands-on’ programme for literacy trainers to investigate everyday literacies often overlooked by formal adult literacy initiatives. Street’s active engagement in literacy teaching and learning resulted in methodological innovation, particularly the development of ‘ethnographic style’ methods. Arguing that applied anthropology was often seen as having a one-directional relationship with education, Street demonstrated that education could also make an intellectual contribution to anthropology in terms of deepening understanding of literacy, language and learning within the discipline.
Highlights
Anyone who was taught by Brian will chuckle at the memories evoked by this phrase – perhaps recalling an indepth discussion of an extract from their fieldnotes that they had carelessly pasted into a draft thesis chapter
The “so what?” question which arose in relation to ethnographic data was as important to Brian as the initial “what’s going on here?” The ethnographic-style approach developed with literacy practitioners started from the purpose, the ‘so what’ of research, and critically considered the elements within ethnography that could inform adult learning and curriculum
In the introduction to this article, I mentioned his challenge to anthropology to connect with education, as he perceived an assumption that the influence should be one-way, rather than facilitating a dialogue between the disciplines
Summary
Anyone who was taught by Brian will chuckle at the memories evoked by this phrase – perhaps recalling an indepth discussion of an extract from their fieldnotes that they had carelessly pasted into a draft thesis chapter. Brian’s aim as a supervisor was to introduce his students to ways of making hidden power relations explicit – whether within the Academy or literacy campaigns in development – observing that “the issues involved are those of epistemology (who controls knowledge and how; who has the right to give voice) and of identity” (Street, Academic Literacy draft paper).
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