NCRVE Home |
Site Search |
Product Search
CURRENT VIEWS REVISITED
The popular discourse of workplace literacy is persuasive to a lot of people.
It has a logic: Workers lack literacy, jobs require more literacy, therefore
workers are to blame for trouble at work and employers are faced with remedial
training. The goals of workplace literacy appear civic-minded, even
laudatory--after all, who would argue against teaching a person to read? I
want now to examine this discourse more critically, drawing on literacy theory
and studies of work. As I question the popular discourse, I will not be
claiming that there is no need to worry about literacy, or that there is not a
problem in helping people live up to their potential, or that the nature of
work and the literacies associated with it are not in some ways and some
situations changing, and changing radically. However, I will be questioning
the assumptions which seem to underlie popular beliefs about literacy, work,
and learning. In particular, I will object to the tendency in current
discussions to place too great a faith in the power of literacy and to put too
little credence in people's abilities, particularly those of non-traditional
and blue-collar workers. I will argue that the popular discourse of workplace
literacy tends to underestimate and devalue human potential and to
mis-characterize literacy as a curative for problems that literacy alone cannot
solve. Such tendencies provide a questionable rationale and modus operandi for
current efforts to make the American workforce literate. They also provide a
smokescreen, covering up certain key societal problems by drawing our attention
to other issues that, while important, are only symptomatic of a larger ill.
It is ironic that, at a time when the value of literacy has been rediscovered
in public discourse, theorists from many disciplines are engaged in questioning
the grand claims that traditionally have been made for it. There was a time
when scholars talked of literacy as essential for cognitive development or as
transformative in its effect on mental processes. And there's also been a
tendency to put great stock in the social, economic, and political effects of
literacy--UNESCO's adult literacy campaigns in developing nations being a prime
example. Harvey Graff (1979, 1986) has called the tendency to associate the
value of reading and writing with socioeconomic development and individual
growth "the literacy myth." He has pointed out that, contrary to conventional
wisdom, at many times and in many places there have been major steps forward in
trade, commerce, and industry without high levels of literacy. Conversely,
higher levels of literacy have, in modern times, not been the starting place
for economic development. Grand claims about the consequences of literacy for
intellectual growth have also been tempered by recent sociocognitive research.
For example, in one of the most extensive investigations of the psychology of
literacy, Scribner and Cole (1981) scaled down the usual generalizations "about
the impact of literacy on history, on philosophy, and on the minds of
individual human beings" to the more modest conclusion that "literacy makes
some difference to some skills in some contexts" (p. 234).[3]
These historical and sociocognitive studies of the consequences of literacy
should make us question some of the facile claims found in the popular
discourse of workplace literacy. They ought to make us think twice, for
example, before we assume that increasing the grade level at which someone
reads will automatically improve his or her performance on a literacy-related
job activity (cf. Mikulecky, 1982). They ought to at least slow us down when
we reason that, if only people were literate, they could all get jobs.
Research on the consequences of literacy tells us that there are various
complex forces that either can foster or hinder literacy's potential to bring
about change. Or, as Graff (1986) concludes in his historical look at the
relationship between literacy and economic and social progress, "Literacy is
neither the major problem, nor is it the main solution" (p. 82). Or, in the
words of Maxine Greene (1989), "The world is not crying out for more literate
people to take on jobs, but for job opportunities for the literate and
unlettered alike."
It is hardly credible, given the complexities of work, culture, and ideology in
this country, that worker illiteracy should bear the burden of causality for a
lagging economy and a failure at international competition, or that literacy
should be the solution for such grave problems. According to the World
Competitiveness Report (1989), human resources, which include education and
training, is only one factor among ten which affect a country's international
competitiveness. Further, various people have argued (e.g., Brint &
Karabel, 1989) that claims of illiteracy and other deficiencies make workers
convenient scapegoats for problems which originate in a larger arena.
Suggesting that workers are erroneously blamed for the lack of competitiveness
of American companies, one representative of labor (Sarmiento, 1989) offers
this explanation for exaggerated illiteracy rates: "If the American public is
led to believe that most American blue- or pink-collar workers don't even know
how to read, then what right do they have to demand wage increases or better
benefits?" (p. 9)--a provocative explanation for a national eagerness to count
the millions who are illiterate.[4]
As for contemporary evidence of the connection between a company's or the
country's economic demise and the basic skill deficits of workers, there is not
much available. Popular articles repeat stories of individual workers at
specific companies who fail to read signs or perform some work-related task
involving literacy and thereby make costly errors. These stories have rapidly
become an unquestioned part of the popular discourse on workplace literacy, but
there are alternate ways to interpret them as Charles Darrah (1990) illustrates
in his ethnographic study of a computer manufacturing company where work was
briefly reorganized. Previously workers with the same job title had labored
together, moving around the production floor at the direction of lead workers
and supervisors. Under the "Team Concept," new work groups were formed,
consisting of workers with different specialties, and these groups were
ostensibly given total responsibility for producing a line of computers. The
reason for instituting this new form of work organization, according to
management, was to decrease product quality problems, which would follow from
workers' "owning" the production of the computers from start to finish.
Product quality was also expected to improve when workers had a greater say in
decision-making and thereby felt a greater commitment to the company's
fortunes. The Team Concept failed, and when it did, the workers were seen to
be at fault. These people, managers said, were deficient in oral and written
communication skills. Neither could they manage themselves or "see the big
picture," and they lacked certain quantitative skills that were needed to
analyze production flow. Some supervisors believed the workers, many of whom
were Southeast Asian immigrants, were "just not the sort of people who have
these skills" (p. 15), while others said the workers needed better training.
But all managers located the failure of the Team Concept in workers'
shortcomings.
The view was quite different from the production floor. Darrah acknowledges
that it would have been possible to find instances of workers who did not have
the skills the managers mentioned. But he goes on to demonstrate that the
demise of the Team Concept had little to do with workers' skills, present or
absent, but, rather, it grew out of the contradictions inherent in how this
concept was introduced and experienced. Workers were skeptical from the start
about management's intentions, since no one had been interested in their ideas
previously. They also were worried that putting everyone at the same level on
a team was a not-so-subtle attempt to eliminate job ladders and hard-won
status. In Darrah's words, "many workers reasoned management's goal was to
create a production floor of identically qualified workers coordinated by
rotating spokespersons in order to avoid paying for leadership skills" (p. 18).
In addition, workers found that many parts of the Team Concept were simply
irrelevant to their work. Supervisors thought workers weren't able to take
inventories in order to figure out how many computers to build in a day. The
reality of the production floor, discovered Darrah, was that such planning was
wasted time, for the pace of production was determined by the availability (or
the lack) of parts. When a team did reach its monthly target ahead of
schedule, supervisors simply ordered more parts to assemble--which was a great
disincentive to the plan. Another problem was that, even though the Team
Concept was supposed to open communication and encourage workers to understand
the totality of production, workers felt shut out from particular kinds of
information. On one occasion, a team built eleven more computer bodies than
was targeted during a particular month, and the supervisor promised that the
next month's workload would be reduced accordingly, but added that "you won't
see it. You won't start off with 11 systems as credit" (p. 22). Worse still,
workers didn't believe that they had control over work processes that mattered.
They were asked to identify mistakes of people outside the floor--such as
improperly specified cables or faulty work by subcontractors--but when they did
so, they were a little too successful: The people at fault complained, and the
feedback was stopped. According to Darrah, workers believed this was "yet
another example of their inability to effect change, and of the capability of
some higher status workers to remain unaccountable for their actions, while the
production workers believed they were held accountable for their every mistake"
(p. 23).
Research like Darrah's is as important as it is rare. We are simply not in
the habit of studying workplaces from workers' perspectives, even when we want
to know what skills their jobs require. Yet such perspectives can challenge
the too prevalent claims that America's businesses are suffering simply because
workers lack the necessary skills. There are a lot of reasons for work to go
awry; workers' not having the requisite literacy is just one of them, just one
factor among many which interact in complex ways. To equate economic demise
with basic skills deficits is to set people off on a fool's errand. We need to
be wary of such simplistic assignments of blame and simplistic formulas for
recovery. (See, for example, America's Choice: High Wages, Low Skills!
(1990), which offers the high performance workplace as one answer to America's
economic woes.)
The popular discourse of workplace literacy sets up a we/they dichotomy.
Stressing the apparent failures of large numbers of people to be competent at
what are considered run-of-the-mill daily tasks has the effect of separating
the literate readers of magazines, newspaper articles, and scholarly reports on
the literacy crisis from the masses who, we unthinkingly assume, are barely
getting through the day. As Fingeret (1983) has aptly commented, "It is
difficult for us to conceptualize life without reading and writing as anything
other than a limited, dull, dependent existence" (p. 133). Thus, in our
current accounts of workplace literacy, we are just a step from associating
poor performance on literacy tasks with being lesser and qualitatively
different in ability and potential. This association has, of course, been
common throughout the history of schooling in this country (Zehm, 1973; Cuban
& Tyack, 1989; Fingeret, 1989; Hull, Rose, Fraser, & Castellano, in
press). When children, adolescents, and young adults have done poorly at
English and math, we have tended to think of them as intellectually and morally
inferior and to segregate them in special classes, tracks, programs, and
schools.
But when applied to workers, the stigma of illiteracy is doubly punitive, for
it attaches further negative connotations to people whose abilities have
already been devalued by virtue of their employment. There is a longstanding
tendency in our society and even throughout history to view skeptically the
abilities of people who work at physical labor (cf. Zuboff, 1988). Shaiken
(1984) illustrates the recent history of this tendency in his account of
skilled machinists in North America. Before the turn of the century, these
accomplished workers had pivotal roles in production and considerable power on
the shop floor, but lost their status with the advent of scientific management
in the workplace--à la Frederick Taylor and others of a like mind.
According to Shaiken, Taylor wanted to insure that "production workers [were]
as interchangeable as the parts they were producing and skilled workers as
limited and controlled as the technology would allow" (p. 23). The centerpiece
of Taylor's approach was to monopolize knowledge in management. To justify
this strategy he claimed that ordinary machinists were incapable:
The art of cutting metals involves a true science of no small
magnitude . . . so intricate that it is impossible for any machinist who is
suited to running a lathe year in and year out either to understand it or to
work according to its laws without the help of men who have made this their
specialty. (Quoted in Shaiken, p. 24)
The effects of Taylorism are still with us, it can be argued, both in the
workplace and beyond, both in terms of how work is organized and in terms of
how we view workers. Such an orientation provides fertile ground on which any
criticism of workers can grow like kudzu, including claims of illiteracy and
its effect on productivity.
As demographics shift and workers increasingly are minorities, women, and
immigrants--"groups where human resource investments have been historically
deficient" (The Bottom Line; 1988)--the tendency to view as deficient,
different, and separate those who are not or do not appear to be conventionally
literate is likely to grow. However, there is also an increasing research
literature which can be used to counter such tendencies. Some of this work
documents the uses of literacy in non-mainstream communities and thereby helps
to dispel the common myth that certain populations have no contact with or
interest in print (e.g., Heath, 1983). This kind of scholarship also
demonstrates that there are other literate traditions besides school-based
ones, and that these promote different practices with print. Other work shows
how people get along without literacy--through the use of networks of kin and
friends, for example (e.g., Fingeret, 1983)--without the feelings of dependency
and self-degradation that we sometimes assume are the necessary accompaniment
to illiteracy. From the military have come interesting experiments, some
unintentional, in which recruits whose test scores fell below the cut-off point
were allowed to enter the armed forces; those recruits apparently did all right
(Sticht, Armstrong, Hickey, & Caylor, 1987). Other studies have focused on
the reading and writing of underprepared adults in school settings, showing the
logic and history of performances that are flawed on the surface and thereby
erroneously discounted (e.g., Shaughnessy, 1977; Bartholomae, 1985; Hull &
Rose, 1989, 1990). Such work begins with the assumption that people can
acquire whatever literacies they need, given the right circumstances. In
Heath's (1986) words, "all normal individuals can learn to read and write,
provided they have a setting or context in which there is a need to be
literate, they are exposed to literacy, and they get some help from those who
are already literate" (p. 23).
McDermott and Goldman (1987) provide a work-related example of the benefits of
assuming that all people can learn to read and write, given the need and the
support. They describe their encounters with a group of New York City workers
who needed to pass a licensing exam. These ninety men were pest exterminators
for the city's public housing units, and half of the group had only a
conditional license. This meant lessened job security, lower pay, and zero
access to promotions and extra jobs. To be licensed these men had to pass what
amounted to a literacy test using job-related materials and a test of factual
knowledge of exterminating. The word on the tests was that they were tough.
In fact, some men had been on the job for twenty-five years without even
attempting the licensing exam, and others had been thwarted by not being able
to fill out complex preliminary forms.
"The specter of failure loomed," say McDermott and Goldman, "where it did not
need to exist" (p. 6), and they describe how McDermott and David Harman set
about organizing an instructional program and designing it for success rather
than failure. They began with the assumption that "all the men knew more than
they needed to know for passing the test, and that we had only to tame their
knowledge into a form that would enable them to take and pass the test" (p. 6).
They arranged peer teaching situations by pairing a group of ten students with
two exterminator/instructors who had already passed the exam, and they also
relied on the union's promise to provide whatever instruction was needed until
everybody passed. McDermott and Goldman report that most men passed the test
on their first try, and all passed the second time around. "A tremendous
spirit and confidence grew among both students and teachers," they say, "and
the union went to its next bargaining table with the claim that they were all
licensed professionals" (p. 6). McDermott and Goldman also raise some
questions worth considering: "Why is it that school degrees and literacy tests
are the measures of our workers? Whatever happened to job performance?" (p.
5).
When we do look at job performance, when we pay close attention to how people
accomplish work, we come away with quite different views of both workers'
abilities and the jobs they perform. There is a relevant research tradition
growing out of an interest in and respect for everyday phenomena which attempts
to understand and study knowledge and skill in work (cf. Rogoff & Lave,
1984). Instead of assuming that poor performance in school subjects
necessarily dictates poor performance on related tasks at work, researchers
have used various strategies--participant observation, interviews, simulations,
and situated experiments--to investigate actual work practices (Lave, 1986).
What this kind of research has tended to show is that people carry out much
more complex work practices than we generally would expect on the basis of
traditional testing instruments and conventional assumptions about the
relationship between school-learning and work-learning.
Kusterer (1978), for example, studied the knowledge that workers acquire and
use in jobs pejoratively labelled "unskilled." According to Kusterer,
Today's "unskilled" workers must acquire a substantial body of
knowledge to survive and succeed on their jobs--despite mechanization and
automation, despite bureaucratization and the ever narrower division of labor,
and despite Taylorist industrial engineering. This working knowledge is
indispensable to the production process, yet it is informally learned and
generally unrecognized by anyone outside the workplace. (p.
iii)
Kusterer documented the working knowledge acquired by machine operators in the
cone department of a paper container factory and by tellers in a branch bank.
He illustrated, for example, how operators did not just master the procedures
for starting and stopping the machines, cleaning them properly, packing the
cones, and labelling their cases--routine components of the job that were
officially acknowledged--these workers also had to acquire the know-how
necessary to accomplish work when obstacles arose that interrupted habitualized
routine. Such obstacles included "how to keep the machine running, overcome
'bad' paper, diagnose the cause of defects, keep the inspectors happy, [and]
secure the cooperation of mechanics and material handlers" (p. 45). Kusterer
points out that we usually recognize the basic knowledge necessary to do even
highly routinized work, but we are much less cognizant of how much
supplementary knowledge is also necessary--knowledge, I would add, which belies
the common perception of much blue-collar work as unskilled and routinized and
workers as deficient, incapable, and passive.
Research such as Kusterer's valorizes the abilities and potential of human
workers, and rightly so. So do the later, related studies by Wellman (1986) on
the "etiquette" of longshoring, by Wenger (1991) on the "communities of
practice" constructed by claims adjustors at an insurance agency, and by
Scribner (1985, 1987) and her colleague (Jacob, 1986) on the knowledge and
skills of workers at a dairy. The promise of this kind of research is that it
will bring to light the literate events--the situated writing, reading,
talking, and reasoning activities--which characterize the work that people do
in particular job and job-training settings, and that it will cast workers in a
different light, one that gives their expertise its due.
The popular discourse of workplace literacy centers on the skills that people
lack, sometimes "basic" literacy skills and sometimes "higher order" thinking
skills. These skills that workers need but do not possess are sometimes
determined by experts on blue-ribbon panels (e.g., the Department of Labor's
SCANS Commission--the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills),
and they are sometimes based on opinion surveys of employers and round table
discussions of business executives and educational experts (e.g., Carnevale et
al., 1988). But startlingly, as Darrah (1991) points out, such judgments are
almost never informed by observations of work, particularly observations which
incorporate the understandings of workers. Instead, skills are listed as
abstract competencies and represented as context-free and universal. At best,
the skill lists are skimpily customized--for instance, a job requires that a
worker "signs forms appropriately," "uses listening skills to identify
procedures to follow," or "speaks face to face coherently" (Hull & Sechler,
1987, p. vii).
I am sympathetic to the impulse to understand the knowledge and skills needed
in particular jobs. But an uncritical acceptance of the skill metaphor can
lead to problems in how we conceptualize literacy and literacy instruction.
Bundled with the notion of skills are notions of generality and neutral
technique. We think of reading or writing as generic, the intellectual
equivalent of all-purpose flour, and we believe that, once mastered, these
skills can and will be used in any context for any purpose. This view of
literacy underlies a great deal of research and teaching, but of late it has
begun to be challenged (cf. Street, 1984; de Castell, Luke, & MacLennan,
1986; de Castell & Luke, 1989). The questioning generally focuses on the
ways in which it seems erroneous to think of literacy as a unitary phenomenon.
On one level, this could simply mean that literacy might be viewed as a set of
skills rather than one skill--that a person can perform differently at reading
or writing in different situations, that a person will read well, for example,
when the material is job-related but less well when it's unconnected to what he
or she knows, a point that Sticht makes in his research on the reading
performance of military recruits (e.g., Sticht, Fox, Hauke, & Zapf, 1976),
and that Diehl and Mikulecky (1980) refer to in their work on
occupation-specific literacy.
A related implication is that, not only will the literacy performances of
individuals differ on various tasks, but the uses that people in different
communities find for reading and writing will vary too, as Heath (1983)
demonstrates in her research on the uses of literacy among non-mainstream
communities in the American South. In a later work, she described literacy as
having "different meanings for members of different groups, with a
corresponding variety of acquisition modes, functions, and uses" (1986, p. 25).
A visible instance of these differences occurs among biliterate populations, in
which people have a choice of languages in which to speak or write--English and
Spanish, for example, or English and Hmong--and choose one or the other based
on the social meanings associated with their uses.[5]
But there are other implications of viewing literacy as a multiple construct
which offer a different, more sobering critique of the skills metaphor.
Consider the following commentary about "what is suppressed in the language of
skills":
Skill in our taken-for-granted sense of the word is something real,
an objective set of requirements, an obvious necessity: what's needed to ride
a bicycle, for example. It is a technical issue pure and simple. However,
what is forgotten when we think about skills this way is that skills are always
defined with reference to some socially defined version of what constitutes
competence. (Simon, 1983, p. 243)
Simon reminds us that particular activities, characteristics, and performances
are labelled "skills," depending on which activities, characteristics, and
performances are believed to accomplish particular purposes, to serve certain
ends, or to promote special interests--usually the purposes, ends, and
interests of those in the position to make such judgments. "Listening" in
order to "identify procedures to follow" is a valued skill because employers
want workers who will follow directions. "Sign[ing] forms appropriately" is a
valued skill because supervisors need to keep records and to hold workers
accountable. Conversely, Darrah (1991) discovered in his ethnographic study of
a wire and cable company that there are skills that supervisors don't
acknowledge but workers recognize and develop--such as learning to represent
their decisions in such a way as to "establish their plausibility should they
later be challenged" (p. 21; cf. Wenger, 1991). "The concept of skill," Simon
(1983) argues, "is not just a technical question but is also a question of
power and interest" (p. 243).
Here, for example, is a list of basic skills taught in a particular workplace
literacy program, one sponsored by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Fields,
Hull, & Sechler, 1987). This was a program in which workers could choose
to enroll after taking a mandatory reading test administered to all employees
who were interested in transferring to a new plant containing "high-tech"
equipment:
- Sound-letter relationships
- Number of syllables
- Compound words
- Contradictions [sic]
- Endings
- Word recognition
- Listening and writing skills
- Reading comprehension
- Reading of advertisements
- Filling-in of applications (p. 23)
At first glance, this reading instruction seems as neutral as can be, the
epitome of what people think of when they hear "basic skills." We might
remember, though, that reading requires a text, and texts are about something.
In this case, the texts were workbooks containing "stories often related to job
issues, such as "How do I get along with others at work?" (p. 23). We might
also take note of the kinds of literacy skills that were and were not available
to students as part of this program: For example, phonics instruction is
there, but an attention to critical reading--the practice of debating the truth
or value of texts--apparently is not (cf. D. P. Resnick, 1990). We might also
recall that this reading program was voluntary, yet workers were motivated to
enroll in it by virtue of their low scores on a mandated reading test. Here is
one student's anxious response to this context: "I don't know why I'm here.
They have the reading test, and I made 57. You've got to have 60 to pass"
(Fields et al., 1987, p. 22). All of these features--the materials, the
literacy practices, the context for the program--make learning to read and
write at R. J. Reynolds (and anywhere else) value-laden and ideological.
Here is another example. The Los Angeles Times (Richards, 1990)
recently reported the relocation of a large part of one California-based
technology firm to Bangkok. The chairman of the company reported that there he
had access to cheap labor--Thai women who are "conscientious and compliant."
"In Thailand," he said, "there is a lot of close work under microscopes"
whereas "it is pretty tough to find people in the U.S. to do that kind of work"
(p. D3). So his most highly paid and educated employees--about one-fourth of
the company--stayed in the United States, while he looked to Asia for the
low-cost portion of his workforce. The women in the Bangkok factory speak only
Thai (no mention is made of whether they read and write it), as do most of the
native born managers. It seems, then, that being able to converse or write in
English is not crucial for most of these workers. Nonetheless, the company
provides ESL instruction, during which the young women also acquire, according
to an account oblivious to stereotyping, "a sense of urgency," being "asked to
set aside a typically gentle, easy-going nature that would rather avoid than
confront a problem" (p. D3).
This is an eye-opening case: A high-tech firm moves to another country to
employ women at tedious, nimble-fingered tasks which apparently require little
English literacy, yet provides its new workers with ESL instruction for
purposes of socialization. We cannot really tell from the newspaper account
what skills were required for work in the Bangkok factory--indeed, one of the
points of this paper is that we need to examine workplaces to understand the
literate capabilities and working knowledge that are constructed in
"communities of practice" (Wenger, 1991), rather than beginning with the
assumption that literacy is crucial or superfluous. What the newspaper story
does illustrate more certainly is that literacy is not a neutral
skill--literacy training means socialization as well as language instruction.
We would do well to consider how learning to read and write involves more than
acquiring decontextualized decoding, comprehension, and production skills.
Indeed, some would label such a characterization as patently false, insisting
that literacy can more appropriately be described as "literacies," as sets of
socially constructed practices based upon symbol systems and organized around
beliefs about how the skills of reading and writing might be or should be used
(Street, 1984; Cook-Gumperz, 1986; Levine, 1986; Lankshear & Lawler, 1987).
If literacy is a social practice, reflecting and promoting certain beliefs,
values, and processes, the potential exists for some conceptions of literacy to
promote more expansive practices and for others to promote more limited or
limiting ones. In other words, literacy "skills" are valued because of
particular socially defined versions of literate competence, and those
definitions can promote more or less limiting notions of literacy.
In speaking of efforts to create a literate workforce, what are the
consequences of acting as if literacy is a neutral technology and not a social
practice? One consequence is that we will be less likely to notice when more
limiting literacy practices are promoted over more expansive ones and, thereby,
will be more likely to be short-changed. Another consequence is that we might
not be sufficiently aware of the ideologies that are promoted as part and
parcel of the literacy training and, thereby, we might teach and learn values
that do not serve our students well. We need to be wary of talk about literacy
which strips it of multiplicity and ideology. Teaching "basic" reading skills
and "basic" writing skills never means just teaching abstract mental processes.
It involves, as well, teaching appropriate uses of reading and writing and
inculcating particular values about texts, schooling, and work. The trouble
with "basic skills" in the popular discourse of workplace literacy is that the
use of this term tends to obscure the value-laden nature of literacy learning.
Nonetheless, these skills will be learned in a practice-specific way and will
be governed by particular social meanings.
There is much worry, recently, that with the changing nature of work--the shift
toward high-technology manufacturing and service-oriented industries--comes
changing literacy requirements--both "basic" literacy skills and "advanced" or
"higher" literacy skills for workers previously termed "blue-collar" (Sum,
Harrington, & Goedicke, 1986). There is, of course, some disagreement over
just how quickly work is changing and whether such changes will indeed result
in jobs which require different, additional, or more complex skills (e.g.,
Levin & Rumberger, 1983; Bailey, 1990; Barton & Kirsch, 1990). But the
qualifications that are sometimes present in research literature rarely make
their way into the popular discourse on workplace literacy. Instead, we
imagine the worst--in the calming words of one commentator, "it's like Pearl
Harbor"--and we rush to set up remedial literacy programs and to institute job
training even as we doubt that workers are sufficiently able and motivated to
participate. The descriptions of recent workplace literacy projects that I
have seen--I have examined descriptions of and proposals for approximately
sixty of them--regularly take as a given that literacy is a requirement for
everything and anticipate benefits from a literacy program both for the worker
and the company that are numerous and wide-ranging such as productivity,
promotions, accuracy, on-time delivery, self-esteem, and job retention. There
are almost no attempts at qualifying this rhetoric. How might we complicate
such Johnny-one-note thinking about the requirements and benefits of literacy
and work?
We might, for starters, keep in mind such stories as the California high-tech
firm and its relocation to Thailand--a move, not to seek out a more literate
population, but to take advantage of a cheaper one (whether it was literate or
not). There are many similar instances--there have been for some time--and
with current efforts to enact a "free trade" agreement with Mexico, there are
likely to be many more. We need to listen with a skeptical ear when blanket
pronouncements are made about literacy and its relations to work--when we are
told, for example, that high-tech employment necessarily means increased
demands for literacy, that foreign workers are illiterate and therefore only
too happy to work for peanuts, or that most workers in industries that are
non-information based lack literate competence. We should be skeptical, not in
order to deny literacy instruction to anyone, but to appraise more
realistically what literacy can offer and to assess what else we need to be
concerned about if our sights are set on improving the conditions as well as
the products of work.
Scribner (1985, 1987) and another colleague (Jacob, 1986) studied a dairy
which employs about three hundred people who process, package, and distribute
milk and milk-related products. Some workers at this facility make gallon
containers out of plastic pellets; others fill containers with milk and other
liquids; others assemble orders from a warehouse; and others are drivers. One
might not expect much reading and writing in the dairy, except perhaps for the
paperwork in the office. Yet Scribner (1987) calls the dairy "a
literacy-saturated environment" (p. 3) and this despite the fact that
communication with management was mainly by word-of-mouth. She writes,
as soon as we attempted to inventory the symbolic material in the
plant, we found the task impossible to accomplish; an exhaustive listing eluded
us. In all departments and on all jobs including the most unskilled, some
symbol manipulation seemed to be required: the packaging machine operator
needed to read machine-tallied totals; the lift-fork operator in the warehouse
needed to distinguish similarly packaged goods from one another by accurate
interpretation of words and symbols on the cartons. Endless examples come to
mind. (p. 3)
Not only were certain literacy practices
taken-for-granted and expected aspects of official daily routine, workers also
used literacy on their own to help structure or simplify their jobs. Some
drivers, for example, charted the prices of their standing orders in elaborate
detail, and other workers modified standard forms and charts to make them more
usable and accessible--activities reminiscent of Kusterer's (1978) "working
knowledge." Nor were there dramatic differences between the literacy
activities of blue-collar and white-collar workers. In the main, both groups
"processed" the same forms, though for different purposes, and all of the
literacy practices "required background knowledge of the business and its
production processes which could only be acquired on the job" (p. 4). Scribner
and colleagues found no sign that employees were unable to do their work
because of inadequate literacy skills.
Here, then, is an instance of a job requiring more literacy--and workers
demonstrating more competency--than one might expect given the popular
discourse. But let us take a different example to force the issue, one where,
unlike the situation in the dairy, work is undergoing rapid and radical
technological change and workers' skills are being challenged. Here we will
see that work in such contexts certainly does require new and different
literate capabilities, but in order to facilitate the introduction of such
technological changes, we will need to think of these new capabilities not as
isolate intellectual skills, but as constructed practices which draw their
meaning from social components of work and communities of workers.
Zuboff (1988) has studied, among other industries, several pulp and paper
mills, where experienced workers are trying to make the transition from older
craft know-how to computer-based knowledge. Instead of walking about the vats
and rollers, judging and controlling the conditions of production by touching
the pulp, smelling the chemicals, and manually adjusting the levers of
machines--relying, that is, on what Zuboff calls "sentient involvement" (p.
60)--workers are now sequestered in glass booths and their work mediated by
algorithms and digital symbols, a computer-interface, and reams of data. Here
is how one worker expressed the sense of displacement he felt as a result of
this change in his job:
With computerization I am further away from my job than I have ever
been before. I used to listen to the sounds the boiler makes and know just how
it was running. I could look at the fire in the furnace and tell by its color
how it was burning. I knew what kinds of adjustments were needed by the shades
of color I saw. A lot of the men also said that there were smells that told
you different things about how it was running. I feel uncomfortable being away
from these sights and smells. Now I only have numbers to go by. I am scared
of that boiler, and I feel that I should be closer to it in order to control
it. (p. 63)
Zuboff (1988) reports that, faced with retraining, some workers simply quit,
fearing they couldn't cope with the new requirements, while others struggled,
and still others seemed to adapt more readily to new job demands. While
creating sympathetic and moving portraits of the disturbing impact of the new
technology on some workers and how they experienced their jobs, she goes on to
argue that new technology need not merely signal the diminished importance of
sentient skills, but can offer an opportunity for reskilling, where competence
is defined in terms of what she calls "intellective skills" (p. 77).
Understanding those new skills, and also how they relate to existing sentient
knowledge, is the project recently undertaken by Scribner and colleagues
(Martin & Scribner, 1988; Martin & Beach, 1990), who are studying
machinists' use of new Computer Numerical Control (CNC) technology.
Zuboff's (1988) research is a riveting example of how some jobs are changing
because of new technologies and how some workers will, as a result, be faced
with losing those jobs or retooling by acquiring what we might think of as new
literacies. To be sure, finding the best means we can to ease the way for
workers in such situations is a worthy goal. I believe it is a mistake,
though, as we try to understand what skills are needed, to focus all our
attention on technology per se, to assume that once we understand Zuboff's
intellective skills--those capabilities involved in information-based
knowledge--that we are home safe. When we think of a worker in front of a
computer, we do tend to focus on the individual abilities that a person needs
in order to interact with a program. Wenger (1991) points out, however, that
if we view intellective skills only as individual abilities, we will overlook
important social components in work such as membership in work-based
communities through which particular work practices are generated and
sustained.
Wenger (1991) studied the claims processing center of a large insurance
company where workers, mostly women, received claims by mail, "processed"
them--determining whether and for what amount a claimant's policy would cover
specific medical costs--and entered them into a computer system. He found that
there are crucial differences between the institutional setting that an
employer provides and the communal setting that workers themselves construct,
and he assigns great importance to the latter: "The practice of a community is
where the official meets the non-official, where the visible rests on the
invisible, where the canonical is negotiated with the non-canonical" (p. 181).
If the objectives of the institution are somehow at cross purposes with the
ways of functioning that are developed in these communities of practice--as was
often the case in this insurance company--serious problems occur. For example,
Wenger noted an aggravating mismatch between how workers were evaluated and the
work their jobs required. Although workers needed to spend time and energy
answering telephone calls from irate, puzzled, or misinformed claimants--and
this service was a necessary interface with customers--the company evaluated
the claims processors only on the basis of their speed and accuracy in
production. Such mismatches between community practice and institutional
demands resulted in what Wenger called "identities of non-participation" (p.
182). That is, workers thought of themselves as only peripherally involved in
the meaning of their work, and this disengagement seriously limited the success
of the business.
Wenger's research alerts us that difficulties will arise when competencies and
tools are defined and developed in isolation from workers' communities of
practice, and this holds as much for Zuboff's mill workers as for the insurance
adjusters. As we imagine the training and literacy programs that will greet
technological transformations in the workplace, we might question whether the
intellective skills we teach are in any way anchored in the practice of the
workplace community, and if they are not, what difference our instruction will
make. This is simply another reminder that--contrary to the popular
discourse--neither all the problems nor all solutions will reside in illiteracy
and literacy. Management and workers have a history, and that history is not
all wine and roses by anyone's accounting. Among others, Shaiken (1984) argues
that the history of machine automation has been the history of deliberate
deskilling--the effort to reduce reliance on workers' knowledge and thereby to
eliminate workers' control. Thus, rather than welcoming advanced technology
with open arms, Shaiken wants to see its development proceed in what he views
as more socially responsible ways--creating or maintaining jobs and improving
the conditions of work.
In like manner, we might be vigilant against uses of literacy in the
workplace that are socially irresponsible. Increasingly, businesses and
corporations are beginning to employ literacy-related tests and assessment
instruments to determine whether workers are qualified for hiring and
promotions (see Fields et al., 1987, for examples of such practices); to
certify workers (as with the exterminators' exam); and to determine whether
they are proficient at the skills their current or future jobs require (The
Bottom Line, 1988, gives directions for constructing a "literacy audit" or
test of workers' reading, writing, math, and reasoning skills). These tests
and assessment devices may be administered with good intentions--literacy
audits, for example, are supposed to result in a customized curriculum. There
are several issues worth worrying about, however. Although the courts have
ruled that literacy cannot legally be used as a screening device unless the
literacy skills required on the test reflect actual job demands (e.g.,
Griggs vs. Duke Power Company ), such tests may still eliminate
qualified job-seekers through literacy-related demands that do not reflect job
performance. Others fear a more deliberate discriminatory use of literacy
tests and audits (cf. Carnevale et al., 1988). "I am concerned that workplace
literacy programs will be used to admit a few and eliminate many," writes Raul
Añorve (1989, p. 40), a workplace literacy specialist. Añorve
goes on to predict that high-tech positions may be used as excuses to get rid
of employees with low reading skills, and he also worries that new
communication criteria such as accentless speech will be used to discriminate
against immigrants. For similar reasons, the AFL-CIO's Union Guide to
Workplace Literacy (Sarmiento & Kay, 1990) looks on the use of
literacy audits in the workplace as potentially abusive, a too-handy rationale
for management to justify decisions which jeopardize workers' earnings and even
their jobs.
Understanding the literacy requirements of work is not, then, a cut and dried,
feast or famine issue. Some jobs that are coupled with new technologies may
not require much literacy at all (which is not to say they do not require
considerable working knowledge); other, more traditional occupations may
involve surprisingly frequent literacy-related activities; and radically
altered jobs may require radically altered literate capabilities, yet the
development and exercise of those capabilities will depend on more than
literacy alone. Similarly, the complexity that characterizes literacy,
literacy learning, and the literacy requirements of work ought to spill over
into our conceptions of workplace or work-related literacy programs. It would
be needlessly simple-minded to assume, for example, that in order to design a
workplace program, one need only collect representative texts used at work and
then teach to those documents (one variant of the "functional context
approach"); or that whatever is learned in a literacy program will translate
directly to promotions or productivity; or even that work-related literacy is
something that all workers want to acquire.
Gowen (1990) studied the resistance of a group of African American hospital
workers to a "functional context" literacy curriculum. Trying to tie literacy
instruction to job content, the instructors developed a series of lessons based
on the memos one supervisor regularly sent his housekeeping staff. These memos
were called "Weekly Tips," and the supervisor thought they were important, but
he suspected that employees did not read them. The Tips covered such topics as
"Dust Mopping, Daily Vacuuming, Damp Mopping of Corridors and Open Areas, Damp
Mopping of Patients' Rooms, and Spray Buffing Corridors" (p. 253). The lessons
the literacy instructors devised on the basis of this material asked students
to discuss, read, and write about the information in the Weekly Tips. For
example, students were to read a Weekly Tip and then answer questions about the
topic such as the steps needed to dust mop, the equipment needed for vacuuming,
and so on.
Gowen found that the employees disliked this instruction. For one thing, they
felt they knew a lot more about cleaning than did their supervisors, and they
developed "tricks"--Kusterer (1978) would call this "supplementary working
knowledge"--to get the job done efficiently. One worker commented, "I've been
at King Memorial for 23 years, and I feel like if I don't know how to clean
now, I will not learn. . . . That's not going to help me get my GED I don't
think" (Gowen, 1990, p. 261). And another explained in an evaluation of the
curriculum: "I didn't like rewriting things concerning mopping, cleaning, and
dish washing. I felt I already knowed that" (p. 262). Gowen believes these
workers reacted to the functional context curriculum by resisting: They
stopped coming to class, they finished the work as quickly as possible, or they
lost their packet of "Weekly Tips." When the Weekly Tips assignments ended,
all were relieved. Said one student, "So we off that Weekly Tips junk? I
don't want to know nothing about no mopping and dusting" (p. 260).
The point of this example is not to argue against work-related literacy
projects, but to speak in favor of a serious rethinking of the nature of the
instruction we imagine for workers. As we rush headlong to design curricula
and programs and to measure reading rates and writing quality, we pay precious
little attention to how people experience curricula and programs and for what
purposes they choose and need to engage in reading and writing. We steer our
ships instead by what corporate and government leaders think they want in a
workforce and by our own enculturated notions of what teaching is about, even
when our students are adults rather than children. Schooling is a bad memory
for many adults who are poor performers at literacy, and workplace instruction
which is school-based--which relies upon similar participant structures,
materials, and assessment techniques--will likely be off-putting by
association. I am dismayed, then, to see how frequently proposals for and
descriptions of workplace literacy programs rely upon school-based notions of
teaching and learning. Categories for instruction tend to follow traditional
models: ESL, basic skills, GED preparation, or commercially available
computer-based programs. Basic skills instruction may be dressed up with
occupationally specific materials--hotel workers might practice reading with
menus, for example--but the format for this instruction is a teacher in front
of a classroom of students with workbooks and readers. Perhaps this approach
grows out of the commonplace deficit thinking concerning workers' abilities
described earlier. If adult workers lack the literate competencies that we
expect children to acquire, then the temptation is to imagine for workers the
same instructional practices believed to be appropriate for children.
This is a good time to recall Reder's (1987) research on the comparative
aspects of literacy development in three American communities--an Eskimo
fishing village, a community of Hmong immigrants, and a partially migrant,
partially settled Hispanic community. In these communities, Reder found that
adults often acquired literacy spontaneously, without participating in formal
literacy education classes, in response to the perceived needs they had for
literacy in their lives. They acquired literacy because they needed to, and
they did so in collaboration with others. Reder points out that individuals
participated in collaborative literacy practices in a variety of ways. Some
were technically proficient; that is, they could use the technology of
writing--they knew how to write a formal letter, for example. Others were
functionally engaged, helping to perform the task by providing specialized
knowledge and expertise; this person might understand the purpose of a letter
to the editor. Others were socially adept; that is, they had knowledge about
the nature of the literacy practice and its implications for community life
such as historical knowledge, which could provide background information for
the letter, or support of the village elders, which could certify its
appropriate use.
Such findings have interesting implications for rethinking traditional
conceptions of adult literacy instruction in the workplace. Like Lauren
Resnick (1990), Reder (1987) proposes an "apprenticeship" model for literacy
learning:
Participant structures that provide opportunities for individuals
to be functionally engaged in the practice before they have the requisite
technological knowledge and skills may be a very successful means of
socializing functional knowledge and knowledge of social meanings essential to
accomplishment of the practice, stimulating individuals' acquisition of
literacy even as they may be just learning basic technological skills. (p.
267)
Applied to workplace literacy, we might imagine, instead of or in addition to
pull-out programs in which workers are sequestered in classrooms,
apprenticeship arrangements whereby workers who need to carry out a task
involving complex literacy skills learn on the job with someone who can already
perform that task and, in this way, acquire the requisite technological,
functional, and social knowledge. It may be that if we study the workplace to
see how literacy learning occurs "naturally," in the absence of formal
instruction provided through literacy programs, we may see something similar to
this kind of mentoring. We might also find distributed literacy knowledge,
where workers typically carry out certain tasks which involve literacy in
collaboration with each other. The point I am making is that, rather than
assuming that structures and practices for learning literacy must be imported
from school-based models of teaching and learning, we might do well to study
workplaces and communities to see what kinds of indigenous structures and
practices might be supported and built upon. What we learn may enrich our
school-based versions of literacy and instruction as well.
[3]This extensive literature has been reviewed by
Street (1984), Bizzell (1987), and Salvatori and Hull (1990).
[4]Most accounts of illiteracy in America begin
with counts--estimates of the number of people who are, in various degrees,
poor performers at reading and writing. Recent estimates vary widely:
seventy-two million (U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, 1984, p. 5);
sixty million (Kozol, 1985); twenty-six million (Adult Performance Level
Project, 1977); seventeen million (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1982). As
several reviewers have noted (Venezky, 1990; Sticht, 1988; Stedman &
Kaestle, 1987; Hunter & Harman, 1979), such variability arises from
differences in how literacy has been defined and measured. It would seem that
such differences would at least be cause to examine the terms of the debate.
What is it about literacy that makes so many definitions of it possible, that
makes it so hard to measure once and for all?
[5]Reder (1987) gives examples of "social
meanings" determining language choice: "The decision to use Spanish for
writing comments on the blackboard during a senior citizens' committee meeting,
when all members of the committee were biliterate although not all were
Hispanic, could be interpreted as making a social statement about the origin
and character of the organization. . . . A Mexican mother who leaves notes in
English for her literate children is making a choice based on social meaning
associated with Spanish and English uses" (p. 262).
NCRVE Home |
Site Search |
Product Search