DIFFERENT VOICES AND OTHER STORIES

At the time I knew Alma and Jackie, the students whose comments on literacy at work provide the headnote for this paper, they were both enrolled in a short-term vocational program on banking and finance in a community college.[6] Both of these African American women said that they needed and wanted to work and that they longed to get off public assistance. They dreamed of professional, white-collar jobs in banks--according to Jackie, a job where it is not hot and people aren't always yelling at you the way they do at McDonald's. Before she enrolled in the banking program, Jackie had been out of high school only two years and had held several short-term jobs in addition to working at McDonald's: She had been an aspiring rapper, a janitor at an army base, and a food helper at a park and recreation facility. Alma, on the other hand, was in her forties; she had grown up in Arkansas, raised several children, and had worked only at a convalescent home and as a teacher's aide. I don't think either of these women thought of themselves as having a literacy problem, but, rather, as the headnote suggests, they expected to do reading, writing, and calculation at their future bank jobs as a matter of course. I do think, though, that they would be viewed as having a literacy problem, particularly Alma, who had been out of work and away from school for so long.

Both women said they expected to do well in the banking and finance program and at work. "All you have to do is try," said Jackie. "I think I can master it, whatever it is," said Alma. And both did well in the program, coming to class regularly, participating in the "simulated" bank-telling exercises, practicing the ten-key adding machine, and taking their turn at doing proofs--feeding debit and credit slips through a machine the size and shape of a refrigerator lying on its side. Two months into the semester representatives of a local bank came to test students' ten-key skills, administer a timed written exam, and carry out interviews. Jackie did just fine and was hired right away, but Alma failed the written exam, which consisted of visual discriminations and problem-solving.

The instructor got a copy of the test and asked me to practice with those who, like Alma, had not passed it. Students were amazed at the trickiness of the questions--the "matching" portion which asked you to discriminate quickly between items in two lists like "J. T. Addonis" and "J. T. Adonnis." The most troublesome part, however, and one students invariably fell down on, required the interpretation of a rather complicated visual display of deposit slips and checks as well as the selection of answers from a multiple choice list of the "A but not B" or "A and B but not C" variety--and all this under timed conditions. To the relief of everyone, Alma passed the test on her second try, though she confided in me that she had memorized the answers to the problem-solving portion during our practice sessions and then simply filled them in during the test rather than working the problems.

Jackie and Alma were hired part-time at $6.10 an hour at the same proof-operation center. This center takes up an entire floor of a large bank building and is filled with proof machines--a hundred or so are going at the same time when work is in full-swing--most of them operated by women of color. Workers arrive at 4 p.m. and continue until all their bundles are "proved," which is around 11 p.m. except for the busiest day, Friday, when work sometimes continues until after midnight. Jackie worked at this proof-operation center for two months, until she was late three times, the third time for three minutes, and was asked to resign. She blamed her lateness on transportation problems; she had to drop her baby off at a distant, low-cost childcare center, she said, and then take the bus back to the subway stop, and sometimes the trains came every five minutes, and sometimes every fifteen. Jackie claimed, though, that she liked working at the proof center: "I would have stayed. . . . I liked the environment and everything . . . you have to even have a card just to get on the elevator." And she believed that if she could have held on to this job, and if her hours had been increased, she could have made enough money to support herself: "We was only working like six and four hours. If . . . I would have been working eight hours or something, I really could have bought food and everything, bought a car and everything. But it was enough. It would have been enough."

Being late was not a problem for Alma, but being left-handed was. To make production in the proof-operation center, workers have to process twelve-hundred items an hour--that is, they have to feed twelve-hundred credit and debit slips into a machine with one hand and enter calculations on a ten-key pad with the other. The machines all have the keypad on the right, so if you are left-handed you are up a creek without a paddle. When I talked to Alma a few months after she lost her job, she said she felt good about having worked at the bank. "I was doing the work," she said. "I had no problem opening the machine and closing the machine. I was doing that work." She was adamant, though, about the lack of relationship between the test she had failed and the job she had performed. Right now, both Alma and Jackie are at home taking care of their children. They are presently on assistance, but they both look forward to getting another bank job. The vocational program in banking and finance is thriving, and so for that matter, is the bank. The program had thirty new students last semester, some of whom will be offered the jobs that Jackie, Alma, and others have vacated.

Certainly there are skills that Jackie and Alma have not acquired; perhaps they even could have benefitted from a workplace literacy program. But there are many other complex factors in their situations which push literacy from a central concern to the periphery. These factors include short-term, narrowly focused vocational training; the lack of childcare at work; part-time employment with no benefits; workplaces where employees have few rights, stressful tasks, and low pay; and workplaces where women of color inherit the most tedious jobs an industry can offer. To blame the problem on illiteracy in this instance, and I believe in many others, is simply to miss the mark.

We need to look from other perspectives, to hear other voices and the different stories they can tell. Many people from a variety of disciplines and perspectives are beginning to talk these days about honoring difference. Part of the impetus for these conversations comes simply from the increasing diversity of our country, where different cultures, languages, and orientations by virtue of their numbers and presence are forcing a recognition of America's plurality. Part of it comes from educators who are pressed daily to find ways to teach in classrooms that are nothing if not richly diverse. Part of it comes, too, from a sense among many in academic communities that times are changing intellectually, that a "post-modern" age is now upon us, an age in which there is no widespread belief in a common rationality or a shared knowledge, but, rather, a growing conception of the world as "continuously changing, irreducibly various, and multiply configurable" (Greene, 1989).

In this age of difference, diversity, and "otherness," we are lost if we do not learn to admit other views, to hear other voices, other stories. This means, for those workers whose situations have been represented univocally in the popular discourse of workplace illiteracy, looking anew at training programs and workplaces, not simply by measuring reading rates, collecting work-based literacy materials, or charting productivity--the customary focuses of much previous research and even teaching (cf. Sticht, 1988; Grubb, Kalman, Castellano, Brown, & Bradby, 1991). We need, rather, to seek out the personal stories of workers like Jackie and Alma; to learn what it is like to take part in a vocational program or a literacy class and what effect such an experience has, really, on work and living; and to look with a critical eye at how work gets accomplished and the roles of literacy within work. We need to ask continually with Maxine Greene (1989), "How much, after all, depends on literacy itself?" What else must we be concerned with, in addition to literacy, if we want to improve the conditions and products of work?

In the popular discourse of workplace literacy, we seem to tell just a few stories. We are able to tell sad tales of people who live impoverished lives and cause others to suffer because they don't know how to read and write. Or we are able to tell happy, Horatio Alger-type stories of people who prosper and contribute to the common good because they have persevered and become literate. We have our dominant myths, our story grammars if you will, of success and work, and these are hard to break free of. Other stories, with their alternate viewpoints, different voices, and other realities, can help us amend, qualify, and fundamentally challenge the popular discourse of literacy and work.

[6]The stories of Alma and Jackie come from an ethnographic study reported in Hull (1991).