Keynote speakers
VALBEC is delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the 2013 'Literacies in a diverse world'.
Literacy and social practice matters
Inge Kral, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), Australian National University, Canberra.
In her presentation, Inge Kral will address the question of literacy acquisition in the remote Indigenous context, from an anthropological perspective. By focusing on literacy as social practice, she will discuss how literacy processes cannot be understood simply in terms of schooling and pedagogy, they must be part of more embracing social institutions and cultural processes. She will draw on her long-term experience in remote Indigenous Australia as an educator and researcher over more than two decades, to argue that literacy and social practice matters. The historical perspective she takes draws literacy out of the confines of formal teaching, prescribed curricula and attainment of individual outcomes and qualifications and embraces a notion of meaningful learning that is connected with, and of relevance to, the social community to which learners belong. In particular, she will address the need to find meaningful applications for ongoing alphabetic and digital literacy for Indigenous youth, especially for the many adolescents who are outside institutional learning domains.
Inge Kral is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) at The Australian National University. Inge has an MA in applied linguistics (University of Melbourne) and a PhD in anthropology (ANU). She currently holds an ARC DECRA Award and is researching the socio-cultural and linguistic consequences of digital technologies in remote Australia. As an ethnographer of language and literacy her research interests cover literacy as social practice; adolescent language socialisation; family literacy; out of school learning and literacy; youth, digital media and multimodal literacies; and Indigenous Australian languages. Her recent publications include: Talk, Text & Technology: Literacy and Social Practice in a Remote Indigenous Community (2012) Multilingual Matters UK; and Learning Spaces: Youth, literacy and new media in remote Indigenous Australia (2012) ANU EPress. Prior to coming to CAEPR, Inge worked in remote Indigenous education for some 20 years as a literacy educator, teacher linguist, curriculum developer and education consultant. She continues to work closely with Indigenous organisations and communities in remote Australia. She has also established collaborations with researchers at Stanford University, the University of California Berkeley and the Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Malaysia.
Mass literacy campaigns: A ‘Pedagogy of hope’?
Bob Boughton, University of New England, Armidale, NSW
In 2012, the remote Aboriginal community of Wilcannia in western NSW hosted the first successful Australian pilot of the Cuban-designed Yes I Can mass adult literacy campaign model. Building on an intensive community development process of ‘socialisation and mobilisation’, sixteen community members with very low literacy graduated from the basic literacy course and the majority continued into post-literacy activities, further training and/or employment. In 2013, the campaign will continue in Wilcannia, and will be extended to several more communities.
The Wilcannia pilot demonstrated that this model can be used to achieve significant improvements in the literacy levels of adults in a community, while also identifying many of the barriers and challenges which a larger scale campaign in Australia will encounter. In addition to the unprecedented number of completions, the campaign has had many other positive impacts in the community and beyond, which illustrate the power of this approach. This presentation will detail some of the features of the Cuban model, the achievements of this first pilot, and our progress in 2013 in extending the campaign to other sites. Bob will also discuss the relationship between the popular education approach of a mass literacy campaign and Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of hope.”
Bob Boughton has worked as a community development worker and adult educator since the 1970s. Returning to study in the 1990s, he completed his PhD at Latrobe University on the history of radical adult education in Australia. He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW, where his research focuses on the role of popular education in development in marginalised and impoverished communities. In 2006, he began working with the Cuban education mission in Timor-Leste on a national adult literacy campaign, which has now taught basic literacy to over 120,000 people using local village-based facilitators. Since 2009, he has been working with a National Aboriginal Adult Literacy Campaign Steering Committee to test the applicability of this Cuban model in Aboriginal communities in Australia. The first stage pilot was completed in 2012 in Wilcannia in western NSW, with funding support from both the Commonwealth and NSW Governments with further trials in 2013.