Translating literacy as global policy and advocacy

POLICY AND ADVOCACY Translating Literacy as Global Policy and Advocacy R AÚL ALBERTO MOR A I n Literacy in the New Media Age, Kress (2003) argued about the extended use of the term literacy into multiple (namely, non-English-speaking) contexts partly because of the lack of (at the time, mind you) a similar term. The field of literacy worldwide keeps growing, in ways that sometimes the literature itself may not acknowledge. Although it remains true that the influence of English (Luke, 2004) seems to permeate the discourse of literacy around the globe, it is also true that we are barely discovering how south–south scholarship (meaning, beyond the Australia–New Zealand–South Africa triad, as their contributions to the field are widely documented) is helping reinvent the field of literacy. As one of those scholars from and in the south, I have faced some of the issues that Kress pointed out in his text. I have also faced what is a very interesting moment for the field in Colombia (Mora, 2014) and, more specifically, in Latin America at large. Another impulse that has propelled this column in particular is my own life experiences as I transitioned from my graduate education in the United States and my return to Colombia. I have lived (I still am in many ways) those issues of translating my ideas from English to Spanish and the issues of seeking the words in my native language to do so. I am also in the process of addressing how I can translate the ideas I have read into a local context that sometimes this very literature seems to be unaware of. As I know that this issue is not unique to me, considering the number of international literacy scholars in training in the United States and other English-speaking The department editor welcomes reader comments. Raúl Alberto Mora is an associate professor at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia; e-mail [email protected]. countries (Angay- Crowder et al., 2014), I also want to open this forum again to those fellow international scholars to join this conversation and contribute their thoughts. In this final column for this volume of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (JAAL), I discuss what it means to translate the idea of “literacy” as spaces for policy and advocacy. I make reference to two main issues as I propose some ideas for further discussion: what it entails to take literacy theory and research and translate it into the aforementioned ideas of literacy and advocacy and what it means to actually translate literacy into other languages. Translating Literacy Into Epistemological, Not Instrumental, Matters As a literacy studies instructor, I like to keep track of the implementation of frameworks such as digital literacies, multimodality, and multiliteracies into school and local policies (for a more detailed discussion of this issue, I strongly recommend reading the recent Pop Culture/Digital Literacies column by Burnett and Merchant, 2015) across the globe. In those explorations, one concern seems to be a constant: How are we translating that into practice? To briefly illustrate this, I use an example that sets the tone for my graduate seminar at my home university: I introduce a headline in Spanish quickly translated as “with tablets, they will help 3,600 indigenous children become literate.” I ask my students what may be wrong with that headline. The answers abound, from “this neglects the children’s culture” to “we are assuming they cannot read or write at all.” The whole notion that tablets will solve all literacy issues, besides hearkening back to Street’s (1984, 2012) idea of the autonomous model, highlights a larger issue with literacy policies in different parts of the world: Policies keep looking at literacy Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 59(6) May/June 2016 doi:10.1002/jaal.515 © 2016 International Literacy Association (pp. 647–651) 647 J OURN AL O F A DOL E SCE NT & A DULT L ITE RACY 5 9 (6 ) MAY/JUN E 2016 POLICY AND ADVOCACY 648 development, particularly with the advent of digital literacies, as a merely instrumental matter, whose main (if not only) focus is the infusion of devices and gizmos, an issue that careless translations of terms might aggravate, as I discuss later in this column. In this environment, with an excessive interest in technology, we lose track of why it matters to incorporate these frameworks in the first place (epistemological) to only worry about how to do so (instrumental). The use of multiliteracies and multimodality (Jacobs, 2013) becomes then just making videos on YouTube, and the use of digital literacies becomes the use of tablets, Photoshop, and other applications. This, as I have also discovered, brings about a lack of interest over time and frustration as the needed learning curves that technology includes are neglected within instruction, an issue that advocates of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009) and digital literacies (Hicks & Turner, 2013) have actually foreseen. I propose that a more sensible approach to the translation of these ideas into school and local literacy policies should start from the discussion of the epistemological and ontological (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011) dimensions of literacy as the cornerstone of any instrumental implementations. We need to educate teachers and policymakers about establishing rationales for the validity of these frameworks in local contexts. Sometimes administrations and policymakers are very eager to invest in more hardware and software for classrooms without a sense of awareness of the levels of confidence in practitioners vis-à-vis technology (Boling, 2008; Kist, 2007). We forget that not every teacher is fully confident in the use of devices, yet we expect all teachers to be proficient in them. I believe that technology can aid literacy development, but I am also aware that undue pressures to include it in the curriculum usually backfire. We need to interrogate, to begin with, whether a full-fledged implementation of these ideas is feasible (e.g., I have heard stories in the news and social media about rural schools [in that regard, I recommend looking at Azano, 2015, for an engaging discussion about rural literacies]) with dozens of tablets shelved in a cabinet because the schools do not have the infrastructure to provide WiFi). We also need to consider that a gradual implementation of the pedagogical principles behind these literacy frameworks is a necessary first step. As a former school teacher, I faced some of these woes in my previous life and realized how unable I was to maximize the digital tools available to me (Mora, Martínez, Alzate-Pérez, Gómez-Yepez, & Zapata-Monsalve, 2012). Any implementation of digital literacy initiatives devoid of the proper professional development channels is bound to fail and may have detrimental consequences for teachers’ morale. This is especially crucial in non-English-speaking contexts, where sometimes the imaginary of “borrowing” ideas from English literature, instead of providing organic, indigenous notions to address local issues, remains the norm. I expand on this specific issue in the latter part of this article. Ensuring Literacy Is Not Further Lost in Translation Allow me to return to Kress’s (2003) initial idea for a moment. In his book, he argued (rightly so) that other languages used other terms to refer to the acts of reading and writing that we otherwise term literacy. He also expressed that some languages were producing “translations of this word” (p. 22). I would like to point out that this blanket assertion does not tell the full story. The emergence of alternate terms (see Table 1) has less to do with trying to emulate English and more to do with making local sense of the new forms in which we are talking about reading and writing today in more global contexts. This, I believe, is an extension of my initial argument about translating the epistemological aspects surrounding literacy to these new contexts (adapting and creating) as opposed to simply placing these ideas in contexts that would otherwise be foreign (adopting). I center this brief discussion on two particular languages and contexts: Brazil and Portuguese, and the Iberian American context (both Spain and Latin America) and Spanish. Brazilian and Iberian American literacy scholars have coined two more recent terms to contend with the existing frameworks for literacy. In Brazil, the term letramento (Cerutti-Rizzatti, 2012; Monte Mór, 2012) is the more accepted form to talk about the more alternative (Mora Vélez, 2010) strands of literacy. From this term, derived forms, such as multiletramento (Monte Mór, 2010; Saito & de Souza, 2011) to describe multiliteracies, have emerged in scholarship. In the case of Iberian America, we have the term literacidad (Cassany, 2005; López-Bonilla & Pérez Fragoso, 2013; Mora, 2012), which Mora described as the interpretation and creation of texts from social and critical perspectives, as the one analog to letramento. In the case of Iberian America, literacidad has gained slow traction (Abio, 2014; Mora, 2012), in part as an extension of Kress’s (2003) argument that it is merely a response to English. Assuming that terms such as letramento and TABLE 1 An Overview of Alternate Literacy Terms in English, Spanish, and Portuguese Term for literacy letramento literacidad Definition Language Origin Terms in contention How English terms relate to this language Both letramento and literacidad deal with the extended views of reading and writing (interpreting and creating text; Mora, 2012a) from larger social and critical vantage points. Brazilian Portuguese Brazil, circa 1980 alfabetização Spanish (dialects of both Spain and Latin America) Spain, 1990–2005 alfabetización, alfabetismo, lectoescritura, and cultura escrita Letramento and literacidad organically include (and stem from) ideas from critical literacy, New Literacy Studies, and multiliteracies. However, alfabetização, alfabetización, alfabetismo, lectoescritura, and cultura escrita lean closer to ideas from basic and functional literacy; other ideas from literacy are usually retrofitted into these concepts. a literacidad are just anglicisms is actually detrimental to global literacy scholarship, as it plays to the assumptions that the only source of veritable literacy research comes from the English-speaking literacy communities. When looking closely at the terms from Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish, there is a much deeper reality driving these changes: The influence of English literature is evident but not in the effort to translate. It is our interest in keeping track of and contributing to the global conversations that fuels the emergence and development of these terms. In the case of these two languages, it is true that there are terms such as alfabetização and alfabetización that are ingrained in the curricular and policy discourses. Yet, we also know that these two terms have partly similar origins to the idea of functional literacy initially proposed by UNESCO (1970). Trying to include the more recent ideas about critical literacy, New Literacy Studies, or multiliteracies into the existing terms would be an ill-fated attempt to retrofit an old term with new frameworks. The attempts I have noticed that only try to retrofit make the implementation, returning to the argument in the previous section, a merely instrumental matter that focuses on the functional and neglects the needed larger questions about why we are implementing these frameworks in the first place. The need for the new terms responds to some of the larger questions that Freire (Freire & Macedo, 1987) raised regarding adult literacy in Brazil in the 1960s. Therefore, simply saying that we “are translating literacy into Portuguese and Spanish” overlooks the critical reflexivity that scholars in Latin America and elsewhere are engaging in today. The notions of letramento and literacidad, therefore, are less about translating literacy into Portuguese and Spanish and more about ensuring that nothing gets lost in translation. These two terms return to the discussion of the epistemological and ontological dimensions I mentioned in the previous section. These are not just literal translations; these are terms that encompass the need to look at the new scenarios for reading and writing that scholars in literacy have unearthed in the past 40 years and, from other languages, provide new vantage points that feed the discussion. Yes, we still need to write in English, but we do so from a stronger local perspective as we navigate multiple languages and meanings. Those of us who engage in multilingual literacy practices and research do so with a sense of advocacy and our concern to share our thoughts with an expanded global readership. We are not just translating terms; we are taking global ideas and actually reinterpreting them in our mother tongues, engaging in other struggles (as it can be taxing to convince others that we are not just translating), and opening new avenues for expanded conversations and research endeavors. A Global Call for Policy and Advocacy In the ongoing evolution of literacy research, we have found what might be our final frontier: what goes on in places where local scholars are combining global Translating Literacy as Global Policy and Advocacy Mora, R.A. (2012). Literacidad y el aprendizaje de lenguas: Nuevas formas de entender los mundos y las palabras de nuestros estudiantes [Literacy and language learning: New ways of understanding the worlds and the words of our students]. Revista Internacional Magisterio, 58, 52–56. 649 J OURN AL O F A DOL E SCE NT & A DULT L ITE RACY 5 9 (6 ) MAY/JUN E 2016 POLICY AND ADVOCACY 650 knowledge (by virtue of training and access to the literature) to rethink literacy practices and the possibilities to rethink policies. Larger questions subside, and they also pose a challenge to professional associations, journals, and research units across the globe to be more proactive in both finding and fostering the emergence of more articles. Although recent literature has begun to address these issues (e.g., Burnett, Davies, Merchant, & Rowsell, 2014; Larson & Marsh, 2015), we can still expand our examples to more international contexts beyond the usual milieus that have been our foci. This will imply some efforts for cross-language research to see how we frame literacy in non-English contexts, how we continue to translate and contest the literature in those contexts, and concerted work to help junior scholars in these countries without the full command of academic English discourse to overcome these hurdles to get their word out there. The field of literacy worldwide (as the International Literacy Association’s website so illustrates) is growing faster than ever. I invite all the multilingual literacy scholars out there to engage more actively in the conversations, as we have larger issues for policy and advocacy on the horizon, issues that require a critical global participation. This is a great time to rebuild, to reinvent the field of literacy research as a community that goes beyond languages and borders. This is the last column for the Policy and Advocacy department that I edit. It has been a very rewarding experience for me as a scholar, and I truly hope that the seven columns that featured my twoyear tenure fulfilled the goal I set for them when I wrote the first one back in 2014. These columns were intended to open a space for larger, more global conversations about literacy. Although Colombia in particular (Mora, 2014, 2015) and Latin America in general (López-Bonilla, 2015) were the focal point of most columns, we also opened discussions about Africa (Njeru, 2015), rural contexts (Azano, 2015), and the global effect of online forums for literacy (Angay- Crowder et al., 2014). To the JAAL editors, I only have words of gratitude for opening a space for me to share our global concerns and local proposals. To the JAAL readers all over the world, I hope that you have found some interesting points of reflection in these seven columns. 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