Abstract
The concept of community literacy is based on the idea that local meanings and uses of literacy should inform the design and implementation of adult literacy programs and that literacy programs should respond and be flexible to people’s expressed needs. The in Nepal was informed by the sociocultural model of literacy developed within the “New Literacy Studies” (Street 1995) and was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). The New Literacy Studies is informed by sociolinguistic and ethnographic studies of literacy. Rather than viewing literacy as an autonomous “skill,” these approaches view literacy and literacies as a diverse social practice embedded in local contexts, institutions, and practices (Collins and Blot 2003; Street 1993). This perspective assumes that literacy programs can provide a public space for the articulation and debate over local “situated” meanings of literacy and provide practical mechanisms to help people to learn and use literacy in real-life situations. The paper discusses some of the tensions between the articulation of “local” meanings of literacy within the wider national and international discourses of development and some of the creative responses that emerged.
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Notes
- 1.
The Community Literacy Project ran between February 1997 and September 2003. It was initially managed by the Centre for British Teachers (CfBT) and then by World Education Nepal (WEN). Project staff changed during the course of the project. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors.
- 2.
Nepal is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, with 127 spoken languages and many major language groups.
- 3.
One of the striking examples had been the folk songs that a women’s savings group composed in Bardiya District, which included verses of their joyous feeling of being able to fill up bank vouchers and write and read group minutes and the very songs they composed.
- 4.
There are almost 4000 Village Development Committees in Nepal, each of which oversees the governance and development activities of the nine wards. A ward is the smallest political unit comprising of about 300 households.
- 5.
The project’s external evaluation report rated highly its performance and potential for scaling up the products it came up with.
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Maddox, B. (2015). A Community Literacy Project: Nepal. In: Street, B., May, S. (eds) Literacies and Language Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02321-2_17-1
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