Towards Understanding Situated Perspectives of Adult Literacy Teaching and Learing in Malawi

This paper examines how community members’ understandings of literacy could help in designing a curriculum that would go beyond numeracy and literacy to facilitate the learners’ own situated development agendas. Despite... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines how community members’ understandings of literacy could help in designing a curriculum that would go beyond numeracy and literacy to facilitate the learners’ own situated development agendas.

Despite changing names, the core curriculum for the National Adult Literacy Programme (NALP)in Malawi has essentially remained the same since the late 1940s i.e. focusing on reading, writing and numeracy. Whilst some evaluation reports have pointedly acknowledged that the low completion rates in the NALP are partly due to the literacy curriculum not being suitable for adults, very little has been done to understand this challenge. Instead, efforts have often been made to develop curricula based on ‘de-contextualised needs’ assessment.

Based on ethnographic research undertaken in a small village in Malawi, this paper unpacks differences between the Malawi government and some community members’ expectations regarding what the NALP should be offering. It demonstrates that whilst the government puts more emphasis on functional knowledge to promote active citizenship, some community members focus on schooling and continuing education. At the same time, whilst the government sees literacy in terms of reading and writing extensive texts, community members seem to value an ability to sign their names. In other words, some adults go to the literacy classes with multiple agendas which the official and somewhat de-contextualised curriculum could be failing to satisfy. In view of this, the paper argues that studies aimed at informing the development of the NALP curriculum need to respond to community members’ situated understandings of literacy.