04 Dec “Literacy mediation hides in plain sight.”
Feature interview
In our last Literacy Links we highlighted the ACAL webinar on literacy mediation with Dr Sally Thompson. In the interview below Sally explores these issues further and beautifully articulates a definition of literacy mediation, who does it, where and the complexities around it.
- Can you tell us a little about yourself, how you became interested in literacy mediation and your recent research?
I was an adult literacy teacher for many years in TAFE, the community education sector and in Aboriginal organisations in the NT. I ran a community education centre in the 1990s in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. I first became interested in informal approaches to adult literacy because my observation was that the best literacy learning occurred through participation in the civic and social life of the centre. We used to hold a huge AGM and community barbeque each year and so much literacy learning occurred through students writing speeches, developing and presenting financial reports and preparing different musical performances. Adult literacy students produced a community newsletter that was delivered to every house in the area. We also provided volunteer tutors for every level 1 student in our classes to support them with whatever help they needed. The tutors worked on everything from job applications to legal documents. The disconnect between what adults wanted to learn and the increasingly formulaic curriculum we were funded to provide was striking.
- How do you define literacy mediation and how did the term come about?
I define literacy mediation as a situation in which a person with higher literacy skills helps a person with lesser skills to read and write text for a particular social purpose. A lot of ethnographic research into social practices of literacy has identified that people with low literacy often draw on the support of literacy brokers, scribes or intermediaries to assist them with a broad range of everyday literacy practices. I first came across the term ‘literacy mediation’ at an ESREA conference in Berlin. A researcher called Virginie Theriault spoke about her research with youth workers who helped young people in situations of precarity with reading and writing. Suddenly I had a name for some of the informal practices that I had observed in the community centre. I was excited at the prospect of putting some kind of explanatory framework around this valuable practice. One of the most interesting pieces of research on literacy mediation was undertaken by Arlene Fingeret in the 1980s in the US. Fingaret’s research was significant because she identified a lot of people leading quite successful and happy lives by leaning into their social networks and engaging in reciprical exchanges of goods and services in which support with text was just one item of exchange. In doing so, she challenged the common view of people with low literacy as frightened, ashamed and hopelessly dependant on others.
- Where does most literacy mediation take place?
Literacy mediation hides in plain sight. It doesn’t take much reflection to realise that very few texts are written or read in isolation. A great many literacy practices are distributed across participants, and many involve a person with higher literacy skills supporting someone who struggles with text. My research identified literacy mediation occurring within families, between neighbours, across workplaces and in shops and service settings. Where people with low literacy have networks that include people with higher literacy, they commonly lean into these networks to get by and appear to live quite happy and successful lives.
However, where people with low literacy live in communities with other non-readers obviously literacy mediation within those networks becomes less of an option. Also, when people have fewer resources to share, engaging in reciprocal exchanges to gain help with text is not possible. This is the public policy imperative that emerges from my research. It identified that community organisations played an important role in providing literacy mediation for people with low literacy and other intersecting disadvantage – particularly those who live in communities of other non-readers.
- What are the things that make literacy mediation work?
Literacy mediation is sometimes part of an exchange within communities, but it is also often an act of solidarity with marginalised people. The mediators in my study all showed high levels of empathy, attention to vulnerability in others and a desire to respond in ways that preserved the dignity and autonomy of the person with low literacy. The community centres themselves actively worked to create affective atmospheres that facilitated the types of relationships and exchanges in which people might seek assistance with texts. Material factors like places to gather, soft furnishings, free tea and coffee all played a part in creating a welcoming space in which people felt comfortable seeking support with text.
Then there are the human factors. The mediators were all people who had strong bi-institutional knowledge: they had a shared language and culture with the people seeking mediation but they were also comfortable in the language and culture of the institutions and agencies from which the texts emerged. Importantly they were willing to use these abilities to assist others who struggle with text.
- What are the benefits of community organisations doing literacy mediation? What are some of the costs for these organisations?
Community organisations often struggle with how to engage marginalised members of the community including those with low literacy because the models of service they offer are structured around deficits and labels. This is not through ignorance or lack of insight amongst those who work in community centres. Rather, their funding models are often built around neo-liberal, New Public Management concepts of efficiency and outcomes-based measurement, which people with low literacy, quite naturally, chafe against. In my home state of Victoria, adults with low literacy and other intersecting disadvantage are often called ‘hard to reach learners’. They are, of course, not hard to reach at all. We have a very good sense of where they live and what their needs are, but the programs driven by our funding models are alienating to them. Literacy mediation is sometimes offered as “form filling” in libraries and community centres. It is practical, immediate, responsive and it doesn’t stigmatise people with low literacy. It can also provide a point of engagement with other, more formal, literacy programs.
The challenge for community organisations is that literacy mediation is one of the many forms of informal, largely feminised, care labours that is routinely disregarded by funding bodies. Leaning in to the immediate, individual learning needs of a vulnerable person is often seen as antithetical to professional practice.
- What are the benefits for society to have more effective literacy mediation?
Some researchers have emphasised the learning aspects of literacy mediation and how it might work as a pathway to other learning opportunities. For me the question is more fundamental. If government’s choose to remove human intermediaries from delivery of services and replace them with textually and technologically dense systems, then they have an obligation to provide all citizens with access to these new systems. It’s important to note that some of the texts for which people in my research sought mediators are legal obligations such as completing a tax return or registering with a job agency. It should go without saying that people with low literacy deserve access to the texts that are required for them meet their obligations as citizens, as well as to fully participate in social, work and civic life.
- We often get calls to the Hotline asking for help with filling in forms or managing bills especially when a partner who did this work previously has died or has dementia. It’s often difficult to find somewhere or someone who can help, especially with legal documents. Do you have any suggestions?
In the immediate term I don’t unfortunately. It’s a massive gap. There are a few pilot literacy mediation programs cropping up around the country run from libraries and neighbourhood houses usually called “form filling sessions”. Nationally, public libraries have managed to carve out a space for the provision of informal intergenerational literacy programs such as ‘story time’. I think they are probably the most likely system to be able to make a case for funding of literacy mediation. Also, there are some systems like Tasmania’s 26 Ten program that focusses on individual tuition that could possibly adapt to include literacy mediation. In the longer term, we need additional research on both demand and models of supply. The 2020 Helping Clients Fill in Forms research undertaken by the Hotline with the NSWCOSS was a great start.
- Do you see a role for AI or other device-based assistive technologies going forward as the population ages and need rises?
Definitely. When I was conducting my research, a man reached out to me to give me the perspective of someone who left school early and had low literacy but didn’t particularly rely on mediators. He had entered work as a fifteen year old, due to what he called ‘the gift of the gab’, and was a prolific user of technology. He had a very successful career including winning a place on local council using Siri as his primary mediator.
However, technological skills are inevitably developed within social networks. Although this fellow had low literacy, he had a strong social network made up of other literate people and good economic resources. Technology can play an important role for people like that. For aged pensioners in the same town, who are without social networks of technologically literate people, device based assistive technologies are unlikely to fill the gap. It’s also probably worth noting, that the community where I did my research had massive internet black spots that could only be overcome through purchasing satellite systems or antennas worth thousands of dollars. The library and neighbourhood house both rationed access to computers and the internet because demand exceeded supply. The digital divide is real.
- What would you like to see to build more effective and inclusive literacy mediation?
One of the questions that inevitably arises about literacy mediation is whether it supports people with low literacy to develop skills and live lives of autonomy and dignity or whether it keeps them in relationships of dependency. My research suggests the former, but we’ll never really know the answer to that until we resource literacy mediation, train mediators, build pathways between literacy mediation and other pedagogies and then study the results.