Situating senior women in the literacy landscape of North Africa
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Laura Rice
Abstract
Although literacy programs in North African countries vary in method, management approach, and in content emphasis, their discourse is strikingly similar: It focuses too often on learners' deficits and considers the condition of these “illiterate” subjects, i.e. persons lacking the 3Rs, as a “disease” against which a war of eradication must be waged. For Government Agencies, NGOs, and other institutional actors in literacy projects, such lexicon of combat, in which the lack of print culture becomes a physiological scourge, becomes a convenient framework to develop measurable outcomes for the literacy efforts. However, as will be demonstrated in this paper, there is a serious risk that their reductive discourse will result in their losing a real opportunity to significantly enhance learning outcomes if the local knowledge of women, and particularly, senior women, are not integrated in the literacy efforts. Senior women are repositories of wisdom in their communities. From life experience, they have developed multiple literacy skills, unrelated to schooling, by which they contribute significantly in caring for the health of their kin and neighbors, in teaching survival and subsistence skills, and in transmitting their pragmatic wisdom to younger generations. Based on fieldwork conducted in rural Tunisia and Morocco, the authors provide examples to demonstrate that including senior women's knowledge in the literacy landscape would strengthen the literacy efforts upon which sustainable development depends.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Gender, sex, and language in Valencia: attitudes toward sex-related language among Spanish and Catalan speakers
- Situating senior women in the literacy landscape of North Africa
- Continuité, rupture et construction identitaires : analyse de discours d'immigrés maghrébins en France
- Between the languages of silence and the woman's word: gender and language in the work of Assia Djebar
- Morocco's languages and gender: evidence from the field
- Emergence et développement de la différenciation de genre entre 7 et 18 ans : perception de stimuli en arabe marocain en milieu scolaire à Ksar el Kébir
- Language and gender in Moroccan urban areas
- Representations of women in Moroccan Arabic and Berber proverbs
- Constructing gender identity in two languages
- Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco, by Moha Ennaji
- Retrospective insight: reflections on the specialist's role in developing an Arapaho language assessment protocol
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Gender, sex, and language in Valencia: attitudes toward sex-related language among Spanish and Catalan speakers
- Situating senior women in the literacy landscape of North Africa
- Continuité, rupture et construction identitaires : analyse de discours d'immigrés maghrébins en France
- Between the languages of silence and the woman's word: gender and language in the work of Assia Djebar
- Morocco's languages and gender: evidence from the field
- Emergence et développement de la différenciation de genre entre 7 et 18 ans : perception de stimuli en arabe marocain en milieu scolaire à Ksar el Kébir
- Language and gender in Moroccan urban areas
- Representations of women in Moroccan Arabic and Berber proverbs
- Constructing gender identity in two languages
- Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco, by Moha Ennaji
- Retrospective insight: reflections on the specialist's role in developing an Arapaho language assessment protocol
