University of Michigan doctoral candidate Jennifer L. Hall, with the guidance of Dr. Judith T. Irvine, will undertake research on the relationship between contemporary programs to promote adult literacy and the historical dynamics of social division and social control.
The research will be carried out in Morocco, where there is an innovative approach to adult literacy education called "passerelle." Passerelle aims to teach adult women to first write their mother tongues, Moroccan Arabic or Berber, using Standard Arabic orthography before transitioning them to broader Standard Arabic literacy skills. The research methods to be employed in the study include long-term participation observation, interviews, surveys, and focus group sessions. The researcher will identify pre-existing, locally meaningful notions of literacy and examine how the language ideologies of literacy learners, their teachers, and Moroccan educators influence and are influenced by their experiences with passerelle literacy programs. The researcher will examine women's relationships towards literacy materials before and after participation in the program. By using a multi-sited research design and by interacting both with women currently enrolled in literacy classes as well as women who completed literacy training over four years ago, the researcher will identify the short-term and longer-term social and political consequences of participation in passerelle based literacy programs.
This research will contribute to social science theory by investigating how the selective valuation of certain language varieties and literate traditions over others may become entwined with other mechanisms of social control. The research also will help education policy makers and development specialists design more effective adult literacy education courses. This project contributes to the education of a social scientist.
With the support of a NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, doctoral student Jennifer L. Hall completed the third and final phase of a two year ethnographic research project that studied the form and effects of language ideologies, beliefs about languages, surrounding an innovative approach to adult literacy education in Morocco called ‘passerelle.’ Passerelle aims to teach adult women to first write their mother tongues, Moroccan Arabic or Berber, using Standard Arabic orthography before transitioning them to broader Standard Arabic literacy skills. Passerelle methodology was developed between 2005 and 2008 by a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) collaborative project called ALEF, Advanced Learning and Employability for a Better Future. During this phase of her dissertation project, Hall examined the longer-term impacts of student participation in passerelle by interviewing and conducting focus groups with a subset of women who participated in passerelle literacy classes in 2006-2007. She tested the hypothesis that the passerelle literacy approach, by promoting Standard Arabic script as an ideologically neutral instrument for representing mother tongue languages in Morocco, presents an ideological conflict for adult learners and educators who may hold differing ideas as to the utility and appropriateness of portraying traditionally oral languages in written form using Arabic script. This project revealed that four years after having participated in the passerelle literacy course, teachers and students alike do not endorse writing Moroccan Arabic or Berber. While most believe it is acceptable and necessary to use mother tongue languages in the literacy classroom setting, they argue that the writing of mother tongue languages should be minimized and at most should represent a "pre-literacy" phase that is quickly passed. After participating in passerelle courses, both teachers and students associate Moroccan Arabic and Berber with primarily oral, informal and private contexts, a position that aligns with dominant language ideologies in Morocco. Passerelle education policy planners, in contrast, continue to emphasize the importance of mother tongue literacy education as a step towards Standard Arabic literacy and are in the process of integrating aspects of the passerelle methodology into normative Moroccan government literacy programs. However, given a change to the Moroccan constitution that elevates the status of Berber to an official language alongside Standard Arabic, the writing of Berber in Arabic script as presented in the passerelle program has become an especially contentious and divisive issue. One of the main long term consequences observed of women’s participation in the passerelle program was a sense of increased self-confidence in other aspects of their daily lives. Many women commented that in the past few years they have assumed more public roles in their local communities and feel more comfortable exploring outside their immediate neighborhood. This is particularly the case for monolingual Berber speaking women who, through participation in the passerelle literacy classes, feel that they have acquired the additional social capital needed to be respected in Arab dominated spaces. There was no spontaneous emergence of a new role for mother tongue literacy observed outside the classroom among women participants, an interesting finding given the increased presence of Moroccan Arabic in new public spaces such as billboard advertising, dubbed television series and the internet. This project has contributed to a better understanding of the semiotic processes inherent to the construction, negotiation and ongoing maintenance of language ideologies by showing how they simultaneously participate in the maintenance of other locally meaningful categories of difference, such as oral/written, rural/urban, traditional/modern and illiterate/literate, through which individuals, institutions and their interrelations become organized. Findings from this research have helped local education policy makers and development specialists design more effective and attractive adult literacy education courses for Arabic contexts.
