What is literacy?

It appears as if each week will be a little bit different than the last. Last week I went to the small village of Belo to observe a teacher training course. This week I am going to be in Bamenda for the week attending a primer creation workshop. The goal of my practicum is simply to observe literacy in a developing country (though when you write practicum objectives you have to make sure it sounds much more difficult than that so that people think this experience should qualify for credit at the graduate level). Anyway I have to journal for my supervisor every day. Here is a portion from today:

I’ve been thinking about literacy and it seems to me that literacy is more than just about knowing how to read the words on a page when instructed to do so. What I mean is that a literate society is a place where people use their skill of reading in order to acquire information and go about their daily routines. In that way, I think Cameroonian culture is still predominantly an oral culture. People don’t have books in their homes except maybe a textbook they had to buy their kid for school. There are no libraries, few newspapers and only a couple of bookstores. Last Sunday the list of announcements in church went on for close to twenty minutes since there are no bulletins (and the church is used as a place to announce community events and school happenings since posted notices have proved ineffective). I think there are some people who read, but as a general rule people just don’t choose to read as part of their everyday routines.

There are probably many complex factors that explain why people make these choices. Poverty means that you may need to choose to buy food and clothes instead of books. There are not many role models for children; they don’t see adults in their families reading and they are not read to by those adults either. Perhaps to a very group-oriented society, an activity like reading feels individualistic. Perhaps it is the absence of an extensive selection of genres of literature. It is interesting for me to muse about how you create a market for written literature or whether that is necessary assuming that the present system is sustainable.