부산대학교 도서관

Summary: Non-formal education programs that target women with little or no formal education living in resource-poor and marginalized communities of emerging nations are among the strategies adopted with increasing frequency to promote human development. Yet evaluations suggest that such initiatives are seldom effective in attaining their anticipated outcomes, despite indicators of continuing need (e.g. Street, 2001). Moreover, little attention has been given to one critical conditioning factor: the uses that African women with low educational qualifications are effectively able to make of the literacy and numeracy skills that they do acquire, and the ways in which these women interact with - or are constrained by profound contextual and gender related factors. A developing tradition in social science research on literacy, the New Literacy Studies (NLS) paradigm, has placed valuable emphasis on examining the actual literacy practices embedded in everyday life, but it has rarely focused on the situation of African women or the interactions between literacy usage and gender roles. The gap is attributable in part to the need for anthropological insight and social science methodology in investigating practical gender-related topics, as well as an insider's knowledge of everyday life and the socio-cultural context of the women concerned. Both remain very scarce in the field. In this study, ethnographic methodology was used to probe the nature of relationship that exists between women's uses of their literacy skills and the gender roles that they perform.