Hearing Other Voices: A Critical Assessment of Popular Views on Literacy and Work

Current popular discussion about the role of literacy in the workplace is often based on the largely unquestioned beliefs that workers are deficient in basic literacy skills and, further, that there are clear links among illiteracy, poor job performance, and the declining economy. These assumptions lead to demands for school-based, skill-driven literacy programs tied to the workplace. In this article, Glynda Hull challenges these demands and the characterizations of workers that underlie them, suggesting that these demands are based on overly simplistic notions about literacy and its relationship to job performance and the economy. Hull argues that ethnographic research on literacy and the workplace demonstrates that the relationship between work and literacy is far more complex than the current popular discussion would have us believe. She concludes that we must pay more attention to how literacy skills are actually used in the workplace and that we can best do this by asking workers about their experiences in workplace-related instructional programs.