Critical Literacy and Beyond: Lessons Learned from Students and Workers in a Vocational Program and on the Job

This article reports a study of students' experiences in a community college vocational program in banking and finance and the jobs the students got and lost in the data center of a bank. The study is situated in current concerns about the presumed literacy problems of North American workers and the relationship between skills and competitiveness in the global economy. The discontinuities between such concerns and the situations of the vocational students in this study are discussed, as are calls for “functional context” and “critical” literacy programs. An argument is made for the educational, social, and political importance of studies of work in juxtaposition to studies of schooling.