Literacy at blue-collar work: making visible the diverse practices
Blog by Sari Sulkunen
Quite often we perceive blue-collar work as manual and physical work in which literacy has only a limited role. Indeed, adult literacy surveys have shown that the role of literacy is pronounced in expert occupations (e.g., senior officials and managers) and to some extent in white-collar occupations (e.g., clerks and sales professionals) (OECD 2013; 2020). In contrast, literacy has a minor role in blue-collar occupations: workers read and write less frequently and less diverse materials at work and show lower level of average literacy proficiency than experts or white-collar workers (Grotlüschen et al. 2020; Sulkunen et al. 2021). However, these surveys focus on limited set of self-reported print literacy activities, ignoring the work-specific practices and the multimodal meaning making. While qualitative, often ethnographic, studies paint a more nuanced picture, such research on blue-collar workers’ literacies is scarce (cf.… Read the rest