Duncan, Samantha; Cullinan, Claire; Kelly, Esther; (2024) Reading the way: a social practice approach to reading development in prisons. Research and Practice in Adult Literacies (RaPAL) Journal , 109 (Summer) pp. 23-33.

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Abstract

Reading the Way (RtW) is a mission to create spaces in prisons to practise and enjoy reading and listening, and to talk with each other about reading and what we read. It was initiated in 2022 by Prison Reading Groups (PRG), part of the charity Give A Book and led by Sarah Turvey, in collaboration with adult literacies experts, Professor Sam Duncan and Claire Cullinan, and a prison education expert, Esther Kelly, who is the Reading Strategy Lead for prisons in Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire, employed by the education provider Novus. We four have come together here to share our understanding of how the RtW project helped us to think more carefully about what it means to say that one is taking a Literacy as Social Practice approach to reading or wider literacies development; how the approach may add to our understanding of Practice Engagement Theory (PET) (Reder, 1994; Reder et al, 2020) and what this might tell us about the complexities of assessing the influence of adult literacies interventions and projects (we use ‘influence’ purposely instead of the more usual ‘impact,’ arguing that influence allows for more reflection on causality and forms of effect over time); and, finally, how we expressed RtW as for ‘emergent readers’ and why this terminology and the conversations behind it matter in prisons and our wider communities.

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