ANEC representative participated in “New ways of researching literacy” workshop on 14-18 January 2018 at Kabul Intercontinental Hotel hosted by UNESCO and Literacy Department of Ministry of Education. The workshop was being leaded by Professor Allan Rogers and the other key members were Mr. Ahmadi and Mr. Omari from UNESCO and around 30 people from different universities and organizations across Afghanistan participated.

The objectives were introduction of literacy, literacy as social practice, informal learnings, ethnography and learning and teaching LSP. Literacy was presented as universal skill and social practice and was mentioned as a process to be shared rather than a possession. Literacy event and literacy practices, development discourses, social imaginaries and types of research such as quantitative, action research and qualitative were discussed. Ethnography was the new method of researching because other old methods could fail due to echo effect, meaning of terms, mediation, gap between sayings and doing and tacit knowledge and skills.

It was emphasized throughout the workshop that every learner who comes to a learning adult course, joins with lots of learning and shouldn’t be expected as ignorant. But unfortunately according to Rogers’ experience there have not been any class to ask the learner what are your pervious learnings since 1973. People are working to make non-literate people as part of the society while they are unaware that these non-literate people are the society themselves.