In this article, I present a case study of the literacy practices of a newly literate woman from Morocco. I adopt the social practice theory of literacy and I use ethnographic methods to explore the participant’s life history and offer a practice account of her family-related literacy practices within the framework of gender studies. To collect data, I used in-depth interviews, informal discussion, participant observation, visual ethnography and documentary photography over one year. In data analysis, literacy events were used as the basic unit of analysis and patterns were identified through coding and theme analysis. The results obtained show that the family is a strong impetus for the participant’s literacy acquisition and a major context where she uses literacy. They also demonstrate that literacy is an enabling tool for the participant because, thanks to her status as newly literate, she can carry out many of the outdoor tasks that were formerly exclusive to men, yet literacy places new family demands on her and does not empower her to claim her place in the world and play leading roles in the family life. These results support findings of previous research on the embedded nature of literacy practice and illustrate the multiple ways in which the vernacular literacy behavior of a participant from the Moroccan context is embedded in a strong gender-based division of labor.
Source: World Journal of Islamic History and Civilization
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