Negotiating the textuality of Further Education: issues of agency and participation.

Students in Further Education colleges in England read and write in many different kinds of ways in different areas of their everyday lives. As part of their participation in Further Education, these students face a multitude of literacy demands: through the bureaucracies of the college, the pedagogic content of their courses, the textual nature of assessment, and the development of new practices of reading and writing relating to their intended workplaces. Drawing upon evidence from research with students and staff at four FE colleges in England and Scotland, this paper presents the argument that students actively participate within this textual world. They elect to engage with some texts and to ignore others, depending upon the value they judge the text to have, the relevance they think it holds to their lives or courses, and the extent to which they are able to access the text and its meanings. This challenges a popular deficit discourse which assumes FE students' lack of literacy: rather than seeing the student as the 'problem' behind the lack of engagement with some texts, the text can be seen as the 'problem' if it has failed to engage the student. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]