Local Volunteering, Adult Learning and Social Change in the Philippines

Chris Millora is Lecturer in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and Academic Associate with the UNESCO Chair in Adult Literacy and Learning for Social Transformation at the University of East Anglia, UK.

• List of FiguresList of TablesSeries Editor ForewordPreface AcknowledgementsNote on the TextAbbreviations1. What Slips through the Net? Volunteering, Learning and Literacies2. A Country Built by Volunteers: Volunteering in the Philippines3. Volunteering, Learning and Literacies as Social Practices: Conceptual Starting Points4. Encountering Volunteering and Learning: A Research Journey5. ‘We Probably Know but We Can’t Explain’: Hidden Motivations for Volunteering6. Learning in/through Volunteering: Discourses and Practices7. Bureaucratic Literacies: Texts, Participation and Inequalities8. Challenging, Maintaining and Reimagining Identities through Volunteering9. Volunteering, Learning and Literacies: Conceptual and Practical Lessons from Local VolunteersReferencesIndex

In this elegant study of the entanglement of literacy practices with volunteering in vulnerable communities in the Philippines, Millora reveals striking contradictions in the work of development agencies. Millora’s vivid account leaves little doubt that, to grasp the role of literacy practices in the continued reproduction of processes of social stratification, literacy learning needs to be studied in social practice rather than as the imparting of a neutral technology or set of skills. Based on the idea of insider-outsider epistemologies and rendered through fine scale ethnographic detail and reflections, this book is an important contribution to studies on adult learning, literacy and social change.