Race, Ethnicity, and Literacy and Essential Skills in Canada

I argue that local adult literacy programming involves consciousness and praxis that obscures and renders invisible the social relations of race and ethnicity, and a key mechanism that enacts these processes in Canada are the Essential Skills Framework. Race and ethnicity, as social relations, have both a muted and active presence in the experiences of learners and adult literacy workers engaged in transitions to further education and work. However, the ideology within local program activities like registration, assessment, and goal development show the treatment of race and ethnicity as separate from issues of work and economy, giving it an invisible presence that can reproduce racialised divisions of labour. The Essential Skills are an important tool in these local processes that impact racialised, ethnic, and migrant communities. Ultimately, adult learners build a praxis of self-identifying with the same racialised division of labour that organises their arrival and participation in Essential Skills-based training and vocational learning.