BALID: who we are: executive committee

About us

Who we are

Executive Committee

BALID Executive Committee

President: Brian Street
Brian Street is Professor of Language in Education at King's College, London University and Visiting Professor of Education in both the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania and in the School of Education and Professional Development, University of East Anglia. Professor Street undertook anthropological fieldwork on literacy in Iran during the 1970s and taught social and cultural anthropology for over 20 years at the University of Sussex, before taking up the Chair of Language in Education at King's College London.

He has written and lectured extensively on literacy practices from both a theoretical and an applied perspective. He has a longstanding commitment to linking ethnographic-style research on the cultural dimension of language and literacy with contemporary practice in education and in development. He has been involved in Technical Support teams, lecture tours, workshops, training programmes and research in a number of countries including the USA, South Africa, Nepal, India and Singapore.

Vice-Chair: Feroz Khan

Secretary: Juliet McCaffery
Juliet McCaffery has worked in the field of adult literacy, gender and education for over 25 years in both the voluntary and statutory sectors and at the British Council. She now runs Consultancy and Training Services, a small consultancy firm specialising in literacy gender and social development. She has worked in the Middle East, Sub Saharan Africa, Nepal and Pakistan.

She has published articles, training guides and student writing. Her most recent publications are Using Transformative Models of Adult Literacy in Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding Processes at Community Level in COMPARE (2005) and "Closing the Gap: issues in gender integrated training of adult literacy facilitators" in Women Literacy and Development (2004) Ed Anna Robinson-Pant, Routledge. She is currently working on a comparative study of the education of Gypsies and Travellers of Southern England and the nomadic Fulani of Northern Nigeria.

Treasurer: Ian Cheffy
Ian is now in his final year of PhD research at Lancaster University exploring what literacy means to adults in an area in the north of Cameroon where literacy has not long been established as a communicative practice and where only the minority of people are able to make use of literacy without help from others. This interest arose from a period of ten years working in the country as a literacy specialist with SIL.

During that time, he assisted one language community to develop a literacy programme for adults and children in their own language and later set up a training centre for Cameroonians in literacy and translation work. Since returning from Cameroon in 1999, he has been working as a literacy trainer for SIL, providing training in the UK and elsewhere for organisers of literacy programmes in developing countries.

He is enjoying his PhD research for the opportunity it has given him to think in depth about what literacy is and about his own practice. He presented a paper on this subject at the AILA Literacy Conference in Belgium in 2003 and he is looking forward to presenting two more at the AILA Conference in Germany in August this year.

Institutional Members
Education Action International – Sally Pritchard
National Research and Development Centre – David Mallows
Feed The Minds – Katy Newell-Jones (Programme Director)
Katy has been actively involved in literacy since 1982, initially as an Adult Literacy volunteer in South Wales. In the last 15 years her overseas literacy work has focused on participatory approaches, training of trainers, evaluation and programme management, with a strong focus on literacy for life-related decision-making.

Katy has enjoyed opportunities to work with NGOs in conflict and post conflict situations, including Guinea, Sierra Leone and South Sudan (Rebuilding communities: the contribution of integrated literacy and conflict resolution programmes. In Critical Literacy: theories and practice (2007)).

Currently she is involved in the production of learner and facilitator-generated materials moving on from peacebuilding towards active engagement in civic decision-making. Katy holds a National Teaching Fellowship from the Higher Education Academy and an honorary research fellowship with the Nuffield Department for Medicine, University of Oxford.

As Programme Director for Feed the Minds since January 2007, Katy is particularly interested in supporting small indigenous NGOs, already delivering traditional literacy programmes, to embrace alternative approaches to literacy.
Co-opted Member: Ian Mowatt

Administrator: Sarah Snow

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