Literacy Revisited: What is literacy?

Literacy Revisited: What is literacy?

Has Literacy has become a victim of its own success?  Many people know and use the term freely, applying it to a suprising variety of contexts and specialisms, but for some educators, there is a distinct lack of curiosity about, or engagement with literacy. The consequences of this are several, lessened  literacy provision and  potential benefits for students, and a reduction of such provision to a limited number of ‘Compliance Literacies’ which feature as disjointed events with little consistency or reference to other learning the student might encounter.  

The lack of curiosity may arise for a number of reasons.

·      Many educators have an internalized notion of what ‘literacy’ is and tend to assume that everyone else agrees with that notion.

·       ‘Literacy experts’ tends to deflect people from evaluating their own notions about literacy so they tend to ‘leave it’ to others.

·      A mistaken tendency to consider that literacy restricted to ‘reading and writing’, and the teaching of that should have been taken care of in school.

·      Some educators consider literacy a hindrance to their teaching as they would prefer to ‘teach’ learning outcomes rather than reading and writing.

As a result, adult educators tend to exhibit a general inconsistency of approaches and emphases on literacy within adult education and this is transmitted to our students. For instance were we to ask a math, social studies, science and languages educator “What is Literacy?”  We may well get some very different views about how it is used and how it should be used. 

Furthermore, the likelihood of each educator to engage in specific literacy or numeracy-centered activities is a constant variable.

So I ask again What is Literacy - to you?