Literacy in the new millennium

This report documents a project that involved a literature review and subsequent consultations with a small group of key stakeholders whose different perspectives helped to inform this research. The main focus of the review was on work published since 1990. The purpose of the review was to identify the issues and the changes which have occurred in thinking about literacy and to provide an intellectual platform from which further debate about the nature of literacy today can take place in an Australian context. It examines some of the often contradictory ways in which literacy has been defined before considering how and why literacy conceptions have changed over the years. The final section of the paper outlines a number of implications for literacy policy and practice highlighted by the research. It indicates that literacy can no longer be assumed to be either a universal or unitary concept, nor can literacy policy continue to be linked to the demands of a globalised economy and a national training agenda which sees adult literacy primarily in terms of vocational outcomes. A broad conception of literacy entails a pedagogy (and an assessment) that can be described as focused on meaning-making. That is, rather than merely reproducing uncritically what is taught, learners are able to make sense of the world and construct their own perspectives. This implies both an engagement with the world and the capacity to critique that world. If this broader conception of literacy is overlooked, then literacy becomes reductive, little more than the mastery of a series of sub-skills such as using punctuation marks correctly, rather than the genuinely transforming experience that current conceptions of literacy - as social practice, critical engagement, situated and multiple - suggest it should be. Show less