Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and boxes
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword: the imperative to resist
- Introduction: resisting neoliberalism in education
- Part I Adult education
- Part II School education
- Part III Higher education
- Part IV National perspectives
- Part V Transnational perspectives
- Afterword: resources of hope
- Index
2 - Research, adult literacy and criticality: catalysing hope and dialogic caring
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and boxes
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword: the imperative to resist
- Introduction: resisting neoliberalism in education
- Part I Adult education
- Part II School education
- Part III Higher education
- Part IV National perspectives
- Part V Transnational perspectives
- Afterword: resources of hope
- Index
Summary
Positioning literacy and hope
In the UK and internationally, the current discourse around literacy is driven by international surveys that have become increasingly important over the last 25 years (for example, those produced for the Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competencies [PIAAC]). Produced and promoted by a range of agencies, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the European Union, national governments commit considerable funding to these surveys and countries then compare themselves against one another using the results.
When literacy is conceptualised as a singular ‘autonomous’ (Street, 1995) skill to be acquired and tested through competency assessment, it can become a vehicle for bringing about the symbolic domination of institutionalised literacies that derive from notions of human capital, economic investment and returns (Becker, 1993). Framed by these human capital discourses, at the level of the individual, literacy becomes a technology for stratifying human beings as embodied labour power. In many ways, this ‘economisation’ of literacy serves to depoliticise it. This is consistent with a neoliberal hegemonic view that typically attempts to neutralise politics through a common-sense assumption that economic considerations are sovereign (Davies, 2014).
Challenging this, we argue that literacy needs to be positioned within a discourse of transformation that includes re-imagining it as a catalyst for hope, whereby learners, their families and their communities are positioned positively in relation to possible life-course trajectories and other new possibilities that they can imagine for themselves. Here, we are drawing on the thinking of Ernst Bloch, who writes powerfully about the connection between hope and agency. For Bloch (1986: 443), hope:
is indestructibly grounded in the human drive for happiness and … has always been too clearly the motor of history … when the will had learnt both through mistakes and in fact through hope as well, and when reality did not stand in too harsh a contradiction to it, [it] reformed a bit of the world; that is: an initial fiction was made real.
This positive orientation towards the future and to the idea that agency can bring about change in the world inhabited by the individual is viewed by Bloch as an inherent ‘drive’ in people, which is, however, characteristically thwarted by current economic and political discourses and conditions.
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- Information
- Resisting Neoliberalism in EducationLocal, National and Transnational Perspectives, pp. 27 - 40Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019