Literacy and Knowledge Production
Literacy Studies emerged through a series of seminal works (e.g. Street 1984; Baynham 1995; Barton and Hamilton 2012) which collectively presented a social theory of literacy. This theory foregrounds the idea that literacy is always associated with, and realised through, ‘social practices’ rather than a purely formally-schooled understanding of correct language. This means that literacy is always embedded within social activities, is socially situated, and mediated by material artefacts and networks. Germane to its methods is to focus on what people actually do with texts and technologies, and how lit- eracy practices are connected to getting things done in everyday life. Literacy research, therefore, invites careful and ethnographic attention to social acts of meaning ascribed to everyday practices of reading and writing.
Literacy Studies begins with the local and everyday experience of literacy in particular communities. It is rooted in people’s intimate experience with text and this is not always predictable from one person to another. There are also different literacy practices in different domains of people’s lives, whether through, for example, formal learning, reli- gious activity, or family life. Literacy is, therefore, to be understood in a pluralistic sense: ‘literacies’ to which, in addition, digital media also adds plurality; and how students use digital technology will vary across different social, age, and subject groups. Students are faced with an increasing range of digital platforms with which to work, and an often unpredictable set of social and material resources which shape their writing and knowl- edge production. This is particularly salient in institutional environments where there is often an attempt to standardise curricular work by organising it around a virtual learning environment (VLE) that all are mandated to use, and large computer suites.
Researchers working within Literacy Studies have examined, in various ways, the cul- tural connections between the nature of knowledge (how it is produced, valued, and bequeathed), and the literacy practices of particular communities. Through Literacy Studies, we have come to know how literacy is intrinsically connected to how societies operate and are organised, how institutions, groups and individuals organise their lives and make sense of the world, and how these realities are produced and re-produced in and through practices of literacy.
Literacy, therefore, cannot be seen outside of the powerful interests and agencies which seek to define it in particular ways (Tett, Hamilton, and Crowther 2012): literacy is a profi- table and fertile resource which can be sponsored, bought and sold, and regulated, sup- pressed or withheld. As Brandt defines it, the ‘sponsors’ of literacy are ‘any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way. Whether they are community leaders, academic institutions, or technology companies, they ultimately control ‘the ideological freight that must be borne for access to what they have’ (168).
Sponsors also shift over time, and where the chief sponsors of literacy were once reli- gious institutions who controlled how and where literacy was taught (and still do in many parts of the world), they have since been eclipsed by new sets of sponsors in the guise of businesses and the digital technology industries. These new actors have shaped current lit- eracy demands in ways which are relevant to this research, as we will discuss below.
