When Paulo Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the mid-’70s, he transformed the landscape of adult education by stating what great teachers have always known, but few had articulated so forcefully: that genuine learning can only occur within a context that is meaningful and relevant to the learner. Literacy, he insisted, is an active phenomenon, deeply linked to personal and cultural identity. Its power lies not in a received ability to read and write, but rather in an individual’s capacity to put those skills to work in shaping the course of his or her own life.
With his central insight, that genuine literacy involves “reading the word and the world,” Freire helped open the door to a broader understanding of the term, one that moves from a strict decoding and reproducing of language into issues of economics, health, and sustainable development. Freire’s view of literacy is at once practical and all-encompassing. It refers to the ability to manipulate any set of codes and conventions-whether it is the words of a language, the symbols in a mathematical system, or images posted to the Internet—to live healthy and productive lives.
This notion of literacy as an inherently active phenomenon informs each of the EDC projects profiled in this issue. We see it when Micael Olsson uses language instruction as a vehicle for cultural survival and economic self-sufficiency; when David Dickinson describes how children acquire language best when it is used in meaningful contexts; and when Bill Tally emphasizes the importance of having students gain mastery with new technology tools by using them to do scientific and historical research. Each of these diverse projects, as well as a good many others at EDC, exemplifies literacy as a meaning-making activity.
And yet, in making these connections among such diverse work, we confront our own issues of language and meaning, namely: Have we stretched the definition of “literacy” too far? Do we dilute the power of the concept when we apply it to a sustainable development project in the rainforest of Papua New Guinea and an after-school mathematics program in the United States? In the introductory essay of Literacy: An International Handbook, the editors comment on “the increased use of the term literacy to stand in for expertise in such areas as computer literacy, geographical literacy, statistical literacy—a veritable host of literacies.” They note that the plural form of the term is used to describe not only these multiple areas of expertise, but also to point out that all definitions of literacy are, to some extent, a function of culture:
the new term literacies was coined as a way to break—both conceptually and practically—with what was thought to be a much more skill-driven and restrictive notion of literacy…literacy is not a single, essential thing, with predictable consequences for individual and social development—rather, literacies ‘vary with time and place and are embedded in specific cultural practices.’
“Breaking the restrictive notion of literacy” is a good way to describe the idea at the center of this issue of Mosaic. We hope you expand your own understanding of literacy through these pages.