We will only focus on some of these interesting topics.

The others are for your additional readings for

more information on literacies. Please read the following:

Paulo Freire and the radical education movement

The rise to prominence of Paulo Freire’s work within the larger context of the radical education
movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Freire 1972, 1973; Freire and Macedo 1987) was a key
factor in bringing the term ‘literacy’ to the foreground as a key concept in contemporary educational
theory and research throughout the English-speaking world. Shortly after his work on education as a
practice of freedom was published in Portuguese, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard
University (1969), and his Cultural Action for Freedom was published as a Harvard Education Review
monograph in 1970. His classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was published the same year.
Resonant with social justice concerns and a rising tide of critical theory scholarship, Freire’s approach to
non-formal literacy education captured the imagination, respect, and support of many academics and
political activists in First World countries – particularly in North America – and was adopted as the
philosophical basis for national and regional adult literacy programs in some Third World countries. It
provided the theoretical underpinning for the development of critical pedagogy, including critical
literacy, in the USA during the 1980s. In the years immediately following the publication of Freire’s early
works, ‘literacy’ became an important focal concept within the emergent sociocultural theory (e.g.,
Scribner and Cole 1981), and within educational research and theory and teacher education more
widely.

Freire’s work with peasant groups in Brazil and Chile provided an example of how literacy work could be
central to radical approaches to education aimed at building critical social praxis. His concept of literacy
as ‘reading the word and the world’ involved much more than merely the ideas of decoding and
encoding print. Far from being the sole objective of literacy education, learning how to encode and
decode alphabetic print was integrated into an expansive pedagogy in which groups of learners
collaboratively pursued critical consciousness of their world via a reflexive or ‘cyclical’ process of
reflection and action. Through their efforts to act on the world and to analyze and understand the
results of their action, people can come to know the world better: more ‘deeply’ and ‘critically’.

From this perspective, ‘illiteracy’ is seen as a consequence of unjust social processes and relations that
have been created historically and become ‘woven’ (or, as we might say today, ‘hard-wired’) into the
social structure. Yet, insofar as these unjust social arrangements have been created and are sustained
through human activity, they can equally be changed through human action. Before such
‘transformative cultural action’ can occur, however, it is necessary to understand the nature and origins
of social oppression.

In Freire’s pedagogy, learning to write and read words became a focus for adults in pursuing critical
awareness of how oppressive practices and relations operated in everyday life. Words that were highly
charged with meaning for them – words that expressed their fears, hopes, troubles, and their dreams
for a better life – provided the vocabulary by which they learned to write and read. These words were
discussed intensively to explore how the world ‘worked’. In the context of this oral discussion, the
written forms of these words, as well as of other words that could be built out of their syllables and
phonemes, were introduced. In the context of discussing and thinking about these words, participants
learned what they ‘looked like’ as text and how to write and read them.

Within Freire’s approach to promoting literacy, then, the process of learning literally to read and write
words was an integral part of learning to understand how the world operates socially and culturally in
ways that produce unequal opportunities and outcomes for different groups of people. Ultimately, this
analysis was to provide a starting point for participants to take action on the world in an attempt to
change it in ways that would create social processes and relations that were juster. Groups would
undertake cultural action for change in the world in the light of their analysis of their circumstances.
They would then analyze and evaluate the results of their action to take the next step in cultural action.
This praxis of reflection and action was the means of knowing the world more deeply and accurately
since it involved ‘testing’ it to see how it works in the light of concepts and theories developed
collaboratively in the discussion of experiences and beliefs. Freirean literacy education was, then, an
integral component of a radical, politicized pedagogy purposefully designed to stimulate action for
change.

Literacy, accountability, efficiency, and quality

During the 1980s and 1990s, literacy emerged as an ‘arch indicator’ for the professional accountability of
schools and teachers and the political legitimacy of public education systems, policies, and
administrations. Education systems increasingly moved to a model based on national- or state-level
curricula and curriculum standards or outcome levels, and reporting based on student performance
assessed on a regular basis, particularly in literacy and numeracy. This ‘standards–testing–
accountability– performance’ model of education reform is defended politically with a range of familiar
justifications. These include greater transparency of school performance, improved student
performance on what the tests measure, greater accountability of schools to their communities, better
value for the taxpayer, and quality assurance.

As an institutionalized activity of the state, education is seen to be legitimated through the principle of
performativity (Lyotard 1984). This is the principle of optimizing the overall performance of social
institutions (like schools) according to the criterion of efficiency: the ‘endless optimization of the
cost/benefit (input/output) ratio’ (Lyotard 1993: 25). Specific institutions are legitimated by their
contributions to maximizing the performance of the state or corporate systems of which they are apart.
Governments and administrations report their successes to political constituencies. For example,
rejecting the charge that the UK’s National Reading Strategy had had minimal impact on reading
standards, Schools Minister Andrew Adonis claimed: ‘This is not an opinion: it is a fact. 2007 results in
reading show that 84 percent of 11-year-olds achieved the expected level – up 17 percentage points
since 1997’ (BBC 2007).

In a classic statement of school/teacher accountability, the 1998 Australian government policy paper
Literacy for All (DEETYA 1998) described a National Plan for literacy based on beginning literacy
assessment as early as possible, with agreed benchmarks for grades 3, 5, 7, and 9. All states were to
assess against the benchmarks, as a basis for national reporting. Teachers were to be provided with
professional development to support the Plan, and early intervention strategies were introduced. The
first principle underlying the Plan was ‘better educational accountability through improved assessment
and reporting’, involving a collection of information of ‘real use’ to schools, teachers, parents, and
governments.

Most recently, in June 2010, a statement of K-12 Common Core State Standards for English Language
Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects produced on behalf of 48
states, two territories, and the District of Columbia was published in the USA (Common Core Standards
Initiative 2010). Led by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors
Association, the initiative has built on work conducted over recent decades by US states to establish
high-quality education standards. The Common Core State Standards have been developed to help
ensure that all students ‘are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school’
(ibid.: Introduction). They provide grade-specific standards for K-12 in reading, writing, speaking,
listening, and language, which ‘lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person’ under current
conditions. States can incorporate the standards into their existing subject standards or adopt them as
content area literacy standards (ibid.). By September 2010, 35 US states and the District of Columbia had
already adopted the standards as a basis for future curriculum development and assessment purposes.