Schooling, Language, and Knowledge in Literate and Nonliterate Societies

1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Niyi Akinnaso
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Systematic Comparison ◽  
Form Function ◽  
American Concept ◽  
Major Medium

The relationships among schooling, language, and knowledge—especially through the systematic comparison of the organization, form, function, and acquisition of institutionalized knowledge—in literate and nonliterate societies has hardly been examined. This essay attempts such an analysis, focusing on knowledge acquired through the use of language, because language is the major medium for imparting knowledge in schools and for social reproduction in the larger society, because knowledge acquired through the use of language is readily identifiable and testable, and because language is one of the major terms of the present analysis. The proposed elastic concept of schooling views schooling as a cover term for institutionalized learning in any society, literate or nonliterate. It thus questions the analytical adequacy of the received, Euro-American, concept of schooling as a unitary phenomenon based on the dual assumption that the school specializes in the transmission of literate knowledge and that literacy education is coterminous with formal education.

Inconsistency between educational attainment and literacy: The case of Russia

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-269
Author(s):  
Dmitry Popov ◽  
Anna Strelnikova
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Educational Status ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Social Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
Employment Education ◽  
Education Indicators ◽  
The Moment

From the moment when wide spread of large scale assessments in sociology and economics began, the most commonly used indicators of peoples' qualifications are the number of years spent in education and the possession of a high school/college/university diploma. But what if these formal indicators are unreliable under certain conditions and do not reflect actual literacy and competency of people? This article, drawing on data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), questions accuracy of the basic educational indicators in Russia. There is a linear relationship between the possession of a formal graduation diploma and the measurement of PIAAC literacy of the able-bodied population in OECD countries, including the Eastern European ones. However, the analysis shows that in Russia there is an inconsistency between literacy and formal educational status. This fact in itself casts doubt on the effectiveness of formal education indicators in Russia. The social implications resulting from this inconsistency become apparent through an international comparison of research results. These ill effects have been documented in the areas of employment, education and social reproduction and in the social self-awareness of the Russian people.

scholarly journals Glocalization, Representation and Literacy Education

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-274
Author(s):  
Heather Lotherington
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Emergent Literacy ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
New Literacies ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Collaborative Action Research ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Textual Representations ◽  
Narrative Thread

This article uses a comic program to graphically summarize a collaborative action research project that brings together York University researchers and elementary school teachers at Joyce Public School in northwest Toronto to experimentally develop multiliteracies pedagogies in a context of emergent literacy education. The project, which has been continuously developing since 2003, searches for ways of socializing both children and teachers into new literacies in the primary and junior grades from a grassroots perspective that operates within the constraints of the modern political machinery that organizes formal education. The teacher-researchers who work in this community of practice carve out preferred trajectories for new literacies action research through narrative projects, focusing on perspectives such as playing with the myriad junctures between and across alphabetic page and iconic screen; creating dynamic textual representations; including community languages towards globally focused linguistic learning; and creating multiple representations of a narrative thread across language, genre, and culture. We work collaboratively to bridge theory and practice using a blended model that includes regular face-to-face workshops. Now an online workspace, and in its seventh year of consecutive funding, the project is moving into ludic approaches to multimodal literacy education through gaming.

scholarly journals Inside Out Literacies

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-99
Author(s):  
Alex Kendall ◽  
Thomas Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Adult Literacy ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Learner Identity ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Adult Literacy Education ◽  
Qualitative Phase

Since 1997, adult literacy education has been of increasing interest to UK policy makers amid perceptions/claims of a causal relationship between attainment in literacy and positive economic participation, social inclusion, and life chance transformation. However, research in the field of literacy studies suggests that many prisoners who identify as beginner readers, report feeling alienated by formal education failing to take sufficient account of the social identities learners bring to their learning or how they want to use literacy to bring about change in their lives. This has resulted in deficit models of the prisoner as learner that impose ‘spoiled educational identities' and fail to engage prisoners as active, agentic participants in their learning. In this article, the authors draw on data produced in the qualitative phase of a year-long study across the English prison estate of Shannon Trust's prison-based reading plan, to explore alternative approaches to prison literacy education that challenge the traditions of formal education and put learner identity and aspiration at the heart of the beginner reader learning process. The qualitative phase of the project involved twelve focus groups across eight prison settings and included 20 learner, and 37 mentor participants engaged in the Shannon Trust peer-reading programme. The authors listen closely to the voices of learners and mentors describing their experiences of peer to peer learning and plug in Anita Wilson's concepts of educentricity and third space literacies to read participants' experiences of formal and informal literacy education. They make use of this analysis to identify and describe a ‘grounded pedagogy' approach that pays attention to learning as social practice and enables prisoners to re-imagine themselves both as learners and social actors and to begin to connect their learning to self-directed desistence identity building. The authors conclude with a consideration of the implications of this work for prison literacy teaching and the potential role of grounded pedagogy ideas in the development of more provocative approaches to prison teacher education.

Schooling the future: Perceptions of Selected Experts on Jazz Education

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Allan Mantie
Keyword(s):  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Situated Learning ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Secondary Level ◽  
Big Band ◽  
Jazz Education ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Jazz Ensembles ◽  
Future Perceptions

Aspects of both the functionalist and interactionist schools in sociology consider formal education as a form of social reproduction. Despite the large number of students that participate in school jazz programs at the secondary level, very little research examines jazz education practices at this level. This paper is a re-interpretation of data collected for the author’s Master’s thesis that examines jazz education practices at the secondary level. Interviews of selected experts revealed that improvisation is considered fundamental to jazz curricula, and yet it is largely neglected in the performing practices of school jazz ensembles. The kinds of jazz education practices that exist in schools would seem to raise several important questions. With what kind of community of practice are students engaging? What kinds of meanings are students able to construct and negotiate, given the practice of performing commercial, Big Band arrangements? What message is communicated when improvisation is largely or completely neglected in school instruction, in favour of ‘polishing’ the sound of the orchestrated passages? School jazz education practices are examined through the theoretical lens of Lave and Wenger’s ‘situated learning,’ with implications presented for culture and society.

Literacy in South Asia

1983 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 93-110
Author(s):  
R. N. Srivastava
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Form Function ◽  
The Way

Recent literature on literacy reveals that the ways people perceive and experience its nature and relevance differ fundamentally across time as well as across different societies (cf., Heath 1980, Graff 1982, Pattison 1982, Raymond 1982). It has been argued by scholars that the way societies view literacy and its benefits is circumscribed mainly by the characteristics of their socio-economic types (cf., Cressy 1980, Slaughter 1982, Neustupný forthcoming). Literacy, thus, by no means is a unified concept. What adds to the baffling complexity of literacy education is that it means different things to different people. Consequently, linguists, educationists, policymakers, etc. differ widely in their approach towards defining the form, function, and use of literacy.

The State, the Family, and Education: Ideology, Reproduction, and Resistance in Western Australia 1900–1929

1983 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paige H. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Western Australia ◽  
Education System ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family

This paper argues that gender-related inequalities in education (and other areas) are most crucially understood as embedded in ideology about the family, and that that ideology is at least partially reproduced through the education system itself. The prevalent ideology about the family corresponds to the nature of the political economy and works to maintain and reproduce the social and sexual division of labour both within the family and in the society at large. This study describes one period of educational reform, 1900–1929 in Western Australia, and examines the ideology about the family that was perpetuated by the state through the formal education system at this time. However, social reproduction is seen as a complex process and subject to human mediation Consequently resistance to the state ideology is described, as are contradictions within the ideology itself. It is hoped that, by looking not only at reproduction but also at resistance and contradiction, the entire process will be seen as a more dynamic one.

Intimate and Instrumental

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Bickford
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peer Cultures ◽  
Language And Communication ◽  
Classroom Routines ◽  
Media And Technology ◽  
Instrumental Approaches

This chapter makes crucial theoretical and conceptual interventions to support the arguments developed through the ethnographic core of the book. This chapter extends an influential “expressive practices” approach, which emphasizes the centrality of expressive language and communication in the social reproduction of class, gender, and ethnicity in schools, to include the social production of childhood roles and identities. It identifies “instrumentality” and “intimacy” as key concepts linking expressive practices to social relationships. It then argues that the expressive practices of children’s peer cultures are characteristically “intimate” in their linguistic and social features, by contrast with the instrumental approaches to language and communication characterized by classroom routines and literacy education. This contrast between instrumental and intimate modes is important for understanding children’s practices around entertainment media and digital technologies in subsequent chapters. This chapter also overviews children’s expressive traditions and develops key themes involving media and technology in later chapters.

scholarly journals Integrating Creativity in the Facilitation of Adult Learning through Analytic and Synthetic Methods: Study of Adult Basic Literacy Education Program in Enugu State, Nigeria

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Dorida Nneka Oyigbo ◽  
K. Chukwuemeka Obetta ◽  
Chinasa M. Ugwunnadi ◽  
J. O. Acha ◽  
Onyinyechi E. Okoye ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Adult Learners ◽  
Adult Learning ◽  
Learning Styles ◽  
Education Program ◽  
Adult Literacy ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Survey Design ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Synthetic Methods ◽  
State Agency

Adult basic literacy education program requires the integration of creativity into learning activities to increase the rate of adult learning in adult basic literacy education program. The study assessed the extent of integrating creativity in facilitating adult learners in adult basic literacy education program. The study adopted a descriptive survey design. The instrument titled, Integrating Creativity in the Facilitation of Adult Learning through Analytic and Synthetic Methods Questionnaire was administered to 880 adult education administrators, adult literacy facilitators and adult learners. Data were presented through the use of mean, standard deviation and ANOVA. The results of the study revealed that integrating analytic and synthetic methods to a moderate extent facilitated the learning of adults in an adult basic literacy education program. The study recommended that state agency for mass literacy, adult and non-formal education should encourage adult literacy facilitators to create personalized programs of instruction and lesson plans that are based on the adult learners’ skill level and learning styles.

scholarly journals Data (il)literacy education as a hidden curriculum of the datafication of education

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pekka Mertala
Keyword(s):  
Functional Data ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Hidden Curriculum ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Cognitive Authority ◽  
Functional Forms ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
Contemporary Education

This position paper uses the concept of “hidden curriculum” as a heuristic device to analyze everyday data-related practices in formal education. Grounded in a careful reading of the theoretical literature, this paper argues that the everyday data-related practices of contemporary education can be approached as functional forms of data literacy education: deeds with unintentional educational consequences for students’ relationships with data and datafication. More precisely, this paper suggests that everyday data-related practices represent data as cognitive authority and naturalize the routines of all-pervading data collection. These routines lead to what is here referred to as “data (il)literacy”—an uncritical, one-dimensional understanding of data and datafication. Since functional data (il)literacy education takes place subconsciously, it can be conceptualized as a form of hidden curriculum, an idea that refers to lessons taught and learned but not consciously intended to be so.

scholarly journals Public Libraries Stepping into the Gap?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve Hart
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Information Literacy ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Public Libraries ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
School Libraries ◽  
Disadvantaged Community ◽  
The Public ◽  
Structured Questionnaire

The paper describes an investigation of school learners' use of the two public libraries in a disadvantaged community on the outskirts of Cape Town. Over 850 school learners were interviewed using a structured questionnaire in late October 2002. The study supports claims that public libraries in South Africa are having to compensate for the shortage of school libraries and are playing a crucial role in formal education. It recommends that this reality be recognised by the libraries' governance structures, by provincial and local government authorities, and, above all, by national and provincial education authorities. Questions are, however, asked about the capacity of the public libraries for an enhanced role in information literacy education.

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