The ability to read and write may be the traditional understanding of literacy, but new definitions are straining the limits of this narrow box. One of the agitators for change is Brian Street, professor of language in education from King’s College London in the United Kingdom.
For Street, literacy is about the way we process information from just about every stimulus in our environment. It stretches from our visual assessments of photographs and newspaper posters, to understanding text message-coding on a cellphone or computer icons, to interpreting a song on the radio.
‘We have so much literacy diversity, varied cultural meaning and uses of literacy in different contexts. What we need is to take new approaches that come from the perspective of what people from different communities want to achieve,” says Street, who has worked in Nepal, Iran, the United States and South Africa.
Street says people’s backgrounds and their individual frameworks of reference need to be kept in mind.
This is particularly obvious in a country such as South Africa where a multitude of languages and cultures means a one-size-fits-all approach often fails to reach the majority of people effectively.
But Street adds: ‘South Africa is well positioned to tackle the new challenges of literacy for a modern context. It’s a robust and critical environment and it’s ripe for this.”
His lectures and workshops with educators in South Africa have been centred around getting teachers to start being more flexible and to recognise that children entering their classrooms arrive with a wealth of useful information even before they are put through the a-b-c mill.
‘For example, children these days arrive at school with a huge amount of computer literacy and their own cultural literacy,” he says. Street says teachers need to be able to build on — or as he puts it, ‘scaffold” — a child’s implicit knowledge. The same principles can also be applied to the way that children are taught numeric skills.
Street says there are enormous similarities between teaching literacy and numeracy. Children are generally socialised to learn numeric skills years before they arrive for their first year of schooling.
Among South Asian children, Street says the trend is for youngsters to rely on finger counting as the initial socialisation into learning numeracy. However, this may be rejected in mainstream schools instead of being built upon.
‘I will suggest that underachievement among some categories of children may lie in a failure to draw attention to the difference and similarities between school and home practices and among the various school encounters with oral, written and other semiotic modes of communication,” says Street.
He adds: ‘A lot of the ways children are being taught today is inappropriate, but the question is how do we replace the existing system.”
Part of the answer lies in nurturing educators to have the flexibility and foresight to adapt classical approaches to schooling that will fit a modern context. It’s a context that places high premiums on electronic mediums of communication and on respecting cultural diversity.