Resources - Discussion Papers

Globalisation, Literacy, Curriculum Practice

Allan Luke & Victoria Carrington, University of Queensland

Chapter for: R. Fisher, M. Lewis & G. Brooks, eds., Language and Literacy in Action. London: Routledge/Falmer.

Professor Allan Luke

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Introduction
The industrial school meets new times
Literacy teaching and learning in the new white diaspora
Critical literacy as a technology for remediating globalisation
References

INTRODUCTION

What is the relationship between economic and cultural globalisation and everyday literacy practices for teachers and students in the stolid 20^th century institution, the state primary school? What happens when the very institution that was designed for the propagation of print literacy, for the transmission of encyclopedic knowledge, for the inculcation of industrial behaviours, for the development of the postwar citizen, for the domestication of diversity into monocultural identity — the technology of the modern state par excellence — faces the borderless flows and ‘scapes’ of information and image, bodies and capital? And, no less important, what might happen if we engage in a momentary suspension of belief in current policy-driven preoccupations with pedagogical method, with decoding and basic skills — and ask a larger curriculum question: Within the existing walls and wires, capillaries and conventions of the school how might we construct a literacy education that addresses new economic and cultural formations?

From the prototypical work of economist Harold A. Innis in the 1940s to the work of Marshall McLuhan and the educational psychology of David R. Olson, the legacy of Canadian communications theory is an undertaking that dominant modes of information — from speech to script to print to digital image — have distinctive and identifiable "biases". By this Innis (1951) did not mean simple ‘prejudice’ or ‘predisposition’. He and McLuhan, who joined the University of Toronto in the decade after Innis’ death, both believed that communications media enabled blended and new conventions and aesthetics of expression, and that communications media powerfully influenced social organisation, spatial and demographic formation, intellectual practice and cognitive habits, and, importantly, the exchange of economic and political power. In work that anticipated current theories of global networks and scapes, Innis (1949) argued that communications technologies had been the agents of "empire": creating what he called "knowledge monopolies", reorganizing space/time relations between metropolis and hinterland through the use of technology, and thereby shaping and controlling the contours of social identity at the margins in the interests of an imperial centre.

Half a century later, it is an axiom of the "new literacy studies" (Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 2000) that how literacy is shaped as a social practice is linked to larger social structures. How those linkages are established is in part an ethnographic and in part a discourse analytic question: pursued through local analyses of the power relations, knowledges and identities built through literacy education and everyday life. The oft-repeated lesson from the history of literacy is that what people do with technologies of writing and inscription — and, from an educational perspective, what we normatively teach kids to do with these technologies — is shaped in relation to the contexts of work, of consumption and leisure, of citizenship and national ideology, and of varied projects of ‘selfhood’ and cultural identity. As literacy educators, we can pursue these links between literacy and social formation either by default, by a science that neglects or denies such links, or through a broader understanding of literacy not just as "social practice", but literacy as curriculum practice.

For educationally acquired social practices with texts and discourses are both ‘shaped’ by dominant and alternative economic and social relations, and they are potentially ‘shaping’ of these relations. Following the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1999), we believe that literacy education involves:

• the teaching and learning of textual disposition — that is, the curricular and pedagogic construction of the literate habitus of embodied skills, knowledges and competences;
  
• the structural positioning by schools and teachers of the aspiring literate in relation to social systems and structures — that is, the production and reproduction of relationships to dominant modes of information and means of production;
  
• the development of the capacities to use literate practice to position take in the social and institutional fields of exchange that require literacy — the construction of habits of agency and a sense of and capacity with the relative power of text and discourse in any particular social field.

Literacy — and by association literacy education — are both historically constructed and historically constructive, normative enterprises. In current conditions, they are about the shaping of patterns and practices of participation in text-based societies and semiotic economies.

These conditions raise alien issues for many teachers and teacher educators: How might literacy and literacy education respond to the challenges of new world cultures and economies and, indeed, forms of governance and citizenship? Without falling prey to the traps of taking globalisation as either universal evil or civilizing force - the "mother of all metanarratives" (C. Luke, 2001) — we wish to raise a series of open ended questions about how to reshape what Richard Hoggart (1956) termed "uses of literacy" almost a half century ago. Our focus is not on narrowing debates over literacy, basic skills and accountability - debates driven as much by the policy imperatives of funding and restructuring a creaky postwar state schooling infrastructure as by a ‘science’ of literacy education per se (Luke & Luke, 2001). Instead our concern is with the potential of literacy education as a curriculum practice for the generation of ‘student’ dispositions, positions and position-takings for viable and powerful life pathways through new cultures and economies, pathways that wind through globalised and local, virtual and material social fields.

This is an introductory view for literacy educators and researchers of these changes, their impact upon local communities, and their potential for the transformation of how we see and ‘do’ literacy education in what remain relatively conventional classroom settings of state primary schools. We use the metaphors of globalised "flows" to explain the impact of new media, new cultures and new economies on children’s identities and developments. We then describe the force of these flows on a regional, small Australian township — Harlow (pop. 1300) - its school and teachers and how they teach literacy. We document the experience of spatialised poverty — the deleterious community-specific effects of economic flows on families’ and children’s life pathways. Our proposed response is an amended curriculum agenda for critical literacy for these children: one that distinguishes a "glocal", cosmopolitan focus from what we define as "parochial" and "fantasy" approaches to literacy education. Our aim, then, is to move away from limiting debates over basic skills and commodified methods into a much broader debate about literacy education as a sustainable and powerful curriculum practice.

THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL MEETS NEW TIMES

What we call it - ‘liquid’ modernity (Bauman 2000), postfordist economy and postmodern culture (Harvey, 1988; Cvetkovich & Kellner, 1997; Burbules & Torres, 2000), "networked" societies (Castells 1998) - is for those of us who work in classrooms and teacher training not very important. What seems certain is that many of the patterns and practices of everyday life are shifting and oscillating, albeit unevenly and at different rates, in relation to powerful economic and technological forces that at the least appear beyond immediate local control and, for many communities, belief and comprehension. The effects and consequences of economic globalisation are both spatialised, local and site-specific — with primary resource and manufacturing economies sitting alongside infotech in some communities, with emergent nation states supporting and sustaining peasant economies alongside of industrial parks. Any sense that we have hit some kind of decisive millennial shift ignores the non-synchronous character of contemporary change. In most nations and regions, disparate economies and lifeworlds sit in various states of emergence and decay, like radioactive isotopes with persistent half-lives.

The common characteristic seems to be the speed and durability, flexibility and mutability of networks and flows: as bodies and capital, information and image move across increasingly permeable political borders and geographic barriers. The result in the postindustrial west and north is the creation and transformation of cultural and economic "scapes" (Appadurai, 1996) in local communities. These are sites for the changes in everyday experiences and uses of space and time, the emergence of new practices of work, leisure and consumption, and the writing of blended, hybridised forms of human expression, artefact and identity. Whether in Bangkok or Brisbane, a particular new species and social class of ‘world kids’ play and learn in shopping malls and basketball courts, on the internet and in schools.

Societies of the North and West are based on complex and blended economies — where means of production entail an increasing majority of working people engaging directly with dominant modes of information — concentrated in culture and creative industries, public and private sector service sector work, and those fast growth sectors involved in the management and movement of imaginary capital, property and consumer goods. Even in strongly resource driven economies like Australia’s, the percentage of workers engaged in the direct exploitation of the natural and biological world through manual or industrial techniques is in decline. In these so-called knowledge economies, human beings’ dispositions and position takings occur in those social fields constituted by and regulating regional, national and multinational flows of ideas and information, capital and bodies, material and discourse artefacts alike. One’s capacities to sign and to engage in a universe of signs have principal exchange value in these fields. The institutional and occupational fields themselves shift quickly and, as the citizens of Harlow have discovered, erode traditional life pathways, patterns of work, consumption and leisure.

The pattern of flows moves capital, information and bodies increasingly towards the cosmopolitan centres of world cities, creating culture scapes where the lifeworlds of Sydney and Brisbane are more likely to resemble those of Los Angeles or London than those of their kin in rural and remote communities — in some cases, indigenous and Anglo-Australian communities less than a hundred kilometres away in the bush. In this way, capital and labour is deterriorialised away from rural and edge city communities — at the same time that new forms of information, image and representation are directed through electronic and digital networks to communities at the margins. The irony is that while citizens in these new diaspora increasingly lose their participation in key aspects of economic and semiotic production — they are repositioned as global, generic consumers and ‘end-users’ of goods, government and social services. These same world kids, desiring subjects who form a growth market for textual and material products created by Pokemon, Nike and Virgin, may at the same time be distantiated from the metropolitan and cosmopolitan sites of production of these and other culture industries.

Yet there are few uniform effects on these new diasporas: global flows are mediated and refracted by local variation and response, constituting a push-pull, "glocalization" effect (Robertson, 1992). Local communities like Harlow become the sites for the playing out of global and the local forces, between cosmopolitan heterogeneity and local homogeneity. Yet while mobility, the global flow of bodies across borders — political refugees, migrants, business migrants, guest workers, transnational knowledge workers — is one of the key factors of glocalisation — many areas of poverty are sites of increasing immobility. The underside of shifting capital and employment is that many families are quite literally stuck in locations from which they cannot shift. Others are caught up in a mythic transit between edge cities looking for work and cheap housing.

While in some urban areas the industrial-era phenomena of inner city poverty remains a persistent problem — in Australia, poverty has begun to shift to the hinterlands. These include both traditional farming and rural areas, and, increasingly, suburban edge cities characterised by inexpensive land and housing, often lacking in significant social infrastructure and capital. This phenomenon of spatialised poverty is focused on regional location, where inequality in incomes and local identity reflects a complex interaction of cost of housing, local employment and jobs infrastructure, and the available cultural capital of the population (cf. Bell, 1992). In such situations, there is little evidence that an educational system in and of itself — without the coordination of the availability of other kinds of social, economic and even ecological capital - can alter life pathways on a large scale.

But, as we will see — a key problem is the inability of the educational system to provide the cognitive and textual tools and discourse resources to explicate these changes for the citizens of communities like Harlow, who remain positioned in the flows and fields of globalised economies without capital, without mobility and, indeed, without an analysis. In fact, across Australia, schools and state departments have been slow to make globalisation a key problematic in curriculum and instruction.

To understand the significance of these shifts and the implications they might have for our work as literacy educators — we need to reappraise the genealogy of current approaches to schooling and our approaches to the teaching of print literacy. Earlier generations grew up in an Australian society arranged around an industrial, Fordist model of work, identity and politics. In this society-past, the productive worker (predominantly white and male) could depend on government to provide a basic level of social and economic capital (here defined as equitable and ready availability of non-discriminatory social infrastructure, institutions and networks), including education, health care, psychic and physical protection, and a relatively secure and stable job market. The nation protected its citizens and guaranteed a better future by warding off migration and diversity, while protecting industries with high tariff walls.

In exchange, citizen-workers demonstrated loyalty to both employer and government, paying taxes, with a highly motivated will to capital, and maintaining levels of consumption. In the idealized social model underpinning this economic order, males engaged in paid employment while females reconciled themselves to acceptance of the role of child bearing and rearing and maintenance of the nuclear family home (Carrington, in press). In such a lifeworld, transience was a kind of deficit, a risk to encased concepts of community, family and neighborhood and counterproductive to the expansion of capital.

The industrial school, then, aims to develop the dispositions to position workers within a particular economy and lifeworld, streaming students into a bifurcated pathway that led, variously, towards university-based and vocational training. In this inter and postwar schema, literacy — neutral, secular and non-ideological, print-based skills available to all — was defined in relation to the decoding of print-based text, and meaning making around canonical texts that entailed moral and ethical models for secular, industrial society. If indeed the education of empire had prepared one to be a colonial subject, the modernist education system that we presently work with prepares and constructs the dispositions of the industrial subject: behaviorally skilled, ideologically tolerant, economically patient, and motivated by a will to capital and the maintenance of stable community and nuclear family. That vision is captured and frozen in the cultural and social scapes of the modern basal reading series.

But the social facts of new times weigh heavily on this version of the world. The Australian economic and employment landscape has undergone significant upheaval in the course of one generation: gone is the ‘job-for-life’ and the promise of a state-funded retirement, gone is the certainty of learning one set of job-related skills sufficient for a life-time’s employment; gone is the security of a delineated, hierarchical work order; vanishing is the job market for non-tertiary educated youth; vanished is the job market for the under-qualified and the elderly (Carrington, in press). In their place are new uncertainties, new flexibilities and new citizen-workers. Prognoses suggest that job and mid-life career shift will increasingly become the norm, rather than the exception.

At the same time, the shift out of a Fordist economy and social order has made cultural and linguistic diversity a focal policy issue. In states like Queensland that might have conceived of themselves and their systems as stable and homogeneous, governments and education systems are contending with the realisation that almost one in five children is of indigenous or migrant backgrounds. New capitalism has created the conditions for the deployment of new and hybridised identities and the emergence of new literate practices, even and perhaps especially in the new hinterlands of edge cities. The fragmentation of the normative model of identity, community and nation that underpinned the older economic system has placed on educators’ tables issues of identity, culture, sexuality or race — whether through presence or absence. Many citizens of Harlow would tell us that the problems they face are due to, variously, Asian migrants who work too hard and cheaply, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who don’t work hard and cheaply enough, urban women who should raise families by choose to work, and, indeed, corrupt urban politicians who aid and abet the capital drain on their communities.

Teachers working in "at risk" communities face a surface set of problems that appear amenable to longstanding approaches. According to the teachers in Harlow, the problems include: an apparent decline in mainstream cultural and linguistic resources required for school success among school-aged children; increasing impatience with conventional pedagogy and curricular approaches; increasing rates of ascertained "attention deficit disorder" and other symptomologies; and affiliated forms of "unruliness" and behaviour management problems. In consultations undertaken on behalf of the state government in Queensland in 2000, these phenomena were attributed by teachers to: deficit parenting with a specific focus on failure to read too children at home, absentee parents, overexposure to television, deterioration of the family structure and increased transience, video games and popular culture in all its forms, oral language deficit, and behavioural disorders (Luke, Freebody & Land, 2000). In other words, the response of many teachers is to see what might well be manifestations of the impacts of new economies and cultures as signs of conventional ‘lack’ in those cultural and discourse resources that we took for granted in monocultural, middle class communities in the postwar print era.

There is some belated discussion of what these trends might mean for education and schooling systems. The policy responses of Western and Northern educational bureaucracies focus variously on:

• the consequences of information technology for classroom infrastructure and pedagogy, under the assumption somehow that digitalisation will both update and revive pedagogical and curricular systems led by an aging teaching force;
  
• the further deployment of a range of compensatory "pull out" programs that attempt to address the ostensive needs of culturally heterogeneous and increasingly mobile student populations (e.g., early intervention, learning support, ESL specialist interventions);
  
• compensatory funding responses to educational exclusion and failure in particular spatial ‘zones’ hit hardest by economic changes; and, in some states,
  
• an early debate on the putative human capital demands of new economies.

From a sociological viewpoint, what has been interesting has been how debates over literacy have focused on early intervention and basic skills, especially in the US and UK, with the assumption that testing and accountability systems are the most effective response to the problems of populations and communities displaced, variegated and replaced by new economies. Policy debates over literacy frequently are steeped in deficit terminology, and are struggling to speak to the phenomena of world kids, new family configurations, and the diasporic communities that have been adversely hit by these economies. In the face of major economic shift, these debates seem to be at once retro and nostalgic, and attempting to restore or maintain an educational equilibrium around traditionally transmitted and measured print-skill levels among students and schools.

Roughly half of the Australian and North American teaching force is over 50. For a generation of teachers raised on debates over cold war ideologies in the curriculum, over deschooling and progressivism, still caught up in the great debate over phonics and word recognition, the issues we have raised here may seem at best medium to long term and, at worst, an irrelevance to the everyday challenges of work intensification in classrooms and staffrooms. Yet the irony is that such changes, and the consequential effects on students’ dispositions and social positions, are unlikely to go away, and are proving particularly resistant to the regimes of treatment past (e.g., use of high stakes testing, expansion of specialised early intervention programs, the roping in of teacher behaviour through standardised and commodified curricula, single-method instruction). And they will continue to remain invisible to an explanatory schema that is still searching out and naming educational problems and human subjects which have morphed into new forms.

LITERACY TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE NEW WHITE DIASPORA

Harlow is an edge-city community caught in the headlights of economic globalization. It straddles the semi-rural zone between two major highways, each leading to the outermost western fringe of the state’s southeastern corner. It sits at the edges of an urban area — about 75 kilometers from the state capital. In its heyday over 50 years ago, it acted as an intermediary service terminus between the city and its outlaying grazier and farming communities. But with the decade long downturn in the adjoining rural communities — exacerbated by drought and deregulation — and with the improvement of direct transportation, communication and just-in-time shipping links between the bush and city, its historical moment, if it had one, has passed. It is caught in a nether world: it is neither a traditional bush community with a longstanding sense of identity and bloodlines, nor is it close enough to the urban centre to participate viably in the service economy. Over the last two decades, Harlow’s population has shifted from a long term base to a significant annual turnover, with families and youth coming to the community for affordable housing, at once finding themselves ‘locked in’ by mortgages yet compelled to commute or leave in search of work. Harlow’s population is relatively homogeneous, comprised of Anglo-Australian families with a few Asian migrants. Harlow is a white diaspora at the edge of the global economy.

Levels of unemployment are high. The official government data puts the unemployment rate around 16%, double the state average, but the actual level of unemployment, including adults not actively seeking work and dropouts not on the dole would be much higher. Many employed adults work in service (e.g., retail) and trades work (e.g., construction) in suburban communities an hour away. The real levels of unemployment among youth aged 16-25 is set at 24% but it probably hovers around 50%. The percentage of people on welfare is double the state norm, with the few jobs in transport and construction unable to offer the many who complete or leave high school sustainable employment.

Yet while several townspeople complained to us about unruly youth — the actual social environment of the community is quite remarkable, with high levels of community participation in sports, low levels of local crime, a strong sense that Harlow is a safe and stable place to raise children, and, in one of its prime attractions, affordable housing. Kids play on the streets and in fields after schools with negligible risk or fear. In the last state and federal elections, it has supported right wing candidates who oppose immigration, call for reimposition of protective tariff barriers, and oppose formal reconciliation and treaty with Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

We are university researchers and teacher educators. We work closely both the state educational bureaucracies on literacy policy and with local teachers developing school and classroom level interventions. In the last year, we were asked to assist Harlow primary school in developing a "whole school literacy plan". The school had been working on its literacy program for several years, with a relatively stable teaching population. Yet despite its best efforts Harlow state school’s scores on the state-wide year 3 and year 5 standardised reading achievement tests have stalled slightly below the state norms for "like schools" of similar socioeconomic and community profiles. A core of 25% of the children struggled with basic reading problems across the years. And while most could functionally decode by the completion of their studies, there were persistent reading comprehension problems, resistances to reading, and struggles to write in syntactically complex ways.

Despite strong administrative commitment, focused remedial work, parental support programs, purchase and implementation of a popular phonics-based curriculum package, teachers and students were unable to raise reading outcomes. Those identified as "the usual suspects" — working class white boys, children of the unemployed, mobile families whose children had interrupted schooling - were continuing to perform relatively poorly according to standard measures of literacy. Reading Recovery programs and special education support generated some short and medium term gains but had no visible effect on raising the overall performance profile of the school. The teachers wanted to improve not just baseline reading skills and performance but overall school achievement as well. In their words, they wanted to know what they were doing "wrong", but they also wanted to know "what was wrong with these children". Why weren’t they responding to the remedial programmes? Why weren’t their reading test scores improving proportionate to the effort of staff?

The teachers — all women ranging from mid-30s through to retirement-aged, with two male staff: the principal and special education teacher — are a stable and experienced staff. They are dedicated to their work, and, for the most part seem to have avoided the industrial alienation and culture of complaint that has become more common in Australian schools. They would view themselves as progressives, as "child centered" and behind the state system’s commitment of equity and social justice. There is none of the high teacher turnover that characterises bush and indigenous community schools. Though many have long histories at Harlow, none of them live in the district, commuting from either of the two larger suburbs 50 — 60 minutes away. The mismatch of teachers’ and students’ cultural and economic locations and world views went unremarked in their comments to us.

The teachers’ comments reflected these differences in standpoint. We were told that there are few community role models, that welfare parents don’t provide supportive print environments, that families move about too much, and that the students’ expectations of their futures seem either wildly exaggerated or limited. Clearly, student transience of the key difficulties – between Year 1 and 6 the school has a 60% turnover of students. This limits the effectiveness of blanket early intervention programs. Additionally, the teachers felt that this made curriculum "integrity" difficult: "one step forward and two backwards". Additionally, they stated, there was "apathy" in parental commitment. A dedicated and progressive staff, they were worried that kids would end up ‘stuck’ in the area, on welfare and with limited futures. Over 30% of the children attending Harlow are from single parent families and even more are from welfare families. Taken together, the teachers’ comments painted an overwhelming picture of student "deficit" and "lack", set against a backdrop of genuine concern, commitment and professionalism.

The other side of the coin emerged in our "audit" of what the children of Harlow were fluent with. While perhaps not matching the expectations of the teachers, the children in this community have a number of strengths. These include strong social networks in the community, in-depth local knowledge about the geography, demography and culture of their own community, knowledge and skill in handling their allowance and earned money, interest in sports, knowing how to ‘make the best’ of difficult family and financial situations. When prompted, the teachers acknowledged that the students had extensive knowledge of video movies and cable television programs, vast knowledge of popular music, fashion and youth culture, and took readily to computer and videogames, internet surfing and the new technologies. Additionally, the teachers reported, these children often carry more of the emotional work of their families than do more affluent, middle class kids and yet are extremely accepting of difference. They are generally well behaved and eager to learn. Reportedly, as a whole the children appear to enjoy school, like their teachers and want to do well.

We worked with the teachers for several days to audit and develop their classroom strategies. Like many other Australian primary schools, Harlow has instituted a ‘literacy block’–one and a half hours each day dedicated solely to literacy activities. In this session, basic skills development and consolidation are the focus. Across the school, students engage in sound-letter recognition activities, the development of dictionary and other research skills, decoding strategies, big book reading and activities, cloze activities and some, but highly variable work with functional grammar. In this regard, there was nothing particularly remarkable or unremarkable about the existing practices. These core strategies are part and parcel of the Australian literacy teachers’ repertoire for dealing with print literacy. At the same time, the teachers found that there had been poor communication about who was doing what — particularly between lower primary and upper grades teachers — and that they as a school staff lacked a shared descriptive metalanguages for (a) describing their practice; and (b) talking about language.

After two days of working with the teachers, the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together for them and for us. If we tracked the children’s dispositions and trajectories through the school, across varying patterns of participation and achievement, onto the local high school and out in to the world of work, a clear pattern began to emerge. The kids of Harlow were relative patient and willing to participate in their schooling through and across primary school. This was established in no small part by the school’s child centered environment, the anti-bullying and behaviour management program and the visible emotional investment in the children by the teachers. Yet that participation was momentary, almost stoic, in the face of larger forces: by the time they hit high school, achievement plateaued or declined, behaviour problems increased, particularly among the boys, and retention rates fell off. The local state high school had one of the highest expulsion rates in the state. Many of these same students who were average achievers in secondary school had later left school, would commute to hang out at the shopping malls an hour away, all the while maintaining strong personal commitments to popular culture and Australian team sports.

In our view, students were patiently ‘doing time’ in a primary literacy program which was:

• focused on delimited sets of skills and knowledge and narrow in its focus on now traditional approaches to decoding;
  
• squarely modernist, pre-digital and anti-popular culture in the form and content of its approach to reading comprehension;
  
• escapist and irrelevant in its approach to teaching literature.

This program more or less was ‘free-standing’ as part of the literacy block study in the morning. When we asked when the kids were taught about the changes in the communities around them — we were told that this wasn’t part of the literacy program, but sat in the varied project work and traditional key learning area studies that were part of the "integrated studies" kids undertook in the late morning and afternoon. Hence, the literacy program also tended to be:

• disconnected both temporally and thematically from any substantive ‘reading of the world’ based on specific discourse and field-specific knowledges.

This offers us a possible explanation to the ‘rise and stall’ scenario of the school’s test scores. Put simply, the baseline skills that teachers were attempting to instill in their students were more or less being achieved through a focused and delimited literacy program, despite high student turnover. Both teachers and students were pursuing this program in good faith and effectively. That program had become disconnected and decontextualised on at least three levels. The literacy program was:

• temporally and programmatically partitioned from the rest of the school curriculum;
  
• disconnected from the background knowledges, skills and life experiences that the students brought to the classroom; and,
  
• its traditional print format and discourse content were disconnected from a broader analysis of community, of environment, of the experiences and practices of glocalisation.

The biggest difficulty faced by the teachers of Harlow was not simply a question of method. There is no doubt that their whole school plan will focus and coordinate their pedagogic efforts, bring them together into a stronger shared vocabulary, and add a few notches to their test scores and any affiliated league tables kept in central office. But the teachers and the program were in some ways caught in their own implicit assumptions about what constitutes ’literacy’ and how it should be taught in school. For all their good intentions and hard work, they hadn’t hardwired what counted as ‘literacy’ in the school with the lives of the children and their families — nor were they adept at anticipating and teaching to the kinds of "literate futures" their students would face as adolescents and young adults.

CRITICAL LITERACY AS A TECHNOLOGY FOR REMEDIATING GLOBALISATION

We have here provided a shorthand account of how students and teachers in one Australian edge community have experienced economic and cultural scapes of New Times. Is there a simple and happy ending to Harlow’s story? Perhaps that the teachers had found the ‘right’ pedagogy or method, that test scores had risen, that this had set in place the foundations for overall improvements in student achievement, that the communities’ and students’ life trajectories had shifted as a result. These are the narrative chains underlying current policy interventions in many OECD educational systems. Yet there are competing claims that we need to consider: that basic skills acquisition is necessary but not sufficient to turn around the overall educational achievement of the most at risk students, that higher order thinking, depth of intellectual engagement (Newmann, King & Ringdon, 1997), critical literacy and "connectedness to the world" (Lingard et al. 2001) have the best chance of "redesign[ing] social futures" (New London Group, 1996) and altering these kids’ dispositions, positions and position-takings.

The story is unfinished. We are continuing to work with Harlow to develop school literacy programs that bring together a richer, more intellectually demanding and ‘contemporary’ analysis of these kids’ identities and competences, a more cogent understanding of the overlapping and multiple communities that these children inhabit with a balanced focus on code breaking, meaning making, using texts in everyday life, and critical literacy. In so doing, we are working within the parameters of a state literacy policy that has an eye equally on basic skills of reading and, as importantly, the emergent multiliteracies required in the cultural landscapes and workplaces of new economies (Luke, Freebody & Land, 2001).

Harlow’s dilemma suggests some very different lessons for us: about the inability of education systems and literacy education per se to change life pathways without other kinds of flows of capital and culture across borders and institutions — about the difficulties teachers, researchers and curriculum developers face in understanding both the new knowledges, experiences and skills kids bring to classrooms and the new knowledges, experiences and skills they will need to ‘navigate’ and ‘surf’ emergent culture scapes. We conclude with a barely modest proposal for what a critical literacy might entail in conditions of ‘glocalisation’.

It was Marx and Engels’ contention that the dominant ideas of an age were those that served the interests of particular forms of social organisation, of production and manufacture, and, indeed, of social class. It was Kuhn’s contention that scientific paradigms reached crisis points, where life worlds presented and generated hosts of problems and anomalies that could not be addressed by the redeployment of existing theories and methodologies. Regardless of which of these or other analytic tacks we might take to explain the new blends of literate practices, texts and discourses, skills and developmental patterns at hand — virtually all social science analyses of contemporary social and economic conditions lead us to a similar transit: that education, literacy practices and childhood itself have reached an historical juncture of transition and change, of residual discourses and text forms coexisting and blending with the new, of persistent old inequalities and new ones, of century-old educational practices sitting alongside of ones that have never been seen in classrooms before.

We are of the opinion that while the new communications technologies are a catalyst for economic change and potentially for pedagogic change — they are neither the core problem nor the main answer for teachers and students in this, what is increasingly resembling a transitional period in the history of schooling. One of the first themes that arose in our discussions with the teachers of Harlow was the assumption that if they just switched to new technologies — that if they just brought in the wires and boxes and went on line — that "empowerment", engagement with the new economy and so forth would magically occur. While we struggle empirically with the question of which blends of print and virtual skills and knowledges might ‘count’ for the kids of Harlow, we are painfully aware that it is some time away, perhaps years, before we will have answers about which blends of communications technologies — oral and written, digital and visual, performed and virtual - are optimal for accommodating and articulating some of the new forms of social practice, representation and cognition.

In the meantime, a teaching force with an average age 47 struggles with a curious cocktail of effects from cultural and economic flows. Answers are at hand. But how we deal with and reshape the kids’ use of the old technology of print is as important, though not mutually exclusive, from their engagement with the new. And in this context the explanatory discourses from conferences, publishers and software peddlers, and professional development experts available to the teachers of Harlow have tended to operate in binary opposition: high tech online facilities and pedagogy will solve the problem and/or low tech, phonics-based programs will solve the problem. Neither is adequate.

A key lesson that we take away from this case study is that many of the current debates over reading and literacy — the ‘available discourses’ for talking about literacy education and schooling more generally in new times — are developed and primed to deal with the entry and traverse of children into another universe: a print based, industrially and economically stable community within which the achievement of rudimentary print literacy was a necessary and, for many, sufficient condition to ‘becoming somebody’. The teachers in Harlow were doing their mighty best to describe and contend with the manifestations a new socioeconomic milieu. Yet at the same time they were struggling to recognize, understand and even ‘name’ it. While they might not have seen it in such terms, in practice they were putting the weight of their efforts trying to contain and ameliorate the effects of globalised culture and trying to counter the effects of truncated and static life pathways. They were, in many ways, swimming upstream against deteriorating community economic conditions.

Their professional vocabulary for dealing with this — that of "recovery", of skills versus whole language, of learning disability and oral language deficit, of behaviour management and deficit parenting - led them down a road to simplistic answers, answers that were more about the micro-management of lessons and plans, to belief in packaged programs and commodities, rather than towards a re-envisioning of the curriculum, of the students’ needs and life pathways, and, indeed of the kinds of literate dispositions that might effectively vie for position in the social fields of globalised capital. Intervention was more rearguard or, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan (1966), "rear view mirror" action. Our view is that neither the available discourses around "methods" for teaching reading, or about cultural, linguistic and intellectual "deficits" of children can begin to address the complexity of problems faced by schools and teachers. And while a floor of basic skills has been established, the question of ‘preparedness’ for this particular construction of adolescence, for school leaving, for an environment of flight from and to structural unemployment across and between edge communities was still moot.

What might be the shape of critical literacy as curriculum practice - fitted for the analysis, critique and engagement with the life worlds of new, globalised and ‘glocal’ economies and cultures? The points of disconnection between literacy and glocal ‘communitas’, between old literacy and world cultures are the very nodal points where a rebuilding of the curriculum could begin. We want to argue for a kind of critical literacy that envisions literacy as a tool for remediating one’s relation to the global flows of capital and information, bodies and images.

David Olson (1986) described the cognitive effects of the technology of print as the construction of "possible worlds". Following Innis, McLuhan and Goody, he argued that the "bias" of writing was its capacity to take human subjects to other worlds, to traverse the constraints of place and time. Whether in its highly amplified digital form or in its traditional static form, one of the communicative effects of the technology of writing is its capacity to represent in a portable and replicable format times and places that are otherwise inaccessible to place-bound readers. It is this capacity of reading — both traditional and digital — that can provide the basis of a reconceptualisation of literacy as a technology for mediating one’s position within globalised flows. As literature teachers have always known, literacy pedagogy can displace and disrupt space, place and time, taking one out of one’s immediate synchronicity — cutting across different spaces and times, and engaging, both virtually and psychically with specific social fields and markets that otherwise aren’t available to, in this case, the children of Harlow. The simultaneous universe envisioned by McLuhan, and before him Innis and Mumford, becomes accessible through one’s capacity to read, whether online or off.

That capacity can equally be used — as it was in literature study in Harlow — as a kind of sublimation from engagement with the texts and contexts of glocalisation, a deliberate suspension of the local and pursuit of texts and discourses ‘other’ to immediate experience. That is, literature study can be enlisted to disengage readers from a ‘reading of the world’ of globalised scapes and flows. In the Table 1 below, we term this a fantasy literacy that aims for a suspension of position in the social fields and scapes of globalisation and a psychic disengagement with flows. While this might have therapeutic purpose, it acts as a pedagogy of disengagement and estrangement from the glocal.

At the same time, the teachers of Harlow used many archetypal strategies, from language experience and ‘show and tell’, journal writing and project work to make their teaching more "relevant" to kids’ local experiences. These ranged from studies of local wildlife to a regular discussion focus on local sporting events and community activities. Teachers argued that this focus on local texts and discourses increased levels of interest, was important for raising student "self esteem". But it appeared that much of this work did not seem to intellectually or textually ‘go anywhere’: there was often limited articulation into a broader conversation about how local contexts, experiences and issues ‘fit’ with the parallel worlds, cultural and economic scapes outside of Harlow. In Table 1, we refer to this as parochial literacy, local in scope and focus and reproductive of kids’ local discourses, dispositions and positions.

Table 1: Uses of Literacy in Globalised Conditions

Parochial Literacy and Fantasy Literacy are two curriculum approaches with long and distinguished pedigrees, both of which would purport to address the alienation from schooling experienced by at risk kids such as those of the new white diaspora. These are, respectively: the argument that ‘relevance’ of curriculum and activity will effectively suture the home/school mismatch and transition problem and, the argument that a rich, imaginative literary focus will build self-esteem, expand psychological horizons and world views, and create a "love of literature".

Our argument here is that texts — both print and virtual, canonical and popular — and engagement with reading and writing can form a kind of "trialectical" moment (Soja, 1996) in each learner’s life that bridges the ‘push-pull’ effects of glocalisation. The focus here would be on a ‘reading of the local’ that connects this with those of other possible worlds; a curriculum approach that focuses students’ work with texts on the analysis of the flows of effects between this time/space locality and others.

In Harlow, such an approach to critical literacy curriculum could take multiple forms: using the internet to audit and analyse the global flows of work, goods and discourse that are leading to changes in Harlow, whether by studying the history and economics of the rural sector, the origin of local environmental issues, or patterns of population movement between communities like Harlow (Comber & Simpson, 2001). It could entail using writing and online communication to participate with virtual communities around "fandom" and popular culture (Alvermann, Moon & Hagood, 2000). Or it could involve reading multiple literary texts that generate or engage intercultural and contrastive historical perspectives on new times, those of economies, cultures and places past, present and future. In these ways, the aim would be to engage children critically in the borderless flows of data, information and image that characterise information economies — using both digital and print media. It would entail working intertextually across various cultural and historical texts and discourses. What this kind of literacy might entail is the modeling of "position-takings" that actively remediate one’s position — both in terms of the capital flows that make forms of work possible and available, but as well to manage the information flows of images, representation and texts that constitute identity and ideology, and, finally, to engage with other cultures and bodies across time and space.

Our aim in this discussion is to move forcefully not just beyond a great debate over method — that should go without saying — but as well a debate between approaches to content and method (from language experience to process writing) that focus on the local, the parochial, the ‘at hand’ — and those approaches that stress the ‘wonder’, the ‘mystery’ of ‘going elsewhere’ through the experience of literature. Both are powerful tools — but if we are looking for a refashioning of literacy as a normative preparation for a critical engagement with glocalised economies — we would need to begin talking about literacy as a means for building cosmopolitan world views and identity: of enhancing, in Bourdieu’s terms, historical memories and contemporary understandings of how these economies of flows actually structurally position (and perhaps exclude) one, how differing dispositions will have different effects in the various fields of flows, and how to actively engage with those fields in agentive and transformative ways. As idealistic as such models might sound, there are viable prototypes in the field drawn from the extensive literature on the teaching of critical literacy and critical language awareness (e.g., Fairclough, 1992; Muspratt, Luke & Freebody, 1997; Comber & Simpson, 2001; Knobel & Healey, 1998). Such models do not discard basic knowledge of print codes, syntactic metalanguage, enhanced automaticity of skill, or metalinguistic awareness — but they ensure that they are lodged within broader curriculum contexts that are not anachronistic, disconnected, dated, or simply intellectually infantile.

Will such approaches to literacy alleviate the patterns and consequences for the children of Harlow and like communities across North America, the UK, New Zealand and Australia? Not in and of themselves. The picture of change and risk here shows that schools and education systems can make a difference, but that that difference is contingent on the availability and flows of other kinds of capital and power as well. But at the same time, cases like Harlow tell us with some certainty that the answer lies as much in re-envisioning literacy education as curriculum practice as it does fetishising the teaching of basic print skills.

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1 Describing human subjects’ traverse across social fields, Bourdieu explains that one brings acquired cultural capital (a "habitus" of embodied practices and knowledges of all sorts) to particular social fields such as workplaces, schools and families. Each social field in turn operates according to objective regularities and patterns that "position" one in relative relations for the exchange of capital. At the same time, each individual has the capacity to engage in agentive "position taking" in relation to social fields. For a shorthand version of Bourdieu on literate capital, see Carrington and Luke (1998). (Click here to return to text)

2 Harlow is an anonymised composite of four schools in Queensland and Tasmania that we have undertaken professional development with over the past three years. We thank these teachers for sharing their work, problems and strategies with us.(Click here to return to text)