Abstract
Ideas about literacy have been shaped in South Africa by historical processes including colonial conquest, missionary activity and race segregation, marking lines of inclusion and exclusion, that constructed religious, racial, cultural and educational/intellectual divides. Post‐apartheid democratic governmental processes have struggled with these legacies, as concerns with human rights, social justice and language equity have encountered the inequalities of the past and the developmental challenges of the present. One sign of these uneven struggles is the narrow way literacy is presented in contemporary school literacy and adult education debates since the 1990s, as a narrow skill to do with coding and decoding skills, reflecting the endurance of an autonomous model of literacy in current conceptions of literacy. This view of literacy as constituting sets of decontextualized, technical and yet socially transformative skills permeates early and secondary schooling, skills‐based approaches to university education and to ‘basic skilling’ strategies in adult literacy campaigns. In contrast, social historians and literacy studies researchers in adult education, early childhood literacy and academic literacies in university education have begun to examine more ethnographic, varied and situated understandings of literacy as social practice, and developed a critical body of literature on the complex and varied dynamics around literacy practices in varying settings, showing literacy learning to be part of much broader chains of sustainability and social development. They show that the divide between literacy and illiteracy is not a clear‐cut one amongst the unschooled, that literacy does not equate simply with powerlessness or silence, but also show the powers of inclusive and developmental literacy-linked social activities. Literacy development in schooling continues to be intertwined and complicated by the multilingual nature of the South African polity and the hegemonic weight of standard English literacy in educational contexts, perpetuating historical inequalities in complex and problematic ways. Further research in early childhood education and around questions of multilingualism in education are still sorely needed and are sites of contemporary research.
Pippa Stein: deceased
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Stein, P., Prinsloo, M. (2017). Literacies In and Out of School in South Africa. In: Street, B., May, S. (eds) Literacies and Language Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02252-9_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02252-9_29
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