Positioning literacy and hope

In the UK and internationally, the current discourse around literacy is driven by international surveys that have become increasingly important over the last 25 years (for example, those produced for the Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competencies [PIAAC]). Produced and promoted by a range of agencies, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the European Union, national governments commit considerable funding to these surveys and countries then compare themselves against one another using the results.

When literacy is conceptualised as a singular ‘autonomous’ (Street, 1995) skill to be acquired and tested through competency assessment, it can become a vehicle for bringing about the symbolic domination of institutionalised literacies that derive from notions of human capital, economic investment and returns (Becker, 1993). Framed by these human capital discourses, at the level of the individual, literacy becomes a technology for stratifying human beings as embodied labour power. In many ways, this ‘economisation’ of literacy serves to depoliticise it. This is consistent with a neoliberal hegemonic view that typically attempts to neutralise politics through a common-sense assumption that economic considerations are sovereign (Davies, 2014).

Challenging this, we argue that literacy needs to be positioned within a discourse of transformation that includes re-imagining it as a catalyst for hope, whereby learners, their families and their communities are positioned positively in relation to possible life-course trajectories and other new possibilities that they can imagine for themselves. Here, we are drawing on the thinking of Ernst Bloch, who writes powerfully about the connection between hope and agency. For Bloch (1986: 443), hope:

This positive orientation towards the future and to the idea that agency can bring about change in the world inhabited by the individual is viewed by Bloch as an inherent ‘drive’ in people, which is, however, characteristically thwarted by current economic and political discourses and conditions.