ABSTRACT
The meanings and uses of literacy are deeply embedded in community values and practices, yet they tend to be associated in many accounts simply with schooling and pedagogy. Recent approaches to literacy, however, have come to focus upon the varied social and cultural meanings of the concept and its role in power relations in contemporary society (Cook-Gumperz, 1986; Heath, 1985). Literacy is not a given, a simple set of technical skills necessary for a range of educational competencies, as much of the earlier literature would suggest. Literacy practices are neither neutral nor simply a matter of educational concern: they are varied and contentious and imbued with ideology. There are different literacies related to different social and cultural contexts rather than a single Literacy that is the same everywhere (Street, 1985). This raises the question of how it is that one particular variety has come to be taken as the only literacy. Among all of the different literacies practiced in the community, the home, and the workplace, how is it that the variety associated with schooling has come to be the defining type, not only to set the standard for other varieties but to marginalize them, to rule them off the agenda of literacy debate? Nonschool literacies have come to be seen as inferior attempts at the real thing, to be compensated for by enhanced schooling.
