ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a positive thesis about education as one element of an overall community activism and mobilisation where government, private-sector and local community resources are brought together to expand and coordinate the availability and exchange of social, economic and cultural capital. It presents an alternative approach to literacy education policy formation. Using Pierre Bourdieu, the chapter defines literacy broadly as a form of habitus/ capital/disposition, arguing that the internal dynamics of curriculum, teaching and pedagogy are bids to enable equitable conversion of embodied capital into material capital for translation into institutional capital. With the global spread of neoliberal and corporate models of government that Bourdieu so adamantly critiques in Acts of Resistance, there is broad consensus amongst critical sociologists and educationists around the ideological bases of current educational policy. Social, economic and literacy education policies must work synergistically. They must go beyond 'fixing classrooms' and focus co-equally on mobilising and changing the social fields of community and institutional use.
