Editor: Viv Edwards (University of Reading, UK)
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Volume: 15 Number: 2 Page: 197–211
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Ciphers and Currencies: Literacy Dilemmas and Shifting Knowledges
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Catherine Kell
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The proposition that has driven much recent research is that a closer understanding of the uses of reading and writing in everyday life, gained through ethnographic study on literacy in social practice,
would lead to transformed literacy policy and provision. The paper argues that the connection between knowledge about literacy in social practice and literacy policy is far more attenuated and from a South
African perspective, there is an ever-widening gap between literacies of everyday life and the literacy provided in the adult education sector. It proposes a foregrounding of the notion of the gap, and
considers ways of theorising it. It then moves to consider two possibilities. The first is that the task of literacy pedagogy is to consciously work in the third space. This may be conceived as a 'bridging'.
The second possibility is that as a result of global developments in technologies of learning, literacy becomes commodified and language becomes technologised to the extent that a new version of literacy
as simply exchange value, as cipher, becomes interposed between the two sides of the gap. 'Bridging' then becomes impossible. It suggests that this emptied-out literacy as knowledge of sets of procedures
may start to replace money as the basis of a new currency in the 'informational society'.
© Multilingual Matters 2001
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