Learning Beyond the Classroom: Coping with Illiteracy in Urban Literate Environments in Benin and Bolivia

Abstract

Abstract

Few ideas have travelled around the globe as successfully as that literacy is a basic need, right and standard throughout the world. Today, people everywhere move through lifeworlds heavily shaped by written signs, even as new illiteracies constantly emerge amidst the apparent failure of ‘development through education’. Master narratives about illiteracy situate it as ‘historical’ or ‘traditional’: something tha will become obsolete. In contrast, our project assumes that not having learnt to read and write at school can no longer be seen as ‘old’ or ‘other’. Instead, we see ‘new’ illiteracies as related to and constantly produced by ongoing global processes that mainstream western-oriented literacy through schooling. The project aims to test this assumption by studying the lifeworlds and processes for coping with illiteracy of urban adults in Benin, Bolivia and (much less extensively) Germany. We identify similarities and differences in our case studies but acknowledge that both countries are influenced by the same global processes of mainstreaming literacy. We aim to understand the multiple ways of non-school learning that help actors who have not learnt to read and write interact with the expectations of a world of literacy and chose these countries because they are striking examples of the deficiencies of globalised literacy discourses and practices on two continents.