Reading the Past, Writing the Future: Fifty Years of Promoting Literacy :: UNESCO

Reading the Past,

Writing the Future:

Fifty Years of Promoting Literacy

Reading the Past, Writing the Future: Fifty Years of Promoting Literacy

UNESCO: April 2017

The present publication takes stock of literacy initiatives world-wide over the last five decades and analyses how literacy campaigns, programmes and policies have changed to reflect the evolutions in our conceptual understanding of literacy.

Fifty countries have been selected in this review based on those that achieved strong progress during the Education for All (EFA) period between 2000 and 2015. These countries serve as a symbol of global progress and wider literacy efforts, although many challenges remain. The fifty selected countries are as follows, listed by region:

Infographic

●● Latin America and the Caribbean:

El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Peru, Plurinational State of Bolivia

●● Northern Africa:

Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia

●● Oceania:

Vanuatu

●● South-Eastern Asia:

Lao People’s Democratic Republic,  Timor-Leste

●● Southern Asia:

Bangladesh, India, Islamic Republic of Iran, Nepal, Pakistan

●● Sub-Saharan Africa:

Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Togo, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia

●● Western Asia:

Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,  Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Yemen

Defining literacy

For governments and organizations like UNESCO that have a mandate to promote opportunities for all to benefit from the use of literacy, two fundamental dilemmas lurk just under the surface.

First, what is meant by literacy? UNESCO has given several definitions, notably in 1958, 1978 and in 2005. The first two definitions focused on the capacity to read and write a simple sentence, whereas by 2005 UNESCO had moved to a broader understanding of literacy, recognizing that the complexity of the phenomenon meant that any definition could not claim to be universal. As a working definition and in the context of assessing literacy, a meeting of experts adopted the following formulation:

Using the term ’literacy’ in other domains

Another perspective on linkages with literacy derives from the extended use of the term ’literacy’.  In addition to its primary connections to communication involving text, the term ’literacy’ is used  by stakeholders in other disciplines to refer to basic knowledge and competences in other domains.  In this sense, literacies are often used as a shorthand for the capacity to access, understand, analyse  or evaluate these areas. Some common areas include:

●● Financial literacy: in OECD surveys,7 this concept has addressed the financial knowledge,  attitudes and behaviour of adults.

●● Legal literacy: a more complex concept that includes the ability to navigate a legal process with understanding, recognize a legal right or responsibility and recognize when problems or conflicts  are of a legal nature.8

●● Medical or health literacy: this indicates how well a person can obtain the health information and services that they need, how well they understand them and how they use them to make good  health decisions.9

●● Media literacy: UNESCO defines this as ’a 21st century approach to education. It provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate with messages in a variety of forms — from print to video to the Internet. Media literacy builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy’ (UNESCO 2016b).10

●● Information literacy: this may be defined as being able to ’empower people in all walks of life to seek, evaluate, use and create information effectively to achieve their personal, social, occupational and educational goals.’11

●● Environmental literacy: the Campaign for Environmental Literacy defines this as ’…the capacity of an individual to act successfully in daily life on a broad understanding of how people and societies relate to each other and to natural systems, and how they might do so sustainably.’12

The extent of this more figurative use of ’literacy’ is illustrated in some less obvious collocations, including emotional literacy, cultural literacy, social literacy… and even kitchen literacy.

Using the term ’literacy’ in this extended way does not sever the links with the basic understanding of the term, but rather builds on it. There is a clear relationship, first in terms of the common element of manipulating knowledge and symbolic systems. More concretely, none of the derived ’literacies’ can be accessed or mastered without some degree of communication involving text. In the pursuit of the SDGs, embedding literacy across the agenda will be essential, meaning that those without basic literacy will have little (or certainly less) chance to acquire competencies in other domains. Moreover, the use of this wider range of basic competencies will be part of achieving all seventeen SDGs as each one will require the learning of new skills and knowledge, as well as the capacity to imagine, analyse and evaluate new solutions. Therefore, promoting literacy – in its central meaning of communication involving text – is fundamental to acquiring other basic competencies as a necessary part of the collective effort to achieve the SDGs.  READ MORE @