Designing literacy education as modes of meaning in globalised and situated contexts: Towards a restoration of the self through embodied knowing

Abstract

The world of the twenty-first century is one that presents humans with diverse forms of identity, loyalty, and sense of place. The nation state appears all but redundant in this time of transnationalism and transculturalism, as ongoing migrations and re-affirmations of identity produce transient loyalties which make policy development problematic in areas such as education. The new empire is a global one, reflecting corporate economic ambition and territorial expansion—a type of colonisation by capitalist interests that we might call “globalisation”. Associated with this global empire are the new technologies of trading and communication which have produced new societal structures, such as social networks, that display various formations of information and cultural amateurs who promote themselves through the voyeuristic possibilities of the World Wide Web. The preparation of students for their life in these scenarios has been guided by governments and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), convinced that the future lies in a vaporous ambition called the ‘knowledge-economy’—a further complication for education policy. Where does that leave the self as an identity requiring forms of efficacy, personal ambition, and a sense of being-in-a-physical-world? This paper explores one facet of this question which is linked both to concepts of literacy and to the embodied self as one way of demonstrating that there are strategies for responding to the new environment. This way suggests giving agency to learners through a radical and embodied means of constructing knowledge and literacy that seeks to retain the humanness in schooling and which potentially empowers learners through the possibilities opened up by these ‘new’ pedagogies.