(Re)orientating literacy doxa in the digital age: the discursive practices of new policy actors

Abstract

ABSTRACT deological struggles over the policy and practice of literacy education continue to characterise the field. This paper explores how ‘new policy actors’, market-orientated and profit-driven players, construct the crisis of literacy and schooling in Australia to reclaim the doxa of literacy education. The concept of doxa is employed to show how recent discursive practices are contributing to orthodox and heterodox positions. A mixed-methods content analysis was performed on reports produced by business groups and their proxies, analysing how these reports construct new narratives. The findings reveal how these stakeholders adopt a stance best characterised as the old doxa revisited and (re)orientated for new economic imperatives. A defence of literacy as ‘common-sense’ basic skills, in crisis, and predominantly developed through schooling for the purpose of work, is supplemented with a discourse which updates literacy doxa to include technological (media) dimensions where digital literacy skills are the ‘new basics’ of literacy education.