Abstract
This is an invited paper based on the keynote presentation that Professor Ralf St Clair made at the 2019 Australian Council for Adult Literacy Conference in Sydney, Australia on 4 October.
Highlights
In the thirty years during which I have been involved in literacy work, I have observed a phenomenon that has caused me some concern
I do not want to suggest that the late 20th century was a golden age for anything. It was the period when Paulo Freire was arguing convincingly that literacy was one of the most essential and human ways in which we shaped the world, Marshall McLuhan was suggesting that the medium is the message and Harvey Graff was developing incisive historical insights into the effects of reading and writing
There was a feeling that literacy education really, really mattered
Summary
One of the aspects of our work that attracts a fair amount of attention is curriculum, and there are many ways of looking at it. Basil Bernstein (1977), a professor at the Institute of Education in London, brought curriculum and language together explicitly in the idea of codes. He suggested that there are restricted and elaborated codes governing language and knowledge. When shown pictures of several foods, all the children in the study grouped them according to what might be eaten together: fish, peas, chips and chicken, carrots, potatoes. Middleclass kids could group them in a way the working-class kids were far less likely to do: they recognised that peas, carrots and potatoes were vegetables, and fish and chicken were meats. While Bernstein’s work has been open to considerable criticism for a sort of language determinism, not to mention the idea that restrictive codes represent an incomplete workingclass semantic system (Barbour 1987), I believe that the idea of restricted versus elaborated conceptions of the world is a useful one
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