Description
Book SynopsisAdults'' literacy is a topic of great interest to multiple audiences and scholarly fields but research into it is fragmented across disparate disciplines and hence lacks coherence. In particular, an impasse exists between cognitive science researchers and economists on the one hand, and critical theorists writing in the social practice tradition. This book acknowledges the importance of these fields, then builds on them and on other scholarly traditions by locating its discussion of literacy and orality within a media ecology framework. Based on in-depth interviews within successive literacy research projects in industry and community settings with trade apprentices, their supervisors and managers, industry training coordinators, literacy tutors, and adults of liminal (threshold) literacy, this book reveals the importance of oral-experiential ways of learning, knowing and communicating that exist in complex relationships with literate practices. The tradition of media ecology as exe
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements – Introduction: Orality and Literacy – Apprentices’ Literacy and Orality – The Literacy Tutors – Supervisors and Communities of Practice – Liminal Literacy and Social Practice Views – Managers’ Orality and Literacy – Literacy, Cognition, and Knowledge – References – Author Index – Subject Index.
