What is the relationship between economic and cultural globalisation and everyday literacy practices for teachers and students in the stolid 20th century institution, the state primary school? What happens when the very institution that was designed for the propagation of print literacy, for the transmission of encyclopedic knowledge, for the inculcation of industrial behaviours, for the development of the postwar citizen, for the domestication of diversity into monocultural identity — the technology of the modern state par excellence — faces the borderless flows and ‘scapes’ of information and image, bodies and capital? And, no less important, what might happen if we engage in a momentary suspension of belief in current policy-driven preoccupations with pedagogical method, with decoding and basic skills — and ask a larger curriculum question: Within the existing walls and wires, capillaries and conventions of the school how might we construct a literacy education that addresses new economic and cultural formations?
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