Ebook: Beyond Economic Interests: Critical Perspectives on Adult Literacy and Numeracy in a Globalised World

Preface -- Introduction: Critical Perspectives in Adult Literacy and Numeracy in a Globalised World -- Part 1: Globalisation, the OECD and the Role of Powerful International Surveys -- Imagining Literacy: A Sociomaterial Approach -- Policy Making at a Distance: A Critical Perspective on Australia's National Foundation Skills Strategy for Adults -- What to Look for in PIAAC Results: How to Read Reports from International Surveys -- Part 2: Resistance and Agency in Local Literacies and Numeracies -- From the Local to the Global: Socialisation into Adult Literacy Practice in the Remote Indigenous Australian Context -- "Basically, I Need Help": Responding to Learner Identity in a Skills-Driven ESL Literacy Programme -- Apprentice Mentoring: A Return to Relationship in Learning -- "I Can See the Rabbit!": Perceptions of the Imagined Identity of Foundation Study Students and Its Link to Academic Success -- Beyond Compliance: Developing a Whole Organisation Approach to Embedding Literacy and Numeracy -- Museum Literacies: Reading and Writing the Museum -- Popular Education and Mass Literacy Campaigns: Beyond 'New Literacy Studies' -- Part 3: Contesting Dominant Discourses -- The Significance of Research and Practice in Adult Literacy in the UK -- The Four Literacies: An Exercise in Public Memory -- The Radical Statistics Group: Promoting Critical Statistical Literacy for Progressive Social Change -- Critical Re-Visioning: The Construction of Practitioners in Aotearoa New Zealand's Literacy Campaign.;Over the last two decades, an increasingly economistic discourse has dominated discussions about adult literacy and numeracy. This book provides critiques of, and alternative narratives to the dominant discourse. Authors provide tools and methodologies of critique, including ways of seeing how policies in the countries of focus come to be captured almost completely by the interests of business and industry, as well as how to critically interpret the data that policy makers use to justify their priorities. But adult literacy and numeracy practitioners and learners find spaces and places to pursue learning that matters for the lived experiences of adults and their communities. Beyond Economic Interests presents the struggles and achievements of practitioners and learners that lead the readers of the book to critically appreciate that a counter narrative to the purely economistic discourse of adult literacy and numeracy is much needed, and possible.