Literacy

A small piece of a recent paper:

While much of the focus on literacy deals with the reading aspect on the literacy spectrum, transliteracy focuses on the full spectrum of literacy within an ecological system.  Transliteracy recognizes that there is a purpose for literacy.  What good is it if someone is only capable of consuming knowledge?  “We should not assume that someone posses … literacy if they can consume but not express themselves” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 170).

Literacy is a fundamental and necessary ingredient for democracy.  Moreover, literacy helps one achieve critical awareness and freedom.  While literacy is “not the equivalent of emancipation, it is in a more limited but essential way the precondition for engaging in struggles around both relations of meaning and relations of power.  To be literate is not to be free, it is to be present and active in the struggle for reclaiming one’s voice, history, and future” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 11). Literacy is the road to freedom, and libraries line that road.