The Restrictions in the Understanding of Literacy and Its Measurement in the PISA Survey - Alternative View of Development

Vida Vončina

Summary:  The article critically enlightens the universalistic view of literacy, also identifi ed in the background of the PISA survey. Since our standpoint is that literacy cannot be understood or developed outside any particular normative framework, we wonder to whose interest it is to have a defined literacy which is intensively becoming part of the global agenda of changing the education. We warn about the conceptual problems with any literacy that prevents the overcoming of social inequality as the consequence of linguistic practices, and the influence of which on curriculum and teaching would lead to their narrowing. We open an alternative view of literacy which respects the fact that what we do with texts is always entangled in the societal distribution of power.