Policy Literacy

This paper explores some aspects of the relations between literacy education and the processes and history of thinking about public policy-making. Policy is a broad field of practice that marshals particular kinds of knowledge to bolster executive action. Policy processes involve representations of fields of practice and can evolve ambiguous relations with practitioners in those fields. Scholars can have an ambiguous relationship with policy since policy draws on research evidence in motivated ways that shape and frame this information for action. The paper discusses two broad abstractions, knowledge and power, that constitute a heuristic of the policy moment. Policy representations of literacy can give rise to struggles over how to characterise and name practitioners' lived literacy realities. Some of the long history in which ruling has marshalled knowledge for power is included. Tensions and struggles are emerging in relation to the adoption by international organisations and national governments of literacy measures as part of human capital accounting. In recent years researchers have often stressed the culturally variable and located nature of literacy rather than its comparability across national contexts. The paper argues that a critical understanding of policy is required to enable literacy educators and researchers to understand, critique and participate in policy.