Exploring an Alternative: A Transformative Curriculum Driven by Social Capital

This chapter explores the potential alternatives to the dominant philosophy, policy and practice. Informed by sociological and critical educational frames that recognise the political, social and economic factors that conspire to marginalise learners, it offers a transformative approach to adult literacy whilst locating the model in an underpinning philosophy. Rich empirical data from practice is probed to offer a justification to the recognition accorded the model. The analysis argues that a different value position to the dominant curriculum could yield a different approach to practice. This is illustrated with transformative and emancipatory literacy, which derives its values from a libertarian, equality and justice base (as against an instrumentalist base). We expose how changes to policy and practice would inform and shape the literacy curriculum and indeed pedagogy, a central driver, we also suggest, being adult education/literacy dis-entangling itself from neo-liberal fusion and creating critical space for contextualised and emancipatory learning. Keywords: emancipatory learning empirical research literacy practice sociology of education transformative literacy