Literacy, Education and Social Development. Ensuring Universal Rights to Literacy and Basic Education. A Series of 29 Booklets Documenting Workshops Held at the Fifth International Conference on Adult Education (Hamburg, Germany, July 14-18, 1997).

Literacy is embedded in social practice and has social meanings. Research and practice in adult literacy are demonstrating that, in order to bring about cultural and social transformation, literacy must be seen as an activity embedded in social and cultural practice. The traditional paradigm, which considers literacy as input for development and tends to see literacy primarily in terms of measurable literacy skills to be attained and the numbers to be made literate, must be replaced by a new paradigm based on the assumption that even small communities can begin their own process of literacy and make it part of the fabric of their own way of life. The notion of societal literacy is central to the new paradigm. The extent to which a community uses literacy as an integral part of life varies greatly, depending on the local, national, and international contexts. In the future, literacy provision must reflect the specific and diverse contexts in which literacy is acquired and used. These contexts include the following: what learners already know, want, and bring to the learning experience; learners' mother tongue; learners' identities in terms of gender, class, religion, and race; and learners' social, economic, and cultural contexts. (MN)