Globalisation and the reconstruction of the literate child

Abstract

In New Zealand, the turn from the welfare state since 1984 to a global market driven economy in the early mid 1990s has affected the way that primary curriculum documents have been developed and implemented. Those documents, together with teachers’ handbooks, have in turn affected the way that teachers teach. In particular, the construction of literacy and what constitutes literacy teaching in these documents have affected teachers’ work and have also constructed and are reconstructing childhood and the child literate. The way that teachers teach literacy depends on their constructions of children and childhood and that as their views of childhood and children change, so too do their views of the teaching of literacy. Against this background of locating childhood and children in educational and literacy discourses, other discourses of new technologies, cultural diversity, time and space of “new times” are also challenging the construction of literacy, the literate child and childhood.