Abstract
Education has always been an institutional process across the globe with schooling as its central agent. But for sometime now, there have been demands to revisit the role of education in building literate societies. For, as has been often stated, education is not just a fundamental and constitutional right, but a fundamental human process as well. However, ironically, evaluations of the existing educational process have come in the form of external commentaries. We need to understand the impact of literacy through an internal evaluation by engaging with the people who directly derive meaning from them. Meaning making, is social, material, and by analogy so is literacy. Field observations conducted in a village in South Assam, a state in Eastern India, to study the impact of the ‘Same Language Subtitling,’ an experiment in support of literacy provided insights into existing models of literacy and demonstrated a need to amalgamate them into contexts that pertain to the receivers of literacy experiments. The responses to the subtitling were motivated by clear pragmatic subjectivities in relation to the surrounding discourses. This paper demonstrates that questions on the growth of literacy should hinge upon what counts as knowledge, whether the users believe knowledge is created, and whether this knowledge relates to their lives in any way.
About the author
Seema Khanwalker (b. 1965) is Head of the Center for Semiotic Studies at Mudra Institute of Communications in Ahmedabad (MICA). Her research interests are semiotics of culture and applied semiotics. Her publications include ‘When is a coconut not a coconut?’ (2001); and ‘Television narratives: Creating a cultural complicity: A semiotic analysis of the Balaji telefilms discourse’ (2003).
© Walter de Gruyter
