Introduction

Abstract

This first introductory chapter presents the rationale for the selection of chapters in this volume. It outlines how the protean construct that is literacy has been presented across time, domains and cultures and explains how the chapters were selected to embody, as far as possible, the multiplicity of research contexts in which literacy has been explored in education. The chapter summarises each of the contributions made by the authors in this book, whose different writing styles and approaches to their texts also reinforce the idea of literacy being multiple and unbound. This chapter concludes that across the differing conceptions of literacy, what unites them is a sense that literacy, however it is defined, can be a force for liberation.