Literacy and learning initiatives : post literacy and joint partnerships between a school and a university

The central argument of this chapter is that the world has changed. The ways in which we have traditionally established our understandings of the world have proven to be inadequate for contemporary education systems in the context of a postmodern world where there is a saturation of media and visual images. Jean Baudrillard's concepts of simulcra, hyperreality and implosion, and seduction are used to construct a post-Literacy framework that is linked to a reconceptualising of generation, culture, knowledge and power within formal educational contexts. The major finding of this paper leads to a more complex understanding of literacies within and outside formal educational contexts. The paper also explores one attempt at beginning to address the changing nature of education by outlining a research project that was centred around research partnerships between schooling and university communities in order to broaden the participants' conceptions of how children engage with media in a futures oriented world. The research also explored how Learning Initiatives (a concept developed by a regional Queensland State School - Waraburra State School) could provide a framework for intergrating the curriculum, pedagogy, policy and practice of e-learning, media studies and futures driven discourses between the school, the university and the wider community.