Human capital literacy. Autonomous literacy is a foundational concept in the human capital theory (Agnello, 2001, pp. 33-36). Human capital literacy refers to skill development of workers as an important economic resource. Rapid advances in technology, electronic communication, and globalization have resulted in significant changes in the workplace. Just as in the industrial revolution there was a shift from agricultural to factory work, now there is a shift from resource based and industrial work to the knowledge sector including jobs in computer and electronic technology. Whereas agricultural workers had the manual skills that allowed them to adapt readily to the factory floor, today's displaced workers do not have the skills or education to move into technical and electronic jobs (Drucker, 1994). In the mid-eighties, shifts from an industrial to high-tech economy rendered well-paid industrial workers unemployable because they typically could not retrain for jobs in the new (Smith, 1992).

Ideological Literacy

Street's (1995) term ideological literacy focuses on the "specific social practices of reading and writing" as distinct from the technical skill understood by autonomous literacy (p. 29). Barton & Hamilton (2000) used the term situated literacy to indicate that literacy consists of social practices that take place in a given context. This implies that there are multiple literacies, each dependent on and situated in a particular context. Personal experience of trying to communicate with people from other social sectors or geographical locations supports the idea of multiple literacies with their own specific nuances of vocabulary and signification. From this perspective, people with limited literacy skills in the dominant discourse typically barter their own skills for literacy skills as "reciprocal parts of an exchange process" (Fingeret as cited in Street, 1995, p. 111). The term ideological literacy goes beyond situated literacy to include the understanding that some literacies are valued more highly in society than others.

Critical or emancipatory literacy. Critical literacy draws upon the writings of Paolo Freire who believed that "reading the world" was the essential basis of learning to read the word. By this he meant that learners must have a critical understanding of the reality of the world they live in and that meaning is socially constructed. He drew his pedagogy from his experience in northeastern Brazil where landless peasants learned to read through dialogue about the key constructs in their lives (Freire, 1970). In the process of naming and discussing things of importance in their lives, individuals learned to read the words that represented those things in a remarkably short time.