Milada Rabušicová, born in Brno, Czech Republic, in 1956. Ph.D. from Masaryk University, Brno. Assistant Professor at the Department of Educational Studies at Masaryk University, Brno.
Mellon Fellow (1 September 1999 – 31 January 2000)
During my one-term stay at NIAS I originally intended to write a book in Czech within the field of sociology of education with a tentative title Social Environment of School and Education in Sociological Perspective. During the first month I wrote an introductory chapter which I transformed into a paper entitled Sociology of Education: contribution to defining its object and methodology and sent it to Prague for publication in Sociologický èasopis [Sociological Review]. Then I realised that the scope of my original intentions was too broad. I decided therefore to drastically narrow the topic of my research and focus on a particular theme – functional literacy.
After four months of rather hectic work I completed my task and finished the manuscript entitled Gramotnost: nový pohled na staré téma [Literacy: An Old Topic in New Perspective]. It has nine chapters in which I deal, firstly, with the development of the general concept of literacy and illiteracy and present the latest world wide statistics on the scope and magnitude of illiteracy in various countries. Then I describe the concept of functional literacy and place it within the context of Czech educational environment. In the final chapters I discuss my results within the context of pedagogical theory.
By writing on functional literacy I made an important contribution, I believe, to Czech pedagogy’s state of knowledge of one of the important problems that are being discussed world wide nowadays. My manuscript, after a review process, will be published as a book and as such it will serve as one of the basic reading materials for my course on sociology of education.