12 Facts About Brian Street

Brian Vincent Street was a professor of language education at King's College London and visiting professor at the Graduate School of Education in University of Pennsylvania.

The elder Brian Street found work in a wool factory, where his adopted son suffered a serious eye injury at the age of 18.

Brian Street spent six months at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, leading to a permanent appointment as a visiting professor in the Graduate School of Education.

Brian Street worked with colleagues in Brazil with particular interest in ethnographic and academic literacies perspectives.

Brian Street became one of the leading theoreticians within what has come to be known as New Literacy Studies, in which literacy is seen not just as a set of technical skills, but as a social practice that is embedded in power relations.

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These, and other scholars, represented what Brian Street called an "autonomous view of literacy", in which literacy is as a set of autonomous skills that can be learnt independently of the social context.

The alternative view Brian Street called "ideological", since it acknowledges literacy's context-dependent and power-laden nature.

The commercial literacy sprang out of the Koranic literacy practices, rather than schooled literacy practices as the dominant view of Literacy might expect and Brian Street explains this by the status and authority the latter practice had within the village.

Later in his career Brian Street worked on academic literacy and numeracy, and both areas can be said to reflect and build on his view of literacy.

Brian Street argued that some maths practices are privileged over others, and this has to do with the control and status associated with social institutions and procedures.

Brian Street was awarded the National Reading Conference's Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.

Brian Street died in Hove on 21 June 2017 at the age of 73 from cancer.