This paper examines how local knowledge is employed in environmental adult education in a community-based ecotourism project in an island community in southern Thailand. The study is based on field research and analysis of project websites, media reports and documents. Situated at the intersection of global tourism and a local Thai-Malay Muslim…

In the tradition of grassroots environmental movements worldwide, activist Buddhist monks in rural Thailand have, since the late 1980s, led a popular movement to protect local forest, water and land resources while at the same time challenging dominant state and corporate "economist" development paradigms. Most famously, these "development monks"…

This ethnographic study employs a gender perspective to understand the motivations of eight women literacy learners participating in a village-based functional literacy programme in rural North-eastern Thailand. Field research took place over six months of periodic residence in a North-eastern Thai village, and involved participant observation,…

Literacy education in Thailand has shifted emphasis over time. Under authoritarian nationalism in the 1940s-1950s, popular democracy was a focus. Work-oriented literacy programs in the 1970s emphasized broader community development. With the neoliberal state's move toward globalization in the 1990s, calls for further democratization of educational…

Uses Lytle and Wolfe's metaphors for literacy (literacy as skills, tasks, practices, or critical reflection) to identity the consequences attached to literacy in each category, focusing on adults in the developing world. Concludes that consequences depend on who is evaluating them and for what purposes. (SK)