Graffiti as a site for cultural literacies in Zimbabwean urban high schools

Abstract

It is widely believed that education is a socially situated cultural process. Generally, schools are regarded as the key educational institutions. However, education can be formal, non-formal and informal, based on media-driven communicative settings. These types coalesce within formal institutions of learning. This study focuses on the transmission of cultural knowledge in informal spaces such as the bathroom. It argues that graffiti is a medium that offers students a unique communicative dynamic enabling an open engagement with issues they would otherwise not do elsewhere. It facilitates the transmission of vital cultural knowledge/literacy whose length and breadth cannot be adequately exhausted by the formal school curriculum alone. Bathroom interactions, therefore, bring a different dynamic to cultural education in learning institutions. Sexuality, hygiene and decency, among others, are negotiated from a strictly student perspective. A trip to the bathroom therefore marks a crucial transition from formal to informal education, and back.