What does it mean to be a literate citizen today?

Often in history, we distinguish between “pre-literate” and “literate” societies. Literacy it seems was a simple threshold: you either could read and write, or you could not. Today, literacy is far more complex – and far more contested. Today we talk about media literacy, financial literacy, digital emotional literacy and cultural literacy. But in our education systems, whose literacy counts? Whose ways of meaning-making are recognised in schools and whose are ignored?

As we look to the future – in the context of curriculum reform, debates about media literacy, concerns about conspiracy theories, and questions about citizenship – we want to explore a series of questions, including

• What does the word literacy mean in the present day?
• Whose literacies count – and why?
• Whose literacies are unheard?
• What are the literacies of the future?
• What are the literacies of hope?

As part of our FED National Education Futures Projects on English and Literacy, this session will create space to explore literacy not simply as a specific skill but as a lived, social and civic practice asking how literacy intersects with culture, identity and civic engagement and what implications this might have for the school curriculum?

Our Keynote speaker is Professor Kate Pahl from Manchester Metropolitan University Professor of Arts and Literacy, School of English, Manchester. She is the author, with Jennifer Rowsell, of the book, ‘Living Literacies: Literacy for social change’ (2020) in which they argue that lived literacies, whether in homes, playgrounds, streets, libraries, forests, buses, online and off-line and ephemeral, messy and miscellaneous, all matter.

Her research projects have been co-produced with young people in community settings, and she worked for many years in Rotherham and the Dearne valley with a focus on community literacies. She has recently completed a large-scale project, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) called ‘Voices of the Future’ which explored, with climate scientists and educationalists, literary theorists and philosophers, landscape architects and plant ecologies, how children and young people can become more involved in future treescapes. From this work, she is currently writing a book, ‘Forest Literacies’ about hopeful literacies.