I love this.
I love it when you read something that manages to express a belief you know you’ve held for some time, without ever having found the words or means to put it out into the world. It’s just happened to me.

I was revisiting the website Route 21, a research project and proposal from an organization called the Partnership for Twenty-first Century Skills. And I followed a link describing an approach to core academic subjects in the 21st century.

What it proposed was a set of literacies that point a refreshing lens on some tired sideroads of curriculum. They propose the need for core subjects (such as Language, Math, Arts etc.) to be taught in the context of what they term themes, but I prefer to keep using their word literacies instead. They are, in no particular order:

The reason I like the term literacy applied to these is that when we look at them as subjects or themes, it seems to suggest an established and somewhat static body of knowledge, history and theory that one can learn and apply to exams and hopefully life. Whereas literacies to me imply the idea of a background underpinning of knowledge that works in collaboration with interdisciplinary skills to support critical and reflective approaches to an ever-evolving stream of information, challenge and experience. Literacy does not seem a stagnant thing the way subject study can default to being…

In terms of the choice of literacies in this project, I think they’re pretty spot on. Certainly each of them is a complex and evolving aspect of our personal and cultural lives. Each has local and global application. Each is a deep, resonant and meaningful area, with enormous potential for integrating the purposeful learning of traditional core skills.

I think in part it’s that learning the tools of a kind of literacy that has appealed to me in the study of digital literacy and my current Masters as well. This is not about learning best practices and a set of tools. It’s about acquiring the literacy needed for critical and reflective approaches to whatever comes next.

All photos by Jamie Raskin