Towards a collective literacy for ethical and relational education

New paper alert — this one I’m crazy proud of, even though it’s very weird and I’m not sure how to describe it.

Over the past year, I’ve been working with my wonderful friend Kaitlin Lucas on an idea borne out of our shared frustration with the collapse of meaning in the word “literacy”.

It’s out now in Postdigital Science and Education, for their special issue on Designing for Literacy in a Postdigital World. It draws on new literacy studies, moral philosophy, critical digital sociology, and more-than-human ontologies of selfhood. It claims collaborative fiction writing as a legitimate research methodology. There is a horse and a toddler and an overworked academic and an enthusiastic chatbot.

Read it here:

Reynoldson, M., & Lucas, K. (2026). Literacy and the Other: Towards Understanding in Relation. Postdigital Science and Education.

Why we wrote it

As you can imagine, “AI literacy” was a major target of our frustration as we sat down to write this. But also financial literacy, data literacy, media literacy, environmental literacy, any construction you can think of where “literacy” is used simply to mean “skills”. This kind of usage treats “literacy” as a metaphor, where one concept is symbolically declared to be represented by another in order to ascribe certain characteristics to it. So what “certain characteristics” of literacy are we trying to superimpose on AI skills, financial skills, data skills?

I’ve said in the past that literacy is a term used to position certain types of knowledge as necessary, foundational. Whoever’s describing the thing as “literacy” is saying “my curriculum is compulsory”. And while we (Kaitlin and I) definitely believe that “compulsory” is the characteristic that “insert-flavour-here literacy” proponents are going for when they pitch their curricular frameworks, we think it misses a breathtakingly simple attribute of what makes literacy essential in the first place.

In short, literacy is about communication. It’s about messages – laying them down, picking them up, drawing them out. We may have evolved beyond a narrow reading-and-writing conception of literacy skills, but reading and writing are the ancestors, the progenitors, of every literacy practice that our digitally-entangled polyculture makes possible today.

So Kaitlin and I spent many months meditating on this idea: if literacy is about communication, then literacy is about relationships. It’s not a set of competencies to be mastered by the individual, but an ongoing, reflexive orientation towards understanding and being understood by each other. The base unit is not a language, or a script, or a software. It’s you and me. It’s us. Those we seek to understand. Those we strive to be understood by.

We wrote this, basically, to make sense of it. It’s not a pitch to completely reimagine all literacy curricula. What it is is an invitation to educators to reclaim “literacy” from curriculum pundits, from tech salespeople, and from slippery rhetoricians. Reclaim literacy for educational purpose. We read and write (and draw and sign and type emojis and exchange gifs and record speech-to-text) to understand one another.

Literacy is what connects us. This word should never be used to promote skills that divide and isolate us.

How we wrote it

There was something really special about the process of writing this. Kaitlin lives in Vienna. I live in Melbourne. We had been connecting and making sense together for about a year, but had never met in person, until after submitting the first version to PDSE.

Nonetheless, we discovered a shared affinity for fictional world-building as a way of making sense. Inspired by recent turns to fiction in sociological and educational inquiry, we decided to try this — not fiction for weaving dystopian worlds, but fiction for building bridges between our separate, but mutually resonant, experiences of the world. The five small stories we wrote were each things that were happening in our own lives, could happen in each other’s lives. They aren’t exercises in fantastical speculation, but in believing one another — in negotiating the terms of stories we could both recognise and make sense of.

If literacy learning is about learning to understand another, then exercises like this, in collaborative storytelling, are powerful and perennial. Thank you, Kaitlin, for gifting me this experience with you.