Reconceptualizing literacy for a new Australia

This article discusses ideas for a new literacy compact in Australia that would encompass multilingual, language revitalizing, and Indigenous grounded perspectives. A key question posed is whether a uniquely Australian literacy order can be imagined, one that would extend the historically inherited tradition of Western grammar–centred practices as conventionally typified in print-based English book and letter reading and its digital equivalents, to include the many languages of the nation and their distinctive literacies, whether Indigenous and immigrant in origin. Any such imagining must understand the inherited and dominant tradition it seeks to change, the colonial legacy of damaged language vitality, and the various revitalization practices underway, and therefore must be situated in the concrete circumstances of contemporary communication issues. This means more than merely teaching non-dominant languages and literacies, but re-conceiving what the national project of “becoming literate” is taken to be, incorporating multiple perspectives, interests, and circumstances. This re-imagining would tie literacy outcomes not just to academic curriculums and assessment purposes, but also to health and wellbeing of populations, to regenerative cultural vitality, and to linguistic human rights. Such aims represent a challenge to current Closing the Gap policy, which is based principally on ameliorating group comparisons of reading performance. The article argues that public discussion about literacy should be able to comprehend such different activities in a coherent and overarching literacy endeavour to grasp the opportunity represented by contemporary social movements calling for a reconstruction of Australian national identity and direction. None of this should lose sight of the need to improve reading acquisition nor deflect from how what counts as literacy is itself being transformed in response to new economic and technological developments as discussed by Farrell, Newman, and Corbel (Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 42 (6):898–912, 2020).