Blog 21, by William G. Brozo & Sari Sulkunen  

In this blog we want to stress one of the often-overlooked affordances of literacy – as a tool for action: in the workplace, in personal and community development, and for political and societal transformation. In an era that seems to prioritize basic reading skills and reading test performance above all else, there is an urgent need for a broader vision of the desired outcomes of a literate life.

What is left out when basic skills become an end in themselves is the understanding that literacy equips those who take advantage of this ever more essential technology with the tools for success in their personal, civic, and occupational worlds and, more critically, to act on insights and knowledge gleaned from engagement with multiple text forms (Cervetti & Pearson, 2023; Hofstetter, Stitcht, & Hofstetter, 1999). Thus, we assert, schooling and training that fails to do more than inculcate narrow units of information and procedures  should be regarded as inadequate for the complex and ever-shifting demands of the modern workplace and media-driven society (Brozo, 2007)  

While motivation to read in the traditional sense is slipping nearly everywhere, we echo the words of early 20th century American educational reformer John Dewey (1938) who said: “Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” Dewey envisioned schooling as a process that leads learners to apply knowledge and skills in new situations.
We would argue that this goal for today’s learners is even more vital going forward given the premium placed on flexible expertise in modern work spaces  (Binkley et al., 2010; Brozo, 2015) and the importance of critical information literacy in an age of mis/ disinformation (Brisola & Doyle, 2019).
To this we would add that learners should be guided to use literacy as the ultimate adaptive skill to enlarge academic, civic, and workplace possibilities. In other words, an actionable literacy. Offering youth and adults an actionable literacy may be the key to motivating them to become engaged, critical citizens.  

Actionable Literacy: The Literacy of Transformation  

Our vision of a multiliteracies pedagogy (Kalantzis & Cope 2023) that leads to actionable consciousness would be to start with learners’ situated practices, conceptualize them, analyze them critically, and apply them creatively.  By transforming literacy practices in this way, social practices would be transformed, as well.

What does this transformational literacy, to rephrase Dewey, look like at this phase of the 21st century? It resembles the lower-secondary students in Colorado, USA who have been guided to use traditional and digital tools of reading, writing, numeracy, and science to explore and propose solutions at a local level to the global challenges of addressing homelessness—a key Sustainable Development Goal. (https://www.summitdaily.com/news/summit-middle-school-students-work-to-find-local-solutions-to-global-issues-thanks-to-this-challenge/). To be truly transformative, though, these students will need to experience an actionable literacy curriculum throughout the grades and across disciplines. 
For Finnish construction workers, the subjects of Sari’s research (Sulkunen, 2026), it means engaging with professional literacy practices that are intertwined with practical tasks of the job and reflect the needs and affordances of the multilingual and multimodal work community. However, at a construction site, not all workers, such as guest workers and subcontractors, have the same opportunities to participate in these practices, which restricts agency in the shared workplace. And yet, agency is needed for transformative literacy and action within the work community. Providing all workers with meaningful learning opportunities, such as on-the-job training, would not only benefit individuals’ literacy and agency, but also ensure fluent and safe work in a high-risk industry.  

With today’s dominant discourse around basic reading skills in both North America and Europe, we urge a reconceptualizing of learning sites as transformative of the lifeworlds of youths and adults through a multiliteracies pedagogy of active engagement and social change.  

 

References  

Binkley, M., Erstad, O., Herman, J., Raizen, S., Ripley. M., & Rumble, M. (2010). Draft white paper 1: Defining 21st century skills. The University of Melbourne: Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills. 

Brisola, A.C., & Doyle, A. (2019). Critical information literacy as a path to resist “fake news”: Understanding disinformation as the root problem. Open Information Science, 3, 274–286. 

Brozo, W.G. (2015, December). Global learning outcomes: Designs and metrics for the 21st century. Paper given at the 2nd International Conference on Assessment, The National Center for Assessment in Higher Education, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.   

Brozo, W.G. (2007). Authentic contexts for developing language tools in vocational education (pp.349-361). In J. Flood, D. Lapp, & Farnan, N. (Eds), Content area reading and learning: Instructional strategies (3rd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.  

Cervetti, G.N., & Pearson, P.D. (2023). Disciplinary reading, action, and social change. The Reading Teacher, 76(3), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369398235_Disciplinary_Reading_Action_and_Social_Change   

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Macmillan.  

Hofstetter, C., Sticht, T. G. Sticht, & Hofstetter. C.H. (1999). Knowledge, literacy, and power. Communication Research, 26(1), 58-80. DOI: 10.1177/009365099026001004  

Kalantzis, M. & Cope, B. (2023). Multiliteracies: A short update. The International Journal of Literacies, 30(2). https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-0136/CGP/v30i02/1-15  

Sulkunen, S. (2026).   High-risk work requires multimodal and multilingual communication and interaction | University of Jyväskylä