Episode 11: Keeping it LIT-Making literacy everyone's business

But I suppose before we get into the training aspect of it, to have the conversation, open up the conversation about what exactly is literacy.

And we, I suppose everyone knows, I suppose they know what literacy is, but when we actually go to describe it, everyone might have a different kind of take on it.

So when we talk about literacy today, are we still talking about reading and writing? And we know that it's something much broader.

So I'd love if we could kind of have a chat about that.

So, Kynwen, are you happy to start with that?

Yeah, thanks, Virgin.

Yes, I mean, reading, writing, numeracy, and I think increasingly the digital skills are still, I suppose, the basis of literacy, what people need to be able to do in order to participate in general life.

There are also, I suppose, more particular aspects of literacy that we're now engaging with or we're now becoming more aware of.

So things like financial literacy, one that I recently encountered in a conversation with somebody was grief literacy.

So the language around grief, how people talk about that, how they talk about loss.

It wasn't something that had ever dawned on me that this was even a thing, but there is a particular area of literacy around that.

So we are talking about the basic skills that we might think of as reading and writing and so on, but it is also these other things like financial, environmental literacy, energy literacy, things like that.

So there's quite a broad range of things now that we consider to be part of literacy.

And Igel, it's that we can kind of make informed choices in our lives that we need to understand the various literacies.

Yeah, and I think just to broaden the definition of literacy a little bit as well, literacy is all about being able to find information that you need.

So to be able to access it.

So whether that's been able to reach the person you need to speak to or accessing something online.

and then being able to read and understand that information is really, really important.

So again, whether it's financial literacy, whether it's health literacy, whether it's digital literacy, whether it's listening and speaking.

So to be able to find the information, being able to understand the information that you get or you hear, and then also one of the most important parts of my point of view is to be able to respond to that appropriately for you.

So they're all things that, you know, we're trying to raise awareness across our various counties and supporting organisations to be more literacy aware.

So if you are providing a service or providing an educational opportunity for somebody and you want to give out all this information and you want to share everything you're doing, that's fantastic.

But if you don't stop and pause and think about the people you're trying to reach, the people that you're trying to support, if you don't think about, oh, hang on a second, are they going to understand the way I'm speaking? You're not going to be able to reach them.

You're not going to get them engaged.

So it's that piece that's really important, whether you're speaking to somebody through or whether you're writing to somebody or emailing somebody or putting a poster up.