Downloadable Resources
Communicative Justice Initiative FRAMEWORK
How do we learn to make sense of it all? How do we learn to trust the data we see, hear, and read? And what opportunities do our adult learners have – particularly those from linguistically minoritized communities – to become data story-tellers in their own right?
Numbers, dates, patterns, charts, infographics …. our world is full of data.
These are some of the essential questions that inspired the development of our Communicative Justice Learner Leadership Framework. We have been working on this framework since Fall 2021, fueled in part by our need to help adult learners make sense of the overload of data and risk statistics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Helping the learners see themselves in the data took on new urgency. We saw up close how learners’ ability to stay safe, healthy, and informed during the pandemic was tied to their resilience in navigating the accompanying infodemic.
How do we learn to trust the data we see, hear, and read?
Our framework reflects ongoing collaboration with adult educators, digital literacy experts, public health practitioners. Our ultimate goal has been to promote shared understanding across disciplines, to give us a common language for talking about the promise of communicative justice. To develop this framework, we have drawn upon rich thinking in many areas of research and theory that have explored the concept of data literacy and the links to social change, including:
Charles Briggs’ foundational work on communicative injustice, referring to the structural inequities that disrupt communities’ access to health information or their ability to shape those lines of communication
Catherine D’Ignazio’s vision for creative data literacy which expands conventional views on data literacy with an emphasis on community engagement and empowerment around data storytelling and visualization processes
Literacy Minnesota’s Northstar Digital Literacy framework
W.E.B. Du Bois’s ground-breaking work with data visualizations as a tool for reclaiming historical truths
We hope to continue to strengthen the framework and the meaning of communicative justice through engagement with learners, teachers, and other community partners. We invite you to explore the framework below and add your voice to the conversation.
Being data-smart doesn’t begin with learning to use tools or create charts and graphics. It begins by exploring big questions:
What is data? Who works with data? Why do we collect data? Does data improve our lives? What data do our communities trust?
If you don’t know the technical language to talk about data and tools, it’s better for you to just listen to what others say about data, right?
No way!
Too often, people don’t join conversations about data because they feel they don’t have the ‘right’ words or the ‘right’ knowledge. The reality is that to ‘speak data’, you need opportunities to play with language. We can’t feel afraid to try out new words and ideas. We need to feel free to ask lots of questions and express our wonder and even confusion.
And remember: English is not the only language we use to ‘speak data’!
How do we turn data – numbers, dates, words, trends -- into memorable big ideas? And then how do we turn these big ideas into community action? For sure, it’s not magic. We need the opportunity to play with data to discover their meaning.
Hear, see, read, write, speak, imagine, collect, and interpret data while problem—solving with others.
Sorting, sifting, testing out ideas, checking for errors, looking closely again and again – the more we play with data, the more confident we are that we’re telling good stories with data.
See ourselves in data and tell stories with a purpose, through a purpose-driven discovery process that shows the power and limitations of data.
Adult learners can play an important role in leading conversations about data in the community. They can be inspiring data-storytellers. They can inspire others to be data-storytellers.
Data story-telling in the community is a powerful way to put public speaking skills to work.
Leaning into the possibility that learners have power as data storytellers in their own right.
For many adult learners, being a data-storyteller takes a special kind of curiosity and courage. You will think about data in ways that are new and unfamiliar. You will ask questions about data that won’t have easy answers. Curiosity is a commitment to asking good questions about data and exploring different answers.
Stay curious, be brave: your questions as a data story-teller matter!