On Sept. 8, the world will celebrate International Literacy Day (ILD) 2021 with the theme “Literacy for a human-centred recovery: Narrowing the digital divide.” UNESCO established ILD in 1966 to intensify efforts toward a more literate and sustainable society.
Of course, the world has evolved. In 2021, we include data literacy – the ability to read and analyze data – as an increasingly important component of education if we are to prepare students for the future workforce. In its ILD 2021 concept note, UNESCO states: “the need for digital skills, which are part of today’s literacy skills, have been recognized for distance learning, a digitally transformed workplace, and participation in a digitalized society.”
Consider this:
The COVID-19 crisis heightened existing barriers to education. Check out this interactive feature from Human Rights Watch.
- According to the UN, “617 million children and adolescents are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics.”
- And “during the initial phase of the pandemic, schools were closed disrupting the education of 62.3% of the world’s student population of 1.09 billion.”
- The pandemic “magnified the pre-existing inequalities in access to meaningful literacy learning opportunities, disproportionally affecting 773 million non-literate young people and adults.” (UNESCO)
Feeling inspired to do something? Here’s an option from the SAS Social Innovation team.
What: An International Literacy Day initiative that brings foundational data literacy skills into the classroom through employee outreach. You will partner with an educator to run an hour-long (at most) SAS® DataFly activity, engaging students with real-time, interactive data visualizations. As students respond to specific poll questions, they instantly see their responses populate in a data chart.
Everyone involved will have the chance to join a livestream later in the month where subject matter experts will look at the aggregated data from all participating schools and discuss the topics of sampling bias, the law of large numbers, geographical bias and the importance of a good sample. Partnering organizations will also discuss the application of these topics within the news and within media literacy.
Why: When our knowledge was contained in books, learning to read became necessary to understand the world. Today, new information is increasingly generated and communicated in numbers, charts and graphs. Data literacy is emerging as an essential skill for everyone who wants to understand our data-rich world and make it a better place.
When:
- Aug. 18 – Attend the information session. This session will be livestreamed and archived on the SAS Video Portal.
- Sept. 8 – International Literacy Day!
- Sept. 9-24 – Conduct one in-person or virtual SAS DataFly activity during this time.
- Sept. 28 – Join a livestreamed event with SAS, Arizona State University and the News Literacy Project. This event will be recorded.
How: Add the Aug. 18 information session to your calendar. During the session you will learn how to connect with an educator and conduct an in-person or virtual SAS DataFly activity in the classroom. All materials and school listings will be provided.
For those who live outside the US, we will need your help in identifying schools that might be interested in participating. More information to follow.
Please email socialinnovation@sas.com or Mimi.Stapleton@sas.com with any questions!
JMPers, let us know:
What are people in your community doing for ILD 2021?
Will you participate in the SAS DataFly activity?
Anyone feeling inspired to visualize global literacy data and share it with us and in JMP Public?
Would love to hear from you…send me an email or comment.
Thank you for posting this, @J_Marquardt . I don't know what I'll do for International Literacy Day yet, but you have me thinking about how I can give back to kids in my community...and maybe those further away as well. Thanks for planting this seed!
I will take part by returning to tutoring elementary school students in reading as part of Reading Partners Baltimore.
