Civic Communication Literacy for Secondary Education

Despite consensus on the need to work on deliberative democracy and value discussion, teachers are unsure about how to meet the goals of the school’s democracy mission. In part, this is due to formulations in curricula, in part due to the lack of tools and practices that foster these goals in the classroom and in the school. Rhetoric has been introduced as one way to meet the needs. We believe that the use of rhetoric needs to broaden so as to include argument literacy, including aspects of critical thinking, together with media and information literacy and communication skills, with the inclusion of ethical considerations and activities for civic literacy. CIVLIT addresses these challenges as civic communication literacy by drawing out guidelines for how related types of literacy and skills can be understood in relationship with current educational curricula, and offers guidelines for educational practices for Secondary education in Sweden, against a Nordic context. CIVLIT is a multidisciplinary project, combining rhetoric, argumentation theory, and educational sciences. We analyse how current goals are formulated and motivated in policy-documents. We review curricula and how the challenges are described and solved today. We focus on empirically establishing tools and concepts for the classroom. Finally, we discuss limits and possibilities within current curricula. We expect to offer both theoretical and practical suggestions.