CJI FRAMEWORK
Numbers, dates, patterns, charts, infographics …. our world is full of data.
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?
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.
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.
