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The theme for this year's International Literacy Day is " Literacy for Diversity: Voices of Resilience".

Related Topics

• Mothers in TFYR Macedonia battle the cycle of poverty with reading, writing and arithmetic

• Angola needs an "explosion" in education

• Education of street children in Ethiopia

Video productions

• Africa's Child 2000

• Sudan: Learning Frenzy

• Young Leaders 2001

Lucy picks up her morning e-mail and SMS text messages from across the street and around the world. She's studying human rights issues in Civics at school and it's been a bit of an eye opener to be in touch with other students in Gaza, Kosovo and Colombia on the discussion site she found by doing a web search just last week. She's becoming a bit critical of her textbook for only mentioning human rights issues regarding men. How come women are left out? Given what she's heard from her e-mail buddies, women and girls have been just as vulnerable, if not more. At least she'll try to emphasise this fact in her multimedia project next week. A couple of video clips and some voice-overs from her new friends will do the trick.

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Faisal picks up his textbook for grade six, as he sits underneath a tree in southern Sudan. He wants to read the book and understand it, but many of the pages are missing. It was published in 1934 he noticed, and the pictures of people in the book certainly don't look like anyone he's ever seen. Maybe if he learns the poems off by heart and can read the textbook to his teacher, she'll tell him he can read, and he can go up to Grade Seven. He just wished he had maybe one more book so he could read more frequently. He hadn't owned a book until he came to school. Funny how his books are so different to the videos the people in his village watch each day in the market place.

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UNICEF's contributions to literacy have traditionally been with ensuring access to text-based literacy as the major contribution to basic education. In developing resilience (an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change) in those who are marginalised, particularly girls, literacy programmes must help girls to critically read texts and respond. They must also start to give girls and others who are marginalised access to new modes of literacy for global connectedness: so they can understand and respond critically to visual images, audio messages, advertisements, gestures and other behaviours. At the same time, local literacies must be preserved to ensure access to tradition and culture.

How can we make sure that the children we serve have access to the diverse faces of literacy? There are many ways beyond reading and writing for making meaning in the worlds of multimedia and electronic interactive media because being literate means more than becoming literate with text. It also means relating what you see in print to images, voices, advertisements, and ways of behaving. How we express meaning is always changing and developing rapidly, so how can there be one set of skills or one specific meaning for what it is to be literate?

Those who are proficient users of screen-based, iconographic (representing pictures or diagrams) and textbased literacies are light years away from those who are not. For those who are marginalised due to poverty, ethnicity, language or gender, the divide increases even more rapidly. What sort of education will help Faisal know his local world better, while giving him access to Lucy's world?

What is needed is the skill of knowing how to communicate, in what way and what mode for what purpose. Code switching, the ability to know which mode (reading or writing, voice message or image making) or language to use (formal or casual, local or international) according to a context is what students need to learn. It is those students who learn how to read the context, …and know which mode is most relevant to use, who will be the most resilient and literate students. It also means that learning new literacies (and having access to new tools for communication), must become a possibility for Faisal, if he is to enter the world of global connectedness that typifies Lucy's experience. Not to do so may increasingly develop as a human rights issue, as access to basic education takes on new meaning.

Literacy Day is intended to raise the visibility of achievements and challenges related to global literacy development among world leaders, organizations and communities.

In UNICEF, we hope that we can rise to the challenge of bridging the gap and make literacy all that it can become for the Faisals of this world.

Visit UNICEF's Education Site and UNESCO's Literacy Day message to learn more.