With lockdown restrictions easing and schools looking at reopening very shortly, it is timely to revisit the important aspects of the literacy landscape. Literacy is essentially a capacity for making meaning. It involves the ability to read, view, speak, listen to and write for different purposes in a range of contexts. Students become literate as they develop the knowledge and skills to use and interpret language confidently and competently. Literacy is fundamental to a student’s ability to learn at school and to engage productively in society. Whilst not a subject in its own right, literacy is central to all areas of learning.

Reading is a vital part of the literacy picture. C.S. Lewis, the author of the popular Narnia series including The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, urges us to read, ‘because words matter.’ He says that ‘we read to link our stories with the stories of others and to remember that our life, like all lives, has a story.’

Stories create a pattern to human experience. While some stories draw us back into the past, others project us into the future. Some illuminate the day and others take us into the darkness of the human condition. The best storytellers lighten and enlighten the contradictions and uncertainties of life. Whether as spectators of events in stories, or as participants in their creation, we can use narratives to link, expand or create templates of reality against which to consider our own existence – particularly in difficult and complex times.

 Fundamental to the reading act is a commitment to vicariously living within a world created by another. There is a natural relationship between narrative and empathy. Empathy is the ability to think what it might be like to be in someone else’s shoes, to be a thoughtful reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and desires that someone so placed might experience. Empathy seeks to understand human behaviour, and not to judge it. This concept is powerfully captured in Harper Lee’s wonderful novel To Kill A Mockingbird when Atticus Finch says to his daughter, Scout – ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it’. This passionate plea for compassion and understanding, is the basis of all morality and true wisdom.

When we read we enter into a dialogue with the writer – a long, unbroken conversation about the important things of life. As the plot unfolds and readers engage with characters, language and the events of the narrative, they can discover an imagined role for themselves in the story. The sense of agency, choice and optional role-taking creates greater enthusiasm for reflection upon important life issues. Stories engage our interest, curiosity, fear, and sense of wonder. American philosopher Martha Nussbaum states that ‘a child deprived of stories is deprived, as well, of certain ways of viewing other people’. They are deprived of those ‘habits of wonder’ promoted by storytelling which ‘define the other person as spacious and deep, with qualitative differences from oneself and hidden places worthy of respect.’

In our complex and uncertain COVID-19 world, the value of reading a good book and ‘going somewhere with someone’ is even more critical for our young people. Imagination, creativity, exploration and storytelling form part of an educative continuum which will in turn foster thinking, deep learning, language enrichment and compassion.