This symposium will explore literacy/literacies across different school subjects with the attempt to define, illustrate and explore what each learner should have acquired in terms of thinking skills and communicative capacities within the framework of compulsory education. Literacy is a main goal for most compulsory education, thus the concept is significantly broad and with many different definitions, understandings and stakeholders. Some researchers explore issues of minimal literacy requirements relevant for contemporary schooling while others are concerned with the relation between generic versus subject specific literacies and the possibility to distinguish between them. Some analysts are occupied with how of ICT and social media put new constraints when fostering literacy skills while others again has genres and discourse features of literacy as their focal point of investigation. Literacy as a foundation for identity building and lifelong learning has equally been explored, as well as literacy as a tool for fostering democracy and citizenship. All these aspects of literacy will be addressed in the proposed symposium. A key question in the discussion of literacies and schooling is how we as educators create access to all learners to develop the cultural competence and social skills for full involvement necessary for societal involvement of today.

The three papers in the symposium that follows will relate to these questions in different ways:

HERZBERG will discuss whether it is possible to agree on minimal literacy requirements on the bases of writing across the different school disciplines. Based on cooperate work with teachers at upper secondary level in Norway she explores diverging norms and standards, and the way they are expressed in texts discussions among teachers.

Dolin, from Denmark, and Englund, from Sweden, will both discuss subject specific versus the generic elements within literacies across the school subjects. On the bases of science education, DOLIN, will examine how much science content (i.e. which science processes and how much knowledge about science) is necessary to know in order to be scientific literate. Definitions of scientific literacy such as it is measured in the PISA tests reveal for example the difficulties in defining and delimiting the content to be specific knowledge areas.

ENGLUND from the point of citizenship and democratic fostering explores the possibilities to distinguish citizenship literacy from other and related kinds of literacy, such as reading literacy and historical literacy. Like Dolin, Englund questions whether a narrow and test based understanding of literacy has come to dominate the field on the costs of a broader understanding of citizenship literacy and which offer scope for open communication between different perspectives. How should the two different forms of citizenship literacy be investigated and distinguished from each other Englund asks.