The Communicative Justice Initiative (CJI) is a new partnership between adult educators, public health, and other social impact practitioners working to democratize data by engaging adult learners and diverse communities – as data creators, data storytellers, data visualizers, and leaders of social change.
World Education is a partner in the Communicative Justice Initiative launched by a team at San Francisco State University (SFSU), the University of California San Francisco, and Mujeres Unidas y Activas. In 2023, we published a blog on the need for increased data literacy and democratization of data and helped support a Study Circle for educators on data literacy. In early 2024, the CJI team helped inspire and inform and add resources to our facilitator guide, Advocating for Digital Equity: A Facilitator Guide for Catalyzing Immigrant and Refugee Community Members.
Then on March 20, 2024, World Education’s Director of Strategic Initiatives Alison Ascher Webber presented with SFSU Professor Maricel Santos and Doctoral Researcher and Community Educator Maria Jose Bastias at the Coalition for Adult Basic Education (COABE) conference and shared new learnings and resources for adult educators and community practitioners.
In a session entitled “Data and Information Literacy: Advancing Learner Leadership and Communicative Justice,” the presenters shared example data literacy activities educators can adapt to their settings and learners’ needs, whether they are working in an adult education classroom, a health clinic, or diverse community settings. The presenters also introduced CJI’s Communicative Justice Learner Leadership Framework which aims to spark new thinking about skills many educators already address in their classrooms. Their framework organizes learner competencies into 5 domains:
- Understanding Data
- Learning to ‘speak data’
- Playing with Data
- Data Storytelling with a Purpose
- Curiosity and courage
The COABE slide deck from the presentation can be viewed here. To stay connected to the initiative, sign up for updates on the CJI’s new website. The website is live but we’re still very much revamping it. The CJI invites adult educators and community-based practitioners to contribute to the website. The following is their invitation to participate comes with remuneration in the form of a stipend.
“We want to use our website to reach out to more teachers, learners, community leaders, data scientists, health practitioners… and more. We want to develop new website content with the voices of people like you who have inspired us.
Our website goal is to educate others about what communicative justice is, inspire them with stories from real people, and share a call to action. Here are some examples of website content we are looking for:
| Website Goal | Description | Examples of website content |
| Educate | To spark curiosity and help people understand what communicative justice is |
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| Inspire | To inspire others with your own experience with data |
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| Call to action | To encourage others to take a next step |
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Website content can take many forms: short quotations accompanied by student work or classroom photographs, videos, artwork, or audio clips. Our goal is to collect website content by June 1, 2024.
Are you interested in sharing your voice and vision on our website! We hope so! If your contribute is featured in our website, we can thank you with a $100 Target gift card. For more information, email: mbastias@mail.sfsu.edu
