Foundations to Futures: Rethinking Literacy for Tomorrow’s Learners

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to give a presentation to the online conference held by the New Zealand Literacy Association, my topic being Foundations to Futures: Rethinking Literacy for Tomorrow’s Learners. My main focus was an emphasis on how, while the teaching of foundational skills of literacy must be regarded as essential, we must also extend our young people’s capacity to build on these skills in order to develop the capabilities they will require to flourish and be active contributors in the world of the future. In this blog post I have attempted to summarise the essence of my talk to share with a broader audience of those who didn’t attend…

I began with a simple question – “why d0w we teach children to read“. It’s a fairly simple thing to ask – something I’ve started sessions with staff and parent groups often. Generally I’ll get a simple response like “so they can read books“. If I then ask “why do they read books” the response is generally “so they can learn” But when I ask “why do we want them to learn?” the responses become far more thoughtful, along the lines of; “So they can participate fully in life.” and so on. Nobody argues with that chain of thinking – until you follow it one step further and ask whether it still holds.

Here’s the question I then challenged the online group with: “if our tamariki can read fluently but can’t recognise when they’re being manipulated, radicalised, deceived or emotionally exploited online, are they truly literate?”

I don’t think this is a rhetorical flourish. I think it’s the literacy challenge of the next decade. The challenge lies in not simply learning to read, but learning what – and who – to believe. AI can now write essays and conjure convincing images in seconds, so what’s left that’s uniquely human about literacy? Almost every learner alive today carries the ability to access more information in their pocket than any generation before them, so why does misinformation still outrun knowledge? Many of our students aren’t choosing what they read anymore; algorithms are increasingly choosing what they think about. Attention itself is becoming education’s scarcest resource. (And as I highlighted in my talk, this isn’t just a problem for our young people, it’s also increasingly evident as it affects the adults in our community – including teachers!)

These aren’t abstractions. The signals are already showing up in our schools and communities. Loneliness is now treated by security agencies, not just wellbeing services, as a risk factor – because isolated young people are the ones online communities go looking for. It’s rarely ideology that draws a young person in first; it’s friendship, belonging, humour, a sense of being seen. The manipulation comes later, once the connection is real. You can hear more on this in my recent podcast with Ray Finch. New Zealand’s own security agencies have started naming this explicitly, and framing it as an educational question as much as a security one – about belonging, critical thinking, identity and resilience, and the literacies our young people need to navigate digital worlds that are more complex than anything we were trained for.

Which brings me to the distinction I keep returning to: the difference between foundational literacy and futures literacy. I used the examples below to illustrate this…

One of the conundrums I often hear being discussed is whether the use of AI might actually help our students (and us) become better writers. It’s a tempting thought, and pretty much every teacher I know admits to now using AI to help them in the work they do. Further, the recent PISA data reports already 46% of students in OECD countries use AI chatbots weekly or more to help them learn. So it was of interest to read what Serena Jampel shared in her recent article in the Harvard Magazine. Serena is a researcher at Smithsonian Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage who writes for a living. In her article titled “I Used to Think AI Could Make Me a Better Writer“, she concludes:

‘AI encourages students with endless platitudes, luring the would-be-writer with an illusion of assistance to degrade the inimitable self that makes their writing interesting. AI trains us, more than anything, to parrot the AI voice. I’d rather we teach students how to find their own.’

It’s this illusion of assistance, and the way in which AI tools seduce us into believing what they offer that is especially concerning – and a very important reason why we must be expanding our view of literacy to include these most essential capabilities. I used the following examples in my talk to illustrate this, asking “what would a literate student do?” in the following scenarios:

A student asks AI a question. It gives a beautifully written, confident answer with references.
What would you want a literate learner to do next?

A student sees a post that makes them angry. It contains statistics, an impressive image and a strong emotional claim.
What would you want a literate learner to do next?

A student watches several videos about a controversial topic. Their feed begins serving increasingly extreme versions of the same viewpoint.
What would you want a literate learner to notice or do?

A friend sends a message saying, “Everyone knows this is true. Just look at what people are saying online.”
What would you want a literate learner to ask?

You might find these questions useful to initiate conversation in your staffroom or even among your students. Invariably the responses will include answers that begin with verbs such as check, question, verify, interpret, compare, investigate etc. – suggesting an expansion of the way we think about literacy. My table below is an attempt to illustrate this:

Foundational Literacy	Futures Literacy
Find information	Evaluate information
Read words	Interpret meaning
Use language	Exercise judgement
Learn knowledge	Create knowledge
Communicate	Collaborate
Understand stories	Understand systems

In my talk I referred to the recent PISA report on Future-ready students which states in its introduction:

Overall reading scores saw particularly steep declines in the past three years, including in skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources and thinking critically about what we read. The instances of “hasty reading” – in which students read quickly but inaccurately – nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.

Here’s our challenge. Not only do we see an emerging problem with young people who are being taught simply to decode text but not spend time developing the future-ready capabilities listed above, but the ways in which they are then engaging with text are leading to this ‘hasty reading’. I certainly see and hear this in many contexts., where the conversations consist mostly of the headlines that have been read and missing the deeper engagement with what the piece of writing may actually be exploring. In the conclusion of the same report it says…

Taken together, these findings underscore the need for education systems to adopt a holistic approach to learning, one that values both proficiency and engagement, and ensures that all students have the support, opportunities and resources needed to reach their full potential in school and beyond.

• recognise a deepfake?
• detect an AI-generated scam?
• identify emotional manipulation?
• know when they’re being recommended increasingly extreme content?
• distinguish expertise from popularity?
• recognise synthetic media?
• know when an “friend” is grooming them online?

These aren’t add-ons to the curriculum. They’re what literacy now requires.

I like to think about this using three horizons as a way of ensuring we are maintaining a balance in our approach here. Horizon one is foundations – what must endure, whatever else changes. Horizon two is signals – what’s shifting right now, often faster than our systems can respond. Horizon three is futures – the capabilities that will actually matter once the dust settles.

Many of our current curriculum conversations are stuck arguing about horizon one, as if strengthening the basics and preparing for what’s coming were competing projects. They’re not. They’re the same project.

Which brings me to my main point – none of this is an argument for teaching less reading and writing. It’s the opposite. It’s an argument for understanding why reading and writing matter more than they ever have. Because AI can generate fluent language at will. Because algorithms shape attention by design. Because misinformation moves at the speed of a share button. Because loneliness, tragically, can be weaponised against the very young people we’re meant to be protecting.

Foundational literacy hasn’t become less important. It’s become the floor, not the ceiling. Its purpose has expanded – from decoding words to reading the world; from acquiring knowledge to creating it; from communicating an idea to collaborating wisely with the tools now doing some of that communicating alongside us.

Literacy has always been about making meaning. The question our tamariki now face – and the one we owe them an answer to – is whose meaning they’re making, and whether they have the judgement to tell the difference.

References

• Keeping Our Kids Safe Online – podcast episdoe with Ray Finch
• Future-ready Capabilities – a NZ framework developed by participants at the EdRising convening
• PISA 2025 report
• I used to think AI could make me a better writer – Serena Jampel in the Harvard Magazine
• New Zealand’s Security Threat Environment – an assessment by the NZ security intelligence service

Images from StorySet.com