COMMUNICATION, LITERACY AND CITIZENSHIP: A CONCEPTUAL ORIENTATION IN A PORTUGUESE CHILDREN’S TELEVISION THEMATIC CHANNEL, K SIC

This paper highlights the consequential nature of communication, literacy and citizenship and the meta-pattern that connects everything together – the ecology of the human spirit. It argues that, just like human communication, literacy is consequential in nature for humankind. Through each of our different worlds of experience and processes of communication, we manifest both of these human conditions and co-construct everyday practices that engender a plurality of effects. Literacy is a concept common to all humankind. Thus, it forms an indivisible whole with communication. This viewpoint is at odds with that which confines literacy to being understood as the acquisition of certain competences. It is arguable that, just like communication, the human condition of literacy needs to be both encouraged and developed.
We suggest here that the idea of borders in literacy should be questioned. The work of Gregory Bateson on the ecology of the human spirit – an immanent characteristic of the human species that is based on the physiological structure of the living being and is in permanent interaction and reconnection with both the biosphere and our ways of seeing the world – supports the viewpoint put forward here. From the communication mediatised by a children’s television channel, from SIC K and from the results of studies carried out into children’s use of television we draw the examples that shall illustrate the theoretical approach taken here. They also underpin two premises of an ongoing project. Firstly, television is part of the solution in that it encourages and develops communication-literacy-citizenship-education-connectivity. Secondly, human rights form a shared platform from which to orient the use of Technologies and define connection strategies for the active participation of the children.