What is at stake in literacy education is what we teach people to 'do' with texts - intellectually and culturally, socially and politically. Nations and communities, cultures and institutions have always deliberately shaped these practices. We are not exempt, nor is our teaching simply a neutral or technical or scientific matter. Our work involves helping kids decide which texts are worth reading and writing, how, where, to what ends and purposes. This is an ethical and social responsibility.

The events since 9/11 provide a moment for reconsidering the nature of education in what has become a more interconnected and complex world. It has disrupted the key policy assumption that the purpose of education is the scientific production of job skills. The educational debate that we as an international community of teachers, teacher educators and literacy researchers need to have isn't an acrimonious and ultimately inward looking discussion of scientific evidence and methods. What the last year has done is to put back on the table the imperative of learning to live together ethically and justly. It has also shown us that our students need a literacy education that provides critical engagements with globalised flows of information, image, text and discourse.

Reading and writing have always been tools that take us across borders, build bridges across cultures and communities, and enable us to see and hold up to critical scrutiny the competing and complex texts that vie to influence our beliefs and everyday lives, moral commitments and social investments. Yet schooling which is parochial and inward looking, xenophobic and defensive can have disastrous consequences, for individuals, local communities and for nations - East and West, North and South.

As I was working on this piece, the educational philosopher and activist Ivan Illich passed away. One of Illich's abiding concerns was education for a new ethics of global community. Borrowing from Illich (1973), we could speak of remaking literacy as a tool for conviviality in what have become difficult and risky geopolitical and cultural, economic and social conditions. That is, we could begin to view literacy and multiliteracies as part of every student's tool kit for understanding, analysing, critiquing and engaging with the global "flows" of image, representation and text that they confront daily.

Reading and writing have always had this potential. Umberto Eco (1986) once referred to text as a "machinery for constructing possible worlds". As literature teachers have always known, texts have the capacity of transporting us to others' lives, to other places, to engage with 'Other' cultures. They can do so fictively, deceptively, empathetically, critically - with a host of effects. In this regard, whether in its traditional manuscript or print forms, in digital or online forms, literacy has been a communications technology with the capacity to compress time and space. We can show students how to use literacy to go inward and outward, to engage in comparisons and understandings of other possible worlds, other discourses and ideologies. This simultaneous universe, the "global village" envisioned by Illich and his contemporary Marshall McLuhan (1968/2001) becomes accessible through one's capacity to read and write, whether online or off.

As teachers we engage the powers of text in several ways. That capacity can be used for a kind of existential fleeing from the world, a suspension of the local and the pursuit of texts and discourses 'other' to immediate experience. That is, literature study can be enlisted to disengage readers from a 'reading of the world' of globalised "scapes" and flows of information and capital that have become increasingly important and troubling. While this kind of fantasy literacy might have immediate psychotherapeutic and aesthetic purposes, it also has the potential to take the principal purposes of text as disengagement with the world. Indeed, this was Flaubert's point in Madame Bovary.

In contrast, many of us were trained to use various teaching strategies, from language experience, journal writing and project work, to make literacy education more "relevant" to kids' local experiences. This involved thematic teaching that ranged from studies of local wildlife to discussion of local community activities. Our belief was that this increased levels of interest, motivation and 'student voice'. But the question for this kind of curriculum is whether it intellectually or textually or critically 'goes anywhere'. There is often limited articulation into a broader conversation about how local contexts, experiences and issues fit with the parallel and competing worlds, cultures and economies outside. The risk here is a kind of parochial literacy that, in search of relevance, simply fences kids into the local.

We need something more than this. The very stock and trade of cultural and economic globalisation is the borderless traffic in texts, images, information, data, signs and symbols. The challenge is for a critical literacy education that connects a 'reading of the local' with those of other possible worlds, times and places. A critical literacy education can engage students with the flows of effects between the time/space locality that they live in and other places and spaces that are represented in the multimediated texts around them. And even further, they may have access to and engage with conversation and dialogue that guides takes them into the heart of both what is possible and what is not yet.

An approach to critical literacy curriculum can involve using the internet to audit and analyse the global flows of work, goods and discourse that form the material bases of changes in local communities. It could entail using writing, media production and online communication to participate in virtual communities and transnational dialogue. It can involve reading multiple texts that to compare competing accounts of and stances on events, cultures and places past, present and future. It would entail working intertextually not just across different media and genres, but also across cultural and historical texts and contexts. Our aim would be to shape literacy practices that are about engaging and managing the flows of images, representation and texts that constitute identity, work and ideology, and, finally, those that engage with other cultures and sensibilities. The shift here is one of recognizing the difference between information and knowledge, and perhaps subtler and more important, the difference between knowledge and its ethical applications in social and cultural action.

We need to move forcefully not just beyond a great debate over method - that goes without saying. But as well the binary debate between progressive approaches that stress the 'local' and traditional literary approaches has exhausted itself. These have left educators tired and despairing, cynical about the possibilities of reinventing education at time when vision such as Illich's is needed.

My case is that we need to begin talking about literacy as a means for building cosmopolitan world views and identities: of developing historical and contemporary understandings of how these new economies of flows actually structurally position (and perhaps exclude) one, of the different positions possible in the various fields of flows, and how to actively engage with those fields in normative, self-determining ways. As idealistic and academic as such models might sound, there are prototypes in the extensive literature on the teaching of critical literacy and critical language awareness (e.g., Fairclough, 1992). Such models do not discard basic knowledge of print codes, grammatical metalanguage, enhanced automaticity of skill, or metalinguistic awareness. Instead they set out to ensure that these are lodged within broader curriculum contexts that are not dated, trivial or simply intellectually empty.

I have no doubt that by the time this short piece goes to press, geopolitical events will have caught up with us. I am now teaching and writing in Singapore, having worked in Australian education for the past two decades. In both of these countries, we are having robust debates over the future of education: over new forms of globalised and multilingual citizenship, over new economies and cultures built around signs and symbols, about new forms of work, identity and practice that will be required in these very difficult and risky times, and, most importantly, about learning to live together in our differences rather than in spite of them.

The Chinese word for bridge (qiao) is often used as a metaphor to describe the way in which diasporic Chinese cultures have maintained complex linguistic and social, cultural and economic networks in the face of difficult histories (Ong, 1996). The western term "cosmopolitan" was invented in the 18^th century by Immanual Kant (1795) in his seminal effort to describe what it might mean to be a citizen whose responsibilities were to the world and went beyond the narrow boundaries of nationality and nationalism. Both of these ideas point us in directions for reinventing and rethinking the purposes of education. Perhaps we need a critical approach to literacy education that is about about engaging with texts and discourses as a means of bridging space and time, critically understanding and altering the connections between the local and the global, moving between cultures and communities, and developing transnational understandings and collaborations.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my colleagues Jennifer Vadeboncoeur and Carmen Luke for their editorial advice.

References

Eco, U. (1986) The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Fairclough, N. (Ed) (1992) Critical Language Awareness. London: Longmans.

Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row.

Kant, I. (1795/2001) To perpetual peace. Trans. C.J. Frederich. In A.W. Wood, Ed., Basic Writings of Kant. New York: Modern Library.

McLuhan, M., with Fiore, Q. & Angel, J. (1968/2001) War and Peace in the Global Village. New York: Ginko Press.

Ong, A. (1996). Flexible citizenship among Chinese cosmopolitans. In P. Cheah & B. Robbins, Eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (pp. 134-162).