The skills we need to build our best selves
Identity Literacy is the ability to...
Critically incorporate the knowledge we encounter into our notions of who we are.
Identify how identities drive our behaviours, choices, and attitudes towards others.
Modify and adapt our identities in order to overcome challenges and reach our goals.
Why does Identity Literacy Matter?
It is a root cause of personal growth or decline
Identity influences our life-choices, self-esteem, levels of educational attainment, well-being, personal development and self-actualisation.
It drives us towards or away from negative behaviours
Identity allows us to build resilience to hardship, bullying, and discrimination. But it can also lead us to prejudice and conflict.
It has major knock-on effects for society-at-large
With increasing levels of conflict, polarisation, and dis-information, positive and resilient identities can make or break the world as we know it.
What is IdentityLiteracy.org set up to achieve?
Promote Identity Literacy Across Society
By partnering with key institutions, we are driving the development and incorporation of identity into policy and practice in the UK and beyond.
Provide Tools to Achieve Identity Literacy
We are engaged in the development and deployment of guides, courses, lesson-plans, policy frameworks and consultancy services.
Build Social and Community Cohesion
By empowering people to build positive ideas about themselves and others, we can confront division through its root-cause: identity.
Identity Literacy for Schools Project
Identity is a critical factor in ensuring a child has adequate safeguards against discrimination and radicalisation while also being able to maximise development and self-actualisation.
With a deeper understanding of how their identities work, children and adults can recognise how diverse identities are created and shaped. This improved “identity literacy” can lead to a more accurate understanding of the deeper roots of one’s own and others’ actions, expressions and behaviours. These abilities allow conflicts to be tackled at their core, allowing for more effective resolution, problem-solving and learning experiences to take place within and beyond the classroom.
The Organization for Identity and Cultural Development (OICD) has adapted over two decades of work in the academic and applied understanding of conflict transformation and social cohesion to the field of education. Read more about this project and join our collaboration by continuing to read this page. Or book a consultancy session with a member of the Identity Literacy Project Team to discuss how to incorporate identity literacy into your institution or workplace.
PROJECT FEATURES
- Understand how to help children develop forms of identity that promote resilience, problem solving and self-actualisation
- See how fixed identities can make children vulnerable to radicalisation, bullying and prejudice and learn ways to prevent these from taking hold
- Learn various ways in which identity literacy can be achieved through classroom activities, educator interaction, school policy making and community engagement
- Connect with other educators with the same goals and share resources
- Developed and delivered by the Organization for Identity and Cultural Development - OICD - an organization with two decades of real world experience adapting cutting-edge academic findings to sectors such as conflict transformation and education
WHAT WE OFFER
- Online and in-person research, training, and consultancy services, to help educators understand - 1) How Identity Works 2) How to “Read” Identities, 3) Applying Knowledge in Practice
- Accessible companion workbooks and lesson plans (in collaborative development)
- Supporting academic articles
- Access to an interactive Slack group to engage with peers, instructors and facilitators
- Bespoke solutions to integrate identity literacy into policy and practice
- Community outreach and parental communication strategy development
I found this perspective so powerful - I have been talking about it to everyone I meet whenever I get the chance. I think about it all the time, the concept is so powerful and effective from early relationships to global conflict.
Jo Grant Secondary School LSA
The piece our school didn't even know we were missing!
Michelle Omoboni - Deputy Head Teacher St James Hatcham CE Primary School
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