I suggest that vocabulary adapted to a public pluralism education, could be thought of as communicative literacies; with literacy understood in its significance of orientation towards the ‘outward’, based in communicative meaning making. If the purpose with public education is understood as pluralism education, we cannot use a vocabulary of (lonely) individuals looking for suitable knowledge and competences on a learning market or merely looking ‘inward’ towards single subject matters. Communicative literacy, associated with Dewey’s concepts of transaction and continuity, emphasizes a reflective, participative and critical attention.  Literacy, in its communicative sense, recognizing the continuity between students’ different literacies and their active ‘transactional’ involvement with their environment, makes it possible to understand public education as developing an informed, critical citizenry (c.f. Damico & Rosaen, 2009). The didactic question will be:  What sort of literacy do I invite my students to be members of? Is it possible for the students to ‘carry over’ some of their earlier experiences from other literacies into this literacy? As Alan Luke (2004, p. 1429) suggests, what if the vision of teaching is that teaching is a cosmopolitan work and profession, in a critical and contingent relation to cultural and economic globalization? If we, in line with Luke, think of teachers and students as world citizens, world thinkers and world critics – will communicative literacies, across subjects and time/space divisions, contribute to a notion of democratic public education, with emphasis on its purpose?