Chapter 7
Artistic and Creative Literacy
Objectives:
At the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
● Characterize artistic literacy;
● Discuss the value of Arts to education and practical life;
● Identify approaches to developing/designing curriculum that cultivates
the arts and creativity among learners;
● Formulate a personal definition of creativity; and
● Design creative and innovative classroom activities for specific topic
and grade level of students
Explore
Artistic literacy is defined in the National Coalition for Core Arts
Standards: A Conceptual Framework for Arts Learning (2014) as the
knowledge and understanding required to participate authentically in the arts.
While individuals can learn about dance, media, music, theatre and visual
arts through reading, print texts, artistic literacy requires that they engage in
artistic creation processes directly through the use of materials (e.g.,charcoal
or paint or clay, musical instruments or scores) and in specific spaces (e.g.,
concert halls, stages, dance rehearsal spaces, arts studios, and computer
labs.)
Researchers have recognized that there are significant benefits of
arts learning and engagement in schooling (Eisner, 2002; MENC, 1996;
Perso, Nutton, Fraser, Silburn, & Tait, 2011). The arts have been shown to
create environments and conditions that result in improved academic, social,
and behavioral outcomes for students, from early childhood through the early
and later years of schooling. However, due to the range of art forms and the
diversity and complexity of programs and research that have been
implemented, it is difficult to generalize findings concerning the strength of
the relationship between the arts and learning the causal mechanisms
underpinning these associations.
The flexibility of the forms comprising the arts positions students
to embody a range of literate practices to:
● use their minds in verbal and nonverbal ways;
● communicate complex ideas in a variety of forms;
● understand words, sound, or images;
● imagine new possibilities; and
● persevere to reach goals and make them happen.
Engaging in quality arts education experiences provides students
with an outlet for powerful creative expression, communication, aesthetically
rich understanding, and connection to the world around them. Being able to
critically read, write, and speak about art should not be the sole constituting
factors for what counts as literacy in the Arts (Shenfield, 2015).
Considerably, more dialogue, discussion, and research are necessary to
form a deeper picture of the Arts and creativity more broadly. The cultivation
of imagination and creativity and the formation of deeper theory surrounding
multimodality and multiliteracies in the Arts are paramount.
Elliot Eisner posited valuable lessons or benefits that education
can learn from arts and he summarized these into eight as follows:
1. Form and content cannot be separated. How something is said or done
shapes the content of experience. In education, how something is
taught, how curricula are organized , and how schools are designed
impact upon what students will learn. These “side effects” may be the
real main effects of practice.
2. Everything interacts; there is no content without form and no form
without content. When the content of a form is changed, so too, is
the form altered. Form and content are like two sides of a coin.
3. Nuance matters. To the extent to which teaching is an art, attention to
nuance is critical. It can also be said that the aesthetic lives in the
details that the maker can shape in the course of creation. How a
word is spoken, how a gesture is made, how a line is written, and how
a melody is played, all affect the character of the whole. All depend
upon the modulation of the nuances that constitute the act.
4. Surprise is not to be seen as an intruder in the process of inquiry, but
as a part of the rewards one reaps when working artistically. No
surprise, no discovery, no progress. Educators should not resist
surprise, but create the conditions to make it happen. It is one of the
most powerful sources of intrinsic satisfaction.
5. Slowing down perception is the most promising way to see what is
actually there. It is true that we have certain words to designate high
levels of intelligence. We describe somebody as being swift, or bright,
or sharp, or fast on the pickup. Speed in its swift state is a descriptor
for those we call smart. Yet one of the qualities we ought to be
promoting in our schools is a slowing down perception: the ability to
take one’s time, to smell the flowers, to really perceive in the
Deweyan sense, and not merely to recognize what one looks at.
6. The limits of language are not the limits of cognition. We know more
than we can tell. In common terms, literacy refers essentially to the
ability to read and to write. But literacy can be re-conceptualized as
the creation and use of a form of representation that will enable one to
create meaning-- meaning that will not take the impression of
language in its conventional form. In addition, literacy is associated
with high level forms of cognition. We tend to think that in order to
know, one has to be able to say. However, as Polanyi (1969) reminds
us, we know more than we can tell.
7. Somatic experience is one of the most important indicators that
someone has gotten it right. Related to the multiple ways in which we
represent the world through our multiple forms of literacy is the way in
which we come to know the world through the entailments of our
body. Sometimes one knows a process or an event through one’s
skin.
8. Open-ended tasks permit the exercise of imagination, and an exercise
of the imagination is one of the most important of human aptitudes. It
is imagination, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
Imagination is the source of new possibilities. In the arts, imagination
is a primary virtue. So, it should be in the teaching of mathematics, in
all of the sciences, in history, and, indeed, in virtually all that humans
create. This achievement would require for its realization a culture of
schooling in which the imaginative aspects of the human condition
were made possible.
Characterizing Artistically Literate Individuals
How would you characterize an artistically literate student? Literature
on art education and art standards in education cited the following as
common traits of artistically literate individuals:
● Use a variety of artistic media, symbols, and metaphors to
communicate their own ideas and respond to the artistic
communications of others;
● Develop creative personal realization in at least one art form in which
they continue active involvement as an adult;
● Cultivate culture, history, and other connections through diverse forms
and genres of artwork;
● Find joy, inspiration, peace, intellectual stimulation, and meaning when
they participate in the arts; and
● Seek artistic experiences and support the arts in their communities.
Issues in Teaching Creativity
In his famous TED talks on creativity and innovation, Sir Ken
Robinson (Do schools kill creativity? 2006; How to escape education death
valley?, 2013) stressed paradigms in the education system that hamper the
development of creative capacity among learners. He emphasized that
schools stigmatize mistakes. This primarily prevents students from trying and
coming up with original ideas. He also reiterated the hierarchy of systems.
Firstly, most useful subjects such as Mathematics and languages for work
are at the top while arts are at the bottom. Secondly, academic ability has
come to dominate our view of intelligence. Curriculum competencies,
classroom experiences, and assessment are geared toward the development
of academic ability. Students are schooled in order to pass entrance exams
in colleges and universities later on. Because of this painful truth, Robinson
challenged educators to:
● Educate the well-being of learners and shift from the conventional
learnings toward academic ability alone;
● Give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, and to physical education;
● Facilitate learning and work toward stimulating curiosity among
learners;
● Awaken and develop powers of creativity among learners; and
● View intelligence as diverse, dynamic, and distinct, contrary to common
belief that it should be academic ability-geared.
Enhance
In “First Literacies: Art, Creativity, Play, Constructive Meaning-Making,”
McArdle and Wright asserted that educators should make deliberate
connections with children’s first literacies of art and play. A recommended
new approach to early childhood pedagogy would emphasize children’s
embodied experience through drawing. This would include a focus on
children’s creation, manipulation, and changing of meaning through engaged
interaction with art materials (Dourish, 2001), through physical, emotional,
and social immersion (Anderson, 2003). The authors proposed four essential
components to developing or designing curriculum that cultivates students’
artistic and creative literacy. Such approaches actively encourage the
creative, constructive thinking involved in meaning making which are
fundamental to the development of the systems of reading, writing, and
numbering.
1. Imagination and pretense, fantasy and metaphor
A creative curriculum will not simply allow, but will actively support,
play and playfulness. The teacher will plan for learning and teaching
opportunities for children to be, at once, who they are and who they
are not, transforming reality, building narratives, and mastering and
manipulating signs and symbols systems.
2. Active menu to meaning making
In a classroom where children can choose to draw, write, paint, or
play in the way that suits their purpose and/or mood, literacy learning
and arts learning will inform and support each other.
3. Intentional, holistic learning
A creative curriculum requires a creative teacher, who understands
the creative processes, and purposefully supports learners in their
experiences. Intentional teaching does not mean drill and rote
learning and, indeed, endless rote learning exercises might indicate
the very opposite of intentional teaching. What makes for intentional
teaching is thoughtfulness and purpose, and this could occur in such
activities as reading a story, adding a prop, drawing children’s
attention to a spider’s web, and playing rhythm and rhyme. Even the
thoughtful and intentional imposing constraints can lead to creativity.
4. Co-player, co-artist
Educators must be reminded of the importance of understanding
children as current citizens, with capacities and capabilities in the here
and now. It is vital for teachers to know and appreciate children and
what they know by being mindful of the present and making time for
conversation, interacting with the children as they draw. Teachers
must try to avoid letting the busy management work of their days take
precedence and distract them from the ‘being.’
Reflect
Wrap Up
● Creativity can be defined as the process of having original ideas that
have value.
● All children have the capacity for innovation and creativity. ●
Schools should work toward educating the whole-being of the child.
Evaluate
Read the questions and instructions carefully. Write your answers
on the space provided.
1. How should arts learning be structured so that students can begin to
think like an artist?
2. What are some best practices in teaching that create an active or
student-centered learning environment?
3. Why are 21st century skills or personal dispositions important goals for
students in arts education?
