Chapter 7 PDF

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 experi...

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 a physical, emotional, and social immersion (Anderson, 2003). The authors of Building and Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum 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 symbol 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 teaching 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 or intentional teaching is thoughtfulness and purpose, and this could occur in such activities as reading a story, adding a prop, drawing a children’s attention to a spider’s web, and playing with rhythm and rhyme. Even the thoughtful and intentional imposing of 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 ‘being’. 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, theater, 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 grades (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 relationships between the arts and learning and the casual 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, sounds, or images; imagine new possibilities; and persevere to reach goals and make them happen Engaging in quality arts of 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, discussions, 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 have 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 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 of 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 impress 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 literature 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’s 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