AY 2020-2021

Ed. 110 – Building and Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

Indicative Content
Artistic and Creativity Literacy
Explore
Lesson 1 Characterizing Artistically Literate
Module 7 Individuals
Lesson 2 Issues in Teaching Creativity
Enhance
Reflect
Evaluate

LEARNING OUTCOMES
On completion of this lesson, one should be able to
1. characterize artistic literacy
2. discuss the value of Arts to Education and Practical life;
3. identify approaches to developing/designing curriculum that cultivates the
arts and creativity among learners:
4. formulate a personal definition of creativity; and
5. 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 thru reading print texts, artistic literacy requires thay
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).
Researches 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 behavioural 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 causal mechanisms underpinnings 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 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

1|Page
 AY 2020-2021
Ed. 110 – Building and Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

picture of the Arts and creativity more broadly. The cultivation of imagination and creativity
and the formation of deeper theory surrounding multimodality and multi-literacies 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 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 on traits of artistically literate
individuals:
 Use a variety of artistic media, symbols, and metaphors to communicate of others,
their own ideas and respond to the artistic communication of others;
 develop creative personal realization in at least one art form in which they continue
active involvement as an adult.

2|Page
 AY 2020-2021
Ed. 110 – Building and Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

 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’s 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 fop 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 leanings 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 easily 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 bė,
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 leárning 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 dill and rote learning and, indeed, endless rote learning exercises might indicate the
very opposite of intentional teaching. What makes for intentional teaching is thoughtfulness

3|Page
 AY 2020-2021
Ed. 110 – Building and Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

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 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 fry 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 capacity for innovation and creativity
 Schools should work toward educating the whole-being of the child.

Questions to Ponder

On your own, read the questions and instructions carefully. Write your answers
on the space provided.

1. What is your personal definition of creativity?

2. Recall some of the creative classroom activities you had in school. What makes these
creative?
3. Is creativity the same with innovativeness? Read various definitions on these two
concepts and organize your notes using a Venn diagram.
4. Refer to the characteristics of artistically iterate students. Examine yourself and tell
whether you possess any of the characteristics mentioned
5. Explain this quote from Picasso: All children are born an artists. The problem is to remain
as an artist as we grow up.

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?
4. Guided by the characteristics mentioned, can you name artists from your family, school,
and community? Make a profile of these artists.
5. Choose a grade level and topic. Design instructional plan showing creative classroom
activities that will engage learners.

4|Page
 AY 2020-2021
Ed. 110 – Building and Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

5|Page