Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

Polytechnic University of the Philippines

Sta. Mesa Manila

College of Education
Department of Business Teacher Education

A Self-Learning Outcome-Based Education (OBE)

Instructional Materials in EDUC 30173
Building and Enhancing Literacy Across the Curriculum
with Emphasis on the 21st Century Skills

Lesson 7
ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE LITERACY

Contributors:

DR. CARMENCITA CASTOLO

EDUC 30173: Building and Enhancing Literacy Across the Curriculum with Emphasis on the 21 st Century Skills Page
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Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

MS. RUTH PERIDA

LESSON 7:
ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE LITERACY

Learning Outcomes

After completion of this lesson, you will be able to competently do these:

Upon completion of this module, the student will 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.

Course Materials

Artistic literacy is defined in the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards: A
Conceptual Framework for Arts Learning (n.d.) as the knowledge and understanding required to
participateauthentically 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 spaces (e.g., concert halls, stages, dance rehearsal
spaces, art studios, and computer labs).

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Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

Researchers have recognized that there are significant benefits of arts learning and
engagement in schooling (Eisner, 2002;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 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, 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, cited in
Alata&Ignacio, 2019). 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 multi-literacies in
the Arts are paramount.

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Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

Art Benefits

Eisner (2002) 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

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Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

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

Literature on art education and art standards in education cited the following as common
traits of artistically literate individuals:

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Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

 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 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.

Cultivating Artistic and Creative Literacy

Below are four essential components to developing or designing curriculum that cultivates
students’ artistic and creative literacy. Such approaches actively encourage the creative,

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Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

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 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 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 the ‘being.’

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Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

Readings:

National Coalition for Core Arts Standards.(n.d.).National core standards: A conceptual

framework for arts learning. Retrieved from
https://www.nationalartsstandards.org/sites/default/files/Conceptual%20Framework%2007-21-
16_2.pdf

TED Talks.(2006). Do schools kill creativity?| Sir Ken Robinson [Video]. YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&list=PL70DEC2B0568B5469

TED Talks Education.(2013). How to escape education's death valley| Sir Ken Robinson
[Video].YouTube.
https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley

Activities / Assessment Tasks

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Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

Activity 1

Research on Creativity and Innovativeness and compare and contrast them using a Venn
diagram.

Assignment

Essay Writing:

Arts and Mathematics should be given equal weight in the curriculum. Why? Why not?

Answer must be brief but substantive.

Assessment

Choose a specific grade level and design an engaging lesson which consists of
creative classroom activities.

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Lesson 7: Artistic and Creative Literacy

References

Books and Online Sources:

Alata, E. &Ignacio, E. (2019).Building and enhancing new literacies across the curriculum.
Quezon City: Rex Book Store, Inc.

Eisner, E. W. (2002). What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?
The Encyclopedia of Informal Education. Retrieved from https://infed.org/mobi/what-
can-education-learn-from-the-arts-about-the-practice-of-education/

National Coalition for Core Arts Standards.(n.d.).National core standards: A conceptual

framework for arts learning. Retrieved from
https://www.nationalartsstandards.org/sites/default/files/Conceptual%20Framework
%2007-21-16_2.pdf

Perso, T., Nutton, G., Fraser, J., Silburn, S. R., & Trait, A. (2011). ’The Arts’ in education: A

review of arts in schools and arts-based teaching models that improve school
engagement, academic, social and cultural learning. Darwin: Menzies School of Health
Research.

TED Talks.(2006). Do schools kill creativity?| Sir Ken Robinson [Video]. YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&list=PL70DEC2B0568B5469

TED Talks Education.(2013). How to escape education's death valley| Sir Ken Robinson
[Video].YouTube.
https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley

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