ARTISTIC AND
CREATIVE LITERACY
GROUP 7
Artistic Literacy
National Coalition for Core Arts Standards: A
Conceptual Framework for Arts Learning (2014)
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 text,
artistic literacy requires that they engage in artistic
creation processes directly through the use of
materials and in specific spaces.
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 condition 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 association.
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.
Being able to critically read, write, and speak
about arts should not be the sole constituting
factors for what counts as literacy in the Arts
(Shienfield, 2015).
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 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 know more
than we can tell.
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 a certain
words to designate high level of intelligence. We describe
somebody as being swift, or bright, or sharp, or fast in 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 written. 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.
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 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
Use a variety of artistic media, symbols, and
metaphors to communicate 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;
Characterizing Artistically Literate Individuals
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 school 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
emphasize that schools stigmatize mistakes. This primarily
prevents students from trying and coming up with original
ideas.
Issues in Teaching Creativity
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
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 works forward 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.
The authors proposed for 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 reading, writing, and numbering.
1.Imagination and pretense, fantasy 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.
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 ‘being.’
THANK YOU FOR
LISTENING!!!
