Artistic and Creative Literacy

Concept Digest
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).
Researches have recognized that there are significant
benefits of arts learning and engagement in schooling (Eisner,
2002; MENC, 1996; Perso, Nutton, Fraser, Silourn, & 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).

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 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.
Elliot Eisner posited valuable lessons or benefits that
education can learn 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 fives 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.

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 6. The limits of language are not the limits of cognition.
We know more than we can tell. ln 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 word 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 ifs 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;

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 • 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 academy ability alone;
 give equal weight to 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.

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

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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 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 teaming 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 in
the here and now.an It is vital for teachers to know and
appreciate children and what they know by being mindful of the

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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 fake precedence and distract
them from the ‘being.’