CHAPTER7

ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE

LITERACY
 OBJECTIVES
At the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
▪️characterize artistic literacy:
▪️discuss the value of Arts to education and practical life:
▪️identify approaches to developing/designing curriculum
that cultivates the arts and creativity among leamers:
▪️formulate a personal definition of creativity; and
▪️design creative and innovative classroom activities for
specific topic and grade level of students..
 
 E:
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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 spaces (e.g., concert halls, stages, dance rehearsal
spaces, arts studios, and computer labs).
 

Researches have recognized that there are significant benefits of

arts leaming 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 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). 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 Elsner 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 o 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
leam. 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
marker 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 described
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 recognize to
recognize what one looks at.
6. The limits of language are not the limits of cognition. We
no more that we can tell. In common terms are, 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 now, one has to be able to say. However, as Polanyi
(1969) remind us, we know more that we can tell.
7. Somatic experience is one of the most
important indicators that someone has gotten
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 ones skin.
 
8. Open-ended tasks permit the exercise of imagination, and
an exercise of the imagination, not necessity, that is 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 teaching of mathematics, in all of the
sciences, in history and indeed, in virtually all that humans
create. This achievement world require for its realization a
culture of schooling in which the imaginative aspects of the
human condition were made possible.
Characterizing Artistically Literature 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;
• 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 innovations, Sir Ken Robinson (Do
schools skills activity? 2006; How to escape education’s death valley? 2003)
stressed paradigms in the education system that hamper the development of
creative capacity among learners. He emphasized that school stigmatized
mistakes. This primarily prevents students from trying and coming up with original
idea. 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 the 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, Construvtive Meaning-
Making.” McArdle and Wright asserted that educators should make
deleberate connections with children’s first literacies of art and play. A
recommended new approach to early childhood pedadogy would emphasize
children’s embodied experience thorugh 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
encourag 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 leaning 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
throughtfulness 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 ryhme.
Even the throughtful 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’.
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.
APPLY:
Question to ponder

Read the questions and instructions carefully. write your

answers in the space provided.
1. What is your personal definition of creativity?
2. Recall some of the creative classroom activities you had in
school. what mode them creative?
3. Explain this quote from Picasso: ALL CHILDREN ARE BORN
ARTIST. this problem is to remain as an artist as we grow
up.
ASSESS:

The assessment should be given after the reporting.

15 item test .
 Prepared by:
Francin Joy Moleta
Kristine Joy Pitallos
Emely Santome
Katrina Sapalaran
Renel Sarad
Juvy Saturno
BSED MATHEMATICS 3-D

_THANK YOU & GODBLESS_