EDITORIAL
Creative LITERACIES
W
hen I was a child, I discovered I was a part of a swarm of individuals who drew pictures and told stories of the worlds unfolding within their imagination; I learned how to read this secret society’s creative codes and recode them as my own. I discovered my affiliation with this society while mining deep into the black plastic bags in my father’s closet, filled with Marvel Comics and DC Comics featuring superheroes and tales from the crypt. I introduced myself to other kinds of visual and written codes as I paged through anthologies on my father’s art studio bookshelves by or about artists ranging from Charles Schulz (the creator of Peanuts), to the dark worlds of Charles Addams, to the obscure illustrators of risqué pulp advertisements and girly drawings of repressed 1950s and countercultural 1960s Americana (Rolling, 2013). With my father’s art supplies at my disposal and so much content to draw upon, I routinely made unexpected connections (Figure 1).
Figure 1. A portrait my father painted of me as a child, emphasizing the unexpected connections going on in my thinking—a labyrinth as cavernous as the hidden vaults and subbasements burrowed beneath Snoopy’s humble doghouse.
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ART EDUCATION
Q January 2015
In my father’s home art studio, I first learned to decode the shifting, intersecting patterns of words, images, stories, and the many metaphors for living that emerged from their confluence within our distinctly visual culture. To my young mind, visual forms blended with word forms, story forms, design forms, moving images formatted for cinema, television screens, and eventually computer monitors to inform my understanding of the life I was living in context with the lives others had lived and were living along with me. Through learning to decode, I thereby learned to encode and communicate to others what was on my mind. As it has always been, the arts and design practices are systems of information, the intentional juxtaposition of sensory, phenomenal, and cultural data about the human experience in order to create meaning. According to Alex Wright (2007), it is the organization of data that recasts it as useful information—cargoes of meaning that hold us utterly enthralled, “melded into manufactured forms, cultural symbolism, and liberatory frameworks” (Rolling, 2008, p. 10). In his article, “Art Education for New Times,” Paul Duncum (1997) defines and describes the greater ramifications of the Information Age—that period over the last quarter of the 20th century that saw the rapid globalization of information and communication technologies and the proliferation of the ability to digitize and manipulate information and its traffic. In the wake of the Information Age, the fostering of what would best be described as creative literacies in
teaching and learning has emerged both as a fundamental investment for developing creative leadership capacity in 21st-century urban society and an apt theme for my inaugural issue as the new Editor of Art Education. The development of fluency in “multiliteracies” (The New London Group, 1996) supplants traditional literacy’s emphasis on learning to read and write with a more holistically empowering focus upon learning to interpret and serve as a catalyst for communication across multiple communicative modes and social contexts (Duncum, 2004). A multiliterate learner is better equipped for the generation of situationally relevant cultural forms, information, and social transformations. Ultimately, the traffic of creative literacies goes far beyond teaching learners to decode and encode; creative literacy is the fluency to recode content from one symbol system or network of meanings to another, through a practice akin to “conceptual collage” (Marshall, 2008). Recoding makes fundamental sense of meanings not initially our own as we navigate the unending tempest of wind-blown narratives circulating the globe like turbulent seas, searching out the connections that bind us together, ultimately keeping us safe and afloat. In this issue, Hillary Andrelchik starts us off on the journey ahead with the notion of “Reconsidering Literacy in the Art Classroom,” challenging readers to see the efficacy in integrating literacy practices into art classes. In “Story Bound, Map Around: Stories, Life, and Learning” Ulyssa Martinez and Samantha Nolte-Yupari discuss mixedmedia projects done with elementary students and their work with preservice elementary education majors in an exploration of how of multimodal creative literacies facilitate the transfer of stories and ideas between one language to another. In “Virtual Legos: Incorporating Minecraft Into the Art Education Curriculum,” Alexandra Overby and Brian L. Jones examine the potential of digital-game-based creative literacies for teaching students to be both critical consumers and producers of virtual visual culture. Amanda Alexander and Tuan Ho further look at game development as a form of digital artmaking and an arena for fostering creative literacies in “Gaming Worlds: Secondary Students Creating an Interactive Video Game.” In her article, “Playground Innovations and Art Teaching,” Ilona Szekely takes a historical look at the origins of the popular Imagination Playground modular sets wherein children are given the freedom to exercise a spatial-kinesthetic creative literacy in the construction of a world conducive to their own free play. Sok Hui Low reveals the tremendous sense of student ownership and self-efficacy yielded in the artmaking of creatively literate students in her article, “‘Is This Okay?’: Developing Student Ownership in Artmaking Through Feedback.”
Finally, in the summer of 2014, artist Kara Walker installed a gigantic sculpture of white sugar in an old factory and provided an iconic, real-time instructional resource for exploring important issues of arts education for years to come. By offering a complex and provocative dialogue among art education professionals about Kara Walker’s work as a nexus of creative literacies, Laura K. Reeder, my editorial team’s new Instructional Resources Coordinator, explores those issues in this month’s IR, including: the over-standardization of education, interplays between creativity and literacy in arts education, as well as persistent racism and inequity in our schools and the worlds that surround them. Identity itself is an interpretation, and those who are not literate enough to create a plot from the chaos are subject to having their destinies written for them. These are tumultuous times. Recent events—from those in Ferguson, Missouri, to those in the Ukraine and in the Middle East—reveal that the stories we each live by remain open for much-needed reinterpretation. The more creative activity we engage in, the more creatively we will forge our ongoing reinterpretations of life story, national narrative, and global community. There is much to improvise in the years ahead. We have the supplies; yet, as educators, we are still learning to use the tools. As the late Robin Williams may well have urged us, let us each contribute a verse. And then, let us teach our students to do just the same. —James Haywood Rolling Jr., Editor REFERENCES Duncum, P. (1997). Art education for new times. Studies in Art Education, 38(2), 69-79. Duncum, P. (2004). Visual culture isn’t just visual: Multiliteracy, multimodality and meaning. Studies in Art Education, 45(3), 252-264. Marshall, J. (2008). Visible thinking: Using contemporary art to teach conceptual skills. Art Education, 61(2), 38-45. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. Rolling, J. H. (2008). Rethinking relevance in art education: Paradigm shifts and policy problematics in the wake of the Information age. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 9(1). Retrieved from www.ijea.org/v9i1 Rolling, J. H., Jr. (2013). Swarm intelligence: What nature teaches us about shaping creative leadership. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, A. (2007). Glut: Mastering information through the ages. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press.
James Haywood Rolling Jr. is Dual Professor and Chair of Art Education in the School of Art/College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the Department of Teaching and Leadership/School of Education, Syracuse University, New York. E-mail:
[email protected]
January 2015 Q ART EDUCATION
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