Learning With Text in the Arts

• In Event: Adolescents Learning With Text in the Academic Disciplines

Abstract

Recently, students in first author, Kathi Moxley’s secondary content literacy course, were asked to nudge their conceptual frameworks about literacy. Students were asked to create discipline-specific photo essays for which they selected visual representations to signify their new understandings of the texts and literacies essential to learning in their subject areas. Particularly interesting were the photo essays from the arts disciplines where the use of non-print texts prevails over traditional print texts as sources of subject matter
One music group created a video taking us on a personally guided tour of the music school, pointing out the texts and literacies-in-action along the way. On this journey we witnessed small clusters of students gathered in the common areas playing, collaborating, and discussing their art. Our tour guide stopped occasionally to interview other music students about important texts they were using and the literacies they were enacting to make meaning from text, for example reading and interpreting music language, singing words printed in the music (English or foreign), performing memorized music, recognizing and understanding music symbols and terms, and listening to recordings to develop musical literacy.
Visual arts students defined their texts and literacies by the language or vocabulary they use to understand, demonstrate, or critique their artifacts. Their photo essays described text as the elements of design, such as line, space, color, shape, texture, form, and value and the principles or composition of an artifact, like unity, contrast, variety, pattern, emphasis, movement, rhythm, and balance used to create and critique their own work and the work of others. Print-based text was exemplified in photos as textbooks, labels on jars of paint, washes, solvents, chemicals used to develop film, charts like the color-wheel, and the safety rules posted on the walls of the art studio. Photos of artifacts like paintings, graphic design works, photographs, sculpture pieces, and an architectural design were included as important exemplars of non-print texts from which artists naturally draw meaning. Artists’ tools also represent texts; pencils, brushes, markers, tablets, a canvas, an easel, palette, and even an art studio were selected by students.
These students represent a microcosm for the field of adolescent literacy as Kathi helped them to reconceptualize what literacy means for their respective disciplines. This paper begins with a brief overview of the literature on adolescent and content literacy in relation to teaching and learning in music and visual arts. The voices of music and visual arts discipline experts, who are also the co-authors, reflect on how literacy is defined and what counts as text in their fields. We examine the National Standards for the Arts as a point of reference for exploring the discipline specific strategies that guide adolescents in their ability to learn from text in music and art. Finally, practical instructional strategies that music and visual arts teachers can use to increase adolescents’ literacy learning are discussed.

Author

• Kathleen Moxley, Central Michigan University