Toward a Framework for Arts-Based Pedagogy: Inquiry, Literacy, and a Critical Aesthetic Practice

• In Event: Advances in Arts Education Research

Abstract

This session addresses a need for empirical research with youth on the intersections among the arts, aesthetics, and critical literacy from sociocultural perspectives. Through participatory inquiry with teachers and youth, I explore how arts-based literacy is taken up and understood in a diverse, urban, arts-based high school. The session explores the cultivation of a critical aesthetic through pedagogy comprising of three dimensions: art as story; art as a theoretical instrument; and art as collective action. The findings support an argument for the role of aesthetics in an intellectually rigorous critical literacy education and have implications for pedagogy, policy, and research related to the intersections between the arts and adolescent literacy in 21st century learning.

Author

• Jessica Whitelaw, University of Pennsylvania