Art is Literacy for Everyone

Watching my drama students rehearse an original adaptation of Peter Pan with special needs students always fills me with feelings of pride, happiness, and inspiration. They learn so much from each other as acting encourages risks and challenges many of these kids in ways they would never experience elsewhere. Most high school students wouldn’t dare perform on a stage before an audience. They wouldn’t have the courage to allow their imagination to experiment with all of the physical, vocal, and emotional possibilities. They wouldn’t pay careful attention to subtext that provokes action, reaction, and interaction. They wouldn’t appreciate the discipline necessary to successfully understand and use all of the elements involved in the art of acting. These kids do, and they never fail to move those who watch a rehearsal.

Drama students write, direct, design, construct, and act in a partnership with students who have a variety of handicaps and together they explore the intricacies of literacy that is written, read, and spoken. They create set pieces, props, and costumes, always aware of possible limitations, but never obstructed by them. Every student involved with this project, now in its 6^th year, experiences the magic of theater in all of its glory. For some, this is their first such production. For others, it is their third or fourth. At first, the newcomers are timid, but by the end of the first week, all look forward to the rehearsals.

The drama class is a diversified group in and of itself. There are the gifted, learning disabled, gay, lesbian, bisexual, Mormon, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, emotionally disturbed, cheerleader, band member,  science nerd, artist, chess club member, gamer, athlete, FFA/4H  participant, and many other represented diversities. Everyone works together for the same end. When these students work with the autistic, intellectually impaired, Downs Syndrome, emotionally and socially impaired, special needs students, learning occurs at so many amazing levels. The meaningful connections to learning at a number of levels of inquiry, innovation, creativity, and critical thought could not happen over and over again without the universal literacy of art.

Making snow for the 2010 production of "A Christmas Carol"

Creating the snow making device for the same production

Finding Possibilities in Standards

I find it interesting that there is not a lot of research exploring the connection of oral to written language (Shanahan, 2006). By secondary school it becomes perfectly clear in my experiences and observations as an English teacher, that a major problem found in today’s student writing is the re-creation of the spoken word to the written page. Students write like they speak. Double negatives, extraneous language, and slang infiltrate the short response to the multi-page essay. However, written language allows revision based in vocabulary choice, structure, and sequential organization (Shanahan, 2006).

So, why is what is written among adolescence so often a mimicking of oral communication? School teaches literacy as that which is read, written and spoken. Standards mandate the drilling and assessment of specific word recognition, reading fluency, and lexile driven comprehension skills that compose “a third area of investigation” of reading and writing relationships (Shanahan, 2006, pp. 175 – 176). I have taught to this research in preparation for the Standards Based Assessment of New Mexico that measures some level of adequacy among 11^th graders.

I have taught to the “research” and taught to the “test” as writing was used as an assessment for reading comprehension. I find it somewhat problematic that the short cycle assessment given three times during the school year both separates the two so that a connection to validity and reliability is disconnected in the process. I do perceive one commonality of both assessments. As Scott (2008) posited “the potentially divergent pedagogies of teachers and the divergent interests and potential creative and intellectual endeavors of students are rationalized through the assessment” (p. 154).  I am left to reflect on the loss of “experiences, ideas and genres” (p. 158) that went unexplored in my classroom.

Through his research, Sumara (2002) argues that reading is most effective when it informs thought. He reflects that “ engagement with literary fiction is not merely a practice where one identifies with characters, learns moral lessons, and broadens perceptions” (p. 23) by experimenting with a more indepth reading based in the relationship of personal experience to cultural, historical events. Using the Commonplace Book concept, the goal of literary engagement “is to use features of the novel to create conditions where reader responses can become developed, collected, and interpreted” (p. 29). Relationships to what is read are created instead of based in lexile driven comprehension. However, I do perceive that through these relationships, comprehension reaches heights of critical thinking that will encourage the attainment of heightened skills.

When did individuality, diversity, and creativity cease to exist in the art of teaching? What is so wrong with personally relating  standards to “visions of a rich curriculum that will enable young people to examineways in which a diverse country has struggled to live up to its own ideals of justice, freedom, and equality” (Sleeter, 2005, p. 11)?

 I recently experienced the “turning off” of the wiki spaces site that allowed students to explore online writing possibilities and communicate in ways that superseded the boundaries of the classroom. Witte’s “Talkback Project “(2007) reached a similar roadblock. It is somewhat refreshing to find the “Talkback Project” alive and active as a teacher’s site allowing today’s educators to experience the ability to vent through a blog. Perhaps 21^st century instructional strategies can be explored and shared as a process that diminishes the hidden agenda-driven boundaries that separate teaching from learning.

Instead of succumbing to roadblocksand agendas, there is so much that can come together through discussion, researching, experiencing, and expressing. Stories are allowed to connect, contradict, enhance, ignite, suppress, and deny. The possibilities become unlimited when learning is allowed the excitement of exploration. There is so much depth to so many stories that are taught to meet standardized requirements. Explain to Wiesel why the reading of Night should become a victim of mandated standards. Since when is Orwell’s Animal Farm a neatly ordered fable illustrating analogy, symbolism, and point of view? The enjoyment, frustration, and confusion provoked by Lowry’s The Giver can too easily be confined to discussions and short responses based in plot, characterization, and author intent. “When everyone in a classroom, including the teachers, shares personal experiences, the uniqueness of each voice is heard” (hooks, 2010, p. 57). Each class has its own uniqueness, its own energy, and its own funds of knowledge. No class should be lost in an oppressive pedagogy too easily accepted by simply meeting the requirements of standards and benchmarks.

A Voice for Everyone

"There are many languages besides those that are written or spoken. By learning a new language, a person acquires a new way of knowing reality and passing that knowledge on to others. Each language is absolutely irreplaceable. All languages complement each other in achieving the widest, most complete knowledge of what is real" (Boal. 1985, p. 121).

Diaries open the inner self to the same inner self. They speak, yet are silent with words only heard by the author. Entries are reflections safe from feedback. Vulnerability only occurs when trespassers violate the privacy and expose without permission. When this happens, it is an abuse, and like a rape the result is shame, fear, guilt and accusation. Diaries are life stories locked and hidden within unshared secrets.

Words that are written to fit an educational objective are locked in a predetermined product that cannot escape an assessment of one. The product is static with an identity shaped by standards of sameness,

Blogs are diaries freed of locks allowing the inner self an escape, still founded in “self-reflection, releasing pent-up feelings, and witnessing personal growth” (S. Stern, 2008, p. 101). Identity is defined by the author and the label ‘adolescence’ “negotiate[s] the boundaries of public and private spheres” (S. Stern. p. 97). Self-expression becomes the backbone of social networking and the possibilities to empower are embedded in personal site symbolism that can become a part of “the public culture” (Stern. p.97).

Are the risks worth the rewards? Are blogs, as Stern suggests, “therapeutic” (p. 102)? A former student of mine has given me permission to use her blog as an example of the powerful, insightful, and symbolic possibilities.

Part Two
noel93.wordpress.com

You now know the story. My current students, many who are Anna's friends, know her story,and can follow her story. They are reading. They are writing. They are discussing, debating, grappling. I have to wonder how powerful this would be if allowed into the curriculum.

“Self-reflection is, perhaps, the most commonly cited reward of maintaining a personal site among youth authors” (S. Stern. P. 102). Stern speaks of a self-induced obligation blog authors have that drives reflective updates, discussion to feedback, and creative additions. The Internet author works with multiple literacies that redefine Aristotle’s peripatetic. She is a storyteller, travelling through cyber-space from computer to computer. Though the creation is for the self, it is meant to be read by a vast audience that further empowers self-expression through the reflection of self. The authors are their own directors as well as their own primary audience (p. 105).

Erving Goffman (1959) saw “all self-presentation as performative” (p. 106). The blog author becomes a performer, controlling how the self is represented and directing how words impress. The author creates a role, performs through writing, and presents a self-directed, personally designed, product (pp. 106-107). The “everyday self,” is revealed as the “authentic self,” and the performer searches for “validation” that “relieves [his] fear about being different or abnormal” (p.108).

The blog becomes transformative, as the author is in control of her identity, no longer dependent on false masks of protection. Online authors reveal a self-perception of truth and identity that can be revised as deemed necessary. Unlike a diary, a blog is alive. Blogs are learning experiences for the author as introspection is genuine, expressed through a “youth cultural production” that reveal perceptions of an authentic self.



A teacher's perception of a student's potential can also transform as a new sophistication of reality embraces words, and literacy becomes owned by the individual, not defined by an institution. Critique, too, is allowed a new found freedom, and can be answered, as desired, by the youth author.

A blog is, a new cultural experience and produces a discourse of literacy that, because it is important to youth, needs to be acknowledged by educators.