LITERACIES
Art is literacy of the heart. – Elliot Eisner
Frequently defined simply as the ability to read and write, literacy incorporates abilities to identify, understand, interpret, compare, analyze, evaluate, create, and communicate across a variety of media in addition to text. Cultural, environmental, information, kinesthetic, mathematical, media, musical, scientific, technological, and visual literacies are just a few components of a holistic understanding today’s students need to engage in a global environment.
Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies. These literacies – from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms – are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities, and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:
• develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
National Council of Teachers of English, NCTE Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment.
NCTE, 2008
The arts are a medium and model for learning. All art forms share fundamental concepts with other thinking and symbol systems. Language, math, music, dance, theatre, and visual art all employ systems of symbolic representation. By drawing students’ attention to the underlying structures that they share the study of the systems becomes mutually reinforcing, so students develop a deep and rich understanding of each system and the connections among them.Dan Weissman, Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century.
Columbia College Chicago, 2004
Today information flows in ever-greater abundance and often unmediated. More than ever, the ability to define an information need, access and evaluate resources in multiple formats, use information effectively, and create multimedia content is critical for full participation in society. Likewise, it is paramount to recognize that all information is constructed within a social, political, economic and cultural context and requires interpretation, sensitivity, and awareness. A constellation of 21st century literacy skills – including cultural, information, and media literacy – provides students, teachers, librarians, and all citizens with critical tools needed to flourish today and tomorrow.Multicultural literacy is knowledge of cultures and languages, as well as the ways in which multi-sensory data (text, sound, and graphics) may introduce slant, perspective, and bias into language, subject matter, and visual content. We live in multicultural societies, teach in multicultural settings, and our students often interact with those who come from a different place in terms of gender, rural or urban environments, nationalistically, linguistically, racially, and religiously. Awareness of and sensitivity to culturally determined norms promote understanding. In fact, when students embrace the principle that difference does not equal deficiency, they gain an appreciation for the wealth of diversity that surrounds all of us.
Based on the idea that visual images are a language, visual literacy can be defined as the ability to understand and produce visual messages. This skill is becoming increasingly important with the ever-expanding proliferation of mass media in society. As more and more information and entertainment is acquired through non-print media (such as television, movies, and the internet), the ability to think critically and visually about the images presented becomes a significant skill.
Pacific Bell/UCLA Initiative for 21st Century Literacies, www.newliteracies.gseis.ucla.edu
E-literate Video
A 15-minute video for introducing information literacy to young people Many children today do not remember a time when there wasn't a World Wide Web. As we step into the new century, rapidly changing technologies are dramatically reshaping how we live our lives. This is especially true in the classroom and library where technology has transformed the opportunities for learning. Yet a computer and Internet connection alone are not enough. The resulting explosion in new, often unfiltered information requires information literacy skills – skills to define an information need, access information from multiple sources, evaluate information's accuracy and credibility, and use information effectively. Young people without the computer skills to access information and the critical thinking skills to evaluate it once retrieved will surely be left behind. Recognizing this need, the Pacific Bell/UCLA Initiative for 21st Century Literacies commissioned the production of e-literate, a 10-minute educational video to be used by teachers, librarians, community leaders and parents to introduce 21st century literacies to young people. Produced by noted writer/director Thom Eberhardt (Honey, I Blew Up The Kids; Captain Ron), e-literate addresses facts versus opinions, bias, and information reliability in a humorous yet provocative tone that makes it appropriate for multiple age levelswww.newliteracies.gseis.ucla.edu/video/index.html
Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein studied reports by eminent thinkers on how they think in many disciplines. From those reports, they identified a set of thirteen mental operations they call “thinking tools”. These operations are used consistently across divergent fields – science, mathematics, history, philosophy, theatre, painting, writing, and music.
Observing – patient, detailed, sustained perception
Imaging – forming mental representations of the world when we do not actively perceive it
Abstracting – paring down complicated things to simple principles
Recognizing patterns – discovery of repeated structures in nature, mathematics, rhythm, music, movement, language
Forming patterns – combining and repeating structural elements or operations
Analogizing – identifying shared properties in two or more different things
Body thinking – drawing preverbal and preconceptual intuitions from our bodily sensations and responses
Empathizing – sensing the lived experience of another person or organism or thing
Dimensional thinking – imagining an object in another domain, from two to three spatial dimensions, or from present to future time
Modeling – creating a virtual, mental, imaginary, or physical representation of a concept, idea, object, or set of conditions
Playing – irreverent and imaginative reordering of conventions and rules
Transforming – serial or simultaneous use of multiple mental operations
Synthesizing – bringing together many of these operations in understanding the worldThese are the cognitive processes we employ as we make sense of our experience. They are operations of deeply immersed and engaged thinking.
Root-Bernstein, Robert, & Root-Bernstein, Michele. Sparks of Genius:
The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. Houghton Mifflin, 1999
