Transmediation: What Art Affords Our Understanding of

Literacy

Jeome C. HarsteIndiana University

What insights into literacy does art afford? This paper argues that the

interplay between language and art supports learners, as well as

teachers and researchers, in developing a critical stance toward

literacy. In making these argument I hope to explicate key processes

involved in “transmediation,” the process of taking what one knows in

language and representing it in art.

Art as a Social Semiotic

Systemic functional grammar postulates that language did not develop

because of one language user, but because of two language users who

wanted to communicate (Halliday & Mathiesen, 2013 ). In like fashion,

art did not develop because of a single artist, but rather because

artistically whatever was created captured something not readily

communicated through spoken or written language. The “functional”

part of a systemic functional perspective assumes that if two semiotic

system did the same thing , one would either never have been created

or over time become extinct.

Psychologists tell us that the only thing that confronts the senses

are stimuli of various sorts (Bateson, 2000). If we see something as a

table or a person or an object, it is because of what the brain did in

sorting and organizing these stimuli. Our individual making of meaning

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is called semiosis (for example, calling some array of stimuli “a table”).

The process by which we convince others to call this same array of

stimuli the same thing we are calling it is called semiotics. Semiotics,

then, is the study of how groups of people come to make and share

meaning (Eco, 1976).

In making sense of this bombardment of stimuli, the brain uses

sign systems (language, art, music, math, dance) to placehold the

meaning that was made as well as share that meaning with others.

This process of “naming” our world for purposes of making and

sharing meaning is what literacy and the study of literacy are all about.

The signs we create – be they language, art, music, mathematics,

dance or drama -- allow us to communicate with each other as well as

make sense of our world.

As both an artist and a literacy scholar I’m interested in

understanding what art has to offer educators in terms of a deeper

understanding of literacy and learning. To that end, I’m going to use

the major benchmarks in my career, given the books that I have

published, to share: (1) some language stories and literacy lessons, (2)

some instructional strategies involving art that were created to support

teachers in creating classrooms for authors and inquirers, (3) some

instructional engagements created to support teachers in creating

critical classrooms, and (4) some things two literacy researcher

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colleagues and I learned about art by taking an indepth look at

ourselves as practicing artists.

Language Stories and Literacy Lessons

One of the tasks in our research study on what young children know

about reading and writing prior to going to school (Harste, Woodward,

& Burke, 1984) asked 3, 4, 5, and 6-year olds to write their name and

draw a picture of themselves. While the 4, 5, and 6-year olds could do

this very easily, the 3-year olds had more trouble. Nonetheless, by the

age of 3 they were beginning to make distinctions between art and

writing, although they clearly had not compartmentalized the sign

systems as we adults have. We found 3-year olds, with surprising

consistency, used circles to placehold their art and up and down

strokes to placehold their drawing, or vice versa. We say “vice versa”

because one of the surprising things we found was that if their name

started with a curved letter (like the ‘s’ in Shannon), they tended (91

percent of the time) to use circles or curved letters to placehold their

writing, and up and down strokes to placehold their drawings. The

opposite was true for children whose name started with an up and

down stroke (like Thomas). We concluded that a child’s name is the

child’s first learning laboratory for experimenting with and sorting

semiotic systems.

Another task in our research study of what young children know

about reading and writing asked children to select three props from a

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box of props we had put together, tell us a story, and write it down as

best they could. Three-year olds had a difficult time making sense of

this task so they simply turned it into a task they could understand by

using the paper and pencil we gave them as props for the story they

were telling. The pencil became the rabbit. The marks on the paper

served as a trail of the hops the bunny was taking. The paper itself

was the stage for the play that the child is putting on. Pragmatically,

children negotiated our research task to one that made sense to them.

It was surprising how often they moved to communication systems,

like art and drama. These systems of communication obviously made

more sense to them than did written language literacy.

Children made several other interesting moves during our data

collection. We showed young children pieces of environmental print

and asked them what they said. When we showed them the Coca Cola

logo pasted on a 5”x8” index card several of the children initially said

“Coke” or “Coca Cola.” Virginia Woodward, who was working with the

children while Carolyn Burke and I were videotaping, occasionally

thought they mumbled and so followed up their initial response with,

“What did you say?” or “Could you say that again?” Inevitably, when

this happened, the child being questioned responded, “Pepsi.” Feeling

vulnerable they began to explore other options that not only fell in the

semantic ball park but shared many of the same artistic features of the

logos we were showing them.

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It became obvious that our research procedures were influencing

the data we were collecting. While we had designed a very careful

experimental study --largely because of me having taken 48 hours of

statistics in my doctoral program -- the very procedures we were using

were restricting the data we were collecting. To self-correct we began

a series of more naturalistic studies of young children in more

naturalistic settings, like homes.

It was about this time that the “research wars” started in our

profession. I made myself rather unpopular within the Literacy

Research Association community by arguing that not all research

methods were equal if the goal was to study language or language

learning. I still contend this is true.

I mention the research wars to suggest that maybe one of the

first contributions that art made to the field of literacy is that it

disrupted the dominant research paradigm that was being used to

conduct language research. In an article entitled “Paradigmatic

Diversity Within the Reading Research Community” published in

Journal of Reading Behavior in 1989, Patrick Shannon had this to say

about the shift in our thinking:

Harste, Woodward, and Burke's Language Stories and

Literacy Lessons (1984) may be unique because it frankly

discusses the authors' metamorphosis from E/A

[experimental /analytic science] to symbolic science in

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their efforts to understand the perspective of young

language users. Early in their work, the authors initiated

controlled experiments to determine how young children

did or did not use written symbols in meaningful ways.

After several trials, the researchers noticed that the

experiments actually restricted the children in their

attempts to relate what they knew about written language.

Their study soon switched to an investigation of how

children negotiated adult's language requests in order to

make sense of the task at hand within particular social

settings. Using semiotic analyses, Harste, Woodward, and

Burke interpreted the signs, symbols, and signifiers that

their child informants offered when using literacy

appropriately for specific contexts. This book may be as

valuable as a record of paradigm shift as it is a record of

what young children can do with written language (p.101).

Several of the graduate assistants working with us during these

early literacy studies had young children at home whom they were

raising, including myself. As a result we initiated a series of parent-

research studies. One of my favorite pieces of data, collected from my

daughter Alison at age 6, was her multimodal representation of a

telephone conversation she had with her friend Jennifer (see Figure 1).

After church Jennifer was going to bring her tutu, slippers, and hair

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ribbon in a bag over to Alison’s house and Alison was going to get her

tutu, slippers, and hair ribbon from the dresser in her room. Together

they were going “to play ballerina” (Alison’s words).

PLACE FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE

There are three things that fascinated me about this note. The

first was the sheer economy of the art itself. It captures the subject

and sets the tone. The second thing was that Alison uses language

(letters), art and mathematics (the plus sign) to record her message.

She very freely moved across sign systems in an attempt to mean. The

third thing that fascinated me was the sheer elegance of the note

itself. There is no clutter. We can only wish that our telephone

conversations ended in as tidy a presentation as what Alison at age 6

was able to record in just seconds after getting off the phone.

Creating Classrooms for Authors and Inquirers

Despite the fact that I am now known as a researcher and an artist, I

have always considered myself first and foremost a teacher. I think I

can safely say the same for my research partners, Drs. Carolyn Burke

and Virginia Woodward, as well as the graduate students whom I have

worked over the years. Our interest in early literacy was really an

interest in how to set up more supportive environments for language

learning in schools.

To that end, after Language Stories and Literacy Lessons, we

began working in classrooms with teachers attempting to take what we

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had learned and apply it to practice. The result was a couple of

methods books (Harste, Short, with Burke, 1988; Short, Harste with

Burke, 1996), several videotape series (Harste & Juerwicz, 1985, 1990-

1992), and the creation of a school called the Center for Inquiry in

Indianapolis. The curriculum in the Center for Inquiry uses the learner

as informant but features children’s literature, process reading and

writing, multiple ways of knowing, inquiry-based learning, and more

recently critical literacy (Harste, 1992; Harste, 1994; Harste, Leland,

Schmidt, Vasquez, & Ociepka, 2004).

Sketch-to-Stretch is a specific example of how we -- and in this

particular instance I mean Karen Feathers, Marjorie Siegel, Carolyn

Burke, and myself -- went about taking our research findings to create

more supportive classroom environments for learning. Building off of

the finding that children move very freely across communication

systems in an effort to mean Sketch-to-Stretch featured

transmediation (Suhor, 1984) or what semioticians see as the process

of re-mediating information from one sign system to another.

In practice, Sketch-to-Stretch involves reading a story to children

and afterward asking them (often working in groups) to “symbolize”

what the story meanx to them in art. We encouraged participants to

sketch rather than to use language. Afterward we play Save the Last

Word for the Artist, another strategy we developed, in which the artist

holds up their sketch, everyone generates hypotheses as to what they

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think the artists wished to say, and then the artists themselves get the

last word.

Marjorie Siegel (1984, 1995) and later Phyllis Whitin (1996), and

Megan McBride (2013) made Sketch-to-Stretch the focus of their

dissertations; and in McBride’s case, the subject of her masters thesis.

They found the same phenomenon that we had found in Alison’s

telephone Sketch-to-Stretch and that was a cognitive elegance that

simply astounded. Figure 2 shows Matt’s Sketch-to-Stretch from

Marjorie Siegel’s dissertation. Matt had read Ira Sleeps Over (Waber,

1972) about two boys having their first sleep over. Matt’s sister

heckles Matt by asking him, “How will you feel sleeping without your

teddy bear for the very first time? Hummmmmmm?” “What do you

think your friend is going to say when he finds out the name of your

teddy bear is Foo-Foo, Hummmmmmm?”

When Matt was asked to talk about his sketch and specifically

the formula he had constructed in the left hand corner, he said, “A boy

plus a teddy bear plus another boy plus a teddy bear equals two good

friends.” Now if you know Ira Sleeps Over, this has to be one of the

most elegant summaries of a book that anyone might possibly

construct. Like Alison’s sketch, the meaning or significance of the

event has not only been captured but the presentation is both

uncluttered and elegant.

PLACE FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE

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Over the years we have continued to study Sketch-to-Stretch

as an instructional strategy. Rather than have students transmediate

their readings as sketches, we have had them transmediate what they

made of a text into clay, music, drama, dance, and even more recently

into video productions.

In a presentation given by Marjorie Siegel (2006) at Carolyn

Burke’s and my retirement conference at Indiana University, she

argued that while we had made a strong case for transmediation as a

generative cognitive process, we needed to begin to study

transmediation from a socio-cultural perspective. Art, she argued,

positions the user differently in the world and in so doing alters the

social practices that surround both the “reading” of the sign and the

“reading” of the sign maker vis-à-vis others.

Siegel’s thinking about literacy and literacy learning, like my

own, had been influence by critical theorists. Luke and Freebody

(1997) argued, for example, that what literacies are valued in a

community or culture is a function of the social practices that are in

place. Rather than focus on a particular semiotic system (like reading,

writing, art) in order to understand literacy, from a socio-cultural

perspective the profession needed to focus on the social practices that

are operating in a particular context of situation. To change what

literacy practices are valued or not valued it is necessary to change

the social practices that are in place.

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I took these ideas to begin to think of curriculum as social

practices. I saw the literacies we valued in schools (literature

discussions, process writing, transmediation) as a function of methods,

with methods now being defined as that set of social practices that are

valued and demonstrated on a daily basis in the ongoing day-to-day

life of the classroom (Harste, 2008).

Creating Critical Classrooms

Because I firmly believe that teachers can’t do for children what they

have notdone for themselves first, I began a series of workshops in

which teachers experienced first-hand what it felt like to reposition

themselves sociologically using art. I should add that the teachers I

was working with were all in critical literacy study groups and so

already had an understanding of what it meant to take a critical

perspective on literacy learning having read people like Linda

Christensen (2000), Barbara Comber (2001), Carol Edelsky (1999),

Norman Fairlough (1995), Paulo Feire, (1970), Hilary Janks (2000,

2008, 2013), Michelle Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2007), Alan Luke

and Peter Freebody (1997) Vivian Vasquez (2004) and others.

In my Jacob Lawrence workshop I asked teachers to identify a

critical issue that they felt strongly about and using any element of

Jacob Lawrence’s art work that they wanted to use to produce a

painting that addressed this issue. I introduced the teachers to Jacob

Lawrence by showing them some of his art work and talking about how

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he almost single-handedly alerted the world to what the black

experience meant to African-Americans growing up in the United

States. I followed this presentation by showing the video Jacob

Lawrence: The Glory of Expression (L&S Video, 1999), after which I

invited participants to try to take on critical stance for themselves on

some aspect of literacy they felt strongly about. My intent was to get

teachers to live the experience of what it mentally (cognitively) and

physically (sociologically) felt like to reposition themselves in the

world.

As a culminating activity I asked teachers to write a short

reflection on what they were trying to say in their art work and to take

this reflection to write a 4-line poem that might capture their intent as

well as be displayed with their art work. To bring closure to the

experience we – Vivian Vasquez and Peggy Albers were implicated in

this event -- worked with the teachers to create a gallery of their art

work in a public location, like a public library or a local coffee shop.

Teachers were asked to invite their friends and family to the grand

opening of their “gallery walk.” In most cases we used coffee, cookies,

and when we could get away with it, even wine, to entice them in.

Our intent was for significant others to see these teachers -- who on

one level they knew -- as different; as fighting for a particular social

issue; as positioned in the world differently.

While I worked with over 450 teachers during this period, I

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randomly selected 40 of these products to study more intensely. In

phase one of this study I explored art’s ability to communicate a

consistent message (Harste, Leland, Grant, Chung, & Enyeart, 2007).

In this phase I asked my fellow researchers, working independently

and without the benefit of reading anything the artist had written, to

write a one sentence statement of what they thought the piece of art

was attempting to say. I took these statements and propositionalized

them (Kinstch, 1974) for purposes of comparing the main propositions

to that of the main propositions in the artists’ summary.

PLACE FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE

Figure 3 compares one artist’s statement with the poem the artist

produced and the statements which “readers” of this picture produced.

As is evident from this one example, participants “read” these

paintings with high consistency as to what was the artist’s intention.

In a second phase of this study my colleagues and I

deconstructed the original 40 paintings to uncover what aspects of

critical literacy teachers were likely to address as well as what aspects

of literacy they were likely not to address. For purposes of analysis we

used Kress and van Leeuwan’s visual discourse analysis procedure

(1998) to “read” the paintings and then classified them as to which

dimensions of critical literacy were addressed using Hilary Janks’

framework of dominance, access, diversity, and re-design (2000,

2008). Janks argues that in order to be inclusive, a theory of critical

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literacy needs to address simultaneously all four of these dimensions.

We found teachers in this study rarely addressed issues of re-

design. We also discovered that Kress & van Leeuwen’s approach to

understanding visual design lacked a critical edge in that the

framework failed to identify how participants “othered” the very

groups they were attempting to help through their artistic depictions.

As a result Albers (2007) developed her own system of visual discourse

analysis inviting not only a cognitive but a socio-cultural and a critical

analysis of art.

In a follow-up study my

colleagues and I worked on re-design by having elementary students,

preservice teachers and inservice teachers “read” advertisements and

then re-design them from a critical perspective (Albers, Harste,

Vander-Zaden, & Felderman, 2008). Interestingly, fifth graders in this

study were more aware and critical of consumer messages than were

preservice teachers. Nonetheless, participants of all ages developed a

deeper understanding of critical literacy by actually producing counter

ads than by learning how “to read” or deconstruct the art in ads for

purposes of critique. We concluded that producing art supports

learners psychologically and sociologically to reposition themselves in

the world. They not only, as Dorothy Watson has said, “learn to talk

the talk, but walk the walk” (2000).

Literacy Researchers as Practicing Artists

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One of the shortcomings in our studies of visual literacy up to this time

was that they focused on products rather than on the process of

creating art. In an effort to study art as a composing process Peggy

Albers, Teri Holbrook and I decided to do a longitudinal study of

ourselves as artists using autoethnography as our research method

(Albers, Holbrook, & Harste, 2010, 2012).i

To explore our thinking about ourselves as practicing artists we

engaged in a series of deliberate conversations. To prepare, each of

us chose 10 pieces of our own work over the time of our involvement

with art that signified a meaning for us that other pieces did not. To

focus our conversations we asked each other questions such as: “Why

did you choose these particular pieces?” “What significance do they

hold for you?” “What did you learn from creating them?” “What were

you trying to say?” Our conversations shifted back and forth from our

art to what we learned as artist and about composing in art more

generally. As many researchers have found, conversations often seem

tedious when transcribed. To highlight what was interesting in our 12

hours of recorded conversation we created short poems, which we

then reworked to be even shorter and more concise. We reasoned that

poetry shares many of the same characteristics as art, in that poetry,

like art, sums up while simultaneously highlighting the aesthetic as

well as the critical (Albers, Holbrook, & Harste, 2010, 2012). Figure 4

is an example of our talk around one of the watercolor paintings

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included in the study as well as a first and second distillation of that

conversation in poetic form.

PLACE FIRGURE 4 ABOUT HERE

While this study is hardly definitive, as a result of our study of art

as a social semiotic we wish to hypothesize that art highlights seeing

more differently, critical expression, abduction, and agency in the

meaning-making process and as such supports critical literacies very

much needed by 21st century citizens. While art may not have a corner

on these affordances in comparison to other semiotic systems like

writing, there are distinctive advantages to incorporating art as a

seamless part of the literacy curriculum.

Art Affords Seeing More Differently: Aesthetically,

Emotionally, Parsimoniously. “Artists assimilate a whole range of

psychological, aesthetic, political, and emotional data points, and they

then make forms to organize and give meaning to them” (White, 2011,

p. 2). Within this process, aesthetics reference arts ability to be

responsive to or pleasing to the senses. We saw aesthetics being

addressed in terms of our selection of subject matter and the

emotional tone it set, in the role that close observation of our world

played in shaping our art work, in our understanding, use, and interest

in technique, in the selection of colors we used to represent meaning,

and in the selection of the very mediums we used to work in.

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As an artist one would think selecting a subject matter to paint,

sculpture, or photograph would take precedence over everything else.

Yet, while subject matter was important, its selection, we found, was

one on equal footing to the emotional tone we wanted to capture.

While a watercolorist can take a photograph to remind him or her of

this emotional tone, watercolorists rarely duplicate photos. A

photograph becomes a reference but rarely captures what the setting

emotionally meant to the artist; this is the work of color and technique

when painting.

A photographer, like Teri, found that an old Quaker prison

embodied, to some extent, the emotional tone that she wanted to use

in her collages. To heighten this emotional tone she used Photoshop to

rid her photographs of excess.

Peggy tells the story of how someone in her office disparaged the

workers who had been hired to remodel her home as having only two

teeth in their head. Given her working class background Peggy was

rightfully offended by this remark. As a result, politically her rather

gay, frolicking, ceramic, rabbits often only have a single buck tooth in

their ceramic heads.

In trying to understand how art affords sensitivity we spent

considerable time talking about observation. As artists we firmly

believe in the value of close observation; in slowing down to take note

of our world. Drawing, sculpting, or putting together a collage are

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more than tools for rendering and capturing likenesses. These

processes transform perception and thought into images and teach us

how both to see and to think with our eyes. White (2011) argues that

art “renders back to us not simply what we see, but how we react to

what we see and what we know as a consequence of that seeing” (p.

3). Kress & van Leeuwen (1998) make a similar argument by showing

how a child’s drawing of a elephant demonstrates much more

completely what that child knows about elephants than does the

child’s either saying elephant or telling someone what they know about

elephants.

While art is interested in elaborating, art invites, if not demands,

the removal of excess. In one sense we felt we saw more while seeing

less. Art, like poetry, has the power to sum up, to capture what is new

long after the event itself (Fredrich, 1996). The goal of the artist is to

get at the essence of things, even when that essence is a critique of

what our culture sees as aesthetically pleasing. Two of the poems we

created from our conversations capture these insightsii: “Poppies; That

ephemeral red; A good breeze would make them fall apart; A subtle

sense of essence.” “I think one has to be; A damn optimist; To see

peeling paint; As hopeful.”

Art Affords Critical Expression: The Questioning of Taken-

For-Granted Values. Figure 5 shows one of the pieces each of us

chose to study. There are several things that are interesting about the

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art work we each independently selected. The first thing is that within

the set of 10 pieces, later pieces were always more critical, that is,

they “talked back” to dominant or underlying messages in our culture.

The second thing that is interesting is that they each used visual

metaphors as rhetorical vehicles to talk back. (“Metaphorical thinking;

Rabbits as metaphor –satire-ization; Windows as metaphor –

surveillance; Goats as metaphor – inscription”).

Peggy uses rabbits metaphorically to challenge iconic images in

our culture. The Wedding features same-sex rabbits getting married

(“Rabbits, no less; With buck teeth; As if they haven’t been maligned

enough; Now fornicating on my cup; Questioning Marriage; Making

Trouble”).

Teri creates collages out of the pictures she has photographed of

a historical Quaker prison. Not only does she manipulate the photos in

Photoshop, but she overlays these so that the notion of isolation and

surveillance are front and center (“The Panopticon; The sentiment of

an invisible omniscience; In an over-observed, over-watched world;

Where even the watched are watched; By Quakers”).

My water-media collage, called Inscribed Goats, features various

forms of print overlaid with a sketch of Picasso’s goat I drew when I

visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City many years before.

I used goats metaphorically as “someone being used” and the

undercoat of print to suggest that we are who we are as a function of

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the texts that surround and inscribe us (“Goats tumble, Metaphors

settle, Signs of literacy, Metaphors of inscription”).

While art is often associated with aesthetics, the advancement of

art as a discipline accents talking back. Our art work, in talking back, is

also transgressive. Many of our pieces question taken-for-granted

values and, if not poking fun of the these values (as illustrated in

Peggy’s rabbits), offering a view from the other side (as in my Inscribed

Goats and its statement about literacy, or Teri’s daughter sitting in an

open field of possibility but inscribed by test score data.)

Art Affords Abduction: The Exploration of Possibility,

Creativity, and Imagination. Because our culture is so

verbocentric, to use Eco’s analysis of European culture (Eco, 1976),

certain forms of logic play a particularly distinctive role in art as

opposed to what Kuhn (1996) has called “normal science.”

According to Deely (2004) there are three forms of logic. .

Induction, which is reaching conclusions based on a series of individual

observations. Deduction, which is hypothesizing a conclusion based on

a theory. Abduction, which is the jumping to conclusions intuitively

without a explicit set of arguments to follow.

Art highlights abduction; the jumping to a new conclusion

without any clear path as to how the abductor got there. Because

abduction supports intuition (what Peirce calls “retrospection,” 1931-

58), it is the only form of logic that allows newness into the system.

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Abduction means the focus in art is on insight whereas in induction and

deduction the focus is on the logical conclusion of facts, data, and

information. (“Transgression as technique; Technique as aesthetics;

Aesthetics as abduction; Abduction as transgression”).

With its dual focus on aesthetics and talking back, as artists we

are always thinking about what forms might help us say what we feel.

In art the advice is given, “Paint what you love,” In writing, the advice

make popular by process writing theorists is “Write what you know”

(Graves, 1983).

Because writing is linear it highlights inductive and deductive

logic. This is even true of poetry, although poetry, like art, typically is

jump started with an intuitive leap. Unfortunately the way

mathematics, science, social studies and other subject areas are

taught they too, all too often, only allow for inductive and deductive

logic. An inquiry-based approach in which students are invited to

research things they are personally interested in opens up space for

abduction (Harste, 1994), but inquiry-based education is far from the

norm. While many equate discovery learning with inquiry-based

learning, there is a big difference. In discovery learning the

environment is set up so the students discover what it is that the

adults want them to discover or learn. There is a big difference

between hands-on math or science and first-hand math or science.

What is emphasized in hands-on math and science is inductive logic.

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Most disciplines privilege one form of logic over another, unless of

course you are at the forefront of knowledge production; then,

abduction takes precedence over induction and deduction.

We’re not saying that education that features inductive and

deductive logic is bad. In fact, induction and deduction as forms of

logic are very useful, particularly in written language learning. In

writing, for example, because of the trail that is left on paper, the

author is given the opportunity to reexamine his or her thinking by

following the logic being used to make the argument. When gaps

occur, revision is a self-correction strategy. And one of the pure joys in

writing is starting in the known and writing yourself into a new place,

clearly a form of abduction. Writers often are surprised when their

rhetoric is well ahead of their practice.

That engaging in art highlights abductive thinking is probably

one of the strongest cases I can for its significance in education

generally and literacy education in particular. By fostering abduction,

art invites the exploration of possibility, creativity, and imagination.

I’m not saying that other semiotic systems cannot do these things –

they obviously do – but I am arguing that art highlights this affordance

and that currently vehicles to support abduction are in short supply in

a discipline-based school curriculum.

Art Affords Agency: The Ability to Impose a Different

Order on Experience. Engaging in either art or writing increases

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vulnerability in part because both processes leave a visual trail that

others can critique. One of the things we learned as writing teachers is

that it is a lot easier to intimidate a written language learner than it is

to support one. Just one misplaced comment can stop a writer for

months.

Artists too can be stopped in their tracks by critique.

Nonetheless, I want to argue that there is a difference. Artists, for the

most part, make themselves vulnerable by going off the deep end,

going so far no one can make sense of what they have created. (“Six

collages!!; They say it doesn’t work; Why do I not feel discouraged;

Rather, I want to figure out why.”)

Art embodies us with personality and a concern for how we look.

We mean this two ways. “How we look,” meaning our take on the

world or on the issue being addressed. “How we look,” meaning how it

is that others are going to “read” us by the art we have produced.

Art, like the use of other sign systems, allows us to develop a

signature. Halliday tells us (1975) that it is person-to-person

interactions that allow us to develop a personality. Alone we are just a

person. Through interaction with others we come to see how we are

alike as well as how we are different. It is this difference that endows

us with personality and imprints, I am arguing , our art work with

signature.

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Art allows us to explore who we are. How we are different. What

makes us unique. What contributions we might make to the ongoing

conversation, even if our contribution differs drastically from current

thought.

In a world of groupthink, developing a personality is particularly

important if not critical. Education, too often, is about homogenizing, a

one-size-fits-all education with Common Core standards.

…for those authentically concerned about the ‘birth of

meaning,’ about breaking through the surfaces, about

teaching others to ‘read’ their own worlds, art forms must

be conceived of as an ever-present possibility. They ought

not be treated as decorative, as frivolous. They ought to

be, if transformative teaching is our concern, a central part

of curriculum (Greene, 2001, p. 131)

In our book Creating Critical Classrooms (Lewison, Leland, &

Harste, 2008) we state that the goal of critical literacy is “to make

students agents of text rather than victims of text” (p. 123). Given this

insight, engaging in the arts is more than an instructional strategy but

rather a perspective which has an important role to play in supporting

students “in taking on,” as Vivian Vasquez (2004) likes to say, a critical

stance.

Maxine Greene (2001) argues “education…is the process of

enabling persons to be different.” In similar fashion we want to argue

24

that art as a semiotic system is particularly good at supporting learners

in imposing a different order upon experience.

Some Concluding Thoughts

Our studies of early literacy and especially young children’s constant

movement across sign systems forced us to explore semiotics as a

potential model for understanding literacy and literacy learning. It also

forced us and the profession to consider new research methodologies

for understanding language and learning.. Exploring how art might

support comprehension demonstrated art’s generative potential from a

cognitive perspective. Exploring art sociologically has allowed us to

explore how art might be used to support teachers and students take

on a critical stance as well as reposition themselves differently in the

world. Explore art as a process has provided insights in what exactly

art affords that other sign systems may not.

Art allows us to imagine a curriculum of seeing more differently,

critical expression, abduction and agency. Given these affordances I

firmly believe art could and should be a major component of a 21st

literacy curriculum. By including it in our discussions and researching

its potential, we open up new possibilities about what kind of literate

world we wish to create as well as the kind of literate people we wish

to have occupy that world.

The next step, it seems to me, is to invite educators – teachers

and researchers particularly -- to try on a new set of social practices

25

that highlights art – for themselves and their students – as an

important component of literacy learning and of the inquiry process.

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Endnotes:

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i Peggy Albers starting studying theater as a child and ended up featuring drama

and theater in her middle school and secondary school teaching. She moved into

ceramics as a result of her dissertation work studying the literacy process of sixth-

grade art students (Albers, 1996). She has studied at a local community art

center for 14 years, showing and selling her work in Atlanta art festivals. Her

ceramics and her thinking about art has been featured in several issues of Clay

Times (Albers, 2002, 2004, 2006).

Teri Holbrook’s childhood interest in creative writing led to a career as a

published novelist (2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2009d) and her scholarship in

disabilities and literacy led her to study nonlinguistic expression through

photography and collage.

Upon my retirement in 2006 I took up art in earnest by enrolling in water-

media classes constantly for the past 7 years. At this point in time I am a

“signature watercolorist” in two professional societies, the Bloomington

Watercolor Society and the Missouri Watercolor Society. What “signature status”

means in academic terms is that I’m now essentially an associate professor.

iiThe poems throughout this section of the paper are the result of a poetic analysis

of our ongoing conversations that both sum up and capture key idea units within

those conversation. To stand out, poems are italicized within quotation marks

and parentheses.