Expressive Literacy?

Abstract

Expressive Literacy? A new concept covering the independent cultural and social meaning, competencies and values gained by children’s participation in artistic experiences and creative processes.

Cultural policy addressing children and young people is across the world a complicated field. The different arenas, institutions and contexts - kindergartens, schools, cultural institutions, family and leisure time - surrounding these meetings contribute to the complexity. What does it mean to children? What do they learn from it? The last question has been dominant. Pedagogues hope, the artistic contributions will support kindergartens developmental goals, teachers hope they will benefit curriculum, parents often hope the same and politicians gain legitimate arguments by supporting these hopes. They make cultural policy useful. This has been and still is an instrumental thinking claiming, that meetings with artic experiences and creative activities do not contribute to children’s whole way of life with independent meanings, values, competencies and usefulness, but merely serve extern social, developmental and educational purposes. We have no empirical evidence documenting the truth of these hopes and beliefs. We do have had research projects and investigations trying to turn the instrumental thinking upside down and to develop evidence and arguments for the independent usefulness. The European project DICE is one of them. Anne Bamford, UK, has been head of others. All over the world, we have had small research articles contributing to a turn in thinking. May be it is time to rethink the answers to meaning and learning gained by aesthetic experiences and processes. May be it is time to stress, that the independent meanings, competencies and values actually contribute to make a difference which also make a difference to kindergartens, schools – and children and young people’s lives. The paper wants to propose a new term, which can document, how and why the difference makes a difference.

Key Note

Beth Juncker

Expressive Literacy?

Introduction

Cultural policy addressing children and young people is across the world a complicated field.

The different arenas, institutions and contexts - kindergartens, schools, cultural institutions, family and leisure time - surrounding these meetings contribute to the complexity.

What does it mean to children? What do they learn from it? The last question has been dominant.

Pedagogues hope, the artistic contributions will support kindergartens developmental goals, teachers hope they will benefit curriculum, parents often hope the same and politicians gain legitimate arguments by supporting these hopes. They make cultural policy useful.

This has been and still is an instrumental thinking claiming, that meetings with artic experiences and creative activities do not contribute to children’s whole way of life with independent meanings, values, competencies and usefulness, but merely serve extern social, developmental and educational purposes.

That is what I wrote in the beginning of my abstract to this conference. We do know that the meaning of children’s and young peoples’ meeting with artistic experiences and involvement in creative processes is not just to support abilities to read, to write and to reckon.

We do know that the meetings and processes contribute to children and young peoples’ everyday life with independent meanings, values, skills and competencies, which actually make a difference exactly because they differ from formal learning in schools and developmental learnings in day care institutions.

In spite of that, we lack evidence, and we lack strong and convincing arguments in order to turn the instrumental cultural policy thinking upside down and to make the independent usefulness of these artistic meetings and creative processes visible.

My intension with this key note is to involve you in a discussion of the necessity of a new concept of literacy, based on philosophy of aesthetics, drawing from theories and notions of play and participation, and encompassing children and young peoples’ meeting with art and culture in an everyday context. The main research questions are:

- Do we need an independent concept of literacy, which stems from children and young people’s encounters with and involvement in artistic, creative experiences and processes?

- Do we need an independent concept of literacy arguing from the special abilities, skills, competencies, meanings and values gained from these artistic experiences and activities and their independent impact on and meaning for children and young people’s everyday expressive life?

I think we do! I think so for several reasons on different levels.

The instrumental cultural policy tradition.

The overall reason is the interplay of paradigms we have witnessed since millennium. In relation to the meaning of meetings with and involvement in artistic experiences and creative processes we have in western Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries built on a Cartesian enlightenment thinking and we have been surrounded by a hermeneutic culture focusing on the abilities to analyze and to interprete as the center of meaning creation and understanding.

Part of this Cartesian thinking has been dominated by dichotomies and hierarchies - brain versus body, reason versus emotion, analysis versus experience (feeling), understanding versus entertainment - and the first part of the dichotomies as absolute superior to the second.

Part of this thinking has also been the conviction that children and young people have to create a distance to the experiences and processes, they have to be able analyze and interprete them in order to understand.

As we all know, this Cartesian thinking focused on the brain, on reason, on analysis as intellectual prerequisite for cognition has had not only a great instrumental impact on cultural policy and cultural strategies but also a great impact on our concepts of literacy.

Literacies

Literacy was from the 17th century defined as the ability to read and write. This definition was during the19th and 20thcentury expanded with the ability to analyze and reflect critical.

Facing the 21th century and the radical social and cultural changes, the media and technology development researchers all over the world started to ask for new literacies as an answer to the challenges.

Since then we have talked about visual literacy, media literacy, information literacy, computer literacy, internet literacy, digital literacy. Most of these literacy studies conclude as Professor Sonia Livingstone when she defines media literacy and uses this definition as kind of a basic understanding, which can encompass the other literacy areas:

“I define media literacy as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages across a variety of contexts” (Linvingstone, 2004)

Intellectual skills and competencies, not sensuous, not creative.

Calls for expressive perspectives

The media and technological development in the last decades of the 20thcentury challenged this Cartesian instrumental thinking and as a consequence the instrumental perspective of cultural policy and the intellectual concepts of literacy.

Scholars with different approaches to and perspectives on social media, film, fine and popular literature, music, theatre, dance, performances asked for a rethinking and for a let go of dichotomies and hierarchies.

The American professor Richard Shustermann coined a new concept of entertainment underlining that to be entertained, to feel the fun, is the prerequisite of meaning creation (Shusterman, 2003).

Professor Joli Jensen from Tulsa University, US asked for an expressive logic built on what art and culture actually mean and independently contribute to everyday life with (Jensen, 2003).

The German-American professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht asked to the non-hermeneutic meaning of presence and presence effects (Gumbrecht, 2004).

All of them questioned the Cartesian thinking in dichotomies and hierarchies in order to contribute to a supplementary philosophical grounded non-instrumental thinking drawing from philosophy of aesthetics, philosophy of phenomenology, philosophy of pragmatism and the notions of play, presence and participation connected with them.

Their studies contributed with new notions and perspectives – aesthetic, expressive, playing, participatory. Although our colleges questioned the Cartesian tradition of cognition, although they acknowledged and worked for the supplementary meaning of embodied experiences and sensuous cognition, they did not ask for documentation of the independent skills, competencies, meaning and values involved.

A Gap?

To sum up: we have identified what we consider a major gap. Although researchers all over the world have called out for new kind of literacies, no one has to our knowledge recognized, that we need a notion of literacy encompassing the creative, innovative experiences, and processes in the cultural sector arguing from the special aesthetic symbolic conditions ruling here, and for the independent usefulness of experiences, skills, competencies, knowledge and values drawn from it. As a contribution to variety, richness and meaning creation in an everyday life and as a consequence an independent contribution to the educational formal skills and competencies learned from day care and schools. No one has to our knowledge asked for cultural expressive literacy.

All new notions of literacy end up with the intellectual capacity to critical analysis, interpretation, reflection and evaluation as a key criterion. Confronted with sensitive cognition, sensuous knowledge, with artistic experiences, productions and creative processes we know that here we, the world and our conditions are studied by means of different kind of theories and tools, and the answers are not giving as books, articles, essays, but as theatre performances, paintings, installations, concerts, exhibitions. Critical investigations, new approaches to and perspectives on human beings and our social and existential condition, new knowledge of emotions, feelings, values and meaning creation.

The challenges

Let me end with the challenges such a new notion confront us with.

Here we are in the center of a succesfull theatre experience: intensity, presence, participation (Huizinga, Gadamer, Gumbrecht).

Here we are in the middle of the performing result of a creative drama process. (DICE, Anne Bamford). The kids have worked with ideas, with words, with characters, with bodily coordination of singing and dancing, with choreography, scenography, design of light and sound and room. They have been a team and they have learned that being a team is a huge social challenge: if they do not deliver their part of the work, if they are not in time to rehearsals or release, everything falls apart. It is a disciplining process.

We do have philosophy, theories, notions and concepts and we do have drama studies, which can help us to understand what is going on in both contexts. We still need to specify abilities, skills and competencies gained from them.

We are facing aesthetics as an independent dimension of our lives (Huizinga, 1934). The most central concept of aesthetics is the notion of play and the two most central phenomenon connected to play is participation and presence.

The prerequisite of this intensity, this state of presence is:

- A break up from everyday routines, from social reality

- A framing

- A transformation

Kids have left the social reality and entered an arena, which makes participation in an artistic experience/performance possible. The shift from social reality to cultural reality is a shift of reality conditions.

Entering a cultural arena means to leave the social conditions behind and to face the aesthetic-symbolic conditions ruling our meetings with art and culture.

From the moment the kids entered, they have been transformed – from Anna, Maria, Mohammad and Peter – to the participating, experiencing collective community we call an audience. They are now an active part of a performance contributing to the experiences the aesthetic-symbolic conditions make possible. Together with actors, dancers, musicians on the stage, they are responsible for the meaning created here and now half an hour or two.

When they leave the arena – the theatre, the concert or dance hall – they will again almost be Anna, Maria, Mohammad and Peter. Almost – they have participated in, contributed to and shared an experience, they can exchange meanings and values from it, they can disagree on it, which is a central part of the meaning, they can learn from it.

Entering the stage as part of a creative team, an actor, performer, dancer, singer, musician also means to leave the social conditions behind, to forget yourself, to perform, to contribute to the teamwork and thereby to the audiences possibilities.

Confronted with the central cultural policy question: what do children and young people learn? Researchers’ answers mostly tend to be loose. My colleges and I have underlined that the questions are not wrong, just wrongly put. There is much to be learned, but the point is not to link to, not to support, but to supply school curriculum with skills, competencies and values representing another and independent way to entertainment, joy, feelings, values, knowledge and cognition in our everyday life. The point is to make a difference.

Instead of asking for formal learnings, we have to ask for the independent meaning and the values experienced by the participators in these physical and online experiences, activities and communities and for the independent skills, abilities and competencies produced on these conditions.

We hope you will contribute to the answers!

Thank you!

References

Dewey, J. 2005 [1934]. Art as Experience. New York: Pedigee.

Gumbrecht, H. U. 2004. Production of Presence. What meaning cannot convey. Standford: Standford University Press.

Jenkins, H. & Bertozzi, V. 2008. “Artistic expression in the Age of participatory Culture”. In Engaging Art. The Next Great Transformation of American Cultural Life, edited by Steven J. Tepper & Bill Ivey, 171-195. Routledge: New York/London.

Jensen, J. 2003. “Expressive Logic: A New Premise in Arts Advocacy”. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 33 (1): 65-80.

Jensen, J. 2002. Is Art good for us? Beliefs about High Culture in American Life. Maryland: Rowmann and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Jones, S. (ed.) 2009. Expressive Lives, Demos, collection 27. London: Demos.

Jones, S. 2009. “Introduction: Enfranchising Cultural Democracy.” In Expressive Lives, Demos, collection 27. London: Demos.

Kawashima, N. 2006. “Audience Development and Social Inclusion in Britain. Tensions, contradictions and paradoxes in policy and their implications for cultural management.” International Journal of Cultural Policy, Volume 12, Issue 1, 2006: 55-72.

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Ministry of Culture 2014b. Strategy for schoolchildren’s encounter with art and culture. Copenhagen: Ministry of Culture. Accessed 25th of May _ENGbrochure_skoleboern_05.pdf

Ministry of Culture 2014c. Strategy for young people’s encounter with art and culture. Copenhagen: Ministry of Culture. Accessed 25th of May

Shusterman, R. 1997. “The End of Aesthetic Experience.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Critism, 55 (1): 29-41.

Shusterman, R. 2003. "Entertainment: A question for Aesthetics." British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (3): 289-307.

Shusterman, R. 2012. Thinking thorough the Body. Essays in Somaesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Shusterman, Richard 2013. “Body and the Arts: The Need for Somaeasthetics”. Diogenes, 59 (1-2), 7-20.

Tepper, S. & Ivey, B. (eds.) 2008. Engaging Art. The Next Great Transformation of American Cultural Life, New York/London: Routledge.

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