Telling Pieces

Art As Literacy in Middle School Classes

Peggy Albers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781135662561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Telling Pieces is an exploration of how pre-adolescent middle-school children develop a knowledge and understanding of the conventions of art (art as literacy) and how they use this knowledge to create representations of their lives in a small midwestern U.S. town. Beginning with an overview of social semiotics and emergent literacy theorizing, the authors set the stage for their study of sixth graders involved in art. A galleria of children's artworks is presented, allowing readers/viewers to consider these texts independent of the authors' interpretations of them. Then, set against the galleria is the story of the community and school contexts in which the artworks are produced--contexts in which racism, homophobia, and the repression of creativity are often the norm. The interpretation the authors bring to bear on the artworks reveals stories that the artworks may or may not tell on their own. But the tales of artistic literacy achievement are counterbalanced by reflection about the content of the artworks produced, because the artworks reveal the impossibility for students to imagine beyond the situational bounds of racism, homophobia, and religiosity. The authors conclude by raising questions about the kinds of conditions that make literacy in art possible. In doing so, they explore selected alternative models and, in addition, ask readers to consider the implications of the ideological issues underlying teaching children how to represent their ideas. They also advocate for a participatory pedagogy of possibility founded on ethical relational principles in the creation and interpretation of visual text. Of particular interest to school professionals, researchers, and graduate students in literacy or art education, this pioneering book:
* brings together the fields of art education and literacy education through its focus on how middle school students come to work with and understand the semiotic systems,
* introduces sociolinguistic, sociological, and postmodernist perspectives to thinking about children's work with art--adding a new dimension to the psychological and developmental descriptions that have tended to dominate thinking in the field,
* includes a galleria of 40 examples of children's artwork, providing a unique opportunity for readers/viewers to interpret and consider the artwork of the sixth graders independent of the authors' interpretations,
* presents descriptions of art teaching in process,
* gives considerable attention to the interpretation of the children's artworks and the influences that contribute to the content they represent, and
* considers varying models of art education along with the implications of introducing new representational possibilities.

1
INTRODUCTION

In her essay, “Art Objects,” Jeanette Winterson (1995) spoke of walking past the window of a little art gallery in Amsterdam …

… and in the moment of passing [I] saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on.

The quality of the draughtsmanship, the brush strokes in thin oils, had a Renaissance beauty, but the fearful and compelling thing about the picture was its modernity. Here was a figure without a context, in its own context, a haunted woman in blue robes pulling a huge moon face through a subterranean waterway. (p. 3)

Winterson’s (1995) reverie around a particular moment of viewing a piece of art is a reminder of the multiple levels through which works of art can tell tales—tales of what art is thought to be, tales of the craft of art, tales of culture, tales of the participants in the culture, tales of what is valued and what is not. This book is an excavation of some possible tales art tells. By reflecting on the activities of sixth graders at work in an art class, we examine the tales these young representatives and their artworks tell of the literacy practices in one instance of educational and social life.

We frame this book by linking literacy and art.¹ We use the phrase literacy in art quite broadly to denote knowledge about art. By knowledge about art we mean the collection of practices, or the field of sociohistorical knowledge associated with the field of art, or both. Knowledge about line, form, space, composition, technique, and media exemplifies what constitutes literacy in the practices of art. This kind of knowledge was gestured to by Winterson (1995) when she spoke of media and technique in the phrase, “the brush strokes in thin oils” (p. 3). Winterson also signaled the sociohistorical element in art when she referred to “a Renaissance beauty” (p. 3). Her reference recalls a significant cultural period and the representational forms associated with that period. Knowledge of the sociohistorical aspect may include knowledge of social movements and art’s place within them.

As part of our exploration of literacy, we also consider in art the artist’s representation of a particular content while working within the practices and sociohistorical traditions of visual representation, and the interpretation of the artist’s representation by readers/viewers. In essence, then, the representational power of any artwork/text (whether that literacy is visual or linguistic) lies in the meaning potential of the artwork/text for readers/ viewers (Halliday, 1978).² Winterson (1995), for instance, noted the image of the painting that stopped her: “a figure without a context, in its own context, a haunted woman in blue robes pulling a huge moon face through a subterranean waterway” (p. 3). In this phrase, Winterson showed that she was struck not just by the haunting image rendered by the artist, but by the double moment of the “timeboundedness” of the figure represented and the modernity of a piece that clearly was created long before Winterson’s interpretive encounter.

Representing Meaning

We begin our exploration of art as literacy in chapter 2 by considering what it means to represent meaning. The representation of meaning in a variety of forms is an inherently human act. Writing, visual art, and music are among the forms that immediately come to mind as the kinds of efforts humans make toward expressing meanings for others to interpret (Langer, 1957). In exploring how representation works, we draw on concepts used to think about language and use a semiotic framework to guide our thinking.

In our interpretation of semiotic theory, we use a social semiotic perspective (Halliday, 1978; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Moxey, 1994) in which semiotic systems are conceived very broadly to denote any collection of elements used in relation to each other to represent meaning. This definition is a very open one allowing for many possibilities of meaning representation (visual, linguistic, social, and cultural) to be considered within a similar framework. Any single instance of representation, such as a particular artwork or a particular piece of writing created, is a text available for reading and interpretation. In any one text, semiotic systems can overlap and co-occur with other semiotic systems and, in doing so, can work with or against the other systems. For instance, the visual rendering of a word may be the opposite of the word’s linguistic meaning.

Literacy in a semiotic system is facility in the process of creating or interpreting the signs of one or more semiotic systems used by a social collective. This conceptualization of literacy fits well with how we are thinking about literacy in art: Knowledge about the collection of practices and sociohistorical knowledge associated with the field of art is knowledge concerning the creation and interpretation of the semiotic systems used in art. The openness of semiotic theory enables us to stretch the conceptualization of literacy by drawing on the idea that signs work within a social collective and, as a consequence, are inherently ideological. Volosinov (1983) suggested that “the sign is a creation between individuals, a creation within a social milieu…Only that which has acquired social value can enter the world of ideology, take shape and establish itself there” (p. 22). Semiotic theory extends the definition of literacy so that the sociohistorical practices and knowledge associated with art can be considered in terms of power relations and social values.

With this framing in place, we explore the ontogenesis of written literate practices for very young children. The power of this exploration for visual art lies in the fact that recent research in the field of emergent literacy (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984; Steward, 1995) reveals children’s progressions and regressions as they move toward conventionality in written language representation. These intellectual moves are invariably intertwined with children’s efforts to disambiguate written language from visual art in terms of both form and function. This research stands in contrast to, but yet complements, the research into developmental theories about children’s learning of art (Bland, 1968; Brittain, 1979; Hildredth, 1941; Lindstrom, 1957; Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1982; Paine, 1981) and the romantic vision of children’s work as revealing an innocent eye (Fineberg, 1997). In essence, these bodies of research converge on the fact that the opportunity to become literate in art is a function of the opportunities each individual has with art, and these, in turn, are often related to the social value placed on art.

The Study

We begin our exploration of one art teacher’s classes in Riverview Middle School (RMS) located in a large U.S. town.³ We open our exploration in chapter 3 with a presentation of the pieces generated by the students in the class. We present their work in the form of a galleria–a show that takes the artworks out of the context of the events in the classroom and places them in a visual space, where the possibilities for interpretation are open to reactions such as Winterson’s (1995), where our interpretations as researchers do not intrude on the works and do not begin to direct the possibilities of interpretation (Paley, 1995). We realize that the reproduction of the artworks in black-and-white as well as the photographic reproduction already layers an interpretive film over the pieces. Nevertheless, we believe that the opportunity for the reader/viewer to interpret the pieces independently of any critical text allows the pieces to tell their own tales for each reader/viewer, creating multiple moments of interpretive possibility, not unlike those Winterson noted earlier.

If the pieces are viewed before the reading of our interpretive text is undertaken, we think that readers/viewers may enjoy moments of surprise, dismay, disagreement, tolerance, or recognition in relation to the interpretations we have brought to bear on the images presented. In addition, the presentation of the artworks in this formalistic way implicitly troubles the assumption of “whether children and youth have anything to contribute to a society’s cultural capital” (Paley, 1995, p. 3). In essence, it asks why children’s art is largely forgotten, ignored, or suppressed by cultural institutions and challenges the viewer to consider what such forgetting, ignorance, and suppression might mean.

Our interpretation begins in chapter 4 with the work of the principal researcher in this project, Peggy Albers. Drawing on archival data and contemporary sources, Peggy creates a picture of the context in which the work was created, the town of Riverview: a town covering the range of socioeconomic status, but in which 95% of the population is White; a town wherein evangelical Christian religion is dominant; a town with an active Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Across a period of 2 years, Peggy observed and collected data on more than 400 students who passed through one art teacher’s classes. Using the interviews, artworks, journals, school documents, classroom handouts, and field notes that Peggy collected as a starting point, we examine how the sixth graders in the classes she observed grew toward literacy in art; the ways in which they represented the ideas, feelings, and culture that permeated their existence; and some of the interpretations that arise in relation to their artworks.

Six to 9 weeks⁴ is not a long time to make an impact on the lives of students. Yet, this is the range of time that Louise Woolf, the art teacher at RMS, had to work with each of her classes. We begin our exploration of the students’ learning by revealing, in their own words, their history with art as a process and as a body of knowledge. This history hints at imagined and real losses of a passion for art, the diminishing of emergent literacy skills in art because of immersion in limiting environments, and the push and pull of peer culture on the artistic sensibilities of these young adolescents.

In the context of Louise Woolf’s literate art classroom, sixth graders encountered several features that distinguished it from many of their school-based art experiences of the past. To begin with, Louise maintained an expectancy that students would view art class in a manner not unlike that of the studio art classes characteristic of her own art education, wherein an aspect of artistic practice, technique, or skill was demonstrated and students then were provided with the opportunity to explore that practice, technique, or skill in whatever way they wished. In addition, she recognized that immersion in visual culture was not enough for students. These emerging artists had to have their attention drawn to techniques and skills. However, Louise also recognized that the students could learn to control and elaborate on techniques and skills only if they were given the opportunity to create self-inspired artistic representations. These opportunities included not only freedom of choice for the content and direction of a piece, but typically also a choice in the media that could be used and allowance for collaborative efforts in the production of artworks. Although Louise’s students generated works in the traditional media characteristic of their early elementary school experiences with art, the range of media they used in her class was an indication of the power of the combined demonstrations, opportunities, and pedagogical interventions that heightened students’ attentiveness to skills and techniques in the process of creating a representation.

We interpret the creations of Louise’s students in several ways. In chapter 5, we first of all consider these representations as artifacts of social history, a social history that carries with it concepts of sexuality, gender, race, class, and other identities. Two principal routes are used to carry out this exploration. One route is through the actions and talk of the students during the creation of artworks. The second route follows a series of interviews conducted by Peggy and Louise with the students in the class. These interviews ask the students to respond to questions about palette choices in artistic representations and the content of what is represented. Together, these opportunities provide a grounding for a contextualized interpretation of the artworks generated, an interpretation that remembers the contexts (classroom, school, and community) surrounding the production of the artworks, speculating on how these contexts inform students’ representational efforts.

Indeed, it is toward the creation of artistic representational and interpretive possibilities that we turn for our concluding chapter. In this chapter we argue, as Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), Laspina (1998), and many others have insisted, that the visual world needs much more consideration in educational circles. However, our arguments are about the kinds of conditions that make it possible for children and adults to explore art. We consider, for example, the dilemma of the generalist teacher who personally may be uneducated in art. We consider the arguments for and against Discipline-Based Art Education. Also, we consider the current sociopolitical climate for enlarging art education in schools.

With that framework in place, we lay out what we believe are directions for pedagogical possibilities in art education. In our f...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• Acknowledgments
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 THE REPRESENTATION OF MEANING
• 3 GALLERIA
• 4 LOCATION, LOSS, AND LONGING
• 5 FREEDOM, FORM, AND FEEDBACK
• 6 IDENTITY, IDEOLOGY, AND IMAGE
• 7 CREATING CONDITIONS FOR ART AS LITERACY
• APPENDIX: METHODOLOGY NOTES
• REFERENCES
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX