Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts, Volume II

A Project of the International Reading Association

James Flood, Shirley Brice Heath, Diane Lapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317639695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts, Volume II brings together state-of-the-art research and practice on the evolving view of literacy as encompassing not only reading, writing, speaking, and listening, but also the multiple ways through which learners gain access to knowledge and skills. It forefronts as central to literacy education the visual, communicative, and performative arts, and the extent to which all of the technologies that have vastly expanded the meanings and uses of literacy originate and evolve through the skills and interests of the young.

A project of the International Reading Association, published and distributed by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Visit http://www.reading.org for more information aboutInternationl Reading Associationbooks, membership, and other services.

Part I

HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

Renee Hobbs

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY

Humans are irrepressible communicators. A writer for the New York Times recently estimated that, from the days of Sumerian clay tablets until today, humans have created at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows, and short films, and 100 billion public Web pages (Kelly, 2006). For young people growing up in the 21st century, this ever-expanding array of texts creates important challenges and opportunities both in and out of school. The chapters in Part I examine the historical, theoretical, and policy dimensions of an expanding conceptualization of literacy, one that includes the symbol systems of language, image, performance, and digital technologies of communication and expression.

Authors in Part I explore the historical factors that have contributed to make visual and digital texts ubiquitous, and they examine the ways that educators and policy makers have responded to this challenge. A number of important controversies and tensions are emerging as literacy is positioned within a global culture that is replete with digital technologies. New tools and technologies enable every individual to be both a reader and a writer using an ever-expanding number of modes of expression. In these chapters, the process of meaning making is examined in light of visual media, media production, and the interactive technologies of gaming and online communication, revealing new dimensions and issues that link literacy to inquiry from the fields of education, communication, media studies, social psychology, cultural studies, art history, and public policy. The next generation of literacy scholars and educators will need a broad perspective to realize the benefits and avoid the drawbacks that may result from an expanded perspective on literacy.

REFERENCE

Kelly, K. (2006, May 14). Scan this book! New York Times Magazine, p. 43.

1

VISION FOR LEARNING: HISTORY, THEORY, AND AFFIRMATION

Shirley Brice Heath

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Robert Wollach

BROWN UNIVERSITY

Try an experiment. Pick up any newspaper, turn to any television channel, or listen to any radio station. In the news reports of any of these media, check off every reference to vision, visual, seeing, display, appeared, and other terms similar in meaning. This activity undertaken as an “experiment” will allow you to recognize the ubiquity of references in the media to the dependence of understanding and communicating on our metaphorical use of concepts surrounding vision.

Western society is and has been cut through with the idea that visual learning, including observation of performances, provides the most fundamental and efficient channel for information transfer. These essential facts about vision have held through human history. The capacity for vision came well before the biological development of language, and as the capacity for communication through oral symbol systems evolved, the visual functioned as primary reinforcement of meaning transfer in verbal and performative communication and of memory retention.¹

This chapter looks at a few examples of the power of the visual to stimulate spontaneous verbal communication and to support conveyance across time and space of shared memories. In the first section of this chapter (as in the opening portion of the Handbook), we take an historical view on learning, exchanging, and belonging through all the arts that constitute “multimodal literacies.” We look at two historical cases to illustrate how visual learning undergirds many of the functions, goals, and channels of literacies. These cases, drawn from the Middle Ages, may seem far-fetched in conception and vastly different from contemporary digital technologies. Yet with these, we lay the groundwork that will enable us to see just how persistent are key social continuities in patterns of interdependence that tie the visual with the communicative and performative.

In the second section, we support this interdependence through evidence from current work in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences. Theories and findings from these fields are extending what we know about the neural operations that support our capacities for envisioning, embodying, or articulating knowledge, wisdom, skills, and information.

The third and final section of this chapter threads several key themes from the prior two sections through selected aspects of current advances in videogames. We take these up because of their rapid rise to near universality in the postindustrial world and their foreshadowing of technological and social trends in the arts that challenge long-standing views about individual learning, the role of play, and the primacy of texts in literacy. Examined here in close detail is the affirmative value of communal membership carried out by engaging through multiparty video games in collaborative visual and performative design.

The chapter closes with the challenge of keeping a Janus-like consciousness—looking back to history and forward to what we still have to learn about how the brain works from and with visual and embodied learning (Kosslyn & Osherson, 1995; LeDoux, 2002; Levin, 2004). Moreover, aspects of today’s modes of visual learning parallel in several ways features and purposes prominent in the Middle Ages. This basic acknowledgment carries unending ramifications for our perspectives on literacy and its rapidly evolving dependence on intertwined layering of graphic design, role-playing, symbol systems, and music.

LOOKING BACK

Choices abound of where to look for the origins of the fundamental roles of the visual conveyance of meaning (whether with or without accompanying print or script representations). We can start with cartography, account ledgers, or judicial and constitutional documents. Or we can begin with the earliest recorded accounts of dramatic productions—those performed by traveling minstrels and mime artists, or within the liturgical cycle plays of the Church, or the spectacular pageant wagons that moved from town to town to celebrate particular historical events (Beadle, 1994). From even the shadowy beginnings we have of the earliest theater, we know that the iconography of architecture, dress, and adornments of civic life found its way into the spectacle of these plays as well as into the sculpted, painted, and stained-glass images of pictorial arts in churches and governmental buildings. It is in the merger of spectacle, narrative, and religious and economic history that we begin to look at the visual basis of literacy.

Because of its close associations with the beginnings of the book in the Western world, we start our historical sweep with a brief look at illumination. On this topic, we have not only ample documentation of process but also physical products that provide insight into the multiple ways in which humans have long created and valued pictorial support for music, oral and written language, and the performing arts. Illumination has its primary historical association with manuscripts. Yet, long before the manuscripts and books of the Middle Ages came scrolls, produced in support of political and legal matters, as well as calendrical records, or commercial transactions and religious participation. By providing possibilities for longer preservation and for wider distribution, illuminated manuscripts and books enabled those who could afford to sponsor or own them to ensure for their families or civic units that memories of events, places, and people continued beyond the span of a single generation.²

Manuscript books began in the third century and continued primarily as a monastic and court industry through the 12th century. From the 13th century forward, the commercial book trade took over their production. It was during medieval times, however, that illumination came to be a term that referred to any ornament that was perceived as making a text legible, that is, read or deciphered easily. Borders, fancy pen work, or pictures to be read in co-ordination with the text or to elaborate initial letters would be considered legibility enhancements. All of these first drew the reader’s eye into the text and then deepened the meanings of the written words.

For example, in choral texts provided for some cathedrals in Europe, these illuminations took the form of miniatures and rendered within a single quintessential scene an entire narrative. Stories such as those that surround the Nativity, the Last Supper, Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, or even such specific scenes as the visit of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (Mother of James) to the sepulcher would be called forth within each miniature created within the text of the music. These stories would be known to listeners and readers as scriptural narratives told and read from pulpits, but also rendered visually in lead glass windows, paintings, friezes, and frescoes on the walls of private chapels and churches and cathedrals. These separate illuminations or miniatures are termed such both for their small size and for their power to reflect in the tiniest of scale the magnificence of scriptural messages and the intricacy of natural wonders (such as that of a single flower at the height of its bloom or a magnificent peacock in full display).

Two aspects of literacy carried within illuminations, including miniatures, merit special attention for their continuity. Yet both aspects rarely receive attention in contemporary studies of how reading works. First is the fact that these visual (largely pictorial) aids to legibility and learning affirmed the collective social and shared-knowledge membership of those using the illuminated manuscripts or books. Second is the expansive force that such small intricate visual renderings carried.

To demonstrate this first aspect, we consider in some detail illuminated choir books in their support role for the religious services’ liturgy (Carli, n.d.). As noted above, the miniatures pictured scenes that, in most cases, immediately conveyed a particular Biblical story. But the miniatures related also to the music and liturgy used for particular celebrations and rituals within the Church calendar. For example, the Sundays leading up to and following Epiphany (when the wise men are said to have been told of the birth of Jesus) have special music. Embedded within the musical score would be miniatures of key scenes within this particular story or renderings in exquisite detail of some item (e.g., one of the gifts brought by the wise men) that symbolizes the event.

For the second aspect, we also use the miniatures included within choir books of Gregorian music. Deep within the details of these miniatures were messages discernible to choir members and carrying musical, as well as symbolic, significance. Gregorian music is based on certain modalities (e.g., tetrachord, hexachord, and octachord), and at this important level, the miniatures could carry within them symbols to indicate to the singers (in advance of the chords within the musical text itself) the modality of, for example, the response to come following certain prayers.

The point here is that the deepening or expansive power of the miniatures was carried not only in the general association of a certain story with a particular seasonal ritual celebration but also within details of adornment around the single scene of the miniature. For example, a miniature including a certain number of angels with a particular combination of musical instruments and choristers would convey the message of octachord, perceived to be a portrayal of “perfection” in form and harmony. This modality of Gregorian music would be further reinforced in its “perfection” by the fact that the story behind the scene conveyed in one of the accompanying miniatures would be interpreted as embodying perfection itself—for example, the Virgin Mary being taken up into Heaven (Carli, n.d, pp. 43–44).

Critical for understanding the multiplying effects of illuminations is a sense of not only the associations they carried to music and written and spoken texts, but also the many forms these illuminations could assume. Some were decorative initials that carried within them one or two scenes that conveyed entire stories. These initial letters (that usually opened portions of extended scripted or printed texts) held within their curves and crevices details that conveyed Biblical scenes from the Old and New Testaments: Abraham’s readying his son Isaac as sacrifice, the shaming of King David by the prophet Nathan, or the clearing of the tables of money changers in the tabernacle.

But forms of scripts changed during the Middle Ages. Therefore, the scribes who created the illuminations could choose the type of script that might afford more or less room for internal additions—distant craggy mountains, angels or cherubs, cityscapes, and so forth. These often bore no relation to any accompanying textual materials. Scribes also had borders and frames, as well as ornamental flourishes within the pages, as “extra” hooks and corners. Within borders, scribes sometimes created frames of narrative that in their sequencing told a particular story not necessarily associated with Biblical texts. (Both frames and borders of illuminated texts foreshadowed today’s storyboards and comic strips in their linear portrayals of narratives.)

Borders and frames, more often than not, particularly in medieval manuscript books prepared for noble households or for doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, and merchants, also pictured flowers, fruits, insects, and birds, along with traditional grotesques. String foliage, appearing as sprays of flowers or climbing vines, enclosed these creatures as secondary ornaments. It is significant that until the eighteenth century, the term vignette meant “border,” and, in fact, portraitures, histories, and vignettes were combined in the designs of medieval books (Watson, 2003, p. 35). Also within these borders, as well as within some large ornamented initials, were quintessential scenes of everyday life: the hard-working peasant woman home from collecting firewood and scolding her lazy husband.

Though illuminated manuscripts are generally thought of as strictly religious, their art often portrayed grotesque animals and figures that bear no connection to religious content. By introducing the play of humor or satire, illuminations multiplied the interpretive meanings a reader or parishioner could carry in his or her attitude in relation to a Biblical scripture. Playful monkeys, grotesque figures covering their ears, or hybrid figures blending fantastical creatures with half bodies of humans could convey attitudes ranging from cynical to incredulous. Reversals of the realities of everyday life, such as hares chasing dogs, also bore evidence that scribes chose to include in their art their own thinking beyond the rigid, given, or strictly “textual.” These scribes introduced into their work what today might be considered obscene or bawdry illustrations, showing the persistent inclination of humans to subvert conventional hierarchies.

The role of play for extended meanings, through both the fantastic and the everyday, but often in association with the noble and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Note to Readers
• Preface
• Contributors
• Part I HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
• Part II METHODS OF INQUIRY IN THE COMMUNICATIVE, VISUAL, AND PERFORMATIVE ARTS
• Part III FAMILY AND COMMUNITY CONTEXTS IN THE COMMUNICATIVE, VISUAL, AND PERFORMATIVE ARTS
• Part IV INTO THE LANGUAGE ARTS CLASSROOM THROUGH THE VISUAL AND COMMUNICATIVE ARTS
• Author Index
• Subject Index