Purpose Not Apathy: Arts Literacy in ELA
Do you struggle with student apathy? Is it difficult to convince your students to revise and improve their writing? Do you feel like your students are disconnected from their daily work, questioning its relevance in their lives?
These are huge problems facing us as educators today.
One Beautiful Solution
I recently read about a beautiful solution. Eileen Landay and Kurt Wooton founded The ArtsLiteracy Project to bring arts integration into classrooms around the world, and their book, A Reason to Read, shows how it works and why it’s so powerful.
Let me tell you a little about it, then we’ll dive into some of the most memorable project examples from the book and three ways you can get started creating Arts Literacy projects of your own.
When a classroom uses arts integration, students have the chance to write, perform, construct, and create. They become a community of meaning-makers, artists, collaborators. Their reading and writing takes on new depth because they’re invested in it. Their talents and gifts are honored by the class; whether students are good at drawing cartoon characters, beatboxing, taking photographs, or singing out a barbaric yawp, these strengths become the strengths of a community of artists engaged together on a project that matters to them.
By getting students up and moving, building community, and weaving together many different ways for students to connect to texts through performance, writing, discussion, and art, educators can build units that give students a reason to care about their own literacy. Students will build the skills they need, doing work they want to do.
Work that is Meaningful Now
Landay and Wootton, like many progressive educators and thinkers whose work I’ve read recently, argue we need our classrooms to focus on the kids we have and the work that is meaningful to them NOW, not build basic skills and drill them for some imagined future in which those skills begin to matter to them. They argue against the way standardized testing is creating a homogenized version of school, where the artistry, cultural backgrounds, and unique gifts of both students and teachers fall to the side to make room for the all-important testing gateways.
I’m with them.
In A Reason to Read, Landay and Wootton introduce their concept of The Performance Cycle, dividing arts integration units into a series of categories from which teachers can draw activity ideas. They created these simple and flexible categories to represent the patterns of best practice they saw after watching teachers and artists collaborate on many units in their summer lab school.
Happily, they’ve provided a ton of these activities in their online handbook over at The ArtsLiteracy Project website, and they’ll soon be publishing a book with an even wider array of options. By clicking on any of the category headings (Building Community, Entering Text, Comprehending Text, Creating Text, Rehearsing/Revising Text, Performing Text, and Reflection), you can find creative activities to help you build a richly layered unit that integrates many ways for students to engage with purpose. These categories serve as an accessible framework for designing your own unit on, well, just about any text.
Wootton and Landay talk about what it means for educators to use these activities to create “thick air,” one of my favorite ideas in the book. When the air in the classroom is thick, students have a swirl of ideas, memories, connections and insights already hovering around them when they approach a writing task. They aren’t staring at a blank piece of paper wondering what their teacher wants them to write on it. They’re diving in, eagerly penning a waterfall of ideas they can barely contain and wouldn’t want to.
Sounds good, eh?
Success Stories
Let’s look at some of the units shared in the book.
I’d never heard of “Literatura de cordel” (string literature) before reading A Reason to Read, but now I find myself thinking of all the ways it could be used. It’s a simple concept with that provides rich inspiration for our classrooms. “Cordels are strings stretched between two posts in markets or town squares used to display folhetos, small inexpensive chapbooks containing long narrative poems and illustrations” (36). Daniel Soares used the cordel in his classroom in Brazil. His students read and discussed poems, wrote poems of their own, then shared their work with their peers in class and chose some poems to post on the cordel out in the hallway. Just as cordel authors in the marketplace often stood in front of their work interacting with passers-by and performing their pieces, Daniel’s students performed their work in the hall in front of the cordel at times, calling out to other kids and adding bits of improvisation as they performed their poetry.
When Daniel and his students’ city, Inhumas, was struck by a series of murders, the kids were frustrated by how little their authorities did about the violence. They decided to visit all the schools in their area and encourage every student to contribute a piece of writing or art to show their feelings about what was happening. They created a giant cordel for peace, consisting of more than 6,000 papers, stretching all the way around the lake in the heart of their community. Their work made a difference in their town, breaking the silence about the violence, and their class pulled together as a literacy community around their shared purpose.
How might you use the cordel to help give purpose to your students’ writing? A cordel for protest, a cordel for community, a gratitude cordel? You could create a cordel across one wall of your classroom, in your hallways, or even in front of your school.
Another powerful example in the book features students who had recently immigrated to the United States. Their teachers’ goal was not only to teach them vocabulary, grammatical structure, and reading comprehension, but to inspire them to care about reading and writing and want to do more of it.
“…The teachers sought first and foremost to help students understand the purpose of the work and its connection with their lived experience as young persons with rich opportunities and promising futures. / To reach this goal, students viewed and created written and spoken texts and visual arts designed to culminate in a final performance. With their teachers, they visited area museums to experience and discuss art. In the classroom, the students listened to music of performers such as Miles Davis and learned about his life as an artist. They read a range of primary sources and literature about people traveling across physical and metaphorical borders, including the poetry of Langston Hughes, short stories and essays by Sandra Cisneros and Edwidge Danticat, and myths from Ovid, including Icarus and Daedalus. The teachers wanted students to interact with the material, experiment, and play using the many literacies - or multiliteracies - at their disposal.” (169)
Len Newman and Richard Kinslow guided their students toward a final performance, “We are the Dream Keepers: These are our Stories,” in which each student wrote and recorded the story of their journey to America, then worked together to create huge puppets that eventually acted out their stories in combination with their own performance and recorded audio in front of a large audience. At the end of the performance, their principal turned to a nearby teacher and said, “‘I didn't know these students could do this.’” (169)
Three Ways to Build your own Arts Literacy Unit
#1 Start with a meaningful work you already teach: There’s no need to scrap what you’re doing. Start with a text that your students connect to. Pull a big question from it that relates to your students’ lives. For example, for The Hate U Give, you might build your unit around the question: What does it mean for other people to understand where we are coming from? Why does it matter? Then weave together the discussion and writing prompts that already work well for you with activities from the performance cycle, building in an overall project around student responses to the big question in their personal writing and art. In the end, students will create a performance or exhibition that pulls together their own written and artistic pieces with performances of meaningful moments and takeaways from Angie Thomas’s book.
The final production might include student photo essays about identity, a choral reading of a spoken word piece written by a small group of students about their homes, a short student-directed documentary about the Black Lives Matter Movement, and an original song sung by three students about their experience moving to the United States from Haiti, all woven together with readings and performances of key scenes in the novel.
#2 Collaborate with a Guest Artist - When Eileen and Kurt first began their summer arts literacy lab school program through Brown, they brought artists and teachers together to teach texts and then watched what happened. The first time I ever taught a play, I felt so clueless, with almost no background in performing theater. In fact, I had had several nightmares about being in plays and forgetting my lines even though I had never auditioned for one. So I asked my cousin, a theater professional, to come and stay with me and spend a few days with my classes.
I watched her teach them acting warm-up exercises, teach them to create thematic sculptures and tableaus with their bodies, teach them about character motivation and “I want” statements. I never taught theater the same way again, always using her acting exercises in conjunction with my theater units and soon writing a grant for a “theater corner” full of props and costumes in my classroom.
Try reaching out to an artist in your community. Ask about collaborating and bringing new insight to a unit you’re crafting. Consider the elements of the performance cycle as you brainstorm together. Even if your visitor can meet with you just one time and come in for one day, you never know where your collaboration might lead.
#3 Work within Mini-Studios - Think about artistic mediums that might help your students explore the print text and essential question of your unit. Might stop-motion animation be an interesting lens for response? Blackout poetry? Printmaking? Mural creation? Rapping? Hip Hop? Imagine your unit as a series of studios students will move through, exploring text through different mediums via an introduction and several activities within each. At the end, they’ll have learned new ways to express themselves, as well as crafted artistic responses to your text from totally different angles.
In Closing
If you’ve ever wondered how to get your students out of their seats and on their feet, you’ve found an answer. ArtsLiteracy is a quality solution to the persistent problems of student apathy and exhaustion. Is it easy? No. Is there a printable curriculum set? Not really. But learning more and giving yourself permission to try these new things that might fail before they succeed just might be one of the most important gifts you give your students. As Eileen Landay said to me in our interview tonight, “Start with small steps.”
Find out more
Want to learn more from Eileen Landay? She’s my next guest on The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. If you haven’t got time to read all the teacher books you want to, how about putting in your earbuds and listening to conversations with their authors the next time you take a walk, do the dishes, or change up your classroom bulletin boards?
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stichr, Blubrry, or Podbean.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Betsy loves to travel the world (she'll be back, Morocco!), play playdoh with her little ones, and cook a range of desserts that would make the Hogwarts house elves proud. If you're interested in creative teaching strategies, check out her podcast "The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast" on iTunes and hop into her Facebook group "Creative High School English." Prefer Pinterest? Instagram? She'd love to meet up with you there too!
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