Teaching Literacy Through The Arts

Accessible and hands-on yet grounded in research, this book addresses the "whats," "whys," and "how-tos" of integrating literacy instruction and the arts in grades K-8. Even teachers without any arts background will gain the skills they need to bring music, drama, visual arts, and dance into their classrooms. Provided are a wealth of specific resources and activities that other teachers have successfully used to build students' oral language, concepts of print, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing, while also promoting creativity and self-expression. Special features include reproducible worksheets and checklists for developing, evaluating, and implementing arts-related lesson plans.

This book explores the many dialogues that exist between the arts and literacy. It shows how the arts are inherently multimodal and therefore interface regularly with literate practice in learning and teaching contexts. It asks the questions: What does literacy look like in the arts? And what does it mean to be arts literate? It explores what is important to know and do in the arts and also what literacies are engaged in, through the journey to becoming an artist. The arts for the purpose of this volume include five art forms: Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts. The book provides a more productive exploration of the arts-literacy relationship. It acknowledges that both the arts and literacy are open-textured concepts and notes how they accommodate each other, learn about, and from each other and can potentially make education ‘better’. It is when the two stretch each other that we see an educationally productive dialogic relationship emerge.

Using simple, easy-to-follow instructions, supported throughout with clear diagrams and examples of children's work, Paul Johnson demonstrates how scores of different book forms can be made from a single sheet of paper.

In The Power of Pictures book and companion DVD, Beth Olshansky introduces teachers to her innovative art-based approach to literacy instruction. Widely practiced in classrooms across the country, the model has been proven by research to improve literacy achievement with a wide range of learners, especially those who struggle with verbal skills. At the heart of her approach is the Artists/Writers Workshop. Through study of quality picture books and hands-on art experiences, students learn to visualize, “paint pictures with words,” and ultimately create their own extraordinary artistic and literary work. The book and DVD explain how any teacher can successfully use this process to enable all students, particularly low performers, to make dramatic gains in both reading and writing.

This book highlights the unique and co-generative intersections of the arts and literacy that promote critical and socially engaged teaching and learning. Based on a year-long ethnography with two literacy teachers and their students in an arts-based public high school, this volume makes an argument for arts-based education as the cultivation of a critical aesthetic practice in the literacy classroom. Through rich example and analysis, it shows how, over time, this practice alters the in-school learning space in significant ways by making it more constructivist, more critical, and fundamentally more relational.

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 about Internationl Reading Associationbooks, membership, and other services.

This book extends traditional language arts content by offering multiple communicative channels for expressing, representing, and responding to ideas. The book equips teachers with ways to maximize children's creative potential and critical literacy through activities involving “the arts” (visual arts, music, dance, drama and film including video, TV and computer technology). The author provides thorough coverage of literacy products, process strategies, procedures, and resources not typically found in language arts texts. All of the literacy tasks presented, which fit into Howard Gardner's framework of multiple intelligences, recognize children's different abilities, talents, needs, learning styles, interests, and cultural background.

Partnerships are now pervasive in global education and development, but are they creating equitable, cooperative, and positive relationships? Through case studies of prominent multistakeholder partnerships—including the Education Cannot Wait Fund and Global Partnership for Education—as well as a comprehensive analysis of the global education network, this book exposes clear power imbalances that persist in the international aid environment. The author reveals how actors and organizations from high-income countries continue to wield disproportionate influence, while the private sector holds a growing degree of authority in public policy circles. In light of such evidence, this book questions if partnerships truly ameliorate power asymmetries, or if they instead reproduce the precise inequities they are meant to eliminate. “This text offers a thoughtful look into both theoretical and practical issues surrounding arts integration as a viable strategy for increasing students’ achievement and access to higher education and career pathways. It is especially timely in the context of a widespread focus on equity and inclusion as teachers are facing more diversity in the classroom than ever before.” —Kristen Greer-Paglia, CEO, P.S. ARTS “This book, offering a rich buffet of art-based activities grounded in critical ideas about teaching and learning, includes topics as oral language development, visual thinking strategies, making meaning of narrative and informational texts, and expression through narrative and informational writing. An excellent guide to teachers aspiring to integrate the arts into their curriculum, it is both a delightful and useful read!” —Liora Bresler, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana