Shared Literacies: Promoting Thinking and Learning in Art Education Through Movement Literacy

Abstract

The notion of Shared Literacies describes a process in which specialization in two separate domains merge to generate an opportunity for a new kind of knowledge to evolve. The paper presents a study where "movement literacy" (expertise in the field of dance in both theoretical and practical aspects) meets "graphic-symbolic literacy" (expertise in the creation and decoding of graphic-symbolic representations of any kind of knowledge). The theoretical background contains an overview of the two kinds of literacy, as well as two pertinent pedagogical ideas: the ability to translate information between different modes of representation; and self-generation of representations, an idea which emphasizes the independent design of symbols by learners. Both are tools for constructing a deeper understanding of a given phenomenon. The Shared Literacies' products are independently developed graphic-symbolic representations for dance movements, which emerged through a designated methodology. These reveal new aspects of the participants' insights: in the field of movement, learners became aware of its various aspects, including the ability to analyze, think of and conceptualize the components of bodily movement; in the field of symbolic representation, participants improved their abilities to manage multifaceted information about a phenomenon, using symbolic knowledge already at hand, as well as developing new representational means. The study demonstrates the power of Shared Literacies -the integration between different artistic and general fields of thought -as a novel approach for education in the Arts.