MODULE 11- Arts and Creative Literacy
Teachers need to be creative by all means because teaching entails critical thinking and
creativity not only in presenting lessons but perhaps in all facets of instructional endeavor.
Therefore, students’ creativity potential should be honed through various pedagogic
techniques, classroom activities and student engagement. Teachers have to understand creative
literacy deeply to guide them in assessing their own creativity and that of their students.
Arts and Creative Literacy
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. Moreover, creativity is the
ability to see the world in new ways. Therefore, creative individuals exhibit the ability to switch
between different modes of thinking and shift their mental focus that suggests a connection
between creativity and dynamic interactions of brain networks (Sun, et. al, 2019).
Likewise, creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Henceforth,
it is characterized by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make
connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions. It involves two
processes: thinking, then producing (Naiman, 2011.).
As such, creativity is a combinatorial force: the ability to tap into one’s ‘inner’ pool of
resources, such as knowledge, insight, information, inspiration; and the fragments in the mind to
combine them in extraordinary new ways (Popova, n.d. in Naiman, 2011). It is also the process of
bringing something new into being that requires passion and commitment.
Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a
way of thinking. It can be learned by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using
imagination and synthesizing information.
The ability to generate creative and innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind,
but also a function of five key behaviors that optimize brain for discovery: (1) associating or
drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields; (2) questioning
or posing queries that challenge common wisdom; (3) observing or scrutinizing the behavior of
others to identify new ways of doing things; (4) networking or meeting people with different ideas
and perspectives; and (5) experimenting or constructing interactive experiences and provoking
responses to see what insights emerge.
Developing literacies of the arts and creativity involves design of physical learning
environment, the emotional environment, scheduling. organization and implementation of
curriculum and instruction and attention to the body and the brain. Therefore, teachers should be
empowered in developing these literacies among students with the support of the administrators,
parents, and other stakeholders.
Seven Habits of Highly Creative People
Naiman (2014) opined that if a person makes a habit of the seven practices, he/she will be highly
creative in his/her field. Thus, these would help teachers attain highest possible level of creativity.
1. Prepare the ground. Creativity requires an absorbed mind, a relaxed state of focus and attention
by giving the self sufficient time and space needed while letting the desire to create from the
pleasure of creative expression and inspiration.
2. Plant seeds for creativity. It is important to put attention on what you want to create, not on
complaints and set an intention to produce the desired results.
3. Live in the question. Ask questions, instead of trying to find immediate answers and pay
attention
to questions that other people ask.
4. Feed your brain. Get interested in something that later can provide you wisdom and ideas if
you
learn to make connections between people, places and things that are not usually connected.
5. Experiment and explore; Follow your curiosity, experiment with ideas, and learn from your
mistakes therefore, the quality of your creativity will improve.
6. Replenish your creative stock. You must learn to be self' nourishing and translate hobbies,
talents and skills into wonderful potentials.
7. Liberate your creativity. Your child’s play provides the clue to your creativity, potentials and
passion.
In general, creativity takes on many forms in business, art, design education and science.
When you express your creativity in these domains you have the ability to make life indeed a work
of art (Naiman 2011).
Eye-Hand Coordination
In most of our creative activities and endeavors, we integrate eyehand coordination as we
inhibit our usual body functioning.
Eye-hand coordination (also known as hand-eye coordination) is the coordinated control
of eye movement with hand movement and the processing of visual input to guide reaching and
grasping along with the use of proprioception of hands to guide the eyes. Elle hand coordination
can be observed in diverse activities, such as the movement of objects, handwriting, catching a
ball, sports, performance, music. reading, computer gaming, typing, and others. In short, it
becomes part of the mechanisms of performing everyday tasks. Without it, people would be
unable to carry out even the simplest actions in daily life.
Eye-hand coordination therefore, is the ability of the vision system to coordinate the
information received through the eyes to control, guide, and direct the hands in the
accomplishment of a given task. It is also a complex cognitive ability as it unites visual and motor
skills, allowing the hand to be guided by the visual stimulation that the eyes receive. It is the ability
to do activities that require simultaneous use of hands and eyes, like an activity
that uses the information that eyes perceive (visual spatial perception) to guide the hands in
carrying out a movement.
Hand-eye coordination is important for child development and academic success, which
is equally important among adults to use in countless activities on a daily basis. Most activities in
day-to-day life use some degree of eye-hand coordination, the reason why it is really important
to develop it as possible. Obviously, visual information is used to correct an inappropriate behavior
in a situation.
We use our eyes to direct attention to a stimulus and help the brain understand where the
body is located in space (self-perception). Reciprocally, we use our hands to simultaneously carry
out a determined task based on the visual information that our eyes receive
Examples of eye-hand coordination
1. In writing. When making lines, the eyes send visual ' information to the brain to tell where the
hand is placed and if handwriting is legible.
2. Typing on a keyboard. Although the types of movement are different, but visual information is
used to tell the brain how to guide the hand or if a mistake needs to be corrected.
3. When driving. It uses visual information to. move the hands on the wheel, keeping the car in the
middle of the lane and avoiding accidents.
4. In sports. In any sports, the eyes usually coordinate with the movement of some parts of the
body called “motor coordination”: Depending on the sport, either hand-eye coordination
(basketball, tennis, football, etc.) or foot-eye coordination (soccer, track, etc.) will be more
dominant.
Problems and disorders related to poor eye-hand coordination. Hand-eye coordination
can also work poorly even if the person’s eyes and vision are not affected and if their motor
control skills work properly. It is possible for someone with a perfect vision to have hand-eye
coordination problems that will only manifest when they use both the visual and motor systems
together.
Any alteration to the visual or motor systems can significantly affect hand-eye
coordination, like visual or muscular problems, such as strabismus (crossed eyes) amblyopia,
muscle hypotonia, balance problems, or crossed laterality. Brain damage to the motor areas or
perceptive areas may also cause eye-hand coordination problems.
Poor hand-eye coordination can affect activities that may lead to developmental
disorders, learning disorders (related to reading, writing and playing sports), in academics (making
mistakes when they take notes, poor hand-writing, poor attention), professional areas (in typing
or assembling objects), and problems with daily activities.
Hence, poor hand-eye coordination can have variety of causes, but the following are two main
conditions for inadequate hand-eye coordination.
1. Vision impairment. It is a loss of vision that makes it hard or impossible to perform daily tasks
without specialized adaptations caused by loss of visual acuity, in which the eye does not see
objects as clearly as usual.
2. Movement disorders. These are characterized by impaired body movements caused by variety
of causes, such as ataxia, which is characterized by lack of coordination while performing voluntary
movements; and hypertonia, a condition marked by an abnormal increase in muscle tension and
a reduced ability of a muscle to stretch.
Hand-eye coordination development stages. Hand-eye coordination, development milestones
are as follows:
Between birth and three years
1. Between birth and three years of age, infants can accomplish the following skills and can: 1.1
start to develop vision that allows them to follow slowly moving objects with their eyes;
1.2 begin to develop. basic hand-eye skills, such as reaching, grasping objects, feeding,
dressing;
1.3 begin to recognize concepts of place and direction, such as up, down, in; and
1.4 develop the ability to manipulate objects with tine motor skills.
Between three and five years
2. Between three and five years of age, little children can:
2.1 continue to develop hand-eye coordination skills and a preference for left or right handedness;
2.2 continue to understand and use concepts of place and direction, such as up, down, under,
beside;
2.3 develop the ability to climb, balance, run, gallop, jump, push and pull, and take stairs one at a
time; and
2.4 develop eye/hand/body coordination, eye teaming, and depth perception.
Five to seven years
3. Children between five and seven years old can:
3.1 improve fine motor skills, such as handling writing tools, using scissors, etc.; 3.2
continue to develop climbing, balancing, running, galloping and jumping abilities; 3.3
continue to improve hand-eye coordination and handedness preference; and 3.4 learn to
focus vision on school work for hours every day
Visual Literacy
In the advent of the Internet, students must develop the necessary visual literacy skills to navigate
the image-intense world. Therefore, visual literacy refers to interpreting and creating visual images
and usually about communication and interaction. Visual literacy is the ability to read, write and
create visual images. It is a concept that relates to art .and design and has much wider applications.
It is
about language, communication and interaction. Visual media is a linguistic tool, with
which we communicate, exchange ideas and navigate our highly visual digital world.
The term was first coined in 1969 by John Debes, who was the founder of the International
Visual Literacy Association Debes explains: “Visual literacy refers to a group of
vision-
competencies a human being can develop by seeing, having and integrating other sensory
experiences.
According to Oxford Research Encyclopedia, visual literacy is the ability to interpret,
negotiate and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the
meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text. 'It is
therefore, based on the idea that pictures. can be read and the meaning can be through a process
of reading.
Serafini (2017) asserted that visual literacy is a set of visual competencies or cognitive skills
and strategies one needs to make sense of visual images. These visual competencies were seen as
universal cognitive abilities that were used for understanding visual images regardless of the
contexts of production, reception, and dissemination. More contemporary definitions stress that
visual literacy is a contextualized, social practice as much as an individualized. cognitively based
set of competencies. It is also a process of generating meanings in transaction with multimodal
ensembles that include written text, visual images, and design elements from
a variety of
perspectives to meet the requirements of particular social contexts.
Theories of visual literacy can be integrated across disciplines. Therefore, visual literacy
now incorporates sociocultural, semiotic, critical, and multimodal perspectives to understand the
meaning that are potential of the visual and verbal ensembles encountered in social environments
(Serfini, 2017). Digital technology has greatly impacted our understanding of visual literacy as we
now see children growing up with tablets and computers and what
appears to be highly
developed visual literacy instincts.
Verbal Creativity
In view of the rapidly increasing complexity of the world, creativity is more important now
than ever before and is even considered as a useful and effective response to evolutionary
changes, since it allows the individual to flexibly respond to the continuously changing conditions
around (Runco, 2004 in Fink, et. al., 2015). Torrance, (1969) in Hasan (2017) recognized creativity
as important for the development of a fully functioning, mentally healthy, well-educated and
vocationally successful individual. It is because of growing recognition of the importance of
creative functioning and there is sufficient evidence of the universality of creativity.
Scott, et. al (2004) cited that creativity-related skills can be improved by providing specific
rules, techniques or strategies to develop appropriate cognitive skills for the domain at hand. This
could be realized through creative ideation trainings or divergent thinking exercises (Coskun,
2005; Benedek, et. al, 2006), which aim at stimulating effective search, retrieval, and
integration/combination of remote associations related to a given stimulus word. Divergent
thinking is a useful concept for identifying, supporting and measuring creativity as a process
to actualize one’s self, manipulate internal and external symbols as creation of illustrative ideas
based on his/ her knowledge senses regarding people and objects to produce on (Hasan, 2017).
The four major components of divergent thinking are fluency, flexibility, originality and
elaboration, which are very useful for an operational concept. Fluency refers to the total number
of ideas, options and solutions generated for an open-ended problem; flexibility is the number of
conceptual categories; originality is the aspect of created or invented works 'and is
about statistical infrequency of responses related to the task compared with original ideas; and
elaboration is the ability to expand on an idea with details and the ability to create an intricate
plan.
Fink, et. al (2012) explained that cognitive stimulation through common or moderately
creative ideas was effective in improving verbal creativity, and most importantly, stimulation
effects were also apparent at the level of the brain. As such, a widespread creativity-related neural
network includes left middle and superior temporal gyri along with right parietal cortex being
sensitive to cognitive stimulation. Aesthetics
Britanica defines aesthetics, also spelled esthetics, as the philosophical study of beauty and
taste. it is closely related to the philosophy concerned with the nature of art and the concepts of
which individual works of art are interpreted and evaluated.
In perspective, it is an interesting and puzzling realm of experience: the realm of the
beautiful, the ugly, the sublime and the elegant; of taste, criticism and fine art; and of
contemplation, sensuous enjoyment and charm. In all these phenomena, similar principles
operate and similar interests are engaged.
The nature and scope of Aesthetics. Aesthetics deals not only with the nature and value of
arts but also with, those responses to natural objects that find expression in the language of the
beautiful and the ugly. The terms beautiful and ugly are too vague in application and too
subjective in meaning. Everything on earth may be perceived as beautiful by someone from
his/her point of view while different people may use the word differently that often may have little
or nothing in common but all are simply based on judgment. It may also be that the term beautiful
has no sense except as the expression of an attitude, which in turn, people may associate it to
different matters.
Three Approaches to Aesthetics Britanica laid down three approaches to aesthetics as follows:
1. It is the study of aesthetic concepts or the analysis of “language of criticism” in which
particular judgments are singled out and their logic and justification are presented.
2. It is a philosophical study of certain states of mind. responses, attitudes and emotions that are
involved in aesthetic experience.
3. It is the philosophical study of the aesthetic object that reflects the view that problems of
aesthetics exist because the word contains special objects toward which people react selectively
as described in aesthetic terms.
Integrating Arts and Creativity Literacy into the Curriculum
The following are strategies and initiatives in embedding arts and creative literacy in the
curriculum.
1. Physical environment Design a physical environment to support creativity, such as castle
designed school building, well-architecturally designed edifice, roofs and ceilings, creative murals,
beautiful garden landscape, colorful blocks and benches in the math and science
garden,
structured music and arts studio, an atelier, student lounge, amphitheater, etc.
2. Emotional environment Take time to create and maintain a climate of respect, caring and
support to someone when making-mistakes.
3. Project-based learning (PBL) Provide students time, space and opportunity to express
themselves their ideas, emotions and insights through arts. Design and plan any projects that are
relevant, rigorous and real-world to attain motivation, engagement and learning,
4. Teach creative thinking skills Teach students about “metacognition” or “thinking about their
thinking” even to the 'little ones through the process of brainstorming, reasoning, comparing
and contrasting, problem-solving, concept mapping, analyzing, evaluating and more.
5. Alternative assessments instead of just a worksheet or an assignment, provide different
authentic
assessment like performance, systems design, product/output making, visual arts creation, task-based,
project-based, portfolio and others provided with rubrics and other forms of metrics.
6. Scheduling Project-based curriculum and performance-based assessment need ample time and proper
scheduling in either structured or unstructured manner.
7. Student-centered and personalized learning Provide students freedom to choose on what they will learn,
how they will learn it and how they will demonstrate what they have learned.
8. Incorporate arts integrate seamlessly music, art, drama and dance into the curriculum to develop creativity.
9. Integration of technologies Encourage students to create and utilize blogs and websites, Glogster,
VoiceThread, student publishing, video game design, coding, filmmaking, photography, global collaborative
classroom projects using Google Hangouts, etc.
10. Preparing the body and brain for creativity Create activities that induce body-mind integration, such as
yoga.