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Understanding the collisions between the arts and literacy
Literacy has been redefined to meet the needs of the knowledge economy
by Deborah Brandt
The Community Arts and Literacy Network (CALN) held a conference at the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia on March 17, where over 50 participants talked all day about how arts based in neighborhood centers, schools, and afterschool programs could promote and widen the power of literacy for ordinary Philadelphians.
Independent organizations that bring artists and musicians together with children and their parents are essential for the cultural life of the city, particularly at a time when many schools are pulling back from the commitment to teach all students the visual and performing arts.
The partners in CALN include two arts organizations – Art Sanctuary and Asian Arts Initiative – and two units of Temple University – Tyler Art School’s Community Arts Program and the Writing Program’s New City Writing. CALN was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Deborah Brandt, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was one of three speakers invited to comment on the proceedings at the end of the March 17 conference. What follows is an edited version of her commentary on the arts and competing definitions of literacy.
I study literacy and the ways that people in the everyday gain access to literacy and how they are rewarded for their literacy. The rise of the so-called “knowledge economy” and the social changes that it brings put tremendous pressure on the teachers and learners of literacy these days.
Community arts also are being affected and pressured by the current attempt to redefine literacy. We are seeing the ascendancy of a definition of literacy for work, for productivity, that lies behind so many of the literacy policies, standards, and tests that we see in schools now. Because of our current system, the economy needs more and more workers who spend more of their days manipulating symbols – usually print symbols and other kinds of graphics. Our schools are getting caught up in meeting the inexhaustible demand for this form of literacy.
One of the obvious pressures this has brought is that the arts have been pushed out of the schools. I've heard this complaint over and over: that there’s no curriculum for the visual arts, no time for the arts, that arts are on the defensive. That’s one direct result we’ve seen in this relationship between the redefinition of literacy for certain narrow ends and its effect on the arts.
But I also saw today an articulation of a different definition for literacy. Lorene Cary of Art Sanctuary was talking about the arts, communication, and literacy as a breakthrough of the divine, as a method for healing, as a way for political expression to occur when other avenues are not available. Many people today have linked literacy with free expression, self-expression, human development, the right to be. This has been a definition of literacy that has brought great things to the society at various times, and it’s getting pushed away.
I see the organizations represented here and the teachers in attendance trying to keep this definition alive and present in society and in the lives of children. It’s such important work to do, even though everybody here recognizes it’s being done under great difficulty.
There were also many people here talking about where there were collisions between bureaucracies in schools and community organizations, power differentials between large and small institutions. These are important ways to analyze problems when they occur. But keeping in mind that there are competing definitions of literacy can also be a way to approach certain head-on institutional collisions.
I think people in the arts are in a tough position. I was in a group talking about an after- school art program that found the school curriculum was pressuring their after school activities, and the program had to keep proving that it was carrying out the literacy needs of the school. The person I talked to was fine with that because she recognized that the arts do do some of the very things that the knowledge economy actually needs. The economy needs creativity, it needs great communicators, and it needs people who can cross over lines and divisions. It needs community building and work in groups.
So it’s tricky to find what might be shared by what I think of as literacy for production and also by literacy for self-expression. We need to find where the two definitions indeed share common ground and perhaps where they don’t.
There is a battle going on against a singular dominant definition of literacy for productivity that is encroaching, encroaching, encroaching. People who want to resist that definition need to find ways to be aware of it, address it, and have a language for struggling with it.