A Reason to Respond: Finding Agency Through the Arts

The arts have long been known as a central medium for nurturing artistic expression and aesthetic responses. Notions of arts-based teaching are combined with concepts 1 Debra McLauchlan (1951-2016) was a Professor of Drama Education in the Department of Teacher Education, Faculty of Education, Brock University. Debra contributed her editorial skills to this manuscript and unfortunately, her sudden, untimely death in October, 2016 did not allow her to see this piece to completion. We celebrate her contributions to the Community Arts Zone (CAZ) research project and we honour her memory here through our collaborative scholarship. IJEA Vol. 18 No. 25 http://www.ijea. org/v18n25/ 2 of literacy and composition, focusing on the fact that these separate fields have the potential for relational meaning making. In this article, three arts-based, qualitative research inquiries are featured within a larger, one-year Community Arts Zone (CAZ) research project involving eight projects across four international sites. Findings from the three inquiries in music, visual arts, and drama highlight that responsive meaning making foregrounds aesthetics to create agentive learning environments. By providing students agency in their artistic expressions, there is the hopeful prospect of working in and across various modes to cultivate meaningful learning experiences. A reason to respond: Finding agency through the arts I treat my classroom like it’s a studio, so it’s a place for them to work, so I give them the power.that they are the artists coming into this space, using this as a space, as an opportunity for them to create, and the time to create, and to dialogue with their peers about what they enjoy, and you know, be up to their necks in the creative process without any other distractions and I think that’s really important for them to grow.creating that environment for them. And I think they’re receptive to that, and they feel that vibe when they’re in the classroom ’cause it’s not just me talking down to them, we’re just a bunch of people in a room making Art. (CAZ visual arts teacher participant, December, 2013) The opening quotation comes from an interview with a visual arts teacher who took part in a pilot study for a research study that we feature in this article that combines arts-based teaching with concepts of literacy and composition. The above quote from reflects a key finding; the arts give students the freedom and space to experiment with modes that invite their own agency to flourish. When we speak of agency, we situate this term in the writings of Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence (1999), Craft, Cremin, Hey, and Clack (2014), and Corsaro (2015) who all speak of the importance of providing learning environments that offer contexts for exploration, ownership, and control of learning through the co-construction of knowledge. It is in such places that creative and critical thinking may thrive. The arts, thus, are integral to children’s desire for agency in their learning within school contexts and beyond (Rowsell & Vietgen, 2017; Rowsell & McQueen-Fuentes, 2017). The arts have long been known as a central vehicle for nurturing artistic expression and aesthetic responses. Through agency, choice, and opportunity, students have the hopeful prospect of working in and across various modes to cultivate meaningful learning experiences. Funded by the Canadian government through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Griffin, et. al.: A Reason to Respond 3 Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant, the Community Arts Zone (CAZ) research project featured in this article involves eight different projects that are situated across four international sites. Data collection took place over one year in the Niagara region in Canada, in Boulder, Colorado, and Rochester, New York, in the United States, and in Rotherham in the United Kingdom. What these disparate locations share is a commitment to community regeneration, social inclusion, and a desire to broaden notions of literacy and communication. This article highlights three of five CAZ projects (Griffin, 2017; McLauchlan, 2017; Rowsell & McQueenFuentes, 2017, Rowsell & Vietgen, 2017; Winters & Code, 2017) that took place in one of the research sites to illustrate the power of combining the arts and multimodality to offer more agency for learners to think about ideas and conceptions of literacy and composition. In the CAZ research, there are strong undercurrents with responsivity and writing studies. Sheridan (2014) defines responsivity as “being present with others as we figure out how to contribute to projects that matter” (p. 14). Sheridan identifies “architectures of participation” (Sheridan, 2014; Sheridan & Rowsell, 2010) as structures that can be put in place to foster responsivity from communities and individuals. To be responsive, in our view, an individual needs a reason to respond and mechanisms in place to respond. In the CAZ project, we were curious to explore if the arts would offer students agency and occasions for multimodal meaning making—giving them opportunities for both artistic expression and aesthetic responses. By ‘aesthetic responses’, we are referring to how young people think and communicate through art and, importantly, how they socially engage with art and artistic modalities. Two central questions that guide our thinking in this article are: 1) What is the role of learner agency in arts education? 2) If learner agency is significant, how do the arts and multiple modes of meaning making foster students’ artistic expression and aesthetic responses? Relational Meaning Making: Literacy and the Arts To respond to shifts in communication that are more multimodal (Kress, 1997; Selfe, 2009) in their orientation, the CAZ research team conducted a series of arts-based projects in local, community hubs such as schools and museums, focusing on particular modes of expression and representation with students aged 6 to 18. Premised on a belief that contemporary meaning making rests on not only communicating through words, but also through visuals, music, moving images, and digital spaces, the literacy dimension of the research pushes for 2 The Boulder, Rochester, and Rotherham projects are conducted by Drs. Kris Gutierrez, Joanne Larson, and Kate Pahl (with researchers Dr. Abigail Hackett and Steve Pool) respectively. IJEA Vol. 18 No. 25 http://www.ijea. org/v18n25/ 4 broadened definitions of concepts like writing and reading (Kress, 1997). Like Selfe (2009), we were cognizant that there is a history of privileging print and we wanted research participants to engage in and across various modes. Selfe (2009) explains that there is a need to, . encourage students to deploy multiple modalities in skillful ways—written, aural, visual—and that they model a respect for and understanding of the various roles each modality can play in human expression, the formation of individual and group identity, and meaning making. (p. 626) Literacy researchers, including Selfe and others (Kress, 1997; Stein, 2008), have shown how the affordances of multiple modes allow for more agency in meaning making. These ideas have also been stated by scholars of arts education. For example, Eisner (2002), The arts have distinctive contributions to make. I count among them the development of the thinking skills in the context of an art form, the expression and communication of distinctive forms of meaning, meaning that can only artistically crafted forms can convey, and the ability to undergo forms of experience that are at once moving and touching, experiences of a consummatory nature, experiences that are treasured for their intrinsic value. These are experiences that can be secured when one attends to the world with an aesthetic frame of reference and interacts with forms that make such experience possible. (p. xii) Sheridan and Rowsell (2010) and Rowsell’s (2013) research, focused on interviewing professionals across creative and business sectors, illustrates that people who do creative work out in the world naturally draw on the strengths and limitations of different modes. Linda Flower (2003) interprets “speaking across differences,” which is about negotiating competing agendas and wrestling with terminology while talking across differences. In this process, Flower describes how understanding is transformed through embracing difference, which sometimes involves conflict and contradictions. Certainly, we found as a research team that we did not consistently agree on terms like multimodality, affordances, composition, and artistry, but through discussion and debate, we came to resolutions. These conversations play a role in our argument because, like Flower, we believe that speaking across difference and separate fields (the arts and literacy) transforms understandings, offering potential for relational meaning making. For instance, transforming our understandings allowed us to look horizontally across projects, as well as vertically inside each of the five research inquiries that took place in one of the research sites. Griffin, et. al.: A Reason to Respond 5 Theoretical Tensions: Artistic Expression and Aesthetic Response Enfolding literacy studies within the arts has not necessarily been an easy fit and there have been moments of contrast, tension, and contestations about terminology, practices, and epistemologies across the research team. One of these notions to tease out is the long-standing discourse around artistic expression, aesthetic response, and its relationship to the arts. The arts are powerful as they create a unique platform for creativity and interaction, allowing responses to flourish in ways that are unique from other forms of human expression and experience. For example, in looking at one of the art forms, music is frequently described as, or thought of, as a “language. ” Winters (2010) acknowledges that each system of communication (language or music) provides affordances or se