Background

The works presented in this collection were gathered from the fall of 1991 through the winter and fall of 1992 in the context of a project at The Centre for Literacy. This initiative, entitled the Resource-teacher Project, posits literacy as the root of learning across the disciplines.

The Resource-teacher Project, begun in 1990, was originally designed to release several teachers drawn from different disciplines in colleges, high schools, and literacy programs for three hours/week for one semester. During that time, the group studied together and developed methods and materials to integrate literacy - reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical thinking - into content-area courses.

After one semester of collaborative study, we expected that these teachers would form a corps of "resource-teachers" able to work as change-agents within schools, departments, or programs by giving peer support to other teachers and by leading workshops/sessions inside or outside their own institutions. The project provided a rare opportunity for teachers from different levels and systems to work together and learn from one another. Since its inception, the project has included teachers of English, media, French second language, physics, art, music, photography and study skills, among other subjects.

When Fine Arts teacher Catherine Bates applied to the 1992 project, her idea of exploring the ways in which students express themselves in two symbolic media, word and picture, fit in naturally with the work undertaken by other teachers in the previous two years.

The difference was that, in this case, we were thinking not only about how literacy might enhance the teaching of art, but how art might enhance the teaching of literacy.

When we began to do some background research for this project, Catherine Bates and I discovered that while there was a reasonably substantial literature on the connections between drawing and literacy development in young children, there was almost no literature on the connection between drawing and adult literacy outside the field of art therapy. No researchers seem to have hypothesized that normal healthy adults could engage in art and writing for any but therapeutic purposes. Our own work suggests otherwise.

This publication presents a selection of writings and drawings produced in Catherine's Fine Arts classes as well as some of our speculations about the teaching implications of explicitly linking art and language in the classroom. The students whose work appears range from second-language learners to students with limited language experience to extremely sophisticated writers.

Catherine, in describing the classroom process that produced the array of thoughtful and spontaneous writings and drawings, opens up a series of questions about the possibility of using personal writing/ explorations as a way into teaching the formal elements of art and changing the current Fine Arts curriculum.

I provide an overview of the research on art and children's literacy and suggest reasons for extending the research into the area of adult literacy and for bringing drawing and painting into adult literacy classrooms in order to deepen personal engagement in language awareness and acquisition.

A selected bibliography is included.

Linda Shohet
Montreal, Quebec
June 1993