The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum

5. The Arts: Conceptual Framework

The conceptual framework for The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum draft statement is based on the understanding that the arts are languages, from which literacies may be developed. These literacies might be viewed and developed in the following ways:

Multiple Literacies in a Multiliterate World

Literacies in the Arts

Literacies in the Arts in New Zealand

The Concept of Languages in the Arts

The Arts as 'Disciplines'

5.1. Multiple Literacies in a Multiliterate World

In a postmodern paradigm, traditional definitions of literacy are no longer adequate. Literacy takes on a broader definition and it is becoming increasingly common to refer, for example, to scientific literacy, (Shamos 1995), cultural literacy (Hirsch 1987), critical literacy (Lankshear & McLaren 1993), political literacy (Freire 1985), media literacy (Quin 1998), and technological literacy (Knobel & Lankshear 1995).

The New London Group (1996) has coined the term 'multiliteracies', which refers to a new approach to literacy pedagogy which broadens 'the understanding of literacy and literacy teaching and learning to include negotiating a multiplicity of discourses'.

...literacy...now must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies. This includes understanding the competent control of representational forms that are becoming increasingly significant in the overall communications environment... (p61).

5.2. Literacies in the Arts

The Conceptual Framework for The Arts embraces the nature of literacy and literacies in the arts as distinct ways of knowing. Literacies in the arts are developed as students learn in, through, and about different art forms within the arts disciplines and use their languages to communicate and interpret meaning. The conceptual framework defines an approach to literacies in the arts which is critical, culturally based, and reflects current arts practice and theories of cultural pluralism.

Increasingly important are modes of meaning other than Linguistic, including Visual Meanings (images, page layouts, screen formats); Audio Meanings (music, sound effects); Gestural Meanings (body language, sensuality); Spatial Meanings (the meanings of environmental spaces, architectural spaces); and Multimodal Meanings (The New London Group 1996: 80).

Dance, drama, music and the visual arts are vital to a reconception of literacy, which addresses the broader definition of literacies for contemporary society. As forms of representation and modes of meaning, the disciplines of the arts are vital to literacy education and therefore essential in the education of all people. The arts disciplines comprise literacies that contribute to our ability to explore, negotiate, communicate, interpret and make meaning of the radically changing realities of contemporary culture and society.

5.3. Literacies in the Arts in New Zealand

To develop literacies in the arts in New Zealand society, all students should have opportunities to gain skills, knowledge and understanding of the special character of New Zealand arts forms as they have evolved and developed. These include: the bicultural heritage of Maori and Pakeha as expressed through arts forms; Pakeha arts traditions, values and expressions; the varied European arts forms, traditions and histories; the arts forms of the Pacific Islands, and international and global arts forms, including those of North America and Asia.

To develop literacies in the arts, students should also have opportunities to gain the skills in, and knowledge and understanding of, the electronic media and other technologies and how they transform the ways the arts function in society. Technological advances in communication and arts applications have had a major effect on the ways in which the arts forms are communicated and understood. Information and communications technologies are tools used in the arts disciplines to research, plan, design and make arts works, including sonic, static, and moving images.

The development of literacies in the arts in The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum draft statement assumes that:

• literacies have political, social and cultural significance - they cannot be regarded as autonomous;

• the meaning of a particular arts literacy depends on the context in which it is embedded;

• the processes through which arts literacies are learned and understood help to construct their meaning;

• each arts discipline embodies a range of discourses which may themselves constitute literacies.

Dance, drama, music and the visual arts are important as unique forms of knowledge and representation, they are in themselves literacies, which contribute to the broader and developing view of multiliteracies. As Hatfield (1998) writes,

The arts disciplines are basic as means of communication as historical components of civilisation and as providers of unique forms of knowledge. As such they need no other justification as essential components of education. While study in the arts disciplines may enhance other skills, encourage personal development, or lead to a stronger economic base for professional presentation of the arts, these are not and should not be the primary reason for their study.

The goal of all education in the arts should be the development of basic literacy in dance music, theatre and the visual arts. Such literacy is grounded in the study of the language and grammar of each art form as they are directly related to creation, performance or exhibition. Studies in the history, literature and analysis of the arts at the appropriate time are equally important in the development of artistic literacy.

5.4. The Concept of Languages in the Arts

A language can be defined in relation to the people who use it. The signs or symbols of, for example, the English language are arbitrary in that there is no meaningful connection between sound (or letter shape) and sense, except in onomatopoeia. It is by convention that these arbitrary signs are used and used to mean what they do. Likewise, it is by convention that composers, painters, choreographers, dramatists, use the signs and symbols of particular forms, genres, styles and techniques. Thinking in such terms tends to represent the arts as media of communication and to emphasise large-scale historical and geographical traditions rather than the individual artist. (Pateman 1991: 91)

As a consequence, the languages of each arts discipline are distinctively defined in relation to the people who use it. Each has its own language comprising visual, auditory and kinesthetic signs and symbols. They do not form a universal language or communications system. Each discipline is composed not of a singular language, but rather of a plurality of languages. Each discipline has particular signs and symbols that relate to specific art forms that are culturally determined. Each is a language system comprising different orders of discourse, for example: haka, batik painting, tapa making, kabuki theatre, oriori. In this sense arts languages comprise different languages because they are culturally differentiated.

Languages, as Aspin (1989) states, are not single, uniform or homogeneous; they reflect the number of cultural communities of which they are embodiments.

And this is true not only in the case of the languages that we call our mother-tongues; it is also true of the multiplicity of artificial systems of rules and conventions which mankind has invented and developed in order to transmit meanings and to expand and enrich his understandings of the world and to render it intelligible, in some form, to others: such as non-natural languages as those of mathematics, science, religion -and the Arts. Naturally too, each such community will generate its own 'literature', that will reflect and embody the growth and state of the culture and the increasing range and innovation of and in its products (Aspin 1989: 256-257).

Furthermore, each of these various languages has its own employing community of discourse, the identity of which becomes discernible in the various particularised forms in which members publish and render objective their experience.

the languages of poetry, music, painting, drama and dance, in which the highly complex and variegated layers of meaning are embodied and expressed - which makes that particular community the language of which is seen in the Arts, one of the most prolific and multifarious that we can conceive of (ibid).

5.5. The Arts as Disciplines

Dance, drama, music and the visual arts are separate disciplines. Each has discrete bodies of knowledge and modes of investigation. They have each developed their own distinctive public criteria, conceptual frameworks and syntax or modes of investigation which utilise specialised languages or signs and symbols. They are flexible conceptual structures within which ideas; inquiry, decision-making and experience in the arts may be developed. Each represents unique areas of study, and is concerned with a particular domain of experience. They each have a history and a heritage of literature. Each discipline generates communicating communities of discourse and they each embody expressions of the human imagination.

The arts as disciplines influence how we think, what we know and the ways we communicate. Each discipline provides opportunities through which students develop literacies for communicating, receiving and interpreting meaning, using particular visual, auditory and kinesthetic forms and symbols. The capacity to become literate in these forms and symbols is made possible through engagement with each of the four arts disciplines.