The Arts, New Literacies, and Multimodality (Albers, A. & Harste, J., 2007)

     As I read this article, I thought back - way back- to my days as a kindergarten and first grade teacher.  One of the activities  my students and I enjoyed was "reading" picture books together.  My students loved to find new picture books in the classroom library.  They'd grab a book, take a few moments to look at the pictures, and then start telling the story based on what they saw. (This is during their pre-reading phase).  The students were using the art to make sense of the text. Not only is it incredibly cute to see our smallest students trying to make sense of pictures and share what they imagine the story is saying, but it is also educational to the teacher.  Have you ever noticed that kids pick up on details in pictures that we often overlook?  They see so much more than we do and can usually come up with some pretty creative stories to explain what they see.  I believe the trend towards using the arts to build literacy is a positive one.  Younger students enjoy and respond to art.  The use of music, dance, and the visual arts can only add to, not take away from, the student's experience with a work.  Some of our newer "art" forms, the technology stuff, can be a little scary for some of us older teachers who may not use the technology ourselves.  We owe it to our students to overcome our fears, to take some chances, to even allow them to teach us, so that we can use the technology they enjoy and understand to motivate our students to make connections and understand more deeply the literary world that is evolving around them. Combining the arts, technology, and literary instruction will be motivating and will lead to better understanding of literary topics.