Elizabeth (Lisa) Stuart Whitehead has served as the Visual Art Supervisor for Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland since 2014. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in art education from the University of Maryland, College Park, a Master of Arts degree in education from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and her certificate in supervision and administration also from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently seeking her Doctorate in Educational Leadership from the University of Maryland. Lisa taught elementary art for nine years and was the content specialist for art, theater, and dance for Montgomery County Public Schools in Rockville, Maryland, for seven years. She has co-authored two books—Using Art to Teach Reading Comprehension Strategies (Klein & Stuart, 2013), and Using Art to Teach Writing Traits (Klein & Whitehead, 2018) — along with other articles related to literacy in the arts published in School Arts Magazine.
Literacy as it relates to reading and writing has been a passion of mine since I was an elementary art teacher early in my career. In my current role as […]
When I was asked to create a work of art exploring literacy, I wanted to create a dance but I had no dancers or a studio, so I chose to use my own body in the space I had, my yard. Fluent Nature is video of micro-choreography that explores what cannot be expressed with words, how nature has its own language, and how placing the human body in nature changes the story.
Title: What Is Me and What Is Not Me | Artist: Alex Chadwell | Medium: Music
My thinking on arts and literacy centers around the concept of literacies and artmaking as both sense-making and meaning-making processes that organically and inevitably overlap, intersect, and reciprocate. Compositionally, What is me and what is not me is a sound collage of sorts (there is no notation for the piece, and I'd be hard pressed to recreate it accurately) that abstractly and aurally represents the relationships between literacies and artmaking.
Title: A Curious Honeybee | Artist: Gideon Young | Medium: Film
Offering welcome through traditional and digital elements of literacy, A Curious Honeybee provides an experiential learning environment by activating visual, musical, natural, and emotional literacies.
La Carpa Theatre is a project that I am currently directing in the Detroit Latinx community. The project aims to strengthen and uplift youth voices through devised theatre, in the style of the Mexican Carpas. This audio was created in the theatrical environment envisioned for our project. The ways in which literacies are re-defined are at the heart of La Carpa Theatre's mission.