Opportunity to Learn (OTL) Standards identify the resources that teachers, schools and districts need for all students to achieve at or above the levels suggested in the 2014 National Core Arts Standards. With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the widespread adoption or adaptation of the National Core Arts Standards across the United States, defining the resources required to achieve literacy in each arts discipline is especially important and timely. OTL Standards serve as a key component in the fair and reliable evaluation of arts educators and arts programs.
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.
Title: Tercera Llamada | Artist: Karilú Forshee | Medium: Audio
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.
Title: Literaseas | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite and ink on paper with digital edits
Title: False Binaries | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite on paper with digital edits