Chapter 14
In: Arts Education
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Abstract
This chapter shares learnings from the first stage of a critical participatory action research study conducted during the global pandemic, which necessitated changes to the original research design and implementation to include virtual and hybrid spaces for teacher questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and classroom learning.
The study reconceptualises understandings about arts literacies within a pedagogy of multiliteracies. Arts literacies are positioned as essential affordances for all learning. The goals of the study are to identify, analyse, and implement promising practices and models for designing with the arts in a pedagogy of multiliteracies.
The authors are two leaders in arts education, engaged in a research partnership between Université de Saint-Boniface, University of Manitoba, and the provincial Bureau de l’éducation française. This partnership was developed to gather diverse perspectives and to collaborate with Kindergarten to Grade 12 educators and administrators from English, Français, and French Immersion programmes regarding arts and multiliteracies teaching and learning.
The authors share themes emerging from questionnaire and interview data about arts and multiliteracies teaching and learning, and the challenges and solutions for implementation, including the shift to digital technologies. Study themes are illustrated through participant examples of authentic arts, digital, and multiliteracies design, concluding with an epiphanic event. Study data provides compelling evidence that arts, in a pedagogy of multiliteracies facilitated by digital technology, has the potential to create quality, equitable, diverse, inclusive, and engaging learning spaces now and for the future.