Sensory Literacy and Empowerment in Art and Design

Abstract

Insistence on verbal literacy as a key skill occurs throughout education. There needs to be a greater awareness of literacy as a sensory capacity: creative voices are seen, heard and performed. I argue that all the senses form embodied understanding, and obstructing this flow can impede learning. This article questions how we can use embodied, sensory and performative methods to enable student ownership of theoretical and cultural texts.It contributes a theorised approach and transferrable methods for students to build confidence in their learning capacity. I discuss how interpretations of texts can be seen as discourses that are expressed through visualisation, embodiment and affect to empower learning. Practice research with vocational art and design students is explored, to address their expressions of empowerment, in connection with their interpretations of Foucault and Freire. Students' individuated sensory methods of representing empowerment also offer more inclusive possibilities for decolonised cultural ownership through arts practice.

Arts Practice as the Daily Extraordinary: A Philosophy of Inclusivity

“…The daily extraordinary also emerges in sculpture, which addresses how objects that we see and use every day can become more than themselves in extended lives of experience beyond their initial usefulness. Sculpture also enables the creation of materialities that connect with feelings, memories, conversations and diffracting intra‐subjectivities (Barad 2007), that may otherwise have become subdued ‘muscle memories’ (Cándida‐Smith 2003), or may have been unnameable in verbal discourse (Matthews 2021). Then again, in addition to gathering the fullness of the artist's imaginative experience of their time and place, the artwork lives beyond that moment – beyond the assembled minutes, hours, days, months or even years it took to make the work, and often in contexts beyond the artist's presence (Barthes 1977).…”

“…I have previously written about how Freire raised the sensory literacy of oppressed groups of people by including their songs and poetry as the beginnings of verbal literacy and vocal presence in society (Matthews 2021). Freire observed how these creative refrains, which Deleuze & Guattari (2013) would call ‘ritornellos’, urged forth the confidence, flow and momentum towards verbal literacy.…”

“…Problematics associated with intentions to heighten the aesthetic lives and recognise the social realities of diverse communities were also brought into discussion by curators and artists working with me on Critical Pedagogy in Contested Spaces for the MA Arts and Learning (MAAL) at Goldsmiths. Philosophies referred to in this programme connect with an expanded view of critical pedagogy informed by Freire, hooks and Rancière, as well as drawing upon philosophies of equality, accessibility and inclusion in posthumanist theory via – for instance, Deleuze & Guattari (2013), Manning & Massumi (2014), Bennett (2001, 2010), Braidotti (2013), Atkinson (2018) and Matthews (2021).…”

Inteligencia artificial, Goya y el aprendizaje del dibujo. Primeros pasos

“…Por lo tanto, entre el amplio y denso abanico de impactos y desafíos que la reciente popularización de la inteligencia artificial nos plantea en Educación Artística (Leonard, 2020;Marín Viadel, 2023, Matthews, Shannon y Roxburgh, 2023, aquí nos centramos en tres aspectos: (a) describir los procedimientos de aprendizaje o entrenamiento fundamentalmente visual de la inteligencia artificial; (b) interpretar los resultados obtenidos con la inteligencia artificial a la luz de los métodos habituales de enseñanza del dibujo con alumnado humano; y (c) evaluar la calidad de los dibujos creados por la inteligencia artificial.…”