Creating Literacy Through Making Meaning

When Jerome Bruner published his Acts of Meaning in 1990, I thought that arts education might seize this opportunity for a revival of the infusion of the arts into general education. After all, his Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966) completely revolutionized arts education in the '70s and resulted in arts revival in schools and educational institutions.

Mr. Bruner, Harper's reports, has "stirred up more excitement than any educator since John Dewey." His explorations into the nature of intellectual growth and its relation to theories of learning and methods of teaching have had a catalytic effect upon educational theory. (Harvard University Press)

John Dewey established the concept as Art As Experience, and Bruner then brought ideas of cyclical structure to content combined with a dialectal, dynamic experience in which learners participate actively as they construct personal meaning through creative interaction.

The time is ripe to include Bruner's constructivist concepts to the process of appropriating the arts to further the teaching of literacy. This provides a powerful model that has yet to be developed fully and implemented on a large scale. More importantly it requires the collaboration of educators across disciplines to address a crisis in contemporary culture: the need for a cohesive literate community that establishes the basis for cross cultural collaboration.

The future depends on how educators transform the current crisis into a cooperative opportunity.