Talking Trade: Literacy Researchers as Practicing Artists

V>/ver the past two decades, educational scholars have seen major shifts in how literacy is viewed. One of these shifts has been toward conceptualizing literacy as a set of social practices (Street, 1995) that people embody and value. To disrupt current definitions of literacy, the valued practices that keep those forms of literacy in place must change. We, the authors, have significantly changed our social practices to include personal, systematic, and continuous study of the arts, so much so that we identify both as literacy researchers and practicing artists. As such, our understanding of literacy has changed. This article presents our thinking as artists and literacy researchers about meaning making, including our reflections on how working in the arts has impacted our perspectives on why the arts are significant to literacy practices. We do not suggest that we abandon what we already know about good language arts programs, but our frame is now different. We now ask, How might we understand literacy, not only through a literacy lens but also through an arts lens? What insights might be gleaned about literacy from careful study of one's social practices around the arts? As literacy researchers who are also practicing artists, we are developing a language to see differently; we have learned to "talk trade," a way of talking and creating within disciplines, such as art. In so doing, we have embodied Greene's (2001) call to "break with the taken-for-granted...and look through the lenses of various ways of knowing, seeing, and feeling in a conscious endeavor to impose different orders upon experience" (p. 5). As artists who happen to be literacy researchers, we are brought together into a studied conversation about how the arts help us notice aspects of literacy that we had ignored previously.