Crossing Thresholds and Expanding Conceptual Spaces: Using Arts-Based Methods to Extend Teachers’ Perceptions of Literacy

The context for this paper is a teacher education program for adult literacy practitioners at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. This paper describes and reflects on the use of arts-based approaches to enhance these practitioners’ conceptualizations of literacy, presenting their arts-based responses and their evaluations of the methods and their contrasting definitions of literacy at the start and the end of the course. The discussion raises questions about the inclusion of visual literacy in adult literacy teacher education programmes.

Towards a Poetics of the Cinematographic Frame

In delineating a poetics of the cinematographic frame, this article presents a typology of framing styles, and demonstrates how filmmakers use the frame as an expressive resource and how the frame uses them. The examples discussed are modernist in orientation, and each has a particular association with a city - its history, architecture, and cultural character. Although it is common practice to refer to some framing situations as instances of 'deframing', the article enquires into the problematic nature of this term, suggesting alternative visual and cinematographic contexts more amenable to its deconstructive implications. As the boundaries between cinema and the other arts continue to converge and relations between frame, image, and screen become more complex, this article offers a reassessment of some first principles of film language, especially the aesthetic integrity of the cinematographic frame.

Holding eternity in an hour: A practical exploration of the arts in the health care of older people with dementia

This project involved creative artists working with older people with dementia and staff from two Belfast Health and Social Care Trust supported housing centres in a mixed programme of dance, painting, music and drama which culminated in an open workshop with relatives and friends of the tenants. The study steered away from traditional medical models of art/music/dance therapy where the participant is perceived as a ‘patient’ in favour of identifying the participant as a ‘student’ who avails of a life-long learning experience. A key premise was that access to the arts is a human right, especially in the context of advancing age and cognitive impairment. . According to one the tenants of Mullan Mews, the project served to ‘awaken - or reawaken - folk with dementia to the endless vista of possibility already in their lives if they will only look for it’. A phenomenographic analysis of video data generated by the project emphasises the importance of the individual experiences of participants in the programme. The evidence from these storylines gained strength from the development of a documentary-style film text that has proved successful in capturing and translating the live experience of the project participants into a supportive text that goes beyond the written word.