Book Review: Learning Cultural Literacy through Creative Practices in Schools (Cultural and Multimodal Approaches to Meaning-Making) by Tuuli Lähdesmäki,Ju ̄rate Baranova,Susanne C. Ylönen,Aino-Kaisa Koistinen,Katja Mäkinen,Vaiva Jus?kiene,and Irena Zaleskiene

Cultural literacy education has demonstrated benefits for young children since it instills tolerance, empathy, and inclusiveness. It is an engaging examination of the relationship between cultural literacy and educational practice, bridging the divide between research and practice. In light of the world's uncertainty and change, this book reframes cultural literacy as a tool for social awareness. It illustrates what may be learned about children's creativity and art from a sociocultural perspective. The authors are all participating in the research project of Dialogue and Argumentation for Cultural Literacy Learning in Schools (DIALLS), funded by the European Union (EU) as part of its Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme and carried out in schools. The DIALLS project investigates the role of formal education in promoting cultural literacy, intercultural discussion, and mutual understanding. It has cooperated with educators from pre-primary, primary, and secondary schools to develop dialogic tools for children of all grade levels. A cultural literacy teaching program was developed in 2019 with the assistance of educators from around Europe. Cultural Literacy Learning Programme (CLLP) is formed when students from many countries join together and based on the interaction between students in their class, then within each country, and after that, with a class abroad.

DIALLS enabled student electronic communication. Researchers collected data while the program was running to analyze later. In addition to classroom interactions, these data sets include online arguments and extensive collections of students’ visual and multimodal artifacts. This unique data collection approach allows school-based cultural literacy research. This book focuses on the most recent data set, which consists of the multimodal artifacts created by the students who took part in the CLLP testing. When collecting data from students and parents, the researchers followed all applicable ethical guidelines and the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The DIALLS project created CLLP recommendations for fostering cultural literacy. Encouraging children and young people to practice and enhance cultural literacy includes a virtual exhibition of student-created artifacts and a student-written credo for cultural literacy. This book investigates how art may help children develop their creativity, individuality, social skills, and emotional responses. In addition, this book has nine chapters with detailed information and some figures to support readers’ better understanding.

The first chapter is a key concept of cultural literacy and creativity. Cultural literacy is a social practice focusing on empathic, tolerant, and inclusive interaction to learn and receive knowledge. Creativity is defined as the openness and curiosity to test and to produce something new or inventive. The chapter covers the Cultural Literacy Learning Programme (CLLP) and the study data: 1906 works generated by 5–15-year-olds in Cyprus, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Spain, Portugal, and the UK in 2019 and 2020. The authors examine data-driven content analysis, self-reflexive interpretation, and collaborative interpretation. Dialogue and information gathered via empathic, tolerant, and inclusive engagement constitute cultural literacy.

Chapter 2, “A Sociocultural Approach to Children's Visual Ceations,” situates the book in the field of children's art (p.19). The book's approach is contextualized within the research landscape. The authors integrate developmental psychological, pedagogical, and esthetic perspectives to build a sociocultural picture of children's art. They accept children as competent cultural actors and active participants in cultural production with this paradigm. As a result, the authors study student-made visual artifacts to better understand how they engage with the concept of difference.

According to the authors in Chapter 3, “Multimodality: Art as a Meaning-Making Process” (p.31), multimodality is important as an indicator of the diversity of signals in human interaction and literature. As a result, it adds to the CLLP's transformation into a social interaction space. The authors focus on diverse modalities of communication that are concurrently linked and engaged in young learners’ creative learning activities to demonstrate the relationship of multimodality in an educational context by employing semiotic notions applicable in all communication contexts: field, tenor, and mode. The field was represented at distinct levels of abstraction in the CLLP's implementation, with a solid social significance (e.g., social responsibility) explored through the lens of a cultural text, which triggered class discussion and the creation of an artifact that was verbally reflected on in captions. Furthermore, in a communication scenario, tenor can be determined through the choice of language, discovery of cultural, social, and societal content and subjects, and establishment of social connections. In this case, an emphasis on modes focuses on the expressive methods and conventions employed to communicate the intended concept of impact. To summarize, the CLLP's multimodal education allows readers to assess and understand one medium of communication through another.

The authors examine the artifacts created by students as part of the CLLP as they explore the critical attitudes of cultural literacy: tolerance, empathy, and inclusion in chapter 4 (Tolerance, Empathy, and Inclusion). The chapter begins with a critical discussion of each attitude's meanings, connections, and relationships to other essential cultural literacy concepts, such as diversity, equality, and democracy. Next, the authors investigate how the program addresses these attitudes and the included cultural texts. The analysis of the artifacts reveals a wide range of meanings that children assign to tolerance, empathy, and inclusion, such as helping others. Students use their own experiences and emotions to create meaning in this process.

Chapter 5, “Living Together,” looks at artifacts in which students investigate the concept of living together as a peaceful interaction between people and mutual enrichment of their differences based on fundamental rights and freedoms and mutual respect. In the CLLP, living together celebrates diversity intertwined with solidarity, equality, and human rights. According to the findings, students frequently approach living together from their perspectives, but they can see the perspectives of others. Finally, the chapter discusses how learning about solidarity necessitates cultural sensitivity and how lessons on the subject must be carefully planned to ensure inclusive cultural practices and to respect for diversity and difference.

Chapter 6, “Social Responsibility,” looks at using several textbooks, consisting of themes of social participation and conflict resolution (such as bullying, exclusion, and dwindling wildlife habitats); the authors address social responsibility in the larger social context, including nonhuman objects (i.e., climate and environmental change) through two subthemes: social and civic competencies and sustainable development. To begin with, teachers facilitate topics to discuss and different points of view to help them think about how they can be more socially responsible. Various subtopics were woven into the students’ creative activity based on their levels throughout the lessons. As a result, the chapter demonstrates how students learned to resolve social obligation to encounter the other and collaborate with other people in the course. However, at the same time, students frequently viewed societal responsibility from an anthropocentric (human-centered) perspective in their creative works. Despite this, the authors still identified that the wordless picture books and films with their complex stories about human and nonhuman relationships encouraged the students to think about social responsibility overall and pay attention to nonhumans, nature, and sustainability. In this way, the findings support the idea of the book that art may be an effective tool for teaching students to take into account the perspectives of others and to think critically about complex subjects such as global warming.

The authors delve into students’ conceptualizations of belonging and home in CLLP, where both concepts refer to a fundamental aspect of humanity and cohabitation in chapter 9. Since students frequently associate belonging with the concept of a home, what home means to them and what makes them feel at ease became the focus of this chapter. In the beginning, teachers provided cultural texts for the students and let the students interpret the learning materials regarding the concepts of belonging and home. In this case, teachers applied the relativity approach to understand students’ narration from different perspectives. In this case, students allow to accomplish the tasks based on their levels in form creative artworks. As a finding, the students’ artifacts indicate different perspectives of the themes for several reasons, such as the influences of task instructions given by the teachers and their various grades and cultural backgrounds. In addition, to summarize, the students’ artifacts frequently addressed belonging and home as numerous and interrelated notions, including ties to various geographical locales and groups of people.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic based on Chapter 8 (Cultural Literacy During COVID-19), CLLP includes additional tasks about the pandemic impact for children to make reflections based on the question: How can I be empathetic, tolerant, and inclusive in pandemic conditions? They answer the question through artifacts completed with the titles and texts. From their visual and textual narratives, it could be inferred that they have approaches to depict empathy, tolerance, and inclusion during the global emergency. Furthermore, from the three groups based on their age group – oldest group, second age group, and the youngest age group – the children from Lithuania, Cyprus, and Portugal relate their images to captions. The youngest children in Cyprus visualized their understanding of the pandemic by connecting the artifacts with the textual form of prevention from the virus spreading. Eventually, all Portuguese children and some of the Lithuanian children painted the declaration of wearing masks. All artifacts are related to the need to adhere to the regulations was the best way to get through the pandemic and resume everyday life. What they have made is related to their insecurity because of their inability to go to school and do outdoor activities because of the pandemic. However, the children from the three countries interpreted empathy, tolerance, and inclusion differently.

Tolerance was explicitly mentioned in six captions, but the children misunderstood it because tolerance was frequently unspecified, as exemplified by a Lithuanian student in the oldest age group, who first states the importance of staying safe and then adds that this includes following the rules. It was difficult to distinguish between the subjects and objects of empathy, just as it was with tolerance. In several COVID-19 artifacts, empathy is linked to the shared sadness induced by isolation. Within the data, representations of inclusion were somewhat more challenging to track. None of the captions specifically mention inclusion, although there are numerous depictions of family and references to a “we.” Visually, the most compelling inclusion evidence are images of a global collaborative effort to defeat the pandemic. These photographs of people holding hands worldwide demonstrate the importance of standing together and cooperating. One student displays people from all ethnic backgrounds standing together due to the COVID-19 situation. The data collection reflects the official, instructive discourses that led coronavirus imagery in the media and some particularly combative works that appear to touch on less-discussed problems. The CLLP data during the COVID-19 pandemic differed from other data reported by journalists such as Gulf News, Reuters, and The Hindu in drawing during the lockdown. Most children expressed their feeling of isolation – missing things in a normal situation. In contrast, CLLP was framed by themes, pedagogical goals, and the project theme.

At the end of the chapter, “Conclusions: Cultural Literacy in Action,” with children, cultural literacy could be integrated into their learning because of their capacity to develop their imagination, emotional responses, personality, and position in the community, relationships with others, and the external world. Many artifacts mentioned in this book have attracted discussion in the CLLP. Children's visual expressions from copying and imitating what they could see from their surroundings involve a semiotic process, reinterpretation, recontextualization, and reconfiguration of the new design. Therefore, cultural literacy should be scaffolded by dialogic negotiation and creativity as the effect of influences, inspiration, and stimulus from the books, films, and their peers, implemented in dialogic thinking chains. For example, when they are asked to make captions about home, they repeat the items, emotions, and related activities for making meaning. This evidence is the utilization of multimodality as a critical feature of cultural literacy learning. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the children enrolled in CLLP could reflect their empathy, solidarity, and care through a more dynamic creative process. Their interpretations show their emotions and feelings, and identifications of the characters in the artifacts. Hence, cultural literacy learning is critical to be practiced by artistic tasks based on themes to strengthen their agency in cultural literacy learning through visual dialogue.

This book recognizes people's creative abilities, including children, and views children's visual and multimodal expression as a means of processing, seeking, and maybe discovering unique and valuable ideas and consequences. Cultural literacy enables children to handle the unknown while also revealing more of the known. Readers can better understand how to promote cultural literacy in students by incorporating it into a course or strategy in higher education. This book instructs readers on using their cultural literacy abilities and knowledge to the human endeavor. These abilities enable individuals to comprehend and negotiate diverse cultural situations more effectively. Educators and lecturers interested in incorporating cultural literacy into their classes will find this book a goldmine of knowledge.