Understanding literacies through chalk art
At the end of spring semester, the students in the College of Education’s Language and Literacies in Secondary English Education class depicted their learnings by participating in a modern day Madonnari, or chalk art festival.
The Madonnari street painting festival as a literate practice has long been secularized, though not wholly.
I’ve done it in the past and we talk a lot about multimodal art and the way in which literacies matter in engaging kids," said Kevin Burke, an assistant professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education. “And chalk art is just one way to do it. It’s a nice fundable way of creating something public, and I think that public pedagogy is important in that regard.
Burke, who teaches graduate courses in English education, held the College’s first Madonnari so his students could illustrate their developing understanding of literacies as rooted in their readings and discussions.