General Capabilities and Multiple Literacies

Abstract

In this chapter John O’Toole focuses on the role of the arts in teaching key generic skills – the general capabilities that all young people need in their lives and that transcend subject disciplines. In doing so, he provides a contemporary view of a very familiar topic in education: literacy. John harnesses the powerful arguments currently being mounted for a reconceptualising of literacy education to encompass a much broader range of ‘literacies’ (sometimes called ‘multi- literacies’), verbal and otherwise, which themselves provide the keys to those generic skills and capabilities. The idea that schools educate for multiple literacies, and that the arts scaffold the development of these li..