Sensory Literacy and Empowerment in Art and Design

Insistence on verbal literacy as a key skill occurs throughout education. There needs to be a greater awareness of literacy as a sensory capacity: creative voices are seen, heard and performed. I argue that all the senses form embodied understanding, and obstructing this flow can impede learning. This article questions how we can use embodied, sensory and performative methods to enable student ownership of theoretical and cultural texts. It contributes a theorised approach and transferrable methods for students to build confidence in their learning capacity. I discuss how interpretations of texts can be seen as discourses that are expressed through visualisation, embodiment and affect to empower learning. Practice research with vocational art and design students is explored, to address their expressions of empowerment, in connection with their interpretations of Foucault and Freire. Students’ individuated sensory methods of representing empowerment also offer more inclusive possibilities for decolonised cultural ownership through arts practice