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While visual arts, drama, dance and music have been used to enhance literacy learning for many decades in preschool and primary classrooms, engaging with mobile learning can also provide many opportunities for young learners to explore and develop language and literacy. The use of mobile devices is of particular interest as technology has an impact on pedagogy and the mobility of digital devices provides many opportunities for engaged and meaningful literacy learning when teamed with the arts. In this chapter, we define the arts and their relationship with literacy learning before exploring a number of resources and practices for integrating their use in early learning settings.

Students in all content areas are almost exclusively presented with text-based instruction that starkly contrasts their experiences outside a classroom. With the advent of sophisticated technologies unknown to earlier generations, modern students are evermore immersed in visual data such as photographs, videos, games, apps. Visual media comprise many of the resources that adolescents use to negotiate understandings of the world. Many teachers and teacher-educators suggest that civic competence requires meeting powerful media with equally powerful analysis tools. In this, the first of two coupled articles — the second to be published in the July issue of Social Studies Research and Practice — I describe the educative potential of employing visual documents, especially historical photographs, in social studies instruction and refer to implications drawn from recent research studies. I also introduce an original lesson demonstrating wise practice teaching strategies for implementing historical photographs in classroom instruction to promote students’ civic competence. The second coupled article will extend the wise practice teaching strategies and feature all of the resources needed to enact the lesson and provide closure to the ideas posited throughout both articles.