Deducing the forms of a work, situating it within its history, putting into words an aesthetic experience, proposing and confronting interpretations, even conceiving, producing and assessing a work of art within a creative process, comparing the artistic productions of one art to those of another, all mobilize the capabilities of reading, oral expression and writing, while also calling upon a demanding practice of both verbal language and other languages – graphical, sensitive, bodily – in complex activities of semiotic transposition. Thus, literacy (understood as the broad competence for thinking, learning and self-construction in the elaborate uses of every system of signs) is at the heart of the practices of art present not only in the specialized subject areas but also in the subject areas of language and the human sciences. Learners have to learn to talk and write about art in stimulating situations which are likely to offer students an original yet demanding way of developing their competences. This article takes a cross-curricular approach to literacy. It is inscribed within an enlarged definition of multi-literacy (New London Group, 1996; Kalantzis, Cope, & Cloonan, 2010) so as to emphasise its multiple and integrating aspect vis-à-vis the definition of a core literacy, which CIDREE defines as follows: “Literacy includes the capacity to read, understand and critically appreciate various forms of communication”. The assumption I shall defend here is that literacy practices integrated within arts practices are specifically a part of this multi-literacy and that they provide a unique contribution to “21st century literacy skills”. The first section of this contribution will survey the complexity of current definitions of (multi)literacy. However, it also emphasises that the heart of this multi-literacy is constituted by literacy-in-the-restricted-sense, a core literacy, based upon natural language as a fundamental tool, giving access to the “social brain” (Mercer, 2013). In the following section, I will show how multi-literacy and literacy-in-the-restricted-sense are called upon by the practice of arts, which, in turn, specifically enrich them. I intend to show that, when the practices of arts are deployed in all their potentialities without being ejected to the periphery of the school universe, they demandingly bring into play the fundamental competences in all the dimensions of literacies. Finally, I will refer to French upper secondary curricula to assess whether these potentialities are exploited and what perspectives might be opened that could concern other educational systems in Europe.

Mercer, N. (2013). The Social Brain, Language, and Goal-Directed Collective Thinking: A Social Conception of Cognition and Its Implications for Understanding How We Think, Teach, and Learn. Educational Psychologist, 1(21). Kalantzis, M., Cope, B., & Cloonan, A. (2010). A Multiliteracies Perspective on the New Literacies. In E. Baker (Ed.), New Literacies. Multiple Perspectives on Research and Practice. (61–87). New York: Guilford Publications. New London Group. (1996). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–93.