Page 42 - The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9 and 10: The Arts, 2010

THE ONTARIO CURRICULUM, GRADES 9 AND 10 | The Arts
dictionaries, encyclopedias, interviews, videos, and the Internet. The questioning they practised in the early grades becomes more sophisticated as they learn that all sources of information have a particular point of view and that the recipient of the information has a responsibility to evaluate it, determine its validity and relevance, and use it in appro- priate ways. The ability to locate, question, and validate information allows a student to become an independent, lifelong learner.
CRITICAL THINKING AND CRITICAL LITERACY IN THE ARTS
Critical thinking is the process of thinking about ideas or situations in order to under- stand them fully, identify their implications, make a judgement, and/or guide decision making. Critical thinking includes skills such as questioning, predicting, analysing, synthesizing, examining opinions, identifying values and issues, detecting bias, and distinguishing between alternatives. It involves an inquiry process of exploring questions about and solutions for issues that are not clearly defined and for which there are no clear-cut answers. Students who are taught these skills become critical thinkers who
do not merely accept the obvious as a given.
Students use critical thinking skills in the arts when they assess, analyse, and/or evaluate the impact of something and when they form an opinion about something and support that opinion with a rationale. In order to think critically, students need to examine the opinions and values of others, detect bias, look for implied meaning, and use the infor- mation gathered to form a personal opinion or stance, or a personal plan of action with regard to making a difference.
As they work to achieve the arts expectations, students frequently need to identify the possible implications of choices. As they gather information from a variety of sources, they need to be able to interpret what they are listening to, reading, or viewing; to look for instances of bias; and to determine why that source might express that particular bias.
In developing critical thinking skills in the arts, students must ask good questions to interpret information, detect bias, and consider the values and perspectives of a variety of groups and individuals.
Critical literacy is the capacity for a particular type of critical thinking that involves looking beyond the literal meaning of a text to determine what is present and what is missing, in order to analyse and evaluate the text’s complete meaning and the author’s intent. Critical literacy goes beyond conventional critical thinking by focusing on issues related to fairness, equity, and social justice. Critically literate students adopt a critical stance, asking what view of the world the text advances and whether they find this view acceptable, who benefits from the text, and how the reader is influenced.
Critically literate students understand that meaning is not found in texts in isolation.
People make sense of a text, or determine what a text means, in a variety of ways. Students therefore need to be aware of points of view (e.g., those of people from various cultures), the context (e.g., the beliefs and practices of the time and place in which a text was created), the background of the person interacting with the text (e.g., upbringing, friends, commu- nities, education, experiences), intertextuality (e.g., information that a viewer brings to a text from other texts experienced previously), gaps in the text (e.g., information that is
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