The June 4, 2014 presentation of new National Media Arts Standards is a historic development for arts education, if not for 21st century education as a whole. Most simply described as “interdisciplinary digital arts”, including video, animation, multimedia, game, web, apps, and 3D objects and spaces, this new K-12 subject area functions as an integrative “hub” discipline, or "virtual maker space" for creativity and learning, where students can create almost any production, design, event, or experience imaginable. Just think of the possibilities of a "holo-deck" (just like the Star Trek laboratory) for the support of learning and creativity! Media arts presents extraordinary promise to engage and empower students, and to support the transformation of the educational process through real world projects, productions and experiences. Students are thus placed into the center of the learning process, through complex projects that apply core content within authentic contexts. This supports both the usual acquisition of facts and formulas, as well as an “enactive” and “constructivist” pedagogy, whereby the student has an active role in constructing his or her own meaning through their productions and designs for local and global communities.
The collective endorsement of “Media Arts” by the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards is a leap forward for the arts in education. Media arts is a 21st century discipline, reflected within our media infused, global culture, which will remain relevant to young people even as it continues to evolve. By its very nature, categorizing this rather amorphous, evolving, and intersecting discipline is an innovative leap. It exhibits the unique ability of the arts to literally "think outside of the box" and embrace change. The "traditional" arts disciplines (Dance, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts) have therefore supported media arts to develop its own intrinsic specializations for the integration with, and mutual benefit of all arts and academic subject areas. It actually posits a novel understanding of the arts and aesthetics, to which technology and media add an amplifying aspect, and which the traditional arts disciplines would have been unable to coherently co-develop.
The Media Arts Standards are designed to reflect this inter-connective, dynamic area. While avoiding limiting specifics in evolving technology and forms, they primarily describe the production and design process across conception, development, production, refinement, presentation, and analysis. Beyond that, they present the iterative design process in innovative problem-solving, artistic capacities in experimentation and risk-taking, and the connecting processes of media arts in forming culture and collective understanding. Media arts pedagogy is aesthetics, production and cognition-centered, with a cultural level of implementation. Students are thus active cultural participants as producers and designers. This is where the metacognitive nature of media arts comes to the fore. Not only do students construct and learn from this new content, they are in the position to directly learn about the learning process itself, both at individual and cultural levels. This “student-sourced” form of learning, "dissolves the walls of the classroom" to bridge current divides between subject areas and between student and community for a multiplying "culture of learning". Stay tuned as media arts continues to grow, develop, and is adopted by states and districts across the U.S.!
