With the ever increasing influx of technology into schools and in our world, all educators should address and include some digital media in their instruction. Media Arts Education would support that institution-wide transition with standards-based cohesion and coherence towards rounded, rigorous and relevant competencies for career and college.
With this technological shift, it is especially important that Media Arts Teachers begin to be hired in schools in order to teach the aesthetic, cultural, and literacy aspects of media, that connect, inform and persuade us in the 21st Century. This is literally how we make sense of and take action in the world. Students never examine the media arts world that surrounds them, and remain unaware of its influence and power, let alone their own latent capacity for utilizing it effectively.
Surprisingly, even with the pervasiveness of media in our culture, there is no institutional recognition of the need to teach with and about these essential forms of communication in the K12 system. Schools do not have the internal means for recognizing or acting on a need that doesn't already exist as a formal category, such as English Language Arts, or Physical Education. Establishing a whole new content area is a very unusual proposition. And of course, there are not enough Media Arts Teachers or Specialists already existing to point out and push this need. So how does this start?
That is why the inclusion of Media Arts Standards at the state level across the U.S. is such an important first step, and why we then need strong and continuous public demand to bring this to full formal establishment as quickly as possible. This need for external pressure is exemplified by the decades-long battle for the separate dance and theatre credentials that were recently authorized in California. It must not take forty years to include Media Arts and media literacy in the 21st Century curriculum!
This is why we have initiated the Media Arts Education Coalition, in order to galvanize the community around this momentous opportunity to institute a transformative arts discipline for 21st Century education!
All supportive individuals and organizations are urged to sign-on at this website now!
SIGN-ON TO SUPPORT THE FORMAL ESTABLISHMENT OF MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA K12 SCHOOLS!
