Digital Literacy as Creative Empowerment Through Media Arts Education

In a media arts-centered culture, we are all dependent on multimedia texts and experiences for our understanding of and ability to participate in and contribute to our culture and society. The importance of educating all students in forming, analyzing and negotiating digital environments is crucial to their wellbeing, as well as for our culture and democratic society.

Media arts standards-based education serves a proactive, leading role in developing all students’ capacity for critical independence. Critical independence is defined here as the autonomous ability to discern the value, veracity, methods, and intentions of multimedia experiences. A significant aspect of this quality is conveyed through media arts production processes and the student's resulting cultural agency. The creatively empowered student knows her way around the digital environment, is grounded in her own culture and is confident in being able to assert her own perspectives. This creative empowerment of all students would alleviate many of the negative aspects of digitally immersive environments that younger generations will increasingly encounter, including media misinformation, propaganda and influence, as well as digital abuse, addictions, and social misconduct.

This is another beneficial outcome of a distinct and fully established media arts education discipline, combined with the mutually strengthening interrelationships between all of the arts and academics. The entire educational system should be unified in positively supporting students' creative empowerment, critical independence, and cultural agency. Such an emotionally and socially enriched situation, that is also culturally relevant and responsive, would go a long way towards providing the inner creativity, resilience and self-determination that students need to remain healthy in mind and body in the digital environment.

We can describe these core objectives with more detail across their artistic processes:

Creating - Constructing media arts experiences is the means to analytically deconstructing them, in any format or context. As students build multimodal experiences, they gain the vocabulary and cognitive syntax to fully understand their operational conventions and social objectives. The multimedia experience is essentially demystified. The student is empowered with the capacities to effectively create and interpret meaning within culture and contribute to her world.

Producing - Creative empowerment across embodied multimodalities implicitly builds inner resilience to the plethora of intermedia messaging, and a grounding appreciation for aesthetics, the arts and culture. As creative masters of multimedia, technology and systems, students can see themselves as equal participants and contributors in all cultural forums.

Responding - Media literacy is the critical deconstruction of media artworks and the determination of their technical methods, underlying values, intentions and messages. As she can ‘read’ and critique the variety of multimedia experiences, she is fluent in their sources, influences and systems. She is aware of how designed experience intends to manage her experience, which actualizes her power to inform herself and make her own determinations and assertions.

Connecting - With these inner capacities for creative inquiry, acquiring knowledge and designing experience, the student can become proactive and strategic in her relationships to technology, multimedia and virtual environments. She gains cultural agency in this emerging, co-created and interconnective society.