Why “Media Arts” Standards Now?

      Media Arts is all around us. We live in a world of multimedia. You are reading this through a media arts form - a graphically designed, globally available website with interactive, multimedia capacity. This has become such a common process that we don’t even think about it anymore. This has been a technological revolution which has quickly become the primary communication mode of our globalizing culture. Yet, this medium is still relatively underrepresented in classrooms, both in viewing and producing by students. This is mainly because technology has been underfunded, actually due in large part to the extreme budget crises we’re just beginning to come out of. Teachers have generally been anxious to receive and integrate technology, but with computers a rare commodity, it makes little sense to emphasize it.

      With budgets increasing again, and new portable devices gaining power and affordability, we are certain to be turning the corner in technology deployment. Media arts, both as a vehicle of delivering curriculum and for active production by students, is due to increase dramatically. Common core standards are designed to be assessed through technology, and have technology and media references specifically embedded within them. Are we prepared for this transition?

       Media Arts Standards and Model Assessments will assist in a coherent, sound transition into the 21st Century. Media arts is framed as an integrative arts and design discipline. To describe it more specifically, it is nebulous and connective, with synthesizing capacities. The term ‘media’ itself describes the connecting process or force between things. So, media arts has many different types of interface, and many ways of conveying information and expression. Media arts can serve as a nexus point between different contents and physical processes.

       This is a significant benefit because traditional education is challenged by its regimented, siloed categories in subject areas and learning processes. It is difficult to create interdisciplinary learning that crosses those borders. Each core content has competing priorities and mandates. Each teacher is pressed for time to cover his or her material in preparation for testing. Getting together to make those connections is a lot of extra work and is not inherently supported by the institutional infrastructure.

       Media arts can provide a vehicle for overcoming these barriers so that disparate vocabulary, concepts and processes are connected coherently and made more meaningful for students. If you look around at the world around us, which is very multimedia rich, this is how we live and learn in everyday life.

National Media Arts Standards - A New Discipline

      The idea of new media arts standards may seem a bit dull. Who gets excited about educational standards?! My two young boys think I’m working on the kind of “standards” one writes on the chalkboard 100x! But these standards actually represent a major step forward in education. The establishment of a new subject area, such as a new form of math or science, does not happen every day. This is a newly declared arts discipline! Media Arts is now the "5th" form after Dance, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts! This is unprecedented and historic. When this development is finalized, it should be celebrated with something a billion times bigger than the BET event in LA this last weekend! Our global society is experiencing a renaissance of creativity and unification because of media arts! Now, we can use it within classrooms for dynamic and effective forms of learning!

       This is the opening of a new and very innovative door in institutionalized learning. These standards frame a discipline that is project and design-based. Kids can create their own media - films, tv shows, radio shows, websites, interactive games, virtual worlds, transmedia, etc, etc. This offers tremendous possibilities for teaching and learning!

       Media arts is integrative across all arts and subject areas. When I produce a film, I’m engaged in an array of activities: imagining, brainstorming, organizing, discussing, planning, storyboarding, scripting, negotiating, rehearsing, etc, etc. And that’s just pre-production! Production, post-production, distribution and critical reflection incorporate an immense range of modalities and skills: directing, shooting, acting, speaking, editing, analyzing, evaluating, sound and music. The list is rather endless. This easily covers the gamut of Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is the spectrum of cognitive processes educators use to structure learning. This also includes the 21st Century skill set - collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking. Media arts can truly aspire to a holistic description.

      All of this learning is contextualized. It takes place in a real world setting which makes it more meaningful and engaging for students. It’s active learning where students move around and construct the presentation. It is not just for the teacher. It’s for the world to see so it can be more purposeful. And finally, the content of the film, perhaps a historical event, or science concept that students are enacting, is absorbed by the students in a much deeper way. They become experts in that content. They’ve studied, rehearsed and reviewed it multiple times.

      In the full breadth of the discipline (described in greater detail here) it provides something like a magical, inter-dimensional black box for student creativity and invention. In effect, students are provided the opportunity to create and design whole worlds of experience. The sky is not even the limit to the possibilities!

      So there is much more to this discipline than might first be considered when we talk about standards, assessments and curriculum. This blog will start to lay out the basics of how media arts, framed by these standards, is situated to support a transformation in education and learning.

National Media Arts Standards - Notes for the Open Review

      First of all, let me make a call out to anyone with an invested interest and/or expertise to participate in the review of first ever draft National Media Arts Standards PK-8 until July 15! Your input is crucial to the quality and relevancy of these standards.

To participate, go to http://nccas.wikispaces.com/NCCAS+June+30th+Public+Review

     For the past 18 months, I've had the privilege of leading a smart, experienced and dedicated team of 14 writers from across the country in developing these standards to represent media arts as a trans-disciplinary and integrative form spanning: cinema, animation, imaging, sound, virtual and interactive design.

     This newly distinguished discipline provides engaging opportunities for students to produce their own media and:

·       integrates all core academic content and arts disciplines (e.g. STEM=STEAM);

·       incorpoarates multiple modalities and 21st Century skills in project and design-based learning;

·       empowers student voice and creative expression;

·       promotes emerging multi-literacies - media, tech, culture, systems

      We are at an exciting moment here with this new development and this open review. This post will provide some basic points of emphasis in addition to NCCAS’s Media Arts Position Paper and the NCCAS orientation.

      First of all, these standards are voluntary. They are not imposed from top down. States, districts and teachers can choose to access and tailor them for their particular needs. The intention here is to provide a service and support for any and all teachers who might include media arts in their instruction, specialist to novice generalist. Hopefully, all teachers will find them accessible, useful and practical. The online design should support a more interactive use of these standards.

      The standards are not “the curriculum”. They should not prescribe specific lesson plans, or “performance tasks” - the teacher-designed student activities that fulfill the standard. The standards are at a high level of generalization. Media Arts Standards need to span the very broad range of disciplines listed above, as well as a broad range of factors - expertise, resources, approach, etc. Model Cornerstone Assessments (in development) are where you will find the detailing of specific example lessons with student activities for enacting the standard.

      These standards aspire to Enduring Understandings, the “Big Ideas” that should drive instruction as the learning that is most valuable and lasting. This form of “backwards planning” is based on Wiggins and McTighe’s “Understanding by Design” that stresses actual performance, or “playing the game”, as opposed to its passive reception by students in a lecture-based classroom.

     Media arts standards represent a complex discipline that is often project-based, design-based, technical and systems oriented. This is not only a singular art form. It is often an intermediary discipline that combines forms and contents for their mutual complement. Therefore it is difficult to restrain the wording and concept. The formal wording of the standard may sometime seem overly complex and unapproachable. The actual wording of the teacher’s direction and the activity of the student will be much simpler and direct. For example:

Responding - Evaluating 8.2: Evaluate a work of media arts through analysis of key elements, components, and complex interrelationships within the work.

Teacher: What stood out about the editing in this music video?

Student: The beat and image were totally matched up. They made it stronger.

     Hopefully, this provides some helpful background to understanding and evaluating these standards. We are very excited to hear input from everyone on the coherence and practicality of these standards. Please participate and let us know what is working and what needs work!

National Arts Standards Coalition Considers Media Arts

      The National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) is considering the inclusion of media arts as a distinct arts discipline in their revamping of 1994 national art standards. This is my position of advocacy, refined over the past year:
      This inclusion would authentically reflect 21st century culture and creativity. The “traditional” disciplines have not, and are inexperienced in representing the full breadth and depth of media arts from cinema and animation to virtual and interactive design, let alone emerging "intermedia hybrids". In fact, it is highly questionable whether they would be able to do so with authenticity and coherence in fulfilling media arts potential as a distinct form. 

     If left under-defined, the rapid ascendance and proliferation of media arts outside of educational institutions and from other subject areas will continue to erode the perceived relevancy of traditional arts education. For example, STEM already includes multimedia production and game design through readily available devices and software, with little consideration of their cultural, artistic and aesthetic-design aspects. 

     The declaration and development of media arts as a distinct arts discipline will ultimately reaffirm the arts' “core” PK-12 status, particularly in 21st Century transitions. Media arts’ trans-disciplinary, “nexus” capacity will enhance learning for students by incorporating aesthetic perception and modalities through project and design-based learning that can integrate the arts and all subject areas. Furthermore, media arts specifically addresses critical literacies in media, technology and digital culture.

     Traditional arts educators may hesitate to embrace this inclusion, due to a perceived loss, or extraction of media arts practices out of their disciplines. But media arts is an overlapping form that creates a multiplying dynamic. It is both distinct and pervasive.  Its pure specializations within virtual and interactive design do not inflict on the other disciplines. And its forms can still be utilized within any and all arts disciplines and subject areas. Certainly, every teacher would benefit from some inclusion of media arts in their instruction. 

     This greater, comprehensive assembly of the arts is an embodied, cultural vehicle within education with great potential to benefit learning. Thus, this is a gain for students and for a more aesthetically astute  and media literate global culture. 

Unbinding Learning

      Fostering creativity, the naturally present capacity for effective adaptation, requires “unbinding” opportunities rather than constrictions. The artist’s studio is a completely open environment, shaped to inspire and promote internal dreams and motivations. The closer we can get to this “play-based" model, where we can discover what we truly want to do, the more students will become self-generative, self-reliant and self-directed in their learning.
     Media arts intrinsically promotes this creative-based, unbinding learning environment. It opens many more avenues for discovering, applying, practicing, manipulating and presenting content. And it is capable of adapting to and interconnecting any and all subject areas and arts disciplines. It is literally, the “intermediary” that can integrate them all.

   This has parallels in recent discoveries in cognitive science.

Creativity and Learning

     “Creativity” is biological. It is adaptation and innovation, or “learning”. It is how we find within ourselves the reserve for change and novelty towards unifying with our dynamic environment. Artists are continually involved in the essence of this process. If there is one word that describes the studio method of the artist, it is evolution. Artists' works evolve. I can’t think of one great artist who doesn’t embody this process of problem solving and adaptation towards new forms of unity. Artists are unique in living almost purely within this process in free-form as individuals with internal dreams and compulsions. Therefore, they have a certain expertise in the matter. Inventors and designers would come close to this, but they remain attached to practical and utilitarian outcomes. Any other “creativity” existing in society is in relation to a system or organization, be it an environment, family or a corporation.

      We should not mystify “creativity” as an elusive principle entirely exclusive to art, because everyone is certainly capable of it. Learning and creative invention is continual and pervasive for humans, even when we sleep. Our brains are hardwired to continually scan the environment, to find pattern and anomaly, to “make sense” out of chaos, and to solve the dilemmas of complexity. Ironically, this is compelled by our desire for complacency and security. These two forces, comfort and discomfort, are in constant, dynamic tension. Educators must master their dual representation in instruction. The classroom must be both safe enough and open enough for students to take the risks that foster the creative impulse.

Child-centered Learning

By “child-centered”, I mean that all learning originates purely from internal motivations. It is the intrinsic impetus towards adaptation, as a biological and social necessity. Human beings are highly adaptive creatures, evidenced by their capacity to adjust towards any environmental condition. Over millennia, we have evolved to be learning machines. Thus, it is virtually impossible for us not to learn.


Watching children unbounded in play provides ample evidence of this natural activity. Right now, Elijah (8) and Aksel (6) are setting up their new Pokemon board game. Intensive learning is fun, invigorating, riveting. Aksel demands to learn the game. If Elijah neglects Aksel’s involvement in setting it up properly and learning the game, Aksel is infuriated. He demands to know as much as Elijah. Elijah keeps reasserting his greater knowledge. He must negotiate with Aksel to both maintain control, and to let Aksel know enough to meaningfully participate. Otherwise, Aksel threatens to quit.