Remedying the Blind Spots in Education

Education is capable of having blind spots, and certainty the area of media arts is one of them. But how does education become aware of, and adapt to the areas of need of which it is unaware?

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!

Media Arts Education - Learning Amplified

MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION: K12 Arts Education for the 21^st Century

We live in a “media arts” centered world. We know and learn about, and create our contemporary world through media arts tools, forms and processes. Our 21st C global culture has moved from text-based to multimedia-based modes of communication and interaction. Particularly in California, media arts has a long historic and cultural legacy, and accounts for a substantial and increasing portion of our  $375 billion “Creative Economy”.

It is essential that all students become versed in these new modes to become empowered citizens, effective communicators, and to develop innovative solutions to contemporary challenges.

"Media Arts Education" is a relatively new categorization of K12 arts education, alongside of the traditional disciplines of Dance, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts. It encompasses the digital media arts of imaging, moving image, sound, interactive and virtual design.

Media Arts Students can:

• Produce and design anything they can imagine, including photos, graphics, animations, movies, special effects, motion graphics, video games, 3D designs, virtual worlds, interactive apps, etc.
• Design 3D models of sustainable communities on Mars, complete with agricultural and energy production, and designs for architecture, transportation, tools and clothing
• Investigate the local community for “hotspots” of interest, history, social engagement, or urban and environmental challenge, and then propose transformational designs, investigations and promotions of these hotspots
• Produce videos that present their vision for school change, submitted to their local school board for the (LCFF) district budget decision-making process
• Create 3D game designs addressing a social or environmental issue that exercise every level of mathematics, code, virtual physics, engineering, and game theory, as well as core content
• Design digital and physical 3D models of cities, mega spaces, and everyday objects, such as kitchen utensils and phones, while studying the omni-presence of design
• Analyze and debate presidential election advertising through media literacy methods  
• Exercise their language skills (especially English Language Learners) through producing videos such as news, cooking, travel, stories, talent, social issues, etc., by developing scripts, rehearsing segments, analyzing media, and collaborating in diverse production activities
• Exhibit their productions in “multimedia events” that integrate all arts disciplines for the school and local community, including: video yearbooks, streaming arts and news broadcasts, multimedia theatre, screen exhibitions, film festivals, video and DJ dance experiences, international cultural exchanges, etc.
• Evaluate and design multimedia tools and products for the enhancement and universal access of learning in English, Mathematics, Science, and History

These actual classroom projects demonstrate Media Arts Education’s capacity to:

• Cultivate 21^st Century Skills in Communication, Collaboration, Creativity and Critical Thinking
• Promote student-centered, inquiry-driven learning that is relevant and self-directed
• Engage students in real world activities and problem solving with purposeful results
• Advance core academic and arts achievement through their effective integration in cultural and community projects
• Empower student voice and civic engagement, and foster essential literacies in arts, media and technology
• Support all students towards academic success, including those with special needs, limited language proficiency, and at risk of academic failure

Media Arts Education in these various forms provides rich and rigorous arts content in the instruction of media production and design, and forms a unique space of innovation and invention for 21st C education. A “Media Arts Lab”, incorporating a variety of digital media and design tools and forms, can serve as a virtual “makerspace” within the school, where students can create any expression, production or design they can imagine.  

This virtual laboratory supports integrated and holistic forms of learning that can "dissolve the walls" of classrooms, supporting students to become the researchers, inventors, entrepreneurs, designers and artists of their own futures. By engaging in a broad range of processes and activities in sequenced study, students can master 21st Century and Media Arts Standards-based competencies that prepare them for both college and career:

Multimedia Communication                                Technical Production

Design Thinking                                                      Innovation and Adaptation

Inquiry/Research                                                    Organization/Development

Media, Tech, Arts Literacies                                  Critical Analysis/Evaluation

Self-agency/Community-Interaction                   Contextual Awareness

Synthesis/Metacognition                                      Learning about Learning

Currently, in California, media arts educators do not have specific standards for their instruction, so they have to turn to other sets of standards in order to meet district and school requirements for “standards-based instruction”. Nor do media arts educators have specific pre-service training, program support, or ongoing professional development. Also, media arts courses and teachers may fall under other categories in their districts and programs, such as computer, technical, visual arts, theatre, etc.

In order to move Media Arts Education towards educational establishment, the adoption of standards by the state allows any interested educators to form commonality in practice and outcome. Then, as the discipline gains recognition and support, districts and the state may begin forming specific courses and a credential for authorized instruction. Only with its complete institutional implementation can the promise of Media Arts Education be fulfilled.

Media Arts Education is endorsed by all national arts organizations and their affiliated partners in the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, and is endorsed by: the National Association of Media Arts and Culture, the National Association of Media Literacy Education, the National Endowment for the Arts, the College Board, and is included as a core content in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). National Core Media Arts Standards are currently being adopted or adapted across the U.S. Media Arts is a key recommendation in the CREATE CA “Blueprint for Creative Schools”.

Media Arts Education is now forming a broad-based community of support of educators, parents, industry and community organizations, etc., seeking to formally establish the discipline in U.S. K12 schools. 
See the Media Arts Education Coalition website for more information.
SIGN-ON HERE TO SUPPORT THE FORMAL ESTABLISHMENT OF MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA K12 SCHOOLS

California Superintendent Torlakson Declares Support for Media Arts Standards

On August 26, 2016, I received a public communication from California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Torlakson, that he is committed to "working with the legislature next year to ensure the explicit inclusion of Media Arts in California’s visual and performing arts content standards.” And just now, August 27, this was updated to state that that message “has been conveyed to the Governor (Jerry Brown).”

This is a momentous and historic occasion in the development of Media Arts Education, and will be celebrated by the many people that have long been working for and cheering on this movement, both in California and nationally. This will lead to the galvanizing of our diverse community of practice and support, the development of state standards, and the eventual implementation of the discipline. We are grateful to the Superintendent for his forward-looking vision and dependable character for this assurance. We have much work to do as this is actually a new beginning, but at least now we have moved into a phase where that work will have lasting results. And this work will have national, and even international significance, given California’s leading 21st C media centered culture, and our massive $300 billion Creative Economy, as a significant part of the 6th largest economy on the planet.

This provides substantially greater endorsement and momentum for Media Arts Education than it has experienced since it was initiated in Minnesota in the early 90s. For over 10 years, California has been slowly and haltingly making progress towards this point. In LAUSD, we had been able to achieve multiple concrete milestones of its officiation, including a specific Media Arts Adviser position, the implementation of multiple Demonstration Media Arts Classrooms for regional support and teacher-led development, and an illustrious Advisory Committee under former Director, Richard Burrows. And then the adoption of K12 Media Arts Standards within the Instructional Division, a Board resolution, numerous higher-ed and industry partnerships, its personnel categorization in HR, and the de facto declaration of its establishment of our other former Director, Robin Lithgow.

Yet those points of progress were met with severe setbacks. Primarily due to the economic devastation of the Great Recession of the late 2000s, which caused the division to be completely cut and all of its programs decimated, media arts lost its momentum as a consolidated and focused project. Current LAUSD Arts Ed Director Rory Pullens has been making great efforts to support media arts schools with industry partners and specific professional development for film teachers. But its designation and representation has been split between Theatre (film) and Visual Arts (media), which diffuses its development.

With the National Core Arts Standards finally published in 2014, and since then in the process of adoption by many states across the U.S., there is breathtaking progress for media arts at a much larger scale. In California, there have now been two bills that passed through Congress in order to revise our old VAPA standards. The first bill, SB 975, which occurred in 2015, had stated that California’s VAPA standards revision would refer to the entire National Core Arts Standards document, implicitly including “Media Arts”. Near final passage, it was suddenly gutted to be used as an emergency vehicle for changes to the High School Exit Exam.

I had glanced at the second bill, AB 2862, early in the process when I first heard about it this past July.  I assumed then that it was the same text and watched over time as it progressed through both houses, unopposed. Just two weeks ago though, I was alerted to the fact that “Media Arts” was actually missing from the wording, just before the bill began to pass both houses. When I read it more carefully, I realized that the NCAS arts disciplines were discretely listed as Dance, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts, all except for “Media Arts” . It appeared that someone had gone to the trouble to list these disciplines with the deliberate intent to void one entire discipline.

It is currently unclear how this came to be as no reasoning was in the bill, nor in the analysis. And I am not now interested in investigating it. There were weak reasons shared by the writers, that “there was no credential” and that “media arts wasn’t in the original framework”. Seriously? But the responsible parties had violated the intent of the bill itself in its description of a validating, public, inclusive and transparent process in using the NCAS as the reference in developing state standards. These few people, with no stated expertise, had essentially pre-determined the future of arts education in California prior to opening it up for public discussion.

With that flaw, I could question the bill’s validity, and rally the media arts education community in California that we have been building for this decade. But the bill had already rapidly and unanimously passed through both houses. Once again, it seemed media arts would not happen in California. Apparently, the community's voice was effective. I was just beginning to stage a next, desperate phase of advocacy, when I received Torlakson’s communication. Suddenly, what had been another detrimental hit, became an opportunity to forge a community and ascertain the discipline. Torlakson’s bold endorsement not only corrected the bill's error in allowing media arts to be considered, it placed media arts securely in equal status with the other arts in the standards development process.

With this declaration, media arts is primed for full establishment in California. And this newly initiated and invigorated media arts community is forming in order to serve the next generation of students in the development of this innovative and promising discipline! Many, many thanks to all who raised their voices and made this historic event happen! We’re now supporting the passage of AB 2862, and looking forward to much substantial progress in the months and years ahead!

Please join us as we use this galvanizing moment to form a "Coalition for Media Arts Education" in order to promote and establish this promising and beneficial discipline in California, and across the United States! Stay tuned for an announcement to that effect!

Emerging Educational Metaphors: Network, Amplifier, Media Arts

Recently, I’ve been seeing some understandable and reputable backlash to increasing technology infusion in education. LAUSD’s iPad debacle became a pivotal issue in LAUSD school board elections; an Atlantic article by Toyama titled, “Why Technology Alone Won’t Fix Schools”, cites a variety of supporting research; several recent high-profile reports have disputed the viability of the “flipped classroom”, “personalized learning”, and “blended learning” models.

And then, yesterday, June 8, 2015, the LA Times published this article by Michael Godsey in its print edition, “Traditional Teaching Faces a Cyberthreat From School Model”, which critically examines “Altschool”, a new and rapidly expanding online education program that describes the new teacher role as a "facilitator". Godsey states that teachers cultivate “wisdom” and cannot be replaced by technology. He cites John Hattie’s, “Visible Learning” which synthesizes more than 800 meta-analyses and 50,000 smaller studies”, finding that “‘direct instruction,’ and ‘quality of teaching’ were all significantly more effective than ‘individualized instruction,’ ‘matching teaching with learning style,’ and ‘computer-assisted instruction.’.

Although I am a technology-based educator and artist, I am certainly not a technophile, and I wouldn’t claim technology itself as a panacea that will replace teachers. My friends know that I have been very critical of technology in general, and particularly of its misuse in educational settings. I agree with Toyama that technology is basically an amplifier. To some degree, it will reflect the school situation in which it is placed, good, bad or mixed.  

With that introduction, this is my unedited, responding letter to the editor, which at least has been published on the website, if not tomorrow’s print edition.

Dear LA Times Editor

After using technology and media in the classroom for over 25 years, I can say with confidence that its proper usage will significantly advance education and learning, shifting the teacher’s role to facilitator and coach. You can simply look at the world around us to see how the average citizen has been empowered to learn and create through technology’s increasing access and sophistication. Traditional education is still based on an antiquated “factory” metaphor, with corresponding methodologies and curricula, which do not necessarily benefit from the mere insertion of technology.

The emerging metaphor for education is the “network”, with accompanying redesigns in infrastructure, curricula and methodology. The student is then empowered to produce and design anything imaginable within a virtual lab, within enriched, authentic contexts that support the real world application of core content. Beyond the either/or propositions in the article, traditional, networked and progressive instructional approaches are incorporated. This supports both the usual acquisition of facts, formulas and literacies, as well as “enactive” and “constructivist” pedagogy, whereby the student has an active role in constructing his or her own meaning, through projects for connected local and global communities. Thus, the 21st Century educational focus is on the mastery of the “student-sourced” learning and creating processes themselves. The national advent of “Media Arts Education”, through the recent development of voluntary K12 standards and assessments will contribute to this transformation.

We need to stop thinking of technology as a tool that one simply inserts into schools just as they now are, as a kind of magic pill. The system has to be redesigned around our new understandings of learning and technology. Technology is more of an ecosystem, with this potentiated virtual space and interconnectivity, which should be available to students for active creativity and learning. Technology requires specialized skills, abilities and circumstances to manage well, and schools need to begin thinking from the perspective of the student who is empowered to access an infinite, and self-originating learning and creating process that is the innate capacity of human beings.

iPad Case Study: Media Arts Education as Self-Directed Learning

In the following case study, I’ve been studying my own two children (I’m not above using them for sociological studies), who have had casual access to an LAUSD iPad for 2.5 years. By the way, I won’t go into the details of why this iPad was idling around the house. If you like, you can read about that by searching “LAUSD iPad”.

And I do mean casual, and occasional use. My wife and I severely limited their access to the iPad, counting any game-playing or entertainment experience as “screen time”, which is earned through hard labor (they built a real chicken coop for us in the backyard). However, they were allowed multimedia production access as they wished, and really undertook these projects of their own free will, with no pushing or coaching on my part. So, we can see that this limited and relaxed access nevertheless resulted in a prodigious amount of multimedia production.

The next section details one particular project which has become an ongoing collaboration, in which I did give some input as to the purpose and design. We brainstormed the project as the ultimate amusement park, that could be constructed and explored with a mathematical lens. The elder boy detailed what components of this virtual world would relate to the math processes he and his brother were learning in school. The development of those math integrations, how one exercises them through the construction and experience, are currently ongoing.

The following attributes of Media Arts Education emerge from this and the other various models I’ve been seeing from others, or studying and developing myself.

When we think of media arts as a virtual laboratory, essentially potentiated for any imaginable production, design or experience, we realize that media arts education is a holistic centrifuge for creating and learning. Given that the student can make anything imaginable in this space, what can they not learn from it?  

Media Arts Case Study

11 and 8 years old

Conditions

• iPad – 2.5 year period, limited access
• Non-coached, peer-instruction, Youtube training
• Self-motivated & directed production

Products

• 5 Stop-motion Animations
• 250+ Digital Photos
• 100+ Digital Drawn Cell Animations
• 20+ Minecraft Virtual Worlds – 60+ Structures
• 15+ Digital Puppetshows
• 20+ Digital Song Productions
• 50+ 3D Object Designs

Minecraft Virtual World: “Funland” Amusement Park - Math Integration – 11 year old

• 3-Dimensional Modeling and blueprints
• Construction project estimates and costs
• Speed calculations – lava, roller coaster
• Currency exchange rates
• Treasure coordinate hunting
• Shape, form, structure - dimensions, volume
• Spawning rates
• Health and heart ratios and rates

Media Arts Education Attributes

• Engaging, Stimulating, Challenging, Relevant
• ”Student Sourced” Learning - Self-Generating and Directing
• Scales Low Threshold Entry to High-Complexity Potential
• Holistic - Aesthetic, Arts and Culture Centered
• Incorporates All Modalities - Sensory, Motor, Cognitive
• Comprehensively Relevant -Forms, Contents, Processes, Domains
• Authentically Simulates and Produces 21st C Culture
• Project and Design-based - Emphasizes Process over Product
• Embedded Multi-literacies - Media, Aesthetics, Tech, Digital
• Metacognitive - Learning to Learn

Fantastic Bubble Science and Media Arts

I don’t mean to be plugging the LA Times again, but it is the only newspaper I get, and there was a great article today on how a number of scientists are on the production teams at Dreamworks animation studios. This is another good example of how media arts is not only interdisciplinary, but “integrative” in the seamless interweaving of disciplines, and pushes the creation of new knowledge and content. In the article it is explained that these high level aeronautics and physics scientists sign-up for this work, not just for the money, which is better than their normal research salaries, but because it is so interesting and exciting to solve these kinds of fantastical problems.

In a small, utilitarian office in Glendale, Ron Henderson methodically jotted down equations for Isaac Newton's Three Laws of Motion on a whiteboard next to his desk. The equations, the physicist explained, are the mathematical building blocks for constructing a three-dimensional, bubble-like sphere. Henderson could easily have been preparing a lesson at Caltech, where he once was a faculty member. Instead, he was at DreamWorks Animation's Tuscany-style campus, doing his part to bridge the divide between art and science. Henderson was explaining the math behind a fluid-simulation technology that would help artists working on the upcoming movie "Home" draw soap bubbles inhabited by a race of diminutive aliens called the Boov.

In this way, media arts provides a culturally based product, a fantasy film, to investigate and create very technical and complex virtual events and experiences. This is applied engineering and design, loaded with in-depth knowledge of physics, math, 3D modeling and programming. Putting students into teams to solve these kinds of problems, albeit at a greatly simplified level, may provide a bit more motivation to learn the math, by seeing it in action, testing it, and playing with parameters towards a mind-bending, and believable result.  

When I learned the basics of the Unity game designing platform, I soon realized that the sky is not even the limit to what I could produce there. Literally, one begins with a black, infinite space, and infinite variables in the various forces of mass, resistance and gravity to work with. I fairly easily designed a primitive game, with a basic table top platform, a dozen blocks, and a rolling ball that could move the blocks. The idea was to maneuver the ball around certain blocks, while pushing others into place, without falling off of the table top. This actually gave me a tangible sense of the algebraic formulation of these variables like I had never known before. Suddenly, I experienced what algebra was really about! And it was fun and exciting!

Students should at least be provided the opportunity to apply these math skills in this kind of environment while they are learning the processes in pure abstraction on paper. And perhaps someday, it would make sense that the system could recognize the value of this kind of production as evidence of actual mastery.

Media Arts as Cultural Consciousness

We tend to think of learning and art making in schools as the mastering a set of information that is already known, such as the various techniques of drawing and painting discovered throughout history. We appear to teach students only what is already known about a subject, with the idea that they can transfer that knowledge to new situations in career or college. With media arts, students are in the position of actually contributing significantly to current knowledge, because media arts is centered in the processes of creativity and learning themselves. Students can utilize media arts forms, tools and processes in order to collectively learn and communicate directly their own ideas, perspectives and understandings of a topic. They are active participants in a culture of learning that is larger than the classroom, just as media arts exists in our contemporary global society.  Thus, media arts enacts the process of learning itself, as a culturally based process. Students develop cultural content with the possibility of a reciprocal cultural response.

We can see this concept illustrated in the controversial situation described in an LA Times article about a student-produced newscast in Carlsbad, California, which aired a film examining the issue of immunization. The film has raised the ire of local anti-immunization activists, who have accused the students of collaborating with corporate pharmaceutical interests. The students were initially interested in the idea pitched by a local pro-immunization group. They began to take up the investigation, but this group tried to lead and even direct the students. The students resisted this and decided to research it for themselves to create a balanced perspective. They came to own this process and came to their own conclusion that ultimately agreed with the pro-immunization group. This has escalated into a rather dramatic and public battle on this impassioned issue.

Without getting into the details of the argument itself, nor the students’ role in a social controversy, the story itself describes perfectly the nature of media arts in the learning process. Media arts is a vehicle for expression and learning, more than it is a contained package of content. That is how it functions within our media-based, global culture. In that sense then, media arts is a form of “cultural consciousness”. Media arts education replicates that formation within the school system. Students that produce media arts products are engaged in the actual process of cultural formation.

Students engaged in this process are learning a large number of things simultaneously. Of course they are learning about media production and marketing. They are learning how to create intentional media that effectively expresses a point of view. Through research and writing, they are gaining expertise in the content of the film, “immunization”, its history and its supporting and detracting arguments. But more significantly, they are learning about this “cultural consciousness” that media forms as a “dialectic” around its understandings and intentions, and that they can play an active role in its formation. This is a form of “media literacy”, that is an inherent part of media arts education.                     Ordinarily, students play a passive role in our society. They are seen as “not ready” to fully participate in the world. Here, students are in the middle of a social controversy, and are understanding how emotionally charged and serious information and expression can be in our world. Media, or information, attention, and communication are elements of power in the formation of our culture. These students have literally “struck a nerve” with their production, and are gaining lifelong learning in the process.