Media Arts is an unnecessary, superfulous, and costly addition to the Australian primary school curriculum.
All the pedagogic outcomes, strategies and processes of the Arts Education curriculum may be effectively achieved in each of the other arts education forms. The generating-realising-responding process which is central to the arts education curriculum is not reliant upon a particular medium, material, pretext or artefact.
From reading the Tasmanian Arts Education Curriculum it is evident that every pedagogic outcome claimed for Media Arts is contained in every other Arts Education form - dance, music, drama, visual arts. Additonally, many of the Arts Education curriculum outcomes are also contained in most, if not all, of the other curriculum learning area.
Media Arts is included, I think, because film, radio, advertisements and other communications media (and associated technologies) are relatively new creations - like cryonics, polymers, genetic modification and a wide range of other materials, processes and products created since the 1950s.
In my book, it is the processes and strategies of the pedagogy that are important - not the media through which learner-teaching relationship are expressed. Marshall Mcluhan was flatly incorrect - when it comes to developing student achievement the medium is not the message.
Morrigan suggests:
That she disagrees with Chris - and she is sending him off to have a look at the amazing Inanimate Alice project. She's also going to send him to look at Waves of Girls (caution - adult content on this one); Patchwork Girl; and for Primary classes The adventures of Josie True; and Spywatch.
While these could be considered multimodal texts, they offer a really useful media tool to engage classes and link literacy and arts. To create some of these with students, you might want to visit the Storytools website, which has 65 free tools to build stories and animations and create digital texts, available to teachers.
I think I'll disagree on this one. Given that many young people (and often especially boys - I have no support for this one, other than experience and anecdote) are more comfortable expressing their artistic tendencies through technology, than through traditional media.
ReplyDeleteYou afre right that many of the same outcomes can be achieved through any or all of the other Arts Education forms, but media is different, and offers a different way of expressing ones self. It also offers the ability to combine any or all of the other art forms.
So, just to whet your appetite, I'm going to send you to a website which does all these things. The link is in the bottom of your posting!