NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
for
MEDIA ARTS EDUCATION
ALL STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO PRODUCE AND ANALYZE MULTIMEDIA! It's how we communicate, design, interact with, and understand our world!
Media arts' multi-literacies deliver creative and academic empowerment and are critical to 21st century preparation.
Media arts education forms a futuristic creative laboratory and makerspace, empowering all students’ voices and visions, and infusing the educational system with multimodal versatility.
TRANSFORMING LEARNING AND EDUCATION THROUGH MEDIA ARTS
Media arts is an emergent K-12 arts content area, now initiated through standards in 39 states, which supports student production across photo, video, animation, sound, graphics, 3D design, AI, and XR. These forms are creatively unlimited in capacity, so that students are able to design, construct and simulate any product or experience imaginable, and which can incorporate all arts and core contents in engaging, dynamic projects.
Imagine a media arts laboratory where students are designing their ideal future city.
Using 3D design software and 3D printing for actual scale models, they tackle urban renewal and design, sustainability principles, and the real-world application of mathematics, engineering and construction concepts.
Media arts' versatile, multimodal (multi-sensory, multimedia, arts) tools support students to interact creatively with the educational curriculum and to apply it to real world experiences. For example, they can create interactive, 3D animated models that demonstrate science concepts, such as cell division, the digestive system, or weather systems. Students are then able to manipulate, construct, and play with these multimedia models until they fully and tangibly understand those concepts, and then transfer them to varied applications and situations.
Read the book that introduces and explains media arts education and its potentials for educational reformation, by Dain Olsen, President & CEO of NAMAE!
In an augmented reality (AR) project, student groups design an interactive historical scavenger hunt for their neighborhood. Layered over their real-world environment, they mark significant points of interest and community resources, along with linked information, socially relevant murals and sculptures, and local stories and interviews.
Students produce a transmedia mental health campaign, which supports students to produce, share and interact in socially beneficial and empowering ways. Students produce diverse events, broadcasts, and interactions for varied outputs and audiences. They apply statistical analysis to measure algorithmic processes and their impacts on the school and community. All students gain critical media literacies for verifying, analyzing and evaluating multimedia information, and collaboratively nurturing a civil digital society.
Media arts students design a video game based on a popular sci-fi novel, integrating complex physics simulations and lively, science-based narratives. The project also integrates advanced mathematics, English in project narratives, texts, and scripts, and engineering through game mechanics.
BENEFITS FOR STUDENTS AND SCHOOLS INCLUDE:
Creatively unlimited physical/virtual multimodal laboratories and tools – the ultimate makerspace
An accessible, democratizing art form that reflects and expresses contemporary ideas, capacities and culture
Increased learner engagement, self-direction, deeper learning, and cultural empowerment
Increased access for all learners to core academic content and processes (e.g. Special Education, English Language Learners, socio-economically disadvantaged)
A hub discipline that dissolves silos between subjects, for integrated, transdisciplinary learning
Increased outreach and interactions between learners, schools and communities
Real world learning, school to work connections and pathways, and workforce preparation
More effective, flexible, inclusive and personalized approaches to learning, teaching and education
Comprehensive range of 21st century skill sets and competencies
Critical literacies across media, technology and digital culture
NAMAE is seeking to create a network of associated members and organizations who support the inclusion of media arts as a core component of 21st century education for the benefit of all students.