Post date: Oct 31, 2016 12:31:1 AM
We need everyone concerned about the future of education in California to sign-on to our petition supporting the full establishment of Media Arts Education in California K12 schools! Go to the SUPPORT page now so that it is evident that this is a large and broad community!
Media Arts is a very unique content area, with great benefits for students, schools and communities. 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 will 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 rarely examine the media arts world that surrounds them.
Surprisingly, even with the pervasiveness of media in our culture, there is no institutional recognition of the need to teach with and about these basic 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 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, noted in the post below. It must not take forty years to include Media Arts and media literacy in the 21st Century curriculum!
Many thanks to those who have already stepped up in support of this cause! Please spread the word!