Why Choose Media Arts for your Classroom?

While media arts present a clear means of engagement for students, the exploration and creation of media arts is integral to developing the skills for the 21st Century Learner. Media Arts study and art-making provides us with a stellar opportunity to notice together a student’s perspective on the influence, the power, the importance of discernment within their day to day engagement of media arts. In that process of noticing and excavating our understanding, we begin to question and consider other opinions and perspectives of media arts.

Media Arts is the toolkit that we use to interface with the world. Technology sits in every student’s pocket. When we embrace that phone or iPad as a connection tool/medium to enhance their learning we help them to develop their comprehension of how the medium is used. This will be invaluable preparation for 21st century communication skills and the creative entrepreneurial endeavours they’ll be meeting in their work world. While the medium/tool may change, the foundation knowledge of the medium’s purpose and how to adapt it to an audience will not.

Media Literacy is integral for the development of engaged thinkers and citizens. As young people move from passive observers and absorbers of other people’s ideas/media to the practice of becoming active creators, they gain critical thinking skills through deconstructing and constructing media themselves. As more informed consumers in our media saturated world, they’ll demonstrate discernment about the media they consume about the way in which they’re targeted by the media. Through the creation of media texts, they’ll experience and share their own voices, becoming equal partners in the media creation industry.

Media Literacy: Make Art. Make Change.