Student Work
My multimedia career pathway with sequenced classes across three grade levels plays a significant cultural role in the school by delivering Yearbook, graphic design, promotional videos, news broadcasts, and the many other benefits of multimedia production. This higher order objective is to form the media-based culture of the school, from which all course projects, learning sequences, and skills and knowledge unfold. Therefore, I need students to develop versatile skill sets across these various media. These students need to be able to confidently self-direct and collaborate, as well as acquire additional skills as necessary. Multimedia is so complex, diverse, and open-ended, that students have to be on-the-job learners, based on fundamental sets of technical processes and principles.
To that end, I cannot teach every single technique and concept for every tool within every possible form, genre, and project. Students learn primarily through my demonstration of model projects, but also peer and online support, and through enaction – the actual collaborative production of meaningful, purposeful, and original works for real contexts. Students learn that they can be self-reliant to a certain degree and can reach out to others and other resources for learning support. They learn about and begin to master the inquiry and problem-solving process itself. They realize that it is OK not to know everything and that getting help is just a part of the ongoing learning process.
Also, the main point here is not to learn every technical component or technique to achieve a perfect product through a particular tool. I don't teach “Photoshop”, for example, or even “graphic design” as a completely isolated subject. Within this transmediating environment, instruction is ultimately aimed at media arts' role in forming cultural meaning and well-being through aesthetic empathy. I am supporting students to gain multimedia and multimodal fluency, where they can effectively communicate any message to any particular audience, through any particular medium; whether it is a rough sketch, an abstract digital composition, an emotive design, a TV commercial for their own invented product, or a Yearbook page about the homecoming dance.
Therefore, the development of creative expression, effective multimedia communication, cultural research and documentation, original ideas, media literacy, and intriguing stories are the higher order objectives, as opposed to a set of formulaic projects to learn one piece of software. Students master the creative production process, which elicits core principles for constructing and analyzing impactful messages and products. Students then gain fundamental competencies across creativity, aesthetic analysis, project management, collaboration, problem-solving, etc. (see the end of Chapter 13). Furthermore, media arts is a student-centered, inquiry-based discipline that constantly asks students what they want to create, how they want to create it, for whom, and for what purpose. Students are empowered holistically (e.g., multimodally, intellectually, academically, socially) through their mastery of multimedia design. - Media Arts Education, Olsen, 2024