Watch now: To find out more about the Arts Foundation to Level 6, watch ‘Understanding the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0, The Arts Foundation to Level 6’ on the About the Arts page. To find out more about Media Arts Levels 7–10, watch ‘Understanding the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0, Media Arts Levels 7–10’ on the Resources page.

Rationale and Aims

Rationale

In Media Arts, communication, storytelling and persuasion are used to connect audiences, purposes and ideas. Media Arts explores concepts and perspectives, and examines, interprets and analyses media practices that represent the world from diverse perspectives. Media artists work collaboratively and use traditional and emerging media technologies and creative processes to plan, produce and distribute media arts works.

Through the creative use of materials and technologies to convey meaning, students create and manipulate still and moving images, text, sound and interactive elements. They construct representations and communicate or challenge understandings, ideas and positions.

Media arts plays an important role in sustaining cultural diversity and continuing local, national and global cultures, particularly the cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. It offers opportunities to use media platforms to celebrate, maintain or revitalise ways of knowing, being, doing, belonging and becoming. Through media arts, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples celebrate and express connection to and responsibility for Country and Place.

The Media Arts curriculum recognises that media forms can operate at either a mass level or at an interpersonal level, where communication occurs between individuals and among online communities. Students critically reflect on the role of media in society and consider how their own media engagement is shaped by the practices of media. They develop awareness and understanding of ways that media institutions use information collected from users to create communities and to mediate users’ media choices.

Students learn to be critically aware of the ways that media is used culturally, how it might be negotiated by different audiences and the impact it can have on their own understanding of the world.

Aims

The Media Arts curriculum aims to develop students’:

• enjoyment and confidence to participate in, experiment with and interpret the media-rich culture and communications practices that surround them
• creative and critical thinking skills through engagement as producers and consumers of media
• aesthetic knowledge and sense of curiosity and discovery as they explore images, text and sound to express ideas, concepts and stories for different audiences
• knowledge and understanding of their active participation in existing and evolving local, national and global media cultures.