A model for collaboration: integrating technology into the elementary media arts and studies curriculum

摘要

The model for technology integration at Cranbrook Schools Brookside, the elementary division of Cranbrook Educational Community Schools (www.cranbrook.edu), a private college preparatory day and boarding school in Bloomfield Hills, MI has been developed by the media arts and studies faculty, Dr. Shirley Nuss and Kimberly Conely, Ph.D., candidate. In addition to providing students with a broad and challenging academic environment, Cranbrook is world renown for its comprehensive integration of the arts into the overall elementary and secondary school curriculum. Using Cranbrook's well-established, art-based curricular framework as their impetus, the instructors created an interdisciplinary teaching model that would complement and enhance Cranbrook's philosophy and also address and help mitigate some of the disturbing trends in education perpetuated by the ongoing 'digital revolution.' The professor's approach to the overall integration of Cranbrook's philosophy with state-of-the-art technology in the media arts and studies class is based upon multiple methodologies and technologies including cinema studies, art history, analogue and digital photography, and computer visualization and enhancement. Their unique model utilizes three basic, grade appropriate, instructional components. The first focuses on the ideation-conceptualization process. The second phase incorporates technological instruction and execution. The third step is total integration of components one and two supplemented by further exploration and development of creative thought processes resulting in a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary student production project. For the purposes of illustration, samples of students' work (grades 3, 4, and 5) will appear throughout the following discussion.