Media Arts in Early Childhood: A Framework for Developing Young Children’s Creative Participation in the Digital World

Abstract

Moving from oracy to a text-based world was transformational in terms of people’s thinking, belonging, being and becoming. In a similar way, the transition to living in a digital world is demanding new habits of mind and ways of engaging in the socio-cultural world: new ways of belonging, being and becoming. A number of scholars and researchers describe the evolution of a new literacy (epiliteracy). The first proposition in this chapter is that many of the observed characteristics of this new literacy align to the thinking and work practices employed by artists. The second proposition is that children’s engagement in Media Arts—one of the five subjects in the Arts Learning Area in the Australian Curriculum—facilitates their development of the digital and multimodal authorial practices needed to be active participants in their unfolding socio-cultural world. The third proposition is that the principles for integrating arts learning into the teaching programme, as outlined in the ArtsIN Framework [Hartle et al. (Early Childhood Education 43:289–298, 2015)], provide a pedagogical model for the early childhood educator to support the development of young children’s ability to actively and creatively participate in the ecology of a digitally-based world.