State Board of Education Approves new Media Arts Standards

The state Board of Education approved the first Georgia Standards of Excellence for Media Arts, Theatre Arts and Visual Arts late last month.

Fine Arts Specialist Jessica Booth said the new standards are for three of five subject areas that fall within fine arts.

“The standards are for three of the five subject areas that fall under the heading of fine arts,” said Booth. “And we actually added a new subject area as a way to stay focused on keeping up to date with what was going on in industry, and that’s media arts. The visual arts and theatre standards are not new, they’re revised. The process we went through was the same that social studies, science, math and english had gone through in prior years where we started with a public survey of the existing standards and an open-ended question about whether we felt like we needed media arts standards in Georgia.”

The public feedback included a 60-day public comment period in the spring of 2016. K-12 fine arts teachers, post-secondary educators, school district fine arts coordinators, business and industry representatives, parents and fine arts organizations were represented on the committees.

According to Booth, the updates to the fine arts standards were necessary because the last time that they were updated was back in the early 1990’s.

“We had pretty outdated standards especially in terms of visual arts,” said Booth. “Most of the careers that our students aspire to once they graduate involve using a computer. They would be a web animator or a graphic designer or web designer, and we were using standards that were really in a time when people were just starting to get home computing going and it was being taught in schools but at a very low level. We weren’t up to date with where we needed to be as a state to best prepare our students for the workforce.”

Some of the goals supported by these standards include increasing student participation in the arts, increasing student completion of Fine Arts Pathways, expanding educational opportunities that maximize student engagement and meeting a variety of student interests.

Aside from teachers and board members working on these updates, community art partners were also involved in the process. Booth noted that organizations such as the Woodruff Arts Center and the Alliance Theatre were involved.

Booth said these standards are for K-12 and will be adopted in the 2018-19 school year.

For more information, visit www.gadoe.org.