Panel Statement

Panel: The Madness of Methods: Emerging Arts Research Practices

This paper pre­sents find­ings from a pilot re­search pro­ject called the Ju­nior Au­dio-Video Club.  Con­ducted at USC’s In­sti­tute for Mul­ti­me­dia Lit­er­acy,the pro­ject in­tro­duced media pro­duc­tion skills along with con­cepts of re­com­bi­nant and trans­me­dia sto­ry­telling to two groups of four- and five-year old preschool stu­dents over the course of a 16-week cur­ricu­lum.  Through an ac­count of our ex­per­i­men­tal ped­a­gog­i­cal ap­proaches, and through an ex­am­i­na­tion of stu­dent-pro­duced media ar­ti­facts, this paper aims to iden­tify key in­sights and chal­lenges to the pur­suit of early child­hood media arts ed­u­ca­tion, and to ex­plore ways in which art prac­tice as a re­search method­ol­ogy can in­form prac­ti­cal ap­proaches to col­lab­o­ra­tive cur­ricu­lum de­sign, fa­cil­i­ta­tion of pre-lin­ear cre­ative ex­pres­sion, and pro­mo­tion of media lit­er­acy skills as an in­te­grated com­po­nent of early child­hood lit­er­acy ed­u­ca­tion.

• Gabriel Pe­ters-Lazaro is a PhD student in the iMAP Media Arts + Practice program at the University of Southern California where he also serves as the media design lead for Institute for Multimedia Literacy.  His re­search fo­cuses on the in­te­gra­tion of media arts prac­tice within in­sti­tu­tions and ped­a­go­gies of early child­hood and spe­cial needs ed­u­ca­tion.  His work is in­formed by ac­tion re­search method­olo­gies.  His pre­sen­ta­tion will dis­cuss a media arts ed­u­ca­tion pilot re­search pro­ject for pre-school­ers called “The Ju­nior AV Club”. Video: Junior AV Club Timelapse: Real world RoboLogic

Full text (PDF) p. 1896-1898