EDU115 Creative Expression and Play through the Arts

The goal of this task is to demonstrate your developing knowledge of the Arts and your active engagement in ongoing reflection on the Arts as an expressive medium for communicating ideas, feelings, diverse needs and interests.

Submit: Final submission due Friday 5pm, Week 8, but completed weekly as per below:

Using the recommended template provided in EDU115 you will build an e-portfolio which documents your understanding of the Arts as a language. Your folio requires you to attend to three aspects each week (Weeks 2 – 8):

1.	Each week in your folio you will engage in reflection which demonstrates your developing knowledge about the Arts in young children’s education, and your professional dialogue with the scholarly reading and research informing your developing educator understandings. In your reflections you will discuss the core messages of the course and actively make meaning about authentic arts education using course materials, textbooks, readings, and class workshops/learning material information. You will identify inspirational pedagogical ideas sourced from readings, course information, class workshops and your own research and experience. These will highlight your understandings about promoting creativity, self-expression, communication and aesthetic awareness in the lives of young children. 

2.	You will collect and present a range of inspirational images to show your ability to identify ways to create aesthetic invitations, open-ended challenges, provocations and learning environments that support children’s authentic engagement with the Arts. Your textbooks offer examples to support you as you think about the aesthetic features and design qualities of engaging environments that foster children’s self-expression, play, arts learning and communication. The reflection accompanying the examples you provide will demonstrate your developing knowledge of strategies that enhance aesthetic qualities of materials and spaces both indoors and outdoors. 

3.	You will demonstrate deliberate and committed efforts to engaging with the Arts in your own life. This will involve arts-making – your learning by being an artist – and arts-responding – your learning by being an audience and engaging in reflection and review processes of your own art-making and/or art traditions and artworks of notable artists which are influencing the possibilities of your own art-making adventures. Your folio will present visual evidence of your arts-making exploration and meaning-making and experimentation with materials, ideas, techniques, strategies and methodologies. You can use arts-making and arts-responding experiences you have engaged in during class workshops. Your folio will demonstrate you are developing your visual literacy and information literacy skills and dispositions, and valuing the skills, time and effort needed to produce, represent and communicate knowledge. What you include will document your developing understandings and application of arts knowledge, skills and processes. You will show you are making genuine attempts to respond, review and reflect on your own artwork, and the wider world of art and artists. 

Formative feedback and peer feedback will be provided prior to the final submission date. It is essential therefore that you maintain your folio each week, keeping it up to date, so that you are able to critique the quality and content of your own folio and the folios of peers. You are required to complete your folio weekly each Friday, Weeks 2-8 for formative feedback in tutorials. Final submission is due 5pm Friday Week 8 via the Rich Canvas Editor, Website URL or file upload in Canvas.

The goal of this task is to create an audio-visual resource that invites and facilitates authentic learning in the Arts; and one that evidences related reflection and review.

Submit final artefacts via Canvas, Friday 5pm, Week 10. Please note that the video resource needs to be ready to share in the tutorial Week 10. 

This assessment involves the creation of two multimedia artefacts – one audio-visual resource collectively created by your group (+ single page parent handout or equivalent), and one photo-story with voice-over created by you as an individual. For the group artefact all group members will receive the same mark out of a total 40%. For the individual artefact, you as an individual will receive an individual mark out of a total 10%.

Creative artefact 1 – audio-visual resource (5 minutes) (group task)

You will work collaboratively with a small group of peers to create an audio-visual resource where group members work together to convey ideas artistically in media forms and offer child-centred invitations for meaningful arts learning.  Your group’s audio-visual resource will facilitate authentic and child-centred arts-making and arts-responding experiences. Your resource will be aimed at children in the early years and focused on providing aesthetic learning invitations and open-ended challenges for children to use the Arts to make meaning about themselves and/or their world. Create a resource that could be used as a ‘learning@home’ resource by parents or early childhood educators in the event of a centre or school closure or a child’s absence from their classroom. 

In the creation of your resource you will apply the philosophies, theories and concepts discussed throughout the course. Your resource will demonstrate your ability to organise meaningful, authentic, child-centred experiences and open-ended challenges. 

The experiences and possibilities you invite will support children’s use of the Arts as an expressive medium for communicating ideas, feelings, diverse needs and interests as well as positioning children’s arts explorations in the context of the world of art – artists, artistic traditions and artworks. You will demonstrate you are aware of engaging teaching strategies that position children as creators, communicators and meaning-makers, have knowledge of a range of resources that engage children in their learning, and understand your role in guiding children through processes of responding, reflection and review. 

You will provide a single A4 page accompanying handout (or equivalent support) for parents. This handout will outline for parents:
- the focus of your resource invitation; 
- a short rationale which foregrounds the value of children's expression and ways of knowing, and communicates key messages about the Arts and the features of authentic arts education that are inherent in your resource invitation; 
- a description of key concepts and/or arts vocabulary your resource uses/emphasises; as well as the types of arts-making/arts-responding opportunities being valued in your resource invitation; 
- a suggested list of arts materials or related resources children can use as they engage with your resource; 
- any helpful strategies or open-ended questions for parents in terms of supporting children's arts-making and arts-responding; 
- connections to any notable artists and/or children's picture books; 
- useful links to artists or professional websites or to other resources that support the focus of your resource invitation; 
- extensions or modifications for younger or older age-groups if relevant.

In the tutorial in Week 10, your group will share your audio-visual resource in class and your peers will engage in the learning your resource invites by being an artist (arts-making) – developing ideas, exploring possibilities and creating artworks, and by being an audience (arts-responding) – reflecting on their own ideas/artwork, the ideas/artwork of their peers, and/or artworks, practices and traditions of art-making in the wider world.  You/a member of your group will also share your resources on Canvas (details will be provided in class) and offer a brief statement identifying the age group your resource is aimed at, the Arts focus or key concepts being explored, a list of any required materials, and the names of your group members. Your peers will engage in reflection and review of your resource and their experience of your resource (see next section).

Creative artefact 2 – photo story evidence and reflection with voice-over (2 minutes) (individual task)

Additionally, you are required to provide a separate individual 2-minute photo story with voice-over to evidence your contribution over time to this group task and your reflection and review of the art-making process. Your photo story will serve as a visual work diary/record which documents your participation in and active contribution to your group’s team meetings, planning, researching, resourcing, development and production of the group audio-visual resource. It will highlight the production and presentation roles you played. It will also communicate your reflection on the skills you developed and the peer to peer learning and teaching you enabled and/or experienced.

In the tutorial in Week 10 you will engage with the audio-visual resources of other groups and the invitations for arts-making and arts-responding. You are asked to choose two groups to whom you will provide expanded reflection and feedback in terms of your perspective of the quality of their resource, your experience of the arts-making/arts-responding experiences they initiated, and images of the artwork you subsequently created. You will provide this feedback and images of your arts-responding via the AT2 discussion forum and include evidence of this feedback and images in your photo story. These can be duplicated.

As outlined above, your group's video resource is due for presentation in tutorials in Week 10 and will be also shared in the course discussion forum.

For your formal online assignment submission, please upload your video files for creative artefacts 1 and 2 to a private YouTube account and embed these clips into the Rich Content Area in Canvas. Add the brief statement you provided in the AT2 discussion forum to your word document. Please also attach the single page handout (or equivalent) for parents that accompanies your resource. Ensure these are submitted via Canvas by 5pm, Friday Week 10. 

Criteria:
•	Implementation of a variety of techniques, pedagogies and methodologies for fostering aesthetic responses, self-expression and communication (embedded in a created audio-visual resource aimed at authentic learning in the Arts)
•	Demonstration of knowledge about the Arts/’media arts’ as a language and an expressive medium for representing and communicating authentic ideas, feelings, ways of knowing and interests
•	Oral, visual and digital communication skills including multimodal storytelling, English expression, pace, genre, narrative structure, sequencing, format, message, aesthetics, codes and conventions, technical and symbolic elements, media forms, images, sound and text, editing and review