Visual & Media Arts: Learning, Development & Culture in Australia

This essay explores the importance of visual and media arts in early childhood and school curricula in Australia, arguing for its inclusion in the national curriculum. It highlights how visual and media arts contribute to the development of essential skills such as motor skills, language development, decision-making, visual learning, inventiveness, cultural awareness, and improved academic performance. The essay also emphasizes the role of visual and media arts in stimulating curiosity, creativity, self-expression, and cultural understanding within families and communities. It advocates for children to be seen as producers, not just consumers, of art culture, fostering independence and self-confidence. The essay concludes by asserting that visual and media arts are as vital as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects for holistic child development and future success.

Running head: VISUAL AND MEDIA ARTS
Visual and media arts importantly in early childhood and school curricula in Australia
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Authors note

1VISUAL AND MEDIA ARTS
The visual and media arts are important in early childhood and school curricula. This
topic is elaborated in the coming paragraphs. The visual and media arts are creating and
expressing arts through technologies. The visual and media arts are important in early childhood
and schools in Australia due to development of problem solving skills and building concepts.
Thus this contributes in the development of children towards cognitive and art concepts. The
visual and media art are not recognized as a profound area which parents and school think should
be important and can be taken as a career interest (Flood, Heath & Lapp, 2015). In spite of,
dearth in visual and media art introduction in school and early childhood, children are not bound
to only academic performances. The perfect example of visual and media artist is Walt Disney,
who is known as the pioneer of the entertainment industry. He discovered art lately but later
made it his career and now people recognize him as a creator of world famous cartoon among
children that is Mickey Mouse (Wright, 2015). There are other examples also who excelled in
the field of visual and media arts despite of hurdles in their way. Hence, visual and media arts
have been shown the importance to children over the world from several aspects as discussed in
the paragraph however, people do not value art in early years learning of children.
The importance of visual and media arts can be seen through the following skills that are
developed in the early years of childhood in school and home. Visual and media art can support
children in stimulating many development skills such as motor skills, language development,
decision making, visual learning, inventiveness, cultural awareness and improved academic
performance. The first skill is motor skills that helps in children to identify and understand how
to approach something and do tasks. The skills involve holding a brush for painting or using
crayon to portray their imagination on paper (Spodek & Saracho, 2014). The children at different
ages in school or home identify variety of things and they perceive it in many ways and hence

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the development of motor skill helps children to react towards them. The second skill is children
are also developing language skills through visual and media art learning. The ELYF (Early
Years Learning Framework) helps to develop children through development theories, socio-
cultural theories, socio-behaviourist theory, critical theories and post-structuralist theories (Ko &
Chou, 2014). The shapes, actions and colours help children to convey their thoughts. They create
their own ways to do the tasks through art. The children understand the language through visual
representations more than the languages that they hear such as linguistic learning, musical
leaning, kinaesthetic learning, logical learning and interpersonal learning. The third skill is
decision making that helps children to strengthen their thinking skills in terms of critical and
problem solving skills. The visual and media arts help to develop identification of real world
experiences and aspects that children depict in their art work (Spodek & Saracho, 2014).
Therefore, visual and media arts support children with shaping their own perspectives and
philosophies. The decision making also helps to develop new ideas, concepts and creativity. The
fourth skill is visual learning which is learned by utilizing graphs and diagrams to interact with
other people that helps children to develop a visual aspects of outside environment. The visual
learning is interaction through graphs and diagrams where they communicate effectively. They
learn how to interact with people, how to interpret and criticize things and making choices based
on creativity (Hartle, Pinciotti & Gorton, 2015). The children become more enthusiasts through
visual and media arts that help them to explore world. The fifth skill is inventiveness which helps
children in their early childhood to develop innovative thinking. The children develop skills to
express their views and taking risks in creation of art (Spodek & Saracho, 2014). This helps
children to develop innovating minds that will them in future. The sixth skill is cultural
awareness that helps children to get an understanding of society and its aspects. The visual and

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media art helps children in their early childhood to determine the cultural awareness through
depiction of arts, graphics and visual representations (Hartle, Pinciotti & Gorton, 2015). The
example of a child playing with a toy helps the child to understand that the toy may depict
racisms or sexism. This depiction is due the structure of toy such as colure, hair texture and
shape. The seventh skill is academic performance is improved which means that visual and
media arts helps children to improve academically. According to Derewianka & Jones, (2016),
the visual and media art when conjointly used with academic performances yield an impressive
result for children. This is because visual and media art helps to improve understanding of
academic subjects. Therefore, skills are developed to nurture the child development with
emphasis on future impacts.
The visual and media arts play a major role in the cultural lives of children and families.
However, the parents and school authorities fail to understand that only technical learning is not
sufficient to accomplish a successful career (Hartle, Pinciotti & Gorton, 2015). The technical
aspects helps to develop only theoretical knowledge and career oriented (Gaggi, 2015). The
visual and media arts exist from early days, only the change that has occurred perceives the art,
its implementation and its orientation. Since earliest days, when people drew images on the
walls, the arts made its way into the world that helped present world to get understanding of the
world (Fleming, Bresler & O'Toole, 2014). Thus the role of visual and media arts is thus
important in the cultural lives of children and families and they are described as follows. The
visual and media arts have the role to simulate children’s curiosity and creativity. The curiosity is
the way to learn something new and improve skills. The curiosity helps to children and families
to not only learn and get success but also learn from the failures (Cahnmann-Taylor &
Siegesmund, 2017). Furthermore, the curiosity allows awaking the inner creativity and focusing

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on more problem solving. The curiosity and creativity both helps children to become better
observers, learners, problem solvers and creators.
The children use visual and media arts to express their thoughts and opinions to depict
their way of thinking (Fleming, Bresler & O'Toole, 2014). This helps them to not only express
their thinking but also help them to express their feelings, emotions and imaginations (Yilmaz,
2016). Therefore families and children thus get to know each other in a better way to share and
cooperate with each other. The social development helps children to develop self-esteem and
bonding with family is strengthened. The impactful learning is another role played by visual and
media arts in the cultural lives of children and families. The visual and media arts help to bring
out inner self of children (Banks & Zeitlyn, 2015). The interaction with visual and media arts are
important to recognize and connect with real world object, scenarios and concepts. They learn
these things and they try to visualize implementing it through visual and media arts. The
confidence level boosts in children when they participate in visual and media arts. These help
them to come out from their comfort zone and show their imaginations to the world. The role of
confidence that visual and media arts provide are important as they provide children to believe in
themselves. The families also bond with children to help children boost their confidence
(Derewianka & Jones, (2016). The role of visual and media arts in the culture lives of children
and families are to explain them about the traditions and religions through arts. This helps to
express and record culture in specific features such as different perceptions of God. Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander’s people are the original inhabitants of the island (Funston & Herring,
2016). They have strong connection with the culture and languages that can be expressed
through visual and media arts.

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The visual and media arts help to develop focus through painting and visualizing
(Kucirkova, Littleton & Cremin, 2017). The focus is needed by the children in their childhood to
not only study academically but also excel in future with complete focus on work. The children
must learn to take responsibility and this can only happen if they learn from childhood (Hanna,
2014). The visual and media arts help to make children accountable for their responsibilities.
This is explained as when children mess up with paints drop a ball then they realize to resolve
the mistake. Children will learn to take increasing responsibilities for what mistake they did
while doing any activity (Lummis, Morris & Paolino, 2014). This process will help them to
accept their mistakes, enhance their sense of resilience where children develop socio-cultural and
behavioural development, and learn from them in their growing years with families support
(Yilmaz, 2016). The visual and media arts help children to work in a group and cooperate and
collaborate to achieve the required goal. The result of this will be that they will be successful in
delivering goals while working a group.
The children’s work in visual and media arts and treat them as producers rather than
consumers can better facilitate their self-concept learning. The above paragraphs describe the
importance of visual and media arts in nurturing and developing children for future ready. The
early childhood is an initial phase of life and developing phase where children observe and learn
a lot of things (Banks & Zeitlyn, 2015). This observing and learning method helps children to
become independent and self-confident. The children in their early childhood are delicate minds
that fill up with many imaginations and concepts that they see around them. This is because
being as a producer of media arts will help them to become more expressive (Kucirkova,
Littleton & Cremin, 2017). There are various forms of visual and media arts through which
children can express their thoughts and imagination. The visual and media arts support children

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to learn and build ideas, cognitively, concepts, socially, physically and emotionally. However,
visual and media arts are not limited to any teaching or depth knowledge (Roskos, 2017). It is
inner creativity of children that they develop from their surroundings. Hence, children should be
developed as producers of art culture and not as a consumer of art culture.
The visual and media arts are way through which they express their thoughts and hence
they develop early skills of arts. However, the current trends of technological environment have
led to diminish the value of visual and media arts (Gaggi, 2015). The parents, school and
national curricula has focused majorly on subjects such as science, maths and technologies rather
than visual and media arts. The visual and media arts are increasingly taking back stage due to
present National curriculum focusing to promote the other subjects. Thus there is a need to
introduce the visual and media arts in the current curricula in schools and early childhood. The
visual and media arts provide development of critical thinking, problem solving skills, creativity
and innovative ideas (Roskos, 2017). These skills are important to make children to develop
holistically at early stage as it also benefits children future life. Therefore, visual and media arts
are as important as other academic subjects in early childhood and schools.

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References
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