Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

While all college courses require some foundation, Music & Sonic Arts is committed to meeting students where they are and supporting myriad learning styles and learning curves. As part of this course, instructors are encouraged to support students in the safe development of oral and written communication skills. For instance, students may journal about the ideas they are learning, without worry that they will be punished for their unfamiliarity with Standard American English. This course provides career technical Digital Arts students with ways of thinking and talking about their creative word in the context of critical cultural, ethical and economic issues of the twenty-first century. 

Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

• Define and appropriately employ foundational equity terms including, but not limited to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, protected class, discrimination, implicit bias, whiteness, white supremacy, and toxic masculinity.
• Identify and describe the ways that technologies are overtly and implicitly raced, gendered, classed, and other ways biased.
• Provide multiple examples--historical and contemporary--of digital art and sound creations that perpetuate and challenge histories and legacies of discrimination and bias.
• Create a digital art project, prototype, event or other expression that promotes equity.

• Lecture
• Classroom dialogue
• Classroom exercises

Instructor will provide students with multiple methods for demonstrating knowledge and competency, honoring the wide range of lived experiences, learning styles, learning curves, and communication habits of students. Instructor will determine how students demonstrate learning in conversation with students, understanding how they learn and most comfortably and successfully share.

Themes

• Equity vocabulary
• Equity frameworks
• Histories of Digital Arts. In what social contexts did key technologies emerge? How were those technologies shaped by those contexts? What dominant narratives emerged around those technologies? How do those dominant narratives perpetuate social inequities, and what alternate narratives exist or might be formulated?
• Analyzing technology. How do you unpack the social implications of software and hardware technologies with respect to race, gender and class?
• Industry cultures. How do the internal cultures of discrete industries--the tech industry in the Silicon Valley, the gaming industry nationally--inhibit or advance equity awareness and social justice?
• Disruption. How have digital artists sought to disrupt systems of social injustice?