An immersion learning and work environment

There are four Tiers of Engagement that form the curriculum through which Interns progress during their tenure in Media WORKS Enterprise: Qualification / Workshop, Immersion, Collaborative, Managerial, and Leadership. (See Graphic) Each Tier is associated with a curriculum, a set of learned competencies and product capabilities. Media WORKS Enterprise Interns move through the Tiers using portfolio based assessments of employability, technology and design competencies. The following is a brief description of the purpose of each Tier.

Immersion Tier

The Immersion Tier provides a common experience and core set of design and employability skills for all Interns. The Immersion Tier builds competencies in a enterprise/learning context; the program dynamic is designed to challenge and fade negative assumptions about personal potential, and promote intellectual risk-taking, critical thinking, introduce basic visual design techniques, and develop technological fluency. In addition to preparing participants for entry into the Collaborative Tier, the Immersion Tier operates diagnostically by facilitating the development of individual learning plans and setting personal goal standards for each participant.

Brief Summary:
The Intern works on completing Immersion projects while participating peripherally in client-based projects.

The Immersion Tier is the entry platform for designers in MWE. This tier provides a foundation of experiences, understandings, skills, and practices that will in turn enable Interns to participate as workers in this enterprise. Core competencies integrate development of design skills, technological fluency and personal relational skills such as self-discipline self-esteem, motivation to achieve, and other social and life skills. These are developed in a creative environment through on-hands design projects , and are supported by the Opportunity Works® career management system. Participation in a range of arts and design activities develop marketable skills and help young designers overcome barriers to learning, makes them vulnerable to learn in new ways and provides a common set of experiences for newly enrolled designers. These material arts activities continue as a support to the client based design work throughout the Intern’s engagement with Media WORKS Enterprise, developing in complexity and challenge through the levels of engagement with the enterprise. Membership in opportunityWorks provides participants with a sophisticated computer-based personal development program and career guidance activities.

Collaborative Tier

The purpose of this Tier is to develop introductory to intermediate design skills, increase the level of employability skills competencies, work collaboratively with others to accomplish a shared task, increase academic competence and prepare for life long learning.

Brief Summary:
The Collaborative Tier is the backbone and workhorse of MWE. This is the tier of primary involvement for most Interns and includes:
• Real-life client based project participation
• Experiences a variety of project roles
• One Software certification
•Completion of Capstone Project
•Eligible for Externship after 6 months work

In the Collaborative Tier, designers engage more fully with clients, perform a number of different roles within the enterprise and continue to work with the Career counselor on individual learning plans. Entry into the Collaborative Tier is competitive and includes a salary raise; Interns are selected from the Immersion Tier based on their design portfolio. Intern activity in this Tier is primarily directed towards production, mentoring, or assistant teaching. Each designer continues to compile an on-line portfolio which documents, demonstrates, and presents both their learning process and accomplishments. In striving for effective means to articulate their goals, charting the course of their choices, challenges, and achievements, students build communication and presentation skills and techniques. The portfolio fuses their growing understandings of self with new media for recording and exhibiting work in web-page format. Students will use samples of their work, including material arts projects, expository, critical and creative writing samples, and photography, to demonstrate their growth and development as learners and to demonstrate competencies and in some cases, mastery of state learning standards. Learning in this Tier is primarily centered around the creation of a product, whether initiated by the studio enterprise or a client, although Master Practitioners will also conduct software and design workshops as necessary.

 

Managerial Tier

The purpose of this Tier is to give Interns an opportunity to develop and refine leadership and organizational skills by participating in management of the overall Enterprise.

Brief Summary:
• Real-life client based project participation
• Oversees and leads peers in design production tasks.
• Primary contact with client
• Completion of Capstone Project

Description
The managerial tier is the administrative tier of participation for Interns in Media WORKS. Managers direct productions, oversee Interns at lower levels in the enterprise, act as mentors, and assume a leadership role in the enterprise. Material arts projects at this level are highly advanced, constructed to give designers a more sophisticated and aesthetically complicated set of problems as a support for design work brought in by studio clients. At this level, designers function as teachers, leaders, mentors and problem-solvers for the enterprise. They run after-school and evening programs for the community and engage in program development.

 

Leadership Tier

The purpose of this Tier is to provide opportunities for project leadership for more advanced Interns. It is not foreseen that Interns would reach this level of involvement prior to 6 months of consecutive work in MWE and even then would be closely guided by Master Practitioners. Interns working in this Tier must be chosen by the Management Group based on their portfolio and having met a significant number of leadership competencies listed in the Managerial Tier.

Brief Summary:
• Real-life client based project participation
• Leads Projects: Critiques, motivates, initiates, and oversees projects
• Secondary contact with client
• Schedules projects
• Meets deadlines
• Advises Principal Practitioner regarding supplies and software updates needed for the design project.
• Completion of Capstone Project
• Completion of Externship

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Review Learning Objectives

View graphic of curricular sequence

Learn about the Material to Digital art component