This dissertation investigates the training and education of new media artists in higher education. Based on textually described orientations, rationales, and best practices I analyzed discourses that bear on the development of curricular and pedagogical approaches to educate practitioners and professionals in new media arts. Using a critical discourse analysis methodology, I investigated the most predominant concepts, statements, and discursive formations in academic texts published on this topic from the 1980s’ until today. I bring forward the ideologies, the theories, the discursive legacies and discursive patterns that characterize new media art education, and shape the culture of those involved in teaching future media artists. One of the central points of this analysis is the emphatic and cyclic rhetoric of the adjective of ‘new,’ which is embedded in discourses that curiously express ‘old’ inherited disciplinary pedagogies and assumptions. I also examine the perceived and expressed roles of new media artists, and the varied proposals of how these roles can best be cultivated through curricular programs. The analysis of the discourses of the so-called new pedagogies for media art education revealed what is, as well as what is not, new in the education of media artists at the university. The predominant discourses of new media art practices are characterized by calls for changes in the pedagogies in place. Yet this rhetoric is consistently confronted with the inert architecture of the institutions of higher education. I situate the discursive communities and their teaching-learning interactions in the systemic context of the modern western university that promotes a neoliberal orientation—especially in regards to the education of artists. 
This study provides an informed critical understanding of the discourses that have, to date, crystallized in this relatively young field, and to a demonstration of the (un-)likelihood of newness in media art education, in spite of fast-evolving technology, and of the expanding scope of practices of the communities within this field.