Woo:
Hi all. I’m Mathias Woo. I’m the moderator of the forum today. This is the third day already. Thank you for attending our last forum. Before we begin, I’d like to play a video for you.

Woo:
In the video just now, there is a brief introduction. Before we start our forum, let me share with you some background information. This creative education forum is a part of the “Creative Playground – Danny Yung Experimental Theatre”. It’s a 2-year project which started in 2015. What is its ultimate objective? There are open activities and research studies to develop a curriculum. The curriculum contains 3 forms of learning. One of them is short-termed, for about 3 days. Another one lasts for 2 to 4 weeks. Then there is a long-termed course with Level 3 under the Qualifications Framework. After all the research studies and activities are completed, we will upload the information to the website. This will serve as a reference for the schools and people who are interested in creative education.
Welcome to those who are attending our forum today. If you are interested, please leave your contact information with us. We will contact you later. Apart from the research studies, we have also conducted several pilot programmmes in the past 2 years.
This year, we recruited 18 young people to take part in a 3-month programme.
They began with a 2-week visit to Nanjing. There they joined an intensive 2-week workshop organized by the traditional performing artists. After returning to Hong Kong, there was a 4- to 6-week workshop. Just last week, they staged a performance.
That’s the background of the project.
Today, our discussion is about the relation between education and creativity, and we will focus on theatrical performing arts. A few words about the development of the curriculum up to this moment, it consists of 6 subjects: body, sound, space, science and technology, symbol and structure. All of these subjects are related to one another. Our curriculum explores new forms of education, which when combined with the elements of performing arts and creativity, what outcomes will there be?
We will propose some recommendations.
Firstly, it’s about the curriculum. How should the curriculum be? What teaching qualifications are needed? This time, some traditional art and contemporary workers have joined forces in teaching. How do we teach? What teaching materials do we use? What other equipment is needed to support them? And what kind of facilities and space do we need? We will propose some recommendations at the end.
Today is the third day of our forum. On the first day, we talked about tradition. Is education about inheriting or re-discovering traditions? Yesterday, we talked about the relationship between cross-culturalism and education.
Today we will discuss from another dimension. Is education an experiment? Are we doing different experimentations when we teach? And what is the relation between education and experience? In recent years, public participation is a popular topic.
It includes public participations in political and social aspects, and democracy.
Do we also need these elements in our education system and creative education?
Today we have experts from different places and cities to talk about these issues with us. I won’t be the one to introduce the speakers. I will leave that to the students from Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity. Let’s start please.

Student/ Dan:
Hi all. I’m student of 2016 Creative Playground. My name is Dan. Today I’ll introduce to you Ms Chen Pi-han.
Greetings. I’m an Associate Professor at the Acrobatic and Dance department of the National Taiwan College of Performing Arts, I’m a member of the Legislative Yuan. I want to promote the reform of the Art Education Law in the Legislative Yuan.
Hi all. Welcome to the art education radio programme, and this programme on aesthetic education. I’m the programmme host. This is Ms. Chen Pi-han.
No, this is part of Ms Chen Pi-han. Now, let’s invite the real Ms. Chen Pi-han to come up to the stage.

Chen Pi-han:
Hi all. I am Chen Pi-han. I’m not the Chan Pi-han who slapped the table. I am…I like this place. I’d like to be a communicator. I’m now working in the National Taiwan College of Performing Arts. My life is very special. I grew up in the rural area, and never had anything to worry about. But I don’t know why or how I became a legislator in the parliament.
Part of the reason is that I really settle where my roots are. I have done a lot of works to promote art education. I work very hard on every piece of work I do even though I don’t get acclaims for every single piece. When the KMT party needed an expert in certain fringe areas, I was recommended.

In the past 4 years, I helped formulate many bills with great impact. But they were not reported by the media, as such topics were uncontroversial, and did not invoke fighting in the meeting. What are they then? Like aesthetic education, it can affect the qualities of our citizens and make us very tender and tolerant members of the society. It can also bring about out creativity, and creativity is actually the future competitive advantage of a nation. What’s more, the kids these days are a bit lost.
They think primarily for themselves and might forget what the society needs, and what they can contribute to it. I have pushed for many bills for legal reform, including those on art education, which aims to make up for the inadequacies in the past. Because art is very important. But how can we take art seriously? It’s a marginalized subject in school, and often the lesson time is taken up by examinations for other subjects. The courses have not been implemented, and that’s the situation in Taiwan. So, when I pushed for legal reform, I included a budget for it, so as to ensure its implementation. If it’s not implemented, the headmaster should be subjected to assessment. Then we have to invite artists and art groups to reside in schools, so that the students can enjoy all the artistic activities in their everyday learning environment. Hence, this is a root-planting bill, and I call it the construction of underground water pipe system.
Today, Is education an experiment? Is education an experience? I say it is. Education is experiment, education is also experience. Because education is to allow us to constantly enrich our past experience through the process of assimilation. Sometimes, in the process of assimilation, we may experience conflicts with our traditional values and cognitive facts. Then how can we achieve internalization, so that we can find our own values and attitude in life? And how can we find the ability to adapt to or have impact on the society? All kinds of education are based on experience, and it evolves through continuous experimentation to prove over time.
Why do we regard education as an experiment? Because education is by nature looking towards the future.
All the education we do in the schools, where kids receive education for 12 or 18 years or more, is to equip them to be people of the future. What capabilities do people of the future need? Do we have any ideas? When promoting innovation in education, one difficulty that we often encounter is that we are using the past knowledge to educate people of the future now. Parents who are not very open, or not ready to accept challenges, or not care for the society, may impose their rigid values on their children and demand the children to become the useful people by their standard.
As an educator, suppose we know how to cultivate future talents and what capabilities they need, we are actually facing an unknown future. In fact, we face new futures every day. Then do we have the sensitivity? As educators, have we awaken yet? Because changing is the unchanged law of our time. To change, you need courage. To change means you need to step out of your comfort zone. You may fail, you may meet lots of challenges, and so sometimes you are anxious. But as educators, though having limited knowledge, we make an effort to explore the possibilities for the future, with our limited time.
I think today’s forum makes a lot of sense. I’m grateful that there is a creative guy, Danny Yung. He threw a pile of questions on us, but he’s not just asking questions.
All his questions are open-ended, and so we can dive into our past experiences to find something from our limited knowledge to share. Then we have brainstorming here. I hope we can come to the formation of new possible moves, maybe a new method, or the next step forward.
Hence in today’s forum, I hope we can have many good recommendations. I think if education is about predicting the future trends, then we must have the relevant sensitivity. Looking at our society, and looking at ourselves in the present moment, what is the main theme? In fact, we mentioned industry 4.0 yesterday. We are now amidst the fourth industrial revolution. Talking about innovation, we have entered the age of innovation 3.0. From the innovation of products to the innovation of products with added values. And now, in the alienated society we live in, we look forward to innovation in humanity as well. In our present environment, what capabilities should be developed for our future education?
I think the society is changing too fast. For our grandparents, they could perhaps live the same way of life in the 20 years into the future. What about me now? 20 years later, I will encounter more problems than my parents did. Now every day at school, I’m in touch with students with very different background from me. Like what Director Lee said yesterday, a university student may not have read more than 10 books in 4 years. This is really thought-provoking. But if they don’t read books, what do they read? We discussed it today, and think that they may read e-books on iPad.
Of course, when such tools change, they change too fast. Hence, I think when we work on innovation in education now, it’s most important to instill adaptability in students. So, in the future, when they meet the challenges of their time, they can analyze the problems, and then propose solutions.
Also, they must have creativity. With creativity, they can think out of the box. Yet these abilities are not enough. The society calls for our passion, so they must have very good qualities. What qualities? What is quality? It means in their lives, they must be able to act on fulfilling their responsibilities for the society. This is what they should possess. So, can we teach the students in our old ways? Maybe not.
In the old days, for example in the industrial age, education resembled a production line, and we educate by elimination and subtraction. If we thought the society didn’t require certain qualities in a kid, we simply take them away, and make the kid adapt to the society. But now, we educate by addition. It implies that we respect the individuality of everyone. But in the future, there will be so much diversification of occupations in the society. Depending on the kind of person someone wants to be, we add more elements, little by little, so that the person has more possibilities. As we said yesterday, I think this type of education or classroom is not a traditional classroom, but a platform. With our education now, teachers put forth lots of materials, and students can take what they need. Through what they need, they become what they are. So, I think classrooms of today are platforms. They are not only platforms, but also stages. On this stage, everyone can play his own role. And these roles are performed in the theatre, where people want to be a useful person in their own eyes.
Under such circumstances, what are the problems I often encounter? As I have been working on national policies in the past few years, what I’m going to say is more general in nature. So, I may not be able to give any school-specific examples. The most common problem I have encountered, as I just said, is that we dread failures, and that teachers are the same. Apart from that, our concerns may be very limited in scope, and we just care for our profession, but not the other fields. But look at Danny. He’s different. Besides his profession in architecture, he works with art. He cares for the connection of the whole world, and thinks about what positive energies the art should bring to all. Art is actually the best tool for education. Because the art world is open, and in there, everyone can play his own roles. And the script can be written slowly according to your characteristic. I think rigidity of structures is the problem I often face in Taiwan. I admire what the Professor from Zurich University talked about yesterday. He said that the budget of their university could be fully used. But in Taiwan, budgets have to be approved by the government. And the budget is allocated according to the school’s size in terms of number of students. But the expenses required to build the infrastructure for one student won’t be less than that for 1000 students, because it’s a basic necessity. But I just have a smaller budget than the others. Also, the budget doesn’t take into consideration the nature of art, where it calls for many different teachers to bring in different stimulations. A big part of the budget is allocated to science and engineering subjects. And all our expenses have to be reviewed by the government. Money improperly spent will be subjected to rectification by the Control Yuan. I think the practice like this is a big problem.
In Taiwan, we are very free, but also very closed. Closed in what sense? In the sense that we are not internationalized enough. Taiwan is worrying me. it is like a mentally-retarded society, which is a society that doesn’t think. If a society doesn’t think proactively, its learners won’t have the perseverance to learn proactively. So, teachers can be relaxed, without any pressures. As for students, they can stay unchanged against all changes. This is not our expectation of education. In Taiwan today, we are very lucky that we enjoy freedom. It allows us to create with great flexibility. Despite that flexibility in creativity, we don’t continuously nurture ourselves.
After using up all the original nutrients, we would probably wither. This is the problem that I see.
Apart from that, every school has its own organizational culture. In the past 20 years, two of the schools I worked in were very conservative. So I saw schools which are at ease in their comfort zone, and are not willing to connect with the outside world.
Basically, every time I go back to the schools, I want to be a kind of reformer, and psychologically, I’m greatly prepared for it. How to carry out a reform? It’s absolutely not by slapping on the table in the legislature. I encourage more public participation.
I want to bring in the experts, and also your experiences. I want to make use of a platform, so people can see, with their eyes, how the outside world is developing.
This lessens the mistakes we make in our path of search, and lets us confidently move forward step by step. I think this is what I can do with our limited resources.
Because introducing public power from outside the establishment is itself a way to expand participation. The expansion would produce ripple effects and it may result in greater impact. I very much look forward to bringing your recommendations back to my school after the forum today.
Our school is considering whether it should relocate. Another issue our school considering is how to integrate the 12-years curriculum, from primary 5 to the fourth year of university. We have so many nice guests from different countries here.
We have just had many exchanges, and we have already extended invitations to one another. We’ll bring our teachers and students out. We also welcome you to come to us. Taiwan needs all of you. I very much look forward to be a part of your teams.
That’s my little sharing.
Thank you.