Research On The Teaching Mode Of Art Design Under The Credit System

The history of China’s art design education can be traced back to the beginning of the 20 th century. It has experienced three important stages: pattern education, fine arts education, and art design education that started from the end of the 1980 s. The complete list of undergraduate programs authorized by the Ministry of Education in 1998 marked the completing of discipline shaping of art design education. The discipline said farewell to the time of fine arts and stepped into the time of comprehensive art design. Since art studies became one of the key disciplines in China in 2012, the status of art design has been largely promoted and art design education has been embracing a new era of development.Waves of academic credit reform have gone hand in hand with the turn of art design. China’s higher education has a long history in relation to the academic credit system. During the Minguo period various practices of academic credit system were carried out all over the country and lasted for nearly thirty years. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the learning hour system became compulsory. It is from the last years of the 1970 s that colleges and universities began to involve themselves in the various endeavors of academic credit reform in order to set up a brand new teaching system adjusted to the market economy.People’s cognition of academic credit varied over the time of reform. Some held that the academic credit system was simply one of teaching management, which caused some misunderstanding in the colleges and universities. Most of their academic credit systems actually were not real ones for they did not encourage optional courses and thus put the reform into a dilemma.The essence of academic credit system lies in the course selection system, open courses and the target-oriented academic credit management. Based on these, colleges and universities are able to cultivate talents of all kinds. The open courses are the basis for the course selection system and academic credit management. Looking back into the history of academic credit practices in China, we can see that every academic credit reform started from the reform in curriculum design. One of the major causes of the difficulty in China’s academic credit reform is the lack of credit-based college curriculums.Courses are the media of teaching activities. The success of the art design turn of the discipline of art design education owes a lot to the reform in curriculum design. Over the long period of curriculum reform that went hand in hand with the academic credit reform, a variety of credit-based teaching models came into being and mainly fall into two categories: the complete academic credit system and the semi academic credit system. The typical models include the one that allows earning certain credits in different academic years, the one that requires different credits for different periods of study(e.g., the 1+3 system, the studio system), the one that plans certain credits for every year, and the one that permits students to earn their credits according to their own plan.The teaching model that allows earning certain credits in different academic years, as is shown by its curriculum, is only an alternative of the traditional teaching model. It usually takes the form that adds to the original ones some optional courses which are divided into two parts. One includes the general education courses and the other has to do with the key course for each major or discipline. The former covers the areas of humanities, liberal arts, and science and helps to shape the general education curriculum characteristic of each comprehensive university. At colleges and universities of art education, the former means more courses on basic theories and common knowledge of art. The latter allows the students to take their optional courses only in the second and third academic years, or adds some courses of different directions to the original curriculum. This model has been welcome by many colleges and universities, either those with long histories like Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts or those newly built ones with no more than twenty years of history. Unfortunately, the teaching quality varies because of different lengths of history, lack of teaching resources and poor teaching abilities.The teaching model that requires different credits for different periods of study is meaningful for art design teaching reform. It takes two forms. The 1+3 system requires all the students to study the basic courses together in the first academic year regardless of their majors of study. This strategy to some degree breaks down the fences between different majors, builds up the concept of “general design” with the help of the reform in basic courses, and leads the phase of basic painting training during the time of fine arts education to take on a new air. The studio system advocates the practicality and comprehensiveness of art design teaching based on the experiences from other countries. It breaks the tradition of teaching in a step-in-step fashion and makes art design teaching more multiple and dynamic. The main contribution of this model lies in the parallel reforms in teaching and discipline building. Meanwhile, it adapts itself to the academic credit reform and helps to set up the real academic credit system in art design education.The art design teaching reform that aims at making most of the academic credit system has been practiced in Nanjing University of the Arts as a form of complete and real academic credit system. The reform has rendered Nanjing University of the Arts the flagship in the field of art design education. Under the slogan of “maximizing the courses while minimizing the majors”, the courses of different directions that are added to the original system and the free selection of them allow every student to design his or her own schedule, and thus a real academic credit system takes on the stage. Although such system was abandoned after 2009, the fruits of the reform together with the spirit of innovation have become the valueless legacy of art design education of Nanjing University of the Arts.The thirty years of practices of academic credit reform have witnessed the shaping of China’s multiple art design teaching paradigms and the advance in teaching quality, and encouraged the development of art design education. The major of art design experienced an exploding development with the increased admittance of college students and the over-speeding of teaching size at the end of last century. Although the enlargement of teaching size has satisfied the need of the society for more art talents and the need of the discipline itself for further development, the weak basis of the teaching model and the simply copying fashion cause the whole field criticized for having bit of puffiness. The problem of blending is especially serious in curriculum design and has caused the sliding down of overall teaching quality. Apart from this, various fake academic credit systems have appeared because of the poor state of curriculum design. So, it was argued that curriculum design should be carried out on the basis of specifying the targets of education, strengthening the teaching of basic courses, building some core courses, opening the end courses, and emphasizing the operability of the curriculum. Without these basic considerations, it is hard for us to deepen the academic credit reform, nor to guarantee the quality of art design talents.