Research On The Current Elementary Art Education And Its Trend In Taiwan

The Arts and humanities area has gone through over sixteen years as the current elementary art education in Taiwan. Based on this, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education published the plan of "Aesthetic Education Middle-Term Project-The First Five Years" in May 2013, which has led to a new trend in the art education.The background of Arts and humanities curriculum includes two aspects:the overall educational reform and those specific changes in the area of art education. First of all, as a part of the education reform, the arts and humanities curriculum has a direct influence on the trend of educational reform in Taiwan; Secondly, Taiwan art education has started the disciplinization of art education and established the status of art education as a discipline through legislation since 1990s, which contributed to the birth of the arts and Humanities courses. In theory, arts and humanities curriculum is influenced by "contextualist justification", "essentialist justification" and "Integrated Curriculum". Before the birth of art and humanities curriculum, Taiwan’s art education curriculum system has experienced a transformation from the contextualist justification, which is represented by Viktor Lowenfeld and Herbert Read, to Eisner’s essentialist justification, which is a good preparation for the fusion of the arts and humanities area. In addition, it is one of the features of this curriculum theory to use the idea of integrated curriculum in the art education. On the one hand, Arts and humanities courses draw on the experience of the idea of interdisciplinary integrated curriculum of discipline-based art education in the USA. On the other hand, the transdisciplinary integrated curriculum method has been adopted, which has formed the theory of designing art curriculum with big ideas. At the same time, this course has also developed the unique integrated curriculum theory, which has a comprehensive influence on Teachers’teaching, textbook editing and students’ developmentBased on this, the arts and humanities curriculum was born in 2000, and became the foundation of art education in Taiwan. Guided by the revolutionary ideas-the integrated curriculum, consistency and concept of multiculture which are proposed by the Overall Nine-year Consistent Curriculum for Compulsory Education, arts and humanities courses emphasize the consideration of life as the center to promote the establishment of an open, flexible and comprehensive learning area. Meanwhile the content of the courses is to cultivate students’ ability, the main part of which is exploring and performing, aesthetics and understanding and practice and application. To promote the mutual development of these three aspects, the outline of art and humanities curriculum provides detailed competence indicator of each stage, which can serve as a syllabus. Besides, the curriculum outline released in 2008 specified the content of the text book. According to the syllabus, teachers should guide students to learn from four aspects, including performance and exploration, basic concept, art and history, culture, art and life, which led to a complete discipline curriculum structure, and showed a clear consistency, integration and cultural characteristics. Moreover, the arts and humanities curriculum provides unique methods of curriculum implementation and evaluation, which emphasize the initiative of students and the comprehensiveness of the evaluation system. To summarize, arts and humanities courses combine the contextualist justification and essentialist justification together and establish the unique attraction by the influence of the integrated curriculum.In May 2013, Taiwan’s "Ministry of education" published the "aesthetic education in the long range plan". Thereafter, the Taiwan Ministry of education authorized the Taiwan Normal University to execute the "integrated visual form of aesthetic education experimental plan" in the hope of the development of new types of art courses. Before this, Taiwan’s Ministry of education had published the "creativity education white paper" and "art education policy white paper" in 2003 and 2005 respectively, aiming to enhance creativity by developing art courses. This was exactly a primary contributor of the birth of the aesthetic education plan. On the other hand, the implement of arts and humanities courses triggered a large number of arguments, which led to the switch of the rise of the thought of aesthetic education to the new trend in Taiwan’s art courses. Aesthetic education plan focuses on cultivating the aesthetic qualities of the citizens, and proposes several concrete measures surrounding schools, families and societies. The plan also establishes the course content composed by seven basic modules, including proportion, composition, texture, color, structure, construction and comprehensive exercise. It forms the course structure constituted by observation and description, aesthetic experiment, case appreciation and analysis and application.The focuses of art education in the mainland and Taiwan are different:it is mainly about ethics in the mainland while art educators in Taiwan take more efforts to cultivate the creativity of students. The state council currently stresses the importance of the cultivation of creativity. Thus enhancing the cooperation of art education in the two parts of China can play a significant role in the development of art education in the mainland.