Surprises from the Corner

An elder from the tribe was invited to give a lecture in Mr. Liu’s class. When he talked about the young and old generations in the tribe, he was sad to tell that there had been a cultural gap between the two. Mr. Liu thus decided to revive the tribal tradition of making tree bark clothes, helping the students to understand their own culture. The lesson led the kids to learn the knowledge of trees and understand why people needed to make tree bark clothes in the old times. They practically experienced how to soften tree bark, and used the local materials and techniques to make items that can fit contemporary needs. To pass on the aboriginal culture, the lesson revealed the lifestyle of the tribes and presented the wisdom of ancestors taking good advantage of natural materials from daily life. And it also encouraged the kids to keep discovering new possibilities within traditional craftsmanship.

In Chu-Jen Junior High School, every class has set up its own reading corners in the classroom for years. However, not every class could design a satisfied reading corner that met all expectations of the students. Because they only had a little budget, and most of the three-tiered shelves on the market were standardized, their options were limited. Mrs. Hsu, therefore, came up with an idea. Introducing the concepts of proportion and positive/negative space to the class, she asked the students to use them to design shelves both for functional and decorative purposes. The outcome of the kids was out of Mrs. Hsu’s expectations. Their design drafts showed their creativity and diversity. At last, the students and the teacher even brought one of the drafts into reality and finally made their own bookshelves.

Due to the scarcity of educational resources in the remote and rural regions of Taiwan, Mrs. Lu simultaneously lectures in three schools in Yuli, Hualien. She found most of the children were from tribes, and their families living from farming lived in symbiosis with the land. Therefore, their lifestyle was strongly connected to solar terms and seasonal food. When teaching colors to the students, Mrs. Lu managed to bring food into the class to provide a different perspective on colors. By rearrange the colors on the dinning table, the lesson attempted to help the students to discover new significances of local food. During the process of exploring colors in season, the kids gradually realized how food colored their life and even showed their true colors.

In the Plantae, there are colors that cannot be seen by the human naked eye. To dig more into the essence of colors, Mrs. Chang led the students to walk out of the classroom to take a closer look at plants. They brought the beautiful specimens they collected back to the lab for interdisciplinary experiments and color analysis. After the interesting exploration, they were surprised that the plants they see on campus every day consist of more colors than they had imagined. By extracting colors from the plants and observing the stratification phenomenon, the students learned the variety and complexity of how nature generates colors. To Mrs. Chan, one of the purposes of the art and design course is to break conventions, and the class indeed helped the students to realize that leaves and flowers are not merely in red and green. Through these scientific experiments, the kids’ competence in rational observation was built up. Moreover, the course also triggered them to hold a bolder attitude toward exploring more possibilities.