About Us

Curriculum Reform Initiative Taskforce: Agenda for Art and Design Education (CRIT-AADE) is a nationwide project commenced by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan in 2012. Conceived by Mr. Pao-teh Han (1934-2014), architect, educator and former National Policy Advisor to the President, the agenda assembles teachers, artists, designers, and architects across the country to reform art and design education for students and help them to “brave the challenges in life with the power of art/design.”

 

With long-term goals for art and design education, the agenda devotes to curriculum refinement, interdisciplinary course development, school aesthetic education and online teaching materials for years, to deepen and broaden the foundation of aesthetics in Taiwan.

How can the sense of beauty be relatable, communicable and teachable? In the 20th century, people in Taiwan used to regard art/design appreciation as the privilege of elites, which is not accessible to the public. After decades, CRIT-AADE attempts to break the stereotype and encourages kids to discover their innate potential for art/design sensibility and evaluation. Aesthetics is not defined by textbooks, it is everything in everyday life. It can remain in small, simple things at hand or in the vast, complex environment where we live. Cooperated with professionals, practitioners, and educators, the agenda anticipates an enlightenment of art/design awareness on this island.

The Curriculum Reform Initiative Taskforce is a team within the Agenda for Art and Design Education and is composed of experts from architecture, design, art and education. The main mission of the task force is to pursue:

Our team has worked closely with hundreds of selected teachers from all over the country through the multi-year curriculum reform plan. We have developed project-oriented design courses that are different from traditional art classes, and are more adaptable to school-specific teaching environments. Instead of enforcing a centralized curriculum guideline, we focus on empowering every educator to create his/her own course outlines, and we celebrate the various expressions of art/design possibilities.

 

In addition to the central core team, four regional offices that cover the whole country are also set up to collaborate with local education universities and city-level governmental departments of education. Every semester, hundreds of teachers from selected middle and high schools are recommended by local departments and regional offices to work with us on the project.

 

Since the current team was activated in 2016, we have worked with more than 500 teachers, together to develop almost 4,000 hours of art and design courses. Through all the participating teachers, the project has already reached almost 100,000 middle and high school students collectively.

In order to develop courses for the general senses of art/design, this project refers to colors, texture, proportions, composition, construction, and structure as the basic facets of aesthetics. According to each facet, we develop tools and manuals to incorporate design-thinking into traditional art courses, as well as arrange workshops for the teachers to familiarize themselves with the materials.

 

Since 2016, we have conducted a series of workshops in preparation for the proposed curriculum reform by the Ministry of Education in 2019. In each workshop, we invite professional designers, curators, directors of cultural institutes, etc., to talk directly to hundreds of K12 school teachers from all over the country, to exchange how design thinking and making could be taught inside and outside of the classroom.

Every semester, over 200 participating teachers submit their proposals for innovative art and design courses developed with the aid of CRIT-AADE guidelines, workshops and teaching materials. We focus on creating 6- to 12-week-long project-based courses in contrast to the traditional week-by-week skill exercise in art education. After a committee reviewing process, the revised courses receive government funding to proceed.

 

The documentation and evaluation of the courses are also important for this project. After one course is complete, the instructor uploads the material and results onto our project website, where all courses could be browsed and searched via keywords. This is by far the first and only open-source art and design course platform in Taiwan, where teachers (whether participating in the project or not) could freely learn from all other educators’ contributions.

“SenseAbility: Projects of Art and Design Education” is an exhibition in the summer of 2018 that accumulates five years of ongoing efforts from the Ministry of Education to remodel the environment (both educational and physical) for art classes, from kindergartens to high schools, from within the schools to beyond the bounds.

 

The exhibition not only documents the processes and outcomes of many art and design education programs but also invites eight elite designer teams o display their works, to show how simple objects in our school days could be re-imagined into exquisitely crafted designer projects, while still retaining the basic daily-life qualities.

 

Beauty lies in the ways we live. The education for art and design is more than just lessons in classrooms, but also the appreciation of beauty in our everyday life. The educational courses here are laying down the basics, to encourage everyone to discover, explore, and then practice our senses of beautifulness in various means.

 

The traveling exhibition attracted more than 10,000 audiences in three weeks, resulting in dozens of fully-booked workshops and online outreach.

While basic education in Taiwan traditionally focuses on grades and performances, we believe not in the ending results but in the learning and working processes. In other words, the essence of art/design education is not about producing the finest artistic expressions, but about being aware, observant, caring and reactive to our everyday environments. A personal understanding of aesthetics might not be easily evaluated, but it surely could be nurtured and cultivated.

 

The course development project in AADE is a project for the students as well as a project for the teachers. When the educator starts to teach not by the textbooks, but by actual experiences in everyday surroundings, then what the students would learn could be readily applied back to life as well. The art and design education is not just another subject in school; we bring the students to the understanding of aesthetic decisions as a lifestyle to be practiced everywhere in daily life.