Tributes to Arts Educators Nationwide: 2014 Arts Education Contribution Awards Ceremony
The award winners include teachers, community organizations, and schools which have been committed to arts education for a long time. Two people received a Lifetime Achievement Award for their lifetime contributions: Dr. Liu Feng-Hsueh劉鳳學, a choreographer who has devoted more than 60 years of her life to teaching dance, and Professor Wang Hsiu-Hsiung 王秀雄, who dedicated himself to creating the curricula underpinning arts education.
The winners of awards in the other categories actively pursued professionalism in the arts and education that celebrates and nurtures the arts and cultivates a vibrant sense of aesthetics in daily life. The award-winning organizations have all thrown themselves in to promoting arts education for a very long time, ceaselessly bringing to it innovative ideas and resources. A distinctive feature of the award-winning schools is the excellent use they make of local resources, incorporating local culture and materials. They have created wonderful learning environments with vibrant dedicated teaching and a wide variety of activities. Schools like these broaden their students’ horizons.
As well as the art education offered in schools and colleges, the MOE is actively engaged in holding various arts-related activities designed to make aesthetic appreciation a part of everyone’s everyday life. Arts education plays a vital role nurturing professionals in all areas of the arts, but it also focuses on developing all students’ aesthetic perceptions and sense of the beauty around them in their regular daily experiences, enhancing their creativity.
To help deepen and broaden arts education, the MOE invited 7 other major government bodies—the Ministry of Culture; the Ministry of Transportation and Communication; the Ministry of Economic Affairs; the Ministry of the Interior; the Council of Agriculture; the National Palace Museum; and the Council of Indigenous Peoples—to join its new initiative, the New Aesthetic Life Movement. This includes a cooperative strategy approach to planning 3 key projects, focusing on: Increasing Students’ Aesthetic Experiences; Building and Displaying Beautiful Campuses; and Exhibiting Students’ and Teachers’ Aesthetic Education all around them in their everyday life.
Photo：Representatives of the MOE and other ministries and departments working together prompting the New Aesthetic Life Movement and a cooperative platform to enhance arts education.