The idea is to make education creative (2)

Email|Print|Comments       twitter     facebook     Sina Microblog     reddit    

But not all effects of creative education can be manifest and measured in the short run. That is exactly why our style of academic communication has become more of a craft and less of an art. Administration in education at all levels demands that we quantify everything and create all kinds of "indexes" to measure the effect of teaching and learning.

At contests on teaching techniques, which are now held often, professors become performers whose role is to entertain the "audience". Yet research results indicate that the more engrossed students are in a teacher's "performance", the less they would think critically on their own. Like the audience of an entertainment show, students will just take in the information being fed to them by the "performing" teachers. I'm not saying that academic communication cannot be a craft. What I am saying is that it has the potential of becoming an art.

Teachers can enter a class carrying written materials enough to last three hours. But good teachers refrain from doing so and, instead, get students to voice their opinions and then intervene if the need arises. This style of communication in creative education has had a great impact on students who graduated in the past decade. Even today these students say they have retained much "quality" and "ability" long after forgetting the specific knowledge acquired in college.

But the method should still be applied with increasing caution, because today's college students are mostly people born in the 1990s, while when I first started experimenting with the method most of the students belonged to the 1970s' generation. The "new" students can express themselves better but are less willing to concentrate for long hours on careful reading and critical thinking.

Therefore, new methods are needed to respond to new situations. The only thing that remains the same every year is the creative spirit and interactive style. The rest has to be altered slightly or drastically according to the characteristics of the students in class. More control is exerted before and in class to ensure that the students keep to the point and the learning process is fruitful.

For the success of creative education, it is necessary to promote the "ideal elements" required of students (not just teachers) - interest, industry, intelligence and insight, which are indispensable to delightful and innovative learning and made possible by the constantly inspiring interactive communication facilitated by teachers.

The author is a professor with the School of Journalism & Communication at Xiamen University in Fujian province.

We Recommend

• Fairytale destinations around world
• Top 10 Chinese provinces for the well-heeled
• Fan Bingbing poses for Malaysian magazine Citta Bella
• Art exhibition in tribute to Chavez held in Venezuela
• Wild dream: Hell-like training for bodyguard
• Zhang Xinyi covers COSMOPOLITAN
• China’s weekly story
  (2013.8.3-8.9)
  
• The story of a savior sibling
  
• A collection of bizarre rooftop buildings around China