MEANINGFUL LEARNING FROM CREATING TO CURATING: AN EXPERIMENT IN THE TEACHING OF PERFORMING ARTS

In the current e-learning era, students are largely independent from teachers in acquiring facts of the subject knowledge. How to create a co-learning environment for students to learn appears to be a teacher’s new task.
How to teach and how to elongate the effect of learning? What are the skills and values which students appreciate in the learning of humanity and performing art? How are teachers to move forward from a traditional role to a different teaching position?
By sharing a different teaching approach and learning result from a course offered in the College of Communication, the authors are to raise discussions on the issue of what to teach and the possibility of how to teach it.
This paper introduces the experiment in the teaching of staging performances of Chinese and Taiwanese opera in the Spring Semester, 2014. The course was designed to include a social purpose to serve the audience at Homes for the Elders in Taiwan. Qualitative feedback from 31 students was collected at the end of the course and analyzed by discourse analysis. The study result shows transformation of the young hearts. Some valuable topics to teach in a course and an alternative teaching model are suggested for the future teaching/learning process.