Turning conventional wisdom upside down
After an absence of nine years, the return of handicrafts to the syllabus follows the division of the “technology domain” into two distinct subjects: IT and life sciences. A certain number of class hours will be devoted to handicrafts that emphasize practice of manual skills, in order to cultivate appreciation for craftsmanship.
For example, Taoyuan’s Daxi District is a center for fabrication of shrine tables and wooden furniture, and home to the Daxi Wood Art Ecomuseum. In order to promote in-school woodworking classes for young students, Taiwan Arts & Crafts School assists the district in teacher training and curriculum design.
But does this mean students, saw in hand, practicing carpentry in school?
Taiwan Arts & Crafts School invited Stephan Johannes Elbracht, who has three decades of education experience in the field—including teaching carpentry to students in grades five to 12 at a Waldorf School in Germany—to train craft teachers on the ground in Taiwan. For the opening of his training course, he used an axe to cleave a large block of timber. This dramatic act of sundering shocked his trainees, and turned upside down their ideas of what constitutes a woodworking class.
In his classroom, filled with the fragrance of wood shavings, students can experience the flavor and texture of wood fiber, and become aware of the value of utilizing natural materials to create crafts manually; or, via the process of shaping a wooden soup spoon, a youngster can be taught how to appreciate the rhythm and patterns represented by the wood grain on the back of that eating utensil.
“In Germany, woodworking is a mainstream course, unlike in Taiwan where it is secondary and treated as an excuse to take a rest, or from which time gets ‘borrowed’ for classes in the sciences or mathematics,” explains Ni Mingxiang, director of the Graduate Institute of Early Childhood Education at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, who helped design the lesson plans. “The woodworking curriculum is not designed to teach technical knowhow. It is intended to help woodworking culture and manual craftsmanship to return to Taiwan society. Training in carpentry is fundamental education. The focus is not on the head, but on the connection between hand and heart.”
Woodwork teacher Stephan Elbracht transported his own set of mallets from Germany to let his trainees—handicraft instructors themselves—experience using different tools appropriate for students of different ages.