A Development of Design Education Program Based on Local Cultural Contents to Promote Creativity of Chinese Children

Abstract

Various studies have been conducted to identify the concept of creativity and enhance it effectively. Many advanced countries in the field of design have already expanded the scope of design education from specialized education to universal education and utilized such design education as a curriculum for promoting the creativity. Although education industry in China has been growing rapidly with the increase in the national income, the current educational contents have been mostly focused on the subjects/contents for an entrance examination, with little consideration of creativity promotion for children. Therefore, as an effort to promote creativity of Chinese children, the current study developed a design education program utilizing Chinese cultural contents and verified its educational effectiveness in terms of creativity promotion. The program was developed in the following process: 1) exploring the program development direction through an in-depth interview with parents; 2) deriving three lesson plans through an ideation session with some experts in art education for children; and 3) selecting a final lesson plan through experts/parents evaluation and developing a final textbook. A total of 10 children were educated with the developed textbook, and their levels of creativity before and after the education were comparatively evaluated using Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The study results showed that the education program developed in the current study significantly affected the children’s creativity, which would contribute to promoting the children’s creativity, and also, developing a new creativity education program in the future. Additionally, it is expected that the research methods employed in this study, that is, developing a creativity promotion program using some cultural/local contents, could be usefully/widely applied in various fields of education.