WHEN DR VICTOR LAI Ming-hoi announced he was running a two-day seminar on visual arts criticism for local teachers, he was keeping his fingers crossed he'd manage to fill 150 seats at one of the Hong Kong Museum of Arts lecture theatres.
He was overwhelmed. Five hundred teachers applied and more queued up on the day, hoping to find vacant seats. 'And they all wanted handouts, specific ideas of how to teach this subject,' he said after the event.
The explanation for such a rush is, Dr Lai believes, an indication of the desperation local art teachers feel at being faced with a change from teaching Art and Design to Visual Arts, a curriculum change introduced by the EMB in 2003. It now involves, for the first time, looking at visual cultural products - finding art in everyday life to which 15 per cent of marks are allocated.
It is also, he believes, an acknowledgement from art teachers that the nature of their teaching must change. 'They know they need to engage their pupils on a different level,' said Dr Lai, head of Hong Kong Institute of Education's Department of Creative Arts and Physical Education. 'They have to take a different attitude and not expect the students just to sit there.'
The seminars, on October 8 and 15, were part of a project to offer a new approach and practical course materials. Talks covered implementing visual arts criticism in school curriculums through six topics - TV commercials, comics, folk art, Hong Kong movies, music videos, and fine arts.
'These are all subjects the students can understand. They are part of their daily lives,' Dr Lai said. 'Frontline teachers know change is happening but can't get enough information. Within a few years, the EMB has introduced a new curriculum but hasn't given enough guidance on how to apply it.