On 14 May, the Office of Academic Affairs held the meetings on foundation course development and bilingual course development respectively.
In recent years, the Office of Academic Affairs has been driving the development of foundation courses as it relates to the students’ conception of aesthetics and values and also relates to the students’ sustainable development in the industry as well as the spiritual height that they may achieve. One needs to go through three levels to become a great artist, i.e. skill level, culture level and personality level. The Chinese culture emphasizes on morality as the top priority. In other words, one without the high moral to benefit the people can never become a great artist. The Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA) aims to cultivate the future leaders of the industry. While skill education is certainly very important, but culture and personality education is even more indispensable.
As per the planning by the Office of Academic Affairs, the development of the foundation courses will include a number history courses and personality education courses as the key elements and be provided with funding support. In the meantime, gradual steps will be taken to provide more than six months of acting courses on continual basis to the students of non-acting majors allowing them choose freely from such acting courses as drama and film, Chinese traditional opera and dance so as to cultivate a student temperament of STA style. Continual classes, optional classes, teacher-student two-way selection and workshop style teaching are some of the other initiatives that will be introduced in the context of credit system reform.
With regard to the development of bilingual courses, the Office of Academic Affairs encourages the young and middle-aged teachers to proactively explore opening the bilingual courses and English-only courses on the basis of advanced teaching concept, optimized teaching content, sound and reasonable teaching method and high teaching standard. The participants held productive discussions on the topics of student access threshold, teaching method modification, university-level cultivation and credit incentive. The Office of Academic Affairs will launch the development of bilingual course at the university level in the near future.
