Editor：TNUANEWS  / Date：2023-07-13

Fifty participants from around the world completed their training in this year’s Taiwanese Culture and Folk Art Teacher Training Program jointly organized by the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC) and TNUA’s Center for Art Resources and Educational Outreach.

OCAC has been running the program since 2017 to provide training for those who promote Taiwanese culture and folk art around the world, and it is the first time that the center has co-organized the training courses for the program.

The 15-day training started on July 13, and a ceremony was held at TNUA on July 25 to mark its conclusion.

The training included 16 hours of general courses for all participants, and 54 hours of specific training selected by the participants in one of three areas: folk sports (such as lion dance), folk art (such as puppetry) and folk dance (such as indigenous people’s dance).

The general courses showed the trainees ways to plan and implement overseas cultural activities and gave them better understanding of Taiwan’s cultural diversity.

The trainees were also arranged to visit the Daxi Wood Art Ecomuseum in Taoyuan to better understand traditional Taiwanese architecture and its intangible cultural assets.

At a ceremony marking the start of the workshop, OCAC Vice Minister Roy Yuan-Rong Leu extended a warm welcome to the participants and thanked them for their years of efforts promoting Taiwanese culture in the overseas community.

He noted that OCAC managed to have TNUA help arrange this year’s courses, the first physical ones since the COVID outbreak.

TNUA President Prof. Chen Kai-Huang noted that folk culture is an intangible cultural asset that needs people to pass on from generation to generation. He said the participants of the program play an important role in showing the next generation the value of the cultural assets.