[ Center for General Education News]
On November 10, the Center for General Education of National Chengchi University held a general education lecture titled “A Winding Journey: Reflections and Practices in Cross-Interdisciplinary General Education.” The event invited Professor Hsieh Ming-Feng, recipient of the 11th National Outstanding General Education Teacher Award, to share how his interdisciplinary teaching philosophy and practical trajectory have helped bridge the classroom with the real world, while embedding the spirit of general education into professional training.
Associate Professor Hsieh Ming-Feng, College of Architecture and Design, Feng Chia University. (Photo courtesy of the Center for General Education )
General Education as the Socialization of Professional Education
Associate Professor Hsieh Ming-Feng of the College of Architecture and Design at Feng Chia University began by reflecting on his diverse background spanning music and architecture. He pointed out that contemporary higher education faces challenges such as rigid disciplinary divisions and the gap between academic learning and practical application. He warned that if universities overly cater to immediate labor market demands, they risk being reduced to mere training grounds for narrowly defined specialists.
While universities are responsible for cultivating students’ professional knowledge and skills, they must also confront the problem of excessive fragmentation of knowledge. In this context, general education—aimed at nurturing well-rounded, broadly educated individuals—becomes an ideal starting point for integrating disciplinary knowledge and breaking through established frameworks.
In response, Professor Hsieh developed a teaching model he calls “general-education-oriented socialized professional education,” creating a learning environment centered on solving real-world problems. He emphasized that general education should play a pivotal role: like a hammer that breaks down barriers between disciplines; like a window that allows glimpses beyond disciplinary walls; like a ladder that elevates one’s perspective; and like a rope that connects otherwise unrelated bodies of knowledge.
Further drawing on the ideas of American educational philosopher John Dewey, Professor Hsieh explained that what schools should do for learners is not merely to transmit knowledge, but rather “to present them with real-world problems, guide them in finding solutions, and provide opportunities for practice and verification.”
Interdisciplinary Thinking in Course Design
In terms of curriculum design, Professor Hsieh has created and taught numerous integrative interdisciplinary courses to realize cross-domain collaboration. One such course, Music and Architecture, once attracted students from as many as 19 different departments, posing significant challenges for classroom participation and engagement. Through music and architecture as entry points, the course guides students to explore how two seemingly disparate art forms can foster interdisciplinary creativity.
Professor Hsieh noted that many architects draw inspiration from music, and he encouraged students to analyze such works to understand the relationships between space and time, sound and vision. Through this process, students come to recognize that disciplinary boundaries are not fixed, but fluid and interconnected.
Another university-wide required freshman general education course, Dialogue between Science and the Humanities, addresses the historical divide between scientific and humanistic disciplines dating back to ancient Greece. Structured around four stages—“Initiation, Divide, Crossing, and Integration”—the course guides students to rethink how these two domains might once again work hand in hand.
Additionally, the environmental sustainability course Smart Green Taiwan, which has been offered at Feng Chia University for 15 semesters, emphasizes food-related issues, problem-based learning, project-based learning, and hands-on practice. Students work in interdisciplinary teams to select their own research topics and present their outcomes in three-minute short videos uploaded to YouTube, enabling “boundary-less sharing.” In this way, the broader public can also engage with the sustainability issues addressed in the course.
Learning by Doing: Turning Ideas into Reality
In practice, Professor Hsieh integrates external projects into his courses, leading students into real-world contexts to realize the principle of “learning by doing,” while further embedding general education values into professional courses.
For example, the Participatory Design course series aims to address three major shortcomings of traditional architectural training: students’ limited understanding of project sites, insufficient technical experience, and few opportunities to interact with actual users. To tackle these issues, Professor Hsieh led students into a traditional Chinese medicine community in Taichung, where they transformed a vacant lot into a community vegetable garden. Students brought physical models to discuss ideas with local residents, personally turning concepts into reality and learning how to negotiate between ideals and real-world constraints.
In another example, through collaboration on an Atayal indigenous house reconstruction project, graduate students were divided into a “documentary group” and a “house curriculum teaching group.” Students were not only learners, but also curriculum designers and active participants, responsible for teaching local elementary school students about traditional indigenous house culture. Through firsthand involvement, students realized that the course offered cultural knowledge unattainable within a conventional classroom, and they began to reflect on the disappearance of their own ethnic cultures.
Both cases embody Professor Hsieh’s “reverse learning” approach of “learning while doing, doing before teaching,” forging a concrete link between theory and the real world.
Professor Hsieh shared many inspiring course examples with NCCU faculty and students. (Photo courtesy of the Center for General Education)
At the lecture, Professor Hsieh Ming-Feng presented numerous compelling course examples that showcased his distinctive approach to curriculum design and his teaching strategies that integrate interdisciplinary learning with both general and professional education. He emphasized that the integration of knowledge and its practical application constitutes the core value of university general education. This spirit, he argued, should be brought into professional classrooms, allowing humanistic values to resonate with technical systems and opening up new possibilities. This philosophy and practice aptly illustrate why he was honored with the Outstanding General Education Teacher Award.
