The development of human potentials is the key educational thought of most of the great philosophers and thinkers (e.g. Confucius, Socrates, Buddha).  They believed education is nothing more than enlisting inherent human nature or arousing unlimited human potentials.  By doing so, educators could help other persons create various possibilities of life, embarking upon an abundant and endless living process. Based on this belief, human potentials development is considered as almost synonymous to education.

 

 

In our department, we believe that any educational job should be implemented through some forms of curriculum and instruction in order to achieve the goal of developing human potentials. Since the construction of our department in 1987, we have been attempting to cultivate professional competency of curriculum and instruction for the pre-service teachers.  In order to obtain teaching jobs and perform their teaching duties, our graduates also mainly rely on their competency in curriculum and instruction. Therefore, we believe the focal point of education is curriculum and instruction. We could not have quality education without quality curriculum and instruction.

 

We also believe that quality curriculum and instruction could be attained only through a rigorous process of curriculum design, curriculum development, instructional design and instructional development, which are assumed to be the four key professional skills we intend to cultivate in our students. For the convenience of communication, we choose the term “curriculum design” to encapsulate the four key professional skills.