New Taipei City Qingshan Elementary and Junior High School — "Drama on Paper: A Different Perspective, A Different Story"

This course centers on Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), starting with how teenagers understand themselves and how they understand people who are different from them in their daily lives. It uses "telling stories from a different perspective" as the main axis of the course development, combining the storytelling form of traditional Japanese kamishibai with cross-disciplinary integration of performing arts, visual arts and life technology. It guides students through a complete learning process from role understanding, perspective transformation, story reconstruction, visual translation, physical creation to real performance.
SEL (Self-Learning Experience) is not additional knowledge content in this course, but rather the starting point for teachers' curriculum design. Adolescents often make quick judgments based on others' outward behavior in interpersonal interactions, but may not have the opportunity to understand the emotions, experiences, needs, and circumstances behind those behaviors. Therefore, this course chooses to start with fairy tales familiar to students, focusing specifically on characters often quickly labeled as "villains." It deliberately removes the good and evil labels given by the original stories, guiding students to gradually explore inward from the character's outward behavior: What did he experience? What did he feel? Why did he make that choice? If I were him, would the world I see be different?
This curriculum design echoes the self-awareness, social awareness, interpersonal skills, and responsible decision-making emphasized in SEL (Self-Learning Experience). Students not only identify the emotions of characters but also need to realize how they originally judged a person during the creative process; through first-person role-playing and story reconstruction, they try to understand events from the perspectives of different characters; in group collaborative creation, they listen to each other's different interpretations, coordinate opinions, and form a joint decision; ultimately, they must consider how they choose to tell a story and how such a narrative might allow the audience to understand a person. The teaching team hopes that this design of SEL will not result in answers that are "taught," but rather a learning experience that is gradually generated through repeated observation, role-playing, selection, dialogue, and revision.
Therefore, "perspective shift" becomes the core learning mechanism connecting the entire course. The course does not aim to defend the villains, nor does it try to tell students that all behaviors have reasonable justifications. Rather, it helps students understand that understanding someone's situation does not equate to agreeing with their behavior; but before making a judgment, are we willing to see more? Students view the story from a third-person perspective, gradually move to a first-person perspective to enter the role, and then return to their own position to make judgments. This repeated shift between "I—character—other" practices moving from a single viewpoint to multiple viewpoints, and allows empathy to go beyond "I know how you feel" to further become "I am willing to try to understand this from your perspective."
This SEL learning experience further transcends different art and technology fields. In the performing arts course, students engage in creative theatrical activities such as still images, oral mime, story relay, role-playing, and first-person narration, entering into roles through their bodies, voices, and actions, exploring the characters' emotions, situations, and choices in embodied experience; and through watching and performing historical kamishibai (paper theater), they further reflect on "Who is telling the story? To whom is it being told? Why is it being told this way?" They understand that stories and performances, in addition to entertainment, may also carry information dissemination, social advocacy, and even political purposes of a specific era, establishing an initial awareness of media and narrative stance.
In visual arts courses, "seeing from someone else's perspective" transforms from psychological and performance-level perspective-taking into concrete visual language. Students develop collaboratively created stories into six-panel storyboards and character images, and at least one key scene is transformed into a POV (Point of View) perspective, allowing the audience to not only "see the characters" from the outside, but also to seemingly stand in the characters' position to observe the events. Students thus discover that perspective is not just about who tells the story, but also includes "where the audience stands to see" the image; similarly, the substitution of viewpoints can also be visualized through composition, line of sight, and viewing position.
In the Life Technology course, students transform abstract stories and images into usable paper houses. Using existing waste boards from the school and combining them with seventh-grade woodworking skills, they go through the processes of measuring, cutting, assembling, testing, and refining. The production process doesn't strive for absolute industrial precision, but rather allows students to continuously adjust and solve problems based on their own abilities, material conditions, tool limitations, and practical usage needs. When individual ideas must be balanced with the group's collaborative work, material conditions, and user needs, self-management, collaborative communication, and responsible decision-making from SEL (Science, Technology, and Life Skills) are once again demonstrated in the real problem-solving process.
Finally, the course shifted SEL from "understanding others in stories" to "responding to others in the real world." Students brought their own handmade kamikashi (paper houses), collaboratively created picture cards, and rewritten stories to perform for first-year students in the school. To truly connect with the younger audience, they had to readjust the content of their three-minute stories and refine their presentation. At this point, the students were no longer facing teacher-set evaluation criteria, but a group of real "others."
Therefore, the ultimate outcome of this course is not merely a completed paper box, six picture cards, or a successful performance, but rather the gradual development of an ability in students throughout the creative process—a willingness to step outside their original perspective and try to see things from a different viewpoint. From "How do I see this character?" to "If I were him, what would I see?"; from "How do I want to draw?" to "Where will the audience see it?"; from "How do I want to act?" to "How will the first-graders in front of me receive my story?" Performing arts, visual arts, and life technology, seemingly dealing with performance, images, and objects respectively, actually all point to the same core of SEL: understanding oneself, understanding others, adjusting oneself in relationships, and taking responsibility for one's choices and actions.

Therefore, kamishibai (paper theater) is not only the outcome of this course, but also a medium for SEL (Self-Learning in English) learning. As each picture card is changed, students practice changing their perspective on the world.