Shengli Elementary School in Tainan City - The Future of the City
The SDGs, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, address real-world challenges. In education, we strive to connect the real world with classroom learning, sparking students' attention and awareness of real-world issues, leading to action. SDG 4 - Quality Education: Education is the best way to allow the seeds of sustainable living to take root and sprout.
While everyone is thinking about how to incorporate it into teaching, Shengli Elementary School in East District, Tainan City, takes "SDGs World - Actions to Bring Us Closer to the World" as its core concept. In the school's reading teaching promotion, it uses picture book reading to understand related issues; in the social field and flexible curriculum, it conducts research and implementation of the issues. It has also incorporated "soundscape" to lead students to explore the local environmental change issue - "South Railway Underground", including the disappearing city sounds, using sound to see the changes facing Tainan, thinking about the meaning behind the soundscape, and using artistic creation as a way to create.
Presentation.
With initial experience integrating soundscapes into curriculum for sensory learning, what kind of "multiplier effect" would this have if we could transcend the limitations of visual perception and use soundscapes centered around hearing to break free from the inertial senses of the past, guiding students to read the local context through sound, re-experience life, perceive the SDGs in their lives, explore issues, and present students' thoughts and concerns about real-world issues?
With this idea, we immediately connected with Mumu Cultural and Creative, which is currently collecting, researching, and promoting soundscapes. Based on this concept, we decided to combine the SDGs with soundscapes, making it a connection between students' understanding of the issues and local life. The idea of having sixth-grade students curate their graduation works was thus formed.
Soundscapes record the sounds of different urban contexts, connecting diverse emotions and cultures. How do we perceive a city? Visual perception often subjectively represents the region's established cultural characteristics, weakening other sensory perceptions of the city and unconsciously limiting our impression of the city. Soundscapes exist as another sensory layer of cultural connotation in daily life, representing the pace of ordinary people's lives, conveying environmental changes, and depicting the contradictory coexistence of history and modernity. They have become a mode of communication and recording contemporary collective emotions.
Tainan was founded in 1725, and the Dadong Gate near Shengli was the first city gate built. In 2025, when the SDGs intersect with Tainan's 300th anniversary, what kind of perceptions, imaginations, and expectations will students have about the local neighborhood?
Sixth-grade students from Shengli, East District, used soundscapes to present their local observations on SDGs-related issues. With "Tainan City: 300 Years of the Future" as their graduation exhibition theme, they integrated art with humanities, social studies, and language courses. Through the connotations of the SDGs, they guided students to break through the limitations of visual media. Starting from "sound," they were sensitive to the context of SDGs in their daily lives, imagined the future of the Dongmen area, and learned to listen in the city. With "Creative Aesthetics" and "Exploring the Five Senses" as their topics, they focused on the future issues of "Urban Soundscape" and "300 Years of Tainan City."
