Miss Fanny Tsui, winner of the Chief Executive's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2006/2007, has accepted our invitation to become a teaching consultant at the Institute. Expressing her gratitude to the community, she is keen to share her views and experiences with HKIEd students.
The Art and Design Room at Caritas Ma On Shan Secondary School is like a mini art exhibition hall. With obvious delight, visual arts teacher Fanny Tsui introduces her students’ “visual diary” to Joy of Learning. Apart from appreciating the artistry of her students, Fanny also tries to understand their inner world. She projects no haughty artist airs, rather all you will find are huge and sincere smiles. Full of innovative ideas, she has an immense passion for creative art education, attributable to her studies at
HKIEd, which has never cooled down. Fanny herself is a keen advocate of life-long learning, putting it into practice every weekend when she herself paints, creating a wide range of artistic work on a regular basis. She has her own, personal and creative world to absorb her when it comes to creating art.
“I plan my storyline first, and then I think sketching brings out my story best. All the characters in my story are special and unique.” Form 5 student Wong Ming-fai is vocal about his creative process, despite the fact that he generally appears rather quiet.
To Fanny who has taught in the same school for ten years, the Art and Design Room is a second home. Every corner of this room has housed collections, testifying both to her own and her students’ precious memories over the years. Like a proud gardener, Fanny believes that the seeds of art she sows amongst her students will sprout and grow one day. One satisfying example was her discovery of the creative talents of a Form 1 student a few years ago. Seeing this talent, she started to nurture it wholeheartedly. The student attained excellent grades in her HKCEE results and decided to study graphic design. Today the student is a professional designer. To help some of her students overcome their lack of confidence, Fanny decided to boost
their learning incentives with diverse art creations. Her innovative measures included the screening of short footage on art exhibitions during morning assembly or class, displaying students’ team-work art along school corridors, as well as organising a “Creative Design for Washrooms in School” in 2003/2004 as well as being “Creative in School” between 2004 and 2006. Her aim is to maximise the time and space available at school to create an artistic ambience, subtly influencing students to love art, whilst also enhancing their sense of belonging in school.
Her experience as a visual arts teacher has also helped Fanny take up the additional role as a Counselling Panel. She often communicates with her students through her discussions on their works of art, learning how they think and sharing their feelings in the process. To break the ice with a Form 5 student who was reluctant to talk to other people, Fanny displayed his work to Form1 students. This work gained recognition from the Form1 students, who with their open minds were ready to befriend him. This helped the quiet student to overcome any previous psychological barriers and he started to communicate with his fellow schoolmates.
Since there are over a hundred boarders at school who do not stay with their family on a day-to-day basis, Fanny is planning to launch a project called “Art Therapy in building harmonious families” using the cash prize she won from the Chief Executives’s Award For Teaching Excellence. With her school fully behind her, Fanny intends to invite artists to link hands with the principal, teachers, hostel wardens, parents and boarders to join in this collective artistic and creative activity, which will be held on the school campus. She hopes to build harmonious relationships between all parties, while at the same time allowing her colleagues to take a break from their daily workload via art. In this way, her colleagues will be able to acquire better rapport at work resulting in better cooperation between the school and parents.
This 3-D creation called “Class of Rebels” reflects the inner feelings of a Form 5 student towards his class environment. Through artistic expression, suppressed feelings can be relieved.
