The self-learning community by Teaching for Excellence Project at National Dong Hwa University was grouped with a goal to create an encouraging environment for students to enhance their motivation to practice self-learning. This year, the Schoolwork Improvement Team was hosted by Wang, Zi-Yu and other students from the Department of Special Education. Lin, Guan-Jie, who is now studying in the M.A. Program of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, was invited as the instructor. Lin said that "the part-whole relation" was the core of the courses in this semester and the courses were innovated in three aspects:

I. Finishing Tasks VS. Creating Works

The first step is to turn learning into tasks. Based on the Programmed Instruction by Behaviorism, the learning content was segmented to smaller units and learners were required to self-evaluate their learning effects. The second step is to further turn learning into works-creating, which is inspired by Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. This theory emphasized that the learner should be able to flexibly practice acquired skills and integrate them to create artistic works of hand-writing featured with personal styles.

II. Objective Analyses V S. Subjective Experiences

Traditional theories of calligraphy are closer to inherited wisdom from ancient or senior masters that is usually represented in the forms metaphors and descriptions of subjective feelings. However, contemporary hand-writing teaching emphasizes explicit and concrete definition and representation of knowledge. Two ways are available for the learner. First, through scientific methods of analyses, the learner can decompose the form of a character to smaller components. Second, the learner can also master the structure of the form by means of Gestalt principles of organization.

III. Individual Learning VS. Group Learning

While some students are independent learner, others prefer interpersonal interaction. In response to the varying learning styles, we adopted multifaceted interactive teaching methods. The instructor led a new learner and closely watched his every step at the very beginning, and then gradually guided them to the end of independent self-learning. To be more specific, the courses started with a highly dependent teacher-student relationship by providing class lecturing and individual instruction. Then, it was moved on to the student's group and pair discussion, which is moderately dependent. Finally, students were marching on to the ultimate goal, independent learning.

Lin asserted that with the one core, i.e., "part-whole relation", and the three aspects of innovation, it is able to applying the integration of "the spirit" and "the skill" to hand-writing courses of potentials development and help students in as short as ten weeks remold themselves to write "right and bright".