Exploration and Practice of Integrating the Shangshan Culture into Art and Design Teaching in China’s Higher Vocational Colleges

Archaeological authorities consider Shangshan culture, a unique name for China’s outstanding local culture, to be the origin of the world’s painted pottery civilization, Chinese farming villages, and the world’s rice civilization. Shangshan culture is more than 3,000 years old compared to the local civilization discovered by historians. We hypothesized that introducing art and design majors into China’s vocational colleges is an effective method for promoting local culture. Integrating local culture into art and design teaching in China’s vocational colleges provides diversified teaching resources, heightens students’ sense of cultural identity, improves their creative performance, and extends local culture’s influence. Therefore, by analyzing the current status of art and design teaching in China’s vocational colleges, we highlighted local culture’s role in the teaching process. We adopted a quasi-experimental design method to conduct an experiment on 90 students from a vocational college majoring in an art and design course. These students learned about the integration of Shangshan culture into art and design under their teachers’ guidance and applied their learning to their artistic creations. This study’s results will help better integrate local culture into art and design teaching, and consequently, achieve a win-win outcome.