Local Heritage as Pedagogical Medium: Dabie Mountain—Themed Art Creation and Cultural Identity Education for Preservice Art Teachers in Western Anhui

Abstract

Could a mountain range become a classroom? It is a question I have been turning over since I first walked into a studio full of fine-arts undergraduates at West Anhui University—bright, dextrous students who can manipulate a brush with enviable skill yet often seem baffled when asked to connect their work to any broader social purpose. The Dabie range, wedged between Hubei, Henan, and Anhui, is of course a landscape, but it is also something else: a repository of twentieth-century local memory, home to more than 530 registered early-modern sites, around 1,200 catalogued objects, and a sprawling set of narratives that runs from the 1927 Huangma Uprising all the way to the foundation of the PRC. What follows is a practitioner's account of trying to weave that inheritance into the professional formation of future art teachers—not as decorative window-dressing, but as something closer to the core of how they understand themselves as educators. Drawing on classroom experience in the Fine Arts (Normal) track, on the practice of colleagues including Liu Lanting and Pan Wen, and on student works such as the print Remembering the Glorious Years, I outline a "localised, innovative, and collaborative" framework for culture-oriented art education. This is not offered as a rigid blueprint; it is a collection of grounded observations about what actually unfolds when history-inspired making is taken seriously.