As AI transforms how art is created and taught, Vietnamese educators are seeking ways to embrace the technology without sacrificing cultural identity, human emotion and real-world experience.
A national scientific conference on reforming arts education in Vietnam, held on the morning of Aug. 22 by the Faculty of Arts at Hanoi National University of Education, highlighted the urgent demands facing the field in a rapidly changing environment.
Titled Innovating Arts Education in Vietnam: Developing Creative Capacity, Promoting Traditional Values and Adapting to Digital Transformation, the conference placed one question at the heart of the discussion: how to harness the power of artificial intelligence while preserving cultural identity and the emotional dimensions of art.
Tran Thi Thu Ha, dean of the Faculty of Arts at Hanoi National University of Education, said the rapid expansion of digital transformation and AI was opening virtually limitless creative space while simultaneously creating major challenges for the preservation of Vietnam’s cultural identity.
Among the 76 papers submitted to the conference, experts focused on two of the most pressing issues facing arts education today.
The value of real-world experience and the heritage challenge
Tran Thi Thu Ha, dean of the Faculty of Arts at Hanoi National University of Education. Photo: Organizers
According to Ha, although Vietnam’s 2018 general education curriculum created new opportunities to bring artistic heritage and artisans into schools, implementation remains fragmented and often focused on surface-level activities.
At the same time, imported cultural products are spreading rapidly across digital platforms.
This reality, she said, underscores the need for mechanisms to better integrate heritage into education, develop pedagogical approaches for teaching cultural heritage and reform arts education in ways suited to the digital transformation era.
The rise of the digital world has also produced an intriguing paradox in how people experience art.
Music researcher Nguyen Quang Long pointed to the strong resurgence of live concerts as evidence that the more technology advances, the more people crave experiences that cannot be digitized.
Technology allows people to listen to music anywhere, but it cannot replace the desire for interaction, shared moments and the physical presence of artists within a common cultural space.
Drawing on this trend, Long argued that music education cannot remain confined to classrooms or screens.
Students should be given opportunities to experience concerts and community activities firsthand. Schools, he said, should strengthen partnerships with artists and performing arts organizations so that direct experience becomes a core part of developing artistic appreciation.
Technology, in this approach, should serve as a means of expanding the experience rather than replacing the real world.
Turning AI into a ‘co-creator’ in the classroom
As technology advances, people increasingly seek artistic experiences that cannot be digitized, experts say. Photo: File
Alongside the need to preserve emotional experience and cultural heritage, adapting to AI has become essential.
Colonel and musician Mai Kien of the Military University of Culture and Arts said AI in music has already moved far beyond conventional text-generation tools.
Artificial intelligence can now directly generate and process melodies, harmony, timbre and performance structures in real time.
Such capabilities mean users need more than digital skills. They also need artistic sensitivity, judgment and the ability to evaluate what technology produces.
Yet the use of AI in music teacher training remains largely spontaneous, according to Kien, with the technology mainly serving as an individual support tool rather than being incorporated into a clearly defined pedagogical model.
Most research has focused on using AI to assist music composition, while relatively little attention has been given to integrating it into the development of lesson-design skills among future teachers.
Kien said building an AI-integrated learning model was therefore an urgent priority.
Under such a model, AI would not simply function as an impersonal machine but as a “co-creator,” helping future teachers explore artistic possibilities and transform creative ideas into engaging classroom activities.
Such an approach, he argued, could become an important means of improving teacher training and ensuring that arts education in Vietnam does not fall behind as digital transformation accelerates worldwide.
Vietnamnet.vn
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