In recent years, many policies have been formulated and strongly promoted to improve the quality of early childhood education. In 2012, the Taiwanese government enacted a new national curriculum framework for early childhood education to enhance the quality of early childhood education programs. This new framework is key competence-oriented,…

The new Taiwanese citizenship curriculum has converted its traditional bullet-point guidelines to hundreds of open-ended questions. Each question acts to initiate collective inquiry, to stimulate the sharing of lived experiences and to trigger within-class conversations. The previous pre-determined educational objectives and learning outcomes, in…

This article challenges the simplistic and reductive image of Taiwanese schoolteachers, and reveals their actions of resistance during the turmoil of the recent curriculum reform controversy. Despite the fact that teachers are not usually portrayed as progressive and revolutionary agents, in the face of the disputed curriculum revision in 2014,…

Due to its historical and geopolitical contestations, Taiwan is a country whose people possess divergent imaginations of the national community. Such a condition has been described as institutional liminality, which captures Taiwan's status as not a complete nation state nor a non-nation state; not China nor non-China. Under such a condition,…

This study is aimed at exploring how teachers make curricular-instructional decisions regarding teaching contemporary controversial public issues in Taiwan (e.g., national identity, sovereignty, and ethnic issues). Using a case study design, this study documents how six social studies teachers make curricular decisions about whether to teach…

The national curriculum reformers, regarded as members of the social elites and intellectuals, projected their vision of identity onto the curriculum which they constructed and influenced the next generation's national consciousness. In the tangled relationship between politics and education, the selection of the reformers in a sense dictates the…

In early 2014, a group of senior high school teachers initiated a series of campaigns to fight against the government's imposition of a revised history and citizenship education curriculum, an unprecedented display of opposition in the history of public schools in Taiwan. They rose above the traditional stereotype of the schoolteacher common…

In the 1998 Taiwanese national curriculum revision, environmental education was one of six new "Important Issues". To some early observers, the generic "framework" sections of this 1998 curriculum (Aims, Goals, Core Competences) resonated well with the integrative and transdisciplinary nature of environmental education. This…

New subjects are always emerging but only some gain a place in the formal school curriculum. In fact, most of the now accepted conventional school subjects have, at some stage, struggled to become established. This paper presents findings of a three-year study of teacher and school responses to the introduction of environmental education (EE) as a…

The present study sought to compare and contrast educational policies on creativity education in four Asian Chinese societies, namely mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. It establishes five criteria on creativity education policy, including policies regarding legislation on creativity education, definitions of creativity, standard…

Technology education (TE) in Taiwan is implemented in elementary, junior high, senior high, and comprehensive high schools. Since 2001, the new curriculum syllabus for grades 1-9 reflects the call for educational reform in such areas as articulation, integration, and flexibility of reform. The national curriculum for grades 10-12 is being revised;…

Reviews the textbook content of the second edition of Taiwanese textbooks that resulted from the 1989-95 revision process. Reviews Taiwan' s national curriculum guide for social studies and basic guidelines for evaluating textbook content. Finds that the 1989-95 version addresses the presentation of local cultures but not controversial issues.…

In Taiwan, technology education has traditionally been covered by two courses: Craftwork and Industrial Arts (IA). At present, all students in grades 1-6 take Craftwork. At the junior and senior high school levels, IA is considered a subordinate subject, and students must elect IA or home economics. In accordance with Taiwan's new national…

Technology education focusing on technological literacy is provided to Taiwanese students in grades 1-11, primarily through the secondary school subject Living Technology (LT). Taiwan's newly promulgated national curriculum for grades 1-9 has integrated LT with natural science for the key learning area (KLA) Natural Science and Living Technology.…