Understanding Education Issues in Taiwan and Rethinking How Teachers “Learn to Lead” (II)
By: Tony Huang
Tags: Education Leadership, Alternative Education, Teacher Training, Taiwan, Education Equity

03 What are our problems/ challenges?

Inequality: huge academic achievement gap between urban and rural areas

In PISA 2015, Taiwan got the 4th place in Science and Mathematics, and 23th in reading competence over OECD countries. The result seemed not bad, or even to some extent impressive. However, if we compare the difference between the higher-performance group and lower-performance group, a huge gap could be found. Equity of social background is even lower than the OECD average. It reflects that although Taiwan on average has good quality education, the opportunity to access good education is not equal. In urban area, schools and students attain more local resources and support from local authorities, parents, and communities. According to research (Luoh, 2018), urban students especially from Taipei capital areas are more likely to be accepted in highly-prestigious universities due to their “privileged” socioeconomic status.

Dilemma of equity and school choice

The development of experimental/ alternative education offer student and families a more diverse learning options. However, at the beginning of the alternative school development, there are few or even no public resources support from the government. So what kind of families can afford the expense of alternative schools? Mainly upper middle class and educated families. Students from lower middle class or labour background families have little access to the ideology of school choice. Hence, alternative education was once considered education “for the wealth”. How to soothe the tension between equity and school choice became a dilemma. The pass of Three Types of Experimental Education Act in 2014 shed a light on this circumstance. More and more public schools or public to private schools offer alternative pedagogies with the support of public resources. However, the quality of teaching and learning of the young public alternative schools still need to be concerned. And the government should try to offer equally good mainstream and alternative schools for students in all areas.

Teacher’s quality and well-being

The quality of teacher diverse in mainstream schools. Some teachers regard education as their lifelong career and work extremely hard to address classroom problem, communicate with parents and administration, applying sponsor budgets to broaden students’ horizons and life experiences. They are burning their lives to offer better for their students. These diligent teachers don’t get more paid or even less. Most of them work as substitute teachers and don’t have an official position in schools. Less than ten years, these teachers become exhausted and worn, with worse health condition.

However, there are still some lower-motivated teachers working in public schools. Most of them even boast tenure jobs. They tend to “play safe” with less eager to improve. They often complain about naughty students, tough parents, and annoying paperwork. For them, teaching is just a job to survive, or a job that ensure future well-paid pension. In the face of a new curriculum based on a different paradigm, not every school teacher is well-prepared, or at least willing to adopt the new paradigm of learning. Part of the mainstream teachers could not understand the purpose and just passively “do want I am told to do”, nothing less while nothing more.

Classrooms become more multicultural

Since the 16th century, Taiwan has been an immigrant society. With the process of globalization, the changing demographics in society and classroom become even more drastic and diverse. Over the past 30 years, more marriage immigrants mainly from South-East Asian countries, China, Japan, Korea and more settled down in Taiwan. However, with few experience of international interaction, and the interplay of stereotype, prejudice, and even discrimination, classrooms were not inclusive enough to respond to language and cultural differences. Pre-service teacher training program seldom emphasized multicultural education, if did, most of them just focus on the upper/ surface part cultural iceberg such as “exotic” food/ dance/ costumes. Hence, both in/ pre-service teachers need support to try to improve their multicultural competences.

04 What are Taiwanese educators working on in response to educational problems?

Reshape school culture and teacher training development

In the past, with the influence of neoliberalism, managerialism, and performancism, teachers were constrained by curriculum and students’ grades/ academic performances. And teachers power relationship between the school administration is unequal. Mainstream school cultures were dominated by top-down hierarchies, teachers seldom had autonomy and agency to make a change. However, with the process of democratization and education reform, teachers’ autonomy has been seen in school practice.

From a top-down point of view, “open classroom” is encouraged by the Ministry of Education. Classrooms are no longer “kingdoms” of individual teachers but open to anyone. The practices of co-preparing lessons, co-teaching, classroom observation, feedback mechanism are cultivated in daily school life.

From a bottom-up point of view, some leading teachers who manage several teacher professional development communities across the boundary schools. Besides daily teaching, they utilize their free time to travel to hold speeches, conferences, and workshops to connect teachers with similar characteristic and understanding of education. Some focus on pedagogies such as digital learning, reading, flipped classroom, science and mathematics. Some emphasize cultivating inclusive learning atmosphere such as gender/ sexuality, anti-discrimination, and multicultural education. Also, critical thinking, media literacy, design thinking workshops can be found in grass-rooted teacher professional development programs. Through the co-learning and practising process, school teachers and administration can become a more intimate, equal, and open-minded learning community to support student learning and development of the local community.

Support alternative/ experimental education to thrive

As paragraphs above introduced, experimental schools have been thriving since 2014. However, these experimental schools share a common problem of lacking qualified teachers. Teacher education was centralized by the government, only those who finished a teacher training program and passed the certification exam can be recognized as a qualified state teacher. Nevertheless, the characteristic of the teacher of experimental schools are quite different from most public school teachers. Hence, although many qualified teachers are waiting for official work, in experimental education area, there are still fewer teachers well-trained in alternative pedagogies. Seeing the necessity of cultivating/ training teacher with alternative competences, Taiwan Experimental Education Center and Ministry of Education started an “ experimental educator (teacher) training program” in 2018, supporting a variety of individuals including teachers, higher education students, principals, parents, social and cultural workers from all over Taiwan to become experimental educators.

Recruit and train more talents to become reflective teachers

According to the PISA survey, the achievement gap among students from different socioeconomic status is high in Taiwan. Index of social equity for education is even lower than the OECD average. (PISA, 2015) The unequal education resource allocation and high teacher turnover rate can be found in non-urban area schools, which means students may have to struggle to adapt to new teachers each semester. Teach for Taiwan (TFT) sees the structural inequity of education, and has worked on this issue since 2014. Teach for Taiwan is an non-profit organization endeavours to recruit and train those who want to become a teacher in non-urban area schools in a two-year learning-practising-teaching spiral program. With a vision of “one day, all children in Taiwan, regardless of their background, will have access to quality education.” TFT trained their teacher candidates with a framework of “teaching as leadership”, which hardcore includes: self-breakthrough, encouraging others, and goal achievement (see Table 1). Until 2019, TFT has already trained over 100 teachers in 6 counties throughout Taiwan, serving over 3000 students.

More than teachers, one of the purposes of TFT is to train leaders through the practice of teaching. After two years of teaching, TFT alumni can choose to stay in classrooms or go on another fields/ workplace but still responding education problems because TFT understands that education problem cannot be solved just working in classrooms or schools, it should be discussed and responded in a community/ society scale. In that way, the distance between the vision can be closer.

Teaching as leadership model by Teach for Taiwan (2019) Self-breakthrough: Self-awareness, Resilience. Encouraging others: Empathy, Communication, Empower. Goal achievement: Mission, Action and practice, Problem-solving.

Invest in Vocational and Multicultural and Inclusive Education

To reverse the stereotype of “only academic matters” in Taiwanese society, vocational schools gain more support than ever from the Ministry of Education in recent 20 years. The concept of “different but equal” was proposed.

School teachers such as classroom teachers and guidance and counselling teachers in lower-secondary school should facilitate students’ self-awareness and development orientation, offer clear information to refer to and facilitate communication among student and families. Also, the college entrance approaches become more diverse, offering free-flowing paths for students from both academic and vocational schools.

According to statistics (2018), one out of ten students in lower-secondary and primary school have an international background, mainly from South-East Asian countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Myanmar. At first, their native languages at first were not supported by school systems. Fortunately, the well being of new immigrant children was widely discussed later, affirmative actions were taken to support native languages and cultivate dual/ multiple identities.

When understanding multicultural and inclusive education, gender equity/ sexuality education, and special needs education should be involved. Although Taiwan is one of the most progressive societies on gender issues, “what to teach” and “when to teach” are still highly disputed in our society. Special need education is well supported in Taiwan, however how to build a more inclusive society and reduce prejudices and stigmas become the next challenging work items.

While anti-bullying, and anti-discrimination education practices have been practised in school life, teachers with leadership should have adequate sensitivity to be aware of stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination. And try to implement diverse pedagogical strategies to raise students’ awareness, empathy, and reflections gently and constructively.

Educational Entrepreneurship

From a bottom-up point of view, in addition to public education system reform, social communication and social education are also critical for building a life-long learning and reflective society. The Taiwanese youth generation utilize different methods to respond to educational problems and try to explore more possibilities of learning. Education entrepreneurship starts to thrive again since 2014. Startups like Aestheticell redesigns textbooks layout and representation more aesthetically; inspired by Khan Academy, Junyi Academy offers high-quality and free online learning materials and games for students and teachers; Taiwan Bar produces interesting animated YouTube videos based on social issues and Taiwanese history. The three above are just a few, educational entrepreneurship can also be practised by school teachers who dedicated to improving students’ learning and cultural/ historical workers in local communities, to build a lifelong learning society.

Conclusion

With the process of globalization and digitalization, classrooms tend to be more diverse and dynamic. Hence, there is no single formula for solving problems in the context of education. In this article, we understand education issues in Taiwan and pictured the image of education and society in a rough structural perspective. Also mentioned the challenges/ problems of education reform in both mainstream and alternative approaches and how educators respond to them.

“To become a leader, from a step onto the podium.” Teachers’ vision and mission is undoubtedly essential for the future of a better society. Teacher as leadership have been proposed in Taiwan for years and practised by alternative teacher training programs such as Teach for Taiwan. However, the mainstream pre-service teacher training should be reformed in response to a more diverse workplace and future local/ global society.

Also, to make the vision “One day for all.” possible, multicultural and inclusive education should be stressed to improve equity. Teacher as a leader should not only understand the complexity of social structure and but also aware of the commonness and the differences among cultures. Hence, a teacher leadership training program framework with the lens of multicultural and inclusive competence can be expected. Or, opening an alternative teacher certification trajectory (not necessarily teacher training program offered by universities) can also be considered.

With the effort over the previous 20 years, education in Taiwan has become more open, diverse, and democratic than ever. For now, we need to think ahead to address real-life problems and meet an uncertain future. As Paulo Freire said, to emancipate our education, we are always “on the way, and keep changing.”

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