Between Local and Global: The Implementation of International Education in a Taiwanese Preschool

Abstract

This research aims to explore how international education can be better practiced in the Taiwanese preschool context where there appears a myth for the push of "being global." Collaborative action research was conducted and data was collected from one preschool in Taiwan, which included teaching observations and semi-structured interviews with teachers. Three findings are as follows. First, strategies in the implementation of international education were creating new and genuine foreign contact with flexible design. Second, with the foreign contact experience, children have newfound and brighter cultural vision which trigger children's cultural thinking. Third, children gradually change their cultural bias by simply labelling culture as either Taiwan or foreign without discrimination.