Science education reform in confucian learning cultures: policymakers’ perspectives on policy and practice in Taiwan

Ying-Syuan Huang,Anila Asghar

doi:10.1186/s41029-016-0010-8

Abstract

This qualitative inquiry project investigates the political and policy discourses related to education reform in Taiwan. Specifically, it examines the science education reform policies and policy leaders’ vision for the reform. This work also reveals the unique challenges involved in implementing contemporary science education approaches in a Confucian learning culture. Data sources included reform policy documents and interviews with policymakers. Thematic and constant comparative methods were used to analyze these data. The Foucauldian framework on governmentality served as a lens to examine the historical and political conditions which shaped policy leaders’ rationale for educational change and the strategies that they used to implement the reform policies in local educational institutions. Policymakers identified a number of critical challenges related to the reform initiative, emphasizing that social and cultural traditions in Confucian learning cultures presented significant obstacles to the implementation of inquiry-based and learner-centered approaches in Taiwanese schools. These findings have important implications for future policy and curriculum initiatives in East Asian cultures.

Highlights

Over the past two decades, the Taiwanese government has been making earnest efforts to transform the national science education curriculum for elementary and secondary levels (Ministry of Education, Taiwan 2003a)
Data collection Recruitment of participants Following the approval of this study by the McGill Research Ethics Board in April 2013, the first author, using the purposeful sampling method, contacted the education policy leaders who were the main architects of the reform policies
Before embarking on this research, we examined the policy documents and curriculum guidelines to understand how reform goals intersected with the new vision for social and political change

Summary

Introduction

Over the past two decades, the Taiwanese government has been making earnest efforts to transform the national science education curriculum for elementary and secondary levels (Ministry of Education, Taiwan 2003a). Aligned with global trends in science education, the key objectives of these reforms are to cultivate students’ conceptions of “democracy” and their “ability to think, judge and create” (Ministry of Education, Taiwan 2003a), p 8). A large number of Taiwanese teachers and parents continue to express their opposition to the new science standards and curriculum even after a decade of implementation. Tobin and McRobbie (1996) argued that most students and parents in Taiwan seem to be convinced of the effectiveness of the traditional teacher-centered pedagogy. Other scholars have suggested that Taiwanese teachers often feel

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