As I was saying in my last post (here), my mission or intention was to
somehow get into the education system at the university level in Taiwan and
create change for the better from within. I did not really have a long term
plan as to how I was going to do this; however, I did figure I would have a lot
more autonomy at the university level than at other levels that I had been
teaching. Of course, a big part of my decision also had to do with money,
having a more stable salary and a feeling that it was time once again for me to
get out of my comfort zone home.
In my first year at the university, I did a lot of teaching
English and attempting to explain issues that, I later realized most students did
not have a basis or reference to understand. Then, in the second half of that
year, an opportunity came along to design a new course for the university, which
we would use to compete with against other Taiwan universities for funding from
the Ministry of Education. I took this opportunity very seriously, spending a
lot of time researching and writing with the intent of inputting words into our
proposal that were specifically targeted at winning the competition and getting
funding so as to legitimize the topics that I cared to teach. I inputted a lot
of broad international topics so that, once we won, I would have the freedom to
choose which topics were most relevant. We ended up getting second place in
Taiwan, which was cool because it indicated to me that people high up in the ministry
of education were considering the necessity for a change in the focus of
education. Luckily, the topics that we had inputted – the environment, war,
terrorism, democracy, money, culture, etc., are broad enough to have given me
as much leeway as I wanted to uncover and explore with all of my classes,
consisting of almost four-hundred students, issues that I considered relevant,
yet too often ignored.
Thus, beginning in my second year at AU, I readjusted my
focus of “English” teaching and learning away from acquiring information and
skills relevant to achieving better standardized test scores, to that of acquiring
knowledge and information relevant to taking responsibility for humanity and
our planet as a whole. The biggest challenge for me has been 1) to get students
to care about what’s going on outside of their worlds and 2) to get them to
realize that, through our words and deeds we have the opportunity and/or responsibility
to create change for the better. I introduced issues such as democracy, inequality,
money and false-flag terrorism and instructed students on how to use some of
the technology to enable them to collaboratively assess issues, develop solutions
and promote their solutions to the rest of humanity.
Towards the end of my second year, I had been wondering how
much of a difference my input has had in our university and the educations
system as a whole. As for Asia University, I could se, through other students’
presentations that, geopolitical topics were now starting to be addressed, not
always the way I wanted them to be though, lol. Then just a few weeks ago, I
was encouraged to join a group of teachers visiting one of Taiwan’s national
universities to view their end of the year presentations. To my surprise, every
one of the their topics was of the topics were of the topics that I had deliberately
inserted/inputted into our original proposal for the Global Citizenship and
Cultural Literacy course that we as a group had designed. I guess that, because
we took second place in the contest, other universities (or at least this one)
figured that this is the direction that the Ministry of Education wants to go.
For me, this is an indication, as in feedback that, the effort I have been
putting into changing the system from within has been having an effect, much
more so than I had imagined.
Now, I am on vacation and intend to refocus my attention
back onto me, my personal process. However, I am also formulating plans (such
as democratic learning, letting students decide what to study) for next
semester and I will probably get to this topic in the couple of months and
included it in another post. Finally, I would like to say that, English
teaching no longer has to be done with the focus only on learning to speak the
language. We as instructors have the ability, a responsibility to expand the
learning process to that of acquiring relevant information and knowledge so to best
assist all of us to understand ourselves as the creators creating the created.
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