Skills to go
Integration into seven broad study fields breaks down the old framework of teaching according to narrow subject divisions, and in terms of educational goals, the new curriculum also turns away from an approach of simply helping children to build a body of knowledge, to one of fostering "ten basic skills" (see Table B).
"Give children skills they can take with them" is a famous saying of the late education minister Lin Ching-chiang. The skills required to deal with many events in life are unrelated to any specific field of knowledge, but instead are widely applicable, composite abilities. Yet this is what has been most lacking in our school education.
For example, if our education in the past had fostered children's ability to solve problems and handle stress, would so many young people, when they become unemployed, choose to commit suicide and take their young children with them? Some activity sheets prepared under the new curriculum call for children to find out about the social and educational institutions within their home area, how to contact them, and how to use their resources; and various thematic activities seek to develop composite skills for interpersonal relationships and life planning.
Apart from the seven fields of study and ten basic skills, in line with world trends the integrated curriculum also identifies information technology, environment, sex education, human rights, life and career planning, and home economics as six major topics related to human social development. The main orientation is set out in a "provisional outline syllabus," along with "basic ability indicators" for each study field; these provide textbook publishers with a basis for preparing teaching materials.
Redefining the textbook
However, an even greater breakthrough is the way the integrated curriculum redefines the "textbook." In future both the approved textbooks now used in elementary schools, and the standard textbooks used in junior high, may be relegated from their leading classroom role to a supporting role, for "diverse teaching materials" and "school-developed courses" are another big change introduced by the new curriculum.
"After the integrated curriculum is implemented, the outline syllabus will replace the old, excessively detailed syllabuses that regulated everything large and small, and the preparation and selection of teaching materials will become more diversified and open," avers Ou Yung-sheng. For example, the new curriculum divides social studies into nine thematic units, including "people and space," "people and time," "change and permanence" and "meaning and value," and also extends the perspective for understanding time and space continuously outwards, progressing from personal history (including psychological space), to family history (including family environment), to world history (including world geography).
Third- and fourth-year elementary school pupils are expected to master some 30 defined skills in social studies, including the abilities to "describe the lifestyles of people in different regions," "survey the distribution of and changes in the population of their home area," and "recognize that the formation of a settlement is a response to the human need for communal living."
Because the outline syllabus and the ability indicators are very general in nature, they may conjure up different ideas for teaching in the mind of every teacher, and different textbook publishers may also produce completely different teaching materials.
Also, in line with the general trend in education reform toward diversification of teaching materials, the integrated curriculum not only abolishes the current requirement for junior high schools to use the standard textbooks published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation, allowing them to use any approved textbook instead, but it also allows county and city governments, schools, and teachers to produce their own teaching materials, and particularly encourages schools to form "curriculum development committees" to devise course content.
Guess who's coming to teach?
"In the past it was as if the government was responsible for cooking the dinner and bringing it to the table, and teachers simply had to stuff it down the pupils' throats," says Ou Yung-sheng. But under the integrated curriculum the state will merely remind teachers what nutrients (basic abilities) pupils should have, while the shopping, cooking and eating will all be up to the schools and teachers. This will add enormously to classroom teachers' workload, so it is hardly surprising that the reaction on school campuses is one of skepticism or even hostility.
"The integrated curriculum should not be too disruptive for elementary schools," says Ou Yung-sheng, because the subject divisions in elementary schools were already very broad, and their teaching arrangements are generally close to a single "class teacher" system, with one teacher teaching several different subjects. Therefore integrating the subjects should not be too difficult.
But for junior high schools, with their much narrower subject divisions, the old system of introducing biology in the first year, physics, chemistry, computer studies and applied science and technology in the second year, and earth science in the third year, gave children time to become familiar with the knowledge structure of each subject. But if all five are now all to be rolled into one in the "science" study field, with the addition of ecology, and a single thematic unit may introduce several different concepts together, how should one teach it? And how does one assess academic achievement?
With the current staffing structure in junior high schools, physics and chemistry teachers are not equipped to cross over and teach biology, and biology teachers cannot teach information technology. Thus teaching in a single study field may be split between five different teachers, and pupils may be left to guess from the content of each unit which teacher will appear on any particular day. What kind of uncertainty will that introduce into the pupil-teacher relationship?
Speaking of the reaction from junior high schools, Chan Cheng-tao, director of the teaching research department at the National Teachers Federation and a teacher at Tanfeng Junior High in Taipei County, says that no teacher is opposed to the concept of integration. But what baffles them is that when the policy was being formulated, one heard professors debating various concepts in high-flown terms, but the classroom teachers who are in daily contact with the children and have the richest practical experience had little opportunity to participate or voice their opinions.
Where are the resources?
When the seven major study fields were announced, many teachers were flabbergasted, and could not fathom out how these integrated fields had been arrived at, or what the choice of the six major topics was based on. In particular, in the process of writing the curriculum there were inevitably struggles between members of the preparatory committee as to the number of teaching hours and the status to be allotted to each area of content, with each seeking to protect the position of his or her own subject area. Thus the integrated content in all the fields smacks strongly of compromise. As for whether the content is workable in teaching terms, and whether pupils really can understand numerous complex, composite concepts at once, these are things that were not adequately discussed or investigated.
For example, "arts" includes the three main strands of visual arts, music and drama. Superficially they all appear to be artistic subjects, so one would expect this field to present the fewest problems. Yet integration has already created difficulties for many schools.
"The teachers who used to graduate from teacher training colleges really were all-rounders who could paint with their left hand, play a musical instrument with their right, and teach Chinese and maths too. But since the colleges were turned from junior colleges into full colleges with separate subject departments, teachers with all-round abilities have become harder and harder to find," says Lai Chao-hsi, principal of Wantan Elementary in Pingtung County, with frustration. At least art can be taught verbally, and by letting the children draw or paint independently. But how do you let everyone do their own thing in a music class? With the two subjects combined together in the field of arts, there will be problems in teaching the music part, Lai believes.
The teacher training community also barely participated in formulating the new policy, and after the provisional syllabus was announced in 2000, teacher training institutions continued to maintain their existing teaching structure with independent departments. This creates a serious rift between teacher training and the new curriculum.
"Even our own NTNU professors don't know what has been integrated, so how will the teachers we are training be able to teach the integrated syllabus?" queries one college dean at National Taiwan Normal University. In particular, the higher up one goes in the academic structure, not only is there an ever finer division of labor, but that specialization also represents academic status. "A professor in a graduate institute of history will not be willing to define himself as a social studies professor, that's for sure."
Because of this, teacher training institutions throughout the land currently plan to retain their separate departments, but to offer students interdisciplinary courses as options. For instance, fine arts department students can take an "arts" course to prepare themselves to teach in this study field.
Groping their way
The preparations were inadequate, but because curriculum integration is a worldwide trend, Taiwan couldn't wait. From 1999 on, county and city education bureaus islandwide began trials of the new system in over 300 elementary and junior high schools, which were either selected or volunteered. With a subsidy of around NT$500,000 a year for participation, schools began groping their way forward. Aided by the various theories they heard in study seminars, and using the old textbooks for guidance, over the course of two years the teachers really did achieve many good results. In 2001, the new curriculum was formally introduced in the first year of all elementary schools. A full term has now gone by, and the reaction from schools so far has been fairly calm, so one can say that the plan has got off to a reasonably good start.
During the pilot scheme there were both good and bad experiences. For most of the teachers, the past two years have been a baptism of fire. The new curriculum involves two big challenges: preparing one's own teaching materials, and teaching formerly separate subjects in an integrated way. Teachers not only had to attend training seminars and learn new approaches from scratch, but also had to gather information for teaching materials, compile materials and try them out as they went along, and communicate with teachers of other subjects to coordinate teaching.
"Each of these new tasks requires a great deal of time and effort, as well as convenient access to the Internet and libraries, and to projectors and other multimedia equipment," says Chan Cheng-tao. But the limited resources actually available were quite at odds with the all-embracing compass envisaged by the new curriculum. This left many teachers feeling frustrated.
"A junior high school teacher today has to teach at least 20 lessons a week," says Chan, who cites the example of history, which is timetabled at two lessons a week per class. If a teacher has ten classes with 40 pupils each, then just in terms of marking she has 400 assignments to get through. This is an immense workload, and every teacher's timetable is different. The upshot is that evenings, weekends and holidays are the only times when teachers can get together to coordinate material between courses and plan team teaching.
For the past year and more, many teachers in pilot scheme schools have been attending meetings and working overtime every day, and have spent their evenings surfing the Internet looking for materials, and drawing up teaching plans. To attend training seminars, they have to dig into their own pockets for replacement teachers before they can get approval to spend time away from school. "For such a huge reform project, the authorities have been incredibly stingy with resources!" complains Chan Cheng-tao.
Little MacGyver
Of course, all beginnings are difficult, and for many teachers it was only after their school principals "volunteered" them to work on designing integrated teaching materials that they discovered to their surprise that they had the ability to write materials themselves, and even began learning to create Web pages and presentations, and striving to develop their potential. This made teaching into a joyful activity in which they could develop their creativity and talent.
Chung Mei, a Chinese literature teacher at Sanmin Junior High School in Kaohsiung City, is just such an example. The team she leads took the theme of "family reunion at Mid-Autumn Festival" as the basis to ingeniously integrate content from earth science (the movement of the tides and the waxing and waning of the moon), maths (quadratic functions of Hou Yi shooting down the nine suns), history (mid-autumn legends and the Mongol Empire), and counseling activities (satisfactions and regrets in life), which they linked together in a set of thematic activities with a rich content.
"Initially many teachers were waiting to see a fiasco, but after I set to work on the project, I discovered that it wasn't so difficult, and the results we achieved weren't bad at all," says Chung Mei.
After Sanmin Junior High actively got involved in the pilot project, in the short space of a year staff there created numerous sets of teaching materials including composite activities and school-centered integrated courses, such as "Little MacGyver, Street Scientist" (science study field), which gained national recognition. This experience was repeated all over Taiwan. All kinds of teaching materials and teaching plans written by teachers have been rapidly accumulating, and many teachers have created resource-sharing web sites from which colleagues nationwide can freely obtain materials and inspiration. The trend for writing one's own teaching materials is gradually gathering speed on school campuses.
Professor Chen Po-chang of NTNU's education department, who was a member of the Education Reform Committee, is very pleased to see this change.
"In the past, the education world was very inward looking, and riddled with a 'leveling down' tendency. Any teachers who showed creativity or individuality in their teaching were likely to arouse resentment or even obstruction from their colleagues," says Chen.
On school campuses today, however, teachers from all the different subjects within a study field have to write teaching materials. This not only can promote beneficial competition between teachers, but also gives rise to intense competition between schools. But after the regimented, one-size-fits-all mold of education is broken, competition between classes and schools will no longer be based on college entrance exam scores, but on more challenging and diverse comparisons such as creativity, knowledge and development of potential.
Boldly scaling the learning curve
For many teachers long accustomed to parroting the textbook, curriculum reform and enforced integration will be a bitter pill to swallow. Hence the number of teachers seeking retirement, already substantial, may climb to new heights after the introduction of the integrated curriculum. Will this impact school stability and the effectiveness of education reform? Education reform movement veteran Chou Chih-hung, who is a professor in the public administration department at Tamkang University, is not worried.
Chou notes that since 1996, when the Ministry of Education opened up diverse routes to teaching qualifications, 61 regular universities have established education courses, and they are now training large numbers of teachers.
"There's no reason to worry that new teachers will be in short supply, so the current wave of retirements is actually a good opportunity to get rid of incompetent teachers and bring new blood into schools," says Chou bluntly.
"In fact, teachers needn't be too afraid of the integrated curriculum, and they shouldn't get uptight every time they hear a new piece of education reform terminology," stresses Kaohsiung City education commissioner Michael Tseng, another reform committee member, seeking to give teachers encouragement from a different perspective.
Tseng says that although the changes in the curriculum are large, the implementation of the integrated curriculum can in fact be seen as an extension of the core concepts of education reform over the last three years, such as "open education" and "the spirit of small class teaching," all of which aim to allow children to study in an atmosphere of diversity and relevance to their lives. Former education minister Ovid Tzeng, who has been the most vigorous promoter of the integrated curriculum, goes even further, saying that what the new curriculum really boils down to is quite simply "innovative teaching."
The integrated curriculum is already under way, and its "learning by doing" approach is very much in line with the flexibility and adaptability that characterize the knowledge economy. To follow on from the nine-year integrated curriculum, the Ministry of Education is now drawing up plans for a new curriculum for senior high schools, which it expects to introduce in three years time. At that point the "nine-year integrated curriculum" will become a "12-year integrated curriculum." The education reform express train is speeding down the track. Are you ready for it?
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