Encouraging diversity in teaching materials is a key aspect of the concept of an integrated nine-year curriculum for compulsory education. Textbooks, which long held the exalted status of "classroom bible," may be faced with tough competition from here on in. It is likely to come from teaching materials compiled by local governments, schools, and teachers themselves, not to mention multimedia teaching modules available for download from the Internet.

But we mustn't forget that textbook compilation is a massive undertaking. Schools can only do so much compilation on their own, and most of it is in the area of so-called "school-developed curriculum," i.e. the 20% of the curriculum that the Ministry of Education's new nine-year integrated curriculum has left for schools and teachers to create. School-developed curriculum tends to concentrate primarily on general activities and thematic, cross-disciplinary teaching units. In subject areas where knowledge is more rigorously structured, schools still have to rely on private textbook publishers.

The leading textbook publisher in Taiwan is KST Education Corp., which is planning to list on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and open a bilingual elementary and junior high school this year. KST commands about a 40% share of the elementary school market. Trailing not far behind is Nani Books, with roughly a 20% share. Other significant players include Hanlin, Jen Lin, and Kuangfu publishers.

Li Wan-chi is chairman of KST, which is now working at breakneck pace in an effort to compile new textbooks for the nine-year integrated curriculum. Says Li: "Textbooks play the most important role in translating the nine-year integrated curriculum into a classroom reality." And he acknowledges that textbook publishers, as the intermediate link between theory and practice, face some very vexing problems.

Logically speaking, it might seem reasonable to expect that the nine-year integrated curriculum would have to be built from the ground floor up, starting with first grade and advancing one year at a time all the way until ninth grade (i.e. the third year of junior high), with the entire process of its implementation taking nine years. But the Ministry of Education (MOE) doesn't want to wait that long, and has worked out an accelerated plan that it intends to see completed in four years.

The MOE calls it the "year hopping" plan. The integrated curriculum was already introduced in first grade at elementary schools throughout Taiwan during the current 2001-2002 school year, which began last September. Beginning in September 2002, the MOE intends to additionally implement it in grades one, four, and seven. Together with this year's first graders, who will enter into their second year under the integrated curriculum come September, that makes four grades under the integrated curriculum during the coming school year. The integrated curriculum will then be implemented in grades three, five, and eight beginning in September 2003, and finally in grade nine in September 2004, thus completing the nine-year integrated curriculum.

Lu Hsiu-na, head of the social studies textbook group at KST, reports: "Everyone at KST is busy compiling textbooks for the fourth and seventh grades to support the integrated curriculum schedule. We have to leave third, fifth, and sixth grade textbooks for later." In Lu's opinion, learning is a process of cognitive development, and textbooks ought to be compiled sequentially, tracing the path of that development. She feels that it is a very bad idea to rush ahead to fourth-grade textbooks before doing the ones for third grade.

The keyword in "nine-year integrated curriculum" is "integration," but in fact there are many cases of redundant or, worse yet, conflicting attainment targets within the nine-year integrated curriculum. To name an example, the "life category" (which only exists for elementary grades one and two) overlaps heavily with the "comprehensive activities category" for those same two grades. But the textbook compilers have to work according to the guidelines if they want to get their textbooks past a gauntlet of textbook review committees, each with responsibility for a different academic subject.

Lu worries: "Some parents might wonder, 'Why are the kids going out on a field trip again today when they just went on one yesterday?'" She notes with frustration that unless teachers make adjustments accordingly, problems like this may crop up time and again.

To be sure, it is very convenient for schools that textbook publishers go to the trouble of compiling textbooks and are willing to foot the bill to run training workshops throughout Taiwan to familiarize teachers with their textbooks. This saves the schools a lot of trouble, but questions arise. Might schools not be tempted to shove responsibility for curriculum entirely onto the textbook publishers? And might we not simply be switching from the old "one teacher, one textbook" model to "many teachers sharing one textbook"? If this happens, it will make a mockery of the whole idea behind loosening restrictions and giving teachers and schools more discretionary latitude.

Elementary education curriculum standards have always been extremely detailed. As a result, there has been little to choose between different versions of the same textbook. The task of choosing a textbook never involved much controversy. Textbook standards under the nine-year integrated curriculum, however, are very general, providing nothing but general syllabus guidelines and attainment targets. Textbooks compiled under these standards will naturally differ quite a bit, which makes parents and students nervous that standardized tests might require knowledge of something not covered by a given publisher's textbook. To make sure they don't miss out on anything important, students whose teacher uses a math textbook from KST, for example, will often buy workbooks from Nani or Hanlin. With so many different versions available, teachers and students could be even more stressed out than they are now about not being able to cover all the material that's out there.

But Chen Po-chang, a professor in the Department of Education at National Taiwan Normal University, offers a bit of simple advice: "Everyone should stop getting so worked up!" When people find out that the attainment targets require students to know 1,000 Chinese characters without specifying which characters, right away they get antsy to know which 1,000 characters will end up on the list, and they worry their heads off about kids missing out on a single character.

"But in fact," says Chen, "if you ask a bunch of experienced teachers to pick out the thousand characters they feel should be taught first, their choices aren't going to vary much." Chen adds that basic aptitude tests in the future will not test students on their knowledge of Chinese characters, but will quiz them on their understanding of short passages. With this type of test, it won't matter whether students have been drilled on every single character and sentence in the passage.

The more important question concerns how to achieve lateral and vertical integration between the content of different textbooks as quickly as possible. Curriculum development committees at schools everywhere have all zeroed in on this problem. Teachers may start running into problems when the science teacher in third and fourth grades uses textbooks from Nani Books, for example, while the science teacher in fifth and sixth grades uses something from Hanlin. Or students may find that some of the content in their science textbooks is repeated in social studies.

The problem is, while it's easy to speak of a nine-year integrated curriculum, virtually no public elementary schools in Taiwan are attached to a junior high school. If the textbooks used by elementary schools don't mesh with those used at the junior high level, who is supposed to step in and iron out the problems?

It looks like textbooks, dubbed "the opiate of the teachers" in some quarters, will no longer provide teachers the comfortable crutch they've always had the option of leaning on in the past. Above and beyond selecting textbooks, it looks like the most important task facing us is to make sure that our teachers have what it takes to prepare their own teaching materials and develop innovative new teaching methods.

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Dolls, jigsaw puzzles, and tangram brainteasers. . . In the move to a nine-year integrated curriculum, creative teaching plays an indispensable role, and requires a lot of creative teaching materials. Shown here is a scene from the editing and research department at KST Education Corp. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)