Taiwan Education At The Crossroad

Chou and Ching examine the processes of schooling in Taiwan amidst social, cultural, economic, and political conflict resulting from local and global dilemmas. Collectively, these issues offer a panoramic and in-depth glimpse from the past to the future of educational trends in Taiwan.

Chou and Ching examine the processes of schooling in Taiwan amidst social, cultural, economic, and political conflict resulting from local and global dilemmas. Collectively, these issues offer a panoramic and in-depth glimpse from the past to the future of educational trends in Taiwan.

This book examines the quality assessment movement in academic scholarship, as globalization prompts a search for global measures of university services and output. It gauges productivity in terms of universal publication metrics, and considers ranking and research productivity from a comparative perspective. The book considers the use of the “impact factor” as a gauge of publication value, noting that this less important in countries lacking central government appropriations to universities and to research. It argues that pressure to publish in certain journals, and to research topics of interest to English language readers, has been felt differentially in English-language systems, compared to others, but also that performance pressures fall more on younger, more juniour, contract staff, than on senior and tenured professors. It problematizes international comparisons of quality, and analyses the benefits of a zone of ideas and metrics in a common language – promoting international mobility, efficiency, collaboration - but also the costs which are rarely borne equally across countries, languages and cultures. The book provides a strong, evidence-based contribution to major debates in contemporary higher education reforms and the measurement of academic output.

Global Higher Education During COVID-19: Policy, Society, and Technolog y explores the impacts of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) for institutions of higher education worldwide.

This book discusses mass higher education development in East Asian countries by means of three main issues: the strategy for higher education development; the way professors and students in the region are experiencing the rapid developments; and the challenges imposed by mass higher education. These challenges include the quality of education as well as structural changes in the rapidly developing systems, funding sources for supporting mass higher education, and job markets for college graduates. Part I discusses how the East Asian countries have accomplished or are in the process of accomplishing the rapid development of higher education. Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong serve as case studies of mass higher education in the region. The case studies introduce and discuss national strategies to develop higher education, funding sources and mechanisms, and initiatives to assure quality of education in a period of rapid growth. Part II and Part III of the book focus on the phenomena of mass higher education in the region and the influence on academia. Mass higher education changes professors and students, who are different from those in elite higher education. Part III further discusses the challenges posed to Asian mass higher education. The Comparative and International Education Society Higher Education (HESIG) has awarded Mass Higher Education Development in East Asia the Higher Education SIG Best Book Award 2015.

This open access book examines the implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for education systems and argues that major education reforms will be necessary, particularly in the Global South, to address the learning loss caused by the pandemic. To inform those reforms, knowledge about the implementation reforms in the Global South is necessary, and such knowledge is seriously lacking as the existing literature on the implementation of educational change focused principally in reforms in countries in the Global North. This book contributes to address this gap by examining five major education reforms in India, Egypt, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Senegal, and by presenting two novel approaches to climate change education using a bottoms up strategy of reform. The chapters examine the implementation process drawing on a theoretical model of educational change by Reimers (published in Educating Students to Improve the World by Springer in 2020). The book concludes discussing the implementation of such reforms as an evolutionary and learning process, characterized by four dimensions: the goals of the reform, the drivers of the reform, the reform strategy, and the mindsets about educational change which undergird the implementation strategy.

As a result of the world class university rankings, many governments adopt public incentives and sanctions to push universities to excel. Above all, the better faculty research publication in SSCI and SCI journals, the more resources and social prestige universities will obtain. This timely book attempts to relate these dilemmas in Taiwan to many non-English speaking counterparts which also struggle with the worldwide SSCI syndrome. As Taiwan’s higher education system, similar to that of some other countries, has been recently devastated by the SSCI-based quantitative evaluations of academic performance in terms of its adverse impacts on the balances between teaching vs. research; qualitative vs. quantitative evaluations; globally oriented, English vs. locally oriented, non-English publications; and publications in academic journals vs. books, The SSCI Syndrome in Higher Education is a long overdue study that offers a systematic, comprehensive coverage of the above-mentioned SSCI syndrome on the dynamics of Taiwan’s academe. This book definitely helps fill an important gap in the literature on Taiwan’s higher education system. Tsung Chi Professor of Politics, Occidental College, USA Prudence Chou’s book addresses an academy on crisis caused by the ceaseless hype over university rankings. It further confirms that who comes out on top depends on who is doing the ranking. To save the heart and soul out of the Taiwanese academy, this book makes a cogent argument for culturally-responsive research in the social sciences and humanities. Gerard A. Postiglione Professor and Head, Division of Policy, Administration and Social Sciences Director, Wah Ching Center of Research on Education in China, The University of Hong Kong A spectre is haunting almost all universities in the world, including Taiwan — the spectre of “indexization.” Academics, particularly social scientists are panting from the pressure of globally spread neoliberal ideology and market-based principles. Collegiality on campus in the good old days has declined, and managerialism gained power instead. Competitive funding and university rankings are excessively emphasized, and research results are required to be internationalized, i.e., published in English. Although this book is a case study of so-called SSCI syndrome in Taiwan, the problems and challenges as well as prescription contained here are common to all academics, especially those in the non-English speaking countries positioned as “peripheral.” Yutaka Otsuka Professor of Hiroshima University, President of Japan Comparative Education Society The danger with SSCI syndrome is that it encourages social studies in nonwestern societies to dissociate themselves from local contexts, reflecting a particular view of what is claimed to be ‘universal’ that is informed only by the Western (especially English-speaking) world. It raises the question of what counts as ‘scholarship’ and defines what knowledge is and who may claim competence in it. This volume serves us well as a timely reminder of such a great danger. Rui Yang Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong

This edited volume offers empirical, evaluative, and philosophical perspectives on the question of higher education as a human right in the Asia Pacific. Throughout the region, higher education has grown rapidly in a variety of ways. Price, accessibility, mobility, and government funding are all key areas of interest, which likely shape the degree to which higher education may be viewed as a human right. Although enrollments continue to grow in many higher education systems, protests related to fees and other equity issues continue to grow. This volume will include scholarly perspectives from around the region for a more extensive understanding of higher education as a human right in the Asia Pacific.