Observation as Transformation: "Confucian Seeing" and (Re)Making Professional Teachers in Taiwan's Educational Reform

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Transcultural Conversation and Epistemology in-the-Making

Abstract

This study investigates the technique of making professional teachers in Taiwan’s recent educational reform of twelve-year public education program through opening classes for observation (公開觀課, gongkaiguanke). Most of the scholarship emphasizes lessons drawn from educational transfer (i.e., Japanese lesson studies) and translations for local implementation. Few studies scrutinize how historical complexity and cultural particulars in the Taiwanese context shape translation processes and reform practices. This study uses archival sources to analyze how a cultural principle of “Confucian seeing” that historically produces teachers as kinds of people within pedagogical practices in order to understand the norms of conduct and power effects that continue to work in the present.

Author

• Yichen Lee, University at Albany - SUNY