Critical appraisal of Taiwan’s implementation of Education for Sustainable Development: looking through the narratives of the certified environmental sustainability educators

• In Event: Critical encounters with sustainability

Proposal

This study sheds light on the “messy realities” (Ball, 1990, p. 9) of the various contexts in which a nationwide environmental and sustainability education policy is developed, interpreted, and enacted. In 2011, the Taiwan government implemented the Environmental Education Act. Since then, government employees, school administrators, K-12 teachers and students have been required to complete four hours of coursework in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) each year. To carry out the mandatory courses, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) recruited and certified a group of environmental specialist educators (thereafter called “educators”). These educators navigate between different settings, including schools, universities, museum, and outdoor environmental centers, to inform and exchange and share about sustainability issues and share their stories of sustainability practices. They act as policy brokers or intermediaries (Vandeyar, 2015) who interpret, translate, and mobilize the ESE policy in their own ways for particular purposes.

The framework of policy ethnography (Ball, 2016) is used to “follow” the policy across various contexts from the standpoint of policy actors, such as policymakers, school principals, and/or teachers (Griddiths, 2003). As a policy ethnographer, the first author examined official policy texts (e.g., national goals, evaluation mechanisms) and interviewed educators to explore the hitherto, unwritten, unspoken, and tacit knowledge on the ground. The empirical data include two rounds of semi-structured interviews with ~30 educators, and participant observations with 3-5 educators for 10-14 days. Data were analyzed using thematic and ethnographic analysis (Creswell & Creswell, 2013, Spradley, 1980).

Key Findings:
Our document analysis showed that Taiwan’s sustainability policies are tied to its political struggle to gain an independent status in the international community. Particularly in the past decade, the government has turned to environmental diplomacy as a means through which Taiwan could “develop partnerships with other members of the international community” (Public Diplomacy Coordination Council, 2007). Against this backdrop, narratives such as “aligned with the international trend (Parliamentary Hearing, May 18th, 2010)” and “enabled the international community to see Taiwan's efforts (Environmental White Paper, 2016, p. 17)” are often used by the EAP to justify the institutionalization of sustainability initiatives.
While Taiwan has prided on being the 6th country worldwide to adopt ESE as law, it is thus intriguing to see how and to what extent the policy vision is realized in the everyday practices. Three important findings emerged through our analysis:
(a) In the eyes of many environmental educators (19/30), most schoolteachers and administrators––who are the primary audiences for the policy narrative––have treated the implementation of ESE courses as another administrative task. For them, such top-down approach to policy implementation has become only a matter of writing administrative reports about their achievement without meaningful learning.
(b) Some educators (10/30) contended that the government was avoiding the real problems and only wanted to gain popularity in the media. Instead of tracking and measuring the progress towards environmental sustainability, the government’s evaluation matrix only focuses on the number of participants at the events and their satisfaction levels. Some also believed the policy mainly represents a token action from Taiwan to align itself with the international discourses of sustainable development.
(c) Many educators (16/23) encountered forms of subtle resistance from their students and course participants. Some even thought about giving up on the ESE certification. The educators’ narratives also brought to the fore the tensions between the policy implementation and the development of sustainable practices. Although ESE requires collaborative and interdisciplinary effort, most educators work in isolation and feel left alone in the field to change the social norms.

Discussion and Conclusion:
For the last four decades, education has been at the core of countless international conferences and reports related to environmental sustainability. According to a 2007 report by UNESCO, less than 30% of the world’s countries had national action plans for implementing ESE at K-12 schools. By 2010, this number had increased, and 63% of all UN member countries had such plans (Buckler & Creech, 2014). In Taiwan, the government also adopted the policy framework of education for sustainable development and enforced the mandatory ESE courses at all educational levels. Nonetheless, Taiwan continues to have the highest GHG emissions per unit GDP in the world in the past decade. With only 0.3% of the world’s population, we surprisingly contributed 0.77% of the CO2 emissions per year (Janssens-Maenhout et al, 2017). The Taiwan EPA also indicates that the countries’ per capita CO2 emissions are almost three times higher than that of the global average. At this point, it may be worth pausing a moment to think about what went wrong. With all the efforts for making ESE courses mandatory for all, why has it remained to be marginalized in the everyday practices in schools? With tremendous financial support and the government’s endorsement, why do the educators still feel hopeless and defeated by our collective inability to change? Or, should we continue to be optimistic about the power of education in mitigating the urgent sustainability problems around the world? Understanding the narratives coming from the Taiwanese environmental specialist educators is the key in formulating more impactful education for sustainable development (ESD) interventions. Thus, we believe that this study would be of interest to the CIES members because attending to the voices and narratives of these frontline educators can help us to reveal the challenges to the implementation of ESE policies. It will therefore have implications for future ESD interventions and curriculum initiates.

Authors

• Ying-Syuan Huang, McGill University

• Anila Asghar, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, McGill University