The Course Transformation After The Implementation Of "Curriculum Guideline For Preschool Care-taking Activities" Policy In Taiwan

After the proclamation of "Curriculum Guideline for Preschool Care-taking Activities" Policy in Taiwan, teachers have been much perplexed during the transformation from understanding a curriculum to putting one into practice, which becomes a core issue of this policy. "Preschool curriculum standards" in the past had more characteristics of "Established Curriculum". The curriculum guideline policy, however, focuses on characteristics such as emerging and reviving, which brings out the contradiction between "Established Curriculum" and "Emergent Curriculum" and highlights a need of coordination between these two types of curriculums. Subsequently, the main focus of this curriculum transformation is the idea of "story-telling", i.e. seeing curriculum as a narrative.Accordingly, this thesis examines the daily situation and differences of two preschools after the reform of the policy, and interprets the pedagogical implications behind it. Furthermore, this thesis analyzes the transformation from "understanding a curriculum" to "putting one into practice" in preschools and illustrates the correlations between how much teachers understand the content of the policy and what changes and inspirations of curriculum reforms the policy has created, in terms of the use of established curriculum and emergent curriculum, story-telling curriculum with life experiences shared by students and teachers, the practices of curriculum reforms, etc.This thesis adopted narrative inquiry as the main methodology, and meanwhile utilized other approaches such as document analysis, observation, interview, and empirical analysis. By these means, it detailed the practices of the Guideline policy in these two public preschools.The result showed that:Firstly, the curriculum guideline policy provided instructions for teachers regarding "curriculum understanding" and "curriculum development"1. Teachers all agreed the significance of the guideline, but in some extent disagreed with and interpreted differently about the pedagogical implication of the policy.2. The policy certainly provided guidance for curriculum development.3. For teachers, two key points to understand the Guideline were community of practices and community life experiences.4. The guideline triggered teachers to have new curriculum activities and to follow children’s behavior changes.Secondly, guideline was crucial for teachers’thinking to coordinate established curriculum and emergent curriculum.1. The guideline assisted teachers to better execute teaching and adjust curriculum design.2. In the guideline, the part of curriculum knowledge contained six major areas and the content related to community and local life, but there were disparities among teachers as to the part of curriculum structure.3. The guideline gave guidance for teachers to truly spot the development and demonstration of children’s ability.Thirdly, the story-telling course with life experiences shared by students and teachers brings changes and inspirations for the practices of curriculum reforms.1. The implementation of the guideline was beneficial for teachers to ponder children’s life experiences and its complexity, which make curriculum more likely to have new development.2. The narrative of story-telling curriculum provided more chances to collaborate.Lastly, based on aforementioned conclusions, this thesis suggests:1. Accumulate abundant cases related to guideline so as to stimulate teachers as to self-reflection and depth curriculum awareness.2. Use pedagogical reasoning skills for curriculum transformation and to assist the reasonableness of curriculum development.3. Build up collaborative groups for learners and teachers as the best possible way to understand the guideline.4. The guideline shall act as the role of guiding teachers to have more self-narratives and have the awakening of "seeing children."5. Establish a learning support system of the guideline in the campus which facilitates both the practices of curriculum theory and re-learning for teachers.6. Use special curriculum based on regional co-learning groups to make curriculum as cultural practices.7. Make narrative autobiographical text as the crux for evaluation and guidance of preschool education.8. Use the idea of curriculum re-conceptualization to cultivate preschool teachers’ability to execute and transform courses.9. Use story-telling and narratives to shape future preschool courses.