Reconstructing political education in Taiwan: A study on perspectives of teacher educators and senior high school teachers of civic/citizenship education (China)

This study is the first study attempting to shed light on whether teacher educators and schoolteachers of civic education in Taiwan hold similar or contradictory views of political education. It involves examining what political knowledge, skills, and attitudes and values are considered worthwhile to teach at the senior high school level within the civic education curriculum.; This study employed the dominant-less dominant mixed method design, a dominant quantitative approach with a less-dominant qualitative data aggregation procedure, to do both data collection and analysis. It consisted of two phases. The first phase is based on a pairwise comparison methodology termed the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), followed by the second phase of in-depth interviews.; This study found that there were statistically significant correlations between the teacher educator and schoolteacher groups' perspectives on rationales, goals, and contents of political education. First, "developing reflective thinking abilities" was the most preferred rationale, while "developing action-taking ability" was least preferred. Second, for the goals of political education, "attitudes/values" was rated highest by both groups surveyed. Knowledge was rated second and skills the least. Third, the most important knowledge item is "civic responsibilities," while "Dr. Sun Yat-Sen's doctrines" and "Chinese cultural heritage" were considered least important with very low values of priority. Fourth, "search reference material and information" was selected as the most important skill, while "work to influence/change political situations" the least. Fifth, for the content of attitudes/values, the participants highly evaluated the importance of "toleration of diversity," while also rejecting "acceptance of governmental authority" and "patriotism".; However, some differences do exist in both the quantitative and qualitative data. In the interview data, it was found that schoolteachers and teacher educators interpret some concepts in a very different way, such as "rule of law" and "adjust one's view to fit various situations." In addition, the two groups held different perspectives on the preferences of certain concepts, including "main political issues and disputes," "perceive/evaluate consequences of political decision," "adjust one's view to fit various situations," and "change attitudes and values in the light of evidence".