In order to facilitate the connection to international environmental education trend, Ministry of Education (MOE) has held international environmental education workshop at National Taiwan Museum Nanmen Park. MOE especially invited scholars from Japan and Thailand to join this workshop. This workshop’s topic is “the connection between education for sustainable development (ESD) and school environmental education (EE)” which aims to provide the concept, goal and educational knowledge of sustainable development. School teachers can further understand how to use sustainable development goal (SDG) to design curriculum. Through knowledge and experience exchange, we hope Taiwan’s school EE can be led to international level.
During the open ceremony, the Deputy director general, Liu, Wen-Hue from Department of Information and Technology Education, Ministry of Education, said that, “This is our first time to hold the international EE workshop. Now the new national curriculum for 12-Year Basic Education has started and EE is one of the 19 important education issues. Besides, in recent years, with serious climate change issue and increasing international environmental awareness, MOE hopes to positively promote school EE through policy and capacity building program. At the middle/elementary school level, we hope to cultivate school educators and develop local curriculum through local governments’ EE consulting groups. At the higher education level, we develop climate change education partnership program (links to SDG issue) to develop teaching materials, innovative competition, international visit group, etc., hoping to promote EE with multi-perspectives in the colleges.”
Professor Sachi Ninomiya-Lim from Tokai University, Japan dedicates herself to sustainable development for higher education research which is important for cultivating future decision maker. Professor Sachi emphasized that university students should equip with understanding of sustainable development to deal with serious and complicated social problems. Professor Fuangarun from Chulalongkorn University devoted herself to innovative research for sustainable development, developing middle/elementary teacher training program. She provided positive feedback to Taiwan’s first line educators.
Besides, we also invite guest speakers as Professor Tzuchau Chang from National Taiwan Normal University, Principal Yun-Chieh Liu from Chung-Ping Elementary School and Principal Ching-Hung Hsu from Dashan Elementary School. Professor Chang is the consultant committee of national curriculum for 12-Year Basic Education. He shared the development trend of EE nationally/internationally. Principal Liu and Hsu are both EE delegates from 2017 class. They shared their EE experience about visiting Korea and hands-on demonstration of MAKER which provided interdisciplinary school EE achievement and brought up new learning perspective. There were over 120 participants from different counties to join this workshop and actively interact with speakers. Through learning exchange experience, this workshop will inspire more people to reflect and take action, provide more possibilities in promoting EE in Taiwan.