The Context, Status and Challenges of Environmental Education in Formal Education in Taiwan

Abstract

Like many countries, Taiwan’s concern with environmental education started in the 1980s. During that period, economic and industrial development had brought Taiwan a crisis in the form of serious environmental pollution.

  In Taiwan, promoting environmental education started from the social environmental education sector by the non-formal education system, followed eventually by the formal education system of schools. Two public government organizations, the Environmental Protection Administration and the Ministry of Education, worked mutually through these processes making achievements along the way.

  After the Grade 1-9 Curriculum Reform in 2001, Taiwan’s formal curriculum for environmental education in schools was included as a “major issue” in the National Curriculum. The national curriculum also developed competence indicators/benchmarks for environmental education at different learning stages. From elementary to junior high school, most of the schools brought the competence indicators into their school-based curricula, putting them into the overall school curriculum plans, and assimilated environmental education contents into various traditional disciplines for teaching.