Senior High School Students’ Attitudes towards School Political Education in Taiwan: A Pilot Study through Focus Group Interviews
Yi-Cheng Huang
Abstract
In this paper, a focus group interview is chosen as an instrument to be reviewed and then explored. This study is regarded as a preliminary study of my doctoral thesis, which
focuses on the issues of senior high school students’ attitudes towards school political education. Focus group interview is adopted as a research instrument in this study
because with the dramatically increased usage, it has been among the most widely used research tools in the social sciences. Moreover, it is highly consistent with current trends
in education that aim at understanding more about how the stakeholders think and feel Vaughn et al, 1996: 16. Based on the refinement and improvement of a pilot study, a
focus group interview is undertaken. This paper comprises four sections. The first section provides a brief background
introduction about the school political education in Taiwan. In the second section, an actual focus group is then conducted using the questions and design that have been
refined accordingly. Besides, the proceedings, results and analysis are reported in section as well. Since the focus of this paper is on the methodological perspective, some values
and limitations regarding this research instrument and analysis are presented in the third section. A brief conclusion about adopting the method of focus group interview is made
in the final section.
1 Research Background
1.1 The Context
In Taiwan, there is no specific subject or course called “Political Education” in the curriculum; however, the rationales, contents, and knowledge of political education are
deeply rooted in two subjects at the senior high school level. One is entitled “Three Principles of the People”
1
for students’ first academic year grade 10, with two textbook volumes to be covered over two semesters. The other is the subject “Civics” for students’
second academic year grade 11.
1
The subject of “Three Principles of People” was introduced in 1954. Since then, it has become one of the core subjects at senior high school. “Three Principles of the People”, which comprises three parts: the
Principle of Nationalism, the Principle of People’s Rights, and the Principle of People’s Livelihood, is a series of writings by Sun Yat-Sen 1866-1925, the founder of the Republic of China. The ideological basis
of the Principles is the mixture of nationalism, democracy, and socialism. The followers of Sun, mainly the members of KMT, regard these principles as the guidance for the national development.
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School activities such as morning assembly, school-wide periodic assemblies, class
assembly, the election of model students, and school association, also play important roles in political education. These activities involve significant elements of political
education. Liu 2001 reports in her study on teachers’ perspectives towards citizenship education in
Taiwan that
there is a strong connection between school formal subjects provision and school activities provision of
the development of civic values. In other words, through the curricular arrangement, the political intentions of government might be easily transmitted
to or even indoctrinate students. Therefore, it would be significant to discuss the hidden intentions of school activities.
1.2 Challenges and Problems To examine the curriculum planning and implementation of school political education
and students’ attitudes towards them, there are three critical issues that need to be addressed.
First, the rationales, goals and contents regarding the curriculum of school political education are not well defined. In Taiwan, criticism of school political education has
increased dramatically since martial law was lifted in 1987
2
. The current curriculum standards for all subjects at senior high school, including 24 required subjects and 54
elective subjects, are covered in one volume entitled “The Senior High School Curriculum Standards” MOE, 1996. However, there is no sub-concept or description
provided in the curriculum standards. In the past, the vagueness of the curriculum standards didn’t seem to cause any
significant problems when all the textbooks were published by the government. Since the Ministry of Education MOE changed the textbook policy in 1999, it has been giving
elementary and secondary school administrators a free hand to select the textbooks they prefer. To avoid disputes that might arise from competing with the private publishers in
the textbook market, the MOE also decided to stop editing and printing the standardised version of textbooks MOE 2000, which had been done for several decades by the
National Institute for Compilation and Translation NICT, a governmental educational institute under the MOE. As a result, privately published versions are now in use in
elementary and secondary schools. Different versions of textbooks all present slightly different, and in some cases, widely divergent knowledge.
2
On May 19, 1949, with the Kuomintang KMT regime under Chiang Kai-shek engaged in fighting the Chinese Communist Party CCP -led revolution on the Mainland China, the KMT Taiwan Governor
proclaimed martial law in Taiwan, which took effect in the early morning hours of May 20. Half a year later, the KMT regime was defeated by CCP and thus retreated to Taiwan, where martial law continued in
force. Under the rule of martial law, the basic human rights - freedom of assembly, freedom of association,
freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of movement etc., were strictly restricted. In addition, the establishment of new political parties and newspapers was banned. This state of affairs dragged on for
38 years, and martial law was not lifted until 1987. It is the longest record of continuous martial law rule in the world.
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The second problem concerns the curriculum arrangement of school political education. According to Wringe 1984, education is the process by which society renews itself and
passes on its acquired knowledge and values that are regarded as important within the society. It also requires certain compromises among different interest groups as well as
efforts to reach accord with the public interests within the society. In Taiwan, after martial law was lifted, there have been ongoing discussions about the issues outlined
above. The final problem concerns students’ views of curriculum planning and implementation.
Senior high school students were selected as the subjects in this research because senior high school education is the final educational stage before students become citizens of the
country. At this stage, school political education plays an important part in promoting students’ knowledge, skills and attitudesvalues that effective citizens of tomorrow
should be equipped with. Although an abundance of research has looked at the issues
concerning school political education, comparatively few studies have been undertaken to explore students’ attitudes towards curriculum planning and implementation.
2 Conducting the Focus Group Interview 2.1 Piloting
Since the research aims to explore senior high school students’ views and experiences with regard to school political education, the selection of the participants in this study
was restricted to senior high school students in Taiwan. Based on the purposive sampling proposed by Vaughn et al. 1996, two pilot interviews and four main focus group
interviews were conducted. Three second-year senior high school students were chosen as participants for each pilot interview, and six students for the main ones. The
participants were all from a private senior high school in southern Taiwan, where the researcher worked as a teacher before. The school was established in 1961 and currently
has around 1500 students at both junior and senior levels, although the study only focused on second-year students at the senior level.
Second-year students were chosen as participants for this study because they have received senior high school education for at least one year and thus are familiar with the
way citizenship subjects, namely “Civics” and “Three Principles of People”, are being taught at school. Aged around 17 or 18, these participants were all native speakers of
Mandarin. The pilot interviews were undertaken in the Counsellor Office at school for around 40 to
45 minutes. This location was chosen for conducting the pilot because normally this office is a place where teachers and students can talk more privately at school. I found
that it was easier to conduct the interview on Saturday afternoon because interviewees had classes on every other Saturday morning, and therefore there was no problem with
students attendance.
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Before the main interviews, I tried out the interview questions by conducting the pilot interviews. A set of open-ended questions were piloted with two mini focus group
interviews in order to find out whether the participants understand and respond to the questions in the way the study intends. More importantly, the pilot was designed to gain
insights into the way in which individuals are influencing and influenced by others through participant interaction.
In order to obtain clearer and more specific information regarding students’ viewpoints, I divided the interview questions into three sections. Section one contains some general
questions that lead the participants to discussions. More importantly, warming up the atmosphere and to guide participants’ into the situation were the main functions in this
section. Section II is used to find out how the related subjects and activities are arranged in a senior high school. I then tried to explore participants’ attitudes towards the learning
of political education with regard to the related subjects at school by asking the questions in Section III. The interview questions are shown in appendix 1.
2.2 The Main Focus Group Interview
