Critical Journals

Students in Taiwan, my home country, face the same question when they are about to go to college: how do I choose my major? This is because the test-oriented education system has left students with no time to explore their interests but to study harder. To get into a good university, one has to score high in at least four out of five subjects in the entrance exam. Even when students do well in the exam, their families often expect them to major in medicine, engineering, or law. Students’ real interest is often neglected. As a result, the moment that I realized what I really wanted to study in college is considered critical to me.

During high school, I participated in many English contests and events in school because I got good grades on English tests. Indeed, my English proficiency stored confidence in me, and people thought I would be an English major in college, too. However, when it was time to choose my major, I hesitated because I didn’t want to major in English simply because I was good at English. I had heard many doubts saying that English could not be a profession, but it could only be a tool. My English teacher noticed my dilemma and told me, “If you become an English major, English will be more than just a tool to you. It will be a lifestyle.” Her words brought me a different perspective about a major. I therefore asked myself, “Do I want English to be part of my life,” and the answer was yes. That was the moment when I set up my goal to major in English in college.

This moment made me realize my lack of profound exploration as a high school student. I realized that I did not have a clear picture of what I would be studying in college, what training I would receive, and what kinds of career I could pursue with this degree. If it was not for this moment, I would not know that my grades in all the exams could not provide me with an answer to my future. This experience echoes Lesko’s concept of “expectant time (2012),” which compares adolescence to a concentration camp. Lesko states that an identity crisis emerges as teenagers are always waiting for the future to arrive passively (2012, p. 105), and therefore a confinement is formed. In my case, even though I already knew my ability and interest in English, I was still confined by doubts from others and my own ignorance of college curricula. As a result, I needed dependence, which was my teacher's words, to help me make the decision.

As a victim of this test-oriented education, I want to do something different when I become a teacher. When it was the end of a semester, I figured that I should invite some of my friends to share their life experiences with my students to help them better plan their lives. One of them studied at the school where I taught, and she was enrolled in an undergraduate program that she did not like. Fortunately, she later found meaning in her study and applied to a master’s program that was relevant to her major and her own interest. Now she has graduated and found a job in a world-famous corporation. After her speech, my students wrote in their feedback that they found it was okay to be confused because the speaker was confused when she was their age, too. Despite the fact that she majored in something she had little interest in, her life wasn’t ruined after all. Reading my students’ feedback, I was glad that they learned to think about their future. I hope that this could also be a critical moment in their secondary schooling experience.

​​People often think racial/ ethnic problems only exist in countries where different races mix in one society, but that is not the case in Taiwan. Compared to the US, the composition of ethnic groups in Taiwan is simple. The Han people make up 97 percent of the total population, and Mandarin Chinese is the majority language. However, racial/ ethnic problems are still seen today. About 70 years ago, the government of Republic of China moved from Mainland China to the island of Taiwan, and many Chinese soldiers came along. Even though they were all Han descents, there was a big barrier between the migrant soldiers and residents on the island. Since the Republic of China was in charge, the governors forced everyone to speak Mandarin, which was the official language in Beijing. At that time on campus, other Chinese dialects were strictly prohibited. If a student was caught speaking another dialect, he or she would be humiliated with a sign reading “I don’t speak dialects” worn on the neck. This formed an impression that dialects were inferior to Mandarin, and those who spoke dialects were not good students, or even uneducated. Such an impression not only impacted dialect-speaking students’ self-confidence, but also hindered the development of these dialects. Nowadays, even though this restriction has been lifted and courses have been implemented to revive the dialects, the negative impression still goes on. What’s worse, when it is election season, the old conflict between different language users will be raised on purpose, and students can be affected by the political ideology behind and associate a language with a certain political view.

Another aspect that I would like to mention is the correlation between gender and student major. In Taiwan, students choose their “groups” at grade 11, which decides whether they are going to major in science and engineering or arts and humanities in college. Traditionally, most boys would choose science and engineering, and girls would go with arts and humanities. But there will always be cases that do not follow the mainstream of choice. I became one of them when I decided to go with arts and humanities as a boy. In fact, since I was in a high school where most students come from families of engineers, 85 to 90 percent of students choose to major in science and engineering. As a result, I was assigned to a class with only eleven students, three of which were boys. I read about an essay in the New York Times by Dr. Molly Worthen (2021) from University of North Carolina that people assume science to be more difficult than social studies, so they tend to recognize the value of scientific studies more than social studies. This is exactly what I was facing when people knew that I decided to study arts and humanities. Students in my class, especially boys, were considered not as academically successful as those who chose science. I guess it also has to do with the job market because it is widely accepted that science majors have better opportunities to land on high-paid jobs. What’s more, society expects boys to be the main source of income in a family, so it is taken for granted that boys study in a field that is more profitable. A similar situation happens to girls studying science and engineering. A female friend of mine shared her experience as a mechanical engineering major. When she entered college and saw herself competing with a lot of boys, she felt a sense of inferiority and loneliness. Fortunately, she was able to find support from her female schoolmates and collaborate well with other boys. From these examples, we know that students do feel marginalized because of their choice of major based on their genders. There will be unnecessary pressure from the society that stands in their way to self-actualization.

Theories and practice have been intertwining with each other in the field of education. That is, theories can be observed in the process of teaching and learning, while what happens in that process is also studied and forms theories. I remembered the first course I took in the teacher education program in college was called “Principles of Teaching.” In this course, I learned several theories that contributed greatly to education, such as behaviorism, constructivism, and empiricism. At that time, I only read in the textbook about classical examples in the United States and some European countries but did not see them in a real classroom in Taiwan. I thus wondered whether they could be applied in reality.

A few months later, when I started classroom observation in secondary schools, I suddenly realized that nearly everything happening in the classroom matched with some theories I had read. The most obvious example is behaviorism. When a teacher walked into the classroom, the class leader would shout “stand up, attention, bow” and the other students did what they were told. This is a typical behaviorist way in Taiwan to catch students’ attention when a class begins. Many other classroom management skills are also derived from behaviorism as the theories focus on conditioning a person’s behavior. In addition, constructivist theories were commonly seen, too. An example was that a teacher taught English grammar with example sentences using the same grammatical rule. Then the teacher gave an incorrect sentence for the students to spot the inconsistency of the sentence pattern. Finally, students were able to frame that particular grammatical rule on their own. Constructivist theories also contribute to inquiry-based learning, which emphasizes the importance of active learning and is gaining popularity around the world. Similar to constructivism, empiricism considers students’ experiences a significant source of learning. That is why experiments and fieldwork are included in the curriculum for students to learn by doing. I personally did geography fieldwork several times when composing a mini-thesis in high school. This experience has helped me develop an interest in doing research and gain knowledge that I would never have learned in the textbook. After reading articles about YPAR (Youth Participatory Action Research), I figured out that the mini-thesis was actually an example because I initiated the research on something that was strongly related to my life.

Theories, though, do not always stay the same. As student-centered and multicultural education becomes popular, modifications are made to the ways of how teachers design a curriculum and how to carry out their instruction with the support of theories. Sociocultural theory, for instance, highlights the importance of interpersonal interaction and the cultural backgrounds of students. More and more teachers use collaborative learning strategies in their classes, and students work with their peers more frequently. I personally assigned my students with a group project, in which they introduced a Youtube video they like to their classmates, and designed questions on their own. Consequently, with different types of videos being played in the classroom, students could cover the themes that were left out in my selection of videos and expand their views simultaneously. As Caraballo and Filipiak (2021) stated, “incorporating student voice to expand our framing of curriculum and pedagogy therefore challenges teachers to rethink literacy learning as a collaborative and democratic endeavor (p. 431).” Indeed, this assignment showed me a different side of my students as they were doing the presentation with passion. It opened my views to more possibilities of curriculum and pedagogy.

Moreover, to cater to students’ individual needs, adaptive contents and assessments are offered. During my fieldwork this semester at Hua Yu School, I saw students use iReady, a learning platform providing customized listening and reading comprehension training, in class. Each of them was given a laptop and learned different contents based on their English levels. After students finished a unit, a diagnosis report was generated to let teachers know how students were learning as well as what they needed to improve. While these teaching methods are based on existing theories, they also offer room of development for new ones.

In the field of education, theory acts as a foundation of pedagogies that teachers adopt in class. From the recapitulation theory of viewing adolescence as an uncivilized stage of life (Lesko, 2021, p. 28), to CRE that rests on cultural competence and socio-political consciousness in addition to student learning (Ladson-Billings, 2021, p. 71), theories have helped shape what education is like and how students are perceived. In the meantime, theories of education need to find evidence in schools or any other area where learning takes place. Consequently, theory and practice cannot be regarded as two separate bodies. Instead, they build on each other.

Based on what I have read about YPAR (Youth Participatory Action Research), I understand it as a type of research conducted by young people on their personal experiences. Unlike mainstream research methods, which often rely on statistics collected from surveys and experiments, YPAR recognizes the subjectivity of personal experiences as valuable data. In addition, the results can also be more related to the researchers because they are the ones that are affected the most. I personally conducted this type of research before. I interviewed college students who are interested in learning English to find out when, where, why, and how they learn the language. After that, I tried to see the relationship between their motivation and the ways and frequency they learn English. I did this research because many of my friends asked me questions about how to learn English well, and I happened to be interested in being an English teacher at that time. Despite the data being personal and subjective, the results of the research affected the way I teach English today.

Another example happened recently. I have been observing classes at Hua Yu School, a K-8 Chinese-English dual language public school located in Manhattan, New York, for my Principles of Teaching and Learning class this semester. The class I am observing is an eighth grade English Language Arts (ELA) class. The teacher gave out a writing assignment, the topic of which was differences between life in the past and life today. Students needed to interview people of an older generation (parents, grandparents, etc.) about something common in the past but may be unfamiliar to the younger generation, and then write a personal narrative on what they had learned. Interested in the rationales behind this assignment, I consulted the teacher about his lesson plan. He said that this personal narrative aimed to introduce a type of research that focused on individual experiences and challenged the impression of research being built on authoritative scholarly works and scientific experiments. He hoped that it would help students recognize the value of personal experiences and tell them that their family’s life experience could be sources of knowledge as well.

After reading Mirra, Garcia, and Morrell’s (2015) introduction to their book, I realized that this personal narrative included the concept of YPAR because it invited students and their families to participate in it. Later, when they finished writing and shared their contents in class, all of them could learn from each other. Even though most of their parents and grandparents were Chinese, they did not share the same culture and experience. As a result, exchanging personal stories of older generations is not only an amalgam of cultures, but also a dialogue between the past and the present. The question was given by the teacher at first, but it engaged all the students in class, and even their families. Besides, it echoes the CRE (Culturally Relevant Education) that we have discussed in class because it uses students’ cultural background as materials in class.

I believe that with the implementation of YPAR, schools and communities can build a closer and stronger relationship. We read many articles arguing the importance of communities and families in education, but how to make them participate is not easy. I think it might be hindered by some traditional standards that the schools are regulated to meet, which leads to limited room for students’ culture. Yet YPAR proves that academic learning and youth participation do not contradict each other. Knowledge can also be learned from personal experiences, from one’s family, community, and culture.

From my previous experience of conducting relevant research and class observation, I still wonder how learning outcomes are assessed. Since personal experience varies a lot, the teacher cannot know in advance what the students will be learning, nor can they design a one-size-fit-all assessment for everyone. Consequently, YPAR breaks the traditional framework of student assessment, decentralizes teacher authority in content knowledge, and includes multiple literacies that may be ignored in mainstream values.

For the multimodal project, I plan to focus on cultural inclusion in the classroom. As Milner (2017) stated, “culture is a dynamic concept that encompasses, among other areas, racial and ethnic identity, class, language, economic status, and gender” (quoted in Knight-Manuel & Marciano, 2019), we often see culture involved in teacher-student and student-student interactions. In addition to the aforementioned areas, I also consider “ability/disability” to be one of them because it also shapes one’s identity even though abled people always take it for granted. These cultural aspects can be the reasons for some phenomena we observe at school. For example, when students perform poorly in class or exams, we tend to blame them for not doing their job. However, they may be faced with some obstacles due to their cultural background that is little known to the mainstream culture. This echoes Takacs’ (2002) view of human’s epistemic limits, which often lead to failure to achieve social justice. As a result, educators need to have better awareness of cultures in the classroom.

One way to include students’ culture is YPAR. I gave an example of an assignment that adopted the concept of YPAR in my previous journal. It was a personal narrative on differences between the lives of two generations, which made students’ culture a topic of discussion. Thus, for this project, I want to explore more examples of YPAR or similar assignments done on a smaller scale. This exploration can be done in three ways: (1) talk to in-service teachers about how they perceive and evaluate YPAR projects, (2) collect students’ opinion about YPAR, and (3) read YPAR cases in existing literature or on websites. Because of my background, the results of (1) and (2) will be mainly from Taiwan, and those of (3) will be from the U.S. Eventually, an analytic essay will be written and posted to a Google site, along with the results of (1), (2), and (3). I choose to build a Google site because it is easier to accumulate relevant information even after the project is over.

After some data collection, I think it will be interesting if I compare and analyze the personal narratives by students at Hua Yu School and the group assignment I gave to my students at A Girls’ Senior High School earlier this year. Both assignments have adopted the idea of YPAR, but in a form that is different from action research. They can be viewed as preparatory works of YPAR because they require students to bring personal experiences and interests into the classroom and become part of their learning content. Through these assignments, students can apply what they have learned in class and gain new knowledge from their works. However, the assignments are not yet YPAR because they are initiated by teachers, and they do not require students to conduct what is regarded as academic research. Instead, they are projects of a smaller scale and have simpler procedures than YPAR.