The Development of Greenschools in Taiwan: Current Situation, Obstacles and Prospects

Greenschools have been promoted in Taiwan since 1999, including the Greenschool Partnership Program and Sustainable Campus Project. The former is the most visited environmental education website and demonstrated the promotion results of environmental education in Taiwan and its quality requirements, based on the school teachers’ voluntary sharings of the schools’ environmental education teachings and actions, the responses of committees from the platform and the mechanism of the “Leaves of Hope tree”. In the Sustainable Campus Project, schools apply for subsidy funds to carry out engineering transformation of campus hardware and research and development of curriculum software, so that teachers and students are able to experience the transformation and value of the green campus. The link between the Greenschool Project and the sustainable campus project was developed efficiently through the Central Integrated Supervision System and promoted by the Local Education Bureau. Since Integrated Supervision was withdrawn in 2016, a decreasing number of schools have participated in and applied for Greenschool projects. The long-term promotion of the sustainable campus project has also been in a state of fatigue, which resulted in the reformations of the Greenschool partnership program and sustainable campus project, including the platform transformation of the Greenschools program into a single window for environmental education and the combination of materials of other environmental education programs and resources of various departments. We argue that in the future, the government and school sector should seize the opportunity of 12 years of core literacy and school-based curriculum, use campus space and life, encourage teachers to promote environmental education, establish a community of teachers, and allow teachers and students to actively participate in greenschools with practical, problem-oriented and program-oriented teaching method and under the theme of environment and sustainable development.