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Profiling Dong Hwa University
Ssustainable campus regional integration plan !
Photo and article credit of Tsai Fu-jien, associate professor of postgraduate environmental policy study, Dong Hwa University
The Ministry of Education’s sustainable campus development campaign has successfully influenced how a host of schools view and tackle campus development. As one of its functions being to provide a scenario education setting, a campus provides a more profound setting that helps to transform a student’s knowledge learning, personality development and esthetics appreciation. The conventional campus development that largely taking to developing the firmware enough to house a variety of rudimentary curricular activities throughout the teaching process that not only leaves a campus strewn with a collection of disarrayed concrete structures lacking any ingenious thoughts or innovative creativity.
What the Sustainable Campus Development Campaign proclaims is of an education reform movement
The campaigning of developing a sustainable campus has awaken some of the crucial elements in campus planning that have been long forgotten: when the teacher and students are conducting grassroots education, the new campus development scheme remains everyone whether the development concept also echoes with instilling a passion for one’s roots and land that needs to be emphasized behind the textbooks? And at a time when the Ministry of Education is pushing for extending the school to cover the community and vice versa the community to cover the school, is there a concern that school management might still be kept to the conventional though of teaching within an enclosed wall? And at a time when education reformists, parents are actively reinforcing an education ideology by turning to devising new teaching proposals and rearranging the teaching environment just to provide a better growing experience for the children, pushing the boundary to experimental open school and forest school, are system educators ready to accept such stimuli and reflect an overall direction for future education? Hence the campaigning of a sustainable campus development plan rests more than just a straightforward campus setting reengineering but rather in what it proclaims of an education reform movement. The campus sustainability is inseparably linked to a sustainable education scheme, which is closely tied to the sustainability of a society. Having said that, the value of the sustainable campus development scheme lies in systematically altering the campus environment in a move to unveil a new angle to examine the substance and intrinsic value of education.
The current year’s sustainable campus development campaign encourages the formation of strategic alliance among regional school districts
A slight change this year in the Ministry of Education’s promotion of a sustainable campus development campaign lies in encouraging the formation of strategic alliance among school districts from different regions. The integration team led by Dong Hwa University is comprised of four schools, namely Hualien County, Shou Fong Township’s Shou Fong Elementary School, Fong Shan Elementary School, Wen Lan Elementary School and Dong Hwa University. Thanks to a close geological vicinity, the four have formed a close-knit knowledge and information partnership, in which the spearheading school is responsible for connecting, coordinating and integrating school resources into a collaborated team. While all situated in the rural areas of Hualien’s Shou Fong township, where a majority of the students’ parents are farmers, taken into account a central issue of combining the sustainable campus development with a sustainable community development scheme at the time of devising the school’s green promotional development has led to the inauguration of eco teaching farms, where campus teaching experience and modeling would indirectly help to excel the local farming industry upgrade its management approach. A description profiling two topics in integrating the relevancy among the schools and the spearheading school by topic and region is provided as follows:
1. Topical relevancy: with immense campus ground and a large number of student body, Dong Hwa University has envisioned to instigate a compose production plan by utilizing the abundance of kitchen refuse and fallen leaves generated in nearby communities that could be utilized at the aboriginal national vegetation planting area on campus and in support of farming teaching at various regional schools, while compose research and campus teaching study also help to develop organic farming in nearby communities. In turn, as all schools belonging to the integration plan have all put forth their respective green campus development plans, the resources can be further integrated to instill a unilateral learning network in the foreseeable future.
2. Regional relevancy: With the spearheading school Dong Hwa University, and the four collaborating schools of Shou Fong Elementary School, Fong Shan Elementary School , Wen Lan Elementary School and so forth that are located to the west of Shou Fong township, Hualien County, they have emerged to be four important teaching hubs flanged by Muga Shih and Lao Shih, the two major branch flows as part of the Hualien Shih tributary system. As all these schools are nestling along the Central Moutain Ridges’ conservation lines, and their surrounding areas blessed with rich water sources and green landscape and ecological resources, which are the very results of their pioneering ancestors who fought hard and worked hard to instill a fruitful rural farming phenomenon. Unfortunately as farming begins to plummet in recent years, and the community begins to grapple the issue of migrating youth and the middle aged, the declining rural communities and industries have dipped to the level that threats very existence of survival. As the industry transformation needs and grassroots identify remain two crucial elements to tie a rural community together, the execution of the green campus project also provides a significant value of binding the execution of environmental, industrial and social concerns.
Dong Hwa University’s streamlining regional schools and communities in instigating a green campus system
A green campus system revolving around Dong Hwa University’s environmental education center has been set up to integrate local schools and community serving to integrate regional communities and campus learning, and to promote biodiversity, energy conservation, resource reuse, and farming and ecological conservation reform. With this, the program not only focuses on ecological related teaching and research, but also has a central theme of prompting the concept to other school districts and communities that would poise to recreate an eco and sustainable development-based regional environment and social reengineering promotion center through actual implementation promotions of learning, farming, recreation and environmental reengineering. Shou Fong Elementary School has not only strengthened its existing teaching farms but also ingeniously incorporated artificial wetland’s natural water purification and recycling treatment, combining rainwater reuse adopted for its teaching farms, together with solar energy powered street lamps and heaters emphasizing the exploration and utilization of green energy, as well as campus multilayered foliage planting, aimed to create finer habitats for living organisms and achieve an optimized carbon bonding effect. Fong Shan Elementary School has developed friendly campus fencings, combining the rich water ditch environment of the nearby Lao Shih, to create an indigenous vegetation-based eco pond and the Principal Hao’s Home that is jointly manned by community residents, helping to educate the students the journey of water through exploring irrigation trenches, and bring awareness to the students the correlation of industry and ecology through the organic farms installed. Wen Lan Elementary School has adopted rainwater reuse, organic farming development and firefly eco zone development to instill a campus resource recycling and reuse system, and to tackle an indigenous biodiversity-based micro habitat reengineering plan.
The sustainable campus development scheme serves to integrate campus, students and community into a three-in-one education network
To broach from the very core of education brought forth by the integration scheme, the objective of the campaign lies in integrating the dynamics and characteristics of school, students and community into a 3-in-1 education network that would poise to strengthen the students’ geological and environmental awareness, their ability to appreciate the esthetics of natural beauty, an to culminate their awareness in caring for community affairs and identifying with their hometown society, which would in turn help to steer the children in knowledge learning, personality development and esthetics appreciation.
Profile
- Profiling Dong Hwa University
- System: University
- Report year: 2003
- Area: Middle Taiwan
- County: Hualien
