A Taiwanese delegation has visited Maryland to expand academic cooperation, and held a recruiting seminar in Washington encouraging academics to teach in Taiwan, the Ministry of Education said in a news release yesterday.
The delegation, led by Deputy Minister of Education Lio Mon-chi (劉孟奇), on Friday met with Maryland State Superintendent of Schools Mohammed Choudhury and Deputy State Superintendent for Organizational Effectiveness Sylvia Lawson, the ministry said.
The delegation and the Maryland State Department of Education discussed the implementation of a five-year memorandum of understanding on education cooperation, which the ministry signed with the state in September 2019, it said.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Education via CNA
Under the US-Taiwan Education Initiative, the two sides can continue to deepen cooperation regarding the cultivation of talent in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, as well as teacher and student exchanges, Lio said.
The initiative was launched in 2020 to expand collaboration in language education and to safeguard academic freedom, especially enhancing Taiwan’s role in providing Chinese-language instruction to Americans and around the world.
The ministry said that it was seeking the support and assistance of the department to promote cooperation between Taiwan and counties in Maryland.
Proposals include Taiwan selecting and sending more Mandarin teachers to the US, encouraging international exchanges between elementary and junior-high schools and establishing sister school relations and language exchange mechanisms, the ministry said.
The two sides had fruitful discussions and agreed to expand the scope and scale of cooperation in the field of education, it said.
The ministry also hosted a recruiting seminar in Washington on Saturday to introduce the Yushan Fellow Program, which was attended by nearly 150 people in person and virtually, the ministry said.
The program was launched in 2018 to help higher education institutions in Taiwan attract foreign academics by providing them with subsidies to offer internationally competitive salaries and benefits.
Of 545 applicants, 194 academics have been recruited to be Yushan fellows in the past five years.
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University president Lin Chi-hung (林奇宏), National Tsing Hua University president John Kao (高為元) and other presidents and vice presidents of universities in Taiwan presented the features and development priorities of their universities, the ministry said.
The Taipei Economic And Cultural Representative Office’s Science and Technology Division introduced the recruiting program and National Science and Technology Council research projects, it said.
The annual seminars are an effective way to recruit overseas academics to teach in Taiwan as they give them an understanding of the developments in Taiwan’s academic institutions and allow them to meet faculty from those institutions, it said.
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