This paper examines teaching policy reform in higher education in Taiwan, specifically the policy trajectory that led to implementation of the Teaching Practice Research Initiative (TPRI) in 2018. It moves beyond a conceptualization of globalization as a top-down imposition of policy directions ‘from above’ to focus on the active reciprocal dynamics between global, national and local levels of policy processes. To make sense of these processes, Marginson and Rhoades’ (2002) ‘glo-na-cal agency’ heuristic and Ball’s (1994) ‘policy trajectory’ approach have been applied in the study.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has become a ‘global reality’ (Pitso, 2013). Since E. Boyer’s (1990) original call to recognize the scholarship of teaching, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) movement has been popular in North American higher education to broaden the scholarship mission of universities for the last 30 years. In the UK and Australia, since 2000s the Teaching Quality movement has been driven by national governments and their agencies in response to many of the same issues that had been identified by Boyer (Chalmers, 2011). It can also be observed that the emerging teaching and learning agenda promoted by supra-national European policies has been shaped as a key element in a strategy of economic growth and competitiveness, in the face of the challenges of globalization (Sin, 2015). Initiatives are also taking place in Asian countries, e.g. Singapore (Geertsema, 2016) and Malaysia (Harland et al., 2014). To put it simply, teaching and learning in higher education have increasingly become a global policy problem (Shahjahan & Torres, 2013; Tight, 2018).

Taiwan, as an East Asian country, also responds to this global higher education policy agenda. Since 2018, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (MOE) has launched the ‘Teaching Practice Research Initiative’ (TPRI) subsidy policy, which grants individual academics to conduct pedagogic research in their discipline. This new policy of teaching grants in higher education has several innovations and changes in practice: it is the first time that the national subsidy target has been changed from university institutions to individual academics, it is the first time to officially advocate the concept of ‘the scholarship of teaching’, and it is the first time to carry out a national teaching fellowship scheme. According to the official announcement by the MOE, ‘Taiwan is not only the first country in Asia to comprehensively promote teaching practice research via proactively providing individual academics with teaching grants, but also one of the few countries in the world to fund thousands of teaching projects every year to enact ‘research-informed’ teaching into university curricula’ (Ministry of Education, 2020). Several have argued that this TPRI policy signifies a well alignment with the spirit of the SoTL (Fwu & Li, 2020; Lui & Chang, 2018). Such a SoTL-informed national policy has reverberated significantly at different levels. At the national level, the MOE created national funds to encourage university academics to engage in pedagogic research. At the institutional level, many universities valued the overall performance of this competitive grant, taking the overall academics’ grants as institution’s accomplishment. At the individual level, the TPRI has received enthusiastic response from numerous university academics as soon as it was launched. As a result, more than 8,000 applications were filed between 2018 and 2021. This figure was out of the official anticipation (Fwu & Li, 2020; Haung, 2020).

However, to date, there are very few studies in the literature investigating the policy formation of SoTL initiatives in a globalizing context. Therefore, little has been known about the policy trajectories in the simultaneous ‘globalization’ and ‘localization’ of education policy processes as policy processes are more ‘stretched out’ (Riziv & Lingard, 2010).

Superimposing multi-levels, from global to local, on the different contexts of the ‘policy trajectory’ (Ball, 1994) has been proven useful to simultaneously analyze ‘globalization’ and ‘localization’ of education policy processes (Vidovich, 2013). As Vidocivh (2013) argues, ‘in the era of globalization, adding “levels” can provide a mechanism to better deal with the “stretching out” of education policy processes’ (p. 30). Specifically, Marginson and Rhoades’ (2002) ‘glo-na-cal agency’ heuristic has been a very helpful tool for the analysis of global, national and local levels of policy processes. The heuristic provides this study with a framework for analysis of the two-way interactions between policy actors (organizations and individuals) at multiple levels of higher education policy processes. Therefore, this study applies Marginson and Rhoades’ (2002) ‘glo-na-cal agency’ heuristic, superimposed on the contexts of a ‘policy trajectory’ (Ball, 1994), as a toolbox to examine teaching policy reform in higher education in Taiwan, specifically the SoTL-informed policy trajectory that led to implementation of the Teaching Practice Research Initiative (TPRI) in 2018. An analysis of the new SoTL-informed policy, namely the TPRI, in Taiwanese higher education for the 2017 is used as a vehicle to explore the dynamic reciprocity of global-national-local interactions in policy processes as revealed through empirical evidence generated through documentary analysis and interviews with policy actors of Ministry of Education and the new TPRI Agency. Interviews with policy actors of Ministry of Education and the new TPRI Agency were conducted in 2021-2022. Thus, the perspectives reported here were at a particular point in time after the third year of operation of this new national policy and policy agency. Publicly available policy documents relating to the TPRI policy were identified and qualitatively analyzed. Semi-structured interviews lasted approximately one and a half hours and were conducted by face-to-face interviewing. Respondents were sent the core interview questions in advance and these questions were further developed as interviews progressed according to the different experiences and positions of respondents. Interviews were taped and transcribed, and no respondent wanted to check the transcript to verify its accuracy.

The concluding discussion highlights that the extent of global policy convergence in the example of SoTL policy in higher education is noteworthy, however, active policy processes appear to remain significantly controlled at the national level as political ideologies that drive Taiwan government for policy change in higher education make unique Taiwanese features still discernible.

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