Teaching practices in Taiwan’s education for young children: Complexity and ambiguity of developmentally appropriate practices and/or developmentally inappropriate practices.

This study aims to examine the implementation and application of the revised guidelines for developmentally appropriate practice in the care and education of young children in Taiwan. Child-centered philosophy was introduced to Taiwan 30 years ago, but numerous research studies report that Taiwanese early childhood teachers often encounter tensions between unstructured teaching styles and traditional culture values, such as the hierarchical social structure and emphasis on academic achievement. In order to examine the complexity of teaching practices, four Taiwanese early childhood education teachers from different backgrounds were interviewed, and their teaching practices were systematically described and sorted according to the guidelines for developmentally appropriate and inappropriate practices. The results showed that teaching practices were more of a continuous than a dichotomous process. Some of the classroom practices of Taiwanese early childhood education teachers contained both developmentally appropriate and inappropriate practices, whereas other teachers' performances, which are not described in the developmentally appropriate practice guidelines but can be commonly seen in Taiwanese classrooms, were not easy to identify as either developmentally appropriate or inappropriate. The author proposes a need to explore the essences of culturally appropriate practices for Taiwanese children.