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���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ East Asia scholars partner with Boulder Valley School District teachers to delve into the history and culture of Taiwan

Summer 2026 saw the University of Colorado Boulder’s Program for Teaching East Asia (TEA) bring 14 secondary teachers from across the country to Taiwan to learn about the country’s history and culture. Included in the group of teachers was Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) teacher Vanessa Carroll, who graduated from ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ with an MA in English in 2002.��

Katherine Alexander (center), a ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ associate professor of Chinese, in front of the Grand Mazu Temple in Tainan, Taiwan.

The two-week program was a collaboration between TEA Director Lynn Kalinauskas and Anne Prescott, director of the Five College Centre for East Asian Studies at Smith College. Both were recipients of a Fulbright International Education Administrator Award to Taiwan, which helped build the ties for this summer study. They were accompanied by Katherine Alexander, associate professor of Chinese in the ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, who received a Fulbright Student Grant while in graduate school that supported a year of doctoral dissertation research in Taipei, Taiwan. As the scholar in residence, Alexander shared her knowledge and love of Taiwan with the teachers and provided them with background on Chinese history and culture.

Working with the Fulbright Taiwan team, the ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ scholars created a program and itinerary aimed at increasing teachers’ knowledge of the island. The goal was to better equip them to teach about the complex history that has forged today’s Taiwan. The group circumnavigated the island by bus, train and boat, stopping at multiple cities along the way. They were introduced to Taiwan’s indigenous cultures and its historical and political past as well as its more recent transition to democracy and modernity fueled by technological innovation.

The group made its way through historical sites and multiple museums. They wandered through streets and night markets, tasting Taiwanese food, including mango shaved ice, beef noodle soup and dumplings. As they circled the island, they also encountered some fascinating Taiwanese people who helped them understand the impact of past and present policies. The teachers saw Taiwan not only as a place impacted by history but as an ever-evolving, vibrant economic and political locus.��

Taiwan’s geopolitics are a hot topic in the daily news, so this is often the first thing that we think about when its name is mentioned. In light of this, on the first day of the visit, the program brought the teachers to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Taipei to meet with Liang-Yu Wang, director general of the Department of North American Affairs. Hearing from an official who handles that dossier daily was a wonderful opportunity for teachers who are now better equipped to handle their students’ questions back in the United States.��

Educators from ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ and the Boulder Valley School District at the Lady Linshui Temple in Tainan, Taiwan.

A fraught history

Taiwan’s modern democratic government owes a debt to the victims of its authoritarian past, and the stay took participants to many places that now commemorate the tragedies of the Kuomintang martial law period, which lasted from 1949-1987. While visiting Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park, the group was escorted by Fred Chin, who was wrongfully imprisoned in the facility and as a political prisoner on Green Island for 12 years. He stood in the room where he had been first sentenced to death and in the cell where he was confined before his commutation and transfer to Green Island, sharing stories with the teachers about his case and how he made it through horrible years of torture and persecution.��

“We were all deeply moved by his generosity,” said Kalinauskas. “He took the time to walk with us and answer many questions. He accompanied us all the way back to the bus, waving goodbye until we were gone. He understood that these were teachers who would tell his story in their classrooms so that the horrors of the times would not be forgotten.”��

As the group traveled south out of the capital, they first stopped in Changhua, where they met Wu Sheng, a poet, environmental activist and advisor to the president on his family farm. Wu Sheng’s love of his land was obvious from the moment he invited the group out of the hot sun and into the shade of his beloved trees. Alexander, who translated for the meeting, was especially touched by this chance to meet him, as she has a personal connection to him through an old friend from college, another Taiwanese environmental activist who had been on the front lines of protests with Wu Sheng to defend their precious ecosystem.��

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Boulder Valley School District educator Vanessa Carroll (left) biking in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, with Theresa Illgen (right), a program participant from New Mexico.

“Once he learned this, he welcomed me like a family friend, making me feel right at home again in Taiwan after too many years away,” she reflected. Participating teacher Vanessa Carroll noted after the trip, “Inspired by our day with the Taiwanese poet activist Wu Sheng, I've written a unit called Poetry as Green Activism:�� Finding Eco-Inspiration in Wu Sheng’s ��which I really look forward to teaching!”

Continuing south, the group spent some time in Tainan, where Alexander guided the group through several places of worship, including two temples established in the 1600s where devotees have worshipped ever since. Alexander remarked, “Teaching teachers about these places was so gratifying because of how excited they were to apply their new knowledge and visit other temples on their own in Tainan the next day and in each new city after that. I can see how they’re always learning, just like their students.”��

Exploring Taiwan

Further south in Pingtung County, the group visited the Maya Farm cocoa plantation, where they explored the tree-to-bar process. Cocoa farming is an emerging agricultural field in Taiwan. They tasted the fresh pods, smelled different beans and sipped one of the best cups of hot chocolate they ever had. The teachers learned from the farmers about the land that had been cleared of palm and beetle nut trees to make way for a new industry. They compared this experience with a more traditional farming experience in Maokong, near Taipei, where they visited a tea plantation at which five generations of the same family had worked the land for more than a century.��

Caroll used every minute of her free time to explore even more: “I've lived in Boulder ever since I graduated from CU, so obviously I'm into bikes. In Taiwan, at the end of each day, I'd try to find a bike to explore whatever new city we'd ended up at, and once, in massive and beautiful Kaohsiung in the far south, I was balancing between traffic lights and happened to look over and see an older gentleman wearing a University of Colorado polo shirt. We made eye contact, I gestured to my own chest, and it took him a moment, understandably, to realize I was referencing CU. He told me he went there many years ago; he studied civil engineering, and now he’s an architect. I half-joked, ‘Have you designed any buildings I'd recognize?’ and he immediately gestured broadly and turned around in a half-circle saying, ‘Yes, many here in Kaohsiung,’ as if I could throw a stone and hit one of his designs.��

“The fact that I encountered this kind and possibly famous Asian architect wearing a Buffs shirt on a random, busy sidewalk roughly 7,000 flight miles from my home shows that the world can be so wildly small even when you least expect it to be, and that Taiwan really is a fascinating fusion of experiences, cultures, identities, and global interconnectivity.”

While indigenous groups, the original residents of Taiwan—before waves of migration from China began in the 1600s—now make up only 2% of the population, their histories and their contemporary ways of life remain important to building a complete picture of Taiwan’s present. Participants met with tribal elders from the Paiwan and Rukai peoples, who generously shared stories about their personal histories and how their communities continue to practice their traditions today in the face of cultural and economic challenges.��

While on Taiwan’s east coast, students also visited the National Museum of Prehistory, which details with vibrant exhibits the many indigenous groups that shaped Taiwan's past and how, through these tribes, Taiwan is connected to Austronesia and global indigenous cultures even in the present.��

The trip wasn’t always smooth. A typhoon hit the island while the group was in Tainan, closing most businesses and cultural sites. The ferry to Green Island was stomach-churning. And the heat and humidity were intense. But Taiwan is the birthplace of bubble tea, so there was always a way to hydrate and re-energize for yet another adventure.��

As teachers start up a new fall semester, the experiences will make their way into AP world history, geography and many other classrooms where students will become more curious about Taiwan, its history and importance.��

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