A leading Canadian provider of public education will dispatch qualified volunteers to Taiwan later this year to teach English, a Ministry of Education (MOE) official said on Wednesday.
Liu Ching-jen (劉慶仁), director of the ministry’s Bureau of International Cultural and Educational Relations, said the volunteer teacher arrangement was made possible through a memorandum of intent that was signed between Hugh McKeown, executive director of York Region Learning Connections, the international division of the York Region District School Board (YRDSB) in Ontario, and Joyce Tseng (曾清芸), general director of the non-profit King Car Education Foundation, which sponsors the placement of foreign English teachers in rural schools.
Tseng said the Canadian volunteers would serve as English teachers in Taiwan’s remote schools.
“For example, [schools in] Matsu are in urgent need of foreign teachers,” she said.
If the collaboration between the foundation and the division continues, the volunteers may also be dispatched to mountainous areas in Nantou or outlying islands to teach English, Tseng said, adding that the first group of Canadian volunteers may arrive as early as September.
McKeown said that Canadian volunteers usually serve overseas in the fields of medicine, architecture and environmental protection.
“It [the duration of their stay overseas] depends on the projects. The maximum is usually one year,” McKeown said. “We have four teachers in Taiwan. They are here for the second year now, so it can also be extended.”
Information from the bureau showed that approximately 100 volunteers from the York region serve as volunteers abroad each year.
The bureau said the collaboration between the division and the foundation was expected to help attract more Canadian volunteers to Taiwan and help them have a better understanding of Taiwan.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
RSS