Dr. Chou Whei-ming, Director of the HRC, shared stories behind the birth of this database. In recent years, subjects of social studies (including history, geography, and civics) in high schools have gradually lost their importance due to the shortage of teaching hours. For example, history teachers may teach directly for test preparations by introducing “keywords” in history without detailed explanations. This was what we called the “washback effect”. However, in Dr. Chou’s opinion, subjects of social studies are important in training students’ critical thinking and shaping consensus on relations between human and time (history), human and space (geography), and human and human (civics). These three subjects are crucial when people build their personal identities too. In 2015, there was a controversy over “slight changes” in the guidelines for senior high school history textbooks. In order to create a better teaching and learning environment, Dr. Chou suggested the Ministry of Education establish a database for historical teaching and learning in senior high schools. Therefore, since October 2015, the HRC has been entrusted by the K-12 Education Administration, Ministry of Education to establish the database.

The database is divided into four fields: the history of Taiwan, the history of China, and world history, and the history of East Asia. Taiwan government currently commences the “New Southbound Policy”, but high school students in Taiwan have no enough knowledge on Southeast Asia or even East Asia where Taiwan situates since both history and geography textbooks talk less about these regions. Therefore, the focus on the history of East Asia is the highlight of the database. These entries could be supplements to textbooks and make students think more about Taiwan and its relations to the world.

Ms. Lin, a research assistant of the HRC, introduced four features of the database. They are: (1) lots of images (more than 1,000 pieces), videos (more than 600 clips), and articles for multimedia teaching to arouse students’ motivation; (2) a media for interdisciplinary learning; (3) links between entries for easy searching; and (4) information on the history of East Asia. Next, Mr. Hsu, another research assistant of the HRC, explained how entries in the database were proofread and checked with a couple of examples of improper Chinese translations.

At the end of the workshop, Dr. Chou talked about the idea of “historical literacy” and stressed the importance of distinguishing historical truth from falsity. Dr. Chou believed that the database would be a good helper for teachers and students. Mr. Wu, a history teacher in National Hualien Girls’ Senior High School also expected that the database could provide more information about important historical figures and events.

In the Q&A session, all participants agreed that the database would be a good self-learning tool for senior high students and a treasury for history teachers when designing and preparing courses. Many teachers said that they will be willing to use this database in class. Dr. Chou emphasized that all information in the database were carefully examined and reviewed by experts. Although some information may be different from traditional viewpoints or even challenge them, we must take this opportunity to renew our knowledge and build a correct historiographical perspective.