Fan Shih-jung

In pursuing a more finely crafted form of service learning, Professor Fan built his course around the pairing of professional knowledge with civic participation, and led students to the front line of education in rural Taiwan. Planning across two semesters gave the design real continuity and structure. In the first semester, specialist lectures and documentaries about rural schooling grounded students in lesson planning and classroom management for primary and junior high pupils, and brought them closer to what rural schools actually need.

To help students make the shift into being the ones who pass knowledge on, he sat in on every group's discussions, examining each lesson plan for safety and feasibility — water rockets, DNA braiding, clay cell models, one by one. When the second semester brought them into real classrooms, he guided them to revise as they went, according to how the children actually responded. When something went wrong on the spot — equipment failing, running behind time — he was there to coach them through it. Through that rigorous preparation and the reflection that followed the service, students not only came to see the gap in resources between city and countryside, but found real satisfaction in working as a team: higher education's civic purpose, fully realised.