Original Mutual Help or Social Responsibility of Higher Education—A CJCU Experience

In 2009, Typhoon Morakot caused severe damage to the mountains in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Laulong was one of the villages affected by the typhoon. While all the communities have made all the efforts to restore their infrastructure and livelihood, Laulong village has its unique mission to restore the history and culture of their own. The residents there identify themselves as “Tavorang Tribe”, whose ancestors were from other areas. After merging with other people, they are gradually losing their tribal language. They have come to realize that their traditional rituals and tribal history are at risk of extinction; thus, they have endeavored to preserve and reconstruct their heritage. Chang Jung Christian University (CJCU) has involved in reviving these areas after Morakot. The Department of Applied Philosophy targets at this community as the educational field. The way to flip educational field requires taking students into the society. The purpose of this paper is to share the teaching experience of the past and students’ learning outcomes. It will introduce how a university tried to utilize resource from the government to work with a community while claiming to fulfill its social responsibility, but in fact, both actually received mutual benefits by executing this project. This article is drawn from the experience and reflections from the first-stage cooperation of CJCU Department of Applied Philosophy and Laulong Plains Indigenous Culture Sustainable Development Association.

USR project was carried out by teachers and students from College of Management and College of Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with Baolai in Kaohsiung Liouguei District, two villages in Laulong and Little Township Alliance in Cishan District.
This article is drawn from the experience and reflections from the first-stage cooperation of CJCU Department of Applied Philosophy and Laulong Plains Indigenous Culture Sustainable Development Association.
Laulong community is a typical mountain settlement located in Liouguei District in Kaohsiung City.
Laulong River, streaming from north to south, is the major river in this area. With forests and mountains as its main vegetation and terrain, this area belongs to tropical monsoon climate. Although They could no longer use their traditional language in daily lives.
In the past, Taivoan has been considered a branch of Siraya (Note 5). Through the recent efforts of academic circles, analysis and research from various aspects such as anthropological narratives under colonial Dutch rule, linguistics and migration tracks, people began to accept Taivoan, Siraya and Makatao are three independent ethnic groups. (Notes 6,7,8,9) Under the trends of name rectification movement (Note 10), Taivoan people in Laulong formed "Laulong Plains Indigenous Culture Sustainable Development Association", dedicated to their identity and name rectification movement (Note 11).
Ritual ceremony is an important venue for ethnic groups' cultural identity and inheritance.

Involving Students in the Project by Combing the Subject with Original Courses
Despite that the principal investigator has established some relation with Laulong community because of Typhoon Morakot reconstruction, the project could not be implemented hastily without government funds. It was on Septemeber 2017 the project obtained grants from Ministry of Education and was close to the beginning of a new semester that the principal investigator began to think carefully about how to mobilize students to take part in this project.
For Laulong community, the Night Ceremony has become an annual great event. September 15 in Chinese calendar was around the time of second half of the first semester (Autumn). Senior students from Department of Applied Philosophy who took the elective course "Study on Taiwanese Religions" were arranged to get to know the religion of Laulong community during the ceremony preparation process while taking part in the preparation work. The specialties of professors participated in this activity includes history, community organization, philosophy, arts and communication, with 20 students who took the course.
Students were divided into four groups in this semester. Each group was assigned a different mission related to the Night Ceremony in Laulong community. The first group is "night ceremony group", joining and recording Night Ceremony activities. The second group is "recipe group", joining and learning how to prepare local foods related to the Night Ceremony. The third group is "religion group", conducting a survey and getting to know local religions. The forth group is "genealogy group", taking part in genealogy restoration.
Laulong is 76.9km away from Chang Jung Christian University, which takes an hour's drive by a chartered vehicle and at least two times' transfer for public transportation. Considering time and expense, the principal investigator arranged students in the course to go to Laulong three times at least (including living in the community once) during a semester (Table 1).
Students were asked to leave for the community three times. CJCU would arrange vehicles two times while the other time students would have to go to the place in their groups by themselves. Students were encouraged to search the shuttle bus timetable and ways of public transportation. However, after the first semester students failed to go to the community by public transportation because of the much time it took. They rented a car or were sent to the place by their relatives instead. Students were asked to complete their assigned works based on the predesigned missions beforehand every time before going to the community. Students were required to have a 15-minute presentation as their final reports after the Night Ceremony. The presentations were given on January 2, 2018 in the community to hear feedback and corrections from Taivoan people.

Applying Media and Meetings to Boost Community Participation
This project was based on the conception of the Ministry of Education and the team's ideal, stressing community participation. To avoid the implementation and achievement of this project being controlled by the University, Line group was formed at the initial stage via the app in mobile phones. By involving university instructors, assistants and the community to the discussion group, it was hoped that the message could keep transparent in the university and the community (Table 2). Note. Members of each group have partially overlapped.
Besides social media, regular working conferences between the University and the community were convened by turns as a principle. Between the writing of this article and the actual implementation there were two meetings held in the community and three meetings in the campus. There were fewer people when the meetings were held in the campus (Table 3).

Image Recording Group Rrecorded the Process of Uuniversity-Community Collaboration
This project made use of the resources of mass communication in the University. Each group's working process was recorded and edited to generate a reporting video, which was provided to related people and units in the place and uploaded as citizen journalists' report. The video also became a practical outcome of teachers and students from CJCU Department of Mass Communication for their graduation project.

Semester-End Presentation
The first semester-end presentation was hosted when the project was implemented half a year during the trial period, which was divided into exhibition and forum. The exhibition lasted from February 4 th to 9 th , displaying the cooperative results of community partners and teachers and students from CJCU in three subprojects during the trial period. For one of the subprojects, students of Department of Applied Philosophy from the course "Study on Taiwanese Religions" were divided and assigned four subjects centering on Taivoan's night ceremony: "recipe group", "genealogy group", "religion group", The other part of the semester-end presentation, the forum, was held in CJCU conference hall on March 5 th for sharing and exchanging teachers and students' experience and reflections in the past three months. The forum was aiming at inviting community friends to enter into university campus while enabling university superiors and other students to gain some understanding of the project. This would in turn win more support from the university and the project could develop continuously.
Concerning tracing the cultural origin of Taivoan, by sharing their experience of interviewing Taivoan residents, students from Applied Philosophy had seen local stories truly belonging to the land of Taiwan that could not be learned from schools. These stories were the inner voices of local residents toward identity diffusion. Students unearthed the sincere hopes of this minority group to be recognized by history of Taiwan. How to spare no efforts to assist them and make their stories be seen seem to be the real social responsibilities that can be assumed by university education. Students from the other two subprojects also presented their reflections in the forum. The forum was hosted in the university campus conference hall. Number of teachers and students in the hall were 60, roughly the same as representatives from the three locales, creating an atmosphere that the university and the community were reciprocal and equal.

Results and Reflection
After the project, the author of this article led two focus group on February 12 th and March 12 th , 2018 (Table 4). At the end of each semester, the university would offer students' feedback and comments toward courses to instructors. The instructors would also ask students open-ended questions to describe their undertakings during project implementation period. The following is an analysis on the project's outcomes and reflections based on students' feedback and focus group transcripts during the four-month trial period.

his style… we thought his style had reached a certain level… We really appreciate their efforts in doing the things seriously." (A2) "I have such reflections. For instance, recording the stories of the grandma, I would cut some videos and sent the link to the community executive secretary. But the grandma did not watch it or had the opportunity to see it. Perhaps I should just give the file directly to the executive secretary, making a suggestion to let the grandma watch together or something like that…" (A4) "Besides learning, are we able to motivate students to do something sustainable, not just something lasting 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 years and over?" (C6)
Community representatives came up with some expectations in focus groups on mutual communication and equal treatment toward the interaction between teachers, students and communities, including issues of interaction out of homework or sincerity. They were looking forward to the continuous interpersonal interaction and feedback from teachers and students before and after students' homework is finished.

"If we had some discussions and much interaction before and after the project, probably the collaboration would have had better results. I thought this will let students know the real ecology and ethics of the community…and will make the project have better further development." (A3) "We also told students that no matter whom you interview, the content should be reviewed by us. Sometimes 100 or 200 words might lead to serious mistakes" (A1)
integrating the course with the project. The instructor is enthusiastic about teaching, encouraging students to ask questions for discussion or asking students questions to create interactive learning settings.

Low Teaching Evaluation
3.92 4.29~4.67 The teaching approach of the instructor can be easily understood by students.
3.85 4.33~4.71 The instructor adjusts the difficulty of the contents according to students' learning level.

Learning Assessment
The instructor assigns homework or tests in accordance to students' learning progress. The grading approach is fair, reasonable, and in line with students' learning objectives.
3.92 4.42~4.71 The assigned homework (or tests) follows the design of teaching contents, which is helpful for learning.
Listed in Table 5 is the teaching evaluation of "Study on Taiwanese Religions" course in this project and other courses with the same instructor.
The teaching evaluation questionnaire of the university adopts standardized question sets. There are 12 questions with scores calculated. Among the 6 courses the instructor taught in that semester, there are 12 questions of the three courses having higher average scores than other courses of the Department.
One course received higher scores in 11 questions, while the other one received higher scores in 6 questions. In this evaluation form, the scores of the 12 questions of the course combined with the USR project are lower than the Department's average. Those items lower than 4 are 2.2 "The instructor is enthusiastic about teaching, encouraging students to ask questions for discussion or asking students questions to create interactive learning settings". And 2.3 "The teaching approach of the instructor can be easily understood by students" in Teaching Strategies section, and 4.1 "The instructor assigns homework or tests in accordance to students' learning progress. The grading approach is fair, reasonable, and in line with students' learning objectives" in Learning Assessment section. The item with the highest score 4.23 belongs to Class Management section 3.1 "The instructor holds high expectations to students and teachers with enthusiasm and responsibility". It could be discovered that the students could sense the instructor's effort and enthusiasm but did not identify with his teaching design and assessment.
From the public open feedback, some student said that "Abruptly integrating the project with the course is improper in some way. We understood that the instructor wanted to train students. But certain items require long-time observation and interview, and the arranged place of this project is far away from the university. If we stayed longer, we might have obtained more outcomes. But due to the rush time of interview and the distance, the final outcomes may be unsatisfactory". Generally speaking, students thought the preparation of this course was not enough and thus students' learning outcomes were limited based on the score of the evaluation and feedback (Note 12). be discerned that students had to finish a lot of working items in one semester. They overcame the difficult transportation issues and got to know Taivoan's most important ritual, related religions and culture. The instructor neglected the cognitive gap between himself and students, therefore hindering students' learning. The group arrived at the community on the day of night ceremony and took part in all the activities. What's special was that the group offered a meal to make on the ceremony and was thus very busy. Our job was to record (take photos, video recording) the night ceremony, interview the ritual on the process and special items such as crowns and wreath, compile Mandarin lecture notes for presentation, make PPT and prepare for presentation in Mandarin. project. There were about 120 people including seniors and executive secretaries from community organizations in the three communities Lualong, Baolai and Cishan, as well as university teachers and students and other local government representatives joining the event. In another week, there was an exhibition introducing the community and cooperative works. Students of this course also served as the staff and guide of the exhibition. Although the course ended two months ago, the students all thought that reporting on such an official venue was quite challenging yet pleasing.

Adjustment and Improvement
Based on the above three points, we revised the problems in the first course, introducing the scheduled course contents beforehand and adding co-instructors to simplify students' course missions. We also hosted a series of speech before going to the locale to let students have more understanding of the ethnic groups and focus the issues on the working items of the community. With the course in the previous semester as a foundation, we don't have to start from scratch to establish interaction with the community.

Conclusion-Our Road for the Next Mile
Under the name of USR project, this article centers on the cooperation of CJCU and Taivoan in Laulong community, presenting the interactive experience between the community, teachers and students involved in this project.
With the origin and relation established before, CJCU teachers and students were trusted by the community and were able to cooperate with them, participating in Lualong annual ritual ceremony and cultural revival. In this project, the university did not launch new plans but assisted the existing cultural revival and efforts in ethnic group identity. We obtained many gains within the half a year.
Due to labor shortage caused by the process of social and economic development, rural community requires support and assistance from universities, looking forward to young generation's understanding and participation.
The USR project was proposed by universities, funded by the Ministry of Education in aim of encouraging universities to change their traditional classroom teaching and providing students with real locale experience.
Based on existent experience and identifying with the MOE's educational policy, Chang Jung Christian University proposed the project with Morakot-affected communities as the subjects. The project was arranged in the way that teachers and students could have more understanding of social and economic development and cultural tradition preservation of the marginalized communities and ethnic groups www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/wjer World Journal of Educational Research Vol. 5, No. 3, 2018 through leaning by doing.
The teachers had deeper understanding of Taiwan's grassroots society through implementation, at the same time facing new challenges on teaching locales and methods from teaching design and students' feedback.
The experience has reminded us that university and community are in a mutual-aid and mutual help relation. The community needs the human resource from the university while the university as the organization fostering human resource for the society needs nutrients from the community. CJCU cooperated with mountain areas affected by Typhoon Morakot in Kaohsiung City under the USR project. Although the chosen path was distant and rugged, we were enlightened by the community within half a year. The consensus of the university and the community ought to be a long-term partnership so as to generate meaningful changes.