NIU’s relationship with National Sun Yat-sen University continues to deepen.
Two representatives of NSYSU’s Center for Alumni Services and Social Engagement visited campus earlier this month to explore opportunities for collaborations and to present two talks on university social responsibility in Taiwan.
Han-Yu Wu, director of the center, and Min-Ju Liu, a project assistant, came to DeKalb as guests of the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment (ETRA).
Laura Ruth Johnson, professor of educational research, invited the pair after an encounter during a 2019 sabbatical in Taiwan. She first visited Taiwan in 2016 as part of a delegation building partnerships with National Sun Yat-sen and other universities on the island. She has returned numerous times, and has spent 12 weeks in Taiwan over the last year as part of a Fulbright-Hays research project.
“In 2019, I was a visiting scholar there and delivered a keynote on community-based qualitative research,” Johnson says. “One of them came to talk to me afterward and said, ‘I’d really like you to come meet us.’ They do all this really amazing community-university partnership work – collaborative work focused on community knowledge.”
Since then, Johnson has connected with Wu and Liu every time she returns and has taken “field trips” for a firsthand glimpse of their projects in the environment; migration and globalization; housing and food security; neighborhood-led revitalization; and aboriginal communities.
Results of their projects then inform curriculum development for university classes, as well as elementary and secondary schools, Johnson says.
“Part of their focus is on cultural preservation and awareness, and teaching young people about the culture of their local communities because certain traditions are not being preserved. They’re in elders’ heads, and not being shared or disseminated in structured, formal ways,” she says.
“Or it could be about a community they’re not familiar with,” she adds. “There are a lot of new immigrant communities from Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, and there’s so much to learn about experiences and practices from those communities.”
Johnson found kinship in her Taiwanese counterparts.
“We learned so much from them, and they’ve also heard me talk a lot about the work we do in Puerto Rico. When we were there last fall, they said, ‘We want to come to Chicago,’ so we started planning,” Johnson says. “I said, ‘Well, the best time to come to Humboldt Park is for Fiesta Boricua,’ ” which is a weekend long celebration of Puerto Rican culture, with an emphasis on a particular Puerto Rican town.
During their time in Chicago, Wu and Liu spoke with dozens of community leaders and activists, attended events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and visited Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School, where Johnson regularly conducts research and engages in collaborative projects.
“The Puerto Rican Cultural Center is amazingly vibrant and active. The dedication and passion of the staff were evident in every interaction; everyone is warm, welcoming, and we can really sense their love for the community. We learned that most staff are from the community and strive to live in the neighborhood to experience the lives of the locals, which is worthy of respect. We learned a lot from the community in this visit, and there is so much more to learn.” – Wu and Liu
Conversations throughout their Humboldt Park travels focused on economic development, entrepreneurship, cultural preservation, and youth leadership development, Johnson says.
“They learned a lot about Puerto Rico, which they said they didn’t know about, and they saw a lot of similarities between the situation between Taiwan and China and between Puerto Rico and the United States,” she says. “It was very surprising to them.”
“Both Puerto Rico and Taiwan have endured tumultuous pasts, marked by colonization and political struggles. The fight for self-determination and autonomy resonates strongly in both communities, forging a unique bond that transcends geographic boundaries. However, in Taiwan, few people are aware of the situation of Puerto Rico. Therefore, we wish to engage in collaboration with the Puerto Rico Culture Center and their youth to bring the international perspective into Taiwan.”
Arriving on the NIU campus, Wu and Liu met with Laurie Elish-Piper, interim executive vice president and provost; Wei Chen-Hung, chair of ETRA; College of Education Acting Dean Bill Pitney and Associate Dean David Walker; Mark Schuller, acting director of the Center for Nonprofit and NGO Studies; faculty from the College of Health and Human Sciences; and ETRA students.
During their time with the Instructional Technology graduate students and ETRA faculty, the visitors spoke of the importance of “bridging the digital divide between kids and elders and helping them build understanding so that the kids can teach the elders about technology and the elders can share their own traditional wisdom and knowledge.”
“The exchange of ideas and experiences was enriching, and we were impressed by the faculty’s eagerness to make a positive impact on society. We also have had the honor of sharing the works of community engagement and university social responsibility at NSYSU with faculty and staff at NIU. We hope that our experience has provided some insights on community engagement and sparked some ideas on potential future collaboration.”
“One of the goals of the University Social Responsibility model is to develop global relationships and awareness, so they’re encouraged,” Johnson says. “Their president was very excited that they were going to the United States because they’ve visited similar projects in Japan and other places but hadn’t been to the United States yet. Building partnerships, seeing common interest, learning from one another and creating these global conversations and dialogue was really exciting.”
For that reason, Johnson believes September’s visit is only the beginning.
“I think there will be opportunities for them to come to NIU again because they were just learning about what’s happening here,” says Johnson, whose next trip to Taiwan is scheduled for November. “Now they want to see some of the bigger projects that NIU is starting to think about in community engagement and outreach.”
She is also hoping to plan visits of NIU faculty and students to Taiwan to observe firsthand some of their innovative community-university partnership projects.
“We are grateful for the opportunity to have visited NIU and look forward to a future filled with collaborative initiatives that strengthen connections and empower communities.”
