ABSTRACT
Under the huge impacts of low birth rate and heterogeneous student enrollments, teacher education in Taiwan is facing a series of struggles it has never encountered before. First of all, the most arduous conundrum is the imbalance between the demand and supply of teacher education. Along with the establishment of teacher education centers in the non-traditional teachers colleges since the late 1990s, the Taiwanese government hopes to upgrade the quality of teacher education via market forces. However, the result is totally the opposite. The dual effects of numerous roving teachers on the waiting list and fewer young children caused a lack of demand and an oversupply of teachers-to-be. Therefore the teacher education institutions began to pay more attention to both the school sites and the quality of teacher education.
