Designing a teaching-oriented policy in a research-centric system: procedural bypass and institutional mimicry in Taiwan’s higher education

This study examines the formation of Taiwan’s Teaching Practice Research Programme (TPRP), a national policy instrument designed across 2017 and 2018 to institutionalize the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) within a higher education system strongly oriented towards research. Drawing on an extended multiple streams analysis and a process-tracing study of nine elite interviews, it asks how a teaching-oriented instrument was designed, legitimated, and consolidated in an environment structurally unfavourable to it. The analysis finds that the TPRP was not the product of a fortuitous policy window but the outcome of deliberate design work by a reform coalition. The coalition layered a new funding channel alongside the established one, routing grants directly to individual academics, and modelled the new instrument on the national research-grant system in order to borrow its academic legitimacy. The study’s contribution is empirical: it shows how mechanisms of institutional layering, mimetic isomorphism, and policy feedback were consciously combined in the work of policy design, and it identifies the procedural and instrument-design strategies through which a teaching-oriented reform secured an institutional foothold. The case also illustrates the limits of such a strategy, since borrowing the legitimacy of research may leave the underlying prestige hierarchy intact.