The transformation of Koupi Elementary
Koupi Elementary School was founded almost a century ago, in 1920. Several years back, for a time it was in danger of being absorbed into another school because there were too few children. When Wang Chao-tse took over as principal at Koupi three years ago, there were only 30 or so students. “The people in the community were deeply concerned and had a sense of crisis, because they wanted the school to be preserved.” Thus Wang was faced with the challenge of giving the school some special character that would attract students.
Tainan City was the first local government to recognize the status of the Siraya indigenous people. The city government felt that this recognition should also be reflected on the educational front.
“The Siraya are a very special group in Taiwan,” says Wang Chao-tse. “In the 17th century, during the Age of Discovery, they were the first people to have contact with outsiders, and they were the first window on the international scene for Taiwan, having the deepest interactions with the outside world.” Having been posted to Koupi Elementary by the Tainan City Bureau of Education, Wang set about promoting a transformation of the school. But in fact, a few years earlier Koupi had already begun teaching the Sirayan language, in the form of an after-school club with students divided into two mixed-age groups.
“We were determined to make Sirayan a formal class for two reasons,” explains Wang. “The first was to give a positive response to activists who had long been working to revive Sirayan culture. The second was to make the Sirayan curriculum part of the school system, because only with systemization can language education be comprehensively planned, from instructional goals and curriculum design to curriculum evaluation. Only in this way could the revival of the Sirayan language develop and flourish.” This is why, after communicating with parents and the community, he arranged for one compulsory class in Sirayan each week. Teaching the class using Romanization—that is, writing Sirayan with the Latin alphabet—has the side benefit of reducing the sense of strangeness students will later feel when they begin studying English.
Students are still a little unclear about recognition of their indigenous identity, but through games their interest can be sparked and cultural seeds planted. On campus, Wang Chao-tse will occasionally interact with the students using Sirayan words like tabe (“how are you”), mariyangwagi (“have a good day”), lalulug (“thank you”), and mahanlu (“goodbye”), so that learning and using the language becomes a natural part of daily life.
Teachers of Sirayan in Tainan City are mostly trained by the Siraya Culture Association (SCA). There are currently about ten language instructors working in 17 primary and middle schools across Tainan. Wang Chao-tse is dedicated to working with the SCA. He believes that education is a driver of cultural revival, and that the SCA is making the revival of Sirayan more comprehensive and systematic, and also making it easier for the written form of the language to become established. This will broaden the impact of efforts to promote Sirayan.
An important starting point for the renaissance of the Sirayan language is this Gospel of St. Matthew, written in Sirayan using the Latin alphabet. It was only after Edgar Macapili researched it as the basis for a Sirayan glossary that textbooks, illustrated books, and pocket books were produced in this language.