The Construction of Media in Education Policies: A Comparative Study of Singapore and Taiwan

During the education reform movement starting in the mid-1990s, many educational initiatives from the Western countries have been introduced to the East Asian region. Media literacy education is one of the travelling policy discourses that is getting more significant in some Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore. This chapter aims to explore how media literacy is defined and articulated in the education policies in Singapore and Taiwan and seeks to discuss if the construction of policy discourses is similar or different from their origin in the Western countries, especially in the UK. This study is an ‘analysis of policy’ (Rizvi and Lingard, Globalizing education policy. Routledge, London, 2010), which focuses on critically reviewing the existing policies on media literacy. Data are collected from policy-related documents and government websites. This chapter will offer a comparative study of media literacy in formal education and explains how the Western discourse is localised in Asian context.