The Meanings of Social Practice in Taiwanese Higher Education and Reflections on Its Implications for Curriculum Design

In recent years, social practice in Taiwanese higher education has moved beyond external service activities and stand-alone projects to become a significant issue tied to universities’ public role, knowledge responsibility, and curriculum reform. Shaped by the intersecting policy agendas of University Social Responsibility (USR), local revitalization, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the public role of higher education, social practice has increasingly been institutionalized within university governance and formal curricula. This article adopts a literature-based analysis to examine the conceptual foundations of social practice, clarify its core meanings, and reflect on its implications for curriculum design. It argues that social practice should not be reduced to volunteer service, community engagement activities, or off-campus practicum work; rather, it should be understood as an educational practice that redefines the relationship between universities and society. Its significance lies in the reconfiguration of knowledge, publicness, and local engagement. The article further argues that social practice functions as a catalyst for curriculum transformation by shifting higher education away from knowledge transmission towards contextualized, problem-oriented, and reflective forms of learning. On this basis, it proposes that socially engaged curriculum design should integrate knowledge understanding, public participation, local context, reflective assessment, and structural flexibility. At the same time, such curricula remain vulnerable to instrumentalization under project-based governance, performance-oriented evaluation, and institutional time pressures. The article concludes that future development should move from outcome orientation to relationship orientation, from knowledge transfer to knowledge co-construction, and from policy compliance back to fundamental questions about the purposes of education.