Written by Jeremy C.-C. Chang
Image credit: Sunflower movement demonstration in Taiwan (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
A Personal Point of Departure
For many years, my research has centred on dialogic education: how teachers and students make room for questioning, listening, reasoning, challenge and the co-construction of meaning. I first approached dialogue as a classroom practice. It seemed to name what happens when students are invited to think with one another rather than simply receive knowledge. Over time, however, that understanding has become too narrow for me. Dialogue is not only a pedagogy. It is also a way of asking how a society lives with difference. That shift has led me back to my position as a Taiwanese scholar. Taiwan’s democracy and freedom are not just the political background to my work. They are among the most vivid examples I know of dialogue as a public practice.
Taiwan as a Contested Dialogic Space
To describe Taiwan in this way does not romanticise its democracy. Taiwan is not a harmonious space where disagreement naturally becomes consensus. It is better understood as a contested dialogic space: a place where memories, languages, identities and political imaginations struggle to be heard and organised. Dialogue does not always succeed here. What Taiwan’s democratic life shows, again and again, is that dialogue has to be made. It has to be protected, interrupted, repaired and redesigned. For example, the 2018 referendums on marriage equality often hardened into opposing camps that spoke past one another so that the formal machinery of direct democracy registered a result without generating much shared understanding.
Taiwan’s democratic transformation can be read as a historical expansion of public voice. After 1949, Taiwan lived under decades of martial law, with severe constraints on civil rights, political participation, the press and associational life. The Presidential Office’s account of Taiwan’s democratic development identifies the lifting of martial law in 1987, the gradual opening of party politics and the press, the full re-election of the legislature, the first direct presidential election in 1996 and the first peaceful transfer of power in 2000 as major milestones. These moments matter institutionally for citizens, political parties and the state alike. Their dialogic significance, however, lies in something deeper: they changed the conditions under which people could speak, organise, challenge authority and help define the public world.
Image credit: The end of martial law in Taiwan. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Democracy as a Dialogic Practice
From the perspective of dialogic education, democracy is not only elections, institutions or constitutional design. It is also a form of public learning. John Dewey famously described democracy as more than a form of government: it is a mode of associated living and shared communication. That matters for education because classrooms are among the first public spaces where young people learn whether difference is threatening or generative, whether authority is fixed or answerable, and whether their voices can enter a shared world. Paulo Freire’s dialogic pedagogy makes a related point: education is not the depositing of knowledge into passive learners but a process through which people learn to name, question and transform their world.
This is where Taiwan becomes theoretically important for dialogic education. The field has often focused on classroom talk, exploratory dialogue, cumulative reasoning and teacher-student interaction. These remain essential. But Taiwan invites a wider view. Dialogue is also a democratic condition: the capacity of a public to keep different voices in relation when agreement is uncertain, temporary or impossible. What makes Taiwan distinctive is less the form of its democracy than its recency and fragility. It built this capacity within living memory, deliberatively and under continuing external pressure, so the labour of sustaining dialogue is unusually visible rather than taken for granted. Taiwan, then, is not merely a context in which dialogic education might be applied. It is a living source of insight for rethinking what dialogic education is for.
Public Conflict, Civic Technology, and Designed Dialogue
The 2014 Sunflower Movement offers a concrete example. It was not only a protest against the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement. It was also a public argument about procedure, transparency, accountability and democratic participation. Sociologist Jieh-min Wu’s analysis describes the movement as transformative resistance, while sociologist Ming-sho Ho has shown how it reshaped youth activism and Taiwan’s political landscape. Educationally, the movement can be read as a form of public pedagogy. Streets, occupied spaces, livestreams, online documents, teach-ins and civic discussions became temporary classrooms. Many citizens learned, in real time, to ask what counts as legitimate procedure, who has access to information, and how ordinary people may intervene when formal channels appear insufficient.
Taiwan’s civic technology practices have extended this dialogic experiment in another direction. The g0v (gov-zero) community, founded in Taiwan, describes itself as a decentralised civic tech community committed to information transparency, open results and open cooperation. vTaiwan, launched in 2014, describes itself as a decentralised open consultation process that combines online and offline interactions among citizens, governments, experts, civil society and businesses. An empirical study by Yu-Tang Hsiao and colleagues at the Public Digital Innovation Space, including Audrey Tang, documents how vTaiwan brought citizens and government together to deliberate on national issues and craft digital legislation. The European Partnership for Democracy has also presented Taiwan as an important case of democratic innovation. These initiatives are often discussed as digital democracy. They can also be read educationally. They show that dialogue requires infrastructure: platforms, norms, facilitation, design, trust, translation and mechanisms through which disagreement can be organised rather than simply amplified.
Image credit: g0v hackathon (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
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This point is especially urgent in the digital age. Giving more people channels to speak does not automatically create dialogue. Without structure, digital participation can intensify polarisation, misinformation, outrage and performative conflict. Taiwan faces these pressures too. Freedom House’s 2026 country report continues to classify Taiwan as Free. It recognises its vibrant democratic system, while also noting concerns about attempts by the Chinese government to influence policymaking, media and democratic infrastructure. Taiwan’s democratic achievement is therefore inseparable from its vulnerability. Because the public sphere is open, it must also be protected from manipulation, exclusion and distrust.
This is why the relationship between dialogue and democracy is more complicated than the phrase “dialogue as democracy” suggests. Dialogue values openness, plurality and the unfinished quality of meaning. Democratic institutions, however, must make decisions. They close debate, at least temporarily, through votes, laws and policies. The task is neither to replace decision-making with endless conversation nor to reduce democracy to procedural closure. The task is to design democratic life so that closure remains answerable to the continuing public voice. A vote may decide an issue, but it should not end the democratic learning around it.
Classrooms, Freedom, and Taiwan’s Unfinished Lesson
Dialogic education can contribute precisely here. In classrooms, students can learn that disagreement is not a failure of communication; it is one condition of public thinking. They can learn to listen without surrendering judgement, to provide reasons rather than merely state preferences, to revise their views without humiliation, and to notice whose voices are absent or marginalised. Research on dialogic teaching and exploratory talk has long shown that structured classroom dialogue can support collective reasoning. Through Taiwan’s democratic experience, these practices carry civic significance. They are not merely techniques for improving learning outcomes; they are rehearsals for democratic life.
Freedom, then, is not only the right to speak without interference. It is also the capacity to enter a shared world in which one’s voice can be heard, challenged and transformed by others. Taiwan’s democracy shows that freedom is relational and public. It depends on spaces where different people can appear before one another, contest meanings, and remain connected to a common political world. This is also what dialogic education can cultivate. It teaches students not simply to speak, but to take part in the difficult work of making a world with others.
For me, this is the deepest lesson Taiwan offers to dialogic education. Taiwan is not a complete model of democratic dialogue. It is an unfinished, fragile and contested democratic project. That is precisely why it matters. It indicates that dialogue is not a soft alternative to politics. It is one of the conditions that keep democratic politics alive. Dialogic education is therefore not merely preparation for democracy. It is democracy in educational form. From Taiwan, we can see that the task of education is not only to create better classrooms but also to sustain the capacities that enable a free and plural public life to continue.
Dr Jeremy C.-C. Chang is an assistant professor at the Institute of Education and Centre for Teacher Education, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. As founder and director of the Innovative Dialogic Education Lab (IDEL), his work examines how classroom dialogue connects to the wider practices of democratic and public life.