Navigating Dividing Social Environments: The Civic Engagement Experience of Student Participants outside of Taipei in the 2014 Taiwan Sunflower Movement

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Critical Pedagogies, Dialogue, and Peacebuilding

Proposal

In an increasingly divided world, civic education and movements have become more relevant than ever in promoting peaceful and democratic values. The Taiwan Sunflower Movement is an example of the power of student movements to address national concerns. The Sunflower Movement erupted in the Spring of 2014 as a resistance against a controversial agreement that opened up bilateral flows of the service industry’s capital and workforce between Taiwan and China. Enraged by the ruling party’s passing of the agreement within 30 seconds amidst chaos, a group of civilians occupied the national legislature for 24 days, inspiring a widespread social movement that led the government to pause the agreement. This movement successfully awakened Taiwanese students’ political awareness, encouraging a wave of young adults running for office. Interestingly, with the limited scholarship focusing primarily on the movement leadership, we know little about the delicate process of the then-college students’ citizenship formation and civic engagement. Building on a previous study (Authors, 2024) investigating the civic engagement experiences of students studying in Taipei, this study adds to the nuance of the scholarship by delving into how students outside of the capital area develop their citizenship and civic engagement.
This qualitative investigation is informed by two sociological theories: the Social Development Model (SDM) (Cambron et al., 2018) and Freire’s (1970) work on Civic Engagement. Cambron et al.’s SDM (2018) describes the interplay between internalized and exogenous factors shaping an individual’s prosocial or antisocial behavior. According to SDM, children learn to act based on (1) their beliefs and values and (2) perceived rewards and pressure. As children enter different development stages (e.g., home, school, friend-group, etc.), they operate in sub-development models with different values, perceptions, and social bonds. Perceptions of rewards, social bonds, beliefs, and behaviors in earlier development periods condition perceptions in the new development period. The SDM helps us understand how Taiwanese students navigate various social bonds, beliefs, and power dynamics from different social environments during the Sunflower Movement.
In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1984) highlights dialogues as tools to transform education and society. Instead of solely delivering knowledge through a banking approach, teachers engaging in dialogue facilitate the class with problem-posing skills, encouraging students to be more engaged. In so doing, both teachers and students build a new relationship: teacher-student with student-teacher. With this reciprocal relationship, both teachers and students are engaged in learning and developing their critical consciousness. Dialogue ultimately leads to liberation. We build on Freire’s ideas to explore how the Sunflower Movement served as an opportunity for dialogue among Taiwanese youth and their families and schooling, and, ultimately, liberation for young Taiwanese adults.
The guiding research question is: how do Taiwanese young adults attending universities in areas outside of Taipei understand the influence of their surrounding social environments on their civic engagement beliefs and behaviors during the Sunflower Movement? Specifically, we explore college students’ perceptions of whether and how their families, schools, and exposure to and engagement on the Internet influenced their civic engagement beliefs and behaviors.
We plan to conduct 20 virtual interviews (1-1.5 hours each) that ask young Taiwanese adults how their family, school, and social backgrounds influence their civic engagement beliefs and behaviors. We also invite participants to share artifacts related to their Sunflower experiences for triangulation. We utilize the research project’s social media pages to recruit participants who attended universities outside of the Taipei metropolitan areas in 2014. All interviews will be recorded, transcribed, and imported to the analytical software, where we will conduct an integrative and recursive data analysis. We first use an inductive approach to identify initial themes and codes reflecting the participants’ perspectives. We then refine our coding scheme by comparing multiple data sources and conducting deductive data analysis informed by our theoretical framework.
As the second phase of the 2014 Taiwan Sunflower Movement Project, this study explores how Taiwanese college students in politically divided areas outside of the Taipei metropolitan, where the 2014 Sunflower Movement erupted, develop and demonstrate their beliefs and behaviors about civic engagement. This study’s findings will extend our understanding of how Taiwanese university students enrolled in higher education institutions outside of the Taipei metropolitan area involved themselves in this social movement when they were physically distant from the main movement site. Moreover, the findings will shed light on how Taiwanese young adults, as a generation coming of age in the democratic and Internet era, transcend geographic boundaries to understand, navigate, and clash with different socio-political values and perspectives. These experiences enrich our understanding of how young adults seek peace and social harmony as they encounter diverse and sometimes conflicting social settings.
Previous studies related to the Sunflower Movement are mostly sociological studies that focus on the macro level of the movement (Chen & Huang, 2015; Chen et al, 2016; Ho et al., 2020). Few education studies have been conducted on the 2014 Sunflower Movement. There is a knowledge gap in the students' civic awakening process. The first phase of the 2014 Taiwan Sunflower Movement Project sheds light on civic engagement experiences of Taiwanese college students in Taipei metropolitan areas. However, college students in areas outside of Taipei whose beliefs and behaviors about civic engagement remain unheard and undervalued. This study bridges the research gap by highlighting the voices of Taiwanese college students enrolled in areas outside of Taipei. This study is essential to gaining a more nuanced understanding of the success of the Sunflower Movement as a grassroots movement. By looking at this diverse population beyond the geographic barriers, this study expands the application of the SDM and delves deeper into the intersectionality of college students’ family, school, and internet/social media experiences, which help contribute to the theory building.

Authors

• Ting-Yu Ariel Chung

• Kathy Li, UCLA