Communicative Action and the Trans-Disciplinary Education in Taiwan

Abstract

Based on the theory of communicative action developed by the German sociologist Ju¨rgen Habermas, we performed a systematic review of the development of Trans-Disciplinary Education in Taiwan. The development of Trans-Disciplinary Ed- ucation in Taiwan is initiated by MOE Program for Trans- Disciplinary Education on Society-Humanity- Science and is also abbreviated as SHS Program. There are three sections in this paper. In the first section, we explained the SHS Program and its orga- nizational framework. We examined then the theory of communicative action and discuss why his theory is adopted in this study. In the final section, we reviewed a plan of ten discussion topics with com- municative action to illustrate how the SHS program mobilizes the faculty members to participate in public affairs. Since this program is still in progress, we are following four essential guidelines to describe the development of the Trans-Disciplinary Education in Taiwan.