Ben Mardell: We’re researchers at Project Zero, which is a research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We work on a project called Pedagogy of Play, which aims to make Broadway education more humanistic and democratic by having more agency for students and exploratory studies and makes school more joy, fun.

Ben Mardell: We’ve worked in Denmark and South Africa and US and Colombia, and now we’ve done some research in Taiwan with the humanistic education foundation.

Ben Mardell: Yvonne can do that. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you guys have been doing here?

Yvonne Liu: Yes. I grew up in Taiwan. [Mandarin] . What we were doing is the Forest School which you probably know [Mandarin], maybe. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Yvonne Liu: …and [Mandarin] . The teachers there tried to come up with their own indicators of what this playful learning means to them and what this would look like in the Taiwanese context. Actually, we could share it with you.

Audrey Tang: Some material?

Yvonne Liu: Yes. This is the manual from our presentation, our workshop. That is a page that shows what the indicators are, moving up. Those are the key ideas that they came up with from their research.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know any other way to learn.

Ben Mardell: Correct.

Yvonne Liu: Yeah. That’s what we’ve been doing.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Ben Mardell: Our project tries to answer three big questions. How can you do this? What does playful learning look and feel like in different cultural contexts, because it looks different in different places based on values and goals? Also, why do you need a pedagogy of play?

Ben Mardell: One of the arguments we make is that in play they ask, “What if…?” Little kids pretend that this could be an airplane or a rocket ship or that they’re…

Audrey Tang: Like, “This is a crane.”

Ben Mardell: We think that adults should keep asking, “What if…?” opening up spaces and exploring together, trying to figure out problems. Having heard the National Public Radio interview of you in October 2020, I thought, “This is a person who’s asking, what if.”

Ben Mardell: Part of our rhetoric is to have examples of adults saying, “Hey, these are the types of citizens we want. We need to cultivate this in schools.” That’s what brought us to you.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Ben Mardell: Part of the case that we make out, “These are adults. This is how they think. They think playfully and outside of the box. That’s what kids should be doing in school to prepare them for this.”

Audrey Tang: Excellent. This will be a blog post where the main point would be that as adults, we need to be as playful as possible. Not to lose the intrinsic motivations that we all have as a child.

Ben Mardell: Yes, exactly.

Audrey Tang: That’s the message we want to send to the world. That’s the idea.

Yvonne Liu: Yes.

Ben Mardell: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: Excellent. Cool.

Ben Mardell: Yes? Did you want to say anything?

Yvonne Liu: No. I want to say that we also mentioned you at the workshop.

Colleague A: [laughs]

Yvonne Liu: That was the one that got the biggest applause.

Yvonne Liu: We mentioned Niels Bohr, and people don’t know who he is.

Yvonne Liu: We mentioned Nelson Mandela, and they’re like, “We know who Mandela is.” We’ve mentioned you, and you got applause.

Audrey Tang: Glad to be useful.

Ben Mardell: The first question is about thinking about your work either as a coder or in government, or in both. How do you go about identifying a problem, and then trying to solve it?

Audrey Tang: I don’t solve problems. I live with problems. I spend time with problems. The idea is very simple. It’s about empowering people closest to the pain.

Audrey Tang: For example, in the beginning of the pandemic, the people closest to the pain is probably the pharmacists handing out the rationed masks, so that we have three-quarters of our population properly masked so that we can resist the first year of the virus. They work very long hours. There’s a lot of queuing, so people were quite upset, actually.

Audrey Tang: The pharmacists, there’s a lot of initial fear in starting and doubting, and so on. Instead of doing anything top-down, we worked with the people who were queuing there.

Audrey Tang: They thought, “I queue, and I may or may not get a mask at the end. I may or may not waste my time. Why don’t we put on a map instead for everybody to report which pharmacy have run out of masks?” The mask map was born, but it was not a governmental idea. It was people queuing there feeling very frustrated and coding a little bit to make it happen.

Audrey Tang: Then they posted it online, and it went on the evening news, and that person spent. They got a bill from Google saying that they owe Google some 20 US dollars, or 20K US dollars [laughs] because he went so popular. I was part of the participant that contributed to his bill. He went online to ask for help saying, “I cannot support this public infrastructure with my own pocket money.”

Ben Mardell: True.

Audrey Tang: I went to the head of the Cabinet to the Premier who says that we need to take care of this infrastructure, so that there could be hundreds of different maps, voice assistance, and so on so that people know what’s going on with the mask distribution.

Audrey Tang: Once we wrote that out, which took only three days, the pharmacist went complaining. They don’t have the time to take care of the medical costs of each person to keep track of the inventory. They prefer to collect all the medical costs. Then, during the lunch break, they process everything.

Audrey Tang: Then by evening, they hand out some number cards, so few people would collect that in the evening. They innovated because they are very frustrated. People would complain that the maps show they still have a lot of masks. Actually, because they don’t have time to process the SD cards, it was not accurate.

Audrey Tang: The thing I did again is not to think of a solution, but rather to visit the pharmacists who are complaining and say, “If you’re the digital minister, what would you do?”

Audrey Tang: To basically say that my commitment is to make such a space. It’s like an inclusive playground where people who have some better ideas. Somebody said, “What if we have a cloak of invisibility so that if we press a button, we disappear from the map? So that [laughs] when we run out of the number cards, the whole map here, we just push a button, it disappears.”

Audrey Tang: It is basically people suffering from this frustration, they make a wish. Because I spent a lot of time very closely with them, I’m like, “Let’s code this cloak of invisibility.” Very quickly, they were able to collaborate. The same interface was then used to ration rapid testing, and many other things as well.

Audrey Tang: The point I’m making is that, look, I make sure that people agree on some common values, like three-quarters of people wearing masks, but not any particular innovation.

Audrey Tang: My role is more like a conduit where the innovations that happen on the ground, instead of being frustrated that nobody listens to them, gets instead amplified to everybody so that we can iterate every week at the time.

Audrey Tang: We say, “Every Thursday, we roll out a new version that take care of all the social innovation, civic innovation that happened in the previous week.” That’s higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more connection in the form of DevOps.

Ben Mardell: What I’m hearing, I love the term inclusive playground. It’s like you’re setting up a space for other people to be able to play…

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Ben Mardell: …with ideas, and iterate, and innovate. It makes me think, have you familiar with the anthropologist and anarchist, David Graeber?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Ben Mardell: In his last book that he did with David Wengrow, “The Dawn of Everything…”

Audrey Tang: The Dawn of Everything.

Ben Mardell: I love that book.

Audrey Tang: Me, too.

Ben Mardell: He talks of fear. To me, I didn’t read it about play, but he talked about play as a place of…There’s this line about people being stuck in certain problems. He writes, “When did we forget that we were playing?”

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Ben Mardell: To me and some colleagues, we’ve talked about then playful politics. I wonder if that term resonates with you in any way.

Audrey Tang: I said quite publicly that the reason why we counter the pandemic without a single layer of lockdown, and the infodemic without any administrative take down was of three pillars. They’re fast, fair, and fun.

Audrey Tang: Optimizing for fun is very important in politics. If it’s not fun, then people would not share those innovations to others. If our basic reproduction number, the R-value, of our innovation is lower than that of conspiracy theory, or than that of the vaccine containing nanobots, or the [laughs] masks containing 5G antenna, or whatever…

Audrey Tang: They’re viral. They have a high R-value. If our communication, our innovations are even more fun than those disinformations, then it makes sure that we have this mental vaccine. It’s like people have this inoculation of the mind, what they laugh about.

Audrey Tang: Wear a mask to protect your own face against your own dirty hands as portrayed by a cute spokesdog, the Zongchai. People laugh about it. They share about it. They learned that mask is there to protect you against your own dirty, unwashed hands.

Audrey Tang: Then, the other conspiracy theory about the 5G antenna, or whatever, simply do not take hold, because people are in a playful mood. If you are in a playful, co-creative mood, there’s nowhere for the conspiracy theories, for the disinformation to take hold.

Ben Mardell: When I heard you say fast, fair, and fun in that interview, I was like, “It was so distant, though, from the experience in the United States at that moment that it was like…”

Ben Mardell: I don’t know. I almost drove off the road when I was in the car. I think that idea of being in a playful mindset inoculating you against the non-fun that we experience a lot is a lovely idea.

Ben Mardell: Which moves to my second question, which is how did you get this way? [laughs] I don’t know of you. Thinking about childhood experiences with your family, your parents, with friends, do you have a narrative about yourself of how you were able to get to this point where I think is pretty playful?

Audrey Tang: Part of it is because my dad took on a so-called Socrates method in raising me. Basically, the idea is that he never hands me any authoritarian answers or authoritative answers. There’s no correct answer. If I want something, if I shout that I want something, or whatever, he always makes sure that I must make a case argument.

Audrey Tang: He would not debate me. He would simply say, as Socrates does in the dialogues, that this is self-inconsistent. “You assume something, and then you say something else. It doesn’t follow, or that is inherently paradoxical. You say it’s universal, but it seems peculiar to the circumstances,” and so on. He would do something philosophical.

Audrey Tang: Then, it made me realize that there really is no authoritative answer. There is only this relation of communication among the people in an inclusive playground who come to a shared horizon. As Gadamer was saying, a shared horizon about each other, and about the context.

Audrey Tang: That was my education when I was three or four years old. [laughs] I would say that it was very early in my education. Later on, because I attended three kindergartens, six primary schools, and just one year of middle high, and then I dropped out, [laughs] I never got the time to get fixated on any extrinsic scoreboard.

Audrey Tang: If you’re stuck in a primary school for six years, or stuck in an undergrad school for four years, there’s some individual-to-individual competition. Because I’m always in a school for less than a year, I’ve never done summer homework. [laughs] I was always transferring across schools during summer.

Audrey Tang: There’s nothing in me that says individual-to-individual competition, or external validation, or whatever, is useful because it simply didn’t exist in my life. Till this day, it’s all intrinsic motivation, which is why I said that it’s the only way I know [laughs] of how to learn. I don’t know any other way of learning.

Yvonne Liu: Actually, during the workshop and also the panel presentation, that was a question that keep coming up. People would say, “My five-year-old daughter is so playful, so curious. Then, I teach in the college, and my graduate students are miserable [laughs] when it comes to learning.”

Audrey Tang: I know.

Yvonne Liu: They asked us, “How do we solve this problem?” I said, “That’s the biggest mystery in education. How do we take a child, and then on the other end come up with these miserable adults through education?”

Audrey Tang: I have an anecdote to share because I was part of the 課發會, the Basic Education Curriculum Committee, the new one. When I reviewed the curriculum materials of the previous committees, I found a mistranslation that made us a part of the mystery, which is the word, competence, in education of literature.

Audrey Tang: It was mistranslated as 競爭力, as competitiveness, individual competitiveness in Taiwan. That was around the ‘90s. In every other field that’s not pedagogy, we found it’s translated as core skills, 核心職能, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: In labor, in school development, in management, and so on, competence is translated correctly. Only in my field, which is information science and computer management, information management, it’s translated as 競爭力.

Audrey Tang: It was a mistranslation, but then the pedagogy people took that in. [laughs] Then, we found 個人競爭力, the personal competitiveness, wiggling its way into our curriculum language, which is completely wrong. It was probably a naive mistranslation.

Audrey Tang: People confused of the group-to-group or economy-to-economy competition on the wider scale versus the intra-group, like individual-to-individual competition, which is harmful to the competitiveness of the group. [laughs] There was a mistake.

Audrey Tang: In the new curriculum committee, we overcompensated that, and deliberately translated competence as 素養, which is internal competence, like the intrinsic playful competence.

Audrey Tang: That was quite confusing, because 素養 was not a popular term in pedagogy in Taiwan. It was more like people who were very well-versed in classical reading, [laughs] or whatever.

Yvonne Liu: Yes.

Audrey Tang: It’s more like 美德 virtue, and so on. We choose that translation so that people can never mistake that for individual competitiveness.

Ben Mardell: Something that people asked yesterday at our workshop was about grades. This is now, I’m kind of referring. Can you imagine an educational system without grades? How would you help a country move in that direction?

Ben Mardell: People seemed yesterday…Well, we gave an answer, but it seems like people are stuck there. There’s the grades we have to…As a parent, it’s my job to prepare my child to make sure that they do well. That means doing well on the test, so they can have, in their minds, a successful life, whatever that means.

Audrey Tang: “It’s easy if you try,” as John Lennon was saying.

Audrey Tang: We have an upcoming ministry to be founded on August 27th. Today, we were reviewing the incoming applications to serve in the public sector, including people who were not in career public service, but rather from the…

Ben Mardell: This is your…?

Audrey Tang: This is my ministry.

Ben Mardell: Yes, by the way, congratulations.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Designated minister. People were quite happily surprised that I say that the year that you spend contributing to the community can exchange for the degrees, the diploma.

Audrey Tang: A middle-school dropout like I, my career has been dozens of years contributing to the Free Software helping those communities. Every four years of this counts as a diploma. [laughs] In terms of salary, in terms of recognition, and so on, it’s as good as a PhD or several PhDs according to the years.

Audrey Tang: The quality of your contribution is judged by peer review, by your portfolio, by your experiences, your CV. It counts more than the grade. It’s very easy to find people with A+ grades. It’s very difficult to find people with this particular combination of contributions to the community.

Audrey Tang: This actually puts you at an advantage when applying to MODA, to the Ministry of Digital Affairs. I say very publicly that if your degree is higher than mine, then you’re welcome to work in the ministry…

Audrey Tang: …which, given the basic education, is everybody.

Ben Mardell: That’s very nice. Is there anything that we’re not asking you that we should in terms of…You know what we’re trying to do? Is there anything that I should be asking you at this moment?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. What about the local context?

Ben Mardell: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Yvonne Liu: [Mandarin] ?

Colleague A: How do they were doing in Taiwan in [Mandarin] , in the first school?

Audrey Tang: In the first school?

Colleague A: Yeah, because you observe and evaluate. Actually, in the first school, they still teach as they always do.

Ben Mardell: My knowledge is…Or do you want to answer it because you know it better than I?

Yvonne Liu: Yes. The whole project that we do is that when we go to a country, we would select schools that already have playful learning. That’s why we picked the first school. That’s why we picked that thinking. It’s that you made into the research says something about it.

Colleague A: [Mandarin] .

Audrey Tang: The indicator is already local context?

Ben Mardell: Yes.

Yvonne Liu: Yes, it’s our context.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Yvonne Liu: Every place we go, there’s an indicator for. There’s one for Denmark. There’s one for United States. One for Colombia. One for South Africa. This phase of the research is actually having the teachers develop their own, instead of the researchers coming in. Taiwan is the first to do this teacher research.

Colleague A: [Mandarin] [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Which is great because if you force everyone to use the same grades, the indicators developed by the same country like the GDPs or something, then we’re back to square zero. We’ll be practicing something we teach our teachers not to do. We’ll be projecting ourself to this linear competition.

Audrey Tang: Having this development of a local context-aware is very much the same idea as we have in the mode which is appropriate technology. Technology should adapt so that people collaborate across diversity instead of the technology forces people to reduce the diversity, decimate the diversity, just to fit what the technology think as the ideal indicators.

Audrey Tang: Democracy itself can be thought of as a social technology, the people just innovate and get better over time instead of fitting ourselves into some political system designed 200 years ago, 800 years ago.

Audrey Tang: The relationship between the agents themselves, that’s the main product, not any particular code, not any particular indicator, not any particular conduct, but rather the process of everybody forming this conversation together. That some people say it’s a relationship capital or relationship muscle is the main product of this silo of policy-making.

Ben Mardell: To answer your question, those indicators to me are so radically democratic. To talk about being brave, courageous, not accepting this answer, it’s…

Colleague A: It’s a part we’d imagined. [Mandarin] is one that I really like than an indicator.

Ben Mardell: I’m the least familiar in the room with the Taiwanese context. From what I know, this speaks to this moment in history very specifically. I also was very happy to see that the other four indicators have a similar aesthetic as. This is very different. It made me quite happy that it is different.

Ben Mardell: It spoke as a possibility of having it being more authentic. It wasn’t like, “We’ll tinker a little bit. We’ll change a few words here and there to make it fit for us.” No. We’re starting from the bottom-up and creating our own. It’s the only idea that I think is that there should be indicators.

Ben Mardell: That helps guide a group of educators into thinking what are our values and goals, but not that we have to fit into this already-established model.

Audrey Tang: It’s a device for communication. It’s not a device, a mode to constrain.

Ben Mardell: Exactly. I left yesterday’s workshop feeling a little bit more optimistic about the world.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Colleague A: [Mandarin] .

Audrey Tang: To interpret a little bit…

Ben Mardell: I appreciate that.

Audrey Tang: When we’re developing the core basic education curriculum, although this intrinsic word, competence, is very prominent, there’s a very practical challenge, which is the teachers themselves, especially more senior ones. They were not themselves brought up in such a pedagogical environment.

Audrey Tang: When we say that just make sure that people are autonomous, interaction, common good, and so on, it sounds very good, but they fall back to the old habits of trying to find those linear individual grades. In addition to their own experience, there’s also the expectation of parents and so on of course.

Audrey Tang: A lot of the work that you all doing together, it’s indeed to provide a context for the teachers to transition to a more playful mindset by imbuing into their own experience this playfulness. They can then find some first-hand experiences. On top of which, because they’re smart people, they can develop their own materials.

Audrey Tang: They first need this kindling of playful spirit within themselves so that instead of retiring…

Audrey Tang: …they can upcycle their own materials so that they can empower more children in the future. This is very important. In our original planning, it would take around six years for all the different teachers, especially in the primary school level, to immerse themselves into this new curriculum community.

Audrey Tang: Experimental education community in Taiwan, up to 10 percent of students may be educated outside of the curriculum. Of course, they have different [inaudible 27:22] this one, all sorts of different ways of doing education. Because this is in the public and we all share the same core values of competence, the idea is that the material themselves may change.

Audrey Tang: Experimental education is more like a research branch. The institutional one, more like a development branch. At least, because they’re united by these ideas of common competencies, these researches can be turned into implementations in a very quick fashion.

Audrey Tang: Similar to how the pharmacists and the people queuing working together to make new educational systems at the same way we do our counter pandemic systems.

Ben Mardell: You’ve already told me that you don’t solve problems.

Audrey Tang: I don’t.

Ben Mardell: No. Can I describe a problem in the US context, and have you think together what…?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I can live with the problem together.

Ben Mardell: The biggest problem, as you were talking about this, I was struck by a radical faith in other people that is completely absent from the US educational system.

Ben Mardell: Our national education doesn’t trust the states. Then, the state level doesn’t trust the district level. The district levels don’t trust their principals. The principals don’t trust their teachers, and no one trusts the kids. What I mean by trust the kids is that there’s no fundamental faith that kids want to learn, [laughs] which seems the most crazy part of the system.

Ben Mardell: As I said, I’ve never met a six-year-old who doesn’t want to learn how to read, or is curious about math. Even a high schooler who is a little disenfranchised is interested in something. It may not be the curriculum in front of them. It could be calculus, cars, or cosmetics, but they’re interested in something.

Ben Mardell: I think that we’re stuck because of this lack of trust. Sitting with this problem, what would you…Do you have any suggestions about it?

Audrey Tang: To give no trust is to get no trust. It’s paramount that we start trusting strangers, trusting random people online. That’s what I do.

Audrey Tang: When I dropped out of middle school, I attended this virtual Cornell University project called arXiv, A-R-X-I-V, where people announce their preprints even before they go to the journals. I would bring them and email researchers saying, “I found a typo here, or there is a citation error here.”

Audrey Tang: Something like that. Across the Internet, they didn’t know I was 14 or 15 years old. I got in touch with some of the leading researchers like Douglas Hofstadter of artificial intelligence, and so on, who replied back with [Mandarin] because he knows Mandarin. [laughs] I don’t even have to look up dictionaries.

Audrey Tang: These are fond memories. That empowered me, so that when my interest in studying swift trust, which is how come people trust people over the Internet easier than we trust people face to face? That was my research topic back when I was 14. Actually, all the way to when I was 41 now. [laughs] I was studying this issue.

Audrey Tang: In addition to the fast, fair, and fun, there’s this fundamental trust. That if people took so much time and care to publish their research online under Creative Commons of the nexus already, they’re probably friendly people.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like they’d go all the way to say no to your email inquiry. Pairing our students to such communities of practice, this is very important, especially in the more rural areas, in places with less social privilege.

Audrey Tang: If we use video conferencing starting this semester, I will have a laptop for each child there to connect them with the people who are already in the communities of practice, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Then, we trust the children to use the tablet well. Because we trust the children, the children may trust us back. That’s the fundamental idea of a, as I mentioned, inclusive playground.

Ben Mardell: Yes. Then, because I’ve been immersed in this for eight years, I think about play. Play is a place where you build trust. If you’re playing with somebody, that’s how you build relationships.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. As we nowadays say over a video conference a lot, the two key things is to unmute yourself and to share your host rights.

Audrey Tang: To make sure that the students become the host of their own learning.

Ben Mardell: That’s nice. I don’t have a blog post. I have a book.

Ben Mardell: I do want to invite my colleagues if you had any other things, or you had any questions for us, too.

Audrey Tang: I’m good.

Ben Mardell: Great.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Ben Mardell: My head will be spinning for a few days, [laughs] at least, after this conversation. I appreciate it.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Ben Mardell: Thank you. Not just your time, but your thoughts and your work.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.