​And what this tells us about learning

​Back in the 1980's Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter created a 'computer supported intentional learning environment' (CSILE) for a kind of learning that they called 'knowledge building'.  A more recent version of this software called called Knowledge Forum®, is being used all over the world. CEDIR (the Cambridge Educational Dialogue research group) are working with Carol Chan, Jan van Aalst, Cindy Tong and other members of the Knowledge Forum team in Hong Kong University (https://kbc2.edu.hku.hk/). This collaboration has reminded me of what a great idea Knowledge Forum is and how many of its features can be used to illustrate and exemplify dialogic learning. Marlene writes about this invention:
 ​
'The heart of CSILE/Knowledge Forum is a multimedia community knowledge space. In the form of notes, participants contribute theories, working models, plans, evidence, reference material, and so forth to this shared space. The software provides knowledge building supports both in the creation of these notes and in the ways they are displayed, linked, and made objects of further work. Revisions, elaborations, and reorganizations over time provide a record of group advances, like the accumulation of research advances in a scholarly discipline'. (https://www.ikit.org/fulltext/CSILE_KF.pdf)
 
Knowledge Forum is intended to be an educational version of science where science is understood to be a global networked shared inquiry or dialogue. Students work together in small groups to come up with questions and then inquire into these together by making hypotheses and supporting these with arguments and evidence. Although there are many face to face discussions the claims and evidence for them is uploaded in the form of 'notes' in the shared forum space.

Example of a Knowledge Forum map[1]
 
In building this shared knowledge map students are helped by guides or 'scaffolds' - the row of buttons on the left hand side of the screen. These can be customised depending on the topic and the age of the kids but are usually based around theories, evidence to support the theories and, of course, challenges with counter-evidence. What has always excited me about Knowledge Forum though is one special scaffold: the 'rise above' scaffold or button. Marlene writes about this button:
 
' ...the most constructive way of dealing with divergent or opposing ideas is not to decide on a winner or a compromise position but rather to create a new idea that preserves the value of the competing ideas while “rising above” their incompatibilities. In the simplest cases a rise-above may be simply a summary or distillation; in the most compelling cases, the rise-above presents a new idea that all the participants can recognize as an advance over their previous ideas.'
 
One aspect of rise above move is encapsulating an area of dialogue. Other contributions can be dragged and dropped into the rise above button such that it is seen to represent a whole network of nodes. This is useful to simplify an over complex map. But, much more than this, the 'rise above' button is used to express a new insight that integrates the debate so far by making sense of it.
 
CSILE/Knowledge Forum has been around for over 30 years and if you search you can find many examples of maps and 'rise above' moves online. The examples seem to be mostly about science topics with children exploring questions that they themselves ask such as 'why does it rain?' or 'why are leaves green?'. But this approach is not limited to stem areas. Recently in Hong Kong a class of high school students of 15 to 16 years old explored the question: 'what is design?'. This inquiry included dialogue, conducted within in the Knowledge Forum system, with design professionals and academics while these were physically located outside of the classroom. The students began focussing on the idea that design is about 'solving problems' but increasingly explored the overlap between design and self-expression through art. Their final 'rise-above' move was to recognise that good design combined both utilitarian problem solving and a more artistic expression of a point of view on reality realised in each of the little choices that were made in process of design itself.
 
Is 'rise above' pushed or pulled?
 
The idea that learning involves a 'rise above' move is not new. Piaget wrote about how learning involves the development of schemas or 'cognitive structures'. When the data do not fit with the existing schema this leads, he wrote, to 'disequilibrium' which is uncomfortable forcing a new more adequate schema to emerge. He called this process 'accommodation'. The problem with this account from Piaget is that he implies that 'rise above' is not creative but is necessary, pushed from below by logical contradiction. But his theory has not been well supported by the empirical evidence. We are all, apparently, quite capable of living with contradictions in different areas of our experience. The formation of more adequate schema does not happen automatically. It can happen, but only when these different areas are brought into conscious dialogue with each other.  Our capacity to rise above is not so much pushed from below by unconscious brain mechanisms as pulled from above by the promise of a new, more comprehensive vision that emerges only within dialogue.
 
So how does this work? In every dialogue there is not just my voice and your voice but there is also a third voice, the 'witness' which is the emergent perspective arising out of the dialogue as whole. When we 'rise above' we leave our initial position behind in order to inhabit a new more collective and more comprehensive perspective. Being able to rise above in this way is not just about logic it is also requires what could be called a virtue. To be able to rise above you have first to be able to listen to the voice of truth, or at least the voice of a perspective that is more true in the context.  
 
When I think of my own experiences of learning it is rise-above moments that come to mind. Moments when I was led to understand something after engaging in a shared enquiry with other points of view that challenged my original ideas and made me realise that I had been partial and limited and that there is a different way of seeing that makes much better sense of things. Understanding how the rise above move happens can give us insight into the essence of learning and so enable us to design educational encounters that can better support learning.
 
Rise above and science
 
Currently as I write, a great deal of collective learning is going on in response to the challenge of a global pandemic. This is a global shared inquiry mediated by the Internet. At the very end of last year the WHO spotted a new virus in Wuhan, China; by the end of January this year Chinese doctors had sequenced the whole genome of COVID19 and shared it on the Internet, by 16th March the first dose of a possible vaccine was developed and administered in the USA. Information and theories about how best to respond to the pandemic are being shared around the world. Most agree that we need to trust the science, including the science of crowd behaviour, but it is clear that science here is complex and uncertain, involving a debate between experts who have a range of views. What makes this debate 'science' is not just the reference to empirical evidence but also the motivation of the participants.  What defines science is never a fixed method, after all the appropriateness of any method also always needs to be argued for, but it is much more an  attitude - an orientation towards the truth which can best be seen when people change their minds and rise above egotism or tribalism to see the things in a new way, a way that better fits the arguments and the evidence.

As C. S. Pierce argued over 100 years ago, scientific truth is not a simple idea - it is an ideal - an ideal of the future - the ideal of what scientists will agree on after all the relevant research has been done and every possible avenue gone down. It is this future that calls to us when we find ourselves able to rise above.
 
Dialogic education with networked technology of the kind that is exemplified by Knowledge Forum® is not always the most efficient way to learn curriculum content. It can certainly do that but much more than that, it is a good way to teach children to have a passion for the truth. It is relevant that this essence of learning is not a brain mechanism or even a word, but a button on a screen enabling the creation of a new node in a shared network. Learning is not individual but collective, always indissolubly both human and machine. I wager that the perspective of the future will reveal that children learning how to use the rise above button is the kind of education that we need as a species if we are to survive and thrive in this complex, interconnected and highly unpredictable universe.
 
Some possible further reading
 
Chan, C., Tong, Y., & van Aalst, J. C. W. (2019). Progressive dialogue in computer-supported collaborative knowledge Building. In Mercer, N., Wegerif, R and Major, L (Eds) The Routledge international handbook on research on dialogic education (pp. 469-484). Routledge.
 
Kemple, B. (2019) C. S. Peirce on Science and Belief
https://epochemagazine.org/c-s-peirce-on-science-and-belief-9e1283348c2
 
Wegerif, R. (2019). Towards a dialogic theory of education for the Internet Age. In Mercer, N., Wegerif, R and Major, L (Eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education, (pp 14-26) Routledge 
(PDF online)

[1] Figure from  Milinovich, S and Ma, L (2018) Promoting Student Engagement and Well-being through Community Knowledge Advancement. Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age: Making the Learning Sciences Count, 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329840876_Promoting_Student_Engagement_and_Well-being_through_Community_Knowledge_Advancement

Perez Linares, J. and Wegerif, R. (2019) Dialogar para pensar y aprender juntos en el aula. Mexico city: Porrua

Unfortunately, our face-to-face reading group about Stiegler scheduled at Cambridge for Monday 25th has had to be cancelled. The third and final face to face reading group on the 2nd December about Embodied Cognition is also cancelled. There is a strike. Tech-Cedir will look at these issues again next term.

In my previous blog in this thread towards-a-theory-of-ed-tech-introducing-simondon.html I proposed  developing a theory of educational technology together and introduced the first paper on Simondon. Today I am introducing this paper on Stiegler and explaining why I think that Stiegler might have something to offer our emerging new theory of Educational Technology.

The focus reading is: Roberts, Ben (2012) Technics, individuation and tertiary memory: Bernard Stiegler's challenge to media theory. New Formations, 77 (1). pp. 8-20. ISSN 0950-2378 .
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/57022/1/roberts-nf-prepress.pdf
 
But the discussion is looking Stiegler in general including, for example, his recent comments on the Internet http://www.samkinsley.com/2013/11/21/bernard-stiegler-the-net-blues/

Stiegler builds on from Simondon.
 
Firstly he takes Simondon's account of the distinctive logic of technical objects and their individuation and goes further to focus on the individuation of the network that unites them. Technical objects individuate with their milieus, as Simondon put it and that milieu can  include a network without which they could not exist. Cars require petrol stations, roads, supplies of spares and garage mechanics etc. Whereas Simondon wrote about machines Stiegler is more attuned to the Internet and the emerging Internet of Things. Does this network have its own logic? It seems to have. Something to do with universalising, connecting everything and everyone.
 
Secondly Stiegler points out that what we think of as human is always already bound up with technology such that human development has been and continues to be a co-evolution between the organic element of human and the technical element. Simondon said something similar but he referred to the human element required in the evolution of technology as being 'anticipation'. In the iterative cycles of innovation human intelligence is needed to read the cues and anticipate what is required next for the concretisation journey of the technical object.
 
Stiegler looks at human evolution and spends some time establishing that this 'anticipation' is of technical origin. Or rather it is undecidably human/technical or what/who. So, for example, the frontal cortex grew at the same time as, and in slow conjunction with, the anticipation required to make tools like flint chipped axes. Tool making led to human capacity to anticipate as much as other way around. Part of this story is also communication. Language is also more than biological  human individual. Words are jointly forged artefacts. Their use implies anticipation. Thinking how others will respond. So what we think of as a who question - who are we? - is also a what question. We are technology on the inside from the beginning.
 
[Note: Donald Merlin and Tomasello cover similar ground but focus on communication in a more obviously dialogic way. Merlin points to the splitting of the working memory into two in mimesis or gestural communication to see oneself from the the point of view of the other in communication. Tomasello writes of the need for 'dialogic representions' to handle the joint attention needed by apes to understand their increasingly complex social lives.]
 
These two moves by Stiegler going beyond Simondon are  interesting for a theory of educational technology.  To be human is to be technological. What we are educating is not just the biological individual but the biological plus the technical. 'Person plus' as David Perkins puts it. But more than that the individuation of specific humans seems to be part of the individuation journey of a socio-technical network. Education is not just about human desires it is following a larger than human logic. So we try to expand literacy without worrying too much whether non-literate cultures really want this 'gift' because we are already literacy on the inside (e.g millenium goals). Now there are moves to promote 21st Century skills or 'Future skills' that are the needs of the emerging network society on the inside. Skills such as how to work together with tools on the internet to get things done even when not co-located. This contrasts to the still common view that ed tech are tools to serve separate education goals - now the ed tech becomes the goal in the sense of teaching how to participate in the tech and with the tech. (Wegerif, 2015).
 
For Simondon and for Stiegler, transindividuation is carried by cultural tools. Education is not just about individuation it is about transindividuation. Transindividuation is an open-ended ongoing process with multiple facets.
 
One way to understand this is to take Oakeshott's claim that education is induction into 'the conversation of mankind' through which we become fully human and to push this a little further. Oakeshott ignored the tech required for his vision as literacy was naturalised for him. Clearly the conversation of mankind as taught at Cambridge in his day did not include the voices of non-literates - he did not see the problem with that. With new tech we have to see literacy as not naturalised but as just one technical system of communication amongst others. Education is induction into the dialogue of all things, not just all people, mediated by a range of technics, not just literacy.  Through education we move in the direction of becoming most fully ourselves by becoming participants in an ongoing journey of humanisation that is also transhumanisation. In small-scale oral societies education had an endpoint  - you knew when you were fully human - it was when the ancestors spoke to you and welcomed you in. With literacy, globalising empires and capitalism a new vision of the fully human emerged - the global citizen. But if we acknowledge the independent voices of technics and things, this humanism is no longer enough - education becomes induction into the ongoing journey towards universal dialogue - all matter, all animals, all peoples, all gods etc. I see this emerging new post-human vision of education as linked to science in the broad 'wissenschaft' sense where science is understood as open-minded shared inquiry.
 
Stiegler, technics and time
 
Steigler's account of the role of technics in time is interesting for an emerging theory of ed tech. Roberts, in the reading, outlines this very well:
 
'Husserl distinguishes between primary retention or memory and secondary retention or memory. Primary retention is the kind of memory that is necessary to perceive a temporal object such as a melody: in effect the melody will not exist as an object of perception unless the listener retains or remembers the notes that precede the one that is currently heard. Secondary retention is, as it were, the more traditional understanding of memory where, for example, I remember a melody I heard last week. There is also a third kind of memory, which Husserl calls ‘image consciousness’ and Stiegler calls ‘tertiary memory’ where an external object, such as a picture or photograph, reactivates a memory. Now for Husserl primary memory can be rigorously distinguished from secondary or tertiary memory because it belongs to the act of perception itself, whereas secondary or tertiary memory involve acts of imaginative selection. Secondary and tertiary memory are thus derivative from primary memory, secondary memory or our perception of the temporal object. ' Stiegler reverses that order. Our experience of time, he says,  requires and is mediated by technics.
 
To put this another way, the Internet is not just a repository of our experiences, it constitutes them. When I click on a music video I have a unique experience.
 
This is also an account of how come we experience things in time. Historical time, the past that we have not lived, is embodied in objects, texts, videos etc and our experience of time emerges in a kind of dialogue between primary time (the resonance of now) with this tertiary or historical time which is the time of technics. We have conscious awareness of time because of technics.
 
One way to investigate education technology is in relation to its role in inducting students into time (http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/education-as-a-journey-into-time)
 
Alienation and ed tech
 
As we saw Simondon corrected Marx to say that the problem of alienation is not so much about ownership of machinery as about participation in the design of machinery. Workers or consumers who are not participating creatively in technology development have their individuation capped - they are truncated and unhappy - not part of the larger transindividuation flow process.
 
Stiegler refers to the Internet as a 'pharmakon' concept in this respect - pharmakon means both poison and remedy in Ancient Greek and was used by Plato to refer to writing in Socrate's dialogue with Phaedrus. Writing was offered by a god to the Greeks as a remedy curing their problems but Socrates saw it more as a poison destroying current  morality and education based on practices of face to face dialogue and memorisation. (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html) (http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis and also Bernard in a video https://youtu.be/SRNjImtIA0M Stiegler Keynote www2012 Lyons).
 
Anamnesis is 'calling to mind' without tech and hypomnesis is memory tech, photos, texts etc . The danger Stiegler sees is that of control of big data. The big data of the Internet is our collective life and our possibility of trans-individuation. Is the culture/data something experienced as opposed to us or experienced as something that we are part of? (http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/who-are-we-really-a-blog-for-christmas)
 
This is about our experience of time. Some forms of education separate the hypomnesis from the anamnesis - historical/cultural time from everyday time. Other forms unite the moment with the history/culture - hypomnesis and  anamnesis can be united in dialogue creatively and dynamically. This is the idea of dialogic education from Freire where the dialogue has no limits but includes dialogue between the moment and the culture or between primary memory and Stiegler's tertiary memory. Ed tech has a crucial role in facilitating that dialogue.
 
Wikis and peer-to-peer learning communities enable not only access to collective knowledge but participation in producing it. Tools such as 'tinkerplots'  give interactive access to understanding and working with collective data. Citizen science projects on, e.g, global warming or exploring the interstellar debris of the big bang, give everyone access to live participation in collective inquiry into reality both producing and consuming shared understanding.
 
So the Internet could be reducing us to isolated passive individuals, dumbed down and distracted, at the mercy of manipulation by big companies - or perhaps it has the potential to facilitate the emergence of a collective intelligence that is much more than human. Stiegler shares his concern about the danger of the Internet shaping our brains in a limiting way http://www.samkinsley.com/2013/11/21/bernard-stiegler-the-net-blues/ But perhaps this depends to some extent on us, our foresight and our use of ed tech. We could use it as a tool to deliver fixed high status 'knowledge' - a framework that locates each present moment in its place and each person in their place - or we could use it as a way to engage each moment and each person more creatively in constructive dialogue with every other moment and every other person - participating in a collective movement of transindividuation that is also a transformation - a turning inside out - of reality.
 
For Stiegler this is an undecidable question or an aporia. He is side-stepping the potential charge of technological determinism and teleology. But - according to Simondon - our role as researchers is much like that of any other creative engineer - to read the cues and participate in a process of innovation that is more than just our intentions or the intentions of the machine but a kind of synergy. The emergent logic of what needs to be done to take things forward. One possible reading of our situation - a reading inspired by Stiegler's developments from Simondon - is that a coherent human/technical/natural planetary intelligence has the potential to emerge in the next hundred years or so and that the use of education technology can be defined by the role that it can play in facilitating that process. 
 
 
A glossary of terms:
http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Stiegler%20glossary.pdf
 
References:
http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis
 
https://www.academia.edu/20136235/A_Summary_of_Bernard_Stiegler_Technics_and_Time_1
Dan Ross
 
Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time: The fault of Epimetheus (Vol. 1). Stanford University Press.
 
https://youtu.be/SRNjImtIA0M Stiegler Keynote www2012 Lyons
 
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Harvard University Press.
 
Tomasello, M., & Herrmann, E. (2010). Ape and human cognition: What's the difference?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(1), 3-8.
 
Perkins, D. N. (1993). Person-plus: A distributed view of thinking and learning. Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations, 88-110.
 
Wegerif, R. (2015). Technology and teaching thinking: Why a dialogic approach is needed for the twenty-first century. In The Routledge international handbook of research on teaching thinking (pp. 451-464). Routledge.
 
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum.
 

Some notes to introduce the Tech-CEDiR reading group sessions, especially the first one on Simondon.

Tech-CEDiR Reading Group (Session 1) – 6th Nov 11:30-12:30 – DMB GS4
Simondon
Dumouchel, P. (1992). Gilbert Simondon's plea for a philosophy of technology. Inquiry, 35(3-4), 407-421.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291258917_Gilbert_Simondon's_Plea_for_a_Philosophy_of_Technology
​
Tech-CEDiR Reading Group (Session 2) – 25th Nov 11:30-12:30 – DMB 1S3
Stiegler
Roberts, Ben (2012) Technics, individuation and tertiary memory: Bernard Stiegler's challenge to media theory. New Formations, 77 (1). pp. 8-20. ISSN 0950-2378 .
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/57022/1/roberts-nf-prepress.pdf


Tech-CEDiR Reading Group (Session 3) – 2nd Dec 11:30-12:30 – DMB 2S4 RECS
Chimero, A (2013) Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Review of General Psychology © 2013 American Psychological Association 2013, Vol. 17, No. 2, 145–15
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.400.9177&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Rationale for reading group

I think that we need a proper theory of educational technology and I hope that this Tech-CEDIR reading group will help us to develop it. The idea is that, thinking about these papers and responding in face to face meetings, via twitter and on this blog, we might together begin to emerge a theory of the nature and role of ed tech. Part of that discussion might be suggestions for further readings as well as if and how the group should continue.

The three initial readings, on Simondon, on Stiegler and on radical embodied cognition are meant to stimulate discussions on three possible elements of a theory of ed tech.

Firstly, from Simondon, that technical objects or artefacts do have an essence that is different both from natural objects and from humans. Key to this is his account of individuation which suggests we should look at technical objects from the point of view of how they become what they are in a process of 'ontogenesis' that is not simply determined by human intentions or by material properties.

Secondly, from Stiegler, that what we think of as human is always already bound up with technology such that human development has been and continues to be a co-evolution between the organic element of human and the technical element. This is interesting because it potentially gives a special role to education and to ed tech in making humans and in any future project to make humans differently. Steigler shifts attention to the individuation of the network within which technical objects exist along with humans.

Thirdly the perspective of radically embodied cognition suggests how our technology can be understood as part of cognition. It follows that an education for thinking that is not only about the thinking of the organic individual (the brain?) but also a thinking of the human-technology network. This again potentially offers a role for ed tech at the heart of education.

Bypassing Heidegger

Other initial readings could have been possible. Inquiry into the philosophy of technology often starts with Heidegger. Winograd and Flores' seminal book 'Understanding Computers and Cognition: A new foundation for design' show how Heideggers philosophy is relevant to ed tech. Heidegger's distinction between the 'present at hand' (stuff we see in front of us as if independent of us in the theoretical attitude) and the 'ready to hand' (stuff we are always already involved with in doing things in the world in a practical way) is fundamental. It can be approached using the common expression 'a man with a hammer is a man in search of a nail'. 'Breakdown' is when the ready to hand become present at hand - when the skype call freezes and we move from a dialogue to looking at an image on a screen. This implies that technology extends the human body. But Heidegger's vision of technology seemed to stop with the 'techne' of the ancient greeks which referred to crafts such as weaving. Heidegger did not like modern technology very much. He preferred to spend his time in a simple hut in the Black Forest. He saw modern tech as embodying rationalism in a way that inevitably 'enframed' people, cutting them off from Being and turning the environment into resources to be exploited. I think that Simondon is a better place to start because he loved technology and liked to play with machines and engage with the latest hard science like de Broglie's quantum theory. Levinas's essay on Gagarin contains an excellent dismissal of Heidegger's view of technology.

'Technology wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions regarding place. From this point on, an opportunity appears to us: to perceive men outside the situation in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its nudity. Socrates prefers the town in which one meets people to the countryside and the trees.' (Levinas, 1990)

Here Levinas links Heidegger’s rejection of modern technology to his Nazi party involvement and his love of trees. Arguably Heidegger’s attitude to technology can still be found in Waldorf and Montessori schools and strands of the ecology movement. Human scale tech -good: big global networked tech - bad. But this attitude seems just not very relevant anymore and not very useful to help us forge a vision of education for the Internet Age so I suggest we just move on more rapidly leaving Heidegger grumbling in our wake.

Why Simondon is so interesting

Simondon was a Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne who engaged traditional theory with modern science and technology. Merleau-Ponty was on his PhD panel. He had a big influence on Deleuze and on Stiegler. The paper we are reading introduces his philosophy of technology. (See also Steven Shaviro blog on this http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=298) Simondon is also interesting for his related account of psychic and collective individuation (see Steven Shaviro blog on this http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=471)

Simondon opposes the opposition of technology to nature that sees technology as a tool for controlling nature.
1) Tools are not just passively used: they are reconfigured, reinvented, extended and mutated in the process of use - this is the individuation of technical objects (consider design-based research on new ed tech tools - it is about iteration, resistance and contingency)

2) Technology is a network of relations: far from marking our alienation from the natural world, technology is what mediates between humankind and nature. Every technical object has some agency and every subject has some materiality.

All individuation,- natural forms eg crystals, organic life, technical objects, individual human selves and also trans-individual subjectivity - originates in the pre-individual. The pre-individual refers to the state of metastability that makes possible each individuation. Pure pre-individual actually exists ‘before’ any individuation – in an ‘anteriority’ that is not temporal, since time itself ‘develops out of the pre-individual just like the other dimensions according to which the process of individuation takes place’ (2005, p 34). Simondon’s inspiration for the pre-individual comes from thermodynamic metastability, and also from the famous wave-particle duality in quantum physics, in so far as this duality is ‘more than one’ and in so far as the particle is, strictly speaking, not an individual. (Barthelemy, 2012)

Simondon put forward an original theory of information as that which 'informs' - or has the capacity to inform - individuation. This is a bit like Bateson's idea of information as based on differences that make a difference. Transduction is one process whereby information can support individuation. Consider how a catalyst can lead to crystals forming rapidly in a super-saturated solution. Thought tends to work like that. Information technology has the potential to support the ontogenesis of transindividualities that are indissociably human and technical. Simondon wrote that the ‘value of the dialogue of the individual with the technical object’ is ‘to create a domain of the transindividual, which is different from the community’ (2005 p515).

This vision has inspired new form of Marxism (eg see Antonio Negri). Simondon's idea is that the alienation of the workers in industrialisation was not primarily about not owning the machines they worked on in factories - - but was more fundamentally about not being able to change those machines or to think creatively together with those machines. To be unalienated is to be creative and to be creative is not just to retreat to a hut in the Black Forest to write books and arrange flowers but is perhaps more fundamentally about being able to participate in transindividual collective activity which is supported by technological networks.

For Simondon technical objects always have a subjective as well as an objective side - they have a phenomenology. For example, think of the experience of using the internet which some refer to as being in cyberspace. Moving around cyberspace is not the same as moving around fibre-optic cable networks. Similarly using tools in education has a subjective side. We learn to understand at the same time as we learn to use our tools. Think of a slide-rule or an abacus. Now think of various software tools. This has become known as instrumentalization within ed tech (see impedevo et al 2017).

Before the next reading I will say something more about why Stiegler is interesting for our project, and then why radical embodied cognition might be interesting. Unless someone else volunteers to do this of course

Please post comments on the first reading in response to this blog or in response to a Twitter Chat that Genevieve Smith-Nunes will organise around the dates of the reading groups https://twitter.com/pegleggen




Barthélémy, J. H. (2012). Fifty key terms in the works of Gilbert Simondon. Gilbert Simondon: being and technology, 203-231.

Impedovo, M. A., Andreucci, C., & Ginestié, J. (2017). Mediation of artefacts, tools and technical objects: An international and French perspective. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 27(1), 19-30.

Levinas, E. (1990). Heidegger, Gagarin and Us, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism,

Winograd T, Flores F (1986) Understanding computers and cognition: a new foundation for design. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc., Menlo Park
Simondon 2005 L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Jérôme Millon, coll. Krisis).

Against democracy

Democracy is one of the fundamental British values that schools now have to teach children in the UK. But is it really such a good thing? Most people understand democracy as making decisions on the basis of counting votes. As a value this roughly translates as: if it is popular then it is right. But if a majority of people vote for a politician who denies the reality of man-made global warming that does not make this view right. Whether something is true or not cannot be decided by voting. Similarly, if a majority of people vote in favour of aggression against a religious minority, this does not make such behaviour ethically acceptable. It is a shocking but true fact that Hitler was democratically elected to power in Germany in 1933 when he was first appointed as chancellor after his party gained the largest share of the vote in an election. In practice democracy is often the moral equivalent of two tigers and a lamb voting about what to have for dinner.
 
A common response to criticisms of democracy is to quote Churchill from a speech in 1947: 'Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time'. Accepting this challenge, let us consider briefly another option one which is perhaps the most 'other' of other possible systems at the moment : 'theocracy' as championed by Iran, by the so-called Islamic State and previously by Tibet. If you look up the meaning of theocracy in the dictionary you will be told that it means 'rule by priests'. But this is a rather obviously motivated mis-representation of the kind that we commonly impose upon  views that we do not like and cannot be bothered to take the trouble to try to understand. Just as democracy means rule ('kratos') by the people ('demos') so theocracy means rule by God ('theos') and those who support theocracy are probably very well aware that their priests are not God.

For Theocracy
 
The superiority of theocracy over democracy can be brought out by considering the success of natural science. At the moment there is a competition between string theory and loop quantum gravity to see which offers the best account of the nature of matter. This competition will not be resolved by voting. Deciding on this issue requires dialogue and experimentation where the methods used and the arguments given are all open to public scrutiny. The expectation is that the relevant community of scientists will form a consensus around the claims that are best supported by the evidence. In this shared inquiry the voice that needs to win out is not the voice of one party or the other but the voice of truth. Implied in the success of science is the idea that there is a reality in itself that is not merely a human construction. For there to be knowledge there has to be a knower of that knowledge. The ideal of knowing the truth of things is also the ideal of a kind of perfect knower for whom all is revealed. Stephen Hawking was right when he wrote that science aspires to know 'the mind of God'.[i]

A problem with theocracy in science

The ideal of a God's eye perspective [the truth of things] is a necessary ideal for there to be progress in science. However, there are good philosophical reasons for not accepting the ideal of truth that science generates. Just as we only see the landscape in front of us because we are standing within that landscape so we only ever have knowledge from a perspective. We can improve what our eyes see with instruments like telescopes and we can expand our perspective with networks, for example communicating by mobile phone with other people standing at different positions in the same shared landscape. These efforts expand knowledge but nonetheless the ideal of perfect knowledge or knowledge from no perspective whatsoever does not seem to make much sense.  

This challenge does not undermine science since in practice we never need to claim to see things as they really are in themselves, we only need to claim that some hypotheses work better than others to explain observations in a context. For example experiments in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might one day generate evidence that contradicts Gabriele Veneziano's string theory and fits best with Carlo Rovelli's quantum loop theory. But if this happens neither of these theorists will therefore imagine that they have really seen completely into the mind of God. They know that their theories are still imperfect and need to be developed but they have learnt that one of them fits the evidence better than the other at the moment. This is progress. Progress in science requires not only technical methods but also moral virtues. Science means really listening to other positions and being open to the possibility of changing your mind if necessary[ii].

For theocracy in politics

The same sort of argument that can be made for the  ideal of a Gods-eye perspective in science can also be made in the context of politics. When we say that a policy e.g caring for the elderly, is right and another policy. e.g abandoning the elderly to die alone, is wrong, we are not normally claiming that the correct view would get more votes, we are usually invoking a higher perspective. When judges, for example, have to make controversial decisions they do not think that it is acceptable for them to just follow their own opinion baed on their background, they normally try very hard to put their own  prejudices to one side in order to discern what is right [iii] Discerning what is the right thing to do involves trying to recreate, as far as this is possible, a perspective that is closer to God. The ideal behind a good political decision is one of perfect wisdom including perfect knowledge, as with science, but adding to this ideals of infinite compassion and a fairness untouched by any partiality.
 
In English the word 'good' comes from the word 'God'. Etymologically a good decision refers to a more godly decision, meaning a decision which best reflects what God would do in this situation. When asked to judge you have to think: well if I was God and knew everything, and understood everyone and had infinite compassion then what would I do?

If we translate the idea of God to be the personification and embodiment of a point of view that combines total knowledge, infinite compassion and perfect wisdom - then theocracy or rule by God is a no-brainer - it is certainly a much more convincing ideal than democracy. 

A small problem with theocracy in politics

The question theocracy raises is: how can we best discern the will of God? Here again we can learn from how progress in science works. There are no single simple fixed methods in science, the case for the appropriateness of any given method always needs to be made in the context of the inquiry. However, what is consistent across all sciences is a set of communicative virtues and practices: making arguments clearly and publicly, listening with respect to counter positions, and, above all, being open to learning from the other and being able to change one's position on the basis of evidence plus argument regardless of prior prejudice and self-interest.
 
We can apply what has been learnt from the success of science to politics. We cannot start in politics from a Godlike or perfect perspective [iv]. People value different things so what might seem like justice to one might not be considered justice by another (dialogue-and-equality.html). However we can develop ways to decide what is more just and what is less just in a context. In practice, this can mean an open and transparent public debate exploring the different arguments backed by evidence. However, as with science, the success of this public dialogue approach depends not only upon procedures but also upon the moral character and communicative virtues of those participating.  Decision makers - potentially all of us - need to have the capacity to really listen to other points of view with an open mind such that we are able to learn new things and change our minds regardless of prior prejudices, self interest and tribal identity.
 
For dialogue

A dialogue is never just between people, it also always generates a kind of witness position [v]. Bakhtin refers to this as the 'superaddressee'. The term 'superaddressee' sounds a bit technical but this is not a very complicated idea but a simple truth of experience. Try listening to yourself speak when you have to explain yourself to someone you respect and care about but disagree with. You will find that you do not only listen to your own voice, you also find yourself concerned about how you think the other person is hearing your words. However, you do not know for sure how they are responding so in reconstructing their perspective you find yourself listening to your own arguments as if from the outside, as if you were a witness listening to the dialogue. Often you can see holes in your argument and correct it as you go along. Sometimes you might see, for the first time, what is really motivating you. As Bakhtin puts it, even if the other person does not understand what you are trying to say, the witness or 'superaddressee' does. This is why it is possible to come away from a dialogue feeling frustrated that you expressed yourself badly but nonetheless clearer in your own mind about what you really think and feel.
 
Science focusses on what is true regardless of what the majority of people think. In the same way, in politics we should try to make good decisions - not just popular decisions. In the absence of a God perspective the best way to know what is true in science and what is good in politics is through free and open dialogue between all relevant perspectives such that the position best supported by the arguments and by the evidence can win out. In politics at least this dialogue is not merely cerebral but includes feelings and intuitions that arise from the extended embodiment of reconstructing in oneself how it feels to be the other. Dialogue here is a kind of self-transcending machine. It might not allow us to reach directly into the mind of God but it can expand our vision and extend our sympathies. 

Dialogue, education and the future

Democracy, when understood as rule by the people, is vulnerable to being interpreted either as counting the votes of lots of individuals each of whom is said to be equally entitled to their own opinion however ill-thought through this opinion is or, sometimes even worse, it is the will of 'the people' understood as the community of those who speak my language and think just like me (the ideal of the one mind and one heart of the German 'volk' claimed as an authority to act by Hitler, for example).

Dialogue has been associated with democracy over the years but I think that it implies a very different idea of authority. In place of rule by the people, dialogue gives us the ideal of rule by what is true and right - not as absolutes or mere ideas but as the discovery of what needs to be said and what needs to done to take us forward in this situation that is here in front of us right now.

Implementing dialogue as a system of government is not easy. In some areas of science, over the last 250 years or so, real progress has shown that rule by dialogue is possible. In law courts and in parliaments there have been examples of rule by dialogue but also examples of the failure of dialogue. Recent experiments with 'citizens assemblies' suggest ways to inject more rule by dialogue into politics [vi]. Colleagues like Michael Hogan are exploring the potential of technology to support more effective collective decision making[vii]
 
Trying to improve the future through politics often feels like starting from the wrong place. The key players have always already been shaped in ways that mean that they often seem closed to the possibility of truly learning from others. Perhaps education, more than politics, is the discipline with the greatest potential to shape the future. Education for dialogue, especially when this includes global dialogue, is a way to teach children how to transcend egotism, tribalism, and prejudice. The key dialogic skill that we need to teach is not how to ask good questions or how to critically unpack arguments, important as such skills are, but the more fundamental ability to allow oneself to be led forward by the emergent voice of what is most true here and now in the dialogue and what is most right to do here and now in this situation. In teaching dialogue we can expand minds and expand hearts, but we can also lay the human foundations for a future where politics might one day reflect some of our highest  hopes and ideals instead of, as now so often seems to be the case, reflecting only our lowest common denominators.
 
 
References 

​[i] Hawking, S. (1989). A brief history of time: from big bang to black holes. Bantam.


[ii] McIntyre, L. (2019). The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience. Mit Press.

 [iii] Dworkin, R. (2013). Religion without god. Harvard University Press.
 
[iv]Sen, A. K. (2009). The idea of justice. Harvard University Press.
and also Smith, A. (2010). The theory of moral sentiments. Penguin.
 
[v] Wegerif, R. (2019) Towards a Dialogic Theory of Education for the Internet Age. In
Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Major, L. (eds). The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education
 

[vi] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/16/citizens-assembly-ireland-abortion-referendum
 
[vii] Hogan, M., Hall, T., & Harney, O. (2017). Collective intelligence design and a new politics of system change. Civitas educationis. Education, Politics, and Culture, 6(1), 51-78.
​
See also 
​Wegerif, R., Doney, J., & Jamison, I. (2017). Designing Education to Promote Global Dialogue: Lessons from Generation Global—a Project of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Civitas educationis. Education, Politics, and Culture, 6(1), 113-129.​​


​

​Monologic is the idea that there is just one true perspective or only one correct way of looking at things. Dialogic is the contrasting idea that understanding the meaning of something requires more than one perspective or more than one voice.
 
It is easy to see why dialogue and dialogic teaching could be useful in subjects like literature and history where there are debates between competing points of view and often no certainty as to which one is right. But subjects like maths and science present themselves as essentially monologic, so why should we teach them in a dialogic way?. That 2+2=4 is simply a truth and not a matter for debate. That water boils at 100 degrees C at sea level is a fact not requiring argument and discussion surely? Nonetheless, I think that we do need dialogic education in both maths and science. This short blog explains why.
 
Last week I  gave a talk about dialogic education at a big education conference (EARLI2019 in Aachen).  I focussed on how dialogic education can expand awareness by opening up a dialogic space, widening that space by bringing in alternative perspectives and deepening that space by questioning any framing assumptions. Meaning is only possible, I claimed, in the context of dialogue between different perspectives.
 
The discussant in our symposium, Frank Fisher, said that, while this dialogue approach is obviously useful in citizenship and the humanities it might not apply so well to subjects such as maths and science where there are correct answers to be taught. Frank, a professor at Munich, is a leader in the field of argumentation research. His concern about the limits of dialogic education is probably widely shared.
 
Anna Sfard, a leader in mathematics education,  raises a similar challenge against my account of dialogic education. She quotes me writing that progress in dialogic education is 'not simply from A to B but from A to A + B' and  she points out that this does not apply to monologic subjects such as mathematics[i].
 
This critical challenge from Frank and Anna is really useful in motivating me to express what I mean more clearly and also, perhaps, to think it through a little more carefully - hence this blog.
 
When I came up with the line that Anna quotes about progress being not from A to B but from A to A + B I was pretty pleased with myself. It expresses the experience of learning by talking to people and seeing the world through their eyes. Each new voice is a new way of seeing that does not replace other voices but augments them. For example, I feel fortunate as an adult that I have not entirely lost the ways of thinking, feeling and seeing the world that I had as a child. In that respect I have not moved simply from A to B (child to adult) but from A to A +B  (from child to child plus adult).
 
But I can see that the idea that learning moves from A to A + B is a big problem if it is taken to mean that you do not just learn that 2+2=4 but also that 2+2=3 and 2+2=5. I see the problem. That does not make any educational sense at all! Let me explain myself with three short examples.

1) Seeing the pattern
 
With the direct teaching, or the A to B approach, there is a danger  that children can apparently learn that 2 + 2 = 4 without  understanding what this means.  Maybe they can 'count on' 2 fingers from an initial two fingers without understanding why 2+2 is always the same as 1+3 which is always the same as 3+1. To understand that they need to move from the procedural business of 'counting on' to grasp the concept of 'commutativity'.
 
I did some research on this with maths education specialist Carol Murphy by teaching early mathematics in combination with teaching dialogic talk. In one class we observed the children worked together in groups of three solving a simple form of magic square. They were given the numbers 3, 2 and 1 on cards and asked to arrange them in a 3 by 3 grid so that every row and column added up to the same.

Figure 1: Magic Square

Two of the group, Amy and Jack, worked industriously arranging numbers and counting them out while Judy, the third member, just sat to one side and  watched them.

‘Two, three and one’ Jack counted on his fingers, ‘that’s six’. ‘One, three and two’, Amy counted on her fingers, ‘six’.

They were succeeding at the task, finding the way in which the numbers could be used to make all the rows and columns add up to the same total but they did not seem to realise that 3 + 2 + 1 was the same as 1 + 2 + 3 and the same as 2 + 1 + 3 etc. Judy sucked her finger looking on then said: ‘They are all adding up to six, look they are all six’. Later the teacher affirmed the point that Judy had made and helped to lead the group away from procedural understanding - knowing how to go on - to conceptual understanding - knowing why. I am not sure how much teaching the ground rules of dialogic talk helped with this small breakthrough but in general dialogue in classrooms has been shown to help with the shift from procedural to conceptual understanding in maths and in science.[2]
 
2 Three voices are better than one

Working with Neil Mercer in the 1990s I first explored the impact of teaching 'thinking together' (a form of dialogic education) in the context of citizenship. We could show a development  in the quality of children's reasoning as a result of teaching Exploratory Talk (a form of dialogic talk) but this effect was hard to measure and quantify. We moved on to using standard non-verbal reasoning tests to measure the impact of dialogic education. We did this precisely because each puzzle had a right answer and so we could easily measure the improvement in problem-solving that resulted from our teaching. As a result of dialogic education many groups moved from getting answers wrong to getting them right. In this respect you could say that they moved from A to B. But our analysis showed that they often achieved this greater success through increasing the complexity of their understanding of the problem. Whereas in the pre-test they often got problems wrong by  seeing them only one way, in the post test they often got problems right by seeing them in several different ways and then discussing together which way was best.[3]

Figure 2 Problem A

Before the series of  Thinking Together lessons one group, Elaine, Danny and John,  did not talk together at all well. In the pre-test one person in the group, Elaine, worked out the answer to Problem A (above)  alone and wrote it down as number 5.  She fell into the trap of just looking at the puzzle from top to bottom. In the post-test we gave this group the same set of puzzles and they got it right. The video recording shows why. As before, it seems that the pattern of the top to bottom lines is noticed first and John offers number five as the answer. But this answer is only made as a suggestion preceded by 'I think'. Danny then put forward number two as the answer, apparently because he is looking at the horizontal pattern of the single lines. John explains (through words and pointing) that the vertical black lines have to ‘go out'. Danny in turn explains that it cannot be number five because the light lines have to ‘go in’. Each of the two boys has adopted a different perspective; John takes the side of the vertical lines, Danny that of the horizontal lines. Each can see enough to refute the position of the other but this does not yet produce the solution. Elaine then comes up with the answer which combines the vertical lines going out with the horizontal lines going in, that is number four. Once she has expressed this both Danny and John agree that she is right, nodding.

​There is a single correct answer here which they converge upon. This is monologic. But they only get it because they compare the right answer to the wrong answers. This is dialogic. Understanding the right answer means understanding why it is right which also means understanding the wrong answers in order to contrast and compare.

3 Darwin vs Lamarck

As a teenager I associated Darwin with the theory that humans had evolved from animals. I was confused when I discovered that lots of other people, Goethe for example, had suggested this same idea long before Darwin had published his 'Origin of Species'. This made me realise that I had not really understood Darwin's theory at all. Darwin had not only speculated on man evolving from animals but had offered a theory as to the mechanism whereby evolution worked. This mechanism is variation of organisms combined with selection by survival and reproduction. I really understood this more specific theory only when I saw Darwin's theory of evolution compared with Lamarck’s theory.  Lamarck’s theory is just as much a theory of evolution as Darwin's but it did not work as well to explain the available evidence. This theory is that organisms strive to adapt to their environment in their lifetimes and then passed on this adaptation on to their offspring. Giraffes that stretched to reach leaves in high trees grew longer necks and so their children inherited these longer necks.
 
Understanding the debate in the 19th century between these contrasting views of evolution helped me to understand what was special about Darwin's theory. It is also interesting that, although Lamarck’s view was 'defeated' at the time it has returned. Recent evidence has demonstrated that features acquired through experience in a lifetime can in fact be transmitted to offspring and so Lamarck's name is being referenced in biology articles once again [4].
 
My point is that, as with Mathematics, to understand a theory in science, it is not enough to just state it - it does not mean anything on its own outside of any dialogic context  - it means something in relation to the dialogue that spawned it and the ongoing dialogues that it is engaged within. To understand it then is also to understand the apparently 'wrong' theories that it contrasts with. But even these wrong theories do not really disappear from the dialogue - they remain around as resources to help us think and so to help us to be able to respond to new challenges.
 
It is true that some difference in pedagogy is required if the objective is for students to end up knowing a correct way as opposed to if the objective is to explore the range of ways. However, these different objectives and associated pedagogies can both be valued and combined in any subject area [5]. There can be convergence on a single truth in history and literature just as there can be discussion of a range of perspectives in maths and science. Arguing that progress is expansive and moves not simply from A to B but from understanding only A to understanding both A and B   is not meant to suggest that all points of view are equally valid. It is meant to suggest that understanding why one way is better than another (in a context) requires understanding the contrasting views and so requires mastering a dialogic space  [6].


[1] Sfard, A (in press for 2019) Learning, discursive faultiness and dialogic engagement. In Mercer, Wegerif and Major (eds) The Routledge international handbook of research on dialogic education.
[2] Wegerif, R. (2010) Mindexpanding. McGraw Hill
[3] Wegerif, R., Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (1999). From social interaction to individual reasoning: An empirical investigation of a possible socio-cultural model of cognitive development. Learning and instruction, 9(6), 493-516.
​[4] West-Eberhard, M. J. (2007). Dancing with DNA and flirting with the ghost of Lamarck. Biology and Philosophy, 22(3), 439-451.
[5] Scott, P. H., Mortimer, E. F., & Aguiar, O. G. (2006). The tension between authoritative and dialogic discourse: A fundamental characteristic of meaning making interactions in high school science lessons. Science education, 90(4), 605-631.
[6] Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Routledge.

​Metaphors are powerful. There are many detailed complex and subtle-sounding arguments made about education but if we clear away all of this verbiage to look behind then I think that we find only a few basic metaphors. These metaphors shape how people think about education and  how teachers teach.  

​Metaphor 1: Construction.
 
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget published 70 volumes between 1915 and 1990[i]. Only one of them contained the word construction in the title, The construction of reality in the child written in 1937. (La construction du réel chez l'enfant). However, it is this metaphor of construction that has been taken up.

​
​When I was at secondary school in the 1970's I recall long double periods of science where we worked in small groups to do experiments using equipment such as Bunsen burners and test-tubes.

  To my adolescent self, much of this seemed to be a waste of time. We often spent ages struggling to set up the equipment and then ages putting it away again, we routinely got the wrong result and it often seemed mysteriously difficult to find out from the teacher what the result was supposed to be and why it was significant. I am sure that there was some value in role-playing research scientists in this way but at the time it certainly seemed an oddly inefficient way to teach science. I preferred to read about the experiments and the results we were supposed to obtain in a book that I got from the local University library. The results in the book seemed more reliable! (And yes, perhaps I was a nerd). There were, however, odd moments of inspiration with this hands on discovery approach. I was amazed by the double-slit experiment that reveals particle-wave duality - and the halo-of-hair effect obtained with the use of Van de Graf generators was totally awesome.
 
I recently observed a lesson where, after an initial story input and some discussion about the complex idea of being wild or tame, 6 year old children were asked to create their own understanding of the idea working around tables which were laden with pens, scissors, glue and bits of coloured paper. I listened to their talk. Like our talk years ago in my school when doing practical work, this was not about conceptual understanding but about practical procedures. 'Where is the ruler?', 'can you pass it?, 'No! That is mine! get off!' and so on.  There was also some discussion about which teacher was nicest and who had the biggest house. I think that time for art work is good and mucking around together in an unstructured sort of way is helpful for learning social skills like resilience when someone steals your ruler. But I did not see much connection between the reality of how the children performed the task and the learning objective. I wondered if the metaphor of construction influenced this  teacher to want to want see  children drawing, cutting and gluing.  
 
When I did a PGCE at Bristol university back in 1990 we were asked to record lessons and compare how many teacher turns at talk (ttt) there were compared to student turns at talk (stt). It was made pretty obvious from the feedback that having the least ttt and the most stt was best. The reason for this was, of course, 'constructivism' and Piaget was referred to as an authority. Constructivism, I was taught, says that children do not learn by being told stuff but that they always have to construct meaning for themselves. In fact, according to this theory, teaching ideas to children before they are ready for them can often be harmful to learning. On the whole, rigorously applying the metaphor of construction, the teacher's role becomes not to teach at all but to get out of the way in order for the children to learn for themselves.

Metaphor 2 transmission
 
Some years ago I observed a science class in a primary school in a middle-eastern country where there was little or no teacher education. In the class the students, aged 6 or 7, sat at individual desks chatting together. When the teacher, a young man, walked in, they all stood up and greeted him formally. The lesson consisted of him talking them through examples in a text book and writing things on a blackboard that they then wrote into their exercise books. The children were silent throughout unless called upon by the teacher when they answered questions and sometimes recited responses together in unison.
 
Why did this teacher think that this was the best way to educate children? I wondered if it was simply that the dominant metaphor for education is transmission. If you ask anyone, anywhere, I mean anyone who has not done teacher training in a UK university obviously, then they will probably say that education is about the transmission of knowledge across generations. Perhaps, when he got the job as a teacher, he stood in front of a class and he asked himself ‘what am I supposed to do now?’ then he thought ‘I know, teaching is the transmission of knowledge, I will transmit what I know’.
 
This kind of teaching as transmission also happened to me in most of my lessons at state schools in the 1970's. While science was taught with a lot of hands-on discovery learning other subjects were taught through transmission. In geography, for example, I recall that the teacher would get us to open our text books, he would explain something like the formation of ox-bow lakes, then he would write key text on the board for us to copy in our exercise books.
 
Although I was often bored in geography, I did learn some things. I found the story that the teacher told to explain ox bow lakes quite fascinating. Looking back now I think that it made sense to me through a sort of inner dialogue where the teacher’s words were met with my own inner answering words, asking questions and making sense of what he said by relating it to other areas of my experience. Playing around with water and mud in the backyard certainly helped my understanding of how rivers impact on landscapes but the story also had resonances for me with the many more general patterns one finds in life. I could relate to the young stream gurgling along fast and happy cutting through the rock and then becoming slower and sluggish as it got older, forming great loops, even apparently flowing backwards away from the ocean at times until it cut new more direct paths towards the ocean leaving stagnant pools of water (ox-bow lakes) behind in its wake. I mean life is a bit like that isn’t it? Certainly lots of institutions like Cambridge University seem to be like that. So I got this explanatory story but not everyone in the class did. The tests we had every term and again every year were not formative but summative. They seemed to mainly serve the purpose of separating the good students from the bad students without any apparent pedagogical purpose. Perhaps because of the dominance of the metaphor of transmission students in the geography class were not helped to develop their own inner dialogue through asking questions, testing out explanations and learning from each other.
 
The two basic metaphors of transmission and construction seem like opposites but they are related. The one is the shadow of the other. The perceived failure of the transmission approach in education to teach for thinking led to the construction metaphor. Now that the construction metaphor is itself being increasingly challenged some people seem to want to return back to the simplicity and security of the old transmission metaphor or what is now referred to as 'direct teaching'. [ii]
 

​Metaphor 3: dialogue
​
A recent large study in UK schools found that in classrooms with more key indicators of dialogue students learnt more effectively. 'So long as students participated extensively, elaboration and querying of previous contributions were found to be positively associated with curriculum mastery'[iii].

​When I first started out researching classroom talk for my PhD with Neil Mercer, dialogue in classrooms was often associated with constructivism, more specifically 'social constructivism'. Knowledge was being constructed but not just by students working on their own but by students working together in small groups, asking questions, giving reasons, developing understanding[iv]. However, I came to realise that dialogue as an approach to education offers us a metaphor that goes beyond the construction versus transmission binary.

Oakeshott described education as drawing students into participation in what he termed 'the conversation of mankind'. Conversation is a good word but can be used for some social interactions that have no educational aspect. Dialogic educational theorists often quote Bakhtin's definition of dialogue as essentially educational. Dialogues, Bakhtin wrote, involve a tension between different perspectives that is mutually illuminating. In a dialogue, for Bakhtin, each answer gives rise to a new question in a potentially endless chain of shared inquiry.
 
Whereas the transmission metaphor tends to treat knowledge as if it was physical stuff, the kind of stuff that can be moved around, stored in books and poured into brains, the dialogue metaphor claims that knowledge does not exist outside of a dialogue where people are asking questions. What we know is always the answer to a question. The questions we ask move on as the dialogue develops over time. The dialogues, or shared inquiries, that construct knowledge are not just small group dialogues but collective social dialogues, dialogues between scientists united within a global community of practice for example.

​The role of the teacher in the classroom is to induct children into participation in these larger dialogues. Through the role of the teacher, subjects like mathematics, science and history have a voice in the dialogue. This is not just about construction. It is also, at times, about transmission. Some long-term dialogues of culture, mathematics, science or history are good examples, have already been going on for thousands of years. If you enter a room where a dialogue about a topic has been going on for thousands of years and you immediately tell everyone what you think; well that is just a bit rude - and collectively it is pretty unproductive. It is better to spend time listening first. If newcomers are to learn how to participate in long-term cultural dialogues, they need to know something of the story of the dialogue so far. Telling the story of the dialogue so far is not the transmission of a fixed and settled body of facts but is about engaging students in an ongoing dialogue where the only certainty is that almost everything that we think is true and important now will be proved either wrong or largely irrelevant in the future. Teaching knowledge rich subjects as a dialogue means teaching ideas as fallible and equipping students with the ability to challenge them. Learning science, history or any other subject is not just learning a body of knowledge more importantly it is learning how to think in the area, how to take a position and argue for it understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the all the alternative positions.  
 
Dialogues combine active talking with passive listening. The construction metaphor of education focuses on students actively talking to build their own ideas. The transmission metaphor of education focuses instead on the need for students to passively listen to the collective knowledge of the past that is being passed down to them by teachers. Both metaphors can grip the imaginations of teachers because they both have some truth. Each  metaphor reflects a necessary but insufficient aspect of education. Alone each one is limited because it is one-sided. Education occurs only when there is a dynamic interplay between talking and listening, teaching and learning, construction and transmission. Small group dialogues where students learn to ask insightful questions, elaborate on their reasoning and build knowledge together have a valuable role to play but only as one technique within a larger repertoire that includes the importance of lectures from the front, telling good stories and the kind of live exciting student-teacher dialogues that exemplify the exploration and creation of knowledge.
 
Many complicated things can be written about 'dialogic education' but at root, like construction and transmission, dialogue is a simple, easy-to-grasp, metaphor. My hope is that in the future, when new teachers find themselves in front of a class and are not quite sure what to do next, they will think to themselves 'I know, this is education and education is all about dialogue' so they will begin by asking the students what they already know about a topic and what they think about it in order to engage with them and share their own knowledge in such a way that the students are drawn into participating in the global, long-term, open-ended collective inquiry that is education.

References

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[i] http://www.fondationjeanpiaget.ch/fjp/site/bibliographie/index_livres_chrono.php
 

[ii] Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.
 

[iii] Howe, C., Hennessy, S., Mercer, N., Vrikki, M., & Wheatley, L. (2019). Teacher-Student Dialogue during Classroom Teaching: Does it Really Impact upon Student Outcomes?.
 

[iv] Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for researching peer talk. Language and Education Library, 12, 49-64.
 
Based on the argument of: Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Routledge.
 
My focus on the role of metaphors in this blog is inspired by
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.
And also
Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational researcher, 27(2), 4-13.

The Matrix is playing again in cinemas today to mark the 20th anniversary of its original release. This re-birth of interest in the Matrix may offer an opportunity for educators who want to stimulate a bit of thought in the classroom. 

How do we know it is real?
In the fourth century BC, Plato wrote that we are like people sitting in a cave looking at shadows cast by the light of the sun and mistaking these for reality. Chung Tzu, a contemporary of Plato in China, wrote that he dreamt he was a Butterfly and that when he awoke he no longer knew if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. In the film Morpheus prepares Neo for a new awakening with the same sort of argument:

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would know the difference between the dream world and the real world? 

The idea of the Matrix, that we inhabit a computer simulation controlled by malevolent machines, is very similar to one of the doubts proposed by Descartes that all that we take to be real is a trick played upon us by a powerful demon. Descartes’ way out of this doubt was to provide a rational argument for the existence of an omnipotent and benign God who would not allow the demon to get away with it. Bishop Berkeley, the 18th Century British Empiricist philosopher, continued in this direction to argue that everything exists only as an idea in the mind of God. Dr Johnson, the English wit and man of letters, famously responded to this theory by kicking a stone as hard as he could and claiming: ‘I refute him thus!’

But is that really a refutation? What argument or evidence, if any, would count against the claim that we inhabit a simulated reality? 

So what if it is not real?

When I put forward the idea that we might live in a simulation created by an alien civilisation people commonly respond: 'So what?'. If everything remains exactly the same why should our interpretation of it matter? The Matrix addresses this question and shows that, whether they articulate it or not, everyone really has an interpretation of the ultimate nature of reality and that this really does matter a lot. The common desire to fight social injustice and alleviate poverty, for example, seems hard to question and yet it rests upon an assumption about the material reality of the human condition.

In one dialogue, agent Smith, a personification of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that now rules the Earth, tells Morpheus that the Matrix was originally modelled on human descriptions of paradise, but that this had not been accepted by their human ‘crop’, many of whom had died as a result. In response the machines created a more historically accurate simulation of human life full of pain, poverty and struggle. Humans responded well to this world because it was a world that they could believe in. The everyday struggles of life gave the humans a necessary sense of purpose. In the context of the Matrix, fighting injustice or poverty becomes absurd. Morality and compassion in the Matrix consist in calling people to awake from the dream, even if this awakening is at some cost to their apparent material comfort and health.
​
Contemplating the Matrix shows how different morality might look if we interpret the material world as a dream. Perhaps this can offer insight into the moral perspective of religious/philosophical traditions that teach that the world we experience is a kind of illusion. Buddhism, for example, has, in the past, been criticised by Christian commentators for a lack of practical action on injustice and poverty. However, Buddhism clearly teaches that we have a moral duty to help ourselves and others attain ‘enlightenment’, which roughly translates as 'waking up from the dream'. 

Who is 'Christ'?

Although the theme of awakening from illusion fits well with Buddhist and Hindu traditions the most obvious references in the film are to the story of Christ. Morpheus is a John the Baptist figure, preparing the way for the expected messiah. Neo’s official name in the film is Anderson, meaning ‘son of man’. Early on someone describes him as ‘My personal Jesus Christ’. When Neo is converted and reborn in the real world he is submerged in water and pulled out by Morpheus - an image of Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist. ‘Trinity’, the black-leather clad woman who originally contacts Neo, plays the Mary Magdalene role. Cypher, a member of Morpheus’s band who betrays Neo to the enemy, plays the role of Judas. The sign that Neo is ‘the One’ is that he can perform true miracles, not just virtual reality effects.

Early in the film Neo, or Mr Anderson, is late for his job and is called to his boss’s office. The boss tells him, in words that must surely be familiar to all of us, that his problem is that, like everyone else, he thinks that he is special and that the rules do not apply to him. The boss is asking Neo to conform to a system that is ultimately pointless. But Neo’s role in the film is as the person who really does have something special, something that transcends the rule-bound nature of the system, and not just this particular system but any system. This is also what was said of Jesus Christ. He is described as ‘the stone that the builders rejected’, or the man who did not fit in.
​
What is this special quality of freedom that goes beyond the rules? Is it something that only a few exceptional individuals have, or do we all have access to it? Is Christ a person or a principle?
 
Of course, there are also some differences between Jesus Christ and Neo. Christ might have ‘kicked arse’ in the temple when he threw out the money-lenders but he is not usually portrayed wearing shades and a long black leather coat whilst spraying the crowd with a sub-machine gun. 

A double identity

The hero of the Matrix begins with two identities, by day he is the law-abiding office worker, Thomas Anderson and by night he is the law-breaking computer-hacker searching for truth going by the name of Neo. In the film Thomas Anderson dies and the identity signified by Neo is transformed into its anagram meaning of the 'One’. Are there examples from life where an apparently virtual or fantasy identity turns out to be truer than the officially given identity? What do we make of many examples in religious traditions where one identity is said to have to die for another identity to be born? 

Time out of mind
​
Neo and his friends enter the Matrix from outside and so they can break some of the rules that the normal inhabitants are bound by. In the fight sequences, for example, Neo can slow time down to ‘bullet-time’ – the time in which bullets can be seen as they fly and picked out of the air. Time in the Matrix is a constructed experience. God is described by Augustin as outside of time and space because he created time and space but what would time then be like for God? If our experience of time is constructed then, assuming that we are not really batteries in some future world, what would it be like to be outside of that time looking in? This is also the question of what Nirvana, the Buddhist state of awakening, is like. In the Matrix there are signs that indicate the constructed nature of time such as ‘Deja vue’ experiences, is there anything like that in our experience that might suggest that time and space are not as real as we usually think? Can experiences of eternity, described in spiritual writings but also in the psychological investigation of 'peak experiences', be explained as in some way stepping out of a virtual reality to try to view it from the outside? 

The choice
​
The choice that Morpheus offers Neo between the blue pill, return to a comfortable sleep-walking existence in the collective dream, and the red pill, awakening to an uncomfortable reality outside of the dream, is not new in literature. This is also the theme of the trial of Socrates, where Socrates is accused of disturbing the peace with his questioning and in the end chooses death rather than a lie. In the film Cypher regrets choosing the red pill and seeks a return to ignorant pleasures such as eating steak even though he knows these to be illusions. Can ignorance be bliss? Is knowing the truth worth the sacrifice that Neo pays for it? 

Virtual reality and social control

As well as religious and philosophical themes, Neo’s awakening in the film has many parallels with a more political vision of liberation. The virtual reality Matrix is a massive system of social control designed to distract humans from becoming aware of their true situation, which is that they are being oppressed and exploited by hidden masters. The band of free humans Neo joins in the sewers are an underground guerrilla movement engaging in hit and run acts of violent sabotage against the system, whilst broadcasting a message of freedom from their ‘pirate ship’.

In the film Neo is shown hiding a stash of money in a hollowed-out book with the title ‘Simulacra and Simulation'. This is the title of a book by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard's main argument is that, whereas in the old days we thought of simulations as a simulation of an underlying reality, now they have taken on their own reality. Banknotes for instance, used to contain a promise to pay the bearer with real gold that was held in a bank vault. Now this promise that there is something real behind it has been dropped and money just exists free-floating as a kind of collective illusion that works only because we all buy into it. 
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​

It is common to argue that education should serve the needs of ‘the economy’, but what is now ‘the economy?’ One plausible answer might be billions of people working hard to produce, distribute and consume virtual reality. If young people are motivated to go to work in order to earn money to buy goods that advertisements have programmed them to want, then are they not as much part of a fake system as Neo was in the Matrix? If so, is it possible to ‘drop-out’ of this system as Neo dropped out of the Matrix? 

Is the Matrix itself just another part of the Matrix?

Was bringing a Baudrillard reference into the film an ironic commentary on a big-budget Hollywood movie with a plot-line about escaping the system? Warner brothers, who made the film, are part of Time-Warner who, at the time it was made also owned ​the world’s largest internet provider, AOL and the world’s largest global news service, CNN. Time-Warner, now WarnerMedia, stand accused of using their multiple media interests to manipulate public tastes and opinions in order to create a market for their products. Were we all carefully programmed to find the Matrix theme interesting and to write about it in journals and blogs like this one simply to boost the profits of Time-Warner? Is the film, the Matrix, and all its sequels and spin-offs, itself just part of a Matrix- like system of distraction that fuels the profits of multi-nationals (read, perhaps: 'inhuman money making machines' ?) whilst maintaining social control? 

The search for meaning

The success of the Matrix suggests that many share a dissatisfaction with the comforting illusions of collective social life and feel driven to find underlying truth whatever the personal cost. This is not new. Supposedly written by Lao Tzu around 500 BCE, the Tao te Ching contains similar sentiments:

[Edited extracts from verse 20 of the Tao Te Ching translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English]

Is the role of education to sell students versions of the comforting blue pill or is it not perhaps to provide a protected and supportive environment where they can experiment with the red pill?

References:

St Augustin, (400) Confessions. Online at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3296
 
Baudrillard, J. (1995) Le Crime parfait. Paris: Galilée online at https://monoskop.org/images/a/ab/Baudrillard_Jean_Le_crime_parfait_1995.pdf page 146

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu is online in many places including https://terebess.hu/english/tao/gia.html

Further reading:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/28/the-matrix-20th-anniversary-sci-fi-game-changer [Article in the Guardian newspaper in the significance of the Matrix]

http://www.simulation-argument.com/ [Philosphical papers on the implications of virtual reality]

https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14846/5716 [Disneyworld Company: a Baudrillard essay on the economy as virtual reality]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/22/what-if-were-living-in-a-computer-simulation-the-matrix-elon-musk

My son is 19. He tends to assume that any film made before he was born is irrelevant. I had to fight hard to persuade him to watch Groundhog day, a film made in 1993. But he absolutely loved it. And so did I. I had watched it only once before many years ago. At the time I had enjoyed it as a light romantic comedy but since then I noticed that scenes from the movie kept coming back to me. Watching it again I realised that, whether the director intended it or not, it is an almost perfect popular presentation of Nietzsche’s theory of the meaning of life.
 
Before re-watching Groundhog Day I had struggled to understand why Nietzsche set so much store by what he called ‘the eternal return’. This simple idea, which is found all over the world and dates back to antiquity, is that, if the universe is truly infinite, then it follows that there will be other worlds exactly like this one and people exactly like you living exactly the same lives. Nietzsche found this thought at the same time frightening and empowering:
 
‘What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' [Nietzsche: The Gay Science, 341]
 
In the film Groundhog Day eternal return is the fate suffered by the main character. Phil, a TV weatherman played by Bill Murray,  finds himself trapped in a time-loop re-living exactly the same day. Whatever he does during the day he finds that he wakes up at exactly the same time in the same bed with the same song playing on the radio. At first he reacts with anger and confusion, then he uses his knowledge of what happens in that day to  fulfil dreams of wealth and sexual conquest. When this does not satisfy he turns to self-pity, drink and suicidal self-destruction. Eventually, after trying out many different attitudes, he begins a journey of self discovery and self-development. He finds that there are things he values, especially, this being a Hollywood romantic comedy, his open-hearted TV producer, Rita, played by Ally MacBeal. Trying to impress her just alienates her. It is only when he gives up pretences, stops struggling to win her and accepts his situation that she falls for him. His time-loop is broken when he finally wakes up in bed with Rita and realises that, as he puts it:  ‘today is tomorrow’.   

​Nietzsche’s concern, repeated in different ways, was to cure us of resentment against time. [Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 42]. The problem with time, he asserted, is that the past is fixed and cannot be willed away. It traps us. The problem is that we do not enjoy living in time but  fight against it. We create a fantasy heaven against which to judge the inadequacies of the earth. We create a fantasy future which we can use to condemn the present.
 
This is Phil’s situation. He begins the movie despising his job and the people around him. He makes it clear that he wants to be somewhere else. Every year he has to go to the little country town of Punxsutawney to report on the groundhog festival. The groundhog comes out of his burrow and, if he sees his own shadow that means 6 more weeks of winter and if he not then he predicts an early spring. Phil sneers at the stupidity of this country ritual, the ignorance of the townspeople and also of his own role as a professional fake, pretending to care. Played by Bill Murray, Phil is superior and contemptuous in a very amusing way, but it is also clear that he is unhappy.
 
By the end of the movie we see that he has learnt to love Punxsutawney. As he steps out of a modest suburban hotel he turns to Rita and says ‘we must live here’. In Nietzsche’s language he has been cured of his resentment. But he has only come to accept himself and his situation because he had lived through a near eternity. He can accept himself now as he is only because he had already tried out every other possible way of being Phil.
 
The idea of the eternal return is important to Nietzsche because in affirming any one moment as good he thinks that we also have to affirm the whole thing as good, that includes all the struggles that got to the moment and all the struggles that are to come as we each individually descend into physical decay and death. Accepting just one moment as good does not work because all possible moments are entangled together. The secret to the meaning of life for Nietzsche is to realise that there is no separate self. We find ourselves flowing together with everyone and everything in a perpetual dance of becoming. To cure ourselves of unhappiness we must learn to love the whole thing, all of time, the eternal return of the same, including the annual return to Punxsutawney for the Groundhog day celebration.  
 
One aspect of the movie Groundhog Day could be described as an exploration of the true meaning of education. At first, when Phil realises that he has an infinite amount of time to play with, he teaches himself things for superficial ends; how to get rich, how to impress women, how to play games with people. Eventually, after a few suicide attempts, he turns to a deeper kind of learning. He explores what gives him a sense of meaning and becomes more engaged with the life of Punxsutawney, useful, valued, loving others and loved in return. In a sense he stops living for selfish goals and starts living through participation in the life all around him.
 
Nietzsche has something to say about education for wisdom:
‘what does it mean to us today to live philosophically, to be wise? Is it not almost a way of extricating oneself cleverly from an ugly game? A kind of flight? And someone who lives in that remote and simple way: is it likely that this has let him show his understanding the best way forward? Ought he not to have tried out life personally in a hundred ways, so as to have something to say about its value? In short: we believe that a man must have lived absolutely 'unphilosophically' according to the received ideas, above all not to have lived in timid virtuousness, in order to reach judgements on the great problems from his own experience. The man with the widest experience, compressing it into general conclusions: ought he not to be the most powerful? - The wise man has too long been confused with the scholar, and even longer with the religious enthusiast’. [Nietzsche: Writings from the late notebooks. 35(24)]
 
This view on education for wisdom follows from Nietzsche’s more general view on the value of seeing from multiple perspectives at once, not only cognitive perspectives but different ways of feeling and of being:
 
There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity”, be. (Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals  III, 12)
 
So how might educationalists apply the wisdom of Groundhog Day? Nietzsche’s idea of trying a hundred different lives might sound both too dangerous and a bit too time consuming for the average curriculum. But Nietzsche himself, something of a recluse, seemed to become wise through reading and imagination. I think that my son learnt a lot through watching Groundhog Day. I learnt a lot too and we perhaps learnt most through discussing its meaning together. The arts are important in the curriculum not only for economic creativity, so students can learn to be the next Steve Jobs, but also for wisdom. Books, music, films, drama, video games, immersive virtual reality etc enable us to participate in the lives of everyone else and of everything else so that we realise that we are not alone, not separate, not lacking in anything here and now precisely because we are already participating everywhere and forever – able to say yes to the whole of  life with all its ups and downs and even to contemplate living in Punxsutawney because, after all, as Phil says to Rita at the end of the movie
​ ‘it is so beautiful here’.

How should we research dialogues? Much empirical research on educational dialogue treats it as if it was a thing in the world that can be located and measured. The children talk in the room - we can capture and measure their words. But this is to assume a monologic ontology. Monologism is the claim that there is one correct overview of everything. Dialogism, on the other hand, claims that all and any meaning whatsoever implies and requires more than one voice or point of view.
 
While research often seems to be motivated by the fantasy of reducing everything to a single formula within a completely closed and buttoned down system, in fact that is not really how we understand. Let us take, as an example, the classic formula that Einstein used in his general theory of relativity ‘e=mc2’ – how do we understand it? To understand a formula like this we need to apply it to various contexts, e.g. to imagine travelling in a tram at the speed of light and consider what happens to mass and to time, etc. The understanding is not in the formula but it emerges in the dialogic tension between the apparently abstract and universal formula and various concrete and specific contexts of application. This is not only how such abstract formulae need to be understood, it is also how they are developed in the first place. At least this is how Einstein claimed that he worked to discover these most abstract and universal of claims by doing thought experiments like riding on the front of a tram approaching the speed of light.
 
If this dialogic tension between the concrete context and the abstract idea is true in the natural sciences it is even more clearly true in the social sciences. In the discipline of Social Anthropology, for example, ethnographers have long struggled with the tension between ‘emic’ knowledge that is all about understanding the point of view of the group being studied and ‘etic’ knowledge that is interpreting the same group from the outside, applying a more universal scheme labelling their means of production as ‘hunter-gatherer’ for example or their religious word-view as ‘animist’. In fact the kind of knowledge produced by Social Anthropology always implies a combination of the emic and the etic. We can only become aware of and try to make sense of indigenous ways of thinking because we see them from an outside perspective. We can only take an etic or external perspective on the basis of some insider knowledge which we translate and interpret into our outsider scheme.
 
If we look at a dialogue from the outside we might say there are many voices in play. We might analyse transcripts and break down those different voices. But this is potentially already to fall into the illusion of objectification as if the dialogue was over there in front of our gaze. In reality we are always involved in the dialogue. If we were not involved in the dialogue in some way we could not make any sense out of it. A mathematical analysis of the patterns in sounds would not give the meaning. We know the meaning only because we share an insider view of the language and the culture and so are able, to some extent, to enter into the dialogue as a vicarious participant. 
 
There is always a first person perspective as well as a third person perspective. The essential structure of a dialogue, any dialogue, is not just two or more voices but an inside and an outside. I label you and contain you within my universe when I pretend or claim to understand you and, if I am dialogically engaged with you, I am also aware that you are doing the same to me and that the you as a consciousness that I am in relationship with therefore transcends me. In other words you are not just the person I have an image of – you are the transcendent consciousness that can locate me and define me within your gaze (Wegerif, 2013, p.31). Clearly these two perspectives in any dialogue are incommensurate in the way in which Kuhn claims that different research paradigms are incommensurate (Kuhn, 1962/2012). The inside and the outside perspectives cannot be reduced to a single measure or a single gaze. Yet it is the tension between them that is generative of meaning and indeed of understanding as well as of misunderstanding and of the illusion of understanding.

If most research on dialogues is conducted in a monologic framework then what would a more dialogic framework look like?  It would begin with the awareness that all research involves a living dialogue between two incommensurate or irreducibly different perspectives; the perspective of the lived experience of the subjects of the research moving from the inside out and the view that is trying to define and locate that experience moving from the outside in. This combination of an inside view looking out and an outside view looking in corresponds to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘chiasm’. Chiasm is a term Merleau-Ponty borrowed from rhetoric where it refers to the reversibility of a subject and object in a sentence. The sentence, ‘I see the world: the world sees me’, is an example of a chiasm. Merleau-Ponty applied this to his understanding of the nature of perceptual events.

In proposing a chiasm methodology for research on educational dialogues I am  not just proposing mixed methods. As Shaffer (2017) brings out in his work on quantitative ethnography, we can use numbers and statistics to explore the unique significance of events taking an inside ‘qualitative’ or interpretive perspective. The difference between an inside and an outside approach is not in the method used but in the stance. The outside view objectifies and compares taking what Buber referred to as an I-It stance. The inside view subjectifies and understands empathetically from within taking what Buber referred to as an I-thou stance.

The idea of chiasm suggests a principled way to bring these two research approaches together in one whole. This is to inter-react and inter-animate the inside view and the outside view systematically at each level and type of analysis to gain insights and make meaning without ever fully integrating them into a single vision. If we are comparing classes in terms of test results we should try through videos – if they are group tests, or perhaps guided key event interviews – to also find out what it feels like to perform on this test and what was going on for the student from the inside point of view. 
 
Another way to think about chiasm is as figure-ground reversal. In a video or transcript we are as much concerned to understand unique learning incidents as to find general patterns. Our interest is in the way in which patterns flow from incidents and how incidents may illustrate patterns but in a way in which the two points of view are dialogically inter-illuminated rather than, as in the nomothetic (monologic) approach, one side is reduced to the terms of  the other. 

Figure 1: Generation Global: A class in India in dialogue with a class in Pakistan

A brief illustration
The Generation Global programme promotes internet-mediated dialogue between schools in different countries. It has reached over 200,000 students aged 12 to 17. After a compulsory module teaching ‘the essentials of dialogue,’ classes engage either in team blogging or in facilitated video-conferencing with classes in other regions of the world, discussing issues that often relate to global citizenship. The team blogging involves placing students into teams in the GG online learning community. In these teams, they talk with peers from other countries by creating short blog posts in response to pre-determined prompts (or questions), and by commenting on each other's posts.
 
When we were asked to evaluate this we had to provide an evaluation of the impact of the programme that was rigorous and convincing as possible. On the other hand we also sought to understand the processes whereby individual young people develop and change their attitudes towards others who are different from them. These twin aims required that we combined together in one methodology, two very different perspectives; one perspective looks at the experiences of young people in the programme as if from the outside, seeking to measure change objectively, the other perspective explores the same experiences as if from the inside, trying to understand how each encounter feels for the young people involved and what it means for them in the context of their lives.
 
Before taking part in team blogging, students were asked to reflect on how they ‘feel about people from those countries, communities, cultures and faiths you expect to meet when team blogging?’ They were also asked to reflect on why they feel this way; ‘write about things in your experience that have shaped your views’. Similar questions were posed after the team-blogging event. Quantitative data on how many blogs were written, read, and responded to, were also gathered.
 
1140 reflections were filled in in total by individual students from more than 100 different schools. These were labelled as either ‘pre’ blogging experience or ‘post’. Matching pairs of pre and post reflections enabled us to explore changes in attitudes through changes in language use. Analysis of this data used a combination of discourse analysis and corpus linguistic statistical techniques.
 
When we compared the pre data with the post data using we were most struck by how pronouns use changed(1). These quantitative differences in the way language was being used were massively statistically significant. But that is to look at the matter in an outside and rigorous way – the other question is what did these differences in word use really mean in practice?
 
Before the blogging experience ‘we’ refers most commonly to the home group as in the following two typical uses:
 
  ‘when i heard from my teacher that we were going  to team blog . I was very excited’
 
In addition ‘we’ is also sometimes used to refer to a very abstract notion of the unity of the human race:
  ‘we all made from the same mud which is God create us from’.
 
After the team-blogging experience the way in which ‘we’ is used changes to refer to a much more concrete sense of shared identity:
 
‘It was a wonderful experience. As i blogged and they commented on my blog, i found out that somehow we share similar beliefs and all of us wants to spend our life loving each other. Also i got to know that there are some common problems we face and its time we should find a solution to these problems and should stand up for each other.’
 
‘We could easily find common ground and it was good to splash up my views and recive comments of what they think of my thoughts ‘.
 
 
At the same time the use of ‘They’ to refer to the other also changed. Before the team-blogging experience ‘they’ were clearly simply ‘other’. The following statement is typical:
 
‘I feel curious to know about the lifestyle they live, also the kind of problem they face in the society’
 
After the team-blogging experience the ‘other’ took on a much more concrete form and was seen as ‘like us,’ perhaps even as part of an extended sense of ‘us’.
 
‘after the team blogging I feel that they are also like us . they also enjoy singing , dancing , act , ect’           
 
‘All of them where extremelly different. Each has their own opinion and worldview. Some of them differ from me and some are quite similar’
 
On qualitative examination then the change in the use of pronouns to refer to self and other between the pre-team-blogging reflection and the post-team-blogging reflection indicates a shift in identity from a relatively closed sense of ‘us’ defined against an abstract sense of ‘them’ towards a more dialogic identity which can best be described as identification not with ‘us’ against ‘them’ but with the dialogue that unites the two terms.
 
This corpus-linguistics inspired discourse analysis of changes in the use of language in online reflections by young people both before and after team-blogging experiences of online dialogue with other schools was just one small part of the overall study but it showed clear evidence of changes in the way in which they identified themselves and others. These changes were in the direction of increased dialogic open-mindedness.
 
This use of text analysis illustrated one way in which the inside perspective of reflections by individuals can be combined with the outside perspective of statistical rigour in describing a general change. The changes in each individual’s attitudes towards others and otherness were reflected in changes in the use of pronouns such as ‘we’ and ‘they’ that could be picked up by a general corpus-linguistics analysis of the difference between two corpora. At the same time that general difference helped the analysis focus in on the individual utterances that led to it.
 
This illustration shows the potential of a dynamic circular dialogic interaction between inside and outside perspectives in which neither aspect is reduced to the other and yet there is no synthesis because it is the juxtaposition of inside and outside views that the reader is led to understand both the significance of the statistical changes (outside view) and the causal processes that led to those statistically significant changes (inside view).

[The idea of Chiasm as a dialogic research methodology is developed further in a forthcoming book to be published by Bloomsbury: Kershner, Hennessy, Wegerif and Ahmed. Researching Educational Dialogues.]


The ‘Measuring Open-Mindedness’ report is at https://institute.global/sites/default/files/inline-files/Measuring%20Open-mindedness_29.06.17.pdf

(1) A special thanks to Phil Durrant for help with the corpus linguistics analysis

References
 
Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible: Followed by working notes. Northwestern University Press.
Shaffer, D. W. (2017). Quantitative ethnography. Cathcart Press.
Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the internet age. Routledge.
Wegerif, R., Doney, J., Richards, A., Mansour, N., Larkin, S., & Jamison, I. (2017). Exploring the ontological dimension of dialogic education through an evaluation of the impact of Internet mediated dialogue across cultural difference. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction.
 
 

​From procedures to concepts
One of the core concepts that young children have to learn in mathematics is commutativity: understanding that 1+2 means the same as 2+1 (or a+b=b+a). Counting begins as a process in time, the process of ‘counting on’. Taking two fingers and adding one finger on to make three fingers is not the same process  as taking one finger and adding two fingers on to make three fingers. To understand that these two processes are the same implies taking a perspective that is able to see at least two different time-based processes together at once.  

The time perspective from which cummutativity makes sense is different from and larger than, the  time perspective of 'counting on'. Moving from doing addition as procedural 'counting on' to understanding the concept of cummutativity is a change that occurs within time. But more than just being a change within time it is also a movement into time. 

Vygtoksy specifies that what he means by system is based upon on the model of mathematics. He even uses the example of cummutativity to illustrate a general feature of conceptual thought that he calls ‘the law of equivalence’, writing ‘Thus, the number one can be expressed as 1,000,000 minus 999,999 or, more generally, as the difference between any two adjacent numbers. It can also be expressed as any number divided by itself or in an infinite number of other ways’. His claim is that this capacity to be represented in different ways within a conceptual system is what distinguishes true concepts from children’s spontaneous ideas. 

Children begin with temporal and contextual experience, understanding addition only as counting forwards on the fingers of your hand for example, and they end up with a more abstract and general understanding such as that  a+b=b+a regardless of context or of time. One implication of what Vygotsky is claiming about conceptual thought, following Spinoza, is that the role of the teacher is to help children move from experiencing things within time to understanding their meaning outside of time.
​

Expanding time
 
Spinoza was probably wrong, or at least misleading, in his claim that there is a perspective outside of time - the point of view of eternity. The fact is that we can only see things from within time and within contexts. That is just how thought works. But if he was wrong, he was wrong in an illuminating kind of a way that can help us to understand what education is really all about. The idea that we might one day see things ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ occurs to Spinoza only because there is a direction of travel in education from being trapped within a narrow time perspective to having a bigger time perspective - an expanding time perspective from which we can look back and compare different moments of time with each other in order to make meaning out of our experience. That there can be a movement into time as well as a movement in time is the essence of education. This simple idea is summed up by the well known quotation: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ (Santayana 1905). 
 
One way to re-interpret Vygotsky's ZPD is not that the teacher leads the child from a perspective within time to a perspective outside of time but that the teacher leads the child from seeing things only within one time context, that of the physical present, to being able to see the same things also from the point of view of other time contexts. Science does not provide us with timeless truths – no more than does religion or art - science is an ongoing fallible dialogue about the truth of things, a dialogue between real people in real contexts. However, the time and the space of the cultural dialogue of science is very different from the time and space of talk in a classroom. The time-space of the dialogue of science extends over thousands of years and is global in reach. The role of the science teacher in the classroom is to weave together the very large time-space perspective of science with the smaller and narrower time-space perspective of a face to face dialogue with a child in a classroom. It is one thing to observe a feather and a metal ball fall at the same rate in a vacuum chamber (in a You Tube video perhaps); it is quite another thing to derive from this an understanding of the concept of gravity. Knowledge arises in science as the answer to questions that are asked within a dialogue. For a child to acquire conceptual understanding they need first to be a participant in the long-term dialogue of science. This means to link the time-space of the classroom to the time-space of Gallileo dropping different objects from the leaning tower of Pisa and also to link this to the time-space of current experiments in the CERN collider that might determine our future understanding of gravity (https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/new-antimatter-gravity-experiments-begin-cern).

​Figure 4: ‘Jacobs Ladder’. The Padua Baptistery, 14th century, Giusto de Menabuoi

A two-way ladder
Vygotsky sometimes seems to present education as a one way ladder leading the child away from false ‘participatory’ concepts embedded in time and replacing these with a true understanding derived from a conceptual system that is essentially atemporal or outside of time. The great danger of formal education on this one-way model, a danger articulated by Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich and many others, is that it can disempower children by removing their truth – the truth of their experience in the present moment – and replacing it with someone else's truth, a truth which leaves them feeling inadequate and unhappy. Recent concern about the mental health consequences of pressuring children to do well in examinations perhaps illustrates what can go wrong with a one-way view of education (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/27/exam-stress-creating-troubled-generation-ex-civil-service-chief-gus-odonnell). But the ideal of education as a journey into time is about children finding more meaning in their present moments and not less. Michael Oakeshott, for example, wrote of education as giving children their birthright inheritance of culture so that they could become more fully human . Without education, for Oakeshott, we are just like animals, physical bodies trapped in physical time and space - with education we become cultural beings participating in an shared cultural time and space, the unbounded time and space context that Oakeshott referred to as ‘the conversation of mankind’, a continuing conversation that he claimed began in 'the primeval rainforests' (http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/oakeshott-on-education-as-conversation).
 
I like the story of Jacob’s ladder  (Figure 4) because it describes angels not only going up the ladder from Earth to Heaven but also angels coming down from Heaven to Earth. At times Vygotsky mistakenly seems to suggest that education is about replacing understanding that arises from full-hearted  participation in the present moment with understanding conceptualised in a very dry rationalist sort of way as locating (subsuming) events within an abstract logical system. But at other times he presents the Zone of Proximal Development as a genuine two-way dialogue in which the teacher has to take on the child's perspective in order to engage with it and so to draw the child into participation in the long-term dialogue of culture. 

​Education does not need to be about taking meaning away from the present moment. It is not just about angels going up to Heaven. It can be and ought to be just as much about the angels coming down the ladder from Heaven to inform the present moment with greater  meaning. Bakhtin, for many the key philosopher of dialogism, used the term ‘chronotope’ for the inextricable combination of space and time in experience. He described how the chronotope (time-space) of readers was brought into a dialogic relationship with the chronotope (time-space) of texts. A dialogic relationship is a two way relationship in which there can be mutual understanding arising from an inter-illumination of perspectives. Bakhtin’s ideal of education is of a journey from  the chronotope of ‘Small Time’, the short-term everyday concerns in which we 'fuss about', as he put it, to what he called ‘Great Time’, the unbounded dialogic space in which all cultures and all times are able to communicate together. This vision of education as a journey into time is not about leaving behind our participation in the present moment - it is about expanding and deepening that participation. Bakhtin, for example, described how his appreciation of his own times, the time of the Russian revolution and its aftermath, was enhanced and enriched through his reading of texts from ancient Greece (Bakhtin 2010, introduction).

The teacher's role in education is not to replace one timescale with another, the living present of a child's experience with the dead eternal ‘truth’ of a formula or a text-book. It is to weave together two different time-scales, the short-term time-scale of a face to face dialogue in a classroom with the much longer term time-scale of the dialogue of humanity - or what Oakeshott called 'the conversation of mankind'. As in the picture of Jacob's ladder, the angels of education travel both ways. The angels climbing up refresh the long term dialogues of culture with renewed participation, whilst the angels climbing down enrich and expand the present moment, providing the insight and the wisdom that comes from experiencing everything in the light of larger perspectives and longer timescales.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M. M. (2010). Speech genres and other late essays. University of Texas Press.

De Spinoza, B. (2001). Ethics. Wordsworth Editions.

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Guardian (2018) Exam stress creating 'troubled generation', says ex-civil service chief. (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/27/exam-stress-creating-troubled-generation-ex-civil-service-chief-gus-odonnell)

Illich, I. (1973). Deschooling society (p. 46). Harmondsworth, Middlesex.

Lemke, J. L. (2000). Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind, culture, and activity, 7(4), 273-290.

​Mercer, N. (2008). The seeds of time: Why classroom dialogue needs a temporal analysis. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 17(1), 33-59.

Oakeshott, M., & Fuller, T. (1989). The voice of liberal learning(p. 16). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Santayana . G. (1905/2005) The life of reason. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15000/15000-h/15000-h.htm

Van der Veer, R., & Valsiner, J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky: A quest for synthesis. Blackwell Publishing.
​
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language (rev. ed.). Cambridge. See also: https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/