​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/

I saw this picture, ‘Earthrise’, projected upon a screen being used to illustrate something in a conference talk.  The speaker said, perhaps as an aside, that of course we could not see this ourselves, you had to be a NASA astronaut or perhaps a multi-millionaire to see this for yourself. This set me thinking. Did the man who took this picture really see this himself? And is it really true that we have not seen this Earthrise for ourselves?
 
Wikipedia tells me that this picture, was taken by Bill Anders in 1968. But of course he took it with a camera through the windows of a spaceship. I mean that the picture was not just Bill’s picture but was the product of a collective effort. It is copyright to NASA not to Bill. Now we have robot craft taking pictures of the Earth from space, pictures of the surface of Mars and even moving pictures on the Internet of the state of the roads near you so that you can plan your journey without getting out of bed. Bill only saw the Earth from space with the aid of mediating technology. Mediating technology enables us all to see many things. We do not need to be physically present in order to really see the red rocks of Mars or the dust clouds of the centre of the galaxy or, indeed, the traffic on nearby roads.
 
When Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon I was 9 years old visiting relatives in Africa, camping with them and others in a large game reserve. There was a fire in the middle of the campsite. The moon was bright. The camp-site was fringed with trees and behind them a darkness from which came animal noises, mostly monkeys calling to each other. Around the fire I noticed a certain excitement and people pointing at the moon. An adult explained to me that men were walking on the moon. I was amazed. The people around the fire were of different genders and from different ethnic groups. None were American. Their excitement was not about an achievement by NASA or by the USA, but about something that, at that moment at least, everyone seemed to share. The feeling that we, the human race as a whole, had stepped outside of our home planet and looked back at ourselves. Whenever I see a picture of the Earth from space I get an echo of that feeling. The feeling that this is not just about an individual seeing something but it is more of a collective kind of seeing. Something that ‘we’ see, not just ‘I’ or ‘you’ or ‘him’ or ‘her’ but all of us.

In her claim that we could not see the Earth for ourselves unless we were an astronaut or very rich, the conference speaker was assuming a contrast between technology mediated vision – seeing a picture projected upon a screen - and natural vision – seeing with one’s own eyes. But when we look with our own eyes are we really individual?

Colour first appeared when we were in trees looking for fruit to eat. Being able to distinguish the fruit from the leaves and branches around it had an evolutionary advantage. The few mutant apes who could see in colour therefore had more babies that those who could only see black and white. Whenever I look at brightly coloured fruit in a tree I recall what I have learnt about the history of colour perception and I feel a part of something much bigger than myself. I realise that my vision is not just personal but collective, connecting me to a long line of ancestors all the way back to the original apes who, for the first time, climbing through the trees, were able to see fruit coloured red or orange or yellow, standing out from the leaves.

Learning to participate effectively in a dialogue is more than learning how to take turns, it is also learning how to see things from multiple points of view. To really listen to others implies learning what it means to be them. This kind of insight is necessary if you are to speak constructively in dialogues such that others respond to your voice, finding in it something that they can connect with and learn from because it feels to be already a part of them.
 
When we speak within a dialogue we have to use words already spoken and shaped by others, words with a history and meaning that we cannot control. Paradoxically, when we affirm our unique identity as a voice within a dialogue, when we say ‘I’, we are also affirming the dialogic space within which we speak and without which we would not be able to speak. We are affirming a shared history and culture.
​
In a dialogue identity as ‘I’ and identity as ‘we’ are intermingled. When I listen to you and respond out of that listening and you listen back then, even if there was no sense of ‘we’ there in the first place a sense of ‘we’ is brought into being.

[The Kingdom of God, 14th century, by Giusto de Menabuoi. in the Padua Baptistery]

Writing not as a Christian but as an educationalist, as someone interested in the wisdom that can be found in cultural traditions, I want to argue that Christmas points us to a kind of thinking that may well be relevant to the future of humanity as well as to its past and may even shed some light on the issue of who we are when we look at  Earthrise.

Christ is famous for claiming to be God, a claim that got him executed. But what does this mean?  ‘I am in the father and the father is in me’ (John 14:11) he reportedly said but there is still clearly some distinction to be made between him and God at times because he also said he did not teach on his own authority but on that of God (John 7:16) and he asked people not to call him good since there is only one who is good (Luke 18:19).  In a parable much quoted at Christmas he says:  ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ (Matthew 25: 35-40).  He added that ‘whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ So is Christ here claiming to be everyone? Not so much ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me’ as ‘I am in everyone and everyone is in me’?
 
Yes I think that he is claiming that. And not only everyone but also everything. After all if the people did not sing out then the stones themselves would sing (Luke 19:40). For me this interpretation also comes out clearly when he says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ (Matthew 5:43-48).  It is our enemies that define the limits of ourselves. Our enemies are the people outside of the dialogue. Love is the experience of unity across an apparent gap of difference. Jesus’s call to love your enemies is therefore also a call to refuse to recognise any limits to the dialogic space and so any limits to the self.
 
Self can be limited by our socially conditioned imaginations to being all about my body or your body, my tribe or your tribe. These different ways in which we are taught to imagine the self have consequences. Jesus was offering us a different understanding of self identity, one which could, he claimed,  ‘set us free’. It is not so much a self-identity as a dying to the self in order to be re-born as everyone and everything. ("Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”). Maybe there are no separate selves at all and we are all, each one of us, just a temporary aspect of everything engaged in a dance of perspectives, ‘now inside’, ‘now outside’. This is perhaps to take the experience of a dialogic self, a self that identifies with the dialogue as much as with its own voice within the dialogue, and expand this experience to the whole of life. According to this view heaven is not elsewhere but here and now on earth if we allow ourselves to participate fully and freely in something bigger than our various bounded images of the self, for ‘the kingdom of God is among you’ (Luke 17:20-21).

​As individuals it is clear that we did not see the Earth rise over the moon just as we did not invent colour vision nor do we create the words we use and the festivals we celebrate. To participate in a culture, just as to participate in life, is already to be part of a thinking that is much bigger than us in all directions and has deeper roots than we can fathom. Too much of what passes for thinking these days is narrow-and technical. The kind of thinking that already assumes what is of most importance. As if we already know who we are and where we are going. Thinking about education and how we should teach our children requires bigger thinking, thinking that questions everything because everything is at stake. This is the kind of thinking that you might find yourself projected into if you listen responsively to the parables of Jesus. One key question that I think he was addressing some two thousand years ago is ‘who are ‘we’ really?'

Ekkehard Martens' ‘Five Finger Model’ of philosophising

Ekkehard Martens is an authority on Philosophy for Children (P4C) in Germany, offering a comprehensive theoretical and methodological basis for teaching philosophy in schools. However, his work is not well known in the English-speaking world as the majority of his work has not been translated. I’ve been exploring Marten’s work in my academic research, translated by Sarah Rimmington. Cambridge Thinking Press[1], has recently acquired the English translation rights to Marten’s book, Methodik des Ethik- und Philosophieunterrichts: Philosophieren als elementare Kulturtechnik (Methodology of ethical and philosophical education: philosophising as an elementary cultural technique) to publish in English in the coming year in a translation by Sarah Rimmington, and so ahead of that I offer an introduction to Martens’ work and its value to P4C practitioners.

Martens spent most of his career at the University of Hamburg, where he is now Professor Emeritus, and has produced a considerable body of work which connects the academic study of philosophy with the activity of philosophising. He has argued that philosophising constitutes an elementary cultural technique, similar to learning to read or to do maths, which can be carried out by everybody, including children. His work remains valuable in Germany today: giving seminars at the Akademie fur Philosophische Bildung und Werte Dialog (Academy for Philosophical Education and Dialogue of Values) in Munich, and his work is the basis of Eva Marsal’s book series Ethik entdecken mit Philo[2], (Discovering Ethics with Philo – Philo is a mouse character in the books). Marsal’s books are a resource series for primary school teachers and learners, and were nominated for the School Book of the Year in Germany in 2017

Martens work centres around the ‘Five Finger Model’[3] , a detailed breakdown of philosophical skill acquisition that allows children to approach philosophical stimuli from different perspectives:  

Finger 1 – Phenomenological (perceiving, observing and visualising)

Finger 2 – Hermeneutic (understanding connections and different perspectives)

Finger 3 – Analytical (evaluating, explaining and recognising arguments)

Finger 4 – Dialectic (arguing for and against, acknowledging other viewpoints)

Finger 5 – Speculative (exploring broader perspectives, possibilities and alternatives)

Martens is clear that children are capable of philosophising, but also stresses that we must not be too quick to designate  their every thought and question as examples of philosophical thinking because some of these questions (such as ‘Why is a tree called a tree?[4]) can be ascribed to their newness in the world rather than examples of philosophical thinking.

Each of the ‘fingers’ of Marten’s Five Finger Model aims to develop children’s thinking from their initial point of wonder and stems from Socratic reasoning in which the skills of philosophising “can be practiced and acquired gradually without having to forgo the moments of sudden, spontaneous insight” (ibid p.107).

This model seems to offer a means by which learning to philosophise can take its place alongside other school subjects in the primary curriculum: while engaging in dialogue about themselves and the world around them, children can become more skilful in their thinking. It preserves the openness of mind which characterises the inquiry-based methods of P4C while at the same time providing education practitioners with criteria along which to progress children’s thinking in each of the five categories.

In English-speaking countries (notably the UK, Ireland, the US and Australia), philosophy for children is continuing to expand: a greater number of schools are carrying out philosophy sessions, more teachers are receiving training, and universities are offering modules in philosophy for children in both education and philosophy departments. To extend the reach of P4C, a more systematic approach such as Martens’ helps to ensure that P4C is not seen as an optional extra which is carried out as a circle time activity if time permits, but has a place in the school curriculum.
 
Laura Kerslake is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Her work, the Playground of Ideas, is a guide to philosophising with children while developing their thinking and talking skills and dispositions. It has recently been published by Cambridge Thinking Press and more information is available here: www.playgroundofideas.co.uk
​
Sarah Rimmington is a professional translator of German and French whose specialisms include literary and academic translation. She recently translated the Playground of Ideas into German (Der Gedanken-Spielplatz) and is working on the translation of Martens.  She studied German and French at the University of Cambridge.  www.germanfrenchtranslation.solutions


[1] www.cambridgethinkingpress.com

[2] Marsal, E. (2014) Ethik entdecken mit Philo. Unterrichtswerk für Grundschulen Bamberg: CC Buchner

[3] Martens, E. (2003) Methodik des Ethik- und Philosophieunterrichts:Philosophieren als elementare Kulturtechnik Hannover: Siebert Verlag

[4] p.101 Martens, E. (2009) Children’s philosophy and children’s theology: a family resemblance in Hovering over the face of the deep: philosophy, theology and children (eds. Iversen, G., Mitchell, G. and Pollard, G. pp.97-116 Münster: Waxmann

Dialogic education is a relatively new force in educational theory and practice. Despite the variety of approaches to dialogic education it nonetheless offers a coherent theory of education with implications not only for how education should be practiced but also for the purposes of education. Dialogic education takes place through dialogue which means opening up dialogic spaces in which different perspectives can clash or play together and new learning can occur. But dialogic education is not only education through dialogue, it is also education for dialogue meaning that as a result of dialogic education learners become better at learning together with others through dialogue.

The intellectual background of dialogic education theory goes back at least as far as Socrates and includes thinkers as varied as Freire, who saw dialogic education as a means of liberation from oppression and Oakeshott, who understood education to be a process of engaging learners in their cultural inheritance described as ‘the conversation of mankind’. Bakhtin, an influential source for recent dialogic educational theory, argues that meaning requires the clash and interaction of multiple voices.

There is a range of approaches to implementing dialogic education varying in the extent to which each one focuses on teacher to student dialogue, small group dialogues and whole class dialogues. All approaches include some idea of
1) a dialogic orientation towards the other characterised by an openness to the possibility of learning and
2) social norms that support productive dialogue.

Published assessments of the impact of dialogic education in relation to general thinking skills, curriculum learning gains and conceptual understanding have been positive. However the assessment of dialogic education raises methodological issues and new methodologies are being developed that align better with dialogic theory and with the idea of measured increased dialogicity or expanded ‘dialogic space’.

Assuming that dialogic education works to promote educational goals, various hypothesises have been suggested as to how it works including some that focus on the co-construction of new meaning through explicit language use and others that focus more on changes in the identity of students and changes in the possibilities of engagement afforded by the culture of classrooms.

There are many issues and controversies raised by dialogic education. One issue is the extent to which dialogue as a goal is compatible with a curriculum which pre-specifies certain learning outcomes. Another is the extent to which teaching a set of social norms and practices promoting dialogue might be a form of cultural imperialism failing to recognise and value the culture of the students. These and other challenges to dialogic education are part of a lively and constructive debate in the field which values a multiplicity of voices within the broader context of convergence on the value of teaching through dialogue and teaching for dialogue.

Taken from: Rupert Wegerif. “Dialogic Education.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Ed. George Noblit. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming

Some approaches to dialogic education, ‘Thinking Together’ for example, are all about teaching Exploratory Talk. The idea of Exploratory Talk was introduced by Douglas Barnes in the 1970s but the version behind Thinking Together was developed mostly by Neil Mercer as part of a triad of ‘types of talk’: Exploratory Talk, Disputational Talk and Cummulative Talk (Mercer, 1995). But what exactly is a ‘type of talk’?
 
The following characterisation of the three types and variations on this can be found in several books, articles and web-sites:
 

• Disputational Talk, which is characterized by disagreement and individualized decision making. There are few attempts to pool resources, to offer constructive criticism or make suggestions. Disputational talk also has some characteristic discourse features – short exchanges consisting of assertions and challenges or counter assertions
• Cumulative Talk, in which speakers build positively but uncritically on what the others have said. Partners use talk to construct ‘common knowledge’ by accumulation. Cumulative discourse is characterized by repetitions, confirmations and elaborations.
• Exploratory Talk, in which partners engage critically but constructively with each other’s ideas. Statements and suggestions are offered for joint consideration. These may be challenged and counter-challenged, but challenges are justified and alternative hypotheses are offered. Partners all actively participate, and opinions are sought and considered before decisions are jointly made. Compared with the other two types, in Exploratory Talk knowledge is made more publicly accountable and reasoning is more visible in the talk. (Mercer and Wegerif 2004 p72)

 
Types of talk are perhaps a way of seeing more than they are a coding scheme.
 
We do not measure the curvature of the smile of a child and then check this against the expression in their eyes in order to work out that they are happy, we experience their happiness directly.
 
In a similar way teachers do not always need to collect and code talk 'data' in order to work out whether a group is working well or not. Tone of voice and body language is often enough. If challenges are being given without elaboration or empathy then the talk is ‘Disputational Talk’ and you need to intervene. If the body language and expressions show shared engagement then it is ‘Exploratory Talk’ and you should probably leave them be. This way of analysing talk in action in a busy classroom depends upon the teacher’s ability to be a participant in the dialogues of the students, grasping what is really going on in between the children in ways that are not always immediately reflected in the words being used. 

Are types of talk ‘real’?
 
When researchers code talk they usually depend upon units that are easy to see and distinguish. Words for instance or ‘turns at talk’. Are types of talk identifiable bits of reality  in the same way?
 
In Mercer and Wegerif (1997) ‘A Dialogic Framework for Researching Peer talk’ we gave an example of a sudden transition in the talk of a small group of primary students. In that example a triad were working well together when one girl began to feel that the others were not respecting her views and she stopped giving reasons. The others in the group demanded that she give reasons for her disagreements. She refused and suddenly left the group. In this example the switch in the mood of the group was very obvious. Although the shift was reflected in the talk it was really about the relationship between this girl and the other two children. This is a shift in ‘intersubjective orientation’.
 
I hope that you agree with me that this kind of shift in intersubjective orientation is something that we are all familiar with as participants in dialogue. For example I might be talking openly about my life and worries to someone then notice, from something they say, that they are judging me. I then become more defensive and cautious in what I reveal. This sort of shift is not always about the surface of the talk which might remain almost the same. It is therefore not always easy to code. Recognising this kind of transition involves an interpretation of the depth structure of the talk. This depth structure is about relationships. It is what is really going on.

‘Ground rules’ or social norms

The intersubjective orientation of being ‘open to the other’, is essential for Exploratory Talk but it is not enough on its own. Further levels of description are required.

The Thinking Together approach to teaching dialogue relies on teaching learners ‘ground rules’ for talk. But what exactly are these ‘ground rules’? I wrote about them in another blog post http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/what-exactly-are-ground-rules.
One way to think about teaching ground rules for effective dialogue is as a form of culture-change. Any culture has implicit assumptions or expectations that shape explicit behaviour. These assumptions tend to be unconscious because you only become aware of them when they are challenged. If the culture of a classroom is individualistic and competitive, for example, then inviting a child to tell the class what she thinks about an issue might be interpreted either as an opportunity to perform or as an invitation to be judged and found wanting or, indeed, as both. If the culture of the classroom is ‘dialogic’ and collaborative then exactly the same invitation might be interpreted simply as a chance to participate in shared thinking with the goal of shared understanding in which case provisional or ‘half-baked’ thoughts are welcome and mistakes are understood as valuable learning opportunities.

Specifying a social kind of reason

Neil Mercer and research team defined Exploratory Talk in terms of specific ground rules

• everyone in the group is encouraged to contribute

• contributions are treated with respect
• reasons are asked for
• everyone is prepared to accept challenges
• alternatives are discussed before a decision is taken
• all relevant information is shared
• the group seeks to reach agreement.

(From: http://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/resources/Ground_rules_for_Exploratory_Talk.pdf)
​
But I think that is too specific in its focus on explicit reasoning. If we go back to Douglas Barnes we can see that Exploratory Talk was set up as an opposition to ‘Presentational Talk’. Barnes claimed that usually children are called upon talk in classroom to show what they know or to ‘present’ but that it is useful to have time to work out ideas by talking them through in an open and provisional way. The trouble is that whenever he pointed to examples of Exploratory Talk he chose examples of explicit reasoning where hypotheses were formed and tested. Mercer tends to follow suit. That is one way of thinking that is useful in some contexts but it is not the only way of thinking. Creative thinking often proceeds without evidence of explicit reasoning left behind in the transcripts.

Playful talk 

Teachers I talked to all recognise that playful talk is very common in classrooms. Playful talk involves making verbal puns and imaginative associations with words. Playful talk works with the resonances and associations of words rather than with explicit meanings and explicit reasoning. Neil Mercer almost gives an example of this when illustrating cumulative talk (1995: p. 101). Two girls in a primary school working on creating a newspaper front page try out alternatives for their headline about how wonderful their region is. One tries ‘Fantastic’, the other tries ‘Brilliant’ but these words are obviously not quite right. Then suddenly the first girl says ‘Fantabuloso’ and both of them repeat it a few times excitedly. While this might not be reasoning it is co-constructive talk that solves a design problem.
​
Books on creativity are full of examples of new connections that have been made between contexts in a way that solves a problem. In my book ‘Mind Expanding’ I give the example of how a business technique to generate creative thinking, ‘Synectics’ discovered that the way that a horse’s backside works, with two separate openings, was perfect for dispensing creams in a way that keeps them from going dry (Wegerif, 2010 p47-8). This might seem a long way from the playful talk of puns and rhymes and resonances in classrooms. But both kinds of talk use metaphors in a way that explicit reasoning talk does not. There is a continuum between more silly ‘playful talk’ and more serious ‘creative talk’.
 
In Mexico Sylvia Rojas-Drummond led an interesting experimental study that tested the importance of explicit reasoning to the effectiveness of Exploratory Talk. Students who had been taught Exploratory Talk over three months using the Thinking Together approach were given two different kinds of test. One was a version of the kind of reasoning test that has already been widely used. The other was a more creative task in which groups of students had to collaborate together to write a short text. It was found that the students did better on the reasoning task than they had in a pre-test and this improved result was associated with more explicit reasoning. However, they also did better on the more creative task, using established ways of judging the creative quality of the writing, but that this improvement was not associated with explicit reasoning (Rojas-Drummond et al 2006).
 
I do not have the recordings of the talk of the groups doing the more creative task but it is possible that their lack of explicit reasoning was compensated for by more of the kind of thinking by resonance that also characterises playful talk (Wegerif, 2005).

So what are ‘types of talk’?

A type of talk needs to be specified at at least three levels
 
A)     Intersubjective orientations

Types of talk are rooted in intersubjective orientations or ways of relating to the other like being ‘open’ or ‘closed’
 
If we take Exploratory Talk in the spirit of Douglas Barnes as that kind of talk in which children can work out their thinking together then we need to expand our understanding of this type of talk to include creative talk which builds understanding through resonances between ideas even if no explicit critical thinking is present.
 
Cumulative talk should not be defined as any talk without explicit reasoning. Such talk can be creative. But we can preserve the term cumulative talk for that kind of closed talk which defends the image of the group. I am sure we have all been in meetings where it was clear that criticism of any kind was not welcome, we can add on to what has been said, we can agree with the others but we are not allowed to challenge. The closure of cumulative talk is based on defending an image of the group. This balances the closure of disputational talk which is all about defending the image of the individual ego.
 
This discussion leads us to table 1: Types of talk

​The intention of Barnes was that Exploratory Talk represented thinking talk. Thinking includes creative thinking that progresses by resonance and metaphor. I therefore think we need to expand the definition of Exploratory Talk given earlier to recognise that explicit reasoning is only present for some tasks in some contexts and that for other tasks in other contexts more creative and even playful forms of talk are also Exploratory Talk.  Exploratory Talk is now understood as a way of talking together that takes shared thinking forward.
 
 B) Social norms 
Each ‘type of talk’ will be characterised by a set of appropriate social norms. Whereas the fundamental division between open and closed attitudes is probably a human universal social norms vary greatly across history, culture and social context. The social norms that best support Exploratory Talk in a Mathematics classroom might not be the same as those needed in an Art class but the Exploratory orientation underlying the ground rules might be the same. The social norms we should teach for Exploratory Talk in China might not be same as those we should teach in Mexico (e.g Yang 2016). One way to approach this cultural diversity is to give children an experience of group work and then to ask them what they think the ‘ground rules’ should be for effective and productive dialogue.

C) Surface features
 
Intersubjective orientations like openness to the other are instantiated in social norms like listening with patience and respect, these norms then realise themselves in terms of interaction patterns like asking clarifying questions and giving elaborated responses and communicative actions like showing appreciation for the other. The underlying structures, in combination with a context, result in patterns of data on the surface of talk, the number of turns, the length of turns, the words used, the eyebrows raised etc.
 
A type of talk has all these levels, intersubjective orientation, social norms and surface features. Type of talk analysis is interesting because it is not simply empirical. It does not start with the data and work up to reconstruct meaning but it starts with the experience of teachers as participants in classroom dialogues that are always already full of meaning.
 
Types of talk analysis shows us that the kind of thinking that occurs in classrooms depends upon intersubjective orientations and social norms that are not always apparent to participants. How children think in classrooms is largely determined by these invisible rules. In Disputational Talk, for example, speakers find themselves narrowly defined in opposition to others and only think defensively to justify themselves. In Exploratory Talk speakers may forget themselves at times and flow into participating in a kind of ‘thinking in general’ that is not my thinking or your thinking but just good thinking.

PS An extended version of this blog can now be found as Chapter 3 Orientations and Ground Rules: A Framework for Researching Educational Dialogue in:  Kershner, R., Hennessy, S., Wegerif, R., & Ahmed, A. (2020). Research methods for educational dialogue. Bloomsbury Publishing. A preprint draft is now on researchgate and can be found by searching on my name and that chapter title .

'One law for the lion and the ox is oppression' Blake  

This quote from that old radical, William Blake, has always struck me as expressing something essential to dialogism.  In a real dialogue we learn only if there are different views. These different views are not always just different perspectives on a single world such that we can agree together once we see the bigger picture. Often the different worlds of experience found in dialogue together are not reducible to one single ‘correct’ view but really are different – ontologically different. Blake’s Ox and Lion have such different perspectives that they are never going to agree. This is troubling. That trouble is the source of creativity. Dialogism says we must remain in that gap of uncertainty without an answer and not run away from it by imposing a universal  law.
 
There are cultures that seem to side with the Ox, even to the extent of worshiping cows and advocating vegetarianism. Other cultures past and present have sided with the Lion, valuing strength, ruthlessness and eating as much red meat as possible. Blake, I think, would like us to live on both sides at once: to appreciate the beauty and the energy of both the lion and the ox.
 
Dialogue in education is often associated with the value of equality. But usually this equality seems to be understood in a way that is the opposite of dialogical.  I am often told, for example, that differences of power in a classroom mean that true dialogue is not possible. The assumption seems to be that dialogue requires equality. It would follow from this that dialogic education is a pious but rather hopeless idea since there are always power differences.
 
Even academics who write books about dialogue in education make the same error. Baruch Schwarz and Michael Baker mis-interpreted my appeal to the importance of dialogue as an end in itself as some sort of ethically based opposition to power differences ‘Wegerif sees in the mediation of the teacher an unbearable power relation imposed on the student’ they wrote (2016, p101-102)[i]. Of course teachers need to have authority in their role as mediators of knowledge. But their role as mediators is not to transfer closed facts but to induct students into open ongoing dialogues or shared inquiries. That is really what knowledge  is, an ongoing dialogue. In that ongoing dialogue there is no necessary equality between the voices: everyone brings something different, some their great experience, others their curiosity and innocence – all are valued. Clearly a long-term dialogue of the culture needs newcomers as well as old-timers.
 
Dialogue presupposes difference not sameness. The bigger the difference that can be held together in the tension of a dialogue the brighter the sparks of insight and illumination that might result. I see no reason why a Queen cannot enter into dialogue with a chambermaid or a Professor of Education with a primary school student. All that is required for successful dialogue is that participants are able to put aside, just for a short time, their images of themselves and enter together into a process of shared inquiry. This suggests a radically different conception of equality. Not the external equality of equal parts, everyone treated as a separate identity and measured to be equal to the others in power or wealth or knowledge or age or whatever. The equality of widgets on a production line. Thinking of equality and justice in this external way is a big mistake - it almost always leads to tears before bedtime. At the individual level it leads to anxiety and resentment, at the collective level it has an established history of provoking mass murder. The dialogic alternative is the kind of internal equality that comes from opening up the boundary of the self to include the other within a shared space – a dialogic space. When we identify with the process of dialogue to the extent that we allow the voices of others to speak to us as if they were our own voices, then, for that moment at least, we are equal[ii].
 
This second more dialogic conception of equality is very relevant to understanding inclusive education. In a large study of diversity in science education we sent questionnaires to thousands of science teachers in the UK, Netherlands, Turkey, Lebanon, India and Malaysia asking about their approach to gender and ethnic diversity. I was surprised that most of these teachers responded that they did not have a problem with diversity since they treated all the students exactly the same.  This shows the dominance of an external view of equality. Justice is done if everyone gets the same treatment. A dialogic approach to diversity makes the opposite claim. Responsibility means treating everyone differently because everyone is unique[iii].  
 
Justice is not something that can be imposed from above like a universal law or a set of ‘equal rights’. Justice has to be worked out gradually, always imperfectly, always provisionally, within the contingent messiness of concrete relationships. The only universal behind internal equality is not an abstract law or principle but the complex concrete mystery of how it is that we are able to overflow our apparent boundaries and enter into dialogue.  A dialogue means that it is no longer just me thinking or just you thinking but that it is now both of us - and ultimately all of us - thinking together. How is that possible? Well I think it must be because the external dividedness of reality – you over there in your corner and me over here in mine – is something of an illusion and through dialogue we can partially recover a truth of internal interconnectedness that was always already there.  

Some references

William Blake  ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (http://www.levity.com/alchemy/blake_ma.html)
 
[i] Baruch Schwarz and Michael Baker (2016) Dialogue, Argumentation and Education: History, Theory and Practice’ , Cambridge University Press.

[ii] Sennett, R. (2003). Respect in a world of inequality. New York: Norton.


[iii] Wegerif, R., Postlethwaite, K., Skinner, N., Mansour, N., Morgan, A., & Hetherington, L. (2013). Dialogic science education for diversity. In Mansour, N and Wegerif, R (eds) Science education for diversity (pp. 3-22). Springer, Dordrecht.

Blake's poems 'Little girl lost' and then 'Little girl found' describe how a young girl called Lyca goes to live peacefully with lions 

Haji Bektash, 13th century mystic and founder of the Bektashi muslims, is often shown holding together a lion and a deer.

Classic cognitive psychology locates mind within brains. Cognition begins with an input to the brain and ends with an output from the brain. A possible problem occurs if we realise that this picture that we have of a world with a brain in it – a pink squishy object about 15 cm long and weighing about 1400 grams – is presumably an image that we generate in our minds eye. In other words the mind is always presupposed in any account of the physical world making it hard to understand how that mind itself can be understood as simply a part of the physical world. This problem was expressed rather neatly in the 19th Century by the reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson:

Figure 1: ‘The BRAIN is wider than the sky’
​
When we look at the sky or the stars we might imagine that we are looking directly at an external world but we would be wrong. It would be more accurate to say that we are looking directly at neuronal activity within our brains[2]. Neuro-science research on perception suggests that to be conscious of any part of the world requires an act of paying attention[3] but that the world we are paying attention to is already pre-processed by the brain out of a pre-conscous analysis of differences [4]. Insofar as we are looking at reality in itself we are doing so only very indirectly. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive psychologist and expert on vision, uses the analogy of the computer desktop interface to explain how perception has evolved[5]. Darwinian selection, he argues, leads to perception only of those features of reality that help in basic tasks related to survival and reproduction. The resultant model of reality that we appear to perceive directly  bears no more direct relationship to underlying structures of reality than a computer desktop with images of files, and a wastebasket bears to the underlying reality of computer processes. In both cases we see what is most useful for us to see given our everyday tasks and not what is true in itself.

Figure 2: A photo of a bit of the platform at Kings Cross station: What we see is pre-processed and already pre-loaded with meaning

Realising that all experience is already pre-processed by the brain suggests that the mind is in fact to be found everywhere in the world. So talk about cognition occurring only in the brain is not wrong exactly, just misleading and paradoxical. To make sense of the paradox it might help if we distinguish between two uses of the word brain: 1) the pre-personal generative brain that creates a world for us and ourselves within it that is always already there before and behind every act of awareness and 2) the objective brain that is that squishy pink object freshly pulled from a cranium and lying on the medical lab bench in front of us. 

This duality of the brain, brain as subject and brain as object, is a version of the fundamental duality between subjectivity and objectivity  found everywhere in experience. Martin Buber begins his 1937 book ‘I and thou’ with the claim that ‘To man the world is twofold, in accordance with, his twofold attitude.’[6] This twofold attitude, Buber continues, is to objectify the world in the ‘i-it’ attitude and to subjectify the world in the ‘I-thou’ attitude. For Buber one can objectify people, turn them into numbers, treat them all as equal individual units, or one can in a sense subjectify them, that is treat them as people, as sources of meaning who need to be listened to with respect. Buber’s I-thou attitude is the basis of dialogic pedagogy. But Buber went further than most dialogic psychologists in claiming that one could take an I-thou attitude and, in a sense, subjectify the world as a whole and non-human animals and even objects within it. He has a famous account, for example, of learning from engaging in dialogue with a tree[7]. One way to make sense of this dialogue with objects is to realise that every apparent object, like the tree, is already pre-processed by the pre-personal brain and so is pre-loaded with meaning (see Figure 2).
 
Group thinking

One problem that I have with classical cognitive psychology associating mind too closely with the physical brain, - I mean the little pink object weighing about 1.5 kilos - is that this makes it hard to understand group thinking. Realising that mind is everywhere makes it easier. Assuming that my brain and your brain and ape brains in general have evolved in pretty much the same way explains why we inhabit roughly the same world of experience. If I (as physical body) see a tree in a landscape then you (as physical body) will see the same tree from a slightly different perspective.  When I look out at the tree I am also looking at the inside of your brain and you are already looking at the inside of mine. 
​
To understand what is going on in group thinking we need to invoke the two levels of brain referred to earlier.  The pre-personal generative brain or brain 1 produces a sort of image of myself walking through a landscape just as it produces an image of you walking through the same landscape. This means that, for the pre-personal brain, my status is not that different from yours as just another sort of image generated by the pre-personal brain and, in a sense, within the pre-personal brain. ​Group thinking is possible precisely because we inhabit a shared world and we move within that shared world in relation to each other[8].

Figure 3: you, me, tree and world within the pre-personal brain

The Chiasm

Like most labelled brain images Figure 3 is potentially very misleading. It is not helpful to imagine that things like me, you, trees and the world are to be found as objects ‘within’ a brain. The brain is not really like a computer and it does not really store representations of the world[9]. It is more that the brain works closely with the body to do things. The body-world is ‘enacted’ each time we reach out to grasp something or each time we look at a tree in a landscape. The mind and the world are both only to be found bound up with the actions that constitute experience. Ideas about the separateness of the mental and the physical are misleading ideas that form in the wake of experience[10].
 
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a professor of psychology at the Sorbonne for many years as well as a phenomenologist philosopher, struggled with ways to understand the paradox of experience or how come we think that we have both a mind (subject) and a body-world (object). He explored how pre-personal processes produced both a body image and a world image[11]. The world, for Merleau-Ponty, was never simply objective but always the world as experienced. He called the world ‘the ensemble of my body’s routes’[12].(VI 246).   Against the crude dualism of Descartes who claimed that there is mental stuff and physical stuff, Merleau-Ponty’s careful analyses of perception show that the mental and the physical are closely bound up together in each act of experience.

Figure 4: Maurice Mearleau-Ponty forming a ‘couple’ with his daughter on the streets of Paris.

Merleau-Ponty suggested an experiment we can all do to explore how subjectivity and objectivity (the mental and the physical) are bound up in even the simplest experience. If I touch my left hand with my right hand I can experience my right hand touching or, with a shift of perspective, I can experience my right hand being touched. Am I now an object or a subject? Mind or matter? And where is the gap between these two?
​
Each experience seems located in a pre-given world of space and time. But if we ask ‘where is the world’ we see that it is generated out of thousands of these kinds of touching and being touched type experiences. When I touch the table, the table touches me back. I am on both sides of the experience. The same when I look at the horizon. The horizon looks back at me and locates me in the centre of it. The world of space and time that I experience is constructed through perceptual acts and does not exist separate from them. So where exactly is the gap (écart) between my right hand touching my left and my left hand touching my right? The gap is generative of space and time. It is not itself located in space and time since it is that which locates. And yet at the same time it appears to be located here right in front of me where my right hand is touching my left?  

Mearleau-Ponty develops a new ontology from his analysis of the apparent paradox of the fact that experience is always already located and yet it also does the locating. This new ontology is sometimes referred to as the ‘flesh’ but is based on the figure of the ‘chiasm’. The chiasm is a term from rhetoric referring to the reversal of subject and object in a sentence. ‘I see the world: the world sees me’ is a chiasm. Each act of perception involves a figure ground chiasm whereby the figure, that which is seen or touched, stands out to define the world around it while, at the same time, the world crowds in to define and locate the figure.

Figure 5: figure ground gestalt as ‘chiasm’

Merleau-Ponty was particularly interested in analyses of art and language showing how bits of the perceptual world could separate out from the background to become signs and symbols with which to think the world by reflecting back upon it. Thought is never pure thought for Merleau-Ponty but always bound up with bits of the material world, using signs, syllables and sounds. At the same time matter is never purely material but always richly charged with invisible meaning and only standing out as a ‘thing’ because it speaks of an invisible idea.  In every bit of the ‘flesh’ the visible and the invisible, the subject and the object, mind and matter are always closely intertwined in a chiasmic relationship  - that is in a relationship of mutual envelopment and reversibility.
 
In the poem above by Dickenson the physical brain becomes a model or metaphor for the whole world. But for Merleau-Ponty perception pointed to the universal metaphoricity of matter. For Merleau-Ponty everything can become taken as a metaphor for everything else and this metaphoricity of the world is the medium of thought and the origin of ‘mind’. He writes:
 
The “World” is this whole where each “part,” when one takes it for itself, suddenly opens unlimited dimensions— becomes a total part. (VI p218)
 
This blog began with the question ‘where is the mind?’. It is not to be found just in any one little bit of the world – the brain for example - but in every little bit of the world. Everything is already a kind of thinking and when we think properly we participate in that larger thinking, the thinking of the world. Thought or mind is as much the thinking of material things as it is the thinking of humans since material things and humans are always already thoughts within a larger thinking that is not simply ‘my thinking’ or ‘your thinking’ but a thinking in general that possesses us as much as we possess it. But when we ask ‘where is this thinking?’ we face a problem because the world is as much a product of thinking as it is a location of thinking. Space, time and matter are not a kind of shoe-box given before we think – they are the medium with which we think.

Mealeau-Ponty refers to ‘that primordial property that belongs to the flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever’ (VI, 142). He points out that we sometime think we might get a better view of the world if we did not have a location within it but this is a misunderstanding. A view from nowhere would be no view at all. Being embodied is what enables us to see, touch, taste, smell  and think the world. It does not trap us within a world but gives us a perspective. This understanding of embodied perception gives us a clue as to the location of mind. Mind, or ‘minding’ in the sense of active embodied thinking, is always to be found both ‘here and now’ and also ‘everywhere and forever’. It is never just in the middle,  but always both extremes at once because mind is only located  ‘everywhere and forever’ by virtue of being located ‘here and now’. The moment I open my eyes or open my mind to think I find myself both ‘here and now’ on one side and looking out ‘everywhere and forever’ on the other side. Where we tend to think we are, the images we construct of our self identity or the models we construct of the world, models that we then often imagine that we are trapped within, are born out of the continuous dynamic tension between these two extremes - being everywhere and forever by virtue of being here and now. 

Notes
[1] See her poems at http://www.bartleby.com/113/1126.html
[2] Here are two interesting videos on perception making this point https://youtu.be/yxa85kUxBDQ with Ramachandran and https://youtu.be/C8k-lrJrldw with David Eagleman
[3] DeHaene, S. and Naccache, L. (2001). Toward a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition, 79, 1–3: 1. 
[4] Poort, J., Raudies, F., Wannig, A., Lamme, V. A., Neumann, H., & Roelfsema, P. R. (2012). The role of attention in figure-ground segregation in areas V1 and V4 of the visual cortex. Neuron, 75(1), 143-156.
[5] https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is. While Hoffman has some controversial views involving the direct applicability of quantum theory the interface view of perception that I refer to here is not very controversial.
[6] Buber, M. (1958/1937). I and Thou (Second Edition, R. Gregory Smith, trans.). Edinburgh: T & T Clark; available online as a PDF of you search a little.
[7] http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/dialogue-with-a-tree
[8] Gerry Stahls careful analyses of group cognition shows how it is more about moving within a shared world than about building shared internal schemas. Stahl, G. (2005). Group cognition in computer‐assisted collaborative learning. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 21(2), 79-90.
[9] Epstein, R. (2016). The Empty Brain: Your Brain Does Not Process Information and It Is Not a Computer. Aeon Essays. Google this excellent essay to find out more.
[10] Chemero, A. (2011). Radical embodied cognitive science. MIT press. See also his video at: https://youtu.be/dZn9Y1jqGls]
[11] Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
[12] Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible: Followed by working notes. Northwestern University Press.
​
BTW most of these arguments can be found in a different form in Wegerif, R. (2013) Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age, Routledge pp 155-157.

In ‘The Philosophical Investigations’ Wittgenstein draws attention to this simple puzzle to point out then when we think we see reality what we are seeing is always already an interpretation. While a computer programme could perhaps measure the marks on the paper and then try to figure out what they might represent, humans have no choice but to see a rabbit or to see a duck. I like it as a model of a kind of doubleness in being. It is both a duck and a rabbit. But while it is both options, it cannot be both at the same time. If you see the rabbit you can learn, by focusing on the strange looking ears (the beak of the duck), to shift perception to see a duck. If you see a duck you can learn, by focusing on the funny bump in the duck's head (the mouth of the rabbit), to see that it is a rabbit. When you see it as a rabbit you know that  it is also a duck but you can't see that at the same time. When you see it as a duck you know that it is also a rabbit but you can't see that at the same time. The best that you can hope for is a kind of oscillation between these two views.
 
I think that to have a dialogic identity is to be double in the same sort of way. When I am speaking in a dialogue, I know who I am. People turn and look at me, frowning in puzzlement or nodding agreement. At that moment I am clearly located as a speaker. But then when others respond to what I say and I listen to them I find myself, at least to some extent, identifying with what they say even when I know that I probably disagree with it. When I was speaking I might have felt convinced by what I was saying, but now that I am listening to other voices I hear the echo of my own voice as just one alternative amongst others. When I am speaking I am often trying to express as best I can what I think is the truth of the matter but I am also aware in the background that there are always other voices, other ways of looking at it, and that nagging awareness prevents me from being too sure in the way that I present things and leads to a more tentative, provisional, and open style.
 
A more dialogic person is a person who identifies both with being a position in a dialogue and with the dialogue as a whole. When they add to the dialogue they often identify with themselves as a speaking voice but when they question their own ideas and are able to learn new things that is because they identify with the dialogue as a whole. As with the duck-rabbit picture, although we see both things and identify with both things we cannot do so at the same time. When we are speaking we tend to identify with ourselves as a voice and not with the dialogue. When we are in listening mode we tend to identify with the dialogue as a whole rather than with our own voice. But in listening it is important not to forget that one has a voice and can question and indeed challenge everything that one hears. And in speaking it is important not to forget that your voice is not the only voice. However convincing it may sound to you in that  moment.
 
Experientially I find this kind of double identity very interesting and very odd. It is like always being on two sides of everything at the same time.  Being on one side looking out at the world thinking I see stuff while secretly knowing that really I am also on the other side looking back at myself from the darkness and the invisibility that lies behind everything that I think that I see. Perhaps it is a bit like a dialogic relationship between the conscious mind, this little circle of light made up of things that I know that I am aware off, and the much larger so-called unconscious mind which is aware of so much more and which I know that I also am and simply have to take on trust. Every action relies on that dialogue and that trust. It is not really possible, for example, to speak in a dialogue, if you have to know in advance what you are going to say every time you open your mouth. Yet often people have the experience that when they open their mouths they say something unexpected but interesting, something that contributes to the dialogue and even perhaps something new that adds to the dialogue that they had no idea in advance that they knew. 

Monologic vs dialogic? 

Dialogism is often put forward as a contrast to monologism. Indeed it is possible to outline their differences in a table.

​
 
Levi-Strauss, the French social anthropologist, argued that the human mind always has to think in contrasts like this even when they not really very useful. We can only understand dialogic as a contrast to monologic but this is still quite misleading. The doublesness of a dialogic identity always has to include monologic within it.
 
Buber begins his classic work I and Thou (first published in 1923 and translated to English in 1937) with the claim that “man is twofold”, and draws our attention to the two fundamental modes of being: ‘I-It (‘Ich-Es’) and “I-Thou” (‘Ich-Du’). The I-It mode generates a world of objects blocking the view such that we often find ourselves trapped within it. The I-Thou mode on the other hand leads us into the presence of another person. He explains that being in relationship is a very different kind of being from the being of the It-world – the world of things. Whereas the realm of I-It is fragmented, one thing next to another, one he, one she, one it, etc, the realm of I-Thou is an experience of wholeness.
 
While Buber is often taken as focussing on the importance of the I-thou mode of being he is actually saying that both modes are essential. As well as being able to be called out by relationships we are also objects that can be located and labelled. Both are true. In fact it may be that the real learning of learning dialogues occurs not between different voices but precisely in the dialogue between the openness of the dialogic space and the apparently fixed context in which it occurs. This dialogicality between a dialogue and its social and historical context is often referred to as the double-dialogic (e,g Linell, 1997).
 
So to be truly dialogic is not to oppose monologic but to incorporate it into a higher dialogic. A good dialogue does not consist in everyone saying ‘well I don’t know – what do you think?’ Often it requires that each individual speaker makes an effort to defend a coherent position as ‘true’ making sure it is as consistent as possible. Einstein’s general theory of relativity was a great contribution to physics in this way. But of course he knew, even as he put the final full-stop on his manuscript, that his theory was not the final word on the matter but just a voice in an endless ongoing dialogue. 

External or monologic relations (Thunk!)

Internal or dialogic relations (Think!). 
​The multi-levelled doubleness that comes from identifying with dialogue.

Defining thinking is inevitably difficult because thinking is already implied behind the action of defining. The task of understanding thinking is a bit like the short cartoon above in which the Pink Panther sucks himself up entirely in a vacuum cleaner that he himself is holding – this sucking yourself up in your own vacuum cleaner move is not really possible but we enjoy imagining it as if it was possible.
 
When people write and talk about ‘teaching thinking’ they do not just mean teaching any and all types of thinking because some thinking is obviously quite bad. They mean teaching ‘good thinking’ which they might call ‘intelligence’ or ‘higher order thinking’ or some other technical sounding term which always really translates most accurately as ‘the kind of thinking that we do not think we see enough of and that we want to see more of’. Of course this kind of thinking changes over time. It is plausible that Plato and other ancient Greeks valued formal logical reasoning so much precisely because there was not much of it around and it was very hard for humans to do. Now there are computers who can do that sort of thing for us we tend to value creative reasoning more. In 1987 Lauren Resnick reported that the kind of thinking that teachers of thinking valued was characterised by complexity, nuance, multiplicity, uncertainty and surprise by which they meant that they could not say for sure in advance what good thinking was but they recognised it when they saw it (Resnick, 1987).
 
In order to try to account for the nature and origin of the complex and surprising thinking that we value and want to teach more of, dialogic theory puts forward the metaphor of thinking as embodied dialogue. Educational research has confirmed that the metaphor of thinking as dialogue is a fruitful one. This metaphor lies behind programmes that have been successful at teaching thinking (Resnick et al, 2015). Bakhtin’s clarification that dialogue occurs only when answers give rise to new questions (Bakhtin, 1986) is useful and suggests that the ‘dialogic’ nature of dialogue refers to dynamic mutual illumination and inter-animation across a gap of difference (Wegerif, 2011).
 
Considering what is wrong with some of the other metaphors for thinking provided by cognitive psychology can help us to understand the potential value of the metaphor of thinking as dialogue. Behaviourism gave us a metaphor of thinking as ‘nothing but talking to ourselves’ producing sub-vocalisations that can be measured as behaviour (Watson, 1958), cognitivism violently replaced behaviourism with the metaphor of thinking as nothing but information processing (Pinker, 1999) and now I hear it is hard to get a job in a psychology department unless you can scan brains and the new metaphor of thinking is nothing but neural activity. These various metaphors or lens have all proved insightful in different ways. The problem with them arises from their ‘nothing but’ nature. Dialogic theory says that the ‘truth’ of something complex like ‘thought’ is unlikely to be found in any one metaphor or model but is something that we can best move towards when we have a variety of different metaphors in dialogue with each other. This is the polyphonic version of truth put forward by Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1991). It also, interestingly, lies behind the new transdisciplinary understanding of how best to make progress in science (Nowotny, 2004).
 
Dialogue as a metaphor for thinking is both specific and general. Specifically it draws attention to and promotes real concrete face to face dialogues in classrooms when the thinking is found in the speaking or other embodied semiosis. The way that small groups work together to solve problems and to pose problems is already thinking (Woolley et al 2010: Stahl, 2009). The way in which cultures, societies and communities respond to challenges and design together for a collective future is also thinking (cf Dewey on the importance of ‘social intelligence’ 1993, p104).
 


The word ‘teach’ comes from an old German root ‘tǣcan’ which means to point out. Teaching is about pointing things out. It is only possible to point things out in the context of a relationship where you can follow my gaze and I can follow yours. So teaching involves first building a relationship and then directing the attention of students within the context of that relationship.

If we want to teach thinking then the most important thing to point out is ignorance: just how much we do not know. Rather than simply being a model for ignorance, by asking questions a teacher can serve as a model for curiosity.
 
Teaching questioning 

People might say that questions are always asked in a context and are always questions about something. I am not so sure. I think that, independent of any language or any sign system there is somehow always the archetypal question. Not a questioning of this or that but just a general questioning. An attitude of curiosity about new things and humility in the face of the many things that we do not know – especially the incalculable number of the things that we do not even yet  know that we do not know.
 
Whatever you point out to learners it is possible to point it out in a way that closes down this fundamental question or in a way that opens it up. Knowledge, as this is taught in schools, is only the dialogue so far. I mean by this that is consists only of answers that have been given to questions that have been put. Teaching knowledge not as finished and final but as the story of this dialogue leaves a space for the learners to enter into knowledge as an ongoing dialogue in which they themselves are able to ask further questions and find further answers. In this way anything and everything can be taught as an invitation to join a dialogue and so as an invitation to think (Langer, 2016).
 
Opening, widening and deepening dialogic space 

Constructivist accounts of thinking tend to emphasise the positive ability to build models and systematically apply thinking tools (Holyoak and Morrison, 2005). A dialogic approach lays more stress on what the poet Keat’s referred to as ‘negative capability’ or the ability to remain in uncertainty until a creative solution emerges (Keats, 1817).
 
Simply pausing after asking a question is a good illustration of what it might mean in practice to teach thinking by opening a space.

The kind of talk moves promoted in dialogic education usually include asking open questions such as ‘why do you think that?’. Such moves do not work as positive tools to co-construct meaning but as a negative and indirect way to open a space for reflection and the resonance of multiple voices out of which a creative response might (or might not) emerge.
 
Dialogic switch in perspective

In a dialogue we sometimes do not understand the other person’s point of view initially and have to listen harder which means doing work to re-construct it so that it makes sense and we can practice inhabiting it ourselves. This switch in perspective to facilitate understanding is not a once and for all switch, we do not lose our initial perspective in making the switch, but it is more about being able to hold different perspectives in tension together. The ease with which children can make this switch depends on the quality of their relationships. However nicely children talk together to ask each other questions and give each other reasons this will not automatically translate into insight unless they allow themselves to switch positions with other speakers. Such switches do not only occur with physically present voices and physically present tools but also with virtual cultural voices, voices such as Shakespeare, History or Mathematics (e.g Kazak, Wegerif, & Fujita, 2015).
 
Identification with dialogue

Different ways of talking in classrooms are related to different kinds of identification (Wegerif and Mercer, 1997). Where children identify with themselves only and reject the other they might be prone to what Mercer calls ‘disputational’ talk (Mercer and Littleton, 2007). However when they identify strongly with their group they might be prone to what mercer calls ‘cumulative talk’ and what is often referred to in psychology as ‘group think’ which is when the harmony of the group prevents critical questioning and good reasoning. Issues of identification seem important to group thinking and one mechanism of successful dialogic thinking might be shifting that identification away from all static bounded objects, be that an image of the self or an image of the group, onto identification with the open-ended process of dialogue itself. (Wegerif, 2011).
 
Changing the culture

Some of the proposed mechanisms or processes for understanding why dialogic education works to promote better thinking focus only on changes within individuals. But individuals are shaped within cultures. One way to understand this, informed by Rom Harre’s positioning theory (Harre, 1999), is about how different cultural ‘discourses’ offer different ‘speaker positions’. In standard classroom cultures, for example, students are often positioned as not being able to initiate dialogues. An element that is common to all dialogic education approaches is a concern to address behavioural norms directly by explicitly questioning old norms and teaching new norms or what Mercer calls ‘ground rules’. These new ground rules or behavioural expectation in turn shape how individuals see themselves and their possibilities. Teaching ground rules is a way of teaching thinking through changing the culture such that a different experience of individual agency is produced, an experience that is less egotistical, less tribal and more tolerant of uncertainty and multiplicity because open to learning from the others and from otherness.
 
Design for collective global intelligence

Technology is part of the essence both of education and of thinking. We know that the dialogues of oral thinkers like Socrates, Gautama Buddha and Confucius were intelligent only because their followers wrote them down. Because of the technology of literacy and because of mass education policies we have something that Oakeshott referred to as the ‘Conversation of Mankind’ (Oakeshott, 1962). Education, as we know it today, is part of the communications technology that enables us to participate in this great dialogue of culture, - without education there is no literacy, mathematics or science. The advent of the Internet is transforming this ongoing dialogue of humanity, bringing it into real-time. Through access to the Internet we can all potentially participate in global dialogues that are building shared understanding and knowledge in every area as well as responding to challenges and designing the future together. Realising this new potential for real-time global collective intelligence requires teaching thinking as a form of educational design. Some argue that our use of the Internet is leading to increased stupidity and tribalism. But it is possible that the use of the Internet, with the right kind of supporting education into how to dialogue across difference more constructively, might be the beginning of a new age of collective global intelligence.
 
Summary

The metaphor of thinking as dialogue leads to an understanding of teaching thinking as drawing students into dialogue. This has some overlap with other models of teaching thinking and also some differences. It overlaps in seeking to produce thinking dispositions such as curiosity and thinking strategies such as asking questions and reasoning. The main differences stem from the understanding that dialogue between people and dialogues carried by media in society as a whole is already thinking such that silent inner thought is just a modality of this larger dialogue. One aspect of teaching thinking is to be concerned to teach individuals to think through internalising dialogue such that they end up carrying their own inner dialogic space around with them. But more than that a dialogic approach to teaching thinking is concerned to open, widen and deepen shared spaces of dialogue in the school classroom and beyond. A dialogic theory of teaching thinking suggests that it is important to teach cultures to think as well as individuals and ultimately to teach our increasingly global society to think. The project of teaching thinking through engaging students in dialogue therefore connects a focus on dialogues in classrooms to the design of educational technologies, including pedagogies, which will promote and sustain a more intelligent global dialogue.
 
 
 
References

• Bakhtin, M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In M. M. Bakhtin (Ed.), The dialogic Imagination. Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas.
• Dewey, J. (1993). The political writings. Hackett Publishing.
• Harré, R. (1999). Positioning theory. The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons
• Holyoak, K. J., & Morrison, R. G. (20015) Introduction in (Holyoak, K. J., & Morrison, R. G Eds.). The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning. Cambridge University Press.
• Kazak, S., Wegerif, R., & Fujita, T. (2015). The importance of dialogic processes to conceptual development in mathematics. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 90(2), 105-120.
• Keats, J. (1817). Letter to George and Thomas Keats. December, 21(27), 1817.[ https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_George_and_Thomas_Keats,_December_28,_1817]
• Langer, E. J. (2016). The power of mindful learning. Hachette UK.
• Mercer, N. and Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Sociocultural Approach. London: Routledge
• Nowotny, H. (2004). The potential of transdisciplinarity. H. Dunin-Woyseth, H. and M. Nielsen, Discussing Transdisciplinarity: Making Professions and the New Mode of Knowledge Production, the Nordic Reader, Oslo School of Architecture, Oslo, Norway, 10-19.
• Oakeshott, M. (1962). The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen: 197–247.
• Resnick, L., Asterhan, C., & Clarke, S. (2015). Socializing intelligence through academic talk and dialogue. American Educational Research Association
• Stahl, G. (2006). Group cognition: Computer support for building collaborative knowledge (pp. 451-473). Cambridge, MA: Mit Press.
• Watson, J. B. (1958). Behaviorism. Transaction Publishers.
• Wegerif, R (2011) Towards a dialogic theory of how children learn to think. Thinking Skills and Creativity. 6 (3) 179-195
• Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for researching peer talk. Language and Education Library, 12, 49-64.
• Woolley, A. Chabris, C. Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. (2010) Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups. Science, September 30, 2010 DOI:10.1126/science.1193147

​Imagine if we were to get two robots – or chatterbots – each programmed to respond to words and categories of words with pre-prepared utterances and we made them interact, the results might look externally like a dialogue but it would not actually be one. Some so-called dialogues in social life can be a bit like that. It is quite possible for people to falsely claim ‘we are having a dialogue’ when they are just talking at each other or talking past each other. 

​Fortunately we know when social interaction is not real dialogue because we all know the experience of engaging in a real dialogue. Real dialogues happen when people listen to each other and learn from each other. Real dialogues tend to feel exciting and enjoyable. One way to characterise real dialogues, so as to distinguish them from mere external interaction of the robot kind, is to point out that in a real dialogue shared thinking occurs such that it is not always possible to say who is thinking. One could say that in a real dialogue there is no longer just ‘I am thinking’ and ‘you are thinking’ but there is also the experience that ‘we are thinking together’. 

The mutual resonance or entanglement or intertwining involved in dialogues results from a kind of circularity of reference that Rommetveit calls ‘attunement to the attunement of the other’ (Rommetveit, 1992). In communications theory, Rommetveit points out, messages go one-way from a sender to a receiver, whereas in a dialogue the process is more of a loop. The ‘other’ is always already on the inside of every utterance. This is because each utterance responds to what the other has said in a way that is intended to relate back to the other. 

Every theorist who can reasonably be referred to as dialogic addresses the dialogic space aspect of dialogue, but each does so in a different way. Bakhtin explicitly links dialogue to learning through his concept of the ‘internally persuasive discourse’ (1991 p376). Authoritative discourse, he writes, remains ‘outside’ us and remains static in meaning. You either have to accept it or reject it but you can’t really engage with it. In contrast the internally persuasive word or discourse is one that enters inside you as if it was one of our own words, it is ‘half ours half someone else’s’ and so it is able to re-organise our words from within and also to engender new words and new ideas.
 
In a similar way Buber contrasts the objectifying ‘I-it’ attitude that turns the other into an object with the intersubjectivity of the ‘i-thou’ attitude that engages responsively with the subjectivity of the other. The ‘I-thou’ attitude leads to entanglement which Buber characterises with a spatial metaphor, the space between or simply ‘the Between’ or ‘Zwischen’ (1958).

Buber extends the apparent inter-subjectivity of the I-thou relation to include relationships with non-human objects such as trees. This extension of dialogic relationships beyond human voices is also found in Bakhtin who remarked ‘I hear voices in everything’. It is essential to dialogic educational theory that we realise that the dialogic space is not only inhabited by the voices of physically present humans. In education the dialogic relationship from which we learn the most is often with a disembodied cultural voice. This might be a dialogue with someone like Shakespeare, for example, or with an area of discourse such as Mathematics. In each case Shakespeare or Mathematics could appear external and static, if the education is not dialogic, or, with a more dialogic education approach, they could dynamically enter inside a learner to become a living voice that helps the learner understand new things.
 
The idea of dialogic space was perhaps first introduced into the analysis of classroom talk when I was writing and thinking together with Neil Mercer about how to explain effective collaborative learning in small groups (Wegerif and Mercer, 1997). The issue at the time was how to understand social cognition in the way in which the upper primary children (aged 8 to 11) were talking together in small groups. There seemed to be at least three significant types of talk, disputational talk when children disagreed with each other without giving reasons, cumulative talk when they agreed without reasons and ‘exploratory talk’ where they genuinely engaged with each other’s ideas. We realised that each type of talk reflected an intersubjective orientation related to a form of individual identification.

​In disputational talk children identified with their own self-image or ego and each wanted to be the one to win the game and get the answer and in cumulative talk children identified with their image of the group as a harmonious unit and so did hot want to criticise. This seemed clear but then we asked ourselves, what is the form of identification involved with ‘exploratory talk’? A key feature of exploratory talk is being able to change one’s mind. The question then was, from what position is it that individual children are able to look at what they have said, find it wrong and so change their minds? This way of thinking about this practical issue led me to introduce the idea of identification with a ‘space of dialogue’ or ‘dialogic space’. 

While Buber’s ‘Between’ is always a highly abstract notion, 'dialogic space' has a concrete aspect. This was seen recently in a primary classroom in Japan where a group of three upper primary children were arguing about a puzzle presented on a tablet. Not only did their body language converge on this central focus but so did their fingers. Each put a finger on the tablet to point out what they thought the key to solving the puzzle was. Pretty soon it was clear that much of the shared thinking was being done by their fingers (research by Taro Fujita – in preparation to be published, similar to Wegerif et al referenced below).

Before dialogic space opens up things tend to be thought of as located in space using the default Identity Ontology that I wrote about in earlier blogs. Identity Ontology says that ‘a thing is what it is and not another thing’. The pepper and salt pots  on the café table are just pepper and salt pots. When dialogic space opens up then material things, bodies, hands, voices, gestures, pixels on the screen, become signs for other things and representative of voices that are not present. Depending on the dialogue the pepper pot could become Lionel Messy scoring a goal for Barcelona dribbling brilliantly around the salt pot and into a goal marked out by knifes and forks, or the two pots could represent the relationship between a proton and a neutron in an atom  (deuterium in this case) surrounded by an electron cloud of scattered pepper on the table or they could stand in for almost anything at all.

​Each opening of dialogic space is unique, but all dialogic spaces, once opened, share something in common. While in practice any given dialogic space might have a limited range of themes and probable outcomes these cannot be determined in advance because, in principle, any real dialogue opens up an infinite potential for creating new meaning. This is just another way of saying that the context that could be brought into play in any dialogue is not bounded, at least not as far as we know. In practice a group of children in a dialogue might just bring in references from the TV shows that they saw the night before but in principle anything could be brought to bear on the problem at hand. I often refer to dialogic space rather than dialogic spaces in order to draw attention to this unity of the structure of dialogic space as always opening up a potential for unbounded contextual meaning. But, of course, dialogic spaces are also all different in their physical location. Dialogues always open somewhere that could be given a location in space and time and also in terms of cultural and historical context. The neologism of ‘dialogic space(s)’ would be the most accurate term with the singular ‘space’ referring to the unbounded ideas side and the plural ‘spaces’ to the physical concrete side. 

Dialogues cannot be defined only in terms of the external surface of things: they cannot be reduced to visible countable things as if they were just so many words or bits of data. Wherever dialogue occurs it opens up a space of multiplicity and uncertainty - a dialogic space which consists of resonances between utterances and voices. The opening of this space is the precondition for the possibility of learning something new. To try to define dialogues in terms only of the external and the visible is to try to kill precisely what makes them not only useful but essential to education -  the internal and invisible dialogic space that makes new connections, new insights and new understandings possible. That is why we need a concept of dialogic space in education and in educational research.