Rupert Wegerif
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Defining 'Dialogic Education'

9/8/2017

10 Comments

 

Dialogic education emphasises the importance of dialogue for learning. But what exactly is meant by the word ‘dialogue’? And what does it entail for an educational programme or approach to be ‘dialogic’?

In everyday speech the term ‘dialogue’ can be used to refer to almost any kind of social interaction where words or other signs are exchanged between people. Bakhtin, a philosopher referred to as a major source for recent approaches to dialogic education, defined dialogue by claiming that; ‘If an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue’ (Bakhtin 1986, 168). Robin Alexander quotes this sentence from Bakhtin in outlining his Dialogic Teaching approach. The aim of the approach is to engage students in sustained stretches of talk which enables speakers and listeners to explore and build on their own and others’ ideas (Alexander, 2006)
 
It is sometimes assumed that dialogic education is about talk in classrooms but the definition of dialogue by Bakhtin given above does not necessarily limit itself to explicit spoken language or even to any form of explicit language. Since personality and tone of voice are part of dialogues for Bakhtin, it is clear that some forms of music, Jazz for example, and some forms of improvised dance can be dialogic. Bakhtin was interested in the way in which holding different ideas or perspectives together in the tension of a dialogue led to new insights. For Bakhtin dialogue is not just about talk or texts but includes the more general idea that the inter-animation of different perspectives can lead to mutual illumination (Bakhtin, 1984).

Level 1: Dictionary definition
The term ‘dialogic’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an adjective applied to describe anything ‘relating to or in the form of dialogue’. This is the first level of definition that can be applied to dialogic education. Where there is group work or a high level of open-ended teacher student interaction this might be referred to as ‘dialogic education’ without specifying any more technical meaning for dialogic than that the teaching and learning takes the form of a dialogue.

Level 2: epistemological definitions of dialogic
Dialogic is often used in a more technical way to refer to the claim that the meaning of an utterance is not given by that utterance alone but can only be understood in a context, more specifically through the position and role of that utterance in a larger dialogue in which it is a response to previous utterances and is trying to elicit or have some impact upon future utterances (Rommetveit, 1992: Linell, 2009). To put this another way, if a friend sends a text with a happy face emoji the meaning of that text does not stand alone but depends on the previous message and also on how your friend might want you to respond.

The term dialogic used in this more technical way is a contrast to the term ‘monologic’ which expresses the idea that everything has one correct meaning in one true perspective on the world. For dialogic, by contrast, knowledge is never direct knowledge of an external world but always emerges only within dialogue as an aspect of dialogue. This is simply because knowledge has to take the form of an answer to a question and questions arise in the context of dialogue, both dialogue between human voices and dialogue with the larger context or the world around. Since the dialogue is never closed the questions we ask will change and so what counts as knowledge is never final. The dialogue is never closed because when you think it is over and look back upon it to reflect upon it, that reflection is itself a new utterance in the dialogue. This is why there is a new interpretation of what Socrates really meant almost every year. It follows from this dialogic understanding of knowledge that it is more important to teach students how to construct knowledge together with others so that they can participate more fully and effectively in ongoing dialogues then in is to teach them lists of fixed knowledge or so-called facts. 

This focus on how we gain knowledge gives a second or epistemological level of definition for dialogic education which is that education should be understood as engaging students in an ongoing process of shared enquiry taking the form of a dialogue (Wells, 1999: Linell, 2009). Dialogic teaching, for example, developed by Robin Alexander, mentioned above, is epistemological in focus, drawing students into the process of the shared construction of knowledge. A similar epistemological focus can often be found in the community of enquiry approach in Philosophy for Children (Lipman, 2003), in the promotion of Exploratory Talk (Littleton & Mercer, 2013) and in the promotion of Accountable Talk (Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008).
 
Level 3: ontological definitions of dialogic
Epistemology is about how we know things and so any purely epistemological approach in education does tend to assume that there is a knowing self on the one hand and an external  reality that is known about on the other hand. Some claim that taking dialogic seriously as a theory of meaning implies that it is not just a means to knowledge construction mediating between selves and reality, but, that selves and reality are also part of the dialogue. Applied to education this ontological interpretation of dialogic suggests that dialogue is not just a means or tool to be used in education to help construct knowledge, but, more than that, engagement in dialogue is a way to change ourselves and to change our reality.

Different versions of ontologic dialogic education focus differently on either understanding and transforming a) the self, or b) reality as a whole or c) social reality.  Understanding the self as a kind of dialogic author and education as developing both the freedom and the responsibility of this authorial self, seems to be a focus of one strand of ontologic dialogic educational theory (Matusov 2009: Sidorkin 1999).  Another strand puts more focus on the transformation of reality seeing education, and science understood as dialogue, as a journey of discovery from the naturally occurring illusion that selves and objects are separate substances within an external fixed reality to the realisation that all identities are aspects of a kind of universal dialogue that we can learn to participate in more fully and more effectively or at least more playfully (Wegerif, 2007: Kennedy, 2014). A more political interpretation of dialogic education can be seen in the vision of Freire (1971) and those influenced by Freire (e.g Flecha, 2009) of dialogic education as a way to empower the oppressed such that they can learn to ‘name’ their own reality in a movement that is both an expansion of consciousness (‘conscientization’) and at the same time a transformation of social reality. Where a particular concept of what counts as social justice is established in advance of dialogue then this Freirean vision may be accused of being instrumental and manipulative rather than genuinely dialogic (Matusov, 2009). However, if the focus is on liberating all students to be able to participate equally fully in dialogues that shape a shared social reality then this is a truly dialogic educational goal albeit one which may often have obvious political implications.
 
In practice, despite claims to the contrary (e.g Matusov in Matusov & Wegerif, 2014), these three levels of definition are not mutually incompatible. Most approaches to education that describe themselves as dialogic combine some element of all three levels. It is not uncommon for approaches to combine a concern for taking the form of a dialogue in which all participants are given opportunities to participate with ideas, a concern to promote knowledge age skills through shared inquiry and also an interest in developing dialogic dispositions and promoting more dialogue as a valued end in itself (eg Flecha 2000, 16: Phillipson and Wegerif, 2016; Lefstein and Snell, 2013; Nystrand. 1997).

Conclusion

Dialogic educational theory has a variety of strands and there are significant differences in focus across these strands. Nonetheless some shared themes emerge. The first of these is the dialogic form. Approaches to education that call themselves dialogic tend to involve dialogue, usually in the form of face to face talk including questioning and exploration of ideas of a kind that might have been familiar to Socrates. However what makes this talk ‘dialogic’ is not the external form but the internal or lived experience of a shared space which Buber called ‘the in-between’ (1958) and which more recently is being referred to as ‘dialogic space’ (e.g Mercer, Warwick, Kershner, & Staarman, 2010). The idea behind dialogic space is summed up by Merleau-Ponty who wrote that when dialogue works it is no longer possible to say who is thinking (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) because we find ourselves thinking together.
 
In teaching through the opening of a shared dialogic space, dialogic education draws students into participation in the processes through which shared knowledge is constructed and validated. In other words dialogic education promotes dialogue as an end in itself. As a result of participation in dialogic education students are expected to become better at dialogue which means better at learning things together with others.
 
Dialogic education programmes have elements of these three characteristics, firstly, a dialogic form, secondly, opening a shared dialogic space and thirdly, the aim of teaching for more dialogue or teaching dialogue as an end in itself as well as using dialogue as a means to knowledge construction. 

References
 
 
Alexander, R. J. (2006). Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking classroom talk. Cambridge: Dialogos.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, ed. and trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas.
Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou (Second Edition, R. Gregory Smith, trans.). Edinburgh: T & T Clark; 
​Flecha, R. (2000). Sharing Words. Theory and Practice of Dialogic Learning. Lanham, M.D: Rowman & Littlefield.
Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press
Kennedy, D. (2014). Neoteny, dialogic education and an emergent psychoculture: Notes on theory and practice. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48(1), 100-117.
Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2013). Better than best practice: Developing teaching and learning through dialogue. Routledge.
Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind and world dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Lipman, M. (2003). Thinking in education. Cambridge University Press.
Littleton, K., & Mercer, N. (2013). Interthinking: Putting talk to work. Routledge.
Matusov, E. (2009). Journey into dialogic pedagogy. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publishers.
Matusov, E., & Wegerif, R. (2014). Dialogue on 'dialogic education': Has Rupert gone over to 'the dark side'? Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 2.
Mercer, N. and Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Sociocultural Approach. London: Routledge
Mercer, N., Warwick, P., Kershner, R., & Staarman, J. K. (2010). Can the interactive whiteboard help to provide ‘dialogic space’for children's collaborative activity?. Language and education, 24(5), 367-384.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible (Claude Lefort, ed. And Alphonso Lingis, trans.). Evanston, Il: Northwestern University: 15
Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L. B. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and in civic life. Studies in philosophy and education, 27(4), 283-297.
​Nystrand, M. (1997). Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom. Language and Literacy Series. Teachers College Press,
Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering Core Concepts Through Thinking Together. Taylor & Francis.
Rommetveit, R. (1992). Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communication, in A. Wold (ed.). The dialogical alternative: towards a theory of language and mind . Oslo: Scandanavian Press: 19–45.
Sidorkin, A. M. (1999). Beyond discourse: Education, the self and dialogue. New York: State University of New York Press.
Wegerif, R. (2007). Dialogic, Education and Technology: Expanding the Space of Learning. New York and Berlin: Springer.
Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the Internet age. Routledge.
Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry: Towards a sociocultural practice and theory of education.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Creative Commons Licence
Defining Dialogic Education by Rupert Wegerif is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
10 Comments
Dani Hilliard link
30/8/2017 03:51:32 pm

Thank you Rupert for defining 'dialogic' in the way that you have - it serves to remind everyone that simply calling something 'dialogic' because it involves 'talk' is not good enough and that the term 'dialogic', certainly on both an epistemological and ontological level, involves a different form of dialogue that creates a shared space for knowledge construction which some 'talk' that occurs in the classroom would not allow. I hope you don't mind but I am writing a report at the moment in which I am including your blog post as a link so that other people may appreciate the differences you have highlighted.

Reply
Rupert
31/8/2017 03:03:21 pm

Thanks Dani
I am glad that you like it and that you will include a link in your report. Hope it goes well.

Reply
Leonie Brown
13/6/2018 04:35:47 pm

Hi Rupert, I am hoping you can help with something. I have found this article from you but I am having a lot of problems finding out which article it is or how to cite it in my school work please can you tell me where and when it was published as I can not match it to anything on your website so far.... maybe it is yet to be published, especially as it says pre-print draft, if so can I say in press...? https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rupert_Wegerif/publication/319008133_Dialogic_Education_Pre-print_draft/links/598aedaea6fdcc7cf9247fd0/Dialogic-Education-Pre-print-draft

Thank you very much!

Leonie

Reply
Rupert Wegerif
3/8/2020 09:22:34 am

So sorry Leone - might be a bit late to respond now - I do not always see the comments straight away and it looks like I did not reply to this one at the time. The article in question is
Wegerif, R. (2019). Dialogic education. In Oxford research encyclopedia of education.
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.396

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Steve Williams
1/8/2020 09:47:24 am

Hi Rupert

Thanks for your summary of dialogic education. There was one bit I pause over to reflect on.

"The idea behind dialogic space is summed up by Merleau-Ponty who wrote that when dialogue works it is no longer possible to say who is thinking (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) because we find ourselves thinking together."

in what sense do you interpret the 'phrase' that 'when a dialogue works it is not possible to say who is thinking'?

I guess there is a distinction here between thinking and speaking. It is possible to say who is speaking by looking and listening. But does the quote mean that in a dialogue, the voice of others are in one's own consciousness (perhaps as a question or a response or a disagreement) and so one thinks in relation to what others have said (and therefore thought). That is the sense I make of it. However, that would be true even if I am on my own. Other people's voices are in my head from things I've read or from past experiences and so on. In this sense, 'the self' is a dialogic space. To live a life is to be in a dialogic space. So in what sense does a dialogic space have boundaries? When are humans not in some sense thinking together with some other humans?

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Rupert Wegerif
3/8/2020 10:06:12 am

Hi Steve
Good to hear from you. That is a great comment or question. Thanks for engaging with what I was trying to say. I agree with your interpretation and also with the concern it raises that the term 'dialogic space' has no boundaries.

I explored these issues further in another blog that you might like:
https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/dialogic-space-why-we-need-it

But I think you might also be interested in my account of a dialogic relational ontology in https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/dialogic-and-dialectic-clarifying-an-important-distinction

Summarising the argument:
1) all meaning is dialogic - any claim implies a contrast with other claims within a field - ultimately the field is unbounded ('there are no last words' Bakhtin)
2) but the contrast monologic/dialogic makes sense for us since we experience monologic. 'A=A' or 'a thing is what it is and not another thing'. We tend to take boundaries for granted as real and immutable - like the boundary between me and you - between here and there - between mental and physical.
3) the expansion of dialogic space is an experience whenever that which was outside the dialogue and so unthinkable becomes inside the dialogue and so thinkable. When we think 'black holes' or even 'ideology' dialogic space expands. When concepts that we experienced first as fixed parts of the world become tools for thinking then dialogic space expands. (Bakhtin's 'authoritative word' - fixed - to his 'persuasive word' mutable)
4) The expansion of dialogic space is a movement in identification from identifying with one side of the boundary to identifying with the shared space of dialogue. Dialogic identity is not me or you but a dynamic 'both and ..'
5) dialogues are never simply external - they are lived
6) we experience the opening of dialogic space (which is also dialogic time - a kairos or teachable moment) and the closure of dialogic space. This shift in experience corresponds to some external clues - the way that language is used for example may indicate this - pauses, using new terms introduced by others as if your own, changes in mind, humility in asking for clarification etc
7) I agree that, potentially, the meaning opened up by any sign has no natural limits - it resonates in an unbounded space of potential meaning. But the same is true of sub-atomic particles in quantum theory. Nonetheless measurement is possible using a probability wave function to say not exactly where a particle is but where it probably is. In the same way dialogues in context have relevance criteria (Grice - implicature) that tend to limit them without defining them. There are fields of dialogue eg history of the civil war or photosynthesis and they function in practice although they have no fixed boundary. I distinguish here between potential dialogic space (unbounded) and actual dialogic space (bounded). So dialogic space is a blended or hybrid space - on one side always linked to physical signs like words and locations like classrooms but on the other open - see blog: '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.'
8) So it is a real space (or a sort) with boundaries (of a sort) but it is not reducible to the physical or the empirical. My claims is that it is a useful pedagogical tool. One can open, widen (add new voices) and deepen (question framing assumptions) and so generally expand (bring fixed areas of obviousness into debate) dialogic space. This is, for me, perhaps the main purpose of education.

Reply
Rupert Wegerif
3/8/2020 10:28:40 am

But I should have added that I do struggle with these questions - they are serious questions without simple answers.

I guess I see the educational journey ultimately as one from the monologic illusion of separate self-subsistent identities towards the dialogic Truth (ontological) of internal inter-connectedness (unbounded dialogue - Bakhtin's 'Great Time') via a pedagogy that provokes dialogue and expands dialogue. The idea of opening a dialogic space is meant to be useful (pragmatic truth) in the context of this journey.

Steve Williams
3/8/2020 06:27:13 pm

Hi Rupert

Thanks for your reply. I’ll take a look at that other stuff you mentioned.

With the quote from Merleau-Ponty, I thought that either it meant what I took it to mean in which case it is quite a mild idea that is true throughout life or it is more radical, in which case I wondered to what extent participants would be responsible for their own beliefs and actions (if it is no longer possible to say who is thinking). On second thoughts, I suppose he means that observers might not be able, easily, to tell who is thinking but the participants will still be able to discern their own thoughts as distinct from those of others. But then observers only have the evidence of the utterances of the speaking subjects to go on and, surely, they will be able to spot the differences in meaning. As Bakhtin says (somewhere), even when people are agreeing, there may be significant differences in meaning.

On the question of boundaries, it might be useful to make a distinction between intimate dialogue where there is a to-and-fro of discourse between the same people until the meeting comes to and end, and universal dialogue which never ends. The two could overlap as when there is an in-the-moment exchange and then one of the partners goes away and reads a book that stimulates further inner dialogue and so on.

Reply
Geilsa Baptista
26/7/2022 05:46:31 pm

Dear Dr. Wegeriff, how can I cite this article? Thanks

Reply
Rupert Wegerif
28/8/2022 06:36:04 pm

Wegerif, R. (2017, August 9). Defining 'Dialogic Education'
https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/defining-dialogic-education

from https://libanswers.snhu.edu/faq/190823

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    Rupert Wegerif. Professor of Education at Cambridge University. Interested in Dialogic Education, educational technology and teaching for thinking and creativity.

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