I have recently attended talks and read research articles that refer to ‘dialogic’ in education but then go on to treat this in an entirely external way, coding each utterance and trying to pin everything down to the visible and tangible external surface of things. This worries me. Dialogue is only interesting in education because of its dialogic nature; to study it as if everything was visible and measurable misses the most important thing which is the invisible opening of dialogic space.
Dialogic means seeing things (or feeling things or thinking things) from at least two points of view at once. Monologic means only acknowledging one correct point of view as if everything was visible all at once laid out flat on a table in front of us. It is only through entering into dialogue that ideas change and new perspectives can be taken on board. To enter into dialogue with each other ideas need to move into a shared space where they can resonate together, merge in some ways, clash in others and stimulate the emergence of new ideas. This shared space of mutual resonance is ‘dialogic space’ and without it there is no real dialogue and no real learning.
Dialogic means seeing things (or feeling things or thinking things) from at least two points of view at once. Monologic means only acknowledging one correct point of view as if everything was visible all at once laid out flat on a table in front of us. It is only through entering into dialogue that ideas change and new perspectives can be taken on board. To enter into dialogue with each other ideas need to move into a shared space where they can resonate together, merge in some ways, clash in others and stimulate the emergence of new ideas. This shared space of mutual resonance is ‘dialogic space’ and without it there is no real dialogue and no real learning.
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).
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou (2nd ed., R. Gregory Smith, Trans.), Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.
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. (pp. 19–45). Oslo: Scandanavian Press.
Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for investigating talk. In R. Wegerif, & P. Scrimshaw (Eds.), Computers and talk in the primary
classroom (pp. 49–65). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Wegerif, R., Fujita, T., Doney, J., Linares, J. P., Richards, A., & Van Rhyn, C. (2017). Developing and trialing a measure of group thinking. Learning and Instruction, 48, 40-50.
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.
Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou (2nd ed., R. Gregory Smith, Trans.), Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.
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. (pp. 19–45). Oslo: Scandanavian Press.
Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for investigating talk. In R. Wegerif, & P. Scrimshaw (Eds.), Computers and talk in the primary
classroom (pp. 49–65). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Wegerif, R., Fujita, T., Doney, J., Linares, J. P., Richards, A., & Van Rhyn, C. (2017). Developing and trialing a measure of group thinking. Learning and Instruction, 48, 40-50.
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