Rupert Wegerif
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Dialogue and equality

29/4/2018

5 Comments

 
'One law for the lion and the ox is oppression' Blake  
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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.
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Blake's poems 'Little girl lost' and then 'Little girl found' describe how a young girl called Lyca goes to live peacefully with lions 
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Haji Bektash, 13th century mystic and founder of the Bektashi muslims, is often shown holding together a lion and a deer.
5 Comments
Rupert Higham link
30/4/2018 10:10:00 am

Hi Rupert - thanks for this blog. I love the Blake!

Equality is a difficult concept. As this useful encyclopedia entry points out, it should never be understood as 'sameness' or 'identity'; rather, it inescapably means, 'in some respects different, yet similar in relation to the matter in hand'. (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equality/). I wonder whether either the cooperative value of 'equity', or the socialist maxim, 'from each according to their abilities; to each according to their needs', are more helpful in understanding a dialogic attitude to relationships and justice.

The other concept I work with in this area is Bauman's 'solidarity', as distinct from 'tolerance'. Solidarity is both a personal and ethical commitment to live in difference with others as an active exploration of tension and inspiration.

For me, the last part of the puzzle is acknowledging that genuine dialogue doesn't recognise a false dichotomy between words and actions, and that seeking to live in solidarity with someone inevitably applies changing what you say, think, believe and do. It is a whole-self commitment marked by the opening yourself up to be influenced by, and to seek to influence, others. That's why I think it's important to recognise dialogue as both a fundamantal generative ontological principle and as a full-blooded ethical theory. Our forms of conversation, which by 'dialogue' we easily presume are where dialogue starts, are thus only markers of the dialogic attitudes and dispositions of openness, welcoming and seeking. To me, this is is one of the most important distinctions in the field of dialogue: between a focus on forms of conversation and its instrumental value in learning, and a focus on dialogic relationships and orientations.

Reply
Rupert
30/4/2018 05:31:42 pm

Good points - thanks

Reply
Nate link
2/5/2018 09:20:08 pm

Rupert H,

Loved your comments there.
You mentioned "dispositions of openness, welcoming, and seeking" as dialogic attitudes. I love that, and I think this is the way that we need to frame competition, particularly competitive sport: as generatively dialogical.
When sport honors difference and the other, rather than trying to flatten, smash, or conquer it, it can lead to solidarity.

Perhaps sport can be "the matter at hand" in which we explore and express our equality (which includes difference)?

I wrote something briefly about this after being inspired by Rupert Wegerif's article "Dialogue with a Tree." In it, I mention the notion of Coliberation, which was coined by the late Bernie DeKoven.

emanciplaytion.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/i-and-thou-sweet-tension-coliberation-how-dialogue-in-play-sport-and-human-movement-can-change-the-world/

Would love to hear your thoughts on Sport as Dialogue!

Reply
Dubravka Knežić
1/5/2018 01:31:06 pm

Thank you for this blog! I would like to respond by some thoughts regarding 'internal equality' and 'internal interconnectedness that was always there'. Often was this interconnectedness compared to, or even identified with recognition. Think of the two halves in Plato's Symposium, I think, looking for each other, doomed to separation and longing to be whole again. Could dialogic space not be seen as the locus of, or rather an opportunity for such a reunion of the two halves into a living, continually changing, protean whole? In this light, internal equality could be seen as the state where two or more voices find each other in their quest for self-mainifestation through other voices of which there are, too, the manifestations.
Indeed, the images of ourselves stand this quest in the way. In effect, they seem to be following the opposite dynamics which is continuous foolhardy monologic re-confirmation and re-assertion of separateness.
Does all this make sense to you?

Reply
Rupert Wegerif
3/5/2018 02:18:06 pm

Hi Dubravka
I do largely agree with you. Love is perhaps the experience of finding the self in the other, or the inner unity behind apparent difference. I am not quite sure about the points you make about self-expression. I tend to see the 'whole' as not really a thing but a potentiality for all meaning that we experience as a dynamic process. Perhaps this is the metaphor Derrida borrows from the Mallarme of the white page pregnant with potential meaning - meaning that is then brought out by his pen marking lines on the page. On this model the self is never what it seems. Ultimately the self is the strange loop or flowing movement from the whole through the part and back again. Separate selves are a bit of an illusion and so always experience themselves as inadequate and seeking to return ot the other from which they were drawn - something like that anyway.

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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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