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

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

Figure 1: Magic Square

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

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

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

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

Figure 2 Problem A

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

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

3 Darwin vs Lamarck

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what if it is not real?

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

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

Who is 'Christ'?

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

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

A double identity

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

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

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

Virtual reality and social control

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

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

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

Is the Matrix itself just another part of the Matrix?

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

The search for meaning

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

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

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

References:

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
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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
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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)
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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.
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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 .