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

Playful talk 

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

So what are ‘types of talk’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some references

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chiasm

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

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

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

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

Figure 5: figure ground gestalt as ‘chiasm’

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

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

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

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

Monologic vs dialogic? 

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

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

External or monologic relations (Thunk!)

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