​Imagine if we were to get two robots – or chatterbots – each programmed to respond to words and categories of words with pre-prepared utterances and we made them interact, the results might look externally like a dialogue but it would not actually be one. Some so-called dialogues in social life can be a bit like that. It is quite possible for people to falsely claim ‘we are having a dialogue’ when they are just talking at each other or talking past each other. 

​Fortunately we know when social interaction is not real dialogue because we all know the experience of engaging in a real dialogue. Real dialogues happen when people listen to each other and learn from each other. Real dialogues tend to feel exciting and enjoyable. One way to characterise real dialogues, so as to distinguish them from mere external interaction of the robot kind, is to point out that in a real dialogue shared thinking occurs such that it is not always possible to say who is thinking. One could say that in a real dialogue there is no longer just ‘I am thinking’ and ‘you are thinking’ but there is also the experience that ‘we are thinking together’. 

The mutual resonance or entanglement or intertwining involved in dialogues results from a kind of circularity of reference that Rommetveit calls ‘attunement to the attunement of the other’ (Rommetveit, 1992). In communications theory, Rommetveit points out, messages go one-way from a sender to a receiver, whereas in a dialogue the process is more of a loop. The ‘other’ is always already on the inside of every utterance. This is because each utterance responds to what the other has said in a way that is intended to relate back to the other. 

Every theorist who can reasonably be referred to as dialogic addresses the dialogic space aspect of dialogue, but each does so in a different way. Bakhtin explicitly links dialogue to learning through his concept of the ‘internally persuasive discourse’ (1991 p376). Authoritative discourse, he writes, remains ‘outside’ us and remains static in meaning. You either have to accept it or reject it but you can’t really engage with it. In contrast the internally persuasive word or discourse is one that enters inside you as if it was one of our own words, it is ‘half ours half someone else’s’ and so it is able to re-organise our words from within and also to engender new words and new ideas.
 
In a similar way Buber contrasts the objectifying ‘I-it’ attitude that turns the other into an object with the intersubjectivity of the ‘i-thou’ attitude that engages responsively with the subjectivity of the other. The ‘I-thou’ attitude leads to entanglement which Buber characterises with a spatial metaphor, the space between or simply ‘the Between’ or ‘Zwischen’ (1958).

Buber extends the apparent inter-subjectivity of the I-thou relation to include relationships with non-human objects such as trees. This extension of dialogic relationships beyond human voices is also found in Bakhtin who remarked ‘I hear voices in everything’. It is essential to dialogic educational theory that we realise that the dialogic space is not only inhabited by the voices of physically present humans. In education that the dialogic relationship is often with a cultural voice. This might be a dialogue with someone like Shakespeare or with an area of discourse like Mathematics. In each case Shakespeare or Mathematics can appear external and static or can enter inside a learner to become a living voice that helps the learner understand new things.
 
The idea of dialogic space was perhaps first introduced into the analysis of classroom talk when I was writing and thinking together with Neil Mercer about how to explain effective collaborative learning in small groups (Wegerif and Mercer, 1997). The issue at the time was how to understand social cognition in the way in which the upper primary children (aged 8 to 11) were talking together in small groups. There seemed to be at least three significant types of talk, disputational talk when children disagreed with each other without giving reasons, cumulative talk when they agreed without reasons and ‘exploratory talk’ where they genuinely engaged with each other’s ideas. We realised that each type of talk reflected an intersubjective orientation related to a form of individual identification.

​In disputational talk children identified with their own self-image or ego and each wanted to be the one to win the game and get the answer and in cumulative talk children identified with their image of the group as a harmonious unit and so did hot want to criticise. This seemed clear but then we asked ourselves, what is the form of identification involved with ‘exploratory talk’? A key feature of exploratory talk is being able to change one’s mind. The question then was, from what position is it that individual children are able to look at what they have said, find it wrong and so change their minds? This way of thinking about this practical issue led me to introduce the idea of identification with a ‘space of dialogue’ or ‘dialogic space’. 

While Buber’s ‘Between’ is always a highly abstract notion, 'dialogic space' has a concrete aspect. This was seen recently in a primary classroom in Japan where a group of three upper primary children were arguing about a puzzle presented on a tablet. Not only did their body language converge on this central focus but so did their fingers. Each put a finger on the tablet to point out what they thought the key to solving the puzzle was. Pretty soon it was clear that much of the shared thinking was being done by their fingers (research by Taro Fujita – in preparation to be published, similar to Wegerif et al referenced below).

Before dialogic space opens up things tend to be thought of as located in space using the default Identity Ontology that I wrote about in earlier blogs. Identity Ontology says that ‘a thing is what it is and not another thing’. The pepper and salt pots  on the café table are just pepper and salt pots. When dialogic space opens up then material things, bodies, hands, voices, gestures, pixels on the screen, become signs for other things and representative of voices that are not present. Depending on the dialogue the pepper pot could become Lionel Messy scoring a goal for Barcelona dribbling brilliantly around the salt pot and into a goal marked out by knifes and forks, or the two pots could represent the relationship between a proton and a neutron in a hydrogen atom surrounded by an electron cloud of scattered pepper on the table or they could stand in for almost anything at all.

​Although each opening of dialogic space is unique all dialogic spaces, once opened, share something in common. While in practice any given dialogic space might have a limited range of themes and probable outcomes these cannot be determined in advance because, in principle, any real dialogue opens up a potential for infinite meaning. This is just another way of saying that the context that could be brought into play in any dialogue is unbounded. In practice the children might just mention references from the TV shows that they saw last night but in principle anything could be brought to bear on the problem at hand. I tend to refer to dialogic space rather than dialogic spaces in order to draw attention to this unity of the structure of dialogic space as always opening up unbounded contextual meaning within the diversity of specific contexts. But, of course, dialogic spaces are also all different in their physical location. The neologism of ‘dialogic space(s)’ would be the most accurate term with the singular ‘space’ referring to the unbounded ideas side and the plural ‘spaces’ to the physical concrete side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

I just wrote a review of a new book  ‘Dialogue, Argumentation and Education: History, Theory and Practice’ by Baruch Schwarz and Michael Baker[i]. I found this to be generally a good book except for when it came to engaging with my own work. They seemed to interpret my appeal to the importance of dialogue as an end in itself as if it was a political concern with power relations, writing that ‘Wegerif sees in the mediation of the teacher an unbearable power relation imposed on the student’ (p101-102). No. Not at all. My interest is in how teachers and students can learn to step back from their identity images and power games in order to liberate the voice of the dialogue. I am not especially interested in what students want to say, I am much more interested in how to teach them to be able to hear what the dialogue wants to say by which I simply mean being able to learn new things through engaging constructively with other perspectives. This made me think that I must have failed to explain my point clearly enough. So I will try again, briefly, in this blog. Do let me know if my position[ii] becomes clearer or if it still needs more work.
 
Schwarz and Baker refer often to the dialogical as well as the dialectical nature of argument, writing of this distinction that:
 
‘the dialectic is generally meant as an exchange between people to handle a disagreement; the dialogical simply means multi-voicedness in language production’ (p103)
 
They refer to dialogic whenever emotions and ethics come into play. This implies that dialogic – as multivoicedness – is part of the social context of dialectical reasoning. I agree with that but I think that realising that dialectic is embedded within and encompassed by dialogic has bigger implications for understanding argumentation than Schwarz and Baker seem to realise. Let me explain with a story about three distinct ways of thinking about everything or  three ‘ontologies’ as we might call them: identity, difference-in-identity and identity-in-difference.

Figure 1: Identity

Aristotle pointed out the obvious fact that two different objects cannot occupy exactly the same space. Referring to Aristotle, Leibniz derived the more abstract principle of identity or A = A which he used as part of the foundation for classical logic. This is often elaborated as ‘a thing is what it is and not another thing’. I am me, you are you, a tree is a tree, ‘Brexit’ is ‘Brexit’ etc

For many it seems to follow from identity thinking that the correct meaning of a word is its reference to the correct thing that it refers to. A kind of pointing. This is me, that is you, there is a tree ‘Brexit means Brexit’ etc.

Understanding stuff, on this ontology, is essentially representing it correctly. Education leads us to acquire this understanding and tests it in exams. Who am I? Here is my image in a mirror. What is a tree? Here is a picture. What is ‘Brexit’?– here is my conceptual map of the key concepts linked to Brexit, etc, etc.
​

Figure 2: A Hegelian type total system (thanks to iawake.blog)

​Plato wrote down a number of dialogues that he claimed to have witnessed Socrates engage in with various others. A dialogue has at least one real other person invovled and since you cannot control the other person you cannot predict what they might say and you cannot determine where the dialogue will go. But if you write the dialogue down after the event you start with the conclusion and then you can recall the actual dialogue as if it was a reconstruction of the steps of an argument leading inevitably to the one conclusion that was actually arrived at. While any moment in an actual dialogue has multiple voices in play and multiple paths that could be followed, once they are written down as dialectic there is only one path and only one conclusion. When, in the Republic, Plato describes dialectic as ‘the coping stone that tops our educational system’ (Plato BCE380/1955, p347) he is not referring to living dialogue but to an abstract logical system which offers, he claims, a way of reaching the truth. As Nikulin brings out in his excellent study of the difference between dialogic and dialectic, there is nothing creative in Plato’s dialectic, only ways to criticise claims in order to exclude errors (Nikulin, 2010, p14).
 
Hegel built on Plato’s dialectic and turned it into the basis of a whole world-view or ontology which he characterised with the phrase ‘difference within identity’. Identity comes first. A thing is what it is. I am I, the tree is a tree, Brexit is Brexit etc. Non-identity or difference is then brought in in the form of an internal contradiction – being can only make sense as a contrast to its negative or non-being. I am only I in contrast to you and to her and to them etc. That is how grammar works. The tree is also defined against what it is not, e.g it is not a cherry stone or a forest. So it seems that a thing is both what it is and not what it is. The tension between incompatibles, being and non-being, is then resolved in a synthesis. For Hegel the 'synthesis' that emerged from the clash of being ('thesis') and non-being (antithesis) was becoming. Thought realises that everything is becoming and becoming involves both being and non-being at the same time but now united in movement. The cherry stone is the tree as ‘becoming tree’ and, in a sense, I am you and you are me united in a larger dynamic system of becoming.

Vygotsky applies Hegels’ dialectic vision directly to human development and education:
‘Thus we may say that we become ourselves through others and that this rule applies not only to the personality as a whole, but also to the history of every individual function. This is the essence of the progress of cultural development expressed in a purely logical form. The personality becomes for itself what it is in itself through what it is for others' (Vygotsky, 1991, p 39).
 
This is a ‘relational ontology’ going beyond an ‘identity’ or ‘substance ontology’ because things now do not exist separately from their relationships with other things within a larger system. Marx adopted Hegel almost completely and followed Hegel when he described the human individual as the sum total of his social relationships[iii]. Although the system is dynamic it is ultimately closed because there is an end to history, for Hegel the Absolute Notion and for Marx, global communism.

There might not seem much to link the grand world-views of Hegel and Marx to Schwartz and Baker’s modest claim that ‘the dialectic is generally meant as an exchange between people to handle a disagreement’ but if they assume that there is one correct method to use to solve a disagreement and one correct answer to reach then they are also assuming a closed system. I am not sure that they do assume this, even in the context of mathematics education they seem aware that there are many creative ways to do maths. However, they do seem to focus on dialectical argumentation as abstract logical manipulations and not to see that it is possible and valuable to teach more dialogic ways of thinking as seeing and feeling from multiple perspectives in a way which expands consciousness even if it does not always win arguments or always come up with clear  solutions to disagreements. 

Figures 3 and 4: Other possible pictures for a Hegelian system in which identity is given by relationships internal to a complex structured whole patterned in several dimensions. 

​Bakhtin makes it clear that he thinks of Hegel’s dialectic as a threat to meaning (1986 p103)

‘If we transform dialogue into one continuous text, that is, erase the divisions between voices (changes of speaking subjects), which is possible at the extreme (Hegel's monological dialectic), then the deep-seated (in-finite) contextual meaning disappears’

So what is this ‘deep-seated (infinite) contextual meaning’ that Bakhtin is seeking to preserve from the threat of dialectic?

Bakhtin’s concern is that dialectic, although modelled originally on the experience of dialogue, has forgotten the real source of meaning in dialogues and confused this with an abstract model or picture. It is as if we had replaced the real digestive system with a computer model of the digestive system and then we keep wondering why we feel so hungry all the time.

This model could be animated
and made more 'smart'
​but could it ever feed us? 

Real dialogue involves an encounter between people or voices or ‘utterances’ that are outside of each other. I can learn about myself by talking to you and seeing my life through your eyes. But I also learn about you and your difference from me. At the end of the dialogue there is no synthesis in which the difference between us is submerged within a greater identity. I am still me and you are still you but there might be a greater awareness of the possibilities of human life. I want to call this growth an expansion of consciousness where we define consciousness, as its etymology suggests, simply as shared understanding or knowing with others (‘con’ = with and ‘scientia’ = knowledge)  This kind of expanded consciousness (also ‘expanded dialogic space’)  is not all about that little bit of explicit knowledge that can be put down on paper in an exam. But it is useful nonetheless. The greater the consciousness the more perspectives can be brought to bear on any given problem or issue and the more learnable people become, meaning open to new ideas and able to creatively solve new problems.

Bakhtin agrees with Hegel that the truth is the whole. The true meaning of an utterance, he writes, is found in the whole dialogue. The problem is that this is a living dialogue that has not yet ended! (p146) We might think we have found the truth of things only for the next utterance to completely re-interpret everything that has gone before. There are in fact always many voices in play and always many possibilities with no final conclusion possible, no ‘last word’ as Bakhtin put it.

Like dialectic, this dialogic vision implies a relational ontology. But switching from ‘difference within identity’ to ‘identity within difference’ means that there is no longer a completed system to refer to as a guarantor of truth. [iv] Of course we think we are going somewhere and we think that there is progress but all such thinking is relative to context and might be proved wrong by the next turn in the road so it is wise to be a bit humble about claims and to be open to the possibility that we might have something to learn from others even from those who initially seem very different from us.

Bakhtin makes it clear what this dialogic world-view means for claims such as  ‘Brexit means Brexit’[v],
'Contextual meaning is potentially infinite, but it can only be actualized when accompanied by another (other's) meaning, if only by a question in the inner speech of the one who understands.. …. There can be no "contextual meaning in and of itself"—it exists only for another contextual meaning, that is, it exists only in conjunction with it. Therefore, there can be neither a first nor a last meaning; it always exists among other meanings as a link in the chain of meaning, …'(p145-146).

In other words Brexit does not have one meaning but it means different things in different contexts depending on the questions that are asked about it by different people with different histories and different agendas. If we are given the task of teaching what ‘Brexit’ means, it would not be honest to define it as if anyone knew the correct answer, it would be better to introduce students to something of the background context and the range of things that people are saying about Brexit. Induct them into the dialogue in other words. The same should apply to all teaching: what we think we know now is always provisional. contextual, multiply voiced and open to new understandings which you, the student, might be responsible for in the future.
 
The profound significance of the shift from dialectic to dialogic ways of thinking for education is summed up by a phrase from the Christian Bible: ‘the letter kills but the spirit gives life’ (2 Corinthians, 3:6). Ultimately dialectic thinking, like identity thinking, is about closing down and controlling meaning. To claim that the meaning of a thing, idea or person is given by location within a closed system is to kill meaning. To teach that there is only one correct method and only one correct answer  is to kill meaning. I write this not because ‘‘Wegerif sees in the mediation of the teacher an unbearable power relation imposed on the student’, not at all, I write this because I want to teach in a way that preserves the possibility of students and teachers living meaningful and creative lives in the light of infinite possibility. And I want to preserve us from the horrors perpetrated by those who think that they know the correct answer and want only to teach it to us.

Notes and references

[i] Kerslake and Wegerif, review of Dialogue, Argumentation and Education: History, Theory and Practice’ by Baruch Schwarz and Michael Baker (2016, Cambridge University Press). To appear in next issue of Thinking Skills and Creativity.
 

[ii] Wegerif, R (2008) Dialogic or Dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on Educational Dialogue. British Educational Research Journal 34(3), 347-361. http://elac.ex.ac.uk/dialogiceducation/userfiles/DialOrDialBERJ(1).pdf
​
[iii] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

[iv]  This switch in ontology is what is implied by the term ‘post-structuralism’ –  structuralism tended to see meaning as about contextual relationships within a bounded system or whole, post-structuralism agreed with this but removed the boundary. See eg Derrida http://www.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f13/DrrdaSSP.pdf

[v] A phrase recently asserted repeatedly by the UK Prime Minister Teresa May.

Nikulin, D. (2010). Dialectic and Dialogue. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.
​
Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, trans.). Cambridge MA: MIT.
Press;

Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas
Plato (1955) The Republic. Penguin Classics.
 ​

The Thinking Together approach to teaching dialogue relies on teaching learners ‘ground rules’ for talk. But what exactly are these ‘ground rules’? The term ‘ground rule’ originated with base-ball in America. Every base-ball ground was a bit different and had to have their own ground rules in addition to the universal rules. For instance a ground rule that applies at Fenway Park, the home of Boston Red Sox, is that: A fly ball that strikes the top of the ladder on the Green Monster and then bounces out of play is two (2) bases. These are explicit rules and so quite misleading when it comes to the use of the term ‘ground rule’ in dialogic education. Here the Oxford English Dictionary definition is a better guide. This describes a ground rules as ‘a basic principle’ and gives as one example of use: ‘My first ground rule is always to tell the truth.’ 

Ground rules are not meant to be explicit rules but implicit guides to actions. We sometimes teach them explicitly but this is mainly so that they can become implicit again through practice. For example we might teach very young children to say ‘I think’ before they give an opinion. This is because they do not always talk in a way that acknowledges that what they are saying is only one possible point of view that could be questioned and that is open for change. But after a bit of practice with dialogue the ‘I think’ in front of utterances becomes implicit. In a real dialogue we know that everything put forward is put forward provisionally as an opinion which can be challenged and can be changed so it is no longer needed to spell this assumption explicitly. 

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 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, both. If the culture of the classroom is ‘dialogic’ 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. 

​This diagram of the four stages of competence originally applied to learning any new skill sums up well what we are doing when we teach ground rules for dialogue. In the first stage – unconscious incompetence the children are not very aware of the implicit ground rules behind the way that they talk together or how this impacts on their thinking. We get them to be more aware of this through discussing videos of people talking, even videos of them talking together in a group around a problem, or role-plays or discussing pictures of people talking in different situations. When they realise that maybe the way that they talk together makes a difference and that they ought to think about it they move into the next stage of conscious incompetence. We then introduce possible ground rules. The best way to do this is to get them to do it. Ask them what they think the ground rules of effective talk should be and rely on their intuitions. The actual ground rules should vary a lot depending on many factors but once they have tried to work in a group children will probably be aware that some ground rule work better than others, rules like listening to everyone with respect, giving everyone a chance to speak, even asking everyone they think, not getting angry or being rude when challenged but, instead, giving reason and being open to change your mind. Ground rules like this will make sense to them and all you have to do as a teacher is bring them out and help the class express them explicitly in a set of ‘ground rules for talking’ which could go up as a poster. This is the stage of conscious competence when the ground rules are consciously referred to and applied. But the expectation is that practice will move the rules into a change in the culture of the class. Many anecdotes about how more dialogic classes are able to solve problems together without always asking the teacher or spontaneously organise collaborative learning indicate that this change in culture can occur whereby the ground rules of dialogue become implicit and assumed as part of the background of communication. 

Once implicit ground rules have been established, this does not mean that there is never any need to go back and revisit those ground rules. One reason might be to develop them further in the direction of more advanced dialogue, adding, for example, the rule of looking at things from other people’s points of view and, perhaps, everyone’s point of view as in ‘would everyone see it that way? If not then why not? What are other possible ways of seeing it?’. While at first this could be an explicit strategy on the lines of ‘what would my aunt think? What would Sherlock Holmes think? What would a Martian think?’ after a while this scanning for alternative perspectives and possible counter examples to every claim can become an automatic or implicit part of dialogic thinking. Another reason to dig up implicit ground rules and make them explicit again is when they are no longer helping. In new contexts ground rules might need to change. In dialogues with some other cultures for example, the implicit assumption that eye-contact means good listening might need to change. In some creative tasks the ground rule to ask for reasons and to give explicit reasons might need to be modified and developed or perhaps this is more about questioning and expanding implicit assumptions about what counts as asking for and giving reasons. 

So exactly what kind of thing are these ‘ground rules’ again?

The use of the term 'ground rule' for teaching dialogue is a version of the rules suggested by 'conversational implicature' in pragmatics (Grice, 1975). Conversational implicature concerns the assumptions that people make, and often have to make, in order to interpret what others say in a dialogue.  For example we normally assume that what another person says is relevant so if I ask 'where are the keys?' and my son says 'on the table' I can just assume that he means the car keys I am looking for as I am about to leave the house and that he means that they are on the nearest and most obvious table to both of us. Of course there are lots of misunderstandings but that is why we know that the rules of implicature apply because we can see the assumptions being made that generate the misunderstandings. 'They are not on the table!', 'Yes they are - I didn't mean the big table, I  meant the small table in the hall' etc.

Implicature in dialogues is interesting because it suggests that explicit meaning rests upon a larger background of shared implicit assumptions. It is only because we have a shared 'form of life' as Wittgenstein put it that people can make sense of what each other are saying. The set of implicit assumptions vary across cultures and change over time.  They depend on who we think we are and what we think we are doing. More than that, if we do not question them and take conscious responsibility for them, they determine who we think we are and what we think we are doing. Foucault has argued, for example, that it is not so much that subjects (us) speak the discourse - as we tend to assume - but rather it is the other way around, the subjects - i.e us - are spoken by the discourse. 

Ground rules need to be shared. If one person had a set of implicit assumptions that she used to interpret the meaning of utterances and no one else shared those then they would not be ground rules. While ground rules might be found reflected in neural activity in individual brains –  but then again,  what isn’t? – their primary nature is to be shared and social. They are not material objects found in physical space. Ground rules are invisible features of dialogic space. Dialogic space is that meaning space shared between people in dialogue together. When ground rules are made explicit, written down on cards and discussed together, then they are part of the contents of dialogic space. Anything that enters into dialogic space can be seen from multiple perspectives. It becomes a sign in an ongoing dialogue with a meaning that evolves as the dialogue moves on. However, before they are made into objects of shared attention, before they are written down, they are hidden in the background.  Ground rules originate as part of the invisible architecture of dialogic space. Although, as I have argued elsewhere, dialogic space always has an infinite potential for generating new meaning, in practice any given dialogue has a hidden architecture that shapes what is likely to be said and what is likely to be thought.

Take this simple example that I have invented out of my experience of recording hours of children playing video games together:

Tom: It’s that one
Shane: No, it’s not
Tom: Yes, it is
Shane: I got it right
Tom: No you didn’t
Shane: I won. I am the best
Tom: You're just a d**khead
(2 boys playing a video game)

It is easy to see here simple ground rules at play of the kind that Neil Mercer referred to as characteristic of ‘disputational talk’. Ground rules like ‘always disagree’, ‘try to win’, ‘do not admit to learning anything from the other’. The simple ground rules here are not reducible to the visible words spoken. Those words are, in a sense, generated by the ground rules. Although the ground rules are invisible behind the surface of the talk they are quite close to the surface and easy to discern behind it. 

Kant actually began the kind of analysis we are doing here. He called it a transcendental argument. He meant by that, working back from the empirical surface of things to reconstruct their necessary preconditions. Peirce called this creative generation of causal mechanisms, ‘abduction’, and claimed it was the essence of scientific method. Bhaskar took this idea from Pierce and called it ‘retroduction’. Bhaskar claims that science is essentially ‘transcendental realism’, which is to say that the causal mechanisms we find through retroduction are real, it is the empirical surface of things that is a bit of an illusion. This seems to fit the reality of science pretty well. Matter, for example, does not seem to exist in any very simple surface way but Schrodinger's wave function maps the underlying invisible ground rules that can give you the probability of a particle appearing to an observer at any given point and at any given time. In a similar way much social science uses invisible social norms, rather like our ground rules, as causal mechanisms to explain behaviour, but always in a probabilistic way.

 ​If ground rules are transcendentals then they are not transcendentals in the way that Kant used the term to mean things that can never be part of our experience, unknowable 'ideal' things belonging to a different 'noumenal' sphere. Ground rules are more like what Merleau-Ponty called, in a striking phrase, ‘the invisibles of this world’. He used the example of the nervure of a leaf. If you look at the veins in a leaf you can almost see an underlying  dendritic pattern, an organising idea that lies just behind the surface but each leaf is different manifesting that invisible idea in a unique way. In a similar way ground rules lie just beneath the audible and visible surface of dialogues structuring them from below. But the exciting thing is that we can make them visible and we can alter them and send them back underground again, as it were, to become invisible again behind behaviour. This is exactly what we do when we teach ground rules for effective dialogue. So the idea of teaching 'ground rules for talk' is a more complicated and, I think, a more profound idea than it might at first appear. By teaching ground rules for talk in classrooms we can, consciously take charge of some of the implicit shared assumptions that shape us and re-design them so that we can collectively think together better, learn together better and live together better. 

References and links to follow up

Sources for practical advice on how to teach ground rules for thinking together:
​Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Routledge. 
Dawes, L., Mercer, N., & Wegerif, R. (2004). Thinking together: A programme of activities for developing speaking, listening and thinking skills for children aged 8-11. Imaginative Minds.
http://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/


Bhaskar, R. (2013). A realist theory of science. Routledge.
Cox, B., & Forshaw, J. (2013). The Quantum Universe:(and why Anything that Can Happen, Does). Da Capo Press.
​Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. 1975, 41-58.
Hedström, P., & Ylikoski, P. (2010). Causal mechanisms in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 49-67.
​Kant, I. (1781/1998). Critique of Pure Reason (translated and edited by Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood).
Mercer, N. (2000). Words and minds: How we use language to think together. Psychology Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M., (1968). The visible and the invisible: followed by working notes. Northwestern University Press.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/peirce.html


​

Both the referendum on Brexit and the 2016 USA presidential election led to claims that the Internet was having a negative impact on democracy. Social media sites, especially Twitter and Facebook, were repeatedly blamed for spreading ‘fake news’. These concerns led to the term ‘post truth’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary as the new word of the year in 2016:
 
Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
‘in this era of post-truth politics, it's easy to cherry-pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire’
‘some commentators have observed that we are living in a post-truth age’

The Internet was blamed because the way the Internet works seems to encourage the spread of false news. The false news story about Pope Francis endorsing Trump for president, for example, very quickly reached a million readers via the internet whilst that the retraction of that story reached far fewer people (Lee, 2016).  The ease with which false news spreads is related to what has been called the ‘echo-chamber’ effect.  Participants in online communities and debates may find their own opinions constantly echoed back to them, which reinforces them in their views. This could be because of their choice of friends online – people tend to hang out online with people like them - but there is also the hidden hand of software design. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, have established personalization algorithms that cater specific information to individuals’ online newsfeeds. This is intended to make advertising more focused and so increase revenue for these companies so it follows a capitalist implicit logic rather than any explicit political agenda. The unintended political consequence, however, might be increased political division and cultural tribalism.
 
Applying the term ‘post-truth’ to the ancient phenomenon of false news links it to the Internet and to post-modernism. A popular version of ‘postmodernism’ might be that there are no facts, only interpretations. Perhaps using the term ‘post-truth’ could be a sly way of kicking postmodern professors? Perhaps it is a way of saying: ‘you have been claiming there is no truth for years – now your words have finally come true and I bet you hate it!’.

The link between the idea of postmodernism and the Internet is so close it could be called umbilical:
‘our online experience embodies many of the underpinnings of Postmodernist theory. In the internet we find a system composed of innumerable narratives and voices, where information lacks fixed meaning and context is easily discarded. Our personas, too, are disposable, a patchwork of opinions and connections whose tethers to reality are in constant doubt. Relativism, plurality, decontextualization of information, destabilization of “reality” and identity: these are decidedly Postmodern concepts. In looking at the salient aspects of our online experience, then, we do indeed see Postmodernism in action, its tenets “made real by the internet.”’ (http://artfcity.com/2011/10/03/baudrillard-did-the-internet-kill-postmodernism/)
​
Perhaps the contrast between truth and ‘post truth’ is a version of the contrast we tend to draw between reality – experience in the physical world - and ‘virtual reality’ – our experience online? Perhaps ‘post truth age’ is a version of ‘Internet age’?

​Two kinds of truth 

The term ‘post truth’ implies a contrast, ‘simple truth’ perhaps, that straight-forward no-nonsense old-fashioned truth we used to get told by priests, aristocrats, professors and politicians whom we could trust. Simple facts and not interpretations. The sort of things that experts know and write in text-books or broadcast in BBC voices while wearing jackets and ties. The contrast implicitly being made with the term 'post truth' is not only between ‘true’ and ‘false’ but also between traditional media and new media. ‘True’ news, implicitly, is likely to result from proper procedures, from using trusted authorities, from the practices of regulated broadcast and print media outputs. ‘Fake’ news is associated with the untrammelled access to broadcasting offered by the Internet such that anyone, however ignorant, stupid or malign, can post claims that can quickly reach millions. Traditional one-to-many media such as print and television require physically located technologies, a printing press or a TV studio, which has to be owned and can be regulated and, in extremis, shut down. The Internet cannot be so easily regulated, controlled and shut down. 

But hang on a minute, quite a lot of what we have been told by experts over the years has turned out to be false. This is especially true of the best science. In fact the whole point of science is not to be true in the simple ‘facts’ sense. Science progresses by challenging claims and proving them wrong. It thrives on contention, on multiple interpretations and revolutions which reveal that everything we once thought was in fact wrong. There are no simple bedrock truths, no solid atoms that we can build on. We cannot say what is ultimately true but we can say that something is truer than another thing in a context in much the same way that we can say that some tools work better than others for doing specific jobs in specific contexts. Einstein’s theory of relativity is not absolutely true but it works better than Newton’s theories to explain why light from distant stars curves around the sun. All we have is a method of inquiry. That method is asking questions, being critical, listening the range of voices with an open mind and interrogating reality with creatively designed experiments to see what answers our questions elicit. It is not that there is no truth, but truth turns out to be an ideal that motivates an endless process of interpretation. The only thing that we know for sure, as Socrates pointed out thousands of years ago, is that we do not really know anything for sure. 

​The contrast made between fake news, originating mainly on the Internet and true news, is perhaps similar to the contrast that used to be made in universities between reliable sources and Wikipedia. My university colleagues tend to warn their students against using Wikipedia as a source because it is ‘not reliable’ since, ‘anyone can change anything’. Traditional print encylopedias such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, (now online only of course) only hire experts to write articles and have editorial controls to check for bias and for accuracy.  But a comparison between a print encyclopedia and Wikipedia might miss the point that they are very different kinds of enterprise. Print, like TV, is a one-to-many medium with the authority, which is also to say, the authorship, controlled by the centre. Wikis are, by their nature, intended to be participatory. This means that the information should be read differently. For Wikipedia the reader should be prepared  to be critically aware and to cross-check with other sources. They should also be prepared to take responsibility and to correct anything they find that is not true or suspect. Using Wikipedia, or any participatory online source, requires a shift in attitude from being a passive consumer of the ‘truth’ to becoming an active participant in the process through which we collectively construct useful but always fallible shared knowledge. (Wegerif, 2012 Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age p9). 
 

In 1938 a radio broadcast of a dramatised version of H.G.Wells 'War of the worlds' in which the Martian invasion of the Earth was presented in a series of news broadcasts led, it has been claimed, to some panic and a widespread concern that the planet Earth really was being invaded from Mars. Since then radio audiences have become more adept at telling real news from fictional news. Perhaps the prevalence of 'post-truth' and 'fake news' is a product of readers who have been educated to accept the truth of what they read and hear through one dominant set of media practices, one-to-many media such as print text books, now having learn new practices in order to take a more critical and co-constructive attitude towards the truth.
 
The 'true' news and the 'truth' that is implicitly presumed to have existed before the 'post-truth' age was always already biased and always already should have required a critical and participatory reading.  Delivering news via the Internet requires a shift of readers from passive acceptance to active criticism and participatory co-construction which is potentially a good thing for democracy even if, initially, the failure to make this shift, leads to the apparently harmful effect of believing and sharing false news. Education here might have an important role to play in teaching people how to read and participate on the Internet.
 
Two kinds of education

It is sometimes claimed that education is not a solution to violent extremism since so many terrorists have turned out to have a university level education. But is that true? Yes and no. Martin Rose argues that the issue is not the amount of education but the kind of education.

‘Far from being uneducated, a large number of violent extremists are highly qualified. One study from 2007 found that 48.5% of jihadis recruited in Middle East and North Africa ('MENA') were university graduates, and 44% of those had studied engineering . Furthermore, from Islamists Osama Bin Laden, Mohammed Atta and Sousse killer Seifeddine Rezgui (all engineering graduates) to ‘Unabomber’ Theodore Kaczynski (a PHD and lecturer in Mathematics), anecdotal evidence suggests prominent terrorists of some ideologies particularly perhaps those that could be characterised as being on the extreme right of the political spectrum, disproportionately studied technical subjects rather than graduating from religious or political courses.’


As Howard Jakobson puts this same point ‘show me the jihadist with a well-thumbed copy of middlemarch in his back pcoket’ 

The problem seems to be that in many places science and engineering, technical subjects, that ought to be taught as creative, critical open-minded explorations of possibilities are actually taught as if there were simple truths, black and white, right and wrong. This is ‘monologic’ teaching where monologic means that there is just one voice, just one true perspective. This kind of ‘education’ seems particular common in the Middle East and North Africa but is also common in secondary schools in the UK, especially in science subjects. People taught what to think, what is right and what is wrong, but who have not been taught how to think, are dangerous people, prone to believing that they know the truth. The sort of people who make a mess on the Internet.
 
The alternative to monologic education is dialogic education, education into dialogue, into an idea of the truth as not simple but as a direction of learning through open minded exploration in which challenges and alternative perspectives are to be respected as they are likely to be the sources of new understanding. Although this kind of education is typical of arts subjects it is also entirely appropriate to maths and science subjects as it reflects the real truth of maths and science: open-ended inquiry through dialogue and exploration.
 
The claim that false news spreading on Facebook influenced the outcomes of elections in the USA led to a response from Facebook on the form of a tool giving users tips on how to read Facebook posts and how to spot fake news stories and the strong advice not to pass them on through sharing. This is essentially basic education in critical thinking. In addition software was developed to spot potential fake news stories and label these with a red warning to users to be cautious and not to share. 

The Internet does not have an effect on its own but only in conjunction with cultural practices or shared norms for how to use the Internet. So far we have developed technologies, such as social networking sites built on ‘likes’ and not on questions or challenges. These enhance cultural tribalism. To go beyond post truth and to turn the internet into a tool to support democracy requires an educational intervention.
 
Education for democracy
 
Socrates’, an oral thinker, complained about writing. He pointed out that people can now borrow scrolls and make speeches that have the appearance of truth but no real substance because, if you question them, they quickly reveal that there is no intelligence behind the fine words. Here is describing how writing easily supports a false ‘monologic’ version of truth and  a monologic education into reading out scrolls without thinking for yourself. The modern world has been shaped by the almost magic power invested in key texts, from core religious texts to law codes and more recent universal declarations of human rights. This focus on texts has largely swept aside Socrates’ ideal of truth emerging from intelligent dialogues, replacing this ideal with an image of truth as something more like ‘the laws of physics’ as written down in science text books (Toulmin, 1990). Spoiler alert: there are no fixed laws, truth is not a text, is a living dialogue. The recent concerns over ‘post-truth’ are perhaps a symptom of moving from one regime, print-based truth, to another conception of truth more appropriate to the Internet Age. The advent of the Internet only has the potential to change what we mean by truth again if it is combined, just like the regime of literacy before it, with a universal project of education. Literacy is a communications technology that does not work without education. Perhaps the same is true of the Internet. The Internet without education could lead to stupidity and tribalism. The Internet with education might be the beginning of a new age: not so much a ‘post truth’ age as a ‘new truth’ age or an ‘everyone involved in creating truth together’ age.

How difficult would it be to create an educational version of facebook or twitter that supported children and young people in learning how to dialogue with others across the Internet? Not really that hard. There are many experiments in this direction. One good example is Generation Global https://generation.global/. This project has worked to support over 200,000 students in web-based dialogue with the aim of helping to prevent extremism. The results of an evaluation by Exeter University shows that it works pretty well in promoting more dialogic and open-minded attitudes and a more dialogic and inclusive sense of self that recognises and respects the variety of voices.

An introduction to dialogue programme is an essential precursor to blogging. This teaches ground rules for effective online dialogue. The practical outcome of these activities can be summed up in four prompts that are then repeated throughout the online web-site.

Experience: ‘give readers in insight into your life, explain why things are important for you.’
Clarity: ‘will your post be clear to someone from another country?’
Questioning: ‘Ask good questions that prompt the writer to explain their ideas more deeply’
Reflecting: ‘Make connections between your post and others’ and show that you are thinking about what you read’
​
This is not so different from the sort of ground rules for dialogue taught by the Thinking Together programme I once helped to develop with Neil Mercer and Lyn Dawes (http://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/) .

 Of course any particular set of ground rules can be challenged but those who have learnt how to dialogue are open to those challenges and able to learn from them so that their practice develops and they themselves develop. The key thing to be learnt is how to engage with other views constructively without violence, from that seed everything can grow.

As well as the pedagogy the success of the Generation Global platform depends on technology design. Like Twitter the interface enforces a certain length of message, not too long so that they overwhelm the dialogue (no more than 800 characters) but also (unlike Twitter) not too short (not less than 30) so people can’t just pile in with unreflective likes or dislikes but have to say something. The moderation algorithms have to be powerful to pick up abuse. A culture of reporting is encouraged and any post reported as suspect is instantly suspended until moderated. Students’ blog together in small groups automatically assigned from varied locations and maintained for long enough to create a sense of community and trust. As well as prompts to support ground rules openings can be suggested in case students are not sure how to break the ice or how to phrase what they want to say. Awareness tools reflect back to each student how they are communicating, how much reflection, how many questions and so on. In short we are talking here about education as design, building on decades of experience of how to design for collaborative learning on the Internet.
 
Generation Global tends to focus on issues related to global citizenship but similar approaches have been shown to be effective in teaching almost any and every subject: challenge based science, maths , enterprise  and all the many subjects now taught and learnt collaboratively online   – the difference is that, learning this way, children and young people are also learning how to talk to strangers and not to be afraid. Learning this way they are also learning how to prepare for a future where science, in the broad sense, is not just about passing exams and ‘knowing stuff’ but about working together to overcome real challenges and to build something new.
 
We are still in the early days of the Internet Age, still learning how best to design ourselves through education so as to make best use of the potentials now open to us. At this juncture in human history, with the advent of the Internet and our general confusion about what to do with it, what we need is not just the kind of research that is content to describe reality or educational research that helps to make now outdated print-based education systems work better at producing increasing irrelevant goals and increasingly irrelevant people – what we need is the kind of research that creates a new and better reality. A possible model to follow here is the way in which aviation began in sustained design-based research where the only certainty was the aim, building machines that could enable humans to fly (O’Neill, 2012). We know roughly what we want now, which is global democracy – making decisions on the basis of dialogue and not on the basis of fear or violence - but we do not yet know how to get there. The aim for educational research should be to design educational technology systems to achieve this aim, evaluate their impacts, refine the designs, try and try again and eventually, like the aviation pioneers over one hundred years ago, we might have a system that flies.

References
​O'Neill, D. K. (2012). Designs that fly: What the history of aeronautics tells us about the future of design-based research in education. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 35(2), 119-140.

Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis: the hidden agenda of modernity. New York: Free Press

 
This blog was stimulated by the recent work of Paul Kirschner, a colleague in the broad church of educational researchers. Recently I saw on facebook that he had produced some materials for teachers called, perhaps provocatively, ‘Fully Guided Instruction’. The title evokes his attack on constructivist teaching in the highly cited and influential article: ‘Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching’.  I recommend both the article and the materials. But not uncritically or unequivocally. One positive value of Paul’s recent work for me is pushing us to think more about the awkward relationship between facts and values in educational research.

The ‘is’/’ought’ problem
Constructivist theories of teaching which involve minimal teaching, the idea that teachers need to get out of the way in order to facilitate the learning of students, are an over-extrapolation, Paul claims of perfectly sensible constructivist models of learning. In other words, while it is true that children learn by constructing their own meaning it does not follow that they do not need to be explicitly taught and guided by teachers to help them do this. Apparently while it is true that experts in many domains learn together through collaborative inquiry the same is not true of novices who need to be explicitly taught. This argument made me think more about the general problem in educational theory of moving too fast from a theory of how students learn (what ‘is’)  to a theory of how we should teach (what ‘ought to be’).
 
The shift here from what is to what ought to be looks like a particular instantiation of the fact/value problem in philosophy introduced by David Hume. [http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hume-a-treatise-of-human-nature p469]. Hume was aiming at moralists who pretend to ground their values on the way that things are. In 1739 he wrote:
‘In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not’

​A false dichotomy in educational research
 
Of course it is possible to show, through a control study or a scientific study illuminating ‘cognitive architecture’, that a given bit of the curriculum with a given assessment, can be taught more effectively in this way than in that way. That is useful research in a modest technical kind of way but it avoids the often much more pressing and obvious question that parents and governments expect educationalists to be able to help them with, which is the question about what should we teach and why. Research can show, for example, how best to memorise facts for an examination and why it is better to do it in stages rather than all at once (apparently – I have this only on the authority of Kirschner’s teaching materials), but research cannot show if memorising facts and reproducing them in examinations is what we should be focusing on in education as opposed to, for example, portfolios illustrating more embodied design skills. If you ignore the issue of values because you think it cannot be rationally grounded you become, by default, a purveyor of the ideologies of the past that somehow become sedimented into the curricula of today. As Biesta points out, education is values all the way through.  Why, for example, do children have to spend so much time on trigonometry – knowledge no one ever seems to use in real life - and no time at all learning how to work with others in different countries in order  to solve an international crisis in a mutually beneficial way? Is it really because trigonometry is more important? Who decides? A randomised controlled trial or experiment with cognitive architecture is not going to give us the answer to such questions.
 
On the other hand, some of the academics who are not frightened to tackle the big questions about what education is for, can be quite resistant to the idea that their ‘research’ is anything to do with science.  I see a lot of research out there claiming to be educational research that others might think of as little more than political journalism. The authors start by asserting their values in favour of good things like ‘justice’, ‘anti-racism’, ‘post-colonialism’, ‘feminism’ etc and against bad things like ‘neo-liberalism’. Because they have been open in adopting an ethical ‘stance’ it is therefore somehow seen to be acceptable that the resultant research is obviously biased in such a way that no one who does not share those initial assumptions is likely to read it or be persuaded by its claims. The problem with this approach is that there cannot be any progress in our shared knowledge, just different groups of people confirming themselves in their own assumptions and prejudices. This taking a stance approach means that the values advocated do not get properly challenged and developed through argument and evidence. 
​

Overcoming the fact/value divide.
 
These two types of educational researcher  – the fact-focussed type that often gets labelled as ‘positivist’ by those who do not like this sort of thing as well as the more values focussed type that often gets called names like ‘post-modernist’ by those who do not like that sort of thing – are united in one key assumption: accepting Hume’s fact/value distinction. The one side asserts the importance of facts and thinks you cannot argue rationally using evidence  about values so excludes them from science, the other side asserts the importance of values and agrees that these cannot be put on a proper research footing so exclude themselves from science. But what if the claim introduced so casually by Hume nearly 300 years ago is simply wrong? What if we can derive values from an investigation of the facts?
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Of course Hume has a point if he is merely saying that we need to distinguish between accounts of what is the case backed by evidence and argument from serious researchers as opposed to stories about what ought to be the case invented by moralists who are biased by an obvious ulterior motive. But, although still common, that kind of reasoning is intellectually speaking, an extreme case or straw man argument. On close examination even the best empirical research is found to have a values base and depends on interpretation and argument within a larger dialogue. Similarly the best values-based theory can be persuasive through appeal to reason and  evidence  in much the same way as empirical science. The dialogue of empirical science and the dialogue of values are part of the same larger dialogue, which I want to call, following Oakeshott, the borderless dialogue of humanity. While the findings of this borderless dialogue as shared enquiry are often ambiguous and subject to possible regression there is still real progress over time in slowly expanding and deepening our shared understanding of ourselves and our situation as natural being within nature.
 
Values enter into research when we select what to look at, when we decide how to look at it and when we interpret the meaning of what we think we see. (Standish, 2001). So values are always implicit behind ‘experimental designs’. The large number of different research programmes being followed mean that frameworks of assumptions do get tested indirectly over time. On the whole, in the long run, those research programmes that better reflect the truth of things will survive (Lakatos 1978) and those that just reflect the passing intellectual fashion will fade away. When I say ‘the truth of things’ I include values as well as ‘facts’. There are many reasons for thinking that some values are objectively better than others and there is evidence that these gradually emerge over time. Yes of course all knowledge has to be socially constructed and mediated by language and culture and so on but that does not mean that there is no underlying truth of things that we can tend towards and get to know better albeit always ‘as if through a glass darkly’ (Bible, St Paul, Corinthians 13:12).
 
What I am suggesting here is that values as well as facts can be subject to systematic design-based research. This is not a very new idea. In the Kalama Sutta, the historical Buddha (around 2600 years ago) is reported as claiming that there is no need for faith in values, they do not come from revelation nor are they just subjective choices, we have to try them out for ourselves and then we will see which ones work to promote human flourishing, happiness and liberation and which ones tend to suffering, anxiety and death. Do not believe me or anyone else, the Buddha asserts, just try it and see. And that, of course, is what we do over time in educational research. We count not only the exam results but also the side effects, the employment patterns, the number of suicides and the relative amount of happiness and unhappiness, and we debate these findings and try to adjust education systems accordingly. Educational research is part of the borderless dialogue of humanity about how we should live and about what kind of future we want. In that borderless dialogue facts mix with values, and what ‘is’ blends seamlessly into what ‘ought’ to be.
 
In fact what we are looking at when we think we are looking at ‘data’ is always already informed (meaning shaped from within) by values. Face-to-face dialogue observed in classrooms is an excellent example of how this works. Dialogue is a naturally occurring event in the world producing ‘data’ for research but it is also always a social achievement. Dialogue is not possible without a certain effort at ‘mutual attunement’ between participants. This implies shared expectations that have the force of moral ideals. To engage in dialogue I need to be able to see myself to some extent as if from the other’s point of view. Seeing things as if from the other’s point of view is an ethical ideal but it is also a necessary ideal for successful communication and mutual understanding. It is true that we are often aware of unsuccessful communication but this awareness in itself implies that communication must be successful to some extent at least some of the time. In other words some ideals are also necessary social facts essential to the survival of communities (Habermas, 1994 see also Axelrod 2006).
 
It is widely held that while physical facts are universal, values are relative, changing with each culture. But empirical research suggest that there is one value that seems to run counter to this. This is called the ‘golden rule’ often phrased as ‘do as you would be done by’.According to those who have studied such things essentially the same ideal of reciprocity can be found in every cultural tradition. It seems likely that the ubiquity of the golden rule is a consequence of the ubiquity of face-to-face dialogue. In other words a fact found in every culture and essential to the continued existence of every culture, dialogue, gives rise to a universal human value, reciprocity. It seems that Hume was exaggerating a little in claiming that you cannot get ‘ought’ from ‘is’.

Back to ideas of constructivist and dialogic teaching
 
Constructivism has been the orthodoxy in my area of empirical educational research, educational technology design, for a long time now. Paul Kirschner is right to question this. He is right to claim that there is little support for constructivist approaches to teaching in any empirical evidence about how we learn. But such claims were not the only basis for constructivist teaching. On the whole constructivists have values, they tend to want children to be self-directed, to be able to learn by inquiring together with others and basically to be free thinking autonomous individuals. Many reasons and arguments are put forward for these values in education including the argument that we need lifelong learners in a time of rapid change and the argument that the jobs of the future require creative, flexible interdisciplinary thinkers due to the automation of normal jobs.
 
I have always been suspicious of constructivism. I tend to think that there are cultural traditions that we need to be inducted into before we can be usefully constructive. So I am not unhappy with Paul Kirschner’s account of the need for guided teaching before full participation in knowledge construction. This is bit like the distinction Neil Phillipson and I made in our recent book between learning the dialogue so far (guided teaching) and learning how to take the dialogue forward in the future (teaching dialogue, see ‘Dialogic Education: Mastery Learning through Thinking Together’).
 
Like the constructivists that Paul criticises I too sometimes feel that I move too fast from an empirically based theory of how we learn, learning through being drawn out to take the perspectives of others in a dialogue, to a theory of how we ought to teach – education for ‘dialogue as an end in itself’. I try to be reflective about my own bias. However my arguments for that shift from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ are quite varied and not just based on evidence from studies of learning.  I also make claims about the cognitive affordances of new digital communications technology and the needs of education in the future. In other words the value of dialogic education is supported by arguments put forward with evidence in the borderless dialogue of humanity as well as arguments and evidence in the more bounded field of empirical educational research.

Double loop learning
 
So how are these two contexts related? I mean how can we connect bounded inquiry into learning of the kind that Kirschner refers to and the much bigger unbounded shared inquiry into educational aims and values that I also think is important.
 
I think what we have here is a double-loop process rather akin to what Argyris called ‘double-loop’ learning, a concept widely used in professional education and organisational learning.

Research designs and research programmes embed values. For example I started my career working within a rather modernist frame with modernist values as to the aims of education. Values could be seen in what we selected to look at in the talk of children in classrooms – explicit reasoning – the method we selected to use  – discourse analysis of transcribed talk – and finally how we interpreted what we found out – that teaching a more explicitly rational type of talk, ‘exploratory talk’ , leads to better learning outcomes.  Many studies adopting that frame worked well and got similar results. I fully support the value of that research. However, anomalies in the data led me to question the values implicit in that that frame (second loop in the diagram) and to expand the frame (Wegerif, 2008). The importance of emotions, pauses in the talk, the intangible yet significant impact of opening a ‘dialogic space’ etc. Through a process of creative reasoning linking our research to the larger dialogue of humanity (‘abduction’ from Pierce) a more dialogic theoretical framework and programme of research was developed. This built on the previous frame without rejecting it  but went further in some important respects, for instance in the concept of dialogic space. Dialogic space is an empirical concept that also implies a certain value, that opening widening and deepening dialogic space ought to be an aim of education. This notion depended on adapting ideas from the larger dialogue including ideas from philosophers such as Buber, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Deridda but also readings in sciences such as complexity theory (eg Kaufman), quantum theory (Bohm, Penrose, Barad) and neuroscience (Damasio). In this way the small loop of empirical learning theory research and the big loop of dialogue about who we are and what we should do were brought together within the process of expanding a broadly scientific inquiry into classroom dialogue.
 
My suggestion from this example is that what appears to many researchers as an unbridgeable divide between facts and values within educational research is perhaps better understood as the real difference in quality and temporality of these two intertwined research loops. On the one hand focused empirical research within a theoretical framework that embeds values and on the other hand the rather larger and rather longer dialogue of theory that can question and develop the assumptions of research frames. Both loops can be seen as united in a larger conception of science as collective ‘wissenshaft’ or shared knowledge. Both call upon evidence from experience and both make arguments that seek to persuade. While research findings from the smaller loops of empirical science based on narrow frameworks of assumptions can seem to progress faster and be more certain for a while than the findings of the larger borderless transdisciplinary shared enquiry of humanity this is an illusion because in fact the cogency of the assumptions behind narrow research programmes depend upon justifications that can only be made within the larger dialogue.

When the larger dialogue moves on the apparent progress of narrow scientific programmes can become irrelevant. Consider why we no longer conduct much learning theory research on rats in mazes and pigeons in cages when once this was the norm. I suspect that this is not because such experiments stopped delivering good scientific results in the narrow loop sense but it is more likely because their relevance to human learning in social contexts became no longer obvious in the second loop or deep loop. Once a programme seems irrelevant it no longer attracts funding and new recruits. To attract funding and recruits it is necessary to be able to participate in the larger dialogue of humanity and not just talk to an in-group.

​The larger dialogue is rational but in an expanded, open-ended, embodied, and creative way that includes emotions and values. Against those researchers who think that scientific method is a fixed way of delivering true facts I am arguing that scientific progress is only possible because scientific activity is always embedded within and part of a larger open-ended dialogue which includes values and the question of what we ought to teach.
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​Conclusions
 
Education depends upon values. Those values are not subjective or arbitrary. They arise from an ongoing long-term shared inquiry into our nature and our situation. That borderless dialogue depends upon arguments and evidence often drawn from more focussed empirical enquiries such as the exploration of cognitive architectures relevant to learning referred to by Paul Kirschner. However, these focussed empirical investigations ultimately depend on the larger dialogue around them for their cogency. These two loops of dialogue, the focussed dialogue of shared enquiry within a research programme and the long-term global dialogue about values,  work together. Together they make up something we could call science in the broadest sense since the word science in origin simply means knowledge. But perhaps what we are really describing here -  the slow and often fragile collective growth in insight and understanding of the human race collaborating together - could better be called education. This movement of science in the larger sense combines not only the education of individuals  being inducted by teachers into  ongoing long term dialogues of culture, but also the self-directed learning of humanity -  an always ongoing borderless and transdisciplinary shared inquiry into the truth of things. 

There seems a widespread view that we have to choose between either a traditional transmissional 'teacher centred' approach to education and a constructivist more 'student-centred' approach. A dialogic theory of education offers a coherent third way based on the simple metaphor of education as joining a dialogue.

What is a dialogue?
The term ‘dialogue’ does not refer to just any kind of talk between people but more specifically it refers to that kind of talk in which every answer gives rise to another question[i]. Any real dialogue is a chain of shared thinking and the term dialogue therefore, means roughly the same thing as ‘thinking together’.

Why the term ‘dialogic’?
The word dialogue normally refers to two or more people talking together. But sometimes, when you are thinking on your own, you might notice that your thinking takes the form of a dialogue with a range of different voices. In cartoons it is common to see characters who have to take a tough moral decision talking to either a little devil hovering over one shoulder or a little angel hovering over the other. There is some truth in that popular representation. Whenever we are really thinking hard about anything we do not just think like a computer would with just one logical point of view but we often find ourselves splitting into several different voices[ii]. We need the term ‘dialogic’ in order to refer to this kind of thinking that is not actually a dialogue but that shares some of the features of dialogue.

The most essential feature of dialogic thinking, whether this refers to thinking in a group or thinking alone, is being able to switch perspectives in order to see things from different points of view. To call anything ‘dialogic’ means that it cannot just be reduced to just one point of view but that it requires holding several different points of view together in tension at once.

Dialogic education as education for dialogue
To teach in a dialogic way means that at the same time as children learn conceptual knowledge they also learn how to be better at dialogue.  Dialogic Education therefore means education for dialogue as well as education through dialogue. It is the kind of education that teaches by drawing children into dialogue about any given topic in such a way that children learn how to engage in dialogue about the topic at the same time as they learn the content of the topic itself.

Being better at dialogue means learning how to ask better questions, how to listen better, hearing not only the words but also the implicit meanings, how to be open to new possibilities and new perspectives while, of course, learning how to think critically about new perspectives through comparing different points of view. More than all these specific skills, it means being someone who enjoys dialogue and who is open-minded enough to try to understand new perspectives and to try to see things both in ways that others see them and in any new ways that they could possibly be seen. To be more dialogic essentially means to be more open to learning something new.

Dialogic education between transmission and construction

In order to bring out the way in which dialogic education offers a clear alternative I have to present in a clear and simple way the well known features of the two dominant theories of education found amongst teachers, parents and students of education around the world. 

Education as transmission
The default theory of education in most countries and with most parents and teachers is that education is the transmission of knowledge. This is often seen as the common sense model. On this model education is seen as preserving and transmitting knowledge across generations. The discoveries and inventions of the past need to be communicated to young people so that they can join the culture. To be educated, on this model, means knowing facts and having skills, facts about history, scientific discoveries, geography, literature and so on and skills such as literacy, arithmetic, scientific experimentation and so on.  Although educational theorists have often been critical of the transmissional theory of education it has recently had something of a revival amongst politicians and teachers in reaction to what are seen as the failures of  'progressive' education. The theorist most commonly associated with the movement to revive transmissional approaches is E.D.Hirsch, author of the book ‘Cultural Literacy: What every American needs to know’ 

Learning as the construction of meaning
Educational psychologists at least since Piaget have been influenced by constructivism, the idea that to really learn students need to construct meaning for themselves. Often Vygotskian theory is used to expand Piaget’s version of constructivism into ‘social constructivism’ or the idea that students need to construct meaning for themselves collaboratively with others. A simple but effective way of referring to the difference between constructivism and transmissionism is through the way in which the teacher’s role changes, from ‘sage on the stage’ (transmission) to ‘guide on the side’ (constructivism). 

The idea is that to really understand things students need to be actively engaged in making meaning and the best way to promote this is to encourage them to learn through discovery and enquiry both alone and in groups. In constructivist classrooms teachers are often supposed to talk less and children are supposed to talk more.

Dialogic education as a third way

Elements of a transmissional theory really are common sense - of course we need to transmit civilisation across generations - but there are also some obvious problems with this approach when it is done badly. At its worst transmission means that students learn a set of facts that do not mean anything to them, remember them long enough to put them down in an exam and then forget them again. The problem with constructivist inspired education at its worst is that children learn only what they are interested in and they often do not learn very much at all because it is hard for them to discover for themselves all the knowledge that the culture has discovered and created over millennia.

Like the best aspect of transmissional education dialogic education is about helping children join cultures through learning the most valuable things that have been discovered and created so far. Inspired by Vygotsky dialogic education makes a distinction between short-term local dialogues and long-term global dialogues of culture. Mathematics, for example, is a long term dialogue. The discoveries of the Mayans thousands of years ago are part of the mathematics curriculum. But education into a long-term dialogue of culture such as Mathematics is not seen as simply transmission. The idea is to help students to join the dialogue as participants in the dialogue. If you want to join in an existing dialogue it is polite and also wise to listen before speaking too much or too boldly. It is important to learn at least something of what has been said so far before putting forward your own ideas. In dialogic education the focus is on learning the dialogue so far in a way that enables understanding and participation.

Like the common transmissional theory of education, dialogic education says that we have a responsibility to teach children about their own cultural inheritance, communicating to them all the most valuable ideas that their culture has developed in the past. But, like constructivism, it says that we need to teach in a way that enables students to participate in constructing new knowledge for the future. So we do not  teach culture as a set of inert isolated facts, we teach facts as always part of ongoing dialogues. Science, for example, is not a set of facts but living dialogue. We know nothing for certain, we should teach in a way that inducts students into the reality which is an open and ongoing shared inquiry within a community. 

So dialogic education advocates transmission and construction together. Transmission of culture across generations is seen as teaching ‘the dialogue so far’. Teaching in a way that promotes the students' capacity to learn for themselves and to think for themselves is seen as teaching how to engage in dialogue as shared inquiry and so how to create new knowledge together with others in the future.


 
[i] Bakhtin (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas. P 168.

[ii] Fernyhough, C. (1996). The dialogic mind: a dialogic approach to the higher mental functions. New Ideas in Psychology, 14, 47–62. See also Charles Fernyhough’s 2016 book ‘The Voices Within’ published by Profile Books in the UK and Basic Books in the USA.

On reading:
What is Common About Common Schooling? Rational Autonomy and Moral Agency in Liberal Democratic Education
HANAN ALEXANDER http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…/j.1467-9752.2007.0059…/full (abstract in a previous post).

This is not really a blog as I normally write them but more some notes on our Educational Theory reading group here at Exeter University. Last time we met we had read a paper by Dewey which some felt seemed to be asserting liberalism as a kind of universal religion and the common school as a way to induct (indoctrinate?) everyone into this religion. In response I suggested this paper by Hanan Alexander as a critique of Dewey’s position and an advocacy for faith schools.

We agreed that we liked the style which consisted of strong arguments clearly articulated. Hanan begins with a distinction between two kinds of liberalism, liberalism as a view of the good life and liberalism as a process or way of living together in the context of multiple views of the good life. 
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Hanan then gives about 5 reasons why rationalism (and therefore liberalism) is not defensible as a universal world view on which we can base education. His basic argument is that any justification of rationalism will have to assume rationalism implying that rationalism is just one more cultural tradition like the others ie grounded on non-rational traditions.('Turtles all the way down')
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We agreed that these were strong and interesting arguments but some felt Hanan had thrown away the ideal of rational autonomy too quickly. He wants to argue for moral agency and the virtue of pluralism in the formation of moral agency but this argument also seems to assume the ideal of autonomy. And when he later distinguishes between open dynamic traditions (acceptable) and closed static traditions (non-acceptable) he seems to be falling back on ideals of reason he has apparently already dismissed.

At this point in the argument there seemed to an alternative that he had not explored which is that reason emerges out of the situation of conflict and encounter between plural views and expands to transform culture away from irrational tradition and towards the increasingly rational. This is an argument found in Habermas (It was developed and applied to education by me in an article in 2004 in case you want to pursue this line 
https://www.researchgate.net/…/236950615_Towards_an_Account… ).

Hanan goes on to make the very interesting argument that moral agency comes from socialisation into a tradition with norms and values. He is arguing that there is no view from nowhere and so we need to socialise young people into a view from somewhere – a particular cultural tradition. It is only after they have acquired a moral perspective from this socialisation process that they can usefully engage in dialogue with other traditions and so learn and develop their own tradition. This leads to an advocacy of faith schools that are open to the other. We find this model in some Church of England schools in the UK that are required a) to have a percentage of pupils of different faiths and b) teach in a way that engages with other traditions.

While we generally agreed that children become moral agents in relation to families and communities we felt that Hanan had gone too far in implying that this requires a pluralism of different religions. E.g What about children not brought up with one religion but with several?

His argument seemed to be that first you need to acquire one coherent cultural voice – a religious tradition – and then you can learn through dialogue with other religious traditions. At one point he rejects Brighouse’s claim that it is possible to stand inside a tradition and outside at the same time. He argues that to have moral agency is to be inside a tradition.

A relational ontology – Derrida or Barad to give examples – tend to claim that the relata in any relationship do not need to be thought of as primary but can be secondary – i.e produced by the encounter. This might seem odd in Hanan’s case as a Jew in Israel relating to Muslims. Clearly it makes sense to think that first you learn to be a Jew or a Muslim and then you might learn to engage in dialogue with the other. But historically what it means to be a Jew or a Muslim in Israel might well be said to be defined by encounter with the other – ie that it is not possible to be inside one position without also being outside it from the beginning. Historically Jews and Muslims were often seen by outsiders as to be such similar traditions they were hard to distinguish, now they often seem radically different because often defined against each other. What annoyed me about Hanan’s argument here was the focus on tradition and the absence of religious realism. The traditions he is implicitly referring to believe in a transcendent outside perspective or Truth – a God that is not just a local god (or a world view or a Dharma that is not simply a construction). It is in relation to their orientation to this outside perspective that they are dynamic and able to learn. I mean by this only that prophets and reformers within the tradition criticise it as idolatrous or limited in relation to an appeal to an outside perspective. Therefore to be a good Christian, Jew , Muslim, Buddhist or secular liberal is always to be outside as well as inside your tradition.   

So we generally felt the main argument in this paper was incoherent. However it is well written and has some strong arguments. On the whole, in relation to the issue of common schools, Hanan does mount an effective assault on the kind of monological liberalism that wants to impose secular rationalism on everyone through compulsory state comprehensive education and he does mount an effective defence of a kind of moderate liberal pluralism that supports a diversity of traditions and world views as long as they are ‘reasonable’ in the sense of open and dynamic and willing to engage with others and learn from others in ongoing dialogue. This could be seen as a defence not of monocultural faith schools but of faith schools that are ‘open’ in that they accept a percentage of non-faith adherents and teach in a way that is respectful of pluralism.

Part 2: Transcendental Pragmatism

In the course of the discussion reference was made to another paper by Hanan Alexander which someone had brought along - A View from Somewhere: Explaining the Paradigms of Educational Research’ - which was felt to be much more coherent. This paper is given as a reading on our MSc in Education Research. It is a defence of ‘transcendental pragmatism’.  The core argument is that we need to go beyond ‘paradigms’ in education to embrace pragmatism but pragmatism in education implies references to values that are not shared but ‘transcendental’ in the sense of being beyond us. This could be understood as a version of Bhaskar’s transcendental realism – just as progress in natural science tells us there is a real reality out there beyond us but that we can only approach it indirectly through imperfect constructions – so progress in morality shows us that there is a good out there beyond us but we can only approach this indirectly through fallible traditions.

Basically education requires a vision of the good life – we disagree about this – the arguments we make as we disagree show that we believe that there is a real answer that is not merely subjective or relative – the problem is we do not have full access to this True perspective yet and so we have to acknowledge we might be a wrong and that we might be able to learn from others. Here are a few quotes that make a key component of the argument:

1) ‘ even if some behaviors can be explained by statistical laws over which actors can exercise no influence, many if not most human activity is governed by norms or purposes over which people can exercise control.’ (So no reduction to RCTs as ‘gold standard’ – we need to look at norms)

2) ‘knowledge—at least in education—is always the possession of an embodied agent, constrained by language, culture and history, who grasps, albeit imperfectly, the contours of an entity or the meaning of an idea that transcends—exists independently or outside of—his or her limited experience. And this requires—as a regulative principle—the existence of ideals beyond our own contextualised experience whose ultimate content remains shrouded in culture, history, language, and tradition’.(norms are not just empirical - they point towards transcendental truth-claims)

3) ‘Knowledge of the human condition, in short, is first qualitative in nature—and to the extent that measurement comes into play, it is for the sake of making more precise the qualities that we seek to clarify, understand and distinguish.’

4) ‘ educational research worthy of the name must be conducted within the context of explicit and adequately defended visions of the good in which non-dogmatic ideals are adumbrated to govern policies, practices, and pedagogies’. (Can’t avoid ethical and philosophical debate in education)

5) ‘Inquiry at its best endows us with insights to better control ourselves, not generalisations to more efficiently dominate others; and the surest path to self-governance lies in reaffirming Socrates realisation that genuine wisdom begins with the recognition of how little we really know’ (Brilliant last line!)

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One of my strongest recollections from my own time at school is looking at the clock on the classroom wall wishing the hands would move faster so that break would come and I could escape. When I first suggested using Raven’s Non-verbal Reasoning Tests to evaluate how well groups were thinking in classrooms some teachers objected on the grounds that testing children like this would be boring for them. But when we first tried the tests we could not get the children to stop. The bell rang, other classes left for break and most of the children in our class just kept on talking together. Our ‘Thinking Together’ talk lessons had worked. The puzzles were mostly of the type that requires ‘insight’ or ‘Aha!’ type creativity when, after initial bafflement, eventually a pattern is seen. Solving each puzzle is rewarding in itself but so is the experience of dialogue. In a true dialogue people do not just think separately and then share their thoughts but they think together –  dialogic groups do not think ‘I found the answer’ or ‘you found the answer’ but ‘we found the answer’. Somehow the experience of being fully engaged in dialogue with others means that any sense of the passage of time disappears. This is a phenomenon that has been called ‘flow’ and in this case could be called ‘dialogic flow’.
 
Flow

Mihalyi Csıkszentmihalyi is well known for introducing the concept of ‘flow’ into research on creativity; people enter a ‘flow state’ when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction. Csıkszentmihalyi describes ‘flow’ as: 

being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost. [i] 

The concept of ‘flow’ came out of a major research study[ii]. Csıkszentmihalyi and his team interviewed ninety-one people who could be called creative because they had transformed their field in a publicly acknowledged way, scientists who had won the Nobel Prize, artists who were leaders of new movements and so on. He found that when they really engaged with their field and with producing new ideas or products, all reported a sense of joy and of inner reward. Some reported that the quality of time itself changed from being the external context of actions to becoming an internal flow in which awareness of the passage of time disappeared.

So many creative people described being carried along by a current that Csıkszentmihalyi decided upon the word ‘flow’ to describe this state. Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterised by a feeling of energised focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity. A key component is the loss of a division between self and world.
 
Freeman Dyson, who made a major contribution to quantum theory, was interviewed by Csıkszentmihalyi. Like many creative people he echoed the point that creative work seems to have two sides to it. He describes how, after he immersed himself intensively in reading the relevant literature about a cutting-edge problem in physics, he took a break and went touring across California. The solution to the problem suddenly came to him and he felt impelled to write it down. He writes of his experience of creativity:

I always find that when I am writing, it is really the fingers that are doing it and not the brain. Somehow the writing takes charge. And the same thing happens of course with equations ...The trick is to start from both ends and to meet in the middle, which is essentially like building a bridge[iii].

Summing up the findings of his interviews with creative people Csıkszentmihalyi adds:
Creative thoughts evolve in this gap filled with tension – holding on to what is known and accepted while tending towards a still ill-defined truth that is barely glimpsed on the other side of the chasm. Even when thoughts incubate below the threshold of consciousness, this tension is present[iv]

The points made about ‘flow’ in individuals apply equally to groups. Keith Sawyer, who was one of Csıkszentmihalyi’s research students at Chicago University, underlines this point when he writes: ‘Csıkszentmihalyi found that the most common place people experienced flow was in conversation with others’.[v] 
 
The problem with ‘Flow’

While ‘flow’ is a very valuable description of what creativity often feels like from within, it is not a theory of creativity. A theory would involve some sort of explanation for the transformation of time effect. A useful theory would be able to generate predictions. To develop a theory we need a causal process that leads both to the altered experience of time and to creativity.

Loss of a sense of time is not enough to define creative flow. Some video games like ‘Candy Crush’ are described as addictive. As with solving non-verbal reasoning test problems there is something creative about finding each pattern in the game. This is reinforced with rewards. The uncertain possibility of reward makes playing intrinsically motivating in the way that many find gambling highly motivating.

A scale of circuit size for 'flow'?

In games like Candy Crush there is some ‘Aha!’ type creative problem solving. There is the tension of a problem and then the satisfaction of finding a creative resolution to that tension. This pattern of problem and resolution is also found in Csıkszentmihalyi’s sample of major innovators. The main difference seems to be the scale. Freeman Dyson, quoted above, made a significant contribution to the ongoing long-term dialogue of physics after struggling with unresolved tensions in the field over a period of months if not years. Creative participation in long-term, large-scale dialogues of culture is valued while the short-term small scale creativity required to resolve problems in most video games is seen as a distraction.

The outside-in, inside out pattern of creative flow

In cases where time seems to stop because of focussed engagement there seems to be a pattern:

1. An initial state of division and solidity. An inside and an outside. The outside as fixed. Dissatisfaction with this. E.g Dyson Freeman initially encounters the mathematics of Quantum physics as something outside of him that he does not fully grasp. 
2. Internalisation. The outside becomes more fluid as options are explored and alternative patterns tried out in imagination. From being fixed it moves 'into dialogue'. E.G Dyson Freeman spends months reading and absorbing all the literature he can find on an area of quantum physics.
3. Externalisation. The inside goes back to the outside to transform it. Tension is resolved in an experience of flow. E.G Dyson Freeman finds his fingers writing solutions that he did not yet know he had found.
   
   

So what about space?

The essence of ‘flow’ is not ‘time’ as such but that boundaries fall away. This can be illustrated with a short video clip of ‘free running’. These free runners are taking an environment most of us would see as an external constraint on our movements and turning it into a support for their movement. In a sense they expand into the environment in order to become the environment. This is to realise through action what is in fact the hidden truth of perception which is, as Merleau-Ponty put it, that the world is not an object at all but 'the ensemble of my bodies routes’[vi].

​Where space and time come from

Merleau-Ponty gives a nice concrete experiment we can all do to explore the ‘metaphysical’ construction of space and time. Try touching your left arm with your right hand. Moving the fingers you can experience being the right hand touching. But it is also possible to switch perspective and focus on the experience you have of your left arm being touched. Now close your eyes and ask yourself where exactly does this touching and being touched couple occur? It seems to have a clear location but that is within a model of the world and the body that you have always already constructed out of innumerable small events of touching and being touched, seeing and being seen etc.  In other words this event cannot be strictly located within space and time because it is one source of the model of space and time.

When you touch your left arm with your right hand you are on both sides of the interaction, you are both subject (touching) and object (touched). This is the often hidden truth of all perception. When you push against the solid wall in front of you you experience yourself on both sides of the interaction. You are also the wall pushing back against the body.

We experience space and time as barriers and enemies when we define ourselves as limited beings within space and time. We watch the clock on the wall. We wait for something. We feel trapped. But if we identify instead with the boundary out of which both space and time are constantly being created – the boundary that generates a ‘self’ on one side and a ‘world’ on the other side – then we are space and time in the act. Flow, understood metaphysically, is shifting identification from some sort of image of a bounded self within some sort of fixed image of an encircling world to the dynamic boundary itself out of which space, time and meaning are constantly being generated.
 
Notes towards a theory of flow

In flow one moves from being a voice defined and located as within a dialogue to becoming that dialogue in action. Dialogic flow can be defined through the way in which participants do not identify with themselves or with the group, if this is considered as a bounded and defined group, but with the flow of dialogue itself. In other words they experience flow because they shift identity from bounded images to the dynamic boundary or what I elsewhere call the ‘dialogic gap’. This gap between self and other expands, when it is entered, into an experience of 'dialogic space' which is a space within which identities of every kind become fluid because they are 'put into dialogue' and become seen as possibilities rather than as barriers. 

Flows are all creative but they are not all equally creative. One can have a flow experience in interaction with a smart-phone screen but this can be a kind of short-circuit distracting creative energy away from engaging in larger dialogues. Flows with longer-term and larger scale dialogues – like the long-term dialogues of culture we celebrate in education – are more satisfying both for individuals and for groups.

This account goes beyond the description of flow to give some indications of a potential theory of creativity but it is not yet sufficient to be a clear and testable theory. One possible hypothesis could be that those who can control their experience of space and time to some extent by focusing awareness on the boundary experiences that construct a world and a body are likely to be more capable of solving creative insight problems. Focusing attention on the boundaries of the body, especially where the breath comes in and goes out but also the various points of contact between body and world, is the basis of the kind of Buddhist Vipassana or ‘insight’ meditation that has now been adopted in western clinical psychology as ‘mindfulness’. Such a link has been suggested by Kounios and Beeman[vii] but could be the basis of further experimental study.

​

[i] Geirland, John (1996). Go With The Flow. Wired magazine, September, Issue 4.09. http://www.wired.com/magazine...
 

[ii] Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention.
New York: Harper Perennial.

[iii] 44 Ibid., p. 119

[iv] 45 Ibid., p. 103

[v] Sawyer, K. (2007). Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. New York: Basic Books:

[vi]  Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible p 247
 

[vii] Kounios, J., & Beeman, M. (2015). The eureka factor: creative insights and the brain. Random House

​This is largely a repeat of a blog I wrote on a different platform a couple of years ago so if you have read part of it before, I apologise. I wanted to re-visit this theme as students and colleagues keep asking me about research on mindfulness in education. My title is  ‘what’s wrong with “mindfulness”?’ but this blog is not an attack on mindfulness – it is more a gentle critique outlining what I see as a possible danger with the whole ‘mindfulness’ approach to life. 
 
I am going to do something often described as bad practice in philosophy. I will criticise mindfulness through one of its most extreme exponents – Eckhart Tolle. You might say that is not fair – you would be right. My excuse is that I want to bring out a tendency in the smooth discourse of the mindfulness trainers. This is the contrast that they make between being and thinking. In the iconography of mindfulness this contrast easily slides into a celebration of the simple, the solitary and the physical over the complex, collective and technologically mediated. While I agree that it is great to sniff the flowers in your garden – I also think it is great, for example, to put on a virtual reality headset and play complex games with other people around the world. Can collective virtual reality be mindful too? I want to find out.

​I am going to focus on Eckhart Tolle’s book ‘New Earth’. Wikipedia quote sources claiming that Tolle is the most influential spiritual leader writing today. He has certainly sold many millions of copies of this book.  Just like Tolle’s philosophy of life, mindfulness is about being in the present without judgement. Tolle contrasts thought with awareness. Thought is mechanical, he writes, and leads to illusion and pain. Stepping back from thought and dwelling in awareness leads to bliss and peace. This is also  how ‘mindfulness’ is presented. In standard introductions to mindfulness in the UK ‘thinking’ is contrasted to ‘the senses’ with a clear messages that we should stop thinking so much and return to our senses, smelling flowers, looking at sunsets, walking barefoot in the grass etc.

Here is a slide from a standard introduction to mindfulness that gives the general idea:

The teaching of mindfulness in schools is based on the mindfulness movement in psychology associated with Kabat-Zinn who sums up mindfulness with 7 aspects: ‘non-judgemental’, ‘patience’, ‘beginner’s mind’, ‘trust’, ‘non-striving’, ‘acceptance’, ‘letting go’ (see Kabat-Zinn, 1990, pp. 33–38).

​Mindfulness has proved very successful as a therapy for depression. It has also worked to improve 'mental health' in schools and, perhaps indirectly, also produces increases on measures of achievement and cognitive ability (here is a research report by Katherine Weare on mindfulness in schools http://goo.gl/lHBQhn).

Tolle is not part of the official mindfulness movement. However both Tolle and mindfulness draw on similar cultural sources and I think that they both often seem to make similar mistaken binary assumptions. Ego, bad: loss of ego, good. Ambition, bad: acceptance, good. Critical thinking, bad: dwelling with formless sensations, good. Anxiety and competition, bad: contentment and peace, good.
 
In some ways I like what Tolle is saying, it reminds us all of an important dimension of life that many seem to have forgotten, but there is a big problem for me. This begins with the way in which he says it. He claims that his book is not about thought but about prompting awakening. In so far as you understand him it is because you are awakened and in so far as you do not it is because you are not awakened.
 
This idea that writing is there not to inform but to prompt an altered state in the reader is not new even in western philosophy, it is a big theme in Nietzsche for example. Maybe this style has some value – it is poetic writing rather than academic writing - but I think it can be done in a way that empowers the reader or in a way that enslaves the reader. Nietzsche, for example, made it clear that his style was meant to spur his readers into becoming creators of meaning for themselves not slavish followers. (This did not stop him being treated as a guru by many – as we also see with the way people respond to his disciples, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and so on). Tolle does not seem to see this risk and simply assumes a voice of magisterial simplicity, telling the readers the truth of things, leaving no opening for critical engagement. 
 
In my limited experience mindfulness training can take a similar approach. My questioning comments were met by one mindfulness teacher with the claim, ‘you will understand when you have done the practice, unless you do the practice you can’t understand’. I can see the point of this ‘suck it and see’ argument – but it is also dangerous. I remain suspicious that what we may have here is not part of a scientific inquiry, perhaps a phenomenological variant of design based research or 'suck it and see' research into how best to educate children but perhaps it is something closer to a cult that inducts children into seeing things their way.
 
Tolle talks about building a ‘new earth’ but there are no details. The implication is that all problems are personal mental problems and if we step back and be mindful they will all be solved. But of course, like the rest of us, he does have to think sometimes to address real practical problems and whenever he does this the limitations of his ‘awareness’ approach to problem solving are painfully obvious. There are many incidental claims in the book that reveal ignorance and a failure to think critically. Just to give one small example, he comments on the bad western medical approach of making ‘war on disease’ and how this is not as effective as more cooperative approaches like ‘homeopathy’ (page 75). But of course many scientific trials of homeopathy have found no evidence that it works.
 
So why does Tolle not engage with the best science when it comes to practical questions of how to cure diseases or in other ways build the new earth? I think that the problem here may lie with his understanding of ‘totality’. Eg page 69 ‘Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspective’. I think that this idea of seeing the totality is a common misinterpretation of what could be called ‘spiritual’ experience. Yes we can have experiences of liberation and clarity – ‘peak experiences’ as Maslow called them – when we seem to step out of our bodies and to see ourselves, usually metaphorically, as if from the outside. This can feel like an awakening as it expands the perspectives we bring to bear. This can bring insights and lead people to naively feel that they are ‘awakened’ and understand everything. But of course they don't see everything any more than Tolle knows that homeopathy works (it doesn't). There are very good philosophical arguments why we cannot actually step outside and experience the point of view of the totality. The ‘big other’ that many experience and that is referred to by Tolle as ‘Presence’ is not the point of view of a bounded totality – this would be impossible – it is the taste only of an unbounded infinity. In other words we never see from all possible points of view - there is always another point of view that we have missed [For more on this issue seem Levinas contra Heidegger in books such as Totality and Infinity  - http://lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/TotalityAndInfinity/TotalityAndInfinity.pdf].

               Totality                          or                          infinity?

​Every apparently outside perspective (in Bakhtin’s terms a ‘superaddressee’ perspective) however we interpret it, however ‘enlightened’ it seems at the time, is in fact socially constructed and limited. Every apparent outside is just another inside. That is why we need to remain open to criticism. That is why we need humility and we need science.
 
The metaphor of dialogue can illuminate the problem with mindfulness and also the way forward. Accepting everything and not speaking in a dialogue is an easy way to avoid stress. Any position you take up will inevitably be limited and will die a death as it competes with other positions in the dialogue. So if you tend to over-identify with your words then dialogues can be tough and mindfulness as stepping back from engagement in dialogue can seem like a good idea. But this is only a good idea from an individual mental health point of view and only a temporary point of view at that. From a collective point of view this is not a good move. It kills the dialogue. Very mindful people like Tolle are not normally much fun to talk to. They don't gossip or play with voices. They just have one very serious voice that they claim is not really them at all since they have no ego. Knowledge is also important to education - it is not only about well-being - and knowledge only progresses if people have the courage to take up positions and fight for them. 

Dialogic education teaches how to identify with the dialogue as well as with being a voice within the dialogue. Both together, not one or the other. Identifying with dialogue is not the same as identifying with the formless ground. It is identifying with the dynamic weaving process of taking on form and arguing a position while being prepared to listen to the responding voices and change one’s mind. Dialogue is a kind of hide and seek or lost and found or 'Fort'/'Da' kind of game where you have to take on different voices.

A capacity to listen is crucial, and here mindfulness exercises can help, but so is a capacity for voice and for action even if this implies temporarily losing oneself in what Tolle might call an ego position. Without this capacity for ego and for competition there would be no growth and no new earth will be built. Refusing to take on form leads to the kind of quietism and conservative acceptance of things that tends to be the real life consequence of the mystical world-view that the mindfulness tradition builds upon.
 
Being able to return from the focused foreground of thought to the formless background is an important move for creativity. I have meditated all my life and I love the feeling of 'stepping back' into the warm void of no-self and no-thing-ness. But creativity as a whole also requires the moment of ambition that sets goals and the moment of ruthless critical thinking that selects between alternatives weeding out the worst and pursuing only those that will best achieve the goal. Mindfulness is an important addition to the educational debate to be listened to with respect. But we do not need to buy it as a whole package. Instead we should investigate which bits work and why they work in order to integrate the best elements within a broader vision.

Unfortunately all this reminds me of a terrible old joke which I paraphrase:

Marx: to be is to do - most teachers seem to assume the primacy of education for doing over education for being)

Heidegger: to do is to be - Mindfulness attempts to redress this imbalance by stressing the primacy of education for being.
​
Sinatra: do be do be do  - I tend to agree with Sinatra here, we need to educate for a dance between doing and being, between the foreground and background of thought, or between speaking and listening in the larger dialogue.