Dialogic education is a relatively new force in educational theory and practice. Despite the variety of approaches to dialogic education it nonetheless offers a coherent theory of education with implications not only for how education should be practiced but also for the purposes of education. Dialogic education takes place through dialogue which means opening up dialogic spaces in which different perspectives can clash or play together and new learning can occur. But dialogic education is not only education through dialogue, it is also education for dialogue meaning that as a result of dialogic education learners become better at learning together with others through dialogue.

The intellectual background of dialogic education theory goes back at least as far as Socrates and includes thinkers as varied as Freire, who saw dialogic education as a means of liberation from oppression and Oakeshott, who understood education to be a process of engaging learners in their cultural inheritance described as ‘the conversation of mankind’. Bakhtin, an influential source for recent dialogic educational theory, argues that meaning requires the clash and interaction of multiple voices.

There is a range of approaches to implementing dialogic education varying in the extent to which each one focuses on teacher to student dialogue, small group dialogues and whole class dialogues. All approaches include some idea of
1) a dialogic orientation towards the other characterised by an openness to the possibility of learning and
2) social norms that support productive dialogue.

Published assessments of the impact of dialogic education in relation to general thinking skills, curriculum learning gains and conceptual understanding have been positive. However the assessment of dialogic education raises methodological issues and new methodologies are being developed that align better with dialogic theory and with the idea of measured increased dialogicity or expanded ‘dialogic space’.

Assuming that dialogic education works to promote educational goals, various hypothesises have been suggested as to how it works including some that focus on the co-construction of new meaning through explicit language use and others that focus more on changes in the identity of students and changes in the possibilities of engagement afforded by the culture of classrooms.

There are many issues and controversies raised by dialogic education. One issue is the extent to which dialogue as a goal is compatible with a curriculum which pre-specifies certain learning outcomes. Another is the extent to which teaching a set of social norms and practices promoting dialogue might be a form of cultural imperialism failing to recognise and value the culture of the students. These and other challenges to dialogic education are part of a lively and constructive debate in the field which values a multiplicity of voices within the broader context of convergence on the value of teaching through dialogue and teaching for dialogue.

Taken from: Rupert Wegerif. “Dialogic Education.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Ed. George Noblit. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming

Some approaches to dialogic education, ‘Thinking Together’ for example, are all about teaching Exploratory Talk. The idea of Exploratory Talk was introduced by Douglas Barnes in the 1970s but the version behind Thinking Together was developed mostly by Neil Mercer as part of a triad of ‘types of talk’: Exploratory Talk, Disputational Talk and Cummulative Talk (Mercer, 1995). But what exactly is a ‘type of talk’?
 
The following characterisation of the three types and variations on this can be found in several books, articles and web-sites:
 

• Disputational Talk, which is characterized by disagreement and individualized decision making. There are few attempts to pool resources, to offer constructive criticism or make suggestions. Disputational talk also has some characteristic discourse features – short exchanges consisting of assertions and challenges or counter assertions
• Cumulative Talk, in which speakers build positively but uncritically on what the others have said. Partners use talk to construct ‘common knowledge’ by accumulation. Cumulative discourse is characterized by repetitions, confirmations and elaborations.
• Exploratory Talk, in which partners engage critically but constructively with each other’s ideas. Statements and suggestions are offered for joint consideration. These may be challenged and counter-challenged, but challenges are justified and alternative hypotheses are offered. Partners all actively participate, and opinions are sought and considered before decisions are jointly made. Compared with the other two types, in Exploratory Talk knowledge is made more publicly accountable and reasoning is more visible in the talk. (Mercer and Wegerif 2004 p72)

 
Types of talk are perhaps a way of seeing more than they are a coding scheme.
 
We do not measure the curvature of the smile of a child and then check this against the expression in their eyes in order to work out that they are happy, we experience their happiness directly.
 
In a similar way teachers do not always need to collect and code talk 'data' in order to work out whether a group is working well or not. Tone of voice and body language is often enough. If challenges are being given without elaboration or empathy then the talk is ‘Disputational Talk’ and you need to intervene. If the body language and expressions show shared engagement then it is ‘Exploratory Talk’ and you should probably leave them be. This way of analysing talk in action in a busy classroom depends upon the teacher’s ability to be a participant in the dialogues of the students, grasping what is really going on in between the children in ways that are not always immediately reflected in the words being used. 

Are types of talk ‘real’?
 
When researchers code talk they usually depend upon units that are easy to see and distinguish. Words for instance or ‘turns at talk’. Are types of talk identifiable bits of reality  in the same way?
 
In Mercer and Wegerif (1997) ‘A Dialogic Framework for Researching Peer talk’ we gave an example of a sudden transition in the talk of a small group of primary students. In that example a triad were working well together when one girl began to feel that the others were not respecting her views and she stopped giving reasons. The others in the group demanded that she give reasons for her disagreements. She refused and suddenly left the group. In this example the switch in the mood of the group was very obvious. Although the shift was reflected in the talk it was really about the relationship between this girl and the other two children. This is a shift in ‘intersubjective orientation’.
 
I hope that you agree with me that this kind of shift in intersubjective orientation is something that we are all familiar with as participants in dialogue. For example I might be talking openly about my life and worries to someone then notice, from something they say, that they are judging me. I then become more defensive and cautious in what I reveal. This sort of shift is not always about the surface of the talk which might remain almost the same. It is therefore not always easy to code. Recognising this kind of transition involves an interpretation of the depth structure of the talk. This depth structure is about relationships. It is what is really going on.

‘Ground rules’ or social norms

The intersubjective orientation of being ‘open to the other’, is essential for Exploratory Talk but it is not enough on its own. Further levels of description are required.

The Thinking Together approach to teaching dialogue relies on teaching learners ‘ground rules’ for talk. But what exactly are these ‘ground rules’? I wrote about them in another blog post http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/what-exactly-are-ground-rules.
One way to think about teaching ground rules for effective dialogue is as a form of culture-change. Any culture has implicit assumptions or expectations that shape explicit behaviour. These assumptions tend to be unconscious because you only become aware of them when they are challenged. If the culture of a classroom is individualistic and competitive, for example, then inviting a child to tell the class what she thinks about an issue might be interpreted either as an opportunity to perform or as an invitation to be judged and found wanting or, indeed, as both. If the culture of the classroom is ‘dialogic’ and collaborative then exactly the same invitation might be interpreted simply as a chance to participate in shared thinking with the goal of shared understanding in which case provisional or ‘half-baked’ thoughts are welcome and mistakes are understood as valuable learning opportunities.

Specifying a social kind of reason

Neil Mercer and research team defined Exploratory Talk in terms of specific ground rules

• everyone in the group is encouraged to contribute

• contributions are treated with respect
• reasons are asked for
• everyone is prepared to accept challenges
• alternatives are discussed before a decision is taken
• all relevant information is shared
• the group seeks to reach agreement.

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

Playful talk 

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

So what are ‘types of talk’?

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

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

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

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

PS An extended version of this blog can now be found as Chapter 3 Orientations and Ground Rules: A Framework for Researching Educational Dialogue in:  Kershner, R., Hennessy, S., Wegerif, R., & Ahmed, A. (2020). Research methods for educational dialogue. Bloomsbury Publishing. A preprint draft is now on researchgate and can be found by searching on my name and that chapter title .

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

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

Some references

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chiasm

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

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

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

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

Figure 5: figure ground gestalt as ‘chiasm’

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

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

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

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

Monologic vs dialogic? 

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

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

External or monologic relations (Thunk!)

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

Defining thinking is inevitably difficult because thinking is already implied behind the action of defining. The task of understanding thinking is a bit like the short cartoon above in which the Pink Panther sucks himself up entirely in a vacuum cleaner that he himself is holding – this sucking yourself up in your own vacuum cleaner move is not really possible but we enjoy imagining it as if it was possible.
 
When people write and talk about ‘teaching thinking’ they do not just mean teaching any and all types of thinking because some thinking is obviously quite bad. They mean teaching ‘good thinking’ which they might call ‘intelligence’ or ‘higher order thinking’ or some other technical sounding term which always really translates most accurately as ‘the kind of thinking that we do not think we see enough of and that we want to see more of’. Of course this kind of thinking changes over time. It is plausible that Plato and other ancient Greeks valued formal logical reasoning so much precisely because there was not much of it around and it was very hard for humans to do. Now there are computers who can do that sort of thing for us we tend to value creative reasoning more. In 1987 Lauren Resnick reported that the kind of thinking that teachers of thinking valued was characterised by complexity, nuance, multiplicity, uncertainty and surprise by which they meant that they could not say for sure in advance what good thinking was but they recognised it when they saw it (Resnick, 1987).
 
In order to try to account for the nature and origin of the complex and surprising thinking that we value and want to teach more of, dialogic theory puts forward the metaphor of thinking as embodied dialogue. Educational research has confirmed that the metaphor of thinking as dialogue is a fruitful one. This metaphor lies behind programmes that have been successful at teaching thinking (Resnick et al, 2015). Bakhtin’s clarification that dialogue occurs only when answers give rise to new questions (Bakhtin, 1986) is useful and suggests that the ‘dialogic’ nature of dialogue refers to dynamic mutual illumination and inter-animation across a gap of difference (Wegerif, 2011).
 
Considering what is wrong with some of the other metaphors for thinking provided by cognitive psychology can help us to understand the potential value of the metaphor of thinking as dialogue. Behaviourism gave us a metaphor of thinking as ‘nothing but talking to ourselves’ producing sub-vocalisations that can be measured as behaviour (Watson, 1958), cognitivism violently replaced behaviourism with the metaphor of thinking as nothing but information processing (Pinker, 1999) and now I hear it is hard to get a job in a psychology department unless you can scan brains and the new metaphor of thinking is nothing but neural activity. These various metaphors or lens have all proved insightful in different ways. The problem with them arises from their ‘nothing but’ nature. Dialogic theory says that the ‘truth’ of something complex like ‘thought’ is unlikely to be found in any one metaphor or model but is something that we can best move towards when we have a variety of different metaphors in dialogue with each other. This is the polyphonic version of truth put forward by Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1991). It also, interestingly, lies behind the new transdisciplinary understanding of how best to make progress in science (Nowotny, 2004).
 
Dialogue as a metaphor for thinking is both specific and general. Specifically it draws attention to and promotes real concrete face to face dialogues in classrooms when the thinking is found in the speaking or other embodied semiosis. The way that small groups work together to solve problems and to pose problems is already thinking (Woolley et al 2010: Stahl, 2009). The way in which cultures, societies and communities respond to challenges and design together for a collective future is also thinking (cf Dewey on the importance of ‘social intelligence’ 1993, p104).
 


The word ‘teach’ comes from an old German root ‘tǣcan’ which means to point out. Teaching is about pointing things out. It is only possible to point things out in the context of a relationship where you can follow my gaze and I can follow yours. So teaching involves first building a relationship and then directing the attention of students within the context of that relationship.

If we want to teach thinking then the most important thing to point out is ignorance: just how much we do not know. Rather than simply being a model for ignorance, by asking questions a teacher can serve as a model for curiosity.
 
Teaching questioning 

People might say that questions are always asked in a context and are always questions about something. I am not so sure. I think that, independent of any language or any sign system there is somehow always the archetypal question. Not a questioning of this or that but just a general questioning. An attitude of curiosity about new things and humility in the face of the many things that we do not know – especially the incalculable number of the things that we do not even yet  know that we do not know.
 
Whatever you point out to learners it is possible to point it out in a way that closes down this fundamental question or in a way that opens it up. Knowledge, as this is taught in schools, is only the dialogue so far. I mean by this that is consists only of answers that have been given to questions that have been put. Teaching knowledge not as finished and final but as the story of this dialogue leaves a space for the learners to enter into knowledge as an ongoing dialogue in which they themselves are able to ask further questions and find further answers. In this way anything and everything can be taught as an invitation to join a dialogue and so as an invitation to think (Langer, 2016).
 
Opening, widening and deepening dialogic space 

Constructivist accounts of thinking tend to emphasise the positive ability to build models and systematically apply thinking tools (Holyoak and Morrison, 2005). A dialogic approach lays more stress on what the poet Keat’s referred to as ‘negative capability’ or the ability to remain in uncertainty until a creative solution emerges (Keats, 1817).
 
Simply pausing after asking a question is a good illustration of what it might mean in practice to teach thinking by opening a space.

The kind of talk moves promoted in dialogic education usually include asking open questions such as ‘why do you think that?’. Such moves do not work as positive tools to co-construct meaning but as a negative and indirect way to open a space for reflection and the resonance of multiple voices out of which a creative response might (or might not) emerge.
 
Dialogic switch in perspective

In a dialogue we sometimes do not understand the other person’s point of view initially and have to listen harder which means doing work to re-construct it so that it makes sense and we can practice inhabiting it ourselves. This switch in perspective to facilitate understanding is not a once and for all switch, we do not lose our initial perspective in making the switch, but it is more about being able to hold different perspectives in tension together. The ease with which children can make this switch depends on the quality of their relationships. However nicely children talk together to ask each other questions and give each other reasons this will not automatically translate into insight unless they allow themselves to switch positions with other speakers. Such switches do not only occur with physically present voices and physically present tools but also with virtual cultural voices, voices such as Shakespeare, History or Mathematics (e.g Kazak, Wegerif, & Fujita, 2015).
 
Identification with dialogue

Different ways of talking in classrooms are related to different kinds of identification (Wegerif and Mercer, 1997). Where children identify with themselves only and reject the other they might be prone to what Mercer calls ‘disputational’ talk (Mercer and Littleton, 2007). However when they identify strongly with their group they might be prone to what mercer calls ‘cumulative talk’ and what is often referred to in psychology as ‘group think’ which is when the harmony of the group prevents critical questioning and good reasoning. Issues of identification seem important to group thinking and one mechanism of successful dialogic thinking might be shifting that identification away from all static bounded objects, be that an image of the self or an image of the group, onto identification with the open-ended process of dialogue itself. (Wegerif, 2011).
 
Changing the culture

Some of the proposed mechanisms or processes for understanding why dialogic education works to promote better thinking focus only on changes within individuals. But individuals are shaped within cultures. One way to understand this, informed by Rom Harre’s positioning theory (Harre, 1999), is about how different cultural ‘discourses’ offer different ‘speaker positions’. In standard classroom cultures, for example, students are often positioned as not being able to initiate dialogues. An element that is common to all dialogic education approaches is a concern to address behavioural norms directly by explicitly questioning old norms and teaching new norms or what Mercer calls ‘ground rules’. These new ground rules or behavioural expectation in turn shape how individuals see themselves and their possibilities. Teaching ground rules is a way of teaching thinking through changing the culture such that a different experience of individual agency is produced, an experience that is less egotistical, less tribal and more tolerant of uncertainty and multiplicity because open to learning from the others and from otherness.
 
Design for collective global intelligence

Technology is part of the essence both of education and of thinking. We know that the dialogues of oral thinkers like Socrates, Gautama Buddha and Confucius were intelligent only because their followers wrote them down. Because of the technology of literacy and because of mass education policies we have something that Oakeshott referred to as the ‘Conversation of Mankind’ (Oakeshott, 1962). Education, as we know it today, is part of the communications technology that enables us to participate in this great dialogue of culture, - without education there is no literacy, mathematics or science. The advent of the Internet is transforming this ongoing dialogue of humanity, bringing it into real-time. Through access to the Internet we can all potentially participate in global dialogues that are building shared understanding and knowledge in every area as well as responding to challenges and designing the future together. Realising this new potential for real-time global collective intelligence requires teaching thinking as a form of educational design. Some argue that our use of the Internet is leading to increased stupidity and tribalism. But it is possible that the use of the Internet, with the right kind of supporting education into how to dialogue across difference more constructively, might be the beginning of a new age of collective global intelligence.
 
Summary

The metaphor of thinking as dialogue leads to an understanding of teaching thinking as drawing students into dialogue. This has some overlap with other models of teaching thinking and also some differences. It overlaps in seeking to produce thinking dispositions such as curiosity and thinking strategies such as asking questions and reasoning. The main differences stem from the understanding that dialogue between people and dialogues carried by media in society as a whole is already thinking such that silent inner thought is just a modality of this larger dialogue. One aspect of teaching thinking is to be concerned to teach individuals to think through internalising dialogue such that they end up carrying their own inner dialogic space around with them. But more than that a dialogic approach to teaching thinking is concerned to open, widen and deepen shared spaces of dialogue in the school classroom and beyond. A dialogic theory of teaching thinking suggests that it is important to teach cultures to think as well as individuals and ultimately to teach our increasingly global society to think. The project of teaching thinking through engaging students in dialogue therefore connects a focus on dialogues in classrooms to the design of educational technologies, including pedagogies, which will promote and sustain a more intelligent global dialogue.
 
 
 
References

• Bakhtin, M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In M. M. Bakhtin (Ed.), The dialogic Imagination. Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas.
• Dewey, J. (1993). The political writings. Hackett Publishing.
• Harré, R. (1999). Positioning theory. The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons
• Holyoak, K. J., & Morrison, R. G. (20015) Introduction in (Holyoak, K. J., & Morrison, R. G Eds.). The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning. Cambridge University Press.
• Kazak, S., Wegerif, R., & Fujita, T. (2015). The importance of dialogic processes to conceptual development in mathematics. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 90(2), 105-120.
• Keats, J. (1817). Letter to George and Thomas Keats. December, 21(27), 1817.[ https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_George_and_Thomas_Keats,_December_28,_1817]
• Langer, E. J. (2016). The power of mindful learning. Hachette UK.
• Mercer, N. and Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Sociocultural Approach. London: Routledge
• Nowotny, H. (2004). The potential of transdisciplinarity. H. Dunin-Woyseth, H. and M. Nielsen, Discussing Transdisciplinarity: Making Professions and the New Mode of Knowledge Production, the Nordic Reader, Oslo School of Architecture, Oslo, Norway, 10-19.
• Oakeshott, M. (1962). The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen: 197–247.
• Resnick, L., Asterhan, C., & Clarke, S. (2015). Socializing intelligence through academic talk and dialogue. American Educational Research Association
• Stahl, G. (2006). Group cognition: Computer support for building collaborative knowledge (pp. 451-473). Cambridge, MA: Mit Press.
• Watson, J. B. (1958). Behaviorism. Transaction Publishers.
• Wegerif, R (2011) Towards a dialogic theory of how children learn to think. Thinking Skills and Creativity. 6 (3) 179-195
• Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for researching peer talk. Language and Education Library, 12, 49-64.
• Woolley, A. Chabris, C. Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. (2010) Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups. Science, September 30, 2010 DOI:10.1126/science.1193147

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​Each opening of dialogic space is unique, but all dialogic spaces, once opened, share something in common. While in practice any given dialogic space might have a limited range of themes and probable outcomes these cannot be determined in advance because, in principle, any real dialogue opens up an infinite potential for creating new meaning. This is just another way of saying that the context that could be brought into play in any dialogue is not bounded, at least not as far as we know. In practice a group of children in a dialogue might just bring in references from the TV shows that they saw the night before but in principle anything could be brought to bear on the problem at hand. I often refer to dialogic space rather than dialogic spaces in order to draw attention to this unity of the structure of dialogic space as always opening up a potential for unbounded contextual meaning. But, of course, dialogic spaces are also all different in their physical location. Dialogues always open somewhere that could be given a location in space and time and also in terms of cultural and historical context. The neologism of ‘dialogic space(s)’ would be the most accurate term with the singular ‘space’ referring to the unbounded ideas side and the plural ‘spaces’ to the physical concrete side. 

Dialogues cannot be defined only in terms of the external surface of things: they cannot be reduced to visible countable things as if they were just so many words or bits of data. Wherever dialogue occurs it opens up a space of multiplicity and uncertainty - a dialogic space which consists of resonances between utterances and voices. The opening of this space is the precondition for the possibility of learning something new. To try to define dialogues in terms only of the external and the visible is to try to kill precisely what makes them not only useful but essential to education -  the internal and invisible dialogic space that makes new connections, new insights and new understandings possible. That is why we need a concept of dialogic space in education and in educational research.

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


​