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. 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. 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. Plato wrote down a number of dialogues that he claimed to have witnessed Socrates engage in with various others. 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. 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. This implies that dialogic – as multivoicedness – is part of the social context of dialectical reasoning. They refer to dialogic whenever emotions and ethics come into play. ‘ the dialectic is generally meant as an exchange between people to handle a disagreement the dialogical simply means multi-voicedness in language production’ (p103) Schwarz and Baker refer often to the dialogical as well as the dialectical nature of argument, writing of this distinction that: Do let me know if my position becomes clearer or if it still needs more work. So I will try again, briefly, in this blog. This made me think that I must have failed to explain my point clearly enough. ![]() 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. ![]() 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. 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). I found this to be generally a good book except for when it came to engaging with my own work. I just wrote a review of a new book ‘Dialogue, Argumentation and Education: History, Theory and Practice’ by Baruch Schwarz and Michael Baker.
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