Rethinking Dialogue in Networked Spaces

Largely through the influential legacy of Plato’s dialogues and the mythic status accorded to something called “the Socratic method,” dialogue has come to hold a central place in Western views of education. The idea behind the Socratic approach to dialogue is that a guided process of inquiry will secure a grasp of knowledge that is not dependent on the status of authority or tradition: that dialogue teaches how to think in a way that produces an autonomous, skeptical learner. Whether and to what extent we actually see Socrates teach this way in the dialogues, whether this approach to teaching is properly considered a “method,” and whether it is a single unified method have all come into question. Nevertheless, a broad commitment to teaching through dialogical questioning is derived from this canonical status. More recently, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970) added a new dimension to this tradition: the idea that dialogical teaching is more essentially democratic, more egalitarian, more humane, and more liberating (compared with more didactic and for Freire oppressive, “monological” modes). This adds to the epistemological weight Socrates gave to pedagogical dialogue, an additional quality of political and ethical correctness: that a teacher committed to liberatory, progressive values must rely on dialogical methods or something like them. As someone who has written a good deal on dialogue, partly influenced by the Freirean tradition and yet not purely of it, I have come to be more and more distrustful of this canonization of dialogue as a pedagogical ideal (Burbules, 2000). First, it has always seemed to me foolish to elevate any single approach to pedagogy as the solution to all the problems of teaching. Just as critical scholars challenge the hegemony of standardized modes of instruction that dominate many teacher education programs or K-12 settings, we should also be suspicious of any attempt to identify the “one best way of teaching,” even with progressive intentions. Different circumstances, different subject matters, and different learners and learning styles would all seem to indicate that an eclecticism of method and an adaptability to circumstance provide the only intelli-