Theory and Research on Teaching as Dialogue

conceptions of discourse. Among other issues, we need to ask why the dialogical form (in certain incarnations at least) has been regarded as the paragon of education. What have been the educational consequences of promoting the idealized norms of egalitarian, open-ended, reciprocal communicative interaction? Is there anything about the dialogical form itself that protects dialogue from having discriminatory, damaging, and educationally counterproductive effects? What are the circumstances, and audiences, for which the ideal of dialogue is not only unobtainable but actually a harmful aspiration? Can the idealized image of dialogue as one of reciprocal engagement make it, ironically, more susceptible to manipulation or ulterior purposes? As Ellsworth (1989, 1997) asks, when might dialogue itself become oppressive? The discursive perspective alerts us, then, to the larger social and institutional dynamics within which dialogue occurs. Sometimes these contexts introduce or reinforce real tensions that inhibit the possibilities of dialogical teaching and learning. For example Eckert (1989) shows how the primary activity for students in schools is identity-construction; Goldman (1991) similarly shows the strong interpersonal interactions that shape learning possibilities in the classroom. Studies such as Taylor & Cox (1997) or Anderson, Holland, & Palincsar (1997) analyze in detail how social processes can work against group sense-making and the negotiation of meaning: Classroom conditions are often assumed to be the ideal place for all forms of learning. In our view they are, in fact, highly problematic. There is undoubtedly ongoing practice in the classroom, and there is learning. But the gap between these and the didactic goals of education is often severe (Brown & Duguid, 1993, p. 14). The preceding sections of this essay have raised central questions that should guide a rethinking of dialogue as an approach to teaching. First, we need to go beyond the idea that dialogue can be simply characterized as a particular pattern of question and answer among two or more people. Many instances of pedagogical communicative relations that might have this external form are not dialogical in spirit or involvement, while interactions that may not have this particular form can be: Pedagogical communication is not reducible to the formally defined relations of communication (sender-receiver), much less to the explicit content of the message. For in addition to whatever conscious symbolic mastery is conveyed, the educational process also communicates an implicit pedagogy, transmitting a kind of "total" knowledge of a cultural code or style (Ulmer, 1985, 171; see also Bernstein, 1990; Bourdieu, 1991). Second, we need to attend to the complex genealogy of "dialogue" as both a philosophical ideal and a pedagogical method. Dialogue is not unitary but multiple, and while particular conceptions of dialogue (the "Socratic method," say, or Freirean critical pedagogy) hold currency for certain audiences, it must be pointed out that even those paradigms (the teaching styles of Socrates or those of Freire) were actually multiple, not homogeneous. No single approach holds the patent on dialogue and it is even "undialogical" to think that it can (Burbules, 1993). In all of these ways, then, we ought to find a way of explaining dialogue in teaching that goes beyond the "two people talking" stereotype. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to spelling out what such a reconception might look like.