2. My Personal Responses to the School of the Dialogue of Cultures

Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 49, no. 2,
March–April 2011, pp. 83–89.
© 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–0405/2011 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/RPO1061-0405490213
Rupert Wegerif

The ideas that concepts such as number are “points of wonder” to be approached from multiple perspectives and that a dialogic pedagogy should be also a pedagogy for “selfness” are both inspiring. However, I challenge the uncritical use of Vygotsky and contrast Bibler’s transformation of Hegel with that of Marx and of Derrida in order to question the notion that there could be a discrete set of fundamentally different logics.
Is dialogic about “selfness” or is it about “nonselfness”?
I begin with the definition of dialogic that struck me most forcibly in reading the articles published in the Journal of Russian and East European Psychology (vol. 47, nos. 1 and 2), from Eugene Matusov’s interview of Igor Solomadin: a dialogic approach, is aimed at devising a learning system that permits children’s “selfness” to be manifested and retained, their uniqueness and unrepeatability, their unsubstitutable positions in the world. (Matusov 2009, p. 87) I intuitively felt that this definition was powerful and yet it contrasts with the way in which I myself have been outlining dialogic education. Solomadin refers to several Russian poets “Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Gumilev, Marina Tsvetaeva, Velemir Khlebnikov, Anna Akhmatova” for his account of dialogic education as involving the coming into being of a unique personality. I too have been influenced by poets in presenting dialogic education in much more negative terms. First, the “negative capability” idea of John Keats, which, appropriately enough, in the context of a discussion of dialogic, he described as an insight that had emerged in a conversation:
I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, ithout any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Sunday, December 21, 1817 Hampstead. (http://englishhistory.net/keats/colvinkeats8.html; emphasis added)
I argued that this described the oxymoron of identifying with nonidentity, the nonidentity of a dialogue (Wegerif, 2007, p. 33). The second negative image I have used to refer to dialogic is from Mallarmé, who pointed out that the white page is always already pregnant with all possible meaning before it is marked with black ink. He claimed that the meaning in his poems was not found within the words and letters but in the blank spaces between them (Mallarmé, 1998).
For me the essence of dialogic is taking difference seriously. This difference cannot be filled in because it is constitutive. As Bakhtin said several times, it is the difference between us in a dialogue that makes the meaning flow; if you fill this difference in with “common ground” then the flow of meaning will stop (e.g., Bakhtin, 1986, p. 162). I have always privately thought of dialogic as a direction for education in terms of the Buddhist conception of nonself or anatta. While this sounds negative, in Buddhist practice it is quite emotionally positive because realizing that there are no separate self-subsistent identities, either things or selves, leads to enlightenment or “nirvana” (literally, “the putting out of the flame”). In
the light of this understanding of dialogic as nonself, the question that struck me then, when I read Igor Solomadin’s definition of dialogic as about “selfness” was, how could this be the same dialogic?
I find this a fruitful question. For dialogic theory, the self is not just there already, it has to be called into being within a dialogue that includes other voices. To use the language of Buber: the self is a response of an “I” to the call of a “thou.” In a similar way Levinas references the Bible when he refers to the self as the response “me voici” or “I am here” to the call of the Other. In the context of rethinking education, Gert Biesta brings out the link between the opening of dialogic space and the bringing into presence of unique selfness through a commentary on Levinas: While Levinas would ... agree that the subject comes into presence in an intersubjective space, he takes this idea one step further by arguing that the subject as a unique and singular “being,” as a “oneself,” comes into presence because
it finds itself in a situation where it cannot be replaced by anyone else. (Biesta 2006, p. 34)
According to Biesta, it is our job as educators to call unique new selves into being. He replaces Sidorkin’s call for “dialogue as an end in itself” with a call for subjectivity as an end in itself. Igor Solomadin’s definition of dialogic suggests that this might be two ways of saying the same thing. We do not call unique selves into being by telling them what to say or how to act (traditional education) or by training them to fill pre-prepared slots (dialectic education). The unique self is born as an act of response that is also the taking of responsibility. As the Quaker prophet, George Fox, put it in the seventeenth century: “You will say, ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this’; but what canst thou say?” (www.qis.net/~daruma/index.html). The thoughts provoked by this conflict in expressions has led me to recognize that selfness as an end in itself, not dialogue as an end in itself, is what dialogic education is really all about. Solomadin points out that, in the contemporary
context of growing complexity, uncertainty, and multiplicity it is important that we develop a pedagogy for birthing such unique selves into presence. It is clear from the examples given that, at its best, the School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC) approach can achieve this.

Concepts as dialogues?
I was fascinated by Bibler’s (2009) account of a curriculum built around “points of wonder” and the illustration of how this works in practice that was offered by Sergey Kurganov (2009). I have recently been exploring young children’s learning of basic concepts in math. I have speculated from empirical observation that much concept learning can be understood in terms of dialogues. I was heartened therefore to read Kurganov’s account of how the SDC had made the same criticisms of Hegelian dialectical development that I have made in favor of a more genuinely dialogic account of what concepts are and how they can be learned in a
way that enables creative thought instead of constraining it. On the whole though, only Davydov is criticized, whereas it seems to me that Vygotsky is also behind an inadequately monological view of development.
Vygotsky writes about how children’s experiences lead to the formation of ideas that are fuzzy complexes, informed by words but still embedded in the contexts in which they are experienced. Full concepts, on the other hand, concepts such as subtraction, are logical and live in the preexisting language of the culture. If education works, it is a kind of negotiation or dialogue between teachers and children in which their emergent ideas are grafted onto preexisting concepts. Full concepts, Vygotsky writes, exist in relation to other concepts in a logical conceptual system where every term is defined by every other term (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 199).
This account suggests a one-way hierarchical progress in which the initial “participatory” thinking of children is overcome and replaced by more abstract and logical thinking.* The focus of this and similar accounts is on the development of explicit rationality. Creative thinking is harder to explain in this model.
*In Vygotsky’s, not Bakhtin’s, sense of this term. Compare Vygotsky’s call for “liberation from the immediacy of the context” in favor of universal decontextualism as an advanced stage of human development.—Eds.
Although dialogue enters into this account it is just as a means to the achievement of a monological (single-voiced) conceptual system.
An alternative more genuinely dialogic account of conceptual development would suggest that concepts do not replace experience. Thought always remains participatory and metaphorical. Concepts are always fuzzy and they are always temporary, provisional staging posts, like eddies in a stream, where experiences are brought together in dialogues. In fact concepts are not “things” at all but more like perspectives on reality achieved in a dialogue and then given a marker in language.
In dialogues the participatory voices are never completely overcome but remain and can be recovered later if needed (Wegerif, 2010, ch. 5)
My account of children learning number and basic mathematical concepts has some similarity with the SDC approach but is not quite the same. One thing that the SDC seems to lack is an understanding of the key role of Bakhtin’s “superaddressee” or witness concept. I think that “conceptual development” is not about experience being drawn up into a preexisting logical system but about experience being organized by seeing as if from the perspective of others, and ultimately as if from the perspective of the witness position or the ideal of what I call (adapting Levinas) the “infinite Other” that emerges from every dialogue. It is dialogue with the superaddressee that draws us into understanding. Because the superaddressee always evades any attempts to locate it or to pin it down, this dialogue is infinite and constantly challenges us to see our prejudices and provisional conceptualization
as if from the outside (an impossible outside, of course). Instead SDC theory seems to be using the rather undertheorized concept of “inner voice” taken from Vygotsky. While this inner voice as silent internal thought is said to originate in real dialogue it becomes increasingly monologic as it turns inward and as we are supposed to coincide with ourselves. The naivety of this is brought out when Kurganov writes: “The child does not need to pronounce every word to the end: after all, he always knows what is going on inside him” (2009, p. 36)
Surely we do not need to refer to Freud to know intuitively that we often do not know what is going on inside us unless a little voice tells us. As Bakhtin (1973) points out, in discussing Dostoevsky, the self is never a simple coincidence but always a polyphony of voices. For Vygotsky, monologue was a developmentally higher form than dialogue. By contrast, the idea I propose of “higher-order thinking” as dialogue with the infinite other remains genuinely dialogic all the way up.
There is always a nagging voice somewhere in the background telling us we have not understood and need to think again. This keeps us honest and keeps us open.
Logic versus dia-logic?
The SDC seems insightful and exciting in many ways but there is one thing that I experience as a block. This is the idea that there are a limited number of separate logics. A number of distinct logics are referred to throughout, as different ways of looking at every phenomenon. Bibler describes how the children start off with the logic of antiquity and then a medieval logic moving up to the logic of the enlightenment. The sources referenced, whether poets or scientists, all come from high culture. There is no reference to the logic of Winnie the Pooh or Homer Simpson. My questions would be: where do these different logics begin and end? Are you sure there are only a limited number, why not more?
I understand (or misunderstand?) this as a particular transformation of Hegel. Instead of a series of logics overcoming each other toward a final synthesis, Bibler has proposed that each logic is equally universal and valid. So several logics coexist in a perpetual state of dialogic tension without overcoming or surpassing each other. This transformation of Hegel is a step forward for me but not far enough. To explain this, I will contrast it with two other transformations of Hegel, first, that made by Marx augmented by Habermas, and second, that made by Derrida.
Marx claimed that Hegel’s story was an ungrounded idealism that needed to be turned on its head. In reality, he argued, the “spirit” (Geist) of peoples and of periods of history are shaped by their actual interactions. Mind is to be found emerging from embodied praxis not in free floating universal “logics.” Habermas points out an important weakness with Marx’s history of technological development, which is that it does not allow for the possibility that some developments in history, the development of democratic political systems for example, arise not from the logic of production alone but also from the logic of communication (Habermas, 1984, p. 148). Habermas argues that the conditions of communication lead to a separate drive toward “ethical” ideals such as “justice” and “cognitive” ideals such as “truth.” A simple way of summarizing his argument is that when
differences arise in communal life people argue together and seek to persuade each other and it is not possible to give arguments without invoking an ideal of a situation in which the argument would be properly listened to by others, even though this is not always the case and indeed, is never fully the case. To put it even more simply: if you want other people to listen to you, and be persuaded by your arguments, then you will find, over time, that you also have to listen to them and be open to the possibility of being persuaded by them. However, Habermas remains within the spirit of historical materialism, grounding ethics on
real interactions. The careful history of communications technology from writers like Harold Innis, Walter Ong, and Jack Goody suggest to me that the “Geist” of different ages is a mystified reflection of the means of communication as much as it is a mystified reflection of the means of production. In Cosmopolis, Toulmin (1990) argues, for example, that the Enlightenment shift to abstract models of reason was connected to the spread of print technology. The Internet, which enables dialogue at a distance, might be partly behind the renewed relevance of dialogic models of reason. On this broadly Marxist transformation of Hegel there may be a discrete set of different logics related to modes of production and modes of communication but none is universal because these “logics” are grounded in cultural practices. From this perspective Bibler could appear to be uncritically propagating the mystified ideologies of different cultures rather than engaging with the complex realities of historical praxis in which ideas and logics are enmeshed with actions.
Derrida makes a quite different transformation of Hegel which I think is also very relevant for understanding dialogic education. In an essay titled “The Ends of Man,” Derrida (1969) wrote that he was fed up with people dismissing Hegel without having read him properly: Hegel was almost completely right, it is just that the tiny bit he got wrong turned out to be quite significant. I interpret this bit that Hegel got wrong as the role of difference. By starting his system with being, Hegel constrained difference to the role of a contradiction within identity. Derrida followed the later Merleau-Ponty in assuming identity within difference rather than Hegel’s motto, which was difference within identity. The Hegelian dialectic is the journey of undifferentiated being toward a more complexly internally differentiated and self-aware being or the Absolute Notion (see, e.g., Hegel, 1975, p. 139).
Derrida’s transformation of this Hegelian schema is simply to put difference first.
It then follows that identity is a product of the play of difference, not the other way around. We no longer need to wait for contradictions in identity to drive history forward, the underlying ground is already the creative potential of difference or “différance” as Derrida (1968) puts it. Many of the consequences of this transformation of Hegel fit with Bakhtin’s dialogic transformation of dialectic. From this perspective, for example, there is such heteroglossia and polysemy that it is hard to make sense of the discrete universal logics posited by the SDC. If every voice is unique and can be interpreted as meaning an infinite variety of different things, then where does any one logic begin or end?
Last words?
It is extraordinary that a pedagogy so different from the norm and so intellectually based could have been so successfully implemented. The success of the SDC in generating internally persuasive dialogue in classrooms and in producing unique new selves suggests that we have much to learn. I am inspired, for example, by the idea of teaching concepts such as number as “points of wonder” to be approached from multiple perspectives. I have learned from the idea that dialogic pedagogy is a pedagogy for “selfness.” I feel that some of the theoretical problems or aporias with the SDC might be eased by taking dialogue with the superaddressee more seriously and not taking Vygotsky’s notion of inner thought uncritically. On the whole, the idea that there are a discrete set of fundamental different logics in dialogue seems hard to ground in a way that is self-consistently dialogic. Perhaps the SDC fails to take full account of the revolutionary implications of Bakhtin’s ontologic dialogic.
I have presented two alternative transformations of Hegel, the Marxian and the Derridean, both of which, although apparently mutually contradictory, seem to me more plausible than Bibler’s transformation of Hegel. But of course, we all know from Bakhtin that there can be no last words. The dialogue continues . . .

References
Bakhtin, M. 1973. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. Rotsel. Ann Arbor: Ardis.
———. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist;
trans. V.W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas.
Bibler, V.S. 2009. “The Foundations of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures Program.”
Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 47, no. 1 (January–February),
pp. 34–60.
Biesta, G. 2006. Beyond Learning. New York: Paradigm
Derrida, J. 1968. “La Différance.” In Théorie d’ensemble. Paris: Editions de Seuil.
———. 1969. “The Ends of Man.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 30,
no. 1 (Septemper), pp. 31–57.
Habermas, J. 1984. “Towards a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism.” In
Communication and the Evolution of Society. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 130–78.
Kurganov, S. “Reading and Literature in the Primary and Middle Schools of the Dialogue
of Cultures.” Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 47, no. 2
(March–April), pp. 30–58.
Matusov, E. 2009. “Interview with Igor Solomadin.” Journal of Russian and East
European Psychology, vol. 47, no. 2 (March–April), pp. 81–94.
Toulmin, S. 1990. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press.
Vygotsky, L. 1986. Thought and Language, trans. A. Kozulin. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Wegerif, R. 2007. Dialogic Education and Technology: Expanding the Space of Learning.
New York and Berlin: Springer.
———. 2010. Mind Expanding: Teaching for Thinking and Creativity in Primary
Education. London: Open University Press.

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Rupert Wegerif is a professor of education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Exeter in the UK. He has researched and published widely on a dialogic approach to education with technology, the theory and practice of education technology, and how to teach thinking through drawing children into dialogue.
E-mail: r.b.wegerif@exeter.ac.uk.