Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 49, no. 2,
March–April 2011, pp. 62–66.
© 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–0405/2011 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/RPO1061-0405490209
Elina Lempert-Shepel
The comments compare the School of the Dialogue of Cultures and the Developmental Instruction approach and explore the historical context, epistemological framework, approaches to meaning making, and cultural tools of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures. The author poses theoretical and methodological questions regarding the approach.
History matters: The dialogical space of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures and developmental instruction (Elkonin–Davydov)
In the late 1980s, the School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC) as an educational approach came into being historically in the context of a dialogue with another innovative educational alternative to traditional school that has been developing in the former Soviet Union since the 1960s, Developmental Instruction, or to be more exact, the Elkonin–Davydov innovative curriculum. The latter was grounded on Hegelian dialectics, Marxist philosophy, and Lev Vygotsky’s principles of learning and development as they were interpreted in the Learning Activity theory. Many of the founders of the Dialogue of Cultures approach worked in either Vygotsky-inspired psychological laboratories or Developmental Instruction schools. This context created the dialogical space for these two pedagogical cultures—Developmental Instruction, an educational approach grounded in the tradition of Enlightenment, and the Dialogue of Cultures, and educational approach conceptualizing the dialogical philosophical tradition of the past in the spirit of postmodernism. It was a dialogical space as it questioned the foundations of both approaches and this “border questioning” identified the important differences of both educational cultures (see Matusov, 2009, for specific details on some historical developments).
I believe that this historical context contributed to questioning the foundations of the Developmental Instruction approach and articulation of the original principles of the SDC. For example, one of the major criticisms of Dialogue of Culture educators was that students’ inquiry discourse during quasi-research activity in Developmental Instruction classrooms, on one hand inspired them to generate various theories in search for solutions, but on the other hand, always ended up with a single endpoint theory that was mediated by a theoretical concept they mastered at that time and was known by the teachers in advance. From a dialogical perspective, such discourse was monological as it channeled all the possible heteroglossia into a one-voiced theoretical perspective known by the teachers in advance. As a result of such experience, it was believed that students would become young scientists capable of analyzing, reflecting, modeling, and planning their own inquiry-based activity of lifelong learning. In response to this criticism, V.V. Davydov in his lectures to teachers would claim that if students internalize the abilities of theoretical universal thinking in the course of quasi-research object-oriented activity, these abilities to analyze, reflect, model, and plan will transfer to other spheres of human life, and this will make them “subjects of culture.”
Although teachers and psychologists who worked in Developmental Instruction classrooms observed the abilities of students to see the limitations of the “scientific approach” and engage themselves in ethical explorations and poetic activities, there was no consistent research evidence to prove that such a transfer in the consciousness in fact existed and was caused by the formation of theoretical thinking.
The purpose of the SDC is to educate a “person of culture” who “. . . conjugates in his or her thinking and activity different cultures, forms of activity, values, semantic spectra that are not reducible to one another” (Bibler, 2009, p. 35).
The process of education is a continuous dialogue of old and new idealizations, different synchronic and diachronic forms of culture (the West, the East, Africa; Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the New Time). What is important in this dialogic “experiencing” of cultures for students is not their learning of the cultural heritage or even their internalization of conceptual and any other rational meta-schemas contained in these cultural forms, it is not even their experiencing the spectra of values and spirituality, but the “encounter (and tragic joining)” (ibid., p. 36) of these multiple voices of culture in the unique and unrepeatable personality.
Dialogical consciousness is always a moral and ethical “deed” in the Bakhtinian sense, as it requires from a person a “constant spiritual integration,” bridging a unique constellation of cultural voices in a dialogue about the eternal questions of being. This is a relationship between culture and individual that differs fundamentally from Developmental Instruction. Culture is not cultural tools that we internalize in the process development and learning activity as in Developmental Instruction inspired by Vygotsky; culture is not an “armor” that empowers and liberates from contextual dependence; culture is not something more progressive or a higher order phenomenon constructed through “sublation” in the Hegelian sense, but the continuous personal effort of a human being to construct a unique dialogic encounter of chosen various cultural voices of past and present in the individual consciousness.
At this point I want to pose a pedagogical and methodological question to the SDC. First of all, there is a pedagogical question of the development of dialogical consciousness that is vital for being a “person of culture” from the SDC perspective. As reflected by the SDC, an earlier such consciousness is vital for being a “person of culture.” But dialogic consciousness requires the ability to hold and consider different, often conflicting and contradictory cultural voices. How does the Dialogue of Cultures Program support a student’s development of dialogical consciousness that is capable of synchronic and diachronic heteroglossia of cultural voices? How does it support the development of dialogic continuity in the individual consciousness that is not constructed through “sublation” of the previously learned form of culture?
Another line of questioning here is related to the development of the Dialogue of Cultures concept itself. Do the authors and followers consider the positioning of the Dialogue of Cultures concept in a dialogical space with other educational cultures important for its development? If yes, what philosophical, educational, psychological, aesthetic, and other approaches have the potential to contribute to its development?
Dialogue of Cultures and meaning making
Meaning unveils its depths while meeting and touching another alien meaning: as if a dialogue began between them, a dialogue that overcomes isolation of these meanings, these cultures.
—Bakhtin (1986, p. 354)
In my view, the philosophy and educational tradition of the SDC offer a number of epistemological and methodological principles that can be quite useful for current semiotic, hermeneutic, pragmatic, and phenomenological approaches to the conceptualization and practice of meaning making. The Dialogue of Cultures approach helps one to move away from the modernist instrumental paradigm of meaning making as a search for understanding and new universal truths to the dialogic nature of meaning making.
Accepting the irreducible complexity of meanings versus viewing meanings in an oversimplified universal monistic form Irina Berlyand (2009) in her article about Bibler summarizes the key aspects of Bibler’s view on dialogic reasoning as one in which several equally universal logics could coexist. Bibler’s nonreductionist dialogical dialectics resists the idea of progress when every new, more advanced step includes and transforms the previous meanings into the new higher level of truth, and, therefore, previous understanding loses its specific cultural meaning. Bibler also stressed the value of a diachronic dialogue of cultures as it has the potential to reveal meanings that were unknown to the culture in its actual historical existence. Considering cultural meanings as dialogically integrated in its contemporary simultaneity offers the opportunity to capture the irreducible complexity of meanings and avoid a search for the universal monistic truths.
Plurality versus generalization as an epistemological framework
The general attempt in meaning-making activities that are often used in teaching and learning contexts is to generalize the emergent meanings into a newly formed general concept accepted by a particular community of practice. Postmodern practice issues a plurality of educational dialogues, practices, ends, and values as well as epistemological frameworks. It recognizes dissimilar contexts resistant to finalizing generalization, either empirical or theoretical; it requires judgmental styles to be plural, relative to the particular contexts of enactment.
The methodological principles of Bibler’s dialogics, the dialogical joining, complementarity, often oppositional, of cultural meanings offers a different approach to meaning making.
Heterogeneity versus the hierarchy of cultural tools
The activities of meaning making in various communities of practice assign a different value to various cultural tools that mediate such activities. Different philosophical and theoretical traditions created a plethora of hierarchies of cultural tools. In some traditions, theoretical concepts and scientific models will be at the top of the hierarchy, while in others—metaphor and performance. The Dialogue of Cultures approach considers the heterogeneity of cultural tools in their cultural and historical situatedness. This heterogeneity ensures the multivoicedness of meaning-making activity.
References
Bakhtin, M.M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Berlyand, I.E. 2009. “A Few Words About Bibler’s Dialogics: The School of the
Dialogue of Cultures Conception and Curriculum.” Journal of Russian and East
European Psychology, vol. 47, no. 1 (January–February), pp. 20–33.
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.
Matusov, E. 2009. “Interview with Igor Solomadin.” Journal of Russian and East
European Psychology, vol. 47, no. 2 (March–April), pp. 81–94.
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Elina Lempert-Shepel is faculty and EdD Methodologist at Walden University. She coordinated the development and implementation of the teacher-education program grounded on the principles of Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology at Eureka University, Moscow, Russia. She took part in the development of a Dialogue of Cultures teachereducation program. Her main research interests include teachers’ learning and development, reflective praxis, cultural and psychological intersubjectivity and the nature of dialogical consciousness; qualitative and cultural-historical psychology research methodologies.
E-mail: ens7@columbia.edu.
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