Reason and Dialogue in Education

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511499937.017

14 - Reason and Dialogue in Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2009

Edited by

Ed Elbers and

Rupert Wegerif: Affiliation:
School of Education, University of Exeter, United Kingdom; formerly at the Centre for Language and Communications, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, Open University, United Kingdom
Bert van Oers: Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Wim Wardekker: Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Ed Elbers: Affiliation:
Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
René van der Veer: Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden

Book contents

Get access

Summary

A concern with reason has always been at the heart of European educational theory. For the ancient Greeks, reason was considered the defining characteristic of humanity. Both Aristotle and Plato argued that the promotion of reason should be a central aim of education. The movement for universal education that began in eighteenth-century France was at least in part inspired by the belief that education for all would expand the influence of reason in society and therefore fuel social progress. Harvey Siegel (1997) argues that thinking skills programmes are a continuation of this Enlightenment project to promote reason by means of education. Some “postmodernist” thinkers, such as Lyotard and Foucault, have strongly criticised this Enlightenment project. However most postmodern theory applied to education, when examined closely, does not involve a rejection of the ideal of reason so much as a redefinition of reason in terms of local dialogues (e.g., Parker, 1997). The important question is not so much, should education promote reason but, rather, which model of reason should it promote. In this chapter I tentatively put forward the suggestion that the idea of “dialogue across difference” (Burbules, 1993) offers a coherent model of reason that could serve as an ideal within education.

THE DIALOGIC TURN

Recently there has been an increasing number of studies in education and psychology informed by dialogical rather than monological theoretical assumptions.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Transformation of Learning
Advances in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
, pp. 273 - 286

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511499937.017 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Axelrod, R. (1997). The complexity of cooperation: Agent-based models of competition and collaboration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar

Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar

Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas.Google Scholar

Buber, M. (1923/1958). I and thou (2nd ed.) (R. Gregory Smith, Trans.). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.Google Scholar

Burbules, N. (1993). Dialogue in teaching. New York: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar

Casti, J. (1997). Would be worlds. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar

Edmonds, B. (1997). Modelling socially intelligent agents. Paper presented at the AAAI fall symposium on Socially Intelligent Agents, Cambridge, MA, November.

Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology. London: Sage.Google Scholar

Habermas, J. (1990). Moral consciousness and communicative action. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar

Habermas, J. (1991). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar

Hobson, P. (2002). The cradle of thought: Exploring the origins of thinking. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar

Holland, J. (1992). Complex adaptive systems. Daedalus, 121 (Winter), 17–30.Google Scholar

Juarrero, A. (1999). Dynamics in action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar

Lévinas, E. (1989). Martin Buber and the theory of knowledge. In Hand, S. (Ed.), The Lévinas Reader (pp. 59–74). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Lévinas, E. (1990). Totalité et infini: Essai sur l'extériorité. Paris: Le Livre de Poche.Google Scholar

Mercer, N. (1995). The guided construction of knowledge: Talk amongst teachers and learners. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar

Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Dawes, L. (1999). Children's talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25 (1), 95–111.CrossRef Google Scholar

Parker, S. (1997). Reflective teaching in the postmodern world: A manifesto for education in postmodernity. Buckingham: Open University Press.Google Scholar

Rommetveit, R. (1992). Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communication. In Wold, A. (Ed.), The dialogical alternative: Towards a theory of language and mind (pp. 19–45). Oslo: Scandanavian Press.Google Scholar

Sendak, M. (1963). Where the wild things are. Harmondsworth: Puffin Books.Google Scholar

Siegel, H. (1997). Rationality redeemed? Further dialogues on an educational ideal. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar

Volosinov, V. N. (1929/1986). Marxism and the philosophy of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Vygotsky, L. (1991). The genesis of higher mental functions. In Light, P., Sheldon, S., & Woodhead, B. (Eds.), Learning to think (pp. 34–63). London: Routledge.Google Scholar

Waldrop, M. (1992). Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos. London: Penguin.Google Scholar

Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for researching peer talk. In Wegerif, R. & Scrimshaw, P. (Eds.), Computers and talk in the primary classroom (pp. 49–65). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar

Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (2000). Language for Thinking. In Cowie, H., Aalsvoort, D., & Mercer, N. (Eds.), New perspectives in collaborative learning. Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar

Wegerif, R., Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (1999). From social interaction to individual reasoning: An empirical investigation of a possible socio-cultural model of cognitive development. Learning and Instruction, 9 (5), 493–516.CrossRef Google Scholar

Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry: Toward a sociocultural practice and theory of education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef Google Scholar

Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar