Bildning för alla! - DiVA

Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts
alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only
form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts … Stick to the Facts, Sir!
Teaching which proceeds in this fashion objectivises the learner, turning them
into a thinglike other to be acted upon, as if they were an inert lump of clay to
be moulded into shape by the potter. A dialogic approach to pedagogy, by contrast,
recognises that learners have minds of their own, and consequently that the
teacher must be prepared to talk with (rather than at) her/his students in order to
understand their thinking processes, the better to be able to adjust her/his teaching
practice so as to lead the development of their consciousness in the desired
direction. This kind of intervention may then set up in the mind of the learner
what Bakhtin calls a “microdialogue” (Bahktin, 1929/1984, p. 74), in other words
an inner conversation between different voices, one representing their preexisting
knowledge or understanding of the topic in hand, the other the fuller, more developed
understanding represented by the voice of the teacher. It seems clear that, in
most acts of learning, the learning subject must undergo a more or less extended
period of inner doubt and uncertainty before they reach a new, clearer and more
confident understanding of some skill, concept or value that goes beyond their previous
level of knowledge or ability. The aim of dialogic pedagogy, then, is to present
a model of external dialectic in the interaction between teacher and students that
supports the development and appropriation of this relation between the voices of
the already-known and the not-yet-understood in the microdialogue of thought in
the mind of the learner.
In an important passage, Bakhtin spells out the distinction between the
atmosphere of “monologic” thought (as represented, for example, by Mr Gradgrind’s
philosophy of education), and the dialogic conditions that we have been
discussing (Bahktin, 1929/1984, p. 81):
In an environment of philosophical monologism the genuine interaction of consciousnesses
is impossible, and thus a genuine dialogue is impossible as well. In essence
idealism knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses:
someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it
and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it follows, can
only be a pedagogical dialogue.
The appeal to an analogy with the teacherpupil relationship is revealing. I do
not think we should take Bakhtin to imply that teaching should or must have this
monologic quality. Rather, the image suggests that instruction in schools all too
often conforms to this stereotype. The idea of “pedagogical dialogue” in fact corresponds
closely to the transmissionrecitation model of teaching that still accounts
for a great deal of observed classroom practice, according to empirical studies
(Alexander, 2001; Galton, Hargreaves, Comber, Wall & Pell, 1999). The dialogic
approach, conversely, endows learners with the “fully competent ideological power
to mean” (Bahktin, 1929/1984, p. 82) recognising that they bring their own ideas
to the table when education takes place, and that these ideas are a nonzero term
in the teachinglearning equation. Whereas monologic modes of teaching tend to
stifle thought on the part of learners, treating them as recipients of knowledge to
be dispensed by an authority “who knows and possesses the truth”, dialogic peda-
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