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willed away. The pre-existing notion that the teacher’s role is to “transmit culture”,
in which culture is reified and taken as a given, rather than a living tradition to be
explored and interrogated, exercises a powerful ideological effect on conceptions of
the purpose of the education system. This is undoubtedly reinforced by the apparatus
of credentialism that occupies a strategic place in the institutions of schooling
and tertiary education: the mass engine of social differentiation that is constituted
by the system of individualised public examinations and testing. Nevertheless,
it is important to point out that the teacher or tutor continues to have some discursive
room for manoeuvre in how they construct the conditions for interaction in
their own pedagogic practice. If we want to encourage children or adult learners
to think for themselves, we must first be prepared to think with them, to grant the
legitimacy of expressing their differing points of view en route to building a deeper
collective understanding of the field of knowledge being investigated.
Dialogue without words?
In conclusion, I want to return to one of the key dilemmas raised by Rosenqvist
in his discussion of “co-operation for optimal learning occasions for all students”
(Rosenqvist, 2010). He focuses on the heterogeneity of learning groups which
include students identified as being in “severe learning difficulties”. This indeed
poses a “big challenge” for the concept of the polyphonic classroom which I have
developed above, not least because many of these students may be “non-verbal”,
that is, they may not develop the capacity to speak to others using words strung
together in articulated utterances, whether the language of their speech community
is Swedish, English or another natural language. The idea of polyphony lays
great emphasis on the importance of the subject’s “voice”, and implicitly I have
assumed the possibility of spoken interaction between teacher and students when
discussing approaches to classroom discourse in the examples of monologic and
dialogic pedagogy I have given above. Does this not exclude those learners who are
“without words”, and thus unable to participate in the kind of discursive pedagogic
interaction that I have been advocating?
In response, I would begin by returning to the question of the composition of
teaching groups raised by Rosenqvist in his chapter (Rosenqvist, 2010). It seems
to me there is great potential in the model of flexible grouping arrangements that
he describes, where no student would be confined to a permanent “bottom set” or
“help class” identity, and where all students would participate in multiple, varying
learning groups that come together for particular, time-bound educational activities.
When reading his account of the role of the special pedagogue in this setting
as “educator, developer and investigator” (Rosenqvist, 2010, p. 153), it struck me
that in a certain sense this is the role of all teachers who understand and try to
respond to the “plurality of consciousnesses” that faces them in working with a
class or other collectivity of learning subjects. The concept of polyphony that I have
described above leads me to ask whether every group of learners is in fact heterogeneous
to a greater or lesser extent. In this case, perhaps every teacher in an
inclusive school needs to take on responsibility for investigating, developing and
adapting their pedagogy in response to the varied and dynamic ensemble of learning
potentials that confronts them in any concrete educative encounter. To be
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