Two years ago, after I participated from the first Connected Learning Summit at MIT, a swedish researcher that had listened my presentation recommended that I contacted another researcher from the University of Cambridge, whose work I might be interested in: Rupert Wegerif, And his research group called CEDIR. [He actually said you should visit him, but how to explain how is living in #Argentina, so I wrote him an email]
The contact point that we have is dialogue in digital spaces for learning. In particular, I work withManuel Castells,framework an author which Wegerif also use (The Information Age Trilogy)
So, what is dialogic education? The University of Cambridge website defines it as a “global movement of research which focuses in dialogue as a transformative tool”. As that website points out, dialogue is a complex concept and in education, is been relevant since Freire (brasilian pedagogue) to Wegerif now use it
Dialogic education becomes very important in the current context, digital, because, as Wegerif argues: “with the Internet it is not possible to draw discretional limits around culture and close them or define them as a dialogical space”. With old ways of communication, oral and written, the contexts of learning limited to those people could think in relation to their community
Diálogo as a teaching goal is not the most common thing in education, and above all in relation to technology In other realms, there’s a lot said about dialogue but it sounds like an empty slogan
The focus in general in education is in technology, how teachers and students should adapt to interaction with a certain platform, app, etc. But many times, contents are the same, meaning, there’s only a mediation between the student and a content that could be taught the same way Or there’s multimedia content, for example
But dialogical education tries to generate a space that is not purely individual, but that works with a new space-time dynamic through language, a group of people which form a unique voice Here the rationality of speech, of being able to express oneself, of presenting an idea, becomes central
Professors and teachers participate today in spaces of dialogue with no clear boundaries, with perspectives which are diffuse, and which make them question their contexts
Dialogical thinking is never individual, says Wegerif, and there’s an emergent meaning because it’s not about generating questions and looking for answers between defined discrete voices, but rather, about setting a relationship with the cultural world as well
Wegerif states that
“Dialogicity means that the participants in interactions not only respond to what others do, but also respond in a way in which they consider how they think the others will respond”.
The point, argues Wegerif,and what I’ve been researching for some years,is to find a new pedagogy adequate for new situations that the Internet presents us
If you’re interested in this, you can follow my work on ResearchGate and Academia
Foto destacada by me en Museo Stedelijk, Amsterdam, 2019.
