NOTES TOWARD A THEORY OF DIALOGUE
by Grace Deniston-Trochta, Ed Check, and Jane Vanderbosch
Abstract
Multiple dimensions of dialogue as pedagogical practice are examined
in the following three essays. In the first piece, "When
Life Imitates Art: Notes on the Nature of Dialogue," poet
Jane Vanderbosch reflects about the politics of silence and voice
in graduate school. She analyzes how power and politics charge
the atmosphere of the classroom. In "The Pedagogy of Dialogue:
A Relation Between Means and End," Grace Deniston-Trochta
examines the possibility of dialogue in a large "pit"
classroom. She addresses her teaching reality, a reality limited
by an anonymous and passive audience. In the final essay, "Managing
the Silence of Children," Ed Check considers how power and
control are mediated in the lives of students and teachers. He
implicates himself as he reflects on a conversation with his nephew.
Throughout, the writers dissect pedagogy as dialogue through the
personal as political. Each reveals how telling one's truth can
be a site to rethink institutionalized and self-imposed silences.
DEDICATION to Jane Vanderbosch (1944-1999)
Grace and I dedicate this article to Jane Vanderbosch who died on April 29, 1999. Grace emailed me the following: "I realize that on e of Jane's greatest influences on me was how supportive she was, specifically, how she encouraged my insights. I'm realizing how vital it is, to be surrounded by people who can do this for each other."
I met Jane in 1991 at The United, a social service umbrella agency in Madison, WI for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people. I was a graduate student, angry at myself--at odds with a misogynist and homophobic culture. Jane was recovering from violence, incest, addiction and co-dependency. We clicked. We discussed many times, how we had accepted, rejected, denied, struggled with, and learned from or replayed our childhoods. We talked about our working-class backgrounds, how we then passed for middle-class, the betrayal and angst of not having a class to identify with, and the impostor syndrome--that we were the kinds of people who weren't supposed to get Ph.Ds.
As a lesbian feminist, Jane heard and counseled gay men "coming out" at The United. She saw how patriarchy and misogyny hurt both men and women. She always knew how to respond in a crisis--her words wise and challenging--her wit sharp. She managed much of her pain by helping others. She, like me, was vulnerable and searching. After Jane was fired without explanation, her cancer came back. Unable to work, she went on disability. She later noted that it took getting fired and having cancer to push her toward the love of her life--being a full-time writer.
Jane's writing includes published essays (1997, 1994, and others), published and unpublished poems and unpublished novels. Jane witnessed and legitimated my journey as a gay male, artist, educator, and academic. Her wisdom, empathy and kindness are tools I use to mentor students today. We miss you dear friend.
Ed and Grace
Vanderbosch, J. (1997). Notes from the working class. In S. Raffo (Ed.), Queerly classed: Gay men and lesbians write about class (pp. 83-94). Boston: South End Press.
Vanderbosch, J. (1994). Beginning again. In J. Swallow (Ed.), The next step: Lesbians in long-term recovery (pp. 65-71). Boston: Alyson Publication, Inc.
INTRODUCTION: Notes on Dialogue
To teach is to do (at least) two things: share knowledge of the object of inquiry with others and initiate a search for wisdom. The first, given the explosion of both real and faux information, is a relatively simple matter. The art education teacher speaks of color, form or materials and the matter is done.
The second, however, is much more difficult, for it requires not the traditional monologue of knowledge -- e.g., lines and light are the basic structures of art -- but a dialogue, a dialogue wherein teachers and learners enter into a relationship where the process of learning itself is the singular method to achieve wisdom, the final goal. This relationship, in order to succeed in its mission of promoting the awareness, acceptance and acquisition of wisdom, must be egalitarian. That is, the teacher must not simply be the subject in the inquiry, leading the younger or the less informed to the Promised Land of Knowledge. No -- like both the students and the subject itself -- the teacher must be both subject and object in a process of inquiry that is essentially a spiral.
In this spiral of inquiry, the subjects analyze the objects of inquiry -- in this case, four objects: themselves, art, themselves in relationship to art, and themselves in relationship to the entire process of experiential learning. As they investigate themselves-in-art, they also investigate what others have said about them, the art they are studying, and about how those two subject-objects are connected.
This relationship requires that learners learn how others -- adults, teachers, parents and all those operating in "loco parentis" -- view them as children, adolescents, young adults and returning students. It requires that they fit the views that others hold of them into the great puzzle that is their lives. It will mean that they study educational texts as well as art books and decide for themselves the limits of disciplinarity. For example, Chicano students in an Anglo classroom might decide that Spanish and Mexican art must be included in any discussions of their own art. Or first graders might decide that books not written by children under twelve do not mirror their subjective experience of childhood. As the examples imply, dialogue would necessitate a new appreciation of subjectivity -- and a less universal definition of it.
New definitions would not only widen the knowledge base but also allow those currently silenced by both art and education to have their voices heard. And they would have their voices heard in the ensuing dialogue: a loud and exciting collage of colors, classes, ethnicities, genders, ages, nationalities and races.
Sometimes peaceful, sometimes discordant, this dialogue would be initiated not to know, for it would be recognized that knowledge is a poor peg on which to hang our endangered future, but the many skills that lead to acceptance of wisdom: Skills like joy, fearlessness and kindness. (1) Skills like self-love and a delight in ambiguity. Skills like art.
These skills, which together will revolutionize not only education but both life and art, will enhance the world and the place of humans in it. They will lead us to accept both the achievements and limitations of each species, including our oh-so-human one; they will enable us to not only recognize the limits of knowledge but also allow us to turn each act of knowledge into an act of being itself.
The following three essays are linked by one commonality: the examination of the politics of silence in relation to dialogue. A poet writes about notions of speech and silence contained within texts of legitimized knowledge. Required to teach a "pit" class, a seasoned teacher tries to make sense of teaching in anonymity, an experience foreign to her personality and teaching philosophy. And a chat takes place between an uncle and his nephew, one in which the young child is listened to within the safety of a loving relationship.
These essays/stories and authors are linked by a common search for understanding silence as it relates to dialogue. Jane Vanderbosch reflects upon her own experience as a graduate student and the ways in which silence and "noise" of a given curriculum can constrict or expand the mind and experience. Grace Deniston-Trochta submits that it is possible for dialogue to exist in the disposition and silence of the mind, as we try to reach out to each other. Ed Check registers dismay and concern that his nephew's experience epitomizes an absence of dialogue by way of a deadly silence common to institutionalized schooling.
Upon first glance, it may appear as though these are three stories united only by their common interest in the potential of dialogue in learning. However, the search for dialogue that is catalogued within these stories constitutes a larger dialogue in-as-much as the stories appear together in an appeal to the reader for its fulfillment. This triptych directs a spotlight on three divergent experiences of the concept of learning through dialogue, and it is this very divergence that stimulates responsive dialogue.
WHEN LIFE IMITATES ART: NOTES ON THE NATURE OF DIALOGUE
by Jane Vanderbosch
Dialogue: a speech act between two active speakers. Monologue: a speech act between an active speaker and a listener.
Such were the definitions, general enough and vague, that I knew as a young graduate student in English. Someone talked; someone else listened -- whether it was during a play, where there were two listeners (i.e., the character spoken to and the audience), or within a novel or poem, read silently by a solitary reader.
I did not question the function of either of these definitions until the late 1970s, when feminism exploded like a supernova in my mind. Suddenly, it wasn't such a simple matter of isolated or even interconnected speech acts. Now, other variables -- authority, intent, and context, for example -- became part of this literary equation about dialogue.
As these variables intruded into the analyses of the poetry I was studying, entirely new sets of questions came following on their heels. Who is given the power to speak in any given speech act and who is silenced? What are the dynamics of the speech act itself? Where does the locus of control in a speech act reside -- e.g., is there evidence that a speech or conversation is merely rhetorical, functioning more to provide the appearance of dialogue than an actual exchange of thoughts or feelings? How can we weigh the relative importance of each speech act within a dialogue? Why should dialogue matter to the reader, thinker or seeker (2) at all?
At first these questions nearly paralyzed me as a reader. Literature that I had read solely for "content" now seemed fraught with extra-readerly consequences. One example here is pertinent: I had become immersed in the poetry of women, especially that of modern British and American women, and my whole notion of what a poem was "about" was evaporating before my eyes. Anne Sexton's "crazy poems," for instance, in which she directly addressed her psychiatrist (especially those in To Bedlam and Part Way Back), turned my poetic world upside-down. These were not the restrained, disinterested works I had been taught to admire by the New Critics, who clearly favored the order of thought over the anarchy of emotion. No, these were the poems of a gifted, sensitive, and enraged woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown.
And reading these poems marked the beginning of the end for me. I could no longer trust my teachers -- hawkers of the New Criticism line -- because they had left not only women poets like Anne Sexton out of their discussions of what was the proper or appropriate subject of poetry. They had left me out as well.
As a reader, a writer, and a woman, I was nowhere to be seen
in these dialogues on the appropriate. And I did not know what
I was missing until I read Anne Sexton.
So what does this one example of silence in the classroom about
women's lives, of being silenced as a woman, have to do with an
understanding of dialogue?
It is a clue. A clue that dialogue is not only a linguistic act, but a political act as well; a political act that is as much about power and control as it is about speech. It is a clue that, as seekers, we have a responsibility to gauge how we can facilitate dialogue in the politically charged atmosphere of a classroom -- where sexism and racism and classism abound, not simply as ideologies from "out there," but as the speech acts of all the individual speakers who enter the room. Speakers -- who sometimes can be teachers rather than seekers -- who do not listen to the voices of women or little girls. Or speakers -- who may be students rather than seekers -- who bully and intimidate less powerful speakers than themselves. Or speakers who have -- to paraphrase the poet Audre Lorde -- "learned" the speech patterns of the dominant, visual culture, and who refuse to "hear" the speech acts of the auditory or the kinesthetic.
This one example, then, taken from one life, speaks of the many variables, the many differences, within dialogue that arise as much from enforced silence as imposed speech. In this final sense, then, dialogue cannot itself be understood without reference to either silence or noise. The one denoting the inability or unwillingness to speak; the other the cacophony that results when speech itself is divorced from the real purpose for speaking: to share our individual understandings of our world. To fuse those understandings into a collective undertaking, where words and speech acts combine, separate and re-combine to form a language, a common language, that attempts -- much like this essay itself -- to articulate what has historically been called "the getting of wisdom." (3)
THE PEDAGOGY OF DIALOGUE: A RELATION BETWEEN MEANS AND END
by Grace Deniston-Trochta
In September I began teaching a "pit" course, so nicknamed because of the large amphitheater setting, holding the 164 students who had signed up for the class. Reluctantly, due to the size and the setting of the class, I was forced to choose the lecture format. Yet, all semester, John Dewey's words rang out: "These means form the content of the specific end-in-view, not some abstract standard or ideal" (Archambault, 1964, p.104). As I tried to justify the means, my anxiety spilled onto pages of a teaching journal, and in the process I began to examine the concept of dialogue as pedagogy.
The notion of dialogue as pedagogy has great appeal to me in that it is based on two informed assumptions: that it enhances lasting learning and produces more satisfying social interaction (Palmer, 1998). It also mirrors the complexity and "copious" nature of the world (Grudin, 1996). And, according to the late Paulo Freire (1997) who championed dialogue, it also contains the seeds of political empowerment. These claims have a healthy history, dating back to the Greeks. However, Elizabeth Ellsworth has demonstrated that dialogue as pedagogy is not without problems (Ellsworth, 1997).
The Characteristics of Dialogue
The image of Socratic dialogue at work in the classroom is one
of students engaged in learning by animatedly interacting with
each other and the teacher as points are argued. Deborah Tannen
points out in her recent book, The Argument Culture, that this
popularized version reflects our devotion to the Adversary Paradigm
and is not true Socratic dialogue. Socratic dialogue is characterized
by convincing others and leading them to new insights as habitual
thought is abandoned. "Our version of the Socratic method
-- an adversarial public debate -- is unlikely to result in opponents
changing their minds" (Tannen, 1998, p. 274).
Dialogue in Multiple Forms
My recent experience in the "pit" raised several questions
for me: Are there no other models of dialogue besides an image
of vigorous student interaction in an intimate classroom? Does
the large lecture format exclude dialogue? If our attempts at
dialogue fizzle, do we conclude that no dialogue has taken place?
In other words, is dialogue only "good" when particular
standards are met? Dictionary definitions of dialogue do not help
answer these questions because they neglect the subtleties of
dialogue as they play out in the classroom. Robert Grudin, a contemporary
scholar already cited, has made a prescient statement, which helps
to flush out a fuller notion of dialogue:
What happens in dialogue? The key ingredients are reciprocity
and strangeness. By reciprocity I mean a give-and-take between
two or more minds or two or more aspects of the same mind. This
give-and-take is open-ended and is not controlled or limited by
any single participant. (Grudin, 1996, p. 12)
Vivian Gussin Paley
Vivian Gussin Paley teaches very young children at the University
of Chicago Laboratory School. Having taught at the Lab School,
I have been in Paley's classroom and observed her "laboratory
of learning." I have also read several of her books in which
she has reflected deeply on her behavior as it relates to interactions
with her students. As Paley examines her own behavior as a teacher,
her self-reflection becomes both the means and the ends. Similarly,
she looks to the student to learn about herself, inverting the
traditional role of teacher and learner. In her books, Paley has
allowed us numerous intimate glimpses of this learning process
as she recounts a range of teaching dilemmas, including her own
ethnicity and race as they impact on her students (Paley, 1979).
It is this emphasis upon Paley's role as learner that allows change
to occur (for herself and for her students).
In her book, The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter, Paley describes how she uses children's stories as the curriculum. As she relates some of these children's stories to us, however, she reveals how they become sources of deep learning for her, about her students and about herself. The title is taken from the child in her class, Jason, who lives out the fantasy of being a helicopter. He is an outsider in the classroom, a loner who for quite some time resists all attempts -- by students and teacher -- to engage him in the learning community of the classroom. While the other children benefit from Paley's storytelling curriculum, Jason resists it. Or, rather, he lives his own story of isolation and loneliness through his fantasy of being a helicopter. Appearances would suggest that Jason seems to be out of dialogue with his classroom, but a dialogue exists nonetheless.
Through much struggle and introspection, Paley gained the following understanding:
Jason's most reliable tool has been the helicopter; mine had been drills and exercises. Both Jason and I, as newcomers to a classroom, hovered over children without landing on their runways, without entering their fantasies. I cannot avoid my own premises and experiences, and I can only pretend to know Jason's. But he is a child who causes me to analyze myself and everyone else. In his visible confusion, he often clarifies matters for me. (Paley, 1990, p.122)
Paley identifies teaching as a moral act when we acknowledge and respond to the fact that "every child enters the classroom in a vehicle propelled by that child alone, at a particular pace and for a particular purpose" (Paley, 1990, p. xii).
Although Paley may not call her practice a pedagogy of dialogue, her work constitutes an elaborate dialogue in which the teacher becomes a listener par excellence, a learner, a person who responds to and respects students, one who has earned the trust of his/her students. Her self-reflection (her learning) becomes the means and the end, as it changes the behavior and perceptions of both teacher and student.
Teaching in the "Pit"
As I anticipate the beginning of a new semester and lecturing
to a new group of students in the "pit," I have few
illusions about my role. I am still convinced that a richer learning
environment exists when you can recognize your students and "land
on their runways."
However, my hope rests in the complexity of dialogue as revealed in the self-reflective aspects of Paley's work. Her experiences suggest that dialogue as pedagogy may begin in solitude, in the mind and will of the teacher. Not only does this suggest that dialogue as pedagogy wears as many disguises as there are teachers and student communities, it also suggests that something vital happens in solitude (in the process of self-reflection). We know that it is passed along to students: The means and the ends become indistinguishable.
Specific to my "pit" class, I know that the time, energy, and attention I devote to preparing my lectures will show up in kind, giving me a measure of control over the material substance of my lectures. I can also state with confidence that every struggle and effort I make to reach my students will also be in the sphere of my learning. Less predictably (and certainly with less control), there will be moments of grace when I will accidentally "land on the runways" of some of my students as their learning continues.
It is clear, finally, that internal dialogue can overcome the barrier of anonymity in "pit" classes, or other environments not conducive to mutual learning. In the context of student teaching, John Dewey once suggested that a student teacher should "observe with reference to seeing the interaction of mind, to see how teacher and pupils react upon each other -- how mind answers to mind" (Archambault, 1964, p. 324). This is a useful phrase when thinking about dialogue, as well. While mind seeking mind may give birth to a dialogue of pedagogy, mind answering mind sustains and nurtures it.
MANAGING THE SILENCE OF CHILDREN
by Ed Check
[S]ilence sends a strong message to children: This may be your reality but it is not [a] truth that we honor in this institution. (Lyman, 1998, p. 14)
I was taught that "kids should be seen and not heard." From elementary school on, I was on the receiving end of multiple monologues telling me what to do: from my parents, relatives, priests, nuns, neighbors and teachers. As a result, both my formal and informal educations failed me miserably as an adult. I was not at all prepared to discuss or deal with the realities of life -- not sex, or sickness, or diversity, or death.
A recent conversation I had with my ten-year old nephew, Brandon, suggests to me that unfortunately, little has changed. It was a holiday chat; we were catching-up. I asked Brandon what was going on in his life. As he talked first about his family, then his school, I asked him about his art class. What was it like, was it fun, what was he learning?
Without hesitating, Brandon began a long list of complaints: his teacher didn't listen; she had them all doing "stupid assignments;" he was bored; he wasn't learning "much of anything;" he wasn't able to do what he wanted to do; and then the teacher always wanted them "to do things her way." As an example he said, she had recently demanded that he redo a print according to her specifications -- in spite of the fact that he felt it was finished. Rather than comply, he had taken a lower grade.
After reciting his list of gripes, Brandon then contrasted his current teacher with one he had had in second grade. He said this teacher, whose name he didn't tell me and who I'll call Mr. Smith, made art interesting and exciting. Mr. Smith not only asked what kinds of projects the class might want to do but encouraged them to do what interested them. Brandon said he felt respected, like Mr. Smith "was listening to him."
Returning home I realized that Brandon's list of complaints paralleled many of my own critiques of art education. And then I realized something else: Brandon had voiced them all to me but he had never told his teacher. Never said what bothered him. And she had never asked.
Learning To Listen To Children
I've often wondered why don't we listen to children more? Or better
yet, why we are afraid to engage in meaningful dialogue with them?
What do we fear? Since creating a dialogue-centered curriculum
would mandate that we simply tell the truth, perhaps the fear
is not in telling the truth but in losing control (Silin, 1995).
For that is what schools are about: power and control (Apple,
1979, 1982). The power to convey the messages of the dominant
culture and the ability to control the audience.
Yet, listening to children (or anyone, I suppose), requires respecting not only their experiences and opinions, but the contexts of their lives. It also requires a trust between the speakers that can only develop naturally over time. This, in turn, would mandate a genuine interest in the lives of students. For example, my conversation with Brandon was based on mutual interest and affection. We trusted the other to hear our truths. Not only as uncle and nephew, but as two individuals who had two stories about our two lives to tell.
This kind of respectful dialogue means children must be heard, so that they can verify and witness their realities (Felman and Laub, 1992). This kind of dialogue is a mutually informed and empathic speaking and listening. I suspect the type of listening I provided Brandon allowed him enough safety to tell his truth about his teachers and enabled him to feel that he was being heard. Following Brandon's critique of his current art teacher, children are apparently icons of innocence: helpless, silent and passive others. Within such a paradigm, children are neither seen nor heard because they are the projection of each teacher's own childhood, their own "lost times." The content and process of teaching then becomes so censored that any possibility of dialogue is destroyed. As a result, art classes become environments that are antithetical to creativity, imagination, and expression. Environments that are public stages, paid for by public moneys, where the "numbing out" and "dumbing down" of the American child is played out.
From Monologues to Dialogues
Listening to students and to their needs, hopes and visions, is
the first step in creating dialogue. This is not an easy thing
to do. As Ellsworth (1997) reminds us, such modes of address are
not neat and can be messy and may lead to unpredictable events.
And as teachers who have been taught to control or be in control
at all times, giving up control is often the bane of our professional
lives. Yet what we gain from such a "loss" is a fluid,
living curriculum that guarantees dialogue and passion (Silin,
1995). Utilizing the rich contours and texts of student lives
opens up our own lives as well, as we -- teacher and student alike
-- explore our common humanity. (4)
None of this is easy to do. I struggle daily with how to incorporate dialogue and humanity into my teaching. And though dialogue, talking, being heard and listening to others has grounded my pedagogy, its still feels out of place for me in school. Why? Because that's not how I learned to learn or to teach. Schools were places that didn't have much to do with life. And it's only now, as I enter my third decade as an educator, that I realize that the most powerful lessons are those that connect students to their lives. Like my students, I have much work to do.
CONCLUSION
Throughout each of these essays, personal truths have been revealed,
truths that have transformed our relationships not only to ourselves,
but to our students, art, and education. When spoken and heard,
our individual searches for wisdom become part of a larger dialogue.
Through this dialogue, each of us experienced a kindness that
not only encouraged our individual searches but led to a greater
awareness and appreciation of difference.
Part of our vision is reconsidering the value and place of dialogue. It means hearing, trusting and respecting what people tell us as their truths. Within such a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1970), we can delight in ambiguity and the unknown rather than fear or distrust it. It started when we recognized and addressed our silence, that "noise," and began to trust our voices, experiences and visions. No universalities, just differences. All richly textured bits of knowledge. Such is our vision for personal achievement and critical awareness. As we allow ourselves to turn each richly textured bit of knowledge into an act of being itself, we transform not only ourselves, but dialogue.
Footnotes
1 We are purposefully expanding the traditional notion of skill -- using it in a non-traditional way. Just as art is a skill and a social construct, so is joy, fearlessness, kindness, etc. It is one way to personalize/humanize the discourse.
2 Seeker is a term I am using here to replace teacher-learner. A teacher does learn each time she/he teaches a particular subject, but because the balance of power in a classroom is usually tilted toward monologic teaching and away from dialogic learning, I preferred creating a faux term rather than perpetuating the acceptance of a false dynamic.
3 See Proverbs 4:7-13.
4 See Kate Lyman's essays: "Staying Past Wednesday" (about sickness and death) and "Teaching the Whole Story: One School's Struggle Toward Gay and Lesbian Inclusion" (homophobia) for examples of utilizing dialogue to create informed critical pedagogy.
References
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Apple, M. (1979). Ideology and curriculum. New York: Routledge.
Apple, M. (1982). Education and power. New York: Routledge.
Ellsworth, E. (1997). Teaching positions. Difference, pedagogy, and the power of address. New York: Teachers College Press.
Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge.
Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (M. Bergman Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1970).
Grudin, R. (1996). On dialogue: An essay in free thought. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Kuhn, T. (2nd ed.). (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lyman, Kate. (1998, Fall). Staying past Wednesday. Rethinking Schools, 13(1), 4.
Lyman, Kate. Lyman, K. (1996/97, Winter). Teaching the whole story: One school's struggle toward gay and lesbian inclusion. Rethinking Schools, 11(2), 14-17.
Paley, Vivian Gussin. (1979). White teacher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paley, Vivian Gussin. (1990). The boy who would be a helicopter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Palmer, Parker J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Silin, J. (1995). Sex, death, and the education of children: Our passion for ignorance in the age of AIDS. Columbia University, New York: Teachers College Press.
Tannen, D. (1998). The argument culture: Moving from debate
to dialogue. New York: Random House.