Toward the end of this paper, I will outline in more detail the "Learning Regions" project in Sweden (to which I have an association), and the role of the "dialogue conferences" they involve (Shotter and Gustavsen, 1999). But here, by way of further scene-setting, I would like to explore a number of issues connected with collaborative learning projects, with ‘enabling communities’, as Bruner (1996) presents them in his recent book, The Culture of Education. Crucial to them, as I have already noted in the epigraph quote above, as the absence of the oneway transmission of information, of teachers as experts. As he sees it, the educational task has now changed. In the context of our continually developing and changing cultures, in which all fixities and stabilities are now of a dynamic and often only momentary kind, we now "need desperately to look more closely at what we mean by an ‘enabling’ culture, particularly that part of the enabling community represented by its schools" (p.77). And as already mentioned, he goes on the conceive of schools "as serving a renewed function within our changing societies... [we must build] school cultures that operate as mutual communities of learners, involved jointly in solving problems with all contributing to the process of educating one another... [With schools becoming] centers for the cultivation of a new awareness about what it is like living in a modern society" (pp.81-82) – where, as it is now often remarked, we can no longer train when young for a lifetime’s career, but must think of ‘re-inventing’ ourselves during our working lives, two or three times at least.

But how does Bruner arrived at this renewed view of our educational institutions? He begins with the by now familiar social constructionist claim, that "the ‘reality’ we impute to the ‘worlds’ we inhabit is a constructed one" (p.19), in which our use of words plays a crucial part. This leads him on to the claim that, rather than thought giving rise to action, "‘thought’ as it is usually discussed may be little more than a way of talking and conversing about something we cannot observe... a way of talking that functions to give ‘thought’ some form that is more visible, more audible, more referable, and more negotiable" (p.108). This results in him assuming, as we have already assumed above, that our practices are primary. But if this is so, what becomes of our idea that education is to do with the growth or cultivation of pupils’s minds?

Instead of still taking it that our primary task is that of providing yet, but now a more complex and up-to-date version of the world around us, Bruner turns our attention back on ourselves, toward our own social powers of construction. As he sees it, schools should become "a place for the praxis (rather than the proclamation) of cultural mutuality – which means an increase in the awareness that children have of what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why" (p.82). In other words, the growth of mind becomes for Bruner, the growth of mindful action, a growth of the ability to act self-consciously. As he puts it, "the process of becoming aware of practice... is an antidote to mindlessness. And mindlessness is one of the major impediments to change" (p.79).

But how is such an awareness cultivated? In contrasting the "impoverished" communicative negotiations of chimpanzee pairs with human mother-child negotiation, Bruner describes an example of, as he puts it, "mother-child ‘book reading’, where the mother was engaged in teaching her son, Jonathan, the names of things pictured on the pages of the book" (p.182). In the example, "as soon as Jonathan could give a passably correct label in reply to his mother’s standard ‘What’s that?’ question, she would begin a next ‘And what’s the X doing?’ routine. She was elaborating the name given to the object at the focus of their joint attention into a wider system of symbols... Indeed, Jonathan’s mother even used a distinctive intonation pattern... reverting to the rising intonation she used whenever entering new intersubjective territory" (p.182). In other words, this is clearly not a process in which one person is observing another from a distance, and only later providing them with a theoretical formulation of the results of their observations to ponder over, cognitively. The two people are in an immediate, living, embodied, responsive contact with each other’s activities. They are not just coordinating their activities cognitively, but are interrelating them in what Bakhtin (1986) calls a dialogical fashion.

I will turn to the very special nature of dialogically-structured phenomena in more detail below. Here it will be sufficient to mention just one, among the many strange characteristics of such phenomena. For it is a characteristic that Bruner feels to be a major tenet, among the nine he sets out, as guides to his (psycho-cultural) approach to education – I will give it its name in a moment. Under the umbrella of the question: "What bonus or increment of knowing follows from combining information from two or more sources" (Bateson, 1979, p.77), Bateson explores such phenomena as binocular vision, and beats and Moiré patterns. I will explore the case of binocular vision and its relation to dialogically-structured phenomena further below. Let me here turn to what Bateson has to say about beats and Moiré patterns. As is well-known, the combination of two rhythmic patterns will generate a third – two sounds of different frequencies will create beats (a rhythm in time), and two rhythmic spatial patterns (two metal gratings, say) superimposed will create a Moiré pattern (a rhythm in space). If I was producing one rhythmic pattern in my activities, and you were producing another in your’s (with mine being, roughly, in response to your’s, and your’s being, roughly, in response to mine, so that both your’s and mine were ‘in the same ball park’, so to speak), then the third pattern produced would be neither your’s nor mine but our’s. However, because neither of us can have a sense of directly shaping its production in our actions, it appears to us as an ‘it’, as a third something existing independently of either of us as individuals². Such third things, such ‘its’, exist only in, as Bruner calls it, "intersubjective territory."

Such ‘its’– Bruner also calls them "works" or "oeuvres" – play an important part in Bruner’s "psycho-cultural" approach to education. He discusses them under the heading of his "externalization tenet" (pp.22-29). He sees them as serving many functions. For instance: "‘It’ takes over our attention as something that, in its own right, needs [something]... ‘It’ relieves us in some measure from the always difficult task of ‘thinking about our own thoughts’... ‘It’ embodies our thoughts and intentions in a form more accessible to reflective efforts" (p.23), and so on. Indeed, what is especially important in people’s living, responsive, involvements with each other, is the fact that they find the living ‘Its’ they create between them exert moral obligations on them in some way – which leads Bakhtin (1986) to talk of such ‘its’ as superaddressees (p.126). As Bruner points out, "much of what is involved in being a member of a culture is doing what the ‘things’ [the ‘its’] around you require" (p.151). Rather than our surroundings being seen as a neutral and inert, from within our human involvements with the others around us, they must be seen as providing us with a dynamic, living context with its our requirements, invitations, offerings, and affordings. In short, its motivations³. And it is in the invention for ourselves of new ‘its’ to ‘call out’ from us new actions, that we can motivate change our cultural practices – perhaps sufficiently extensively to elaborate them everywhere, not just in schools – into the self-developing practices of an "enabling community." I will return to these issues at the end of this article, where I will discuss the Swedish "Learning Regions" project.