We are now in a position to draw some conclusions to do with the creation of resourceful or enabling communities of learners. I will first state them in general and abstract terms, and then in terms of a project (in which I am involved - see Shotter and Gustavsen, 1999) which I think already embodies many of the features important in creating such communities.

Taken together, what all these comments on the re-thinking learning amount to, is the need to shift our current focus in the West, on learning as a result of explicit teaching, on it as a matter of the one-way transmission of information by an expert, toward learning another kind of learning altogether. For, there is another, much more basic and important kind of learning that occurs without teachers, spontaneously within our everyday engaged involvements in activities shared with the others around us. In current Western, Cartesian influenced notions of knowledge and learning, what is learned is such that when a problem arises, the tendency is for the knowledgeable person to turn away from the situation in which it occurs, and to take thought (experts should have discussions in seminar or conference rooms). While in the approach being advocated here, the tendency is for knowledgeable people, first to take pause, to then look over the situation before them ‘through’ a number of alternative forms of talk, thus to select and to inter-relate features in it in ways quite different from those spontaneously selected and related. It is the quite different way of paying to attention to ongoing events in one’s surroundings that is crucial in distinguishing the different consequences of the kind of learning involved. Wittgenstein’s (1953) remark – that we can come to a recognition of the workings of our language as a whole, "not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known" (no.109) – can be generalized. New learning is achieved when abilities that are exercised spontaneously, as something that children already know how to do without knowing that they know, are first ‘called out’ from one by the words of others, which later one can ‘call out’ from oneself by one’s own words. In such circumstances as these, learning occurs as just one moment in an otherwise continuous, multi-party involvement, in which a shared field of creativity emerges in which all alike are collaboratively engaged. Indeed, we can imagine a whole interrelated sequence of different kinds of moments spontaneously occurring within the doing of a shared practice – some being prototypically to do with providing a commentary on it, others with critiquing it, some with rendering it more shareable, while others are to do with teaching or researching into it. In such a process as this, we continually draw on resources already available to us in our existing forms of life together; we draw on them by inserting into our already existing practices, a dialogical practice, i.e., moments when we pause in the otherwise mindless following of established routines, and through the use of words, turn our attention to previously unnoticed features in our surroundings. As a result, we are better able to find our ‘way about’ inside our own practices of social construction, and less likely to ‘mislead’ or to confuse ourselves. Where all this depends on us working from the new beginnings we can find in our body’s spontaneous responsiveness to events from within our already existing practices.

I would now like to turn to the Swedish "Learning Regions" project. No teachers are involved in the project. Instead, its goal "has been to initiate and provide the basis for cooperation between enterprises in regions, local public bodies, organizations and other interest groups. By co-operating over the different sectors of society, the resources available for the development of competence and enterprises can be better used and achieve greater results, thereby providing the preconditions for an increase in employment and sustainable development in the regions" (Arbetslivsinstitutet, Solna, pamphlet). In other words, all involved are learning resources for each other, and overall, the region constitutes, in Bruner’s (1996) terms, a mutual community of learners, with all involved jointly in the process of educating one another.

Central to the project are a number of regional universities and regional Industrial Development Centers (IUCs). In 1997, the law governing higher education and research in Sweden added "a third task" to be done by these regional universities and IUCs: "they were now no longer expected just to educate and to do research but also to relate to and collaborate with their local environment... [T]his third task implies a new form of knowledge, viz., knowledge generated in interactive cooperation with practitioners" (Brulin, 1998, p.113), i.e., in dialogues.

As we shall see, in the collaborative dialogues between academic researchers and practitioners (a term I shall use for all the stakeholders in a region: business people, members of state institutions, other enterprises or regional members, etc.), a dialogically-structured space, or shared field of creativity, emerges. In their responsive conversations together - whether it is between a single researcher and a practitioner or regional stakeholder, or between regional members who don’t usual meet with each other, or when the whole group involved in a "dialogue conference" comes together - participants shift between moments in which details of their practical lives are articulated, moments of reflection and instruction, and what might be called ‘research’ moments, with each moment informing and specifying the other. As the details of the different moments are spelt out, their reciprocal relevance, the non-separable aspects of their nature, becomes apparent: the doing, the commentary, the sharing, the elaborating, the critiquing, the teaching, the researching, the relating of each other’s activities to all the other crafts and practices in the surrounding region, to economics, to the region’s administration, and, especially, to everyone’s everyday lives, etc., are all intermingled in together. Indeed, in this process, practitioners become co-researchers, and academic researchers become co-practitioners, as each articulates what they have been ‘struck by’, i.e., what they have noticed, in the unfolding process. As a result, people’s practical living activities, teaching, and research are all enfolded with each other, as one in-forms and creates the other in a evolving, generative fashion⁷. As previously mentioned, people draw out responses from each other that they lack the resources to draw out from themselves. A central feature of the learning regions project – along with the formation of regional development coalitions and a network of Industrial Development Centers (IUCs) – is the conduct form time to time of Dialogue Conferences. The point of such conferences is to afford effective communication between those stakeholders in a region who do not usually come into face-to-face, living contact with each other – with all the advantages discussed above of such contacts. The basic rules, or better, "orientational directives," regulating the conduct of the conferences are below.

Basic rules or "orientational directives" for "Dialogue Conferences:

• Work experience is the point of departure for participation (concrete examples are important - in particular, "moving" events that one has been "struck by").
• All concerned with the issues under discussion should have the possibility of participating.
• Dialogue is based on a principle of give and take, or two-way discourse, not one-way communication (participants must be responsive to each other).
• Participants are under an obligation to help other participants be active in the dialogue.
• All participants have the same "rank" in the dialogue arenas
• Some of the concrete experiences possessed by participants on entering the dialogue must be seen as relevant.
• It must be possible for all participants to gain an understanding of the topics under discussion (time must be spent in achieving this).
• An argument can be rejected only after exploration of its details (and not, for instance, on the grounds that it emanates from a source with limited legitimacy).
• All arguments that are to enter the dialogue must be expressed by the actors present.
• All participants are obliged to accept that other participants may have arguments better than their own.
• Among the issues that can be made subject to discussion are also the ordinary work roles of the participants - no-one is exempt from such a discussion (something unique can be seen from every position in a relational-landscape).
• The dialogue should be able to integrate a growing number of differences (indeed, it is precisely from their integration into a living whole that a sense of the region’s relational landscape emerges).
• The dialogue should continuously generate decisions that provide platforms for joint action.

The form of the dialogue conference is an application of the principles of a democratic dialogue.

The first directive in the list above is crucial. It means that everything discussed in the Dialogue Conference has the character of a living example. Further, in being to do with a person’s work experience, others find little difficulty in orienting and responding to it. When participants are focusing on events occurring in the discourse (rather than on "hidden realities" that the discourse is supposed to be about), new issues (possibilities) emerge in terms of how such events are responded to and understood by new others.

In people’s living relations to one another, it is not their general, theoretical understandings that matter, but their relational-responsive understandings of the unique details of their region, a matter of their practical rather than their reflective consciousnesses. And, as each detail is spontaneously enunciated in a dialogue conference in a responsive, living relation to a just previously enunciated detail, participants are able to sense the link of each to the other, and to link them all into a dynamic, living, scenic-sense of the region as a whole. This practical understanding of their region, from within their involvement in it, is of a kind quite different to that usually articulated in academic analyses. Such analyses are usually of a retrospective, objective, and disinterested kind, while the accounts offered in a Dialogue Conference are of a prospective, relational, interested kind; they focus on quite particular, relational possibilities for the actual future development of a region. Furthermore, the possibilities focused on are of a kind that the participants in the region themselves understand; they are an aspect of their own practical consciousness; they know how "to relate" to them. Thus it is in their power to articulate them further, both linguistically and materially.

While academics might feel that discussion of region’s future should be about a regional action plan, and that everything that does not pertain to items and priorities within the plan is a waste of time and effort, Dialogue Conferences make it clear that many other kinds of events are of great importance too. Such events as people simply "getting to know each other," "making relationships," "swapping stories about life events," "finding one’s way about inside the region,""finding coalition partners," and so on – which might seem mere social niceties to be indulged in only for leisure purposes – are important details in organizing the regional actors into an enabling community. All these ‘trivialities’ come to acquire a major significance, for it is these myriad trivialities which are fashioned -- in dialogically-structured processes in the Conference – into a meaningful whole, into a shared sense of "our region."

As all this may sound to many as if those of us engaged in this project have abandoned the grand aims of science far too easily, we would like to offer these final comments: As the kind of research I have been discussing here is only a partner in the development processes of region (not the director of it), this kind of research has to relate to the same dynamic scenic-sense of the region that is shared by all the other participants involved. As a consequence, we have not sought, nor do we think that the possibility exists, to reduce all the discourses involved to one single kind of ideal type discourse. Indeed, if the dialogues in question are to remain "democratic dialogues," this must not and cannot be our aim. For the essence of a democratic dialogue is, we believe, that it is only structured as such by all those within it bringing to bear from within its conduct what "orientational directives" they, at any one moment feel are appropriate to its democratic conduct. In other words, rather than being based on externally imposed, prior, abstract "organizing principles," formulated by supposed experts on the basis of their reasoning or experience, we believe that regional participants must also develop a set of "orientational directives" appropriate to their own historical, geographic, economic, social, and political conditions. As just one of the voices in such dialogues, the directives we have offered here are not offered as finally definitive of what a ‘proper’ democratic dialogue is - we, like many others in a region, can only make offers which, in relation to a region’s needs can be taken by others in the region as a possible "resource."

Thus, we cannot take our main task to be that of creating an abstract, representational understanding of the "hidden meanings" that participants themselves are unaware of, as if they are located "deeply beyond the surface" of their lives. Nor can we take our ultimate aim to be that of providing them with our "organizing principles." We feel that we must stick with what we can hear and see and place from within the kinds of involvements that we can have as a interested partners in a region’s development. And offer what help we can - as academics and intellectuals with some practice in linguistic and conceptual issues - in creating sensible patterns among the events we can hear and see and place, with as little use of intervening principles as possible. Where, all the time we are, in our dealings with each other, being sensitive to the new beginnings offered us by our bodies in their responses to the events occurring in our surroundings. This is what we feel is involved in helping to construct living enabling communities of mutual learners. To emphasize this, I will end with a remark of Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) to this effect: "My body is not only an object amongst all other objects,... but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colors, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them.... We are not, then reducing the significance of the word, or even of the percept, to a collection of ‘bodily sensations’ but we are saying that the body, in so far as it has ‘behavior patterns’, is that strange object which uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world, and through which we can consequently ‘be at home in’ that world, ‘understand’ it and find significance in it" (pp.236-237).