Starfish on Palos Verdes Shelf, L.A. Harbor

Constructing ‘Resourceful or Mutually Enabling’ Communities:

Putting a New (Dialogical) Practice into Our Practices

ABSTRACT

The whole idea of being a "participant," of being an involved actor as distinct from being an "external observer" standing over against or apart from what one is learning about or researching into, is crucial in everything that follows below. It leads us to a focus on actual practices and activities in an everyday context, rather than on theories and talk in classrooms, seminar rooms, and conference halls. As academics, the world of practice, however, is not very familiar to us. We must re-teach ourselves to think in relational rather than atomistic-corpuscular (Newtonian) terms. A whole new way of being in the world is involved. Instead of taking the thoughts or theories of individuals as an original source of new activities in our lives, it involves a focus on the primacy of our living, spontaneously responsive reactions to the others and othernesses around us. Such a change in stance - from an uninvolved, outsider's view of a scene to an insider's sense of their position, their relational-involvement, within a situation - changes how we think and talk about many notions of importance to us in our discussions of the meaning of learning. For instance: thinking becomes inner dialogue (rather than calculation); understanding becomes a relationally responsive bodily activity (rather than a representational-referential one in our minds); knowledge becomes a matter of 'knowing one's way about', as in knowing what to do next (rather than the accurate picturing of a state of affairs); while communication becomes more a matter of pointing out aspects of one's surroundings (rather than the giving of decontextualized information). In particular, though, a focus on our spontaneous responsiveness in participatory contexts, suggests that learning is something we do incidentally, spontaneously, without effort (rather than self-consciously, effortfully, in classrooms). Indeed, it suggests that any explicit teaching we might do must rely on what is learned easily and spontaneously, as long as the appropriate surrounding conditions are in place. In short, it suggests that teaching can best be done through the use of living, concrete examples (rather than through the enunciation of abstract rules or general principles). Indeed, rather than 'putting a theory' into practice, effective learning (in which we learn how to learn) is achieved by inserting both into our lives and into our more institutionalized practices, a new kind of dialogically reflective practice. This approach is illustrated by material from the Swedish "Learning Regions" project.

“I conceive of schools and preschools as serving a renewed function is our changing societies. This entails building school cultures that operate as mutual communities of learners, involved jointly in solving problems with all contributing to the process of educating one another” (Bruner, 1996, pp.81-82).

“... what [these others] did was outside my skin. But whatever it was that I learned, my learning happened within my experiential sequence of what these important others... did” (Bateson, 1979, p.24).

“The ‘otherness’ which enters us makes us other” (Steiner, 1989, p.188).

“To those who wish and know how to think participatively* [see next quote below], it seems that philosophy, which ought to resolve ultimate problems... fails to speak of what it ought to speak. Even though its propositions have a certain validity, they are incapable of determining an answerable act/deed and the world in which it is actually and answerably performed once and only once" (Bakhtin, 1993, p.19).

“*That is, those who know how not to detach their performed act from its product, but rather how to relate both of them to the unitary and unique context of life and seek to determine them in that context as an indivisible unity” (footnote to the above quote, Bakhtin, 1993, p.19).

“A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists is ‘seeing connections’” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122).

“Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loopholes open, and the practice has to speak for itself” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.144).

“For more clearly... in my experience of others than in my experience of speech or the perceived world, I inevitable grasp my body as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it ... It [my body] must teach me to comprehend what no constituting consciousness can know — my involvement in a ‘pre-constituted’ world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, pp.93-95).

“Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them” (Vygotsky, 1978, p.88).


Pre-Classic Mayan Mural, San Bartolo, Guatemala

“Learning is in urgent need to be ’undefined’,” is one of the orienting statements for this symposium. “There is a need to rethink research in light of the ‘undefinition’ of learning beyond the boundaries of instructional processes,” is another. Toward the aim implied in these statements, I want in what follows to explore – and to put into dialogue with each other, so to speak – the work of a group of philosophers and other writers on language and life. Mainly, I will draw from Wittgenstein, Voloshinov, Bakhtin, and Merleau-Ponty, who all in their own different ways, focus on the primacy of our living, spontaneously responsive reactions to the others and othernesses around us, rather than taking the thoughts or theories of individuals as an original source of new activities in our lives. As Wittgenstein (1980) puts it: “The origin and the primitive form of the language game is,” he says, “a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language - I want to say - is refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ (quoting Goethe)’” (p.31). Whilst elsewhere he remarks: “Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (1953, no.284). Rather than on what is supposed as occurring in some hidden way within us, so that we must approach it indirectly, in terms of hypotheses and theories, this focus on our spontaneous, living, differential responsiveness to the otherness around us, and on our immediate, ‘inner’, felt experience of it, is crucial. For there is something very special in people’s living, bodily presence to each other that is not properly acknowledged in our current modernist, mechanistic ways of making sense of our world.

As Merleau-Ponty (1968) puts it in his The Visible and the Invisible: “In a sense, if we were to make completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are already given in it. Already our existence as seers (that is, we said, as beings who turn the world back upon itself and who pass over to the other side, and who catch sight of one another, who see one another with eyes) and especially our existence as sonorous beings for others and for ourselves contain everything required for there to be speech from the one to the other, speech about the world. And, in a sense, to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says (l'entendre). The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of “copy reality” spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear” (p.155). In what follows below, I shall explore the special nature of our spontaneous, bodily responsiveness to events in our surroundings, and the many implications it has for how we must re-think the process of learning in our lives. Rather than merely causal or rational, our relations to our surroundings are, I shall argue, dialogically-structured.

This, as we shall see, changes completely the way in which we make sense of many terms of importance to us in our conduct of our daily human affairs. In particular, such terms as learning, understanding, knowing, communicating, meaning, organizing, etc. – they all will have to be used in a wholly new way; or, to put it differently, they will all have to be used in a very old, participative manner, a manner which in the past was thought of as ‘primitive’ (Levy-Bruhl, 1926).


Our Cartesian Heritage

Collaborative Learning

Primordial Scene of Social Life

Re-Thinking Learning

Conclusions

References