Re-Thinking Learning:

What the Dialogically-Structured Nature of Our Relations with Our Surroundings Means for Learning

1) Our spontaneous bodily responsiveness in learning: As living beings, we can never cease to be in constant contact with our surroundings. The importance of our living, bodily involvement in, and bodily responsiveness to, real surroundings – surroundings in which we can move about, and to which we can relate ourselves in both a sensory (incoming) and an instrumental (outgoing) fashion in a multiplicity of different ways – cannot be over-emphasized. Indeed, we first react, not as rules demand, but as our circumstances demand.

2) The importance of our responsiveness to the others around us: Closely related to the importance of the situations surrounding us, is our bodily presence to each other. For, by their words and gestures, others can ‘call’ our attention to aspects of our surroundings which are important to them in their practices. So although we first act, not as rules but as our situations demand, the aspects of, or loci, in our situations to which we respond may be selected for us by others.

3) Basic learning occurs spontaneously, without explicit teaching, and is not cognitive (epistemolog ical) in character but bodily (ontological): Initially in our development, we learn to be little Occidentals or Orientals, in England we learn British English while in America American English, we acquire a certain sensibility appropriate to our culture. As Voloshinov (1986) puts it: "People do not ‘accept’ their native language – it is in their native language that they first reach awareness" (p.81). Indeed, as I have already begun to argue above, the special phenomena of consciousness and self-directed action (as distinct from mere awareness and spontaneous responsiveness to circumstantial events), is a function of us being able to act in ways related to features in our surroundings witnessable by others. The spontaneous learning (without explicit teaching) taking place in children involved in the everyday, socio-cultural activities of their culture, by those around them offering them opportunities to express certain kinds of responses, has been, for example, studied by Rogoff (1990; Rogoff and Toma, 1997). She describes, for instance, an episode in which a pair of 91/2 month twins were eating Cheerios, when their mother first snatched one to eat herself, and then snatched another, put it into one of her baby’s fingers, and postured in a ‘now you feed me’ pose. Both babies laughed hilariously. As Rogoff (1990) comments: "Such passing moments of shared activity, which may or may not have explicit lessons for children, are, I believe, the material for development" (p.17).

4) We learn to act deliberately, to ‘orchestrate’ or ‘regulate’ our higher mental activities, by inserting words of self-instruction and self-direction into our own, otherwise spontaneous or naturally occurring, lower activities: The remarks above suggest that all our new learning grows out of, or is a further articulation within, activities that in some sense we are already doing spontaneously, unthinkingly, or mindlessly. For as he sees it, "...the child about to enter school possesses, in a fairly mature form, the functions he must next learn to subject to conscious control" (Vygotsky, 1986, p.169). Where, by the term "functions" above, he means such psychological functions as perception, attention, memory, thought, language, etc.

5) Such instructive dialogues must first by carried out by others around us: At first, others expert in a practice we learn, must not only arrange (architect) the situations for our learning, but in their responsive presence to us, use their words to draw our attention at just the appropriate moment in our joint activities, to crucial relations between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us. Further, in being surrounded by a number of such voices, each drawing our attention to yet further aspects of our circumstances from their own points of view, they can give us access to a ‘deep’ and undivided sense of their nature, a rich and complex multidimensional sense of many inter-related aspects. Just as we can appreciate the landscape around us as being to do with people, animals, plants, water, rocks, with roads, buildings, land use, towns, cities, villages, homes, with near and far, north and south, east and west, with many kinds of weather, and so on and so on, to an inexhaustible extent, so we can come to appreciate the rich ‘landscape’ offered us in much more specific spheres of practice: whether it is music, painting, engineering, mathematics, medicine, or whatever. As Vygotsky (1978) comments: "Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them" (p.88). Rogoff (1990), in particular, has pursued this approach in her book Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in a Social Context. As she sees it, development is a matter of "... transitions of a qualitative (as well as quantitative) nature that allow a person to manage more effectively the problems of everyday life, relaying on resources and constraints offered by companions and cultural practices to define and solve problems. Child development involves appropriation of the intellectual tools and skills of the surrounding cultural community" (p.11).

6) Self-controlled, deliberate action depends on self-conscious noticing of crucial features in one’s surroundings, which involves noticing that can be witnessed by others: To act in a more deliberate, self-controlled manner, we must respond to events of our own choosing, that is, to events to which we ourselves direct our attention while ignoring others, to events which, we say, we consciously notice. But conscious noticings are not only events we can focus on deliberately, but their noticing is something we can, potentially at least, share with others. They are possible, witnessable noticings. Thus, a conscious noticing by one of us is such of kind that (i)we could first pause, i.e., inhibit our own impulsive tendencies to spontaneously respond immediately... (ii) we would then turn to ‘look over’ or ‘survey’ our current circumstances, while adopting a number of different stances toward them... and then (iii) go on to react to a previously unnoticed possibility. Thus, a conscious noticing provides a moment in our practices when we could change them in ways more appropriate to our circumstances. It could also provide a moment in which our practices could be refined and elaborated in ways which others in our linguistic community could share in too. For, such a noticing is a noticing which we could all do, and then act upon, in the same way, and as Vygotsky noted above, it is the ability to direct one’s attention and to regulate one’s actions by the use of words or other auxiliary means, that allows us to be self-determining beings. Voloshinov (1986) puts it thus:

7) A true sense of reality: Coming to embody an inner, shifting, orchestrated, dialogically-structured way of sustaining a contact with one’s surroundings, gives us a basic sense of what counts for us as ‘reality’ in our dealings with our surroundings. But we realize that not everything which counts for as ‘real’ individually, counts for every one else in our community. Nonetheless, there is a common "sense," a shared set of inarticulate feelings, a witnessable consciousness, against the background of which, we can judge any explicit (often theoretical) statements as to whether they adequately characterize a state of affairs in our surroundings or not.

8) External activities between people become internalized within them: What first occurs out in the world between students and their teachers, later becomes internalized, not so much geographically as ethically, i.e., rather than responsibility for it being shared between learners and teachers, the activity becomes something for which learners can become wholly responsible. Vygotsky (1978) puts it thus: "An interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one. Every function appears in the child’s cultural development twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All higher functions originate as actual relations between people" (p.57). But this does not mean that once we are an adult, all our thinking must go on ‘inside our heads’. Even for us, it may still occur in the dialogically-structured interactions occurring between our words as we write them on the paper (or word processor screen) and our further responses to them.

9) An unending openness to novelty: In being always responsive to new calls coming to one from one’s surroundings, if we can progressively develop our surroundings to ‘call out’ from us more and more complexly orchestrated activities, there should be no end to our learning. Indeed, as Vygotsky (1978) remarks: "We have found that sign operations appear as a result of a complex and prolonged process subject to all the basic laws of psychological evolution. This means that sign-using activity in children is neither simply invented nor passed down by adults: rather it arises from something that is originally not a sign operation and becomes one only after a series of qualitative transformations. Each of these transformations provides the conditions for the next stage and it itself conditioned by the preceding one; thus, transformations are linked like stages of a single process, and are historical in nature" (see Shotter, 1999).

10) Striking or arresting or passing moments, and poetic methods: What matters in new learning is not repetitions and regularities. What matters is the occurrence of new distinctions, of new relations and connections, or of differences that make a difference. Hence, the crucial role played by living examples (not by statements of rules or propositions) that ‘speak for’ a practice. They do so by working poetically; that is, by bringing together two or more situations – see the discussions of relations between the binocular and the dialogical above – not usually juxtaposed. In so doing, they make a difference that makes a difference, a difference that matters. In calling out from us a new response that we have not previously expressed, they provide us with the beginnings for a new way of thinking.

11) Vagueness and ambiguity: The use of gaps, of shifting, oscillating, and unsystematic forms of expression (rather than systematic forms) is important in giving listeners and readers an opportunity to gain knowledge which is, so to speak, is accessible to them; it is continuous with their own being and not alien to them; it is meaningful to them in their lives, rather than having a meaning imposed on it in a one-way fashion by authoritative (Humpty-Dumpty like) others. The two-way nature of dialogically-structured exchanges allows people to make what they learn their own. Bakhtin (1981) puts the issue this way: As he sees it there are two kinds of discourse, "authoritative" and "internally persuasive discourse." The meanings of terms in authoritative discourse are, in being unresponsive to modification by coming into contact with other voices, fixed. "The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority fused into it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is prior discourse..." (p.342). By comparison: "Internally persuasive discourse...is, as it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly interwoven with ‘one’s own word’. In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition... it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses...The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean" (pp.345-346). Thus strangely, the very idea of a need for clarity, for disciplinary terms to be learned to have a single, unambiguous meaning or definition, makes mindful learning impossible – if by mindful learning we mean learning that we can apply flexibly to new circumstances as they arise.

12) Play and playfulness: As Rogoff and Toma (1997) discuss two quite different ways in which cultures involve their children in what they call "shared thinking." They compare what they call a "transmit-and-test" (TT) format used extensively here in the West with the "buildingideas- in-a-shared-endeavor" (SE) format used in the Guatamalan Mayan, middle-class Turkish, and Indian tribal farming communities they studied. While the TT format gave rise to learning in lessons as such, children in engaged in SE learning did so "through engagement and evesdropping on ongoing language use" (p.475). Indeed, the SE group learned by playful participation in group activities involving "multi-party engagements," i.e., not just expert teachers, but many, informally, from different positions in the life of the community. Although this kind of playful involvement "is not the predominant feature of childhood," Vygotsky (1978) argues, "it is a leading feature... [For] in fundamental, everyday situations a child’s behavior is the opposite of his behavior in play. In play, action is subordinated to meaning, but in real life, of course, action dominates meaning" (p.101). In other words, play provides a special realm within real life in which one’s spontaneous, impulsive reactions are suspended. The child sitting astride a stick, for instance, responds to it as if it were a horse, moving as an imaginary ‘horse’ requires. Thus it is in this sense that play becomes a "leading" feature in the child’s psychological development. It provides the child with a "zone of proximal development" (Vygotsky, 1978), a dialogically-structured space, within which both new motivations and new stances toward reality can be created. The critical point is that in play, "what passes unnoticed by the child in real life [e.g., the possibility of responding to a stick as one responds to a horse] becomes a rule of behavior in play" (Vygotsky, p.95). Indeed, what is of especial importance here – in relation to our interest in children becoming able to bring their behavior under their own self-control – is their spontaneous separation in play of meaning from what is seen, the separation of the field of meaning from the visual field. As Vygotsky (1978) points out, children of two years old, "when asked to repeat ‘Tanya is standing up’ when Tanya is sitting in front of her, will change it to ‘Tanya is sitting down’" (p.97).