Egalitarian Dialogue and Equality of Differences
The recognition and respect of different types of knowledge raises the awareness that each person has something to share, something different and equally important. Therefore, the wider the diversity of voices engaged in egalitarian dialogue, the better the knowledge that can be dialogically constructed. In this sense, dialogic learning is oriented towards equality of differences, stating that true equality includes the right to live in a different way (Flecha, 2000). This perspective, which Paulo Freire (1997) calls unity in diversity, never defends diversity or difference without simultaneously proposing equality and fairness toward different individual and groups.
Equality of differences is also enacted in the Learning Communities (Valls, 2000; Elboj et al., 2001). The Learning Communities are schools in Spain, Brazil and Chile that have undergone a process of educational and social transformation based on dialogic learning. In the learning communities, the equality of differences principle is shown, among other practices, in the interactive groups (Aubert et al., 2004), where students and adults who have different levels of instruction and are from different backgrounds, teach and learn from each other. Those interactions create Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978), this showing that meaning making and learning do not depend solely on the intervention of professionals, but on all the knowledge brought by anyone related to the students (Flecha, 2000).
Read more about this topic: Egalitarian Dialogue
Famous quotes containing the words egalitarian, dialogue, equality and/or differences:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren’t dying. They’re merging into big conglomerates.”
—Erma Bombeck (b. 1927)
“A woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.”
—Mary Daly (b. 1928)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome about A.D. 100] hoped that teachers would be sensitive to individual differences of temperament and ability. . . . Beating, he thought, was usually unnecessary. A teacher who had made the effort to understand his pupil’s individual needs and character could probably dispense with it: “I will content myself with saying that children are helpless and easily victimized, and that therefore no one should be given unlimited power over them.””
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)