Egalitarian Dialogue and Instrumental Dimension
The Instrumental Dimension of learning, as a principle of dialogic learning, should not be confused with instrumentality or the technocratic colonization of learning. In dialogic learning, as in Habermas (1984), the instrumental and communicative rationality are not opposed to each other, but instrumental learning becomes more intense and profound when situated in an adequate dialogical framework. The ability to select and process information is the cognitive tool that best enables one to function confidently in today’s society. Dialogue and reflection encourage the development of that ability. Relationships with other people put not only diverse information but also its selection and processing at our disposal(Flecha, 2000, p. 16). In addition, when dialogue is egalitarian, it encourages intense reflection, since people need to understand other positions and express their own (Flecha, 2000, p. 16). In this sense, in egalitarian dialogue, procedures and ends are dialogically agreed. Those work for purposes of understanding, and do not let interactants hide themselves behind means that obscure exclusionary interests.
In education without dialogue, every single item becomes a target for power claims, even methods and instruments for learning, and therefore, the bureaucratization of those elements is inevitable. For this reason, the instrumental dimension of dialogic learning is never purely instrumental. It is also ethical, respectful, characterized by a sense of solidarity that contributes to break up the existing educational structure.
Read more about this topic: Egalitarian Dialogue
Famous quotes containing the words egalitarian, dialogue, instrumental and/or dimension:
“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)
“Ultimately, it is the receiving of the child and hearing what he or she has to say that develops the child’s mind and personhood.... Parents who enter into a dialogue with their children, who draw out and respect their opinions, are more likely to have children whose intellectual and ethical development proceeds rapidly and surely.”
—Mary Field Belenky (20th century)
“America owes most of its social prejudices to the exaggerated religious opinions of the different sects which were so instrumental in establishing the colonies.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
—Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)