The role of Dialogue Conferences in the Development of Learning Regions

Description

Something very special happens when people from a region come into living contact with each other, face-to-face. In responding not only to each other’s uniqueness, but also to the unique features of their shared surroundings, they create between them, first-time events that are a rich mixture of all these influences. Aspects of these events can, if they are attended to and developed, function as the beginnings of new and productive relations in the region. Researchers can help regional members set the scene for such meetings, help to draw attention to the creative events to which they give rise, and, by an appropriate use of language, help participants articulate their relations to their surroundings in ways which take account of local particularities and details. Researchers in this sphere, thus, assume a somewhat unusual role. Rather than as external observers seeking to understand radically hidden processes that can only be understood inferentially, through the terms of a theory, researchers become interested partners in the process of development. As such, they come to work, not in terms of concepts, principles, or theories worked out in laboratories or seminar rooms ahead of time, but in terms of the self-same dynamic, scenic-sense of the region as a “relational-landscape of developmental opportunities” as all the other participants within it. It is this shared overall scenic-sense of the region that researchers help participants develop in the “dialogue conferences” they facilitate. This kind of shared, dialogically-structured, synoptic sense of a region, shared between all those actively living and working in it, is quite different from what has been sought in the past. Previous, monologic attempts to construct overall “synoptic” visions of a region (or a State) have led to the production of documents, or other kinds of pictures, maps, or representations, which officials in central offices can “read” without any “lived experience” at all of life out in a region. But, as Bakhtin (1984) puts it:

“It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that in principle cannot be fitted within the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature, full of event potential and is born at that point of contact among various consciousnesses. The monologic way of perceiving cognition and truth is only one of the possible ways. It arises only where consciousness is placed above existence” .

We seek in what follows below, to replace the single orders of connectedness sought in centralized, “administrative” views, with the richly structured scenic-sense of a region that all those participating in it can achieve between themselves ... if only they can be brought into living, responsive relations with each other.

Original URL

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22205830/The-role-of-Dialogue-Conferences-in-the-Development-of-Learning-Regions

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22205830/The-role-of-Dialogue-Conferences-in-the-Development-of-Learning-Regions