Although dialogue is a common word in educational theory, its full significance is diluted if it is seen as a matter of exchange or negotiation of prior intellectual positions. In fact, the dia-of dialogue indicates through: dialogue moves through participants and they through it. Dialogue allows participants to have thoughts they could not have had on their own, yet to recognise these thoughts as developments of their own thinking. On this understanding of dialogue, education is a transformative rather than simply accumulative process. Similarly, team teaching is often thought to involve no more than the summative logic of sharing loads and adding perspectives. In dialogic pedagogy, however, team teaching refers to the way that the supportive relationship between teachers opens opportunities for students to join the team as teachers. Although teachers and students have different responsibilities, all learn through a collective dialogue. The article draws on our practice of dialogic team teaching large first-year classes.
IntroductionDialogic pedagogy begins with the paradox that teaching is an impossible project. No matter how determined or knowledgeable they are, teachers can, as independent agents, teach students little or nothing. The role of teachers is only carried to fruition when students act, grow and learn. Rather than an action that one person performs for or on another, teaching is what teacher and student do together. By the same logic, learning is also a collaborative exercise and, moreover, a necessary element of teaching. Real learning, like real teaching, occurs in the dialogue that constitutes the meeting of teacher and student (see Felman, 1982).People often assume that the di-in dialogue refers to two parties, in contrast to the one party of a monologue. The corollary of this conventional view of dialogue is that it is based on a variety of exchanges between two prior and identifiable positionsthat is, it arises from interaction, competition, opposition and the reconciliation of positions. In fact, however, the dia-of dialogue indicates through. As Bohm (1985) puts it, dialogue implies 'a new kind of mind' that carries and is carried by the participants: the dialogue moves through them and they through it. Dialogue is not located in any or even in all of the individual participants, but rather in a whole that is incommensurable with the sum of the finite parts. Thus, Merleau-Ponty (1974) argues that dialogue is a relation arising between participants, controlled by no one:
