Learning 1191999). Thus, speaking in learning contexts is closely linked to
understanding our own understanding: to sharpen, change, or to elaborate
it. This extends to understanding our own not-understanding,
understanding our question, or the issue we have in grasping an item to
learn. Learning occurs on this basis in an exchange between different
speaking-listening-replying individuals with their varied understandings
and stances to reality – learning is from the start made of different voices
speaking to each other about something. These voices are perspectives, and
they are linked to each person’s views, values, and evaluations of the
subject at stake and expressed in what they say to each other (Bertau &
Tures, 2019).
For dialogism, dialogue is more than a simple to-and-fro, and more
than the transmission of information from the knowledgeable teacher to the
not-knowing students. As Skidmore and Murakami (2016) put it, it is
rather “an encounter with standpoints other than our own” (p. 29), and it
permits “the kind of inter-mental border crossing that enables ... to
transcend the limits of [one’s] own current consciousness” (p. 30).
Learning then crucially needs such dialogical conditions to explicitly allow
for these encounters, which need to be open to the multiple voices of
different standpoints.
4.2. Multi-Voiced Interactions
With two people in interaction, there are already two different voices
and perspectives on reality. With more people interacting, there will also
be more voices. However, a single person might already have different
voices because she can have different standpoints on a subject topic. Take
for instance “learning” as a topic: a student who has kids might understand
it and speak of it from a parent’s perspective and in the next moment
switch to her own learner’s perspective; these two perspective are
different, learning is experienced and conceived differently and talked
about, voiced, in different ways.