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“difference” or the “gap” between identities and voices in a dialogue. The non-
identity of dialogue is without a voice of its own yet it is pregnant with every
possible voice. To learn to think is to move on a dimension from identification with
limited images and limited objectives towards the impossible goal of identification
with the non-identity of the space of dialogue. Another way of putting this is that
the direction of growth implied is towards becoming more open to learning from
others and from otherness in general.
We argue that movement in the direction of dialogue
as an end in itself
lies behind
the teaching and learning of that Higher Order Thinking described by Resnick
(1987) as an important goal for education. However, this dialogic understanding
of “thinking” is no longer the individual cognition of traditional cognitive psychol-
ogy. Thinking now is seen as embodied and situated in real dialogues. To learn
thinking is to be drawn out into the space of dialogue which is a space of creative
tension between different perspectives. Teaching for Higher Order Thinking, that
kind of thinking which we value and want to see more of, can thus be translated into
opening, expanding, and deepening dialogic spaces.
A Dialogic Foundation for the Design of Educational Technology
On a dialogic account of thinking the main aim is not to replace false representations
with true ones so much as to augment understanding with new perspectives. In the
rationalist tradition, represented by the thinking as computation metaphor that still
dominates much cognitive psychology, there is a strong understanding of the vertical
development of thinking from context-bound thinking towards universality through
abstraction but little acknowledgment of the horizontal dimension of how different
kinds of thinking are embedded in different ways of being. In the socio-cultural tra-
dition, thinking is seen as the use of cultural tools in a social context so there is
a strong understanding of the horizontal dimension in awareness of the variety of
different kinds of thinking but no effective way to account for verticality. A model
of learning to think as appropriating cultural tools and participating in cultural prac-
tices offers no way to say which tools or which practices are better in general, only
in relation to a particular task already shaped by a community. This issue of ver-
ticality is important for education, which is inevitably about values and directions
as well as processes. The metaphor of teaching and learning thinking as drawing
students into spaces of dialogue across difference offers a vertical direction for the
development of thinking without losing a sense of the horizontal. The direction of
travel from narrow and local identifications that block dialogue towards increasing
openness and engagement in universal dialogue is different from rationalism as it
does not presuppose any overarching universal logical structures. The only universal
presupposed “dialogic space”, refers to the context of thinking rather than any spe-
cific content of thinking. It is also different from rationalism because the teaching of
thinking, on this metaphor, does not just mean changing minds but also changing the
world. If one side of dialogic space is transcendent and infinite, then the other side is
