One of my favorite quotations comes from Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917), and it gets at the heart of not only what drives and defines me as a teacher, but also what drives and defines what I think the practice of teaching and learning in higher education should be.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after. (ll. 13-17)
The “beauty of inflections,” that which we get directly from the content of the text, speech, or experience itself, is important, but the “beauty of innuendoes,” that moment of reflection and interpretation that occurs “just after” the experience, is equally, if not more, important. An instructor’s statement, in whatever media, is ultimately fleeting. It doesn’t live on as a matter of its own existence or making, nor in the consciousness of its receiver, but rather in how it is appropriated by that consciousness, in how it resonates in that consciousness. It is this resonance that I believe constitutes the “writerly” and the “dialogic,” and which I believe should not only be the aim of all of our teaching practice, but also the primary measure we use to determine what constitutes “quality” in teaching.
From the time online learning first hit the mainstream in higher education almost two decades ago, interaction has been considered by most authorities to be one of the chief indices of quality in online learning, and interaction as an activity, even as an abstract entity, has received a considerable amount of attention in the literature. However, most of this attention has been at a fairly superficial level. If we are to ever take full advantage of the educative benefits provided by interaction, we need to develop a richer understanding of interaction that goes beyond simplistic adaptations of communication theory, untested decade-old assumptions, and even mathematical analysis. We need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of interaction, as well as of what interaction can be. We need to move beyond mere interaction to what might be called critical interaction.
Perhaps the most important (and overlooked) aspect of understanding interaction is that it must be understood as a two-way phenomenon. Very early in the interaction literature, Herring (1987) defines interaction as “reciprocal events that require at least two objects and two actions, and…occur when these objects and events mutually influence one another” (quoted in Wagner, 1994, p. 13). This fundamental, seemingly clear statement is at the heart of what is potentially valuable about interaction, but it also subtly reveals what most of the literature on the subject often fails to consider. It is the “mutual influence” that defines interaction, where the learner influences the educational experience reciprocally, where the dialogics of learning are strived for and achieved, and are not simply a subtly hegemonic gesture.
This failure to recognize the impact of the student on the outcome (even the direction) of the educational process underscores the current shortcomings of the scholarship on interaction. While the vast majority of this literature is thoughtful, creative, and full of sound advice, most of it simply addresses how to use certain tools for learner-instructor and learner-learner interactions. These discussions, while certainly valuable, move the intellectual focus of the inquiry more toward what is generally referred to as “interactivity,” rather than “interaction.” This distinction between interactivity and interaction is important. Interactivity is a technological possibility where the tools of distance learning provide the potential, or the means, for interaction, whereas interaction is an actual social or intellectual relationship or activity. The problem with most of the literature is that it treats interaction as mere interactivity by taking a complex social relationship and reducing it to a kind of transaction, like a verbal pinging.
Dwight and Garrison (2003) point out that traditional pedagogy, “more often than not, is construed as a monologue, a centralized mode of communication with a closed, hierarchical semiotic” (p. 702). In most courses, traditional or online, the tendency—if not the perceived responsibility—of the instructor is to deliver content monologically, in a single statement from a single voice of authority. Perhaps the biggest problem with monologic education is that it, almost by definition, is reduced to didacticism (McKnight, 2004). Didacticism, then, reduces language to “a means to transfer what is already defined and coded as official knowledge” (p. 289). Language is no longer a “shared relation” in this context but rather a function of authority that ultimately serves to determine, to control, to limit possibilities of thought, understanding, and insight. Such didacticism attempts
to shear away an individual’s historicity in favor of a structure of ahistorical, self-evident meanings that are non-negotiable and therefore not open to dialogue and revision. One’s lived experience and its interpretation have little or no value within this pedagogical and curricular context. (McKnight, 2004, p. 289)
But what would it mean to deliver content dialogically or novelistically? For Bakhtin dialogism means “double-voicedness” (Vice, 1997, p. 45), not “relating to dialogue,” as one might assume. It concerns the interplay of voices, of perspectives, in an utterance. It can certainly be present in dialogue, where two people are discussing something, but it can also be present in written texts, or rather, in the reading of written texts, where there is conversation between the text and reader, where meaning is negotiated, translated, and appropriated. It can be present in online courses where the instructor provides some content and then asks questions or makes demands of the reader to fill in the gaps or finish the lesson. It can also be present in the incorporation of multiple perspectives in that content delivery, in the form of guest speakers or intertextual connections.
Dialogism, thus, addresses different aspects of the concept of multiple voices in a single textual (contextual or intertextual) environment. It is this kind of interaction—between the “voices” within a course, as well as between its participants—that will lead to more robust or writerly learning. We must begin to think of interaction as a many-layered phenomenon where multiple types of interaction (learner-content, learner-learner, and learner-instructor) happen simultaneously and interconnectedly. And if we are to move meaningfully beyond our traditional concepts of interaction, we must also pay more attention to the contextual and discursive factors that mediate the learning/interpretive process.
Furthermore, dialogism is more present in dialogue than we are normally aware. As Morson (1981) points out, “Speech is interlocution…. The interaction among speaker, listener, and context constitutes a ‘field of answerability,’ which is the meaning of the utterance” (p. 6). Any instruction should take into account its intended audience, which would, at least superficially, achieve dialogism, since that would entail a shaping of the utterance by the listener. But dialogism is, and should be, much more than this. When a thought is translated into an expression, it must be edited, reshaped, added to, translated from the fog of mental abstraction to the concreteness of language. As Morson points out, “The thought becomes different from what it was, which means expressing may be a form of learning” (1981, p. 18).
What is most important to remember in the delivery of course content, however, is that even in a largely, and unavoidably, monologic situation, there should always be some accommodation to the dialogic. As Sidorkin (1999) points out,
The teacher’s and textbooks’ monological texts should have some elements of self-destruction, self-doubt, self-irony, or should I add, self-deconstruction…. Any monological texts should include hints and glimpses of possible dialogues. (p. 106)
Such a surrender of power from the instructor to the student is not only a large step toward the democratization of education (Dwight & Garrison, 2003), but also the enabling of the student as a co-writer of the meanings of their learning. It is a move away from mere “training” toward true “education,” from the teaching of methods to the learning of methodologies, from the memorization of bulleted lists to the generation of concepts and understanding, from the epicness of monologic pedagogy to the novelness of a dialogic curriculum. It is a move that opens the texts of the classroom and creates a more active and writerly learning environment.
More importantly, we must understand the shift from monologism to dialogism (i.e., from the readerly to the writerly) is not as difficult, or even as mystical, as it may seem. Almost all teaching, regardless of the approach, is going to have some elements of the monologic; however, as long as we can find ways to make “some accommodation” to the dialogic, some “hints and glimpses of possible dialogues,” we will make tremendous strides in how our students encounter the texts that constitute our teaching.
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