Engaging in Productive Dialogues
Flower asserts that “the real challenge of knowledge building is to embrace, not just tolerate, conflict” (240). To accomplish this, she suggests a rival stance:
this stance takes one beyond merely considering available alternative understandings, to actively seeking them out,
eliciting rivals that might remain silent, striving to comprehend them, and, in embracing the difficulty of talking across
difference, expanding our understanding of a more multi-faceted reality (257). [Participants] enter the dialogue using a set of strategies designed to seek rival readings of the world, that is, to support and draw out the local knowledge of their
partners, to explore options, and to use their differences (in effect to privilege them) to create a collaboratively expanded understanding. (258)
Analyzing Dialogues
Flower suggests a combination of activity theory and negotiation analysis to investigate dialogues. She pulls three claims from activity theory:
- The process of knowledge building is situated in a cognitive, social, historical and material activity, where multiple, heterogeneous, contradictory elements, viewpoints, and “voices” are in play, each giving meaning and shape to the activity.
- These points of conflict and contradiction within the activity are important as places where learning and change can occur.
- Mediational tools (from concepts, to literate practices, to technology) shape activities, and these tools are in fact one way individual actions alter broader social structures. (242)
Finally, she addresses the evaluation of the dialogue. She writes, “The challenge for intercultural knowledge building is whether new knowledge has been constructed or whether prior knowledge has been transformed, by testing, qualifying, or conditionalizing previous ideas” (254). “[I]t is not enough for transformational knowledge to merely offer an alternative representation …Transformational knowledge is a change in the way people, their tools, and their worlds interact—a change in everyday practice itself…The outcome of knowledge building then is the “creation of artifacts, production of novel social patterns, and expansive transformation of activity contexts” (271).
Key Terms
- Intercultural rhetoric: “the study of literate practices that use cultural difference to build knowledge and support wise action” (239)
- Negotiation analysis: “works on the following premises: 1) Acts of writing (and deliberation) give us access to a constructive process that is itself the site of energetic conflict between multiple “voices” or kinds of knowledge that would shape the representation of meaning (just as they shape activities)… They include not only the live voices of teachers, editors, and conversational partners, but the internal voices of personal intention, knowledge and emotion, and the internalized dictates of convention, language, and ideology. 2) When writers turn attention (at some level) to such conflicts, they enter into the construction of a negotiated meaning, the attempt to interpret and manage conflicting voices results in provisional resolutions and—at times—in restructured understanding” (243)
- Discourse: “Discourses are by nature exclusionary devices—they operate as identity cards that reveal who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of the club” (250). “[D]iscourses operate as a multi-layered ‘system of signs’ loaded with social and historical meaning well beyond the claims they make. Discourses work as powerful meditational tools—as thinking tools that shape what is thought and said, as literate practices that (let those who control the practice) govern which ideas get heard and what will be documented as meaningful… A discourse that controls the dialogue will dictate not merely vocabulary, but framing concepts, ways of arguing, and what counts as persuasive evidence. It will suggest an appropriate attitude… In short, the competition between these discourses affects not only language and knowledge (as ideas), but the shape of a literate and social activity and the relations among its participants” (251).
- Working theory: “a guide to participating in that activity in a new, more reflective ‘experimental’ way…A working theory not only makes an idea operational, it reveals the conditions under which it might it might work out—or unravel. It previews possible outcomes and predictable problems. It creates a qualified claim that locates a[n] idea or an option within the complexities and contradictions of a human activity. It prepares participants to act and adapt” (272).