The Blended Intensive Program “Forms of dialogue/discussion in education Philosophical perspectives & approaches”, realized for the first time in Rhodes, from 30 October to 3 November 2023, was an occasion to understand not only how students from different universities and countries can meet, study, collaborate & co-create common practices (in the spirit of Erasmus framework) sharing forms of life but also how these shared circumstances and activities include professors and researchers because of their collaborative dynamics. Meaningfully, to this purpose contribute the very thematic of the B.I.P. focusing on dialogue in its various aspects through a philosophical standpoint.

Discussion and dialogue, except of being an anthropological characteristic,  are basic entrances and ways for the understanding and analyzing educational purposes (in the frame of a democratic education) but their naturality, spontaneity, fluency, the fact that they accompany inherently the human activities (verbally or tacitly), paradoxically, seem to contravene the perplexity of the educational environment and the multiplicity of goals. Education demands more than a good pedagogical ambience  (which usually is related to the liberty to discuss and its psycho social effects) and combines discussional and dialogical forms with the development of capacities and skills useful to an active participation to social and professional environments.

On the other hand the flexibility of discussion as an interdisciplinary tool creates a variety of discussional settings, situations and perspectives blurring the differences between the approaches and permitting the creation of general rules and commonly accepted protocols that often override the real difficulties of the dialogical deed and phenomenon. Precisely, the philosophical reading of discussion/dialogue can restore and reexamine these difficulties without idealizing it (even if, historically,  philosophical dialogue is consubstantial with philosophy). Or in another way, philosophical analysis can reveal the stereotypes and facilities created by education as the latter uses to cherish more  objectives, tools and measurements.

The B.I.P. gave the opportunity to the students to meet all these challenges and discover discussion and dialogue under a more scrutinous light but also to find creative aspects related to arts that can unlock dialogical power in performative and experimental ways, whereas the intercultural perspective of activities revealed the interculturality within the dialogue as well as an openness, a spectrum of possibilities (like the activation of bodies) and an invitation to difference that the dialogical gesture releases.  Because dialogue is not only a ‘theme’ but an action (or fundamentally a praxis), the difficulty of such a B.I.P. grows: it is not only about to teach the  dialogue, to transfer knowledge and enhance the new teachers expertise, but it is more to challenge this expertise and to open a common space for teachers and students for experiencing together dialogue and facing its philosophical stakes.

This tendency to the community bonding through discussion as an horizon, a question and a query has emerged during this B.I.P. sessions and activities and, apparently,  constitutes a permanent doubt as far as concerning its possibility to be achieved, moreover the possibility to form really dialogical situations during a such a short period of time (as the one week duration of the program is). On that grounds, not only the students probably felt some fallibility vis à vis their dialogical capacity (mainly as educators) but also the professors animating the B.I.P. activities felt the strength of the unknown and the provisory (as the group of participants is mainly constituted by strangers) undermine their certainties, which in fact is exactly a philosophical perspective or the expectation of a philosophical gesture. They were obliged (at least at some moments) to think that their tools could not restore a dialogical condition. But in fact this realization cannot but be  a presupposition for every (dialogical) training on dialogue/discussion.

Prof. Elena Theodoropoulou

(Coordinator οf the Blended Intensive Program & Directress of the L.R.P.Ph., University of the Aegean)