The Blended Intensive Program “Forms of dialogue/discussion in education Philosophical perspectives & approaches”, realized for a second time in Rhodes, from 29 October to 2 November 2024, was another occasion to confirm our certainty that not only 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. Even more, in this direction, the program itself of these 2 BIP editions promises to put forward and reinforce the very idea & value of dialogue, horizontally, among all the participants, regardless their position. In fact, it is like an experiment testing and proving the strength of the dialogical will and the significance of the quality of the content of the discussion through which the good questions emerge and persist.

Participants had the opportunity on the one hand to realize the capacity of the dialogical principle, once adopted, through exercises and the organization of different theoretical and practical contexts and on the other hand the risks run by the insertion of such a dynamic material within educational environments, because of the rationalistic and mechanistic construction of these latter mainly infatuated by multiple instrumentalizations, more or less visible.

They were able to recognize the dialogical dimension through various perspectives created by the unfolding of theoretical and practical frames, like political philosophy ( political practices in dissonant democracies, republicanism & citizenship, Communities of Sharing), hermeneutical and communicational strategies, literature, improvisation through different languages, practical philosophy. These interdisciplinary filters open new ways of understanding discussion/dialogue and incorporating dialogical elements in research methodologies and practices. The philosophical understanding of discussional and dialogical forms reveals and explores their depth and complexity denying to accept a priori their value – in fact this value depends on the way dialogue is developed in every moment.

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.

The experience of this 2nd BIP corroborates the sensation provoked during its first edition: that the dialogical intention is not easy to tame and it cannot be limited to a mere communication or pedagogical strategy – it is more profound and complicated analogically to the persons, the situations, the conditions, the presuppositions, the theories, the discourses, the attitudes, the gestures, the intentions, the scenarios, the principles and techniques altogether evolving incessantly. The continuous movement of all these interwoven parameters as they create each time the singular world of the dialogue, makes of this latter a field of experimentations in arts and human sciences, on political, aesthetical, ethical and educational level

Prof. Elena Theodoropoulou

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