ABSTRACT
It seems that hardly anyone has a bad word to say against dialogue. A broad range of political orientations hold out the aim of “fostering dialogue” as a potential resolution to social conflict and as a basis for rational public deliberation. A range of pedagogical approaches, from constructivist scaffolding to Socratic instruction to Freirean liberatory pedagogy, all proclaim the virtues of an interactive engagement of questions and answers in the shared pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Philosophical accounts of dialogue from Plato to the present employ the dialogical form as a literary genre that represents the external expression of an internal, dialectical thought process of back-and-forth ratiocination. Dialogue constitutes a point of opportunity at which these three interests-political, pedagogical, and philosophical-come together. It is widely assumed that the aim of teaching with and through dialogue serves democracy, promotes communication across difference, and enables the active coconstruction of new knowledge and understandings.1
