ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates responses to the evidence outlined above, many of which aim to unite the cognitive, social and pedagogical under the umbrella of ‘dialogue’. However, the term’s use across languages, cultures and academic disciplines generates considerable variation in how it is defined and conceptualised, while the contingent term ‘argumentation’ is equally polysemous. So we categorise the various shades of definition of dialogue, dialogic teaching and argumentation before proceeding via the idea of dialogic stance to a comparison of the main versions of dialogic pedagogy now on offer in textbooks and classrooms. Their extent of common ground may well be more limited than has been claimed, and there is certainly dissonance between those approaches which are essentially about pedagogical technique in pursuit of any ends and those which - in the Bakhtinian spirit that hovers over all of this book’s discussion - seek simultaneously to foster the dialogue of persons, ways of knowing and ways of being, and hence see dialogue as an end in itself.
