Monday, September 16, 2013

On Dialogue

This week I read David Bohm's On Dialogue, in which he talks about the differences between what dialogue actually is and what we may assume it is. This reading got me reevaluating past group discussions. Were they really dialogue as I had thought?

Bohm says that dialogue is discussed and its purpose is to be the glue that hold societies together. This is where we usually get confused... personally, I use discussion and dialogue interchangeably. Bohm deems this inappropriate because he makes the argument that 'dialogue' glues things together and 'discussion' is used to break things up.

As I consider these definitions further, they make more sense. For instance, in addition to big lectures we have discussions once a week where a smaller group of students get together to discuss the material. There's that word again. Discuss. But if you think about it as getting together to go over the lecture material and break down the lesson so it's more understandable, then it makes sense.

Bohm also talks about why dialogue is different than debate. While in both instances people have their own opinions, a dialogue only happens if people suspend their own opinions and listen properly to other opinions with the goal in mind of finding a shared common meaning.

Debate and dialogue are also different according to Bohm because in a debate you are trying to win over the other side, but in dialogue conviction and persuasion are not called for. As I reflect back and try to think of an instance where I had dialogue within a group, I am finding that the amount of dialogues I have had is a lot less than the amount of discussions or debates I have had.

One dialogue I can think of is from an english class in high school. My class was having a dialogue on a book and rather than breaking down the topics of the book (as I feel English class usually does) we talked about how we felt about the book. There weren't any intentions of swaying people to feel the same or hostile feelings, it was just a group of people getting a greater understanding of a story. The dialogue we had was really open, informative, and unifying.