Interrupting the Protocol
Implications of Nikulin's thought on interruption in dialogue
I’ve written here a few times about the ubiquity of dialogue in teaching and learning, and the fraught relationship between established protocols and typical content of teacher collaborative discourse. Educational leaders engaged in the work in schools have surely encountered myriad challenges with applying the protocol to a real, live collaborative meeting of teachers. This has been described as the “meeting after the meeting” or the “parking lot meeting” or what I’ve become fond of explaining as a sort of dialogue around the protocol.
Dmitri Nikulin’s philosophical work on dialogue provides a fruitful frame of reference for these relationships between protocols and teacher collaborative discourse. In his Dialectic and Dialogue, Nikulin describes dialogue as “a series of mutual interruptions,” and contrasts dialogue with dialectic, or dialogue with monologue. It’s fascinating to consider monologue in our contemporary context of social media, digital sharing, Tweets and the edu-blogosphere—and hopefully the remainder of my thoughts in this blog spell out why I find this a useful term in the present moment.
Nikulin claims that “dialogue is essentially based on interruption, which is lacking in dialectic.” Maybe you’ve been a part of a few edutwitter debates of late: Direct instruction v. inquiry-based learning; High-quality instructional materials v. teacher autonomy; Literary canon v. contemporary fiction of diverse authorship. I came across another of these instances of dichotomous discourse yesterday: Music instruction v. coding instruction:
If your experience is anything like mine, many of these “debates” aren’t really debates at all. They’re more recitations of entrenched positions from binary sides that often descend into ad hominem or other logical fallacy rather than a fruitful dialogue or discourse that honors diverse viewpoints. What I believe Nikulin has to offer here is a framework within which to recognize the difficulty—amidst this technological and cultural milieu—of interruption, and, thus, of dialogue.
There’s a responsiveness inherent in dialogue that Nikulin describes as “a series of mutual interruptions that are spontaneous yet still respond to the previous rejoinder in the context of the whole discussion.” He is sure to broaden his philosophical take on dialogue by emphasizing that “dialogue is not solely a linguistic phenomenon, but is also the very human condition in and through which people are persons in their communication and co-being.” This reminds me of what I blogged about last week in relation to Fernando Flores’ thought around Conversations For Action—that dialogue and conversation aren’t the inanimate and dispassionate stuff of cold, linguistic analysis, but are representative of the experience of consciousness and humanity—of being with an other.
Where Nikulin posits dialogue as “constituted by the interruptible speech of the other, rather than by an impersonally arranged order of speaking,” he’s drawing a contrast to what he describes as monologue, and what I generally interpret as protocol. I imagine it’s not a tremendous leap from arranged order of speaking to what is understood by many educators as a protocol: steps to follow in order to achieve a specific result in a collaborative educator meeting. It’s interesting to read what Nikulin characterizes here as monologue as a description of protocol:
Monologue is one-sided, which means that it serves one or a few purposes such as evaluation, feeling, rhetorical persuasion, stressing a particular attitude, establishing oneself in a position of superiority over the other, and so on.
Typically, the protocol is directed or mandated by leadership at the site- or system-level, exercises this positional authority over the collaborators, and—at least implicitly—stresses a particular point of authority, or monologic position, best understood in contrast to a dialogic or both/and (lack of) position.
My experience as both a teacher within collaborative educator meetings, and a leader guiding teacher collaborative discourse, the next bit of Nikulin is evocative:
Monologue, however, cannot contain or prevent dialogue. Monologue only provokes dialogue, even if such provocation occurs internally, for dialogue accompanies every monologue and always wants to interrupt it, to break its usurped and solipsistic speech.
Is this the “meeting after the meeting”? Is this the “dialogue around the protocol”? Is this a talk at the margins of the structure, and interruption of the dialectic, linear authority of school leadership and governance? What can we learn and apply with this enriched understanding of interruption as the essence of dialogue? Nikulin offers:
Monologue only remains uninterrupted insofar as the subject isolates itself from the other and shuns the other’s unexpected—live—interventions.
Next week, I’ll look into some contemporary research by Adam Lefstein and others regarding “dichotomous discourse,” and means by which educators might break the monologic character of much teaching and learning discourse in order to find more nuanced and interrupted positions that seek to address real dilemmas and problems of teaching practice.