Διαλογικότητα, εκπαίδευση, χώρος: Συμμετοχικές πρακτικές, σχεδιαστικές εκτροπές και μετασχηματιστική μάθηση

Abstract

By simultaneously articulating functions of socialisation, learning, knowledge and identity, dialogicality constitutes a multiwave approach to the processes of child education. The ‘other’ as component factor of the self releases transformative forces into the processes of learning and social contact. The questions I shall attempt to answer concern the spatial condition of a dialogical involvement of child and other and the dynamic and praxial character of the integration of a space into the framework of its dialogical relation with the child. We know that over recent decades education theory has shifted from a child-centred model to learning to an experiential, praxial, communicational approach. The child as dialogical subject breaks through the shells of solid stereotypes and contributes to the accessing of knowledge (of the landscape of self-other-and-objects within marginal social significances). But what does this dialogicality, this polyphony, this heteroglossia, mean for space, for design? Can we be content with the rich and diverse, formally, structurally and functionally qualities of space, its complexity and contrapuntal character? Do we, perhaps, in speaking of the possibilities of digital technology, have recourse to the concept of the responsiveness or interactivity of a space? These things are often cited as spatial polyphony, but they are far removed from the polyvalent meaning with which a dialogical frame of vision invests the term. I shall construct my answer to those questions within the conception of the school building and its context, the city, as a network of suspended pathways between interior and exterior, with a potential opening of their boundaries and emergence of a new transformative learning within the condition of relational dialogical ontology.