Conceptually driven inquiry: addressing the tension between dialogicity and teleology in dialogic approaches to classroom talk

This paper addresses a problem that greatly complicates the implementation of dialogic educational approaches in schools: the dilemma between driving children’s talk towards normatively accepted conceptions and, at the same time, avoiding the introduction of these normative conceptions into the dialogue by the teacher. I argue that this dilemma is in fact the expression of an unarticulated theoretical tension between teleology and dialogicity in Vygotsky’s theory, which is the foundation, together with Bakhtin’s work, for many dialogic approaches to education. This paper describes this tension in Vygotsky’s theory and presents a type of talk that enables the articulation of teleology and dialogicity at a practical level: conceptually driven inquiry. In this type of talk, children form meaning spontaneously in conditions of dialogicity, but under the influence of a higher-generality meaning that the child simultaneously forms non-spontaneously – through intellectual imitation. Although not itself the telos, this higher-generality meaning provides teleological direction to children’s dialogic inquiry.