Commentary to the First Section “Dialogical Approach to Learning”: Dialogue about Dialogue: Three Similar/Different Voices

The three chapters presented in this section of the book focus on the issues arising within the framework of the dialogical approach to child development. Three voices are heard here suggesting different viewpoints on what dialogue is and how it can be sensibly applied in human and social sciences—while resonating with each other, they are still different. A lot of beautiful reasoning, arguments, findings, and illustrations are adduced in these chapters; it would be impossible to discuss them in detail in this comment. A thorough examination would certainly pay considerable attention to the interesting analysis of social-philosophical context of the dialog by Ivana Marková (this volume), as well as to the theoretical grounds of the nature of dialogue suggested by Rupert Wegerif (this volume) and to really fresh data obtained in a wonderful research by Lysandra Sinclaire-Harding with her co-authors (Sinclaire-Harding, Miserez, Arcidiacono, & Perret-Clermont, this volume). Instead of this I shall try to reconstruct the general logic of the dialogue between the three authors, to touch upon some examples illustrating this logic, and to consider the most important issues emphasized here.