I'm constantly making my students dialogue with each other. Not only does this satisfy the current educational buzz term of "differentiated instruction," I also truly belive that they learn more and absorb concepts better when they "talk among themselves" about the concepts I am teaching them or the issues that come up in our readings. I teach AP Language and Composition and it is all about getting high school upperclassmen tho understand and analyze the power of language. It's about the art of rhetoric. So, dialogue as a genre being relevant to teaching? You bet it is. We do it everyday in our graduate classes as well.
According to Plato, the "art of the dialectic" has the "power of dividing a whole into parts and of uniting the parts in a whole . . . which may also be regarded as the process of the mind talking with herself." As I am understanding this, dialogue helps the mind to think better as it takes a topic and breaks it down and understands it through the art of a "conversation among friends" in the case of the Sophists -- friends that are worthy of appreciating your intellect and level of ideas. A concept becomes better understood -- a truth revealed in real time -- through the art of conversation or dialogue. It does seem slightly ironic that Socrates was such a critc of the written word -- calling it the "dead" as opposed to the "living" word. This makes me think of how Christians view the Bible as the "living word" which does not just mean the Catholic notion that the word becomes flesh in Jesus Christ, but also that the word in the Bible becomes "living" through the actions of those who read it and then decide to LIVE according to the teachings. Why couldn't Socrates see that his words would live longer when written down as they then would forever be the "living word" through people reading them and then living in accordance with the teachings.
Plato has chosen to preserve the words and teachings of Socrates through the genre of the dialogue. It is writing, yes, but it attempts to preserve what is amazing about dialogue and the living word as it is written in dialectic, conversational form. The reader gets a sense of the working of the mind of the Sophists as their ideas form freely -- or in flux -- as they come out of their mouths. The spoken word as Plato sees it through the Sophists is "transitory, diffuse, more elastic and capable of adaptation to moods and tones" and that the written word is "more permanent, more concentrated and uttered not to this or that person or audience but to all the world." What Plato has done then with the genre of dialogue is to take what Socrates and others said to a SELECT audience and preserve it for all time to "all the world." The genre of dialogue continues to happen each and every day in classrooms. It is just now we take those "dead words" on the page and keep them alive through the living words of our continued dialogue about the things we have read. In Plato's society -- in societies of the present -- and hopefully the future -- wherever there are thinkers to think and ideas to share -- dialogue will be an important tool of teaching, sharing ideas, and intellectual reflection -- whether that dialogue is preserved for future audiences or not.
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