Does adopting the dialogic approach in technology enhanced learning improve student outcomes and learning gain for widening participation students in English higher education? A literature review
In Leonardo (2010) and Flecha (1999), Freire - a (founding) key thinker in the development of Critical Pedagogy - is credited with adopting a dialogic approach that counters postmodernism’s racism.
They describe this approach as seeing cultures as different but equal. How this is achieved, or even if the claim is correct, or on what terms all cultures are deemed to be equal, is not made clear.
This seems problematic. The J.S. Mill observation that we adopt the culture we are born into suggests a certain randomness about the prism through which we make sense of the world - a prism we would do well to reject so as to have a more truthful understanding of the world.
Sam Harris in The End of Faith (2004), when talking about religious culture, asserts that all religions are not all equal, especially when claiming to be religions of peace. Where fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalist Muslims might cite their religious texts as a reason to take up arms, nobody is going to live in fear of a fundamentalist Jain. It’s not the fundamentalists that are the problem, it’s the sexist, racist, violent cultures fundamentalists come from that is the problem.