Alexander Sidorkin addresses educational problems related to difference in his book Beyond Discourse: Education, the Self and Dialogue. His attempt to do so relies heavily on the selected works and insights of Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin. Although he places his work with many that address the problem of difference'' in education, Sidorkin sets his work apart from non-ontological'' approaches to dialogue. He explains that ``F F F both Buber and Bakhtin believe that dialogue transcends language. Dialogue is a meeting beyond discourse, beyond time and space'' (p. 26).
Sidorkin's attempt to weave Buber and Bakhtin's understandings of dialogue into his own theories of the polyphonic self, social discourse and classroom interaction is both ambitious and thought-provoking. However, at key junctures, his effort seems clouded by its relentless focus on the metaphysical aspects of dialogue. After a brief discussion of Sidorkin's central points, I would like to question the validity of his criticism of non-ontological approaches to dialogue.
At the beginning of his book, Sidorkin draws a stark contrast between the conception of dialogue found in Martin Buber's I and Thou or Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and those appearing in more recent works. According to him, the Buberian and Bakhtinian approaches to dialogue stand in marked contrast to those non-ontological'' approaches that F F F promote dialogue in education as an excellent tool of learning'' (p. 14). He singles out Burbules' (1993) book Dialogue in Teaching as an example of one approach that does not take the ontological aspect of dialogue seriously enough' ' (p. 14). In contrast, Sidorkin wants to view dialogue as an end in itself, the very essence of human existence'' and not as an activity directed toward preconceived learning outcomes (p. 14).
Before his chapters on dialogue in classrooms, the author examines the possibility of internal, multiple voices and their relationship to the construction of a ``polyphonic self.'' Challenging dominant cognitive-developmental models