Читать книгу Becoming a Reflective Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 52

It is significant that practitioners and guides become skilful in dialogue. Bohm discerned six rules of dialogue:

1 Commitment to work with others towards consensus for a better world

2 Awareness and suspension of one’s own assumptions and prejudices

3 Proprioception of thinking

4 To be open to possibility and free from attachment to ideas

5 To listen with engagement and respect

6 To have a mutual appreciation of dialogue

Dialogue can be with oneself or within groups of people. It always moves towards consensus for a better world. The emphasis on moving towards acknowledges a letting go of attachment to old ideas. The idea of a better world suggests all action is moral, social action towards this end. To dialogue, people must not only know and suspend their assumptions and opinions but also be aware of the thinking that gave rise to these assumptions in the first place. Where do they arise from? How tenacious do we cling to them? Why do we cling to them? This requires proprioception of thinking, an awareness of where the mind is at the moment. Within the dialogical process, there is a shift from problem‐solving towards acknowledging and resolving paradox that requires thinking about the way people think about things. If we use the same thinking that caused the problem to try and solve the problem, we fail. Hence we need to change the way we think to view the problem differently. As Bohm (1996, p. 25) writes:

We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it’s creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates – because it’s not proprioceptive of what it’s doing.

Only then can people transform their perspectives to see things differently. Dialogue is listening. Only when people really listen can they hear what is being said or not being said. Yet listening seems a rare quality in the patterns of talk that dominate practice and education. Do we listen to what we want to hear, or distorting what we hear in order to fit into our own scheme, to confirm our own assumptions? Finally, it requires that those involved in dialogue have a mutual appreciation of dialogue and ensure when in dialogue with others that the dialogical rules are both known and nurtured.