This study explored the nature of Future Session workshops in current Japan by identifying the motivations, conducting analysis from the point of view a deliberative democracy, and examining the potentials for developing future visions of society. Four workshops were targeted that dealt with a wide range of societal problems and commonly challenged existing societal structures. The study found that the workshops were motivated by the doubt over the current direction of the society, a demand for a crosscutting cooperation between different fields, and a need to foster proactive actors through participatory workshop processes. Accordingly, it is argued that “deliberative democracy of workshops” based on dialogue and collaboration rather than confrontational communication and competition constitutes a Japanese deliberative democracy. The study also shows that the created projects and processes of deliberation contained many critical perspectives towards the dominant societal structure and norms. Finally, it is concluded that the process of actualizing the projects should be reflected carefully and the potential of these methods depends on the overreaching objective of its use.

Intellectual activities seek understanding the way pirates capture booty. It is all about pulling up alongside, finding and holding the rhythm of the other vessel, fixing the grappling hooks in order to board and to appropriate. This is not the way understanding is usually depicted, even if appropriation is its intended aim. Philisophers in particular characterise understanding more gently, as a kind of welcoming of distant truth, held out to the foreign past. However, gentleness is an illusion in hermeneutic thought, philosophical or ethnological, as I wish to show in reflection on \"dialogue\" and \"story\" as two major intellectial grappling hooks.

This thesis presents a critical analysis of the contemporary Islamic discourse of interfaith dialogue (IFD) founded on normative examinations of the Qur'an and hadith. Expanding from this baseline, theories of religious universalism and particularism are engaged as well as underlying themes of humanism, social stability, and acceptance of God's will. These are further placed along a Dove-Hawk framework to demonstrate the patterns underlying interpretations regarding the legitimacy of IFD in situations of conflict. It examines the writings and speeches of nine recent and contemporary Muslim intellectual-activists scholars. This analysis reveals a fragmented discourse, which is generally supportive of IFD, and indicates limits to the religious legitimization of IFD during Christian-Muslim hostilities.

This dissertation is a teacher research study of the ways that young children author themselves by negotiating teacher authority in the context of their dialogue journals. The study detailed herein attempts to discover some of the ways in which young children negotiate teacher authority within the context of a dialogue journal.I collaborated with four second grade students in my multiage classroom who agreed to allow me to analyze the entries in their dialogue journals. We engaged in written dialogue in the context of their journals over two years, from when they were first graders in my multiage class until they left my class at the end of second grade.As a participant observer I used a form of discourse analysis called textual analysis, as mediated by Deborah Tannen's (2005, 2007) work in conversational analysis to unpack the negotiation of teacher authority revealed by the written interactions that took place in the context of the dialogue journals. This study explores the role that the children's personalities, textual competence and relationship with me as their teacher played in shaping their willingness and ability to negotiate teacher authority. It also explores the role my attitudes and actions had in fostering or hindering that negotiation.Implications include the use of ethnographic portraiture to establish context in teacher research, the importance of establishing routines that foster independence in classroom assignments, creating an atmosphere that encourages ownership of the activity in question, the necessity for the teacher to interact with the students in ways that allow them to control the conversation in their dialogue journals, and the importance of periodically reviewing the entire journals to counteract the myopic effect of reading only one journal entry per day. This last is important because when reading only one journal entry at a time it is possible to misinterpret the students' intent, lose sight of context or misinterpret the extent to which the students are engaged in writing in their dialogue journals.

The aim of this study is to investigate into the use of discussions in the classroom to help the pupils develop a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts and operations. The empirical data contain interviews with two teachers and observations from their lessons. The purpose of the interviews was to find out what importance the teachers ascribed to the ability of their pupils to talk about mathematics, and how they organised their classes to encourage mathematical discussions. With the observations, I was able to see the interaction in the classroom and hear discussions between the teacher and the pupils, as well as between the pupils themselves. The interviewed teachers proved to share my own belief in the results of researchers like Malmer (1999) and Löwing (2006) about the importance of verbal discussion, argumentation and reflection during mathematics classes. But convictions derived from the research of others are one thing, the practical application of the wisdom in the classroom another. My study showed that it is a very complex problem for the teacher to create a classroom that allows and enables mathematical discussions between the pupils themselves. The teachers have to plan their classes well and form smaller groups with the mathematical conversation in mind, if the pupils are to use, discuss and reflect upon mathematical concepts and talk about different strategies for solving a problem. There is also a need for individualisation. The teachers have to use many different methods and allow a variety of materials for the pupils to work with, if they are all to be involved in the mathematical conversation in the classroom.

Student influence is a well debated subject and all Swedish teachers should let the students influence their education. According to research the student influence is generally low and something that varies from school to school. The school policy documents do not clarify how much impact the students get to have on their education and the impact is therefore something that every individual teacher decides. These individual differences are the reason of this study. This is a qualitative study about four teachers work and thoughts focusing on the subject of school democracy and student influence in the school environment. The study is based on qualitative interviews in order to highlight four different teacher’s thoughts. Previous scientific studies show that students do not utilize their right of impact that the school policy documents give them. According to the school policy documents all Swedish schools are obligated to teach about democracy, not only convey democratic values but also how to practice and use it. These facts made me want to look in to how teachers think about the responsibility they have to let the students influence their education. What conditions do they think have to exist in order to have student democracy? The conclusions of this study are that the meaning of the concept student influence varies between the four interviewed teachers and the teacher’s point of view does affect the extent of the student influence. The gain of student impact, that all teachers mention, is motivated students. The teachers all think that having an open dialogue with the students is of importance, as well as letting the students take responsibility for their actions. The teachers also talk about the importance of having a culture in the classroom that allows everyone to make mistakes without having to be ashamed of them. Some of the teachers thought that the way for students to make an impact on their education rather happens through the student councils than through having a say in their everyday life in school.

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Dialogue is a written text representing an oral exchange between two or more persons; it also includes catechisms and rhetorically formulated series of queries and responses presenting an argument. The purpose of my thesis is to identify the main non-dramatic dialogues published in France and Italy between 1800 and 1914 and--through their discursive analysis--to provide an assessment of their signification and their impact on modern social discourse. / The first part focuses on the general discourse elements of modern dialogue, such as narrativity, rhetorical devices, character definition and function, paratextual structures, etc. / The second part includes a series of text analyses that proposes a study of ideological tendencies of modern social discourse through the most representative dialogues of the age. / Finally, the third part concentrates on the literary value and the build-up of dialogue as an aesthetic structure towards the end of the XIXth century and at the turn of the XXth century.

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The project is to unfold the dialogical aspects of human subjectivity as expressed through the existential phenomenology of Heidegger's Being and Time. The investigation is divided into three parts. / Part I offers an interpretation of Heidegger's concept of subjectivity with emphasis on the movement from inauthenticity to authenticity. In order to mediate the more traditionally existentialist reading of Dasein's authenticity, I situate Being and Time within Heidegger's larger phenomenological project. This opens up the possibility of thinking about Being-in-the-world and Being-towards-death in terms of a lived intentionality in which Dasein has its own Being as its object. Although Dasein in its everydayness generally only comports toward its own Being in the manner characteristic of empty intentionality, this intention can be fulfilled. This fulfillment constitutes Dasein's authenticity. / Part II poses the question: What is dialogue? I illustrate that there are two figures of dialogue---conversation and encounter. Conversation is an exchange between participants which maintains a particular flow and thematic unity, and is based on the structure of question and response. Its possibility rests in the otherness of the participants with respect to one another and in their ability to mediate this difference through some shared basis of meaning. Encounter, on the other hand, is an event of meeting between participants in which the alterity of the other is thrown into high relief by the challenge which it poses to the self, thereby throwing into question both the self and the meaning in which it dwells. Nevertheless, both conversation and encounter can be shown to be dialogical relative to a constellation of concepts. Dialogue is an engagement with alterity marked by a simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with the other. This engagement bears a relation to meaning and is the ground of responsibility and questionability . / In Part III, this notion of dialogue is used to interpret Dasein's subjectivity and its becoming authentic. I argue that Dasein's everydayness can be understood as a conversationality in the third person which is transformed into the first-person conversationality of authentic historizing through an encounter with radical alterity in anxious Being-towards-death.