Democratization and education: Conditions and technology for dialogic transformative political education

This chapter shows how the promising role that computer-supported collaborative learning technologies could play in the emergence of the talk practices. Like education, democracy is a normative project in a constant state of refinement, depending on the observer’s point of view. Democracies are torn between fear of the people and inclusion. The first impetus has led to different systems of representation and alternative forms of indirect governance. Democracy is an evolving process values and means of communication. The relations between the political and the nation-state have shaped much of the essence of democracy and of educational thought on democracy. The complex, sophisticated, nation-state-bound form of governing that is being referred to these days as democracy is based on previous, local and limited in scope experiences in self-governance. As most research on democratic education operates on the ideational and curricular levels, the project of bridging dialogic theory and dialogic pedagogy with democratic theory is at its inception.