Learning through Listening and Responding: Probing the Potential and Limits of Dialogue in Local and Online Environments

Abstract

This article explores an age-old form of dialogical learning, havruta, which has been employed by Jews throughout the centuries to study the Torah and the Talmud, and evaluates the experiment of extending havruta from a couple of fellow students (haverim) to an international, multi-religious group reading philosophical texts together, and transferring the learning process from the Jewish house of study (in Hebrew: beit ha-Midrash, in German: Lehrhaus) to an online environment. Methodologically, the experiences from the online havruta are brought into a theory-practice feedback loop and are discussed from various theoretical angles: (1) The first section introduces how havruta was conducted traditionally and how Franz Rosenzweig, who in 1920 founded the Frankfurt Lehrhaus and invited Martin Buber to offer lecture courses, advanced havruta. (2) The second section explains how Rosenzweig’s pedagogical principles as distilled from his writings on education are applied and modified in the above-mentioned contemporary online reading group. (3) The third section draws on Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, Juhani Pallasmaa’s architectural theory and Michel Chion’s film theory in order to investigate the epistemological and pedagogical significance of different modes of listening, asking, and responding, and the role of trust for dialogical learning in local and online learning communities.