Development Education and Dialogical Learning in the 21st Century

This introductory paper on Development Education and dialogical learning attempts to briefly contextualise the emerging need of 'Development Education' (DE) as a new discipline of academic study and public action in the context of contemporary 'globalisation'. In the second part, I discuss in detail the specific aspects of a new learning relationship based on dialogical and communicative learning which, for a discussion in this paper, is based on a constructivist approach with comparative references drawn from a range of Asian and Western thinkers including Mahatma Gandhi and Paulo Freire.